[MD] Free Will

[Ham Priday]

John, Steve, and All --



On Mon, June 20, 2011at 9:35 AM, "Steven Peterson" peterson.steve at gmail.com 
wrote

> John:
> You seem to me to be missing a very important point. Is this a choice
> on your part or is it the end-result of a long chain of causes over which
> you have no choice and no say?  Hmmm...
>
> Steve:
> What you are missing is that the above dilemma (the traditional free
> will/ determinism problem) is a false choice that arises only when we
> accept SOM premises. The MOQ denies both horns.

One of the stupidest arguments I've heard for the determinist position is: 
"The future is inevitable, so there is no free will."  My reaction is that, 
while we don't know what that 'inevitability' is, it's undeniable that the 
decisions we make as free agents are going to shape it.

Daniel Dennett studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford and is currently the 
Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for 
Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.  "Human freedom," he writes in 
'Freedom Evolves', "is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, 
distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, 
us."  Although I haven't read this book, I just reviewed a recent interview 
with the Professor on YouTube which I think might interest you folks.  It's 
downloadable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utai74HjPJE.

Meantime, I've copied a portion of an earlier interview that appeared in the 
May, 2003 issue of Reason magazine.  It shows how Dennett actually bases his 
idea of Free Will on Evolution. . . .

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Reason:  Your new book is called Freedom Evolves. Why?

Dennett:   Because people have this strange antipathy for evolution and for 
materialism.  They think that if evolution is true, then they're just 
animals or automatons -- that they won't have freedom and they won't have 
responsibility, and life will have no meaning. The he point of the book is 
to show that, on the contrary, it's only when you understand life from an 
evolutionary point of view that you understand what our freedom really is. 
You realize that it's real.  It's different and better than the freedom of 
other animals, but it's evolved. It's not supernatural.

Reason:   A response might be that you're just positing a more complicated 
form of determinism.  A bird may be more "determined" than we are, but we 
nevertheless are determined.

Dennett:  So what? Determinism is not a problem.  What you want is freedom, 
and freedom and determinism are entirely compatible.  In fact, we have more 
freedom if determinism is true than if it isn't.

Reason:  Why?

Dennett:  Because if determinism is true, then there's less randomness. 
There's less unpredictability.  To have freedom, you need the capacity to 
make reliable judgments about what's going to happen next, so you can base 
your action on it.

Imagine that you've got to cross a field and there's lightning about. If 
it's deterministic, then there's some hope of knowing when the lightning's 
going to strike.  You can get information in advance, and then you can time 
your run.  That's much better than having to rely on a completely random 
process.  If it's random, you're at the mercy of it.

A more telling example is when people worry about genetic determinism, which 
they completely don't understand.  If the effect of our genes on our likely 
history of disease were chaotic, let alone random, that would mean that 
there'd be nothing we could do about it.  Nothing. I It would be like 
Russian roulette.  You would just sit and wait.

But if there are reliable patterns -- if there's a degree of determinism --  
then we can take steps to protect ourselves.

Reason:  Would a deterministic world mean that, say, the assassination of 
John F. Kennedy was going to happen ever since the Big Bang?

Dennett:  "Going to happen" is a very misleading phrase.  Say somebody 
throws a baseball at your head and you see it.  That baseball was "going to" 
hit you until you saw it and ducked, and then it didn't hit you, even though 
it was "going to."

In that sense of "going to," Kennedy's assassination was by no means going 
to happen.  There were no trajectories which guaranteed that it was going to 
happen independently of what people might have done about it.  If he had 
overslept or if somebody else had done this or that, then it wouldn't have 
happened the way it did.

People confuse determinism with fatalism.  They're two completely different 
notions.

Reason:  Would you unpack that a little bit?

Dennett:  Fatalism is the idea that something's going to happen no matter 
what you do.  Determinism is the idea that what you do depends. What happens 
depends on what you do, what you do depends on what you know, what you know 
depends on what you're caused to know, and so forth -- but still, what you 
do matters. There's here's a big difference between that and fatalism. 
Fatalism is determinism with you left out.

If I accomplish one thing in this book, I want to break the bad habit of 
putting determinism and inevitability together. Inevitability means 
unavoidability, and if you think about what avoiding means, then you realize 
that in a deterministic world there's lots of avoidance.  The capacity to 
avoid has been evolving for billions of years.  There are very good avoiders 
now.  There's no conflict between being an avoider and living in a 
deterministic world.  There's been a veritable explosion of evitability on 
this planet, and it's all independent of determinism.

Reason:  What do you mean when you call human beings "choice machines"?

Dennett:  That's actually Gary Drescher's phrase.  He's an artificial 
intelligence theoretician.  He distinguishes choice machines from 
situation-action machines.

Situation-action machines are built with a bunch of rules that say, "If in 
situation X, do A," "If in situation B, do Z," and so forth.  It's as if you 
had a list that you kept in your wallet and when important decisions came 
up, you looked at the list.  If the conditions for a particular decision 
were met, you just did it.  You don't know why. It's just that the rule says 
to do it.

A choice machine is different.  A choice machine looks at the world and sees 
options, and it says, "If I did this, what would happen?  If I did that, 
what would happen? I If I did this other thing, what would happen?"  It 
builds up an anticipation of what the likely outcome of one action or 
another would be, and then chooses on the basis of how much that outcome is 
valued or disvalued.

They're both machines, but one of them is much more free than the other. 
It's choosing its actions on the basis of its values, and it's choosing its 
values on the basis of what it knows.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The complete interview is accessible at 
http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/01/pulling-our-own-strings.

I hope you find these dialogues as insightful as I did.

Essentially speaking,
Ham