Before we move on to arguments for and against free will, there is another issue we should probably consider, one relating to the structure of agents or of the will.
With what should we identify an agent’s will?
One standard answer from ‘folk’ or ‘commonsense’ or ‘philosophical’ protopsychology – the language in which we ordinarily discuss, describe, and analyze human action - is “with that agent’s beliefs and desires.”
(I will not consider skepticism about these notions, or more technical replacements for them from the various branches of scientific psychology and cognitive science, at present. It would be interesting and potentially quite valuable to try to recast the traditional problem of free will in the terms of a better developed and/or scientifically ‘alive’ psychological theory. However, it seems doubtful to me that, whatever models ultimately prevail in our attempt to understand our own minds, representational, inferential, attentional, and motivatory states of human beings will not both exist and be important parts of how we conceptualize human action; and these are, essentially, beliefs and desires, no matter how they are cached out in terms of genuinely better theories than we find in the protopsychology of ordinary reasoning.)
This is a troubling assumption if one hopes to establish the genuine existence of traditional free will. Not because – as one sometimes finds written, presumably due to lazy composition by philosophers who otherwise basically understand the underlying issues here – if the actions of an agent are determined by that agent’s beliefs and desires, such an agent cannot be free. This is clearly an error in the absence of further elaboration: if there are any, beliefs and desires are parts of agents, and so there is no cause external to an agent determining his or her will simply because his or her actions are determined by them. Having beliefs and desires which were genuinely owned by and in some way original to us would indeed be exactly the sort of thing we would need to establish the existence of free will.
The problem is rather that at least the great majority of an agent’s beliefs and desires do not seem to be internal to that agent. One problem stems from the fact that a great number of beliefs and desires are beliefs about and desires for objects, or for doing things with objects, which are in many cases external to agents as we ordinarily conceive them.
(Alternately, we might reconceive the boundaries of agents in such a way as to include the objects of their thought; whether this sort of move might lead to extended minds or even panpsychism, and how making this kind of move might affect our perspective on the free will problem, is an issue I wish to consider later on.)
A second problem comes from what might be called the ‘regress of finitude’, which is a version of one of the main arguments sometimes given against free will, and which has both theological and scientific analogues to the protopsychological version we are considering here. If you consider the beliefs and desires you have now, it would seem that they must have been adopted on the basis of some combination of innate factors, social conditioning, and the choices of the agent him- or herself. The first two involve external causation, so if freedom is to be found in our beliefs and desires it must be found among those which were chosen. But choosing to adopt a belief or desire is itself an action, presumably itself based on beliefs and desires that were held prior to that choice. (It makes no difference whether we add plans, cares, conscious attention, or other factors to the protopsychology here, unless those are structured in such a way as to have been adopted by agents without a determining external influence.) And where do these prior beliefs and desires come from? The same three choices present themselves; but gradually, as we fancifully work our way backwards through the history of an agent’s beliefs and desires, we reach infancy, the embryo stage, and so on; a finite origin for the temporally bounded beings that we are. And presumably at some sufficiently early stage in this development, whatever beliefs or desires an agent has can no longer be credibly held to be freely chosen; an infant does not freely choose its desires for parental comfort, milk, a clean diaper, and a tummy relatively free of gas; and so on. So we are left with only nature or nurture, generally conceived as external to us, as the only originating sources of our beliefs and desires; thus, with a will which is completely ultimately determined by external factors, and which thus is not free.
Roderick Chisholm, a defender of traditional free will, once wrote:
“If we are thus prime movers unmoved and if our actions, or those for which we are responsible, are not causally determined, then they are not causally determined by our desires. And this means that the relation between what we want or what we desire, on the one hand, and what it is that we do, on the other, is not as simple as most philosophers would have it. We may distinguish between what we might call the ‘Hobbist approach’ and what we might call the ‘Kantian approach’ to this question. The Hobbist approach is the one that is generally accepted at the present time (1966 – SS), but the Kantian approach, I believe, is the one that is true. According to Hobbism, if we know, of some man, what his beliefs and desires happen to be and how strong they are, if we know what he feels certain of, what he desires more than anything else, and if we know the state of his body and what stimuli he is being subjected to, then we may deduce, logically, just what it is that he will do – or, more accurately, just what it is that he will try, set out, or undertake to do. Thus Professor Melden has said that ‘the connection between wanting and doing is logical.’ But according to the Kantian approach to our problem, and this is the one that I would take, there is no logical connection between wanting and doing, nor need there even be a causal connection. No set of statements about a man’s desires, beliefs, and stimulus situation at any time implies any statement, telling us what the man will try, set out, or undertake to do at that time. As Reid put it, ‘Though we may reason from men’s motives to their actions and, in many cases, with great probability,’ we can never do so ‘with absolute certainty.’”
The epistemological language here is unfortunate, but despite that Chisholm’s basic point, that the existence of traditional free will requires there to be some factor other than beliefs and desires which determine an agent’s actions, seems right. Beliefs and desires, though important parts of agents, do not seem to be intrinsic to agents in the right sort of way to ground freedom. And a similar point would hold for any descriptive theories in philosophy or scientific psychology or cognitive science whose architecture of the agent contained terms which could be traced back though a similar regress.
To have traditional free will, we need something in the agent which is ultimately undetermined by external causal factors. The choices here are either (i) that there is some part of the agent which is completely free, or (ii) that, while all the parts of agents are ultimately completely determined by outside causes, nonetheless there is something about the whole agent which is free even though none of its parts are free. (I take this to be exhaustive because any instance of (i) would entail the kind of free agent also given by (ii), making the appeal to the agent as a whole redundant.)
Solutions of type (i) include appeals to a fundamental faculty of ‘choice’ or ‘free choice’ or ‘free will’ or ‘volition’ which exists alongside beliefs and desires and selects between them arbitrarily; also certain pseudoscientific notions such as Eccles’ ‘transempirical power centers’. The existence of any of these seems very difficult to establish, to put it mildly, but if anyone has an idea for where to look I’d love to hear it.
Solutions of type (ii) include dualistic theories of the agent, wherein we are conceived as non-physical beings who nonetheless are able to initiate attempts to act in our quite physical bodies. I am an ultimate kind monist, so this solution is not open to me; I do not believe that there can be two fundamentally different ultimate kinds of thing. Even Malebranche’s occasionalism, in addition to being silly, is not truly up to solving the difficulty of mind-world interaction: if we were purely mental beings for whom God initiated physical miracles in accordance with the determinations of our will, we would not be able to so much as perceive these miracles, given that they would have occurred in a realm entirely alien to our nature. Berkeley may have been wrong, but his philosophy is nonetheless a whirlpool into which many bad assumptions inexorably lead, as anyone who has taught a certain kind of introductory course to undergraduates well knows. To my taste these solutions are even worse than the type (i) solutions mentioned above, so I will consider them no further.
A more promising approach along these lines would simply to insist on agents or persons as part of the basic furniture of the universe, alongside the fundamental particles of physics and whatever else one thinks there to really be. (If I recall correctly, van Inwagen holds a view of this sort.) If we take this approach, though, we need some sort of theory of the agent to assuage very natural worries about just where these agents happen to be in the world, and how it is that they interact with the quarks and leptons and so forth. Such theories are very rare in current philosophy, but we have at least one good historical example, in Kant. For Kant, agency may be prior to external determinations of it – though we may never observe such a determination occurring – because it is the agent’s own spatializing and temporalizing of parts of the world that imposes the necessity of causation upon it. Thus, while we cannot ever observe freedom or know that we are free, even in our own minds, it is nonetheless possible that the ultimate springs of our action are not determined by the causal order which is always necessarily revealed in our spatializing and temporalizing cognition. So while we can’t actually know that Im Anfang war die Tat, it’s at least possible.
Kant’s idea is brilliant and I think that it may contain a kernel of insight that will be useful to us later – we will see. I am not a transcendental idealist, though, and without his metaphysics in place we would need another way to unhook the agent’s actions from the prior causal order, or else at least to show that the springs of will and causation were in some way cotemporaneous. (Again, more soon.)
But in general it is not enough for a ‘basic agents’ approach to become plausible for a savvy metaphysician manages to defend it against common objections, or shows it to be a deep and fundamental assumption of our thinking. (In general showing that something is a deep and fundamental assumption of our thinking is less valuable than it is often taken to be: so much the worse for our thinking if it turns out untrue for all that.) The location of agents is coextensive with that of various physical and biological beings and structures; furthermore, there is no physical or biological entity over and above those to which one can point when indicating the agent. So if we are to say that agents nonetheless exist in some important and fundamental way, we must not only defend them against objections; we must say something about what they are and what entitles us to think of them as distinct from the physical entities which make them up.
This leads us to a third type of effort along these lines, one which has been at least sketched by O’Connor: to consider the agent as an ‘emergent’ entity, one which ‘supervenes on’ but ‘does not reduce to’ more basic physical and biological structures. (Perhaps social ones as well, if social structures can supervene on e.g. biology without a prior determination of individuals within that society.)
On this sort of view, as I am able to understand it anyway, agents would be a kind of entity which came about when the right physical (biological, etc.) entities were assembled in the right sort of structure – which structure itself was a fundamental cause of certain events occurring when other entities interacted with it. Perhaps a crystal lens would be a useful analogy: the crystal lens is made up of atoms, and the property of those atoms determine what can be made of them; nonetheless, it is the crystal structure as a whole which makes possible certain kinds of focusing of light, etc. through the lens, and this structure is not reducible to the single or combined powers of the atoms that make up the crystal, without this structural assembly as well.
This is ground on which sensible philosophers fear to tread, but I think e.g. the famous two-slit experiment makes the importance of structure even more apparent: even a single electron may be caused to interfere with itself by the opening of a second gate in an apparatus; and so it need not be the way that e.g. every individual photon interacts with every individual atom in the crystal that determines the type of focused light that comes out of the crystal; it may genuinely be a property of the whole structure that determines the output of the system, along with the properties of its parts. This is only an analogy, and I would love to see this discussed in more detail by a knowledgeable person, but anyway this is the kind of thing that I take it a successful ‘supervenientist’ about anything would need: properties of structures that do not reduce to the properties of their parts. Arches are sometimes put forward as simpler examples – the combined forces exerted by all the stones on one another would not suffice to hold the whole up were the stones not arrayed in the appropriate way.
These arguments that structural wholes have causal powers distinct from the causal powers of their parts have always seemed somewhat plausible to me, but only in a fuzzy-headed sort of way. All of these issues about supervenience need more discussion, especially if we're going to try to see how far we want to develop this kind of solution.
Assuming that the notion of supervenience I have sketched above can be made out in a systematic way, it seems not only possible but quite likely that human beings are agents of this type; it is not merely the neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc. inside us doing their individual causal things that make us physically what we are, but, surely, the way that all of those are assembled into a structure. One could accept this even while still admitting that some of our abilities depend on parts of the brain and go away when those parts are damaged.
But how is this supposed to help with agential causation?
As far as I can see the idea is this. x supervening on some y’s may make those y’s into causes of x’s coming to be. But then there can also be some things that x does that do not depend on any of those y’s individually and cannot be said to be caused by them. Thus: the arch supervenes on the stones; but the arch stays up because it is an arch, and not because of anything the stones do singly or jointly irrespective of being organized archwise. So the staying-ups at t of the arch are caused by the arch, and not by the stones that make it up. On the other hand, there is no arch without the stones, and so if one stone is smashed, the arch, which supervenes on the stones, will cease to be. The crystal cannot be without the atoms that make it up, but its focusing of light depends not on those atoms, but on their being arranged crystalwise in a way which focuses light. It is the crystal which causes the light to be focused.
Likewise, I as an agent depend on the existence of various physical and biological structures: I would not be without them. But my willings come not from any of those parts, or at least not always (it may be that some do); they come from me, the agent, and not from any independent entity outside of me. And thus I may be free, in the sense that I am that agent which acts, and although I may die or my parts may become damaged in a way which deprives me of agency, still the things that agent does are not reducible to the causal sources of its parts; they are whole and intact, and make new contributions to the causal sequence of the universe by virtue of the new structure they introduce into it.
This approach needs more investigation. It has a little bit of the feel of being a cheat and also a little bit of the feel of being ingenious-if-plausible. Our existence depends on the existence of parts which are causally dependent on something external to us, but our actions and the events we initiate are not so dependent, because they trace back to us as a whole and not to our parts.
So:
1. Is this sort of move plausible?
2. If it works, does it really provide us with the kind of free will we were looking for? If our existence is contingent on physical things outside of us but our actions are not, that seems like a pretty good outcome for standard views of human agents anyway. But perhaps the ultimately external determination of our natures will still raise problems for some. Or perhaps free structures, even if they exist, aren't suitable candidates for full-blooded selves or agents on some other ground. Lots more to think about if you want to go this way.
In conclusion, it would be nice to have a solution to the problem of freedom of the will that didn't depend on anything more than a very general description of the will itself, since any such description brings with it additional dubious entanglements and premises. But if one does want to go on and describe the structure of agents or of the will as a way of fleshing out the details of one's account, or defending it against objections, I think this post brings out at least some of the important options one can take in so doing.
No comments:
Post a Comment