This is the fourth part in a five-part series.
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To be free, they say, an action needs to be not uncaused but caused in a specific way, by the right kind of causes—those meeting certain criteria. For example, University of North… [continuing from page 3] … Carolina philosopher Susan Wolfe claims that a free action must “stem from values determined by reason.” Dennett, for his part, says you are morally responsible (and free) if you act while capable of imagining the consequences of your actions, possessed of basic rationality, and not compelled by forces the direction of which you would disavow.
“But that means compatibilists maintain we are free and determined?” Kelly asked.
“Yes.” In rebuttal, Harris says that compatibilist freedom is akin to a puppet loving where his strings deterministically take him.
“Who’s right?” Kelly asked.
When new scientific consensus conflicts with folk understanding, sometimes folk beliefs change; sometimes they do not. The scientific difference between mass and weight has enjoyed—I’d wager—less than 100 percent adoption by the folk. When oxygen was discovered, however, everyone stopped referencing phlogiston. Will free will go the way of phlogiston? In Blackwell’s Companion to Free Will (2023), Shaun Nichols, a philosopher at the University of Arizona, suggests that the concept of free will will change in one of two possible ways: in the way of the concept witch (eventual widespread acceptance that there are no such things as witches) or in the way of whale (eventual widespread acceptance, in spite of Herman Melville, that whales are not fish but mammals).
Dennett wants us to continue using the linguistic expression free will, but such that any libertarian part of it will disappear, and it’ll have to start to mean something non-libertarian via a connotational revision. Harris wants us to accept that free will, like witch, has no denotational referent in the real world. And the self-same responsibility-conferring mental states that Dennett wants to label “free will,” Harris wants to use to label our concept of “voluntary willing.”
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In the first season of HBO’s Westworld, Thandiwe Newton plays Maeve, an android brothel madam who doesn’t know she’s an android. “Everything you do, it’s because the programmers . . . programmed you to do it,” a technician named Felix (Leonard Nam) tells Maeve in a pivotal, revelatory scene. He shows her a futuristic iPad on which are displayed the words she is about to say. “I’ve run a brothel for years, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s when I am being fucked with,” she says with unintended sphexishness, not yet entirely focused on the tablet. Finally comprehending what she’s looking at, Maeve says, “That’s not possible,” a fraction of a second after we, the television audience, see the words “That’s,” “not,” and “possible,” boxed, highlighted, and linked together—making a flowchart-like path, like stepping-stones, among a cloud of alternative words she might have uttered. Confronted by accurate predictions of her behavior or speech, Maeve must conclude that her behavior is indeed caused by her programming. With this realization, she freezes and her eyes glaze over, evidently having crashed like Windows 95. If you or I were confronted by accurate predictions of this kind, we might faint. It would seem to be compelling evidence that free will is an illusion.
The most interesting recent empirical work that threatens free will belief—and in a similar way to Westworld—involves using brain scanners to literally “read minds,” and accurately predict what a test subject is about to do. There is not yet a generally applicable, universal brain decoder, but the in-principle possibility is coming closer and closer to actuality. Neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes and colleagues can predict which button a test subject in an fMRI brain-scanning machine will press—a button under the left index finger or one under the right—more than six seconds before the test subject consciously decides which button. These predictions—published in a study from 2008—were accurate 60 percent of the time. But a 2011 replication, using a technique other than fMRI, achieved 80 percent accuracy 700 milliseconds before the subject consciously decides.
In one experiment, participants are shown two numbers and over a short period may decide to either add or subtract them. Scientists can predict the participants’ decision up to four seconds before the participants consciously decide which they’re going to do. A researcher on Haynes’ team can be locked away in a windowless room and still accurately predict which button the test subject will press, based only on the test subject’s brain-scan data and artificial intelligence software. The upshot for free will is that your conscious decisions have their causes in nonconscious regions of your brain, which the scan can see even though you can’t, since they are nonconscious. The fact of accurate prediction implies, more generally, that consciousness is fed its contents by nonconscious processes—nonconscious content bubbles up, on its own, to populate conscious experience.
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“But if we feel free, is that not enough?” Kelly asked. I quoted Samuel Johnson, who said, “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.” Sam Harris, I told Kelly, disagrees with the last part. Harris thinks experience is against free will too. In this opinion, he is almost entirely alone. Feeling like the author of your thoughts, Harris argues, is not a feeling we ever actually have. We say we have it, but if we paid…
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This is great - TY.