Month: June 2021

In my last essay, I suggested that the definition many philosophers use for free will is not what we actually experience; I implied that there is a “real” free will that the definition doesn’t capture. (Note that there is a third definition – the everyday, non philosophical one – which I will get to soon.) I want to explore these ideas a little now. But first, some motivation for the topic.

Free will is a precious idea to us. It lies at the core of what makes us who and what we are. We are not slaves, nor objects existing at the whim of external forces. We have agency; we determine our course, and steer our ships. Many philosophers believe that free will is a precondition for the existence of morality. How can we blame someone for doing something wrong, if he had no actual choice? We don’t actually blame machines for their actions. They are doing what they are programmed to do. Losing this precious power would be a devastating loss that would strike at the heart of our most cherished feelings about ourselves and our roles within the world, and alter our perceptions of experiences. Just as I feared that my mother’s kiss was rendered meaningless by the fact that atoms don’t touch, now that kiss would be even more destroyed – since she didn’t choose to give it to me. (Read Fritz Leiber’s brilliant, terrifying novel “You’re All Alone” for an excellent picture of what it would be like to be the only “awake” person in a world of “philosophical zombies.”)

I’d like to follow one more tangent before addressing my main point.

I think there are two kinds of powers we might wish we had. The first: powers we might have had. Most of us wish that we could fly. I class this as a power we might have had. If we had evolved on a world with lower gravity, or if we had hollow bones, or even if the laws of physics were different from what they are. So, it is not unreasonable to envy birds and pine for this “missing” ability. We might even resent God for creating us without it (I am speaking metaphorically.) The second kind of power is a power we could never under any conceivable set of circumstances have possessed. This would be a power that was a contradiction; a semantic trick, in a sense. Like being in two places at once, or existing at the same time as we fail to exist. When people say, “Could God create an object that even He could not destroy,” they malign the Almighty with a trick. This power is logically incoherent.

I think that when most people, including philosophers, accept the dire truth about our deterministic universe, they feel this envy and this resentment. After all, why couldn’t we have free will? Why were we created, or why did we evolve, without it? A kinder universe would not have arranged matters so. In any case, we see the “reality” of a world without free will as a bleak one.

I don’t think our reality is bleak. I think we possess the only kind of free will worth wanting (this expression is a paraphrase, I believe fro Daniel Dennett, but my ideas are not.) I think the kind of free will we don’t have is a logically incoherent power, and not worth wanting even if we could have it – which we absolutely cannot. Like touching by atomic collision, it only seems desirable because we have mapped our intuitive notions of freedom onto a bad definition.

Let’s start with the typical philosophical understanding of determinism.

The argument for absolute determinism – the idea that all our choices and actions are “predetermined” and not actually products of our spontaneous will – starts with the proposition that everything that happens is caused by something else. A simple example would be, that if a rock slides down a hill, something must have pushed it, or pulled it, or the ground underneath it must have given way. It wouldn’t simply start down the hill on its own. This push or pull is the cause of the slide – not the rock itself, nor any choice the rock made.

Well, we all know rocks have no free will; they have no will at all. The argument for pure determinism seems to posit that we are so many rocks; what we do is really just another way of saying, what happens to us. Even if we seem to be agents, we cannot be.

Before we come to the reasons why so many philosophers have accepted this startling conclusion, it is important here to consider the difference between the philosophical idea of free will, and the “ordinary” concept.

Let’s use everyone’s favorite, violent metaphor – the gun to the head. Someone puts a gun to your head, and demands that you turn over your money. Now, you probably will do so, but you will say later that you didn’t really want to – you were coerced. This is a perfect example of a non-free-will action. Free will, in the everyday understanding of the concept, involves choices that we make without external coercion. They represent the things we “want” to do.

But, don’t you want to hand your money to the gunman? After all, your life is at stake. I think you are very eager to hand the money over! In a philosophical sense, we have to say that, if free will exists at all, it exists here. You are freely responding to your environment, which just happens to offer you too few good options. Determinists are not committed to the idea that all our decisions are coerced in this way. They want us to understands that all our choices – the choice to turn the money over, or the choice to keep the money if we are not threatened in any way – are all equally predetermined. The gunman seems to have reduced our viable choices to one. Determinists tell us that we always have just one choice – the thing we actually do. (I’ll get back to this “common sense” version later, because it forms the core of what I actually think free will as we should understand it is.)

How is it that all our actions are predetermined this way? Well, let’s take another example. This one will be kind of long, because I need to do what determinists do – close off every avenue of escape. As you read this, and feel your agency slipping away, you will probably start looking for escape routes. There aren’t any. But it’s okay.

Every action you take is caused. Suppose you selected waffles for your breakfast. You feel that you freely chose them – that your choice was not in any way forced upon you. The sun was shining, you had leisure to consider, you weren’t so hungry that you couldn’t think clearly, and you are privileged enough to have many breakfast choices. You simply preferred waffles. What could be more free?

But, why did you prefer waffles? Let’s say you really like waffles. This means that your body chemistry is such that the experience of tasting waffles is more pleasant to you than it probably is for me (I rarely eat them.) Or perhaps you are on a low-protein diet, or perhaps the waffles remind you of your childhood.

Well, okay, you’re thinking. I am motivated to select them, perhaps by unconscious forces. But I am still free to choose!

But, exactly how are you free to choose? Before you even woke up, your body chemistry, your previous diet alignment, and your childhood memories, were already in your brain. The very factors that cause you to choose waffles were already predetermined, waiting their opportunity to affect you.

Ah! You say. But I am no slave to my preferences, or to nostalgia, or to my diet. I could throw all that to the winds, and eat an ice cream sundae!

But – you didn’t. So, in what sense are you saying that you could have done so? There may be two possible answers to this.

One: you could choose not to eat waffles, in ordeer to prove that you are making your own choices, not your chemistry or your memories. But, in order to have any reason to do this, you would need to be challenged to prove it. Perhaps you are reading this right before breakfast, and desire to prove me wrong!

But – that desire is also part of your brain; part of the overall state that inevitably leads to your “choice.” How is it different from your chemical predisposition to prefer waffles? All it means, is that there are competing chemistries, and the more potent one wins. It will always win.

Second: perhaps what you mean by the statement that you could have chosen differently, is that, under the exact same circumstances (with the universe in the exact same initial state, in other words), something different might have happened.

But, this is like saying that if you rewind a film and play it back, the characters on the screen will do something different!

Let’s take another tack: if we could “change” our choices on a second run-through, where would the cause of this change be found? Since nothing in the universe, by hypothesis, would be different, if we behaved differently, this could only mean that our choices are caused by exactly nothing. But, that’s not what we want! We want our choices to be caused by us, rather than by exigent circumstances or pre-existing conditions that act in the role of so many unacknowledged gunman, limiting our choices to one! We never wanted our actions to be purely random, chaotic events that are totally uncaused! *

Basically, the options are two. One: our actions are random uncaused events that might go one way once, but another way another time, even under identical circumstances. Or two: our actions are caused, and can only be what they are, and could never have been otherwise.

Where does this leave our desire for freedom?

I’ll address that next.

*Many scientists and philosophers, who should know better, (like Roger Penrose) refer to quantum mechanics as a possible way out of a deterministic universe. The idea of a “clockwork universe,” wound up at the beginning of time and unfolding in an inevitable manner, goes back to Isaac Newton and even earlier. Newton is well known for it because his idea of universal gravity made it clear that the same forces that govern the earth, also govern the heavens. Many people express determinism as the idea that, if we knew the total state of the universe at any time and totally understood all the laws that act on it, we could predict every future event, including the choices of all so-called agents. Somehow, being predictable seems to many to be the equivalent of being not-free. Quantum mechanics, with its reliance on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, seems to offer a way out. Einstein famously dismissed it with the phrase “I refuse to believe that God plays dice!” Quantum mechanics may restore unpredictability.

But, alas, it doesn’t help. As I pointed out above, absolutely random events aren’t what we are looking for. We want events where we are the cause. Not uncaused events. The trick is deciding what we mean by us.

This is the first, and maybe the last, of many posts about this vexed and vexing topic. I have read and thought about it so often and so intensely that I really need to share my ideas. Sadly, they are neither original nor absurd. Unless (and this is likely, actually) I have misinterpreted what I’ve read badly enough to make nonsensical claims. Well, if I have, then perhaps I had no choice. I was determined from the origin of the universe to make these mistakes. The belief that I might have done otherwise may be an illusion.

I’ll begin with full disclosure: my two favorite philosophers, William James and Henri Bergson (who quite admired each other) both speak up for free will. James, in his essay about the judgment of regret (my essay on which in philosophy class, scribbled at the very last minute, made Fr Moeller at University of Detroit ask me to become a priest), argues that only an insane universe would predetermine its creatures to necessarily feel regret about acts which they had been predetermined to necessarily do. Bergson thinks that originality and freedom are absolutely fundamental to what make us human. Neither argues absolutely persuasively, but I think they’re both right. However, I would consider myself not a libertarian (on this question – don’t get this confused with people who don’t like national parks!) but rather what many philosophers call a “compatibilist.”

I’ll start (different from beginning, I guess) with an anecdote.

I was a peculiar child. I was smart and quiet, and I lived mostly an internal life. My thoughts were my best friends, and what happened amongst them and me constituted the real events of my life. I was barely aware of my surroundings at times.

I wanted to know how things worked, and why they worked, and what the truth was, and how we knew. In single digits age-wise, this was a recipe for trouble. I often asked questions that I wasn’t ready for the answers to, or read books far above my station. Here’s a bizarre example:

I learned at a very young age that objects never really touch each other. It turns out that all matter is composed of atoms, and that the vast majority of the mass – virtually all of it – is contained in the nucleus (composed of protons and neutrons.) Surrounding the nucleus is a cloud of negatively charged electrons. Like charges repel, and this cloud creates a force field that repels other atoms, if they get close enough.

So, what we experience as “touch” – when you press your finger on the table – is actually the interaction of force fields. The nuclei of atoms NEVER touch (except when BOOM events are desired) and even the almost immaterial electrons don’t either.

What was the result of my learning this?

I cried.

I really did. Because, you see, my mother’s lips had never touched my cheek. I had never felt the pages of my beloved books. All things were sundered from each other irrevocably in a cold, cruel world of non-touch.

For years this bothered me. It was only when I was older that I was able to resolve this problem.

IT wasn’t, you see, that touch had existed as a wonderful thing, then been reft away. “Touch” had simply never been what I thought it was. Often, we mistake our intuitive notions of definitions for what those words “actually” mean, as if there were some root, basic meaning open to intuition. I had imagined that “touch” meant “zero distance between the matter in objects.”

But this never happens in nature (maybe in the heart of the Sun, but not your backyard.) What I called touch, and all that it meant to me, has ALWAYS been “electronic field repulsion.”

I think the same is true of “free will.” Those who deny that it exists, I think are denying the reality of what they and others have always believed or characterized it as being. But, I think it never was that.

I will expand on this in “Free Will – Two” (if I ever write it) but here’s a hint: if free will means that I might have done things differently than I did them under identical conditions, then this must mean my choices are not caused by anything at all. Because, if my choices are caused by anything, then those causes are part of the “identical circumstances.” So, this idea of free will – the most common one, I think – describes something that CANNOT exist, or, if it does, would render the whole idea of free will meaningless. (If you really want a candy bar, and so you reach for one – your desire “causing” your action – and then with no cause whatsoever inside or outside yourself, you pull back, this is not free will, it’s a stroke.)

My brother and I have a longstanding discussion topic: James Bond titles.

Ian Fleming had a way with words. His titles (and character names) resonate with a quality that combines a sense of simplicity with sophistication. From single words like “Goldfinger” and “Moonraker” to altered phrases like “You Only Live Twice,” Fleming captured an appealing feel. (Fleming also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with a classic “Bond girl” character – Truly Scrumptious.)

You may disagree. Perhaps you find the sexual innuendo childish and the wordplay obvious. (Pussy Galore? Tiffany Case?) But the point is that there seems to be a “Bond” type of title. Consider some of the novels written about the character by others. “Colonel Sun.” Hmm. It has almost the flavor of “Doctor No” – a title followed by a one-syllable word that can be a name but usually isn’t – but it doesn’t quite work. “No” as a name suggests negativity. It’s vaguely menacing. “Sun” doesn’t really tell me anything. Or what about “No Deals, Mr. Bond.” That one doesn’t even try.

How about the movies, since they ran out of Fleming titles to attach to them? “Tomorrow Never Dies.” Hmm. It has one of the classic Fleming Life/Death words….but….it doesn’t quite make it. “Live and Let Die” is simultaneously absurdist and scary. Tomorrow is a day. We don’t expect it to die. If it could be said to “die” when the sun goes down, then the title is saying … the sun will never go down? I guess that’s a scary thought….

“Goldeneye” was pretty good. But….that was the name of Fleming’s home.

So, the debate is….did Fleming have a unique, irreplicable ability with titles? Or are we just fooled into thinking it because we are so familiar with his actual titles? This would be a testable claim, if only an undiscovered, unheard of Bond draft by Fleming turned up, with title. If my brother or I heard of this title without knowing it was Fleming and concluded that, for the first time, someone else had made fire with two sticks, then we would have some proof. Contrarily, if we decided it “wasn’t Bond-like”, but then after learning it was Fleming, decided it really was after all…well then, we’d know we were reasoning from bias. Sadly, this happy event is highly unlikely.

What makes a good title? I admit I have a particular dislike of using a character’s name as a title. With obvious exceptions – if you have named your character something symbolic or meaningful, like “Doctor No,” then I’m okay with it. But Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Martin Eden….all feel lazy to me. Great books! Great authors! Poor titles.

You might be thinking, “but those books are about those characters. They are character studies!”

I would answer: all novels are about characters. It’s what characterizes the novel and distinguishes it from the short story. Stories are about events; novels are about people.

“Frankenstein” might seem to be an exception. It’s so perfect, right? But that’s a bias. We all know the story! It only seems like a scary name because the book was such a success that that name conjures images that scare us.

“Dracula” is a bit better. A big part of Stoker’s point was a panic at foreign-ness. Dracula is a Romanian name, and readers are unlikely to know anyone by that name, so it attaches more easily to the idea of a particular being. In other words, it’s not just lazily naming the book after the central character, it’s doing a little more with the word. (It’s a little ethnically biased, to be sure.)

“Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” works. It adds “strange case,” which typically wouldn’t satisfy me (“The Life and Death of Martin Eden” is little better, in fact not as good, as just “Martin Eden.”) But the Stevenson title works because even in the title is a sort of play on words. The “and” is a lie.

“Rebecca” also plays a game with the reader (title and novel both.) I won’t spoil the game, but it’s worth it to call the book by that name.

I have to admit to a fondness for titles that actually tell you what the book is about. “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov. “The Puppet Masters” by Heinlein. “Five Boys in a Cave”* by Robert Church. I also like poetic titles that evoke the feel of the book. “The Last Call of Mourning” and “The Sound of Midnight” by Charles L. Grant. I’m much less fond of titles that have a meaning that only makes sense after you’ve read the book, like “Middlemarch” or “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (Christopher Hitchens asked Salman Rushdie what Robert Ludlum, author of”The Bourne Identity” and “The Osterman Weekend,” would have titled Hamlet. Rushdie replied “The Elsinore Vacillation.”)

How important is a good title? I guess it depends. If the work becomes famous like “Frankenstein,” a poor title choice can borrow the glow. (I much prefer the subtitle, “A Modern Prometheus.”)

*This particular book has a special meaning for me. Not because I read it – but because I didn’t. Many, many years ago, my grandfather (a librarian and book lover) brought two books to my house, one for my sister and one for me. We were probably about 10 and 11 at the time. For my sister, Andrew Lang’s “Yellow Fairy Book” (girls, fairies….) For me, “Five Boys in a Cave.” I was in fact a boy.

We promptly traded. I have no idea if she read about those boys. I devoured the Yellow Fairy Book and it began a lifelong love of fairy stories (don’t say fairy tales!) that led me to collect all the “color” fairy books and to meditate on the nature of literature. I may add an essay about how ridiculous people sound to me when they claim to desire “a fairy tale wedding…”