(Roughly) Daily

Further to an earlier post about the latest installment of an age old debate– the “dialogue” on free will vs. Determinism between Robert Sapolsky (determinist) and Kevin Mitchell (champion of free will)– the (remarkable) George Scialabba weighs in…

In 1884, William James began his celebrated essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” by begging his readers’ indulgence: “A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard.” James persisted and rendered the subject very juicy, as he always did. But if the topic appeared exhausted to most people then, surely a hundred and forty years later there can’t be anything new to say. Whole new fields of physics, biology, mathematics, and medicine have been invented—surely this ancient philosophical question doesn’t still interest anyone?

Indeed, it does; it retains for many what James called “the most momentous importance.” Like other hardy perennials—the objectivity of “good”; the universality of truth; the existence of human nature and its telos—it continues to fascinate philosophers and laypersons, who agree only that the stakes are enormous: “our very humanity,” many of them insist.

Why so momentous? Skepticism about free will is said to produce two disastrous but opposed states of mind. The first is apathy: We are bound to be so demoralized by the conviction that nothing is up to us, that we are not the captains of our fate, that we need no longer get out of bed. The other is frenzy: We will be so exhilarated by our liberation from responsibility and guilt that we will run amok, like Dostoevsky’s imagined atheist, who concludes that if God does not exist, everything is permitted.

Note that it is not the absence of free will but only the absence of belief in free will that is said to have these baneful effects. People who never give the subject a thought are neither apathetic nor frenetic, at least not for these reasons. Should we just stop thinking about the whole question?

For twenty-five hundred years, no generation has succeeded in doing that: So we may as well wade in. What is free will? It is the capacity to make uncaused choices. This does not mean that nothing causes my choice—it means that I do. But surely something has caused me to be the person who makes that choice. And doesn’t whatever causes me to be the person I am also cause the choices I make?…

[Scialabba succinctly explicates Sapolsky’s and Mitchell’s (each, estimable) arguments…]

… But are beliefs about free will really the point here? Judges, whether or not they believe in free will, should take more cognizance of mitigating circumstances than they do now. A baby damaged by prenatal cocaine exposure who grows up to be an addict and petty thief deserves mercy; a billionaire whose tax evasion robs his fellow citizens of tens of millions of dollars deserves none. But no philosophical convictions are needed to arrive at these conclusions, only humanity and good sense.

And whether or not we have free will, isn’t punishment also justified as deterrence? Surely, the prospect of a long stretch in prison (or quarantine) would give pause to at least some murderers, rapists, and persons scheming to overturn a fair presidential election? And beyond that, punishment serves as a public affirmation of the values of a family or society. We are embodied beings: Values cannot only be preached; they must sometimes be enforced.

At a certain point, one may ask, what is really at stake in this debate? Sapolsky appears to harbor no metaphysical designs on readers; he spins his intricate, ingenious causal webs only, in the end, to enlarge our sympathy for life’s failures. Mitchell does seem to have a humanity-affirming philosophical agenda. “You are the type of thing that can take action, that can make decisions, that can be a causal force in the world: You are an agent,” he often reminds the reader, implying that these are things a scientific materialist must, in strict logic, deny. But I strongly doubt that any scientific materialist anywhere in the multiverse would deny that she can take action, make decisions, or be a causal force, or that she is an agent, or does things for reasons. She might, though, think that all her choices are caused, which, Sapolsky would say, is perfectly compatible with taking actions, making decisions, being a causal force, or acting for reasons. Elsewhere, Mitchell warns readers not to believe anyone (presumably the insidious scientific materialist) who suggests that we are merely “a collection of atoms pushed around by the laws of physics.” To which our scientific materialist might reply that we are indeed very highly organized collections of atoms, molecules, nerves, muscles, and hundreds of other components, pushed and pulled by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, economics, and politics, along with intimations from philosophy, history, and art, and constantly adjusting to and modifying those influences from a center that is provisionally but not permanently stable. This, she would say, is how one can be an agent without free will.

With what I hope is due deference, I humbly disagree with both Sapolsky and Mitchell, and even with my deeply revered William James. Perhaps the question of free will is not so momentous. Philosophers have been debating about it for thousands of years, Mitchell observes. “That these debates continue today with unabated fervor tells you that they have not yet resolved the issue.” Indeed, they haven’t. Perhaps they should take a break. Perhaps it is a controversy without consequences. Perhaps whether we are free or fated, morality and politics, science and medicine, art and literature will all go their merry or melancholy ways, unaffected.

Notwithstanding Sapolsky’s hopes and Mitchell’s fears, whatever we decide about free will, the world—even the moral world—will look the same afterward as before. This, along with our millennia-long failure to make appreciable, or any, progress toward an answer, suggests that we are in the presence of a pseudoproblem. James himself, in “The Will to Believe,” written a dozen years after he defended free will in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” conceded that “free will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach.” The moral and political worlds run—to the extent they run at all—on generosity and imagination, mother wit and sympathetic understanding. These can answer all our questions about moral responsibility and moral obligation without our having to solve the insoluble conundrums of free will.

A new round in an old debate: “Free at Last?,” from @hedgehogreview.

* Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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As we wrestle with responsibility, we might spare a thought for Henri-Louis Bergson; he died on this date in 1941.  A philosopher especially influential in the first half of the 20th Century, Bergson convinced many of the primacy of immediate experience and intuition over rationalism and science for the understanding of reality…. many, but not Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, nor Santayana, who thought that he willfully misunderstood the scientific method in order to justify his “projection of subjectivity onto the physical world.”  Still, in 1927 Bergson won the Nobel Prize (in Literature); and in 1930, received France’s highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur.

Bergson’s influence waned mightily later in the century.  To the extent that there’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest, it’s largely the result, in philosophical circles, of Gilles Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson’s concept of “mulitplicity” and his treatment of duration, which Deleuze used in his critique of Hegel’s dialectic, and in the religious and spiritualist studies communities, of Bergson’s seeming embrace of the concept of an overriding/underlying consciousness in which humans participate.

Indeed, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Bergson’s doctoral thesis, first published in 1889, dealt explicitly with the question we’re considering, which Bergson argued is merely a common confusion among philosophers caused by an illegitimate translation of the unextended into the extended– the introduction of his theory of duration.

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