The problem with introducing a fundamental indeterminism into the self/agent/mind is that while such beings may be causes of their actions, even ‘first causes’ in some fairly deep senses, they are not controllers of their actions. This may be conceptually forced on us – if ‘controlling’ implies determination at any level, and we are forced to believe in an indeterministic determination in order to believe in free will, then we are in some trouble here. Kane’s often thoughtful discussion of responsibility is in a certain way an attempt to paper this problem over; I think that deeper consideration is showing that one can be a responsible cause (at least under certain assumptions) without therefore being a controller and without therefore being a free-willed agent in the full traditional sense, if we are right about what this sense entails.
Let’s then put indeterminism to one side and consider what the prospects for a determined self are. The difficulty here as I see it is that if the elements of self are determined by prior elements, we seem to be forced into the familiar choice between absolute origins, circularity, and infinite regress.
Infinite regress might work for God’s freedom of will, if there is a God. Could it work for human beings? Could we somehow be at the cresting edge of an infinite regress of causal control with no point of origin, all within us? This would be an interesting line to take. I have trouble seeing how it would work out at this point.
Circularity, where our will is somehow made free by itself, likewise seems more the province of a deity than of human beings, if it is possible. Still this idea resonates with certain themes in the history of philosophy, and perhaps if free will is internal to some kind of ‘performative’ rather than ‘substantive’ self – a self which emerges through actions (though what is acting in such cases?) rather than a self which is prior to its actions, say – the circularity option might be made out.
An absolute origin in space and time seems to be the more natural, pretheoretic assumption about selves/agents/minds of the sort many of us normally take ourselves to be. If I am perhaps being too open-minded about the above options, it’s because this one does seem to bring us pretty close to impossibility. For we seem to have two choices: either the self/agent/mind is created at least in small part ex nihilo, or in some way which is radically causally independent of whatever exists prior to it, or it is caused to be wholly by things which came before it. In the latter case ultimate control seems necessarily to be beyond the self; the self’s internal determinations will always trace back to things that came before it. What about the former? A character appears, or a will, in some way untouched by the things before it: it is an emergent whole with new causal powers, or an extradimensional self which reaches into this reality from another one. Is such a being free (at least if it has the right kind of will, as we do)?
It’s not clear to me that it is. Here’s an argument. Assume a world of believing-desiring beings who are as like us as beings can be without free will. Let’s say that, just before one such being is born, or at just the stage of development that ‘personhood’ is going to emerge, or whatever, there is a quantum-mechanical hiccup in the universe that interrupts the normally deterministic processes of believing-desiring being production with an initial indeterminism. This being, and this being alone, has a character which was not determined by what came before him in the universe. Maybe he even wears plaid with stripes. Is he free, if the others are not? It seems to me that he is not. The fact that a random quantum mechanical accident introduced an indeterminism into his nature and thus rendered him causally independent of the universe that came before him does not seem sufficient to make him free if the others are not free.
So the argument is: if the others are free already, then the introduction of a fundamental indeterminism to cut this man off from the external causal sources of his selfhood is unhelpful. And if the others are not free already, then adding the fundamental causal indeterminism doesn’t seem to make a difference which really matters. So a causal indeterminism which cuts agents/selves/minds off from their origins, however it does it, doesn’t seem to get us free will.
Likewise, consider two beings with an identical psychology, one of whom was created ex nihilo and the other of whom was created through deterministic causal processes. Is the fact of origin sufficient to make one free and the other not?
I am not sure these arguments are conclusive. What we wanted to know was whether beings like us could have free will and we thought that, in order to have this, we had to show that we were not in fact completely causally dependent on things external to us. Now we are presenting some alternate arguments to the effect that two identical beings could be produced by completely different causal processes (standard issue, indeterministic randomness, miraculous ex nihilo) and that this shouldn’t ultimately matter to whether they had free will or not. It seems to me that you can’t have it both ways; as of now though I am very sympathetic to both of these lines of thought.
It would be very nice if we could make both lines of thought a little more precise. But anyway, to conclude the line of thought on external determination for now, it seems as though what the defender of traditional free will would want would be a self that was (a) a determiner of its own actions but (b) was not ultimately entirely control-dependent on things outside itself. So introducing some sort of indeterministic or ex nihilo element into the events which create a self, but not to the events within a self, would seem to be the best one can do here. A non-physical, dualistic faculty of choice which determined one’s attempts to act would be one way to get this, although just as when we specify God as the creator of the universe we may wonder who created God, we may also wonder what the ultimate origins and causal sources of this non-physical mind are. (How do we know we have not taken it out of one causal order only to put it in another?) O’Connor postulates an emergent self as perhaps another, although DP raised an interesting objection to this line of thought last class.
Can we generate a straight contradiction/antinomy out of the free will problem? This morning I’m inclined to think that if we rephrase things just slightly we can, but I don’t have it yet. There are loopholes (which we are exploring in the class!) in the traditional arguments against free will, but maybe they can be closed by rephrasing things a bit. I think that discovering some genuine contradictions in the neighborhood of the traditional free will problem would help us get clearer on the notion, whether they undermined free will in some broader sense or not.
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