BTS: Is the folk naturally compatibilist?
Behind the scenes... I cut this section for length before submitting to The Missouri Review.
Is the person in the street a libertarian or a compatibilist? The relatively new movement called experimental philosophy has for a couple of decades taken the armchair thought experiments of philosophers to the person in the street. Practitioners then utilize the statistical research methods of social psychology to get data on how people respond—whereas philosophers had made claims for their thought experiments from a sample of one. It turns out that what people say about free will depends on framing and ordering effects; that is, surveys and experiments can elicit compatibilist as well as libertarian intuitions. If a vignette about Newton’s success at discovering the laws of nature precedes the survey question, a larger percentage of respondents agree that free will and science are incompatible. If an action was described as immoral and with sufficiently concrete detail, people reintroduce free will in order to hold the evil doer morally responsible.
Robert Sapolsky describes the untutored, folk view as a mix: it’s broadly libertarian with compatibilist aspects. “We have something resembling a spirit, a soul, an essence that embodies our free will, from which emanates behavioral intent; and… this spirit coexists with biology that can sometimes constrain it… A well-intentioned spirit, while willing, can be thwarted by flesh that is sufficiently weak.”
In other words, we have our biology, including aspects of brain function that “can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, etc.,”—basically Sapolsky’s entire book, Behave. “And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or nongendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel.” The homunculus, if you think about it, cannot be made of brain stuff (“squishy biological brain yuck”) or else there’d need to be a tinier homunculus inside the first homunculus. In order to avoid an infinite regress, the homunculus must be an immaterial substance that is capable of spontaneous action outside any causal story preceding it.
Sapolsky says the folk view allows that there are some things “outside the homunculus’ purview—seizures blow the homunculus’ fuses, requiring it to reboot the system… Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock.” However, aside from a few situations in which biology overpowers it, the homunculus maintains its ability to act unpredictably and contrary to everything that had come before.
This view is not supported by science, Sapolsky argues. And, as Sam Harris points out, it’s philosophically confused for invoking a causa sui, i.e., a self-causing, uncaused causer, namely the soul-like homunculus. (Nietzsche said it best: “The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived, a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity’s excessive pride has got itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense.”) The folk view is further problematic philosophically-speaking because of the question of interaction. A dualist view like this needs to explain how the soul, which is immaterial, can “pull” on the “levers” which are physical or biological. It was Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia, who presciently pointed this out in extensive correspondence with the father of modern dualism, Rene Descartes, who had absurdly invoked the pineal gland as the place where the impossible interaction occurs.
[DRAFT]
The quotes that get the problem of free will going. Timothy O’Connor 2000. Galen Strawson 1986. Robert Kane.
It’s maybe not so much that people believe in magic per se…. They believe that determinism is inconsistent with free will. So that leads them to the bad libertarian definition of free will as well as to denying causal determinism at least when it comes to human agency,
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Network: unbidden, Haynes, Nietzsche, “thoughts just appear,”
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I’m David J. Frost. I teach philosophy, write literary nonfiction, and live on the Oregon coast with my dogs, Fritz and Lou Salomé. My essays has appeared in the Missouri Review, The Smart Set, SLAB literary journal, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere. I went to Columbia for undergrad and lived in NYC for 10 years. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy from UNC-Chapel Hill.