Donald Davidson in "The Material Mind" discusses the case of one Art, a synthetically constructed human being, who is ex hypothesi exactly like one of us in all psychologically relevant respects, and suggests that we should/would not deny such a person title to free will just because their origin was entirely determined by outside processes. Davidson thinks that the possibility of Art does something close to providing a knock-down argument for Compatibilism, as far as I can tell. I agree that there is a strong compatibilist intuition that Art pumps in us, but it would be nice to have the argument a little more precise than Davidson makes it (or than I made it in the 'quantum sperm' example).
As was pointed out in class, if we make an exact copy of a person, including whatever gives him free will, then trivially the exact copy has free will. But an exact copy of e.g. a dualist self would include a duplication of his soul. Maybe this doesn't matter; but we don't our claim to come to nothing more than "If you make an exact copy of someone who has free will, the copy will have free will", because the worry is that the result is then trivial because the free will itself got copied.
I think if we assume some sort of underlying physical substrate, as Davidson does, the argument gets clearer.
1. If we make an exact physical copy of a physical being, that being will have all the mental properties (if any) of the being thus copied.
2. Free will is a mental property of some physical beings.
3. Therefore, if we make an exact physical copy of a physical being who has free will, that being will have free will.
4. Exact physical copies may be produced deterministically or indeterministically, naturally or artificially, and with or without purpose or guiding intelligence.
5. Therefore, beings who have free will may be produced in deterministic or inderrministic ways, naturally or artificially, and with or without purpose or guiding intelligence.
You pretty much have to either be a dualist or claim that actual histories are essential to the nature of physical beings to deny 1 and 2; worries about psychological structure and/or physical law don't really matter to endorsing the conclusion.
So if you don't take one of those approaches, this argument seems to show that the actual causal history of organisms is irrelevant to whether or not they have free will. So there's a sort of antinomy here between this argument and arguments that distant causation undermines free will. Which is what we were trying to get to earlier.
A note about anomalous monism. The above considerations seem to show that there must be at least one psychophysical law if every event is (among other types, perhaps) a physical event: namely, every exact copy of the entire physical universe is also an exact copy of the entire mental universe. Furthermore, if we accept various sorts of commonly accepted views to the effect that minds are local and discrete - that mental properties supervene, even if only in a token-token way, on physical properties - or perhaps that events occurring within a particular mind supervene, even if only in a token-token way, on physical events occurring within that mind (or even within that mind's backwards light-cone) - then it seems that we have a second psychophysical law as well, namely, that every exact copy of the relevant physical organisms (perhaps, plus their environments) is also an exact copy of the minds that go with those organisms.
I do not see how to escape this, and Davidson's intuitions about Art actually require it - otherwise we can simply shrug and say that the total lack of psychophysical laws makes it completely unsurprising that we have free will (if we do) and this Art who is identical to us but who came to be in a different, fully deterministic way is not - even if he is an exact clone.
I don't think this is a special problem for anomalous monism, though - the view is still easily stated as claiming that there are no type-type mental-physical superveniences, or as Davidson put it no psychophysical laws, other than the laws of identity stemming from events under multiple descriptions and sets thereof being the same events and/or sets of events.
No comments:
Post a Comment