In a recent post I presented an argument against libertarian free-will, and in favor of compatibilism. In the present post I would like to take a crack at explaining, from my perspective, what it means to be "free" in a deterministic world. So here goes.
I see life as a dialectic-- a dialogue, if you will-- between circumstances internal to an agent and circumstances external to the agent. The key is that the interaction is two-way: there is input from outside the agent, but this is processed and responded to by an identity internal to the agent. At every moment the agent's choices emerge from a sort of synthesis of the two. For me, the concept of freedom describes the condition in which the internal identity is more determinative for the agent's choices at a given moment than are the external inputs that are present at that moment. Now, it is true that the internal identity itself was originally determined by exclusively external factors, and that it has continued to define itself in response to such factors. We therefore might say that it is merely the sum of certain outside influences. But when the agent was born, a boundary was created between the interior and the exterior of the agent. Those outside factors that created the agent became internal factors at the moment of the agent's birth. After that moment, it was no longer true to say that the agent was determined only by external factors, because at any moment after T0 over the course of the agent's life it is the product of both its internal identity and of external inputs at the immediately prior moment.
In other words, what determines whether an act is "free" is the question of whether at a given moment, the agent's acts proceed more from its internal identity or more from the external conditions that obtained at the immediately preceding moment. To the extent that my internal identity is the dominant determinative factor, I act freely. To the extent that the external conditions are the dominant determinative factor, I do not act freely. But the crucial point is that only the factors that are present at the immediately prior moment really count in making this judgment. What this means is that given the set of moments T0, T1,... Tn-1, Tn, we can say that my freedom at any moment Tn should be evaluated in light of the factors that obtained at Tn-1. The only moment at which I have absolutely zero freedom, therefore, will be T0, because at T0 I had no identity in the prior moment; the determinative factors were therefore entirely external. This is not true at any other moment over the course of my lifetime.
A couple observations on the implications of all this. First of all, when I am an infant my identity is "weak". I to a large degree am a blank slate, and so external factors will tend to predominate at a given moment. But as I get older and accumulate more memories, my personality becomes stronger and is more determinative with respect to external factors. We can therefore say that freedom will tend to increase as we get further from T0. Secondly, you might ask what constitutes the "boundedness" of internal factors. I would say that self-awareness is what creates that boundedness. Our analysis would not apply to a handgun or a tree, because these do not have a sense of self or an awareness of internality vs. externality. It is only in the context of such an awareness that it makes sense to speak of freedom.
I think that all of this accords very well with our intuitions. My intuition is that I was not free at birth, and that I had little freedom as an infant. Libertarian free will, I think, would demand that I was free at both times. My intuition is that "freedom" is something I experience to varying degrees in particular situations, and that the configuration of my identity at birth has little to do with the question of whether I am free or not at the present moment. Libertarian free-will, on the other hand, tries to view freedom in some sort of absolute, eternal perspective.
To be frank, I don't really understand why people feel compelled by their intuitions to adopt the libertarian position. I certainly don't. But then, it's a free country, and they are free to adopt that position in accordance with their innermost identity and desires; I'm certainly not going to stop them!
14 comments:
I may not be reading what you're saying correctly but to me it sounds like you are making the same arguments that Victor Fankle makes in Mans Search for Meaning. As I remember it he says that there is always a period of time where man can make his own decsion as to what he will do. This would be the moment of time between Tn-1 and Tn.
I would be interested in knowing when you consider T0 occurs, or birth?
By the way I believe that I now fall in the compatibilist camp of free will, somewhat to my dismay, so I'm interested in your arguments.
Interesting, Max. I've not read Fankle, but what you describe does sound similar to what I'm suggesting. I don't think I would locate the "choice" in-between two moments, though. I see choosing as a temporal process (i.e. one that occurs within the normal course of time and events), not as some sort of supra-temporal or intra-temporal special case.
I would place T0 at the moment that meaningful self-consciousness first occurs. Of course, the questions of how we define self-consciousness and when it first takes shape are sticky questions for which there are no easy answers. It probably doesn't occur at either conception or birth. That would be too easy. Sometime in-between would be my guess. (And for that reason I oppose partial-birth abortion, but see early-term abortions as a more ambiguous issue.)
I guess you know about Victor Fankel. He was a Jew in probably the most deterministic situation a human could be in; a Nazi death camp. He decided that no matter how he was treated by the prison guards there was always a space where he could decide how he would react to them. He chose not to hate the guards. An amazing man. Talk about subjecting your theories to a crucible of fire.
Wow! Crucible of fire indeed! Thanks for the tip, Max. I'll keep an eye out for his books.
Chris: I have no idea what you could possibly mean by "proceed more from internal identity." There is no such act as proceeding from internal identity that I could perform. My basic acts are just that -- doing acts. I don't do acts from identity.
Moreover, you reify identity as a thing that causes acts. That seems to me to be a serious mistake. Identity changes with choices. It isn't a thing that causes anything. Your argument thus makes assumptions based on "concepts" that seem vacuous to me.
Hi, Blake. You appear to see verbs as the most basic aspect of reality, whereas I would say the same for nouns. In my view, the noun "act" is a handy term for a collection of discrete temporal states that proceed causally from my internal configuration (i.e. my "identity") at the prior moment. The verb "to act" merely describes the procession of my "acts" from my "identity".
I agree that "Identity changes with choices." I disagree with the statement that "It isn't a thing that causes anything." It is precisely because my identity at a given moment is the cause of my identity in the next that I have a sense of continuity-of-being over the course of my lifetime.
Best,
-Chris
Chris: Your notion of identity as a cause of anything is just muddled? How does "identity" cause anything. I know how chemical reactions cause results. I know how brain states cause results. I have no idea how a universal like "identity" could cause anything at all. Care to explain?
As I said, your notion of causal determinism rests on on the fallacy of reification. What do you mean by "identity"? As you are undoubtedly aware, what constitutes identity is a very large and vexing philosophical problem. Do you just mean the sum total of your past choices and physical constitution? Do you mean your essential properties as the individual that you are (your individual essence or perhaps a hacceity? How do your past choices sum to a new total to cause anything? The notion seems to be nothing but a universal or concept without any concrete existence. But only concrete actualities can cause things.
Hi Blake,
I am using the term "identity" to refer to a total mental and physical configuration at a given moment. Since there is good evidence that the mind is merely an emergent property of the brain, it is my opinion that the referent of the term "identity" is ultimately concrete and/or reified. Identity is a "universal" for me only in the nominalist sense that a set of instantiated entities have similar relations or properties and therefore can be conveniently grouped together into a common category for ease of conception and communication.
Best,
-Chris
What does it mean to be "more caused" by something? In any event, since you don't have control over your past self now, you don't have control over your choices now.
>>What does it mean to be "more caused" by something?
If I am tied to a chair, my action of "sitting" is more the result of external constraints than of anything that is going on internal to my self. Ergo, my sitting is not a free action. If I am unrestrained but you are holding me at gunpoint, my decision to sit down is still mostly constrained, albeit not totally constrained. If I'm at home sitting in front of my computer typing out a blog comment, my decision to sit is still carried out in response to external circumstances, but those external circumstances are less constraining; I have more options available to me, and therefore when I make my choice by constraining the various options so that only one remains, the constraining occurs more as a result of processes internal to me than in the previous cases.
>>In any event, since you don't have control over your past self now, you don't have control over your choices now.
You are incorrect. The fact that I don't control who I am at this particular moment has no bearing on the fact that I control who I am at the next moment. The givenness of the present self does not negate the given self's control over future states. I don't know how else to say it.
Chris said: "You are incorrect. The fact that I don't control who I am at this particular moment has no bearing on the fact that I control who I am at the next moment. The givenness of the present self does not negate the given self's control over future states. I don't know how else to say it."
You are right that not controlling myself in this moment doesn't logically entail that I don't control myself in the next moment. However, what is at issue isn't this kind of entailment, but causal entailments given causal determinism. To the contrary, if causal determinism is true, the past moment does in fact causally entail the next moment. If you have no control over the prior moment, and if you have no control over the fact that the prior moment causally entails the present moment, then you do not have causal control over the present moment either. Since you don't control past causes, and such causes causally entail what you do now, you don't control what you do now.
On the other hand, if the past does not causally entail what you do now, but what you do now is up to you acting in the present moment, then you are in fact a libertarian agent causalist. if you control what you do now by a basic act from the immediate self, then you have defined agent causal free will. Such basic powers entail power to act in a way that is not dictated by the past so that there is not only one unique present entailed by the conjunction of past laws and past events.
Hi Blake,
I'm glad we can agree "that not controlling myself in this moment doesn't logically entail that I don't control myself in the next moment." You observed, however, that it does entail that I have no control over the present or the past. While it may be true that I have no control over the present or the past, it is not true-- except at the moment of my "birth" as an agent, T0-- that I at no time had control over the present or the past. Au contraire; if it is conceded that at any present moment during my lifetime I have control over my future, and if it is true that every past moment during lifetime except for T0 was once a future moment, then there is no moment after T0 over which I had no control.
Furthermore, you argued that if I do not control the present then I do not control "what I do now," i.e. in the present. This is a category confusion. Remember that according to determinism the term "now" refers to a single moment: a fixed state. There is no "doing" in the "now". When people speak in every-day conversation of what we are "going to do now," the use of the future-esque progressive tense is more than merely accidental. "Doing" refers to the transition between the present and the future. Since my future state is determined by my present state, I do indeed have control over "what I do now".
With respect to the agent causal view you wrote,
>>if you control what you do now by a basic act from the immediate self, then you have defined agent causal free will.
In all seriousness, is it really your experience that your decision to act-- and therefore your "control" over your action-- occurs exactly simultaneously with the action itself? Do you not experience control as temporally prior to action?
Chris: "if it is conceded that at any present moment during my lifetime I have control over my future . . ."
Of course that is just what can't coherently be conceded given causal determinism because it is true in every moment that you are causally determined to do what you do. So all of your past acts were also causally entailed by facts over which you have no control. It follows that there is no moment at which what you do is not within your control if causal determinsim is true.
In fact, this gets back to my initial observation that you illegitimately smuggle in the notion of being in control at some past moment in a sense that requires libertarian free will at that moment. Look, if what you do is entailed by what you have no control over, and that C occurs causally entails that A occurs, and you have no control over that causal entailment, then you don't have control over what is entailed either. Such a result follows because you have no control over what is causally entailed in the past before now.
What you say about acting in the present to bring about a causal result in the next moment may be all very interesting, it is just quite beside the point. The question is whether you have power to change the past and causal laws by any act -- and the answer is that you don't if we accept causal determinism.
You seem to forget that the context of every choice is causally determined if we accept determinism and thus there is no act that is not causally entailed by a conjunction of the past events and causal laws.
And Yes: my experience is that when I do an act I have control over it at the same time that I perform the act. Otherwise, I could not have control with respect to my act. My act just is the creative act of ordering my thoughts and ordering the data of the prior moment into a choice in the present moment as it is passing into the next moment in a new creative act of conscious experience (like creating thoughts in successive moments in the stream of consciousness). What you have to remember is that I don't think in terms of states of being but in terms of related events in a process to create a new moment and a new whole that previously didn't exist.
Is it your experience that you don't have control over your acts at the time you do your acts? If you are responsible then isn't that the moment you must have control? You couldn't have control now over an act that you did yesterday. What makes you think you have control now over what happened 5 seconds ago? Now what I do now may be the causal result of an act over which I had control 5 seconds ago, but the act I do now can be free and responsible only if I also had control 5 seconds ago.
I believe that determinists often have a basic commitment to agent causal powers but hold them inconsistently with their view that what I do now is causally determined by what I did yesterday -- or what occurred 500 years ago for that matter. That is what I believe really underlies your intuition that if I act from my immediate prior self then I am responsible now. What I believe the non-muddled way to state this is: In the immediate prior moment I had an agent causal power to A and I brought it about that B by my immediately prior act to A. So at t1 I brought about A freely because I am an agent cause in control of my act and I did act A which causally resulted in B at t2. So I believe that if we unmuddle what you are saying, it assumes a view of libertarian free will, basic agent causal powers and the ability to act now to bring about causal results in later moments by basic agent causal powers.
Hi Blake,
I have a 20-page paper due in seven days, and I have only written an introductory paragraph thus far. So I cannot guarantee I will be able to post much, if at all, this week. Just FYI.
Much of this I responded to in the other thread, so I'll keep it short. You wrote,
>>My act just is the creative act of ordering my thoughts and ordering the data of the prior moment into a choice in the present moment as it is passing into the next moment in a new creative act of conscious experience (like creating thoughts in successive moments in the stream of consciousness).
OK, so you do have an awareness of a temporal sequence in which thought precedes choice, which precedes action. But you are suggesting that your causation of the choice is not lodged in the preceding thought, but rather occurs simultaneously with the choice itself via a recombination of the preceding thought-data. Correct? That is a very alien model to me. If everything we know about causality suggests that cause precedes consequence, why posit simultaneity in the case of a choice? And if our experience is that choices are the result of the reasoning process that preceded them, why posit that something else scrambles our thoughts and uses them as raw material to produce a choice at the moment of choosing? Can I still be described as a rational being if my thoughts do not lead directly to my choices?
>>I believe that if we unmuddle what you are saying, it assumes a view of libertarian free will, basic agent causal powers and the ability to act now to bring about causal results in later moments by basic agent causal powers.
No offense, but I believe that you couldn't be more mistaken.
Best,
-Chris
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