Comments

1. 

   Mark S.

   October 17, 2014 at 16:46

   “… do we still have a variety of free will that can support morality and responsibility?” It seems to me that almost all of us can adequately answer the moral responsibility question independent of what level of free will we might have. That independence depends on the justification we will accept for assigning, or not assigning, moral responsibility. Assume we would accept as justification, as I expect almost all of us would, whichever choice we expect is most likely to maximize social benefits – a standard utilitarian kind of justification for a moral norm. Then whether or not we assign moral responsibility in any given case is independent of any physics or neurobiology of “free will”. Saying “If we do not have free will (as a fact of the matter) then we ought not to assign moral responsibility” commits the error of claiming to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ without adequately, so far as I have seen, explaining how that remarkable leap was made. Indeed, I have seen this claim presented only as intuitively obvious. Perhaps the Templeton Foundation would fund work to reveal why and how our shared biological and cultural evolution makes this claim “intuitively obvious” but wrong, and thus more decisively put down this particularly zombie-like idea.
   1. 

      George Gabor

      October 22, 2014 at 23:53

      “If we do not have free will (as a fact of the matter) then we ought not to assign moral responsibility” commits the error of claiming to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’... That is easy to fix. How about this: “If we do not have free will (as a fact of the matter) then moral responsibility does not exist either”
2. 

   Jim C.

   October 21, 2014 at 18:58

   "Free will" is a concept of Christian theology that underlies the definition of sin, but the writer seems unwilling to reveal the real roots of the idea. It is metaphysics, not science, and is commonly accepted a priori. The scientists are working out the real details, and so religion's army of apologists, typically using science as a straw man to hide the baseless nature of so many of their ideas, are called to the attack. However, there are other sources of information that also deny its existence. My experience as a psychotherapist certainly showed me that the idea is ludicrous. The Buddhist idea of delusion -- no, I'm not pushing Buddhism -- is a better way of looking at the problem, as it holds that we are all deluded to some degree. Our moral behaviors are often conditioned by our delusions: distorted views of the world and our emotional responses to it. We have a limited free will, in other words, varying from person to person, from time to time, with social conditions, and even with mood from hour to hour.
   1. 

      Sick of Jesus all the time

      October 24, 2014 at 08:20

      The question of Free Will and theories about causation , although important to Christian thinking, are clearly topics that were important to cultures the predate what we would recognize as Christian ...and Christian scientific/philosophical thinking , at least with the Catholic thinkers go, are very clearly following a pagan model , Aristotle.
3. 

   George Ortega

   October 21, 2014 at 20:22

   Refuting free will is straightforward: (a) Everything is caused; (b) Human thoughts are caused; (c) The antecedent causes to human thoughts regress to before the person’s birth; (d) Therefore human thoughts are not fundamentally attributable to a human free will. Some free will defenses assume that demonstrating that human behavior is not fundamentally deterministic might provide an opening for free will, however, choices arising from indeterministic, or uncaused, processes cannot rationally be attributed to anything, including humans. The prospect has emerged that other mechanisms that are described as neither deterministic nor indeterministic, and can be labeled causa sui, (self-caused) or ex nihilo, (out of nothing) may be where a free will resides. However, as Strawson (1994) ex-plains, it has not been shown how a self-caused mechanism allows for free will, and the same can be said for free will arising ex nihilo. In other words, it's futile to attempt to defend free will by questioning determinism, since all other possible action mechanisms render free will equally impossible. Game over for free will. For a more in-depth account of why our belief in free will is quite harmful, download my recent 56-page scholarly work, Free Will: Its Refutation, Societal Cost and Role in Climate Change Denial here - http://refutation.webs.com/fw.pdf
   1. 

      Walter

      October 27, 2014 at 15:15

      Dear Ortega guy, if you are able to refute "free will" it must be the result of some unwilled compulsion. And this is true for every other belief. Then why bother to refute anything at all? Everyone thinks exactly what they are forced to think ...
   2. 

      TIMOTHY_ROBERTS

      November 2, 2014 at 19:23

      Two points: 1) Are you confident that all events are caused? As I understand quantum theory (inadequately) it is not established that events at the atomic level are caused (though they do obey statistical rules). 2) When you seek to establish that belief in free will is 'harmful', presumably you are using 'harmful' in some utilitarian sense, eg, of 'impeding progress towards socially useful goals' (like reducing carbon dioxide emissions). I'm not sure that's relevant - maybe free will is just another 'inconvenient truth'.
   3. 

      Michael Lang

      January 30, 2015 at 17:01

      I'm afraid that I deeply believe in free will, and if I'm wrong I don't even have a say in the matter. Would you have me choose to believe that I cannot choose?
4. 

   Ted Schrey Montreal

   October 22, 2014 at 04:21

   It is rarely, if ever, clear to me to which kind of freedom free will refers; free from historical influences? Free from personal advantages? Free from human empathy? Free from future merit? Free from personal/social image? Free from rational caution and consideration? What what what?
   1. 

      TIMOTHY_ROBERTS

      November 2, 2014 at 18:45

      Influenced by all those things, but determined by none of them?
5. 

   Renaissancenerd

   October 24, 2014 at 21:41

   I believe in free will because the most common of all human pastimes all through history is the denial of free will. Whether they blamed the Fates or Norns, the Will of the Gods, society, the patriarchy, mommy and daddy, or too much sugar in their diet, this is ubiquitous to the human experience. Everybody's looking to blame somebody else for their behavior. If we didn't know, via a common sense, that we had free will, we wouldn't spend so much time trying to deny its existence. I expect no great success for science, which has already tried many times in the last few centuries and still hasn't convinced anybody, because even those who proclaim free will is dead are acting from free will. They couldn't even express their disagreement if they couldn't make up their own minds about it, because it would've been predetermined. So the pleasure they get from telling the world that we're all just helpless automatons in a sea of impersonal forces by itself demonstrates their own detachment from said helpless automatons and impersonal forces, which couldn't happen except though a choice that couldn't be determined in any way other than to resist those forces. Via free will. A simplification of the idea, to be sure. Maybe someday I'll finish writing the book, but not today.
6. 

   Squeaky Rat

   October 25, 2014 at 07:55

   And what does "fundamentally attributable" mean? Is that different from, you know, garden-variety "attributable"?
7. 

   Ted Schrey Montreal

   October 25, 2014 at 21:09

   'Limited free will' strikes me as similar to 'limited pregnancy'.
8. 

   Marshall Eubanks

   October 26, 2014 at 22:15

   Here is my thinking (as a physicist) about this - just as life uses free energy to overcome entropy (a good definition of life is that living organisms have a strong tendency to create things with less entropy than their raw materials), I think that sentient creatures use randomness in the environment to create free will. Shear randomness is not really free will, nor is it very evolutionarily fit, but a use of randomness to make non-predictable decisions could be very evolutionarily fit, and that's how I think free will evolved. I am not entirely sure if that is a “incompatibilist” approach or not - I suspect there is a third path, the path of mathematical chaos (think of fluid mechanics - is a process deterministic if it can never be computed?). But, at any rate, very interesting essay and I look forward to reading the book.
9. 

   Egypt Steve

   October 26, 2014 at 23:55

   First: Why does the conscious ego have to be the agent of free choice? Even if the mind makes its choices sub- or pre-consciously, how does that demonstrate that they were not free? Freud, after all, argued a century ago that the mind is made up of both conscious and unconscious elements. It seems neuroscience is just rediscovering that. Second: Let's say there is no free will. Let's further say that a consequence of this is that there is no moral responsibility in the conventional Christian sense. In that case, we still have to act as if morality exists, since there seems to be some evidence that an external "moral" regime does in fact influence peoples' choices. Maybe that influence is purely behavioristic in the B.F. Skinner sense, but so what? There it is.
   1. 

      TIMOTHY_ROBERTS

      November 2, 2014 at 19:03

      No. If moral responsibility does not exist, there is no moral obligation to act as if it does (or indeed to do anything else).
10. 

    gregdavis

    October 27, 2014 at 10:05

    Philosophy has had a couple of millennia to work on this- neuroscience work on free will is in its infancy.. And the more exciting for it... Prof Dennett's suggestions always interesting but his 'cure' for the prob of free will is pretty much the same as his solution for hard prob of consciousness- pretend it's not there. Not fair to Templeton Foundation who I know fund shed loads of research threatening libertarian free will, and my labs new experiments (they didn't insist I write this!). I also think modest libertarianism amounts to no real claim, but that's not such a bad summing up of where we are.
11. 

    freddy nietzsche

    December 5, 2014 at 04:24

    there's no such thing as a free lunch. similarly, there is no such thing as free will - it comes at a cost. having a will and acting constrain the actor to the consequences of the action, which include the moral responsibility assigned to the actor in the society in which we live. this is why the 'experiments' of the libet tradition would always be found wanting. a better question to be asking, perhaps, is: do we want freedom? i bags not being held responsible for that...
12. 

    Tom Richards

    November 5, 2016 at 18:12

    “Daniel Dennett is Wrong About Free Will”. He is, is he? This is the real problem with the field of Philosophy; the fact that laypeople, amateurs, dilettantes, fanboys, dittoheads, bloggers who are infatuated with the notion that they don’t have free will often feel entitled to clash their little plastic horns with the actual experts and professionals of the field – people who have thought deeply about their subjects for decades- and pretend that they are philosophy experts themselves – a pretense that extends even to the area of the philosophy of the mind (one of the most recondite and obscure areas of human investigation). Not only does the fact that the large majority of the experts in the field (including one of the world’s leading and most acclaimed experts in the philosophy of the mind) hold the view that free will and determinism are quite ‘compatible’ fail to give these pretentious dilettantes any pause for consideration, but they even indulge themselves in slinging mud at these very people for daring to propose (and hold to) a theory that goes against their personal interests and flies above the capabilities of their brains to fathom. Given their failure and inability to understand the ideas that make compatibilism what it is, and their absolute refusal to budge an inch from their cherished determinist-driven dogma, such people have no cards available within their sight other than to impugn the motives of these experts and claim that they are merely “doing semantics in order to appease common folk sensibilities”. In other words, accusing the majority of academic philosophers of being dishonest or not knowing what they are talking about. This is an amazing charge given that not only is it painfully obvious that it is precisely these dilettantes and dittoheads who do not really know what they are talking about, but they are clearly the ones whose attitude and dogmatic position with regards to this topic (as some of them have occasionally confessed) is both anchored and driven by personal agenda and emotion: the desire to be free of any feeling of personal responsibility. What is especially hilarious is the way these people impetuously paster the internet with their ‘responses’ to a written critique giving by a leading philosopher of the mind briefly explaining and outlining the philosophy of compatibilism to someone who is apparently their hero (in superficial thinking). In these ‘responses’ (usually in the form of blog-posts), they begin by pretending that they have read and understood the critique that they are responding to. They then, either deliberately or inadvertently, display/express their anger and displeasure at its author for propounding a position that happens not to sit well with them (and their champion whose misguided book they adore). They then go on to say how much they ‘disagree’ with the author of the dissertation and his points (which they obviously didn’t actually understand) and declare (rather comically) that the author is “wrong”. Why? Because they say so. This of course is usually accompanied by all the other mudslinging accusations about ‘playing semantics’, ‘changing the subject’, ‘being dishonest’ (again, because they, in their all-knowing wisdom, say so). The first dead-giveaway that these dittoheads and dilettantes have no idea what they are talking about or any true understanding of the position they pretend to be criticizing is the very fact that they invoke the accusation of ‘semantics’ in the first place. In other words, the depth of their confusion is sharply illustrated by the fact that these people think (or at least talk as if they think) that the compatibilist position is exactly the same as the (hard) determinist position but merely expressed differently. They fail to see (or simply do not want to accept) that there is a real conceptual difference in the two ideologies that has real consequences. These people think (or at least like or pretend to think) that compatibilists do not really actually believe in the existence of free will in any way at all but merely pretend they do. Of course, one probably has no choice but to embrace such a view if one is simply unable (or unwilling) to understand how free will can still be a very real phenomenon in human nature despite the reality of a world ultimately governed by deterministic forces. Such people are simply unable (or unwilling) to perceive that the peculiar traits of the human mind that distinguish it from most other living organisms – such as self awareness and subjective consciousness, the ability to reason, introspect, plan and make judgments and informed decisions – have given humans the ability to supersede blind deterministic forces in important ways and to act essentially as free agents (in the same way they’ve being able to overcome many other laws of nature). They insist on continuing to see people as merely robots (largely because that is how they like to think of themselves and partly because of their conceptual difficulty in understanding compatibilism). Of course, in a trivial sense, humans still operate under the laws of determinism given that they are part of nature, and thus one could, in principle, predict everything people would do if one had omniscient information. The conceptual difficulty that these ‘hard determinists’ have is understanding that an entity can still act as a free agent (in a way that is relevant both to itself and to all other entities) even though the course of its life could theoretically be predicted by an omniscient being. These people are doggedly fixated on using nonsensical strawman definitions and notions of ‘free will’ which they pretentiously project unto the ‘common folk’ and which enables them to assert triumphantly that “free will doesn’t exist” and to serve whatever internal satisfactions they derive from making that assertion. In doing so, they fail to see that ‘free will’ is simply a complex human trait like many others which are neither time independent or consistent and are not possessed by everyone to the same degree. Yet, when it all comes down to it, when you strip away all the fluff and feathers, the entire position of these “no free will” enthusiasts rests upon a single red-herring that they regularly invoke as a ‘trump card’: “Where does a person’s will (at any time) come from?” [The word often used is “desires”, but it would allow much more clarity if it were expressed more generally as “will”.] In other words, the entire argument of these people is predicated upon the single notion that a person’s ‘will’(at any time) is ultimately due to factors beyond his/her control or choosing. Of course, they will typically cement this argumentative trick with another sleight of hand in the form of some kind of infinite regression: “where did the will that led to that will come from; and the will that led to that one; and the one that led to that one…” and so on and so on. Thus, according to these not very bright but obnoxiously pretentious dormroom philosophers, the luxury of being able to act in accordance with one’s ‘will’ and sense of self interests is not enough to qualify as ‘freedom of will’; one also has to be able to snap one’s fingers and conjure into the driver’s seat of one’s psyche an arbitrary will straight out of thin air, one that they had no prior inclination whatsoever to conjure (otherwise it wouldn’t be ‘free’). And it mustn’t be a random event either, or it still wouldn’t be ‘free’. Therefore, this arbitrary will must be both willed and unwilled at the same time. Only then can someone have ‘free will’. Only then can someone ever have any responsibility for any of their actions. This is the kind of tomfoolery that occupies the base of these people’s minds when dabbling in this subject. Of course, they can always fall back on the very notion of ‘determinism’ itself (if the ‘trump card’ doesn’t work) and what it seems to them to mean: that human beings are simply robotic automatons of nature whose thoughts and actions are determined by a domino effect of causes and who merely labor under the illusion that they enjoy what they call ‘free will’ when they really don’t. It is the sort of conclusion that makes the chests of dormroom (and beer parlor) philosophers swell with pride and pat themselves on the back for ‘seeing’ something so ‘insightful’. Human beings, thus, are merely (at least when they enjoy this ‘illusion’) puppets that like their strings. (Incidentally, is a puppet that likes its strings essentially ‘free’, or isn’t it?) Meanwhile, these self-congratulating retards fail to see that their position is every bit as obtuse as saying that a canvas is not really a beautiful painting featuring a lovely scenery with humans and various objects…Why?...Because if you look very closely at it, it is made up of tiny little dots. Typically, ‘hard determinists’, especially these dilettante types, are usually people who have come to some personal realization and knowledge about a basic fact about the world and biological life (particularly human beings) that has long been trivial and obvious to other people and feel as though they have discovered something revolutionary (and personally exhilarating). This, for some reason, gives these amateurs a tendency to feel entitled to browbeat the works of much more thoughtful minds that have explored the subject long before they even knew that such a subject existed. This tendency may be attributable to the sensation of ‘discovery’ and conclusiveness that such people tend to feel about the concept of ‘determinism’ as it swims around in their heads, and a naïve and presumptuous belief that they have reached some kind of plateau of knowledge about the nature of the human mind – rather than just the foot of a long steep.