free will and moral (or ethical) agency and evolution

[PeterMP]

I've thought of different ways to go about this including quoting the wiki page on moral agency.

However, I think this might be the most robust.

I am going to start by quoting from two people that mostly write and worry about ethics and morality related to science and technology. I don't know anything about either of the people's religion and to my knowledge, they don't write at all on the god/no god topic and to my knowledge don't have a horse in the race.

The first I'm going to quote from is a member of the Philosophy Dept. at Dartmouth:

http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/courses/hon182/The_Nature_Importance_and_Difficulty_of_Machine_Et hics.pdf

"A full ethical agent can make explicit ethical judgments and generally is com-

petent to reasonably justify them. An average adult human is a full ethical agent.

We typically regard humans as having consciousness, intentionality, and free will."

"The other form of bright-line argument is to argue that no machine can become a full ethical agent—that is, no machine can have consciousness, intentionality, and free will.

This is metaphysically contentious, but the simple rebuttal is that we can’t say with certainty that future machines will lack these features."

Now, I'll quote from Drew McDermott who is a Computer Science Professor at Yale:

http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/papers/ethical-machine.pdf


"It is commonly thought that an entity must be capable of acting intentionally, which requires that it be conscious, and that it have free will, in order to be a moral agent."

"Does all this require consciousness, feelings, and free will? Free will, yes; the others I’m not sure about. I agree with the theory of free will set out in (McDermott 2001), which states that for an agent to be free it must model its ability to choose among various options as being exempt from causation. An ethical agent must have free will simply because one can’t make an ethical decision without making a decision."

Now, these are two general people writing about philosophy. Adult mature humans are generally considered to be ethical/moral agents. Such humans are also generally considered to have free will.

They aren't biologist, they don't think much about evolution, and they don't really think about free will in humans.

Lastly, I'll quote from Sam Harris, who is an atheist and I'd even say an advocate for atheism. He also has a PhD in neurobiology, and he thinks a lot about free will in humans.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/life-without-free-will

"Life Without Free Will":

"One of the most common objections to my position on free will is that accepting it could have terrible consequences, psychologically or socially. This is a strange rejoinder, analogous to what many religious people allege against atheism: Without a belief in God, human beings will cease to be good to one another. Both responses abandon any pretense of caring about what is true and merely change the subject. But that does not mean we should never worry about the practical effects of holding specific beliefs.

I can well imagine that some people might use the nonexistence of free will as a pretext for doing whatever they want, assuming that it’s pointless to resist temptation or that there’s no difference between good and evil."

That's right. Sam Harris doesn't think we have free will. He thinks we have an illusoin of free will.

Connecting that to the general concepts of being moral or ethical agents that means we would have the ILLUSION of being a moral or ethical agent (given general ideas of what those terms would mean).

Why does Sam Harris think that? Because there is no known biolgocial/evolutionary mechamism by which free will could be generated.

I'll further point out even if SOME peope MIGHT have free will, BUT if it is also possible for there to be an ILLUSION of free will, then some people might not.

Conservation of complex traits across a large species is expensive and just not likely to happen or be conserved if there is a reasonable alternative.

Now, out of fairness to alexey, I would humbly, politely, and sincerely ask Jumbo to allow alexy to respond to the OP w/o consequences.

For my part, I promise not to respond to ANY of alexey's post in this thread.

[Jumbo]

uhh...Jumbo doesn't have issues that have yet to be created...he often feels very alone in that, here...not sure how you want to label that ..

[s0crates]

The debate between determinism and libertarianism (free-will) is an old saw for philosophers. The guiding assumption for people who are compelled to take one side or the other is that the two positions are mutually exclusive. A third position is that of the compatibilist, who holds that free-will is compatible with determinism. I tend to favor this latter position, as I take free-will to be an emergent (caused) phenomenon.

It is common to assume that this debate has far-reaching ethical implications, but I am not so sure about that. This is a metaphysical question, not an ethical one. Since Hume, philosophers have tended to believe that you cannot derive an ethical claim from an empirical claim. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy. I have my doubts about Hume's fork, but I do think that we are dealing with different levels of reality here. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, as the old saying goes, and we should be weary of reducing a complex emergent phenomena like human consciousness to its components.

When this topic comes up, I like to point out one thing: There is something deeply suspicious about those who would verbally deny what they inevitably presuppose in practice. Whitehead called this a "performative contradiction," and I think the thoroughgoing determinist is guilty of such a contradiction. It seems to me hypocritical to deny free-will and then go about living your life as if you are making choices, as I assume Sam Harris does.

[PeterMP]

The debate between determinism and libertarianism (free-will) is an old saw for philosophers. The guiding assumption for people who are compelled to take one side or the other is that the two positions are mutually exclusive. A third position is that of the compatibilist, who holds that free-will is compatible with determinism. I tend to favor this latter position, as I take free-will to be an emergent (caused) phenomenon.

I don't tend to think of free-will as defined by compatibilist as a free well that allows somebody to be a moral agent.

To now quote from wiki:

"Hume adds that the Compatibilist's free will should not be understood as some kind of ability to have actually chosen differently in an identical situation. The Compatibilist believes that a person always makes the only truly possible decision that they could have."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compati...ning_free_will

If you are making the only choice that you can make, then you really haven't made a choice.

[Tulane Skins Fan]

The debate between determinism and libertarianism (free-will) is an old saw for philosophers. The guiding assumption for people who are compelled to take one side or the other is that the two positions are mutually exclusive. A third position is that of the compatibilist, who holds that free-will is compatible with determinism. I tend to favor this latter position, as I take free-will to be an emergent (caused) phenomenon.

It is common to assume that this debate has far-reaching ethical implications, but I am not so sure about that. This is a metaphysical question, not an ethical one. Since Hume, philosophers have tended to believe that you cannot derive an ethical claim from an empirical claim. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy. I have my doubts about Hume's fork, but I do think that we are dealing with different levels of reality here. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, as the old saying goes, and we should be weary of reducing a complex emergent phenomena like human consciousness to its components.

When this topic comes up, I like to point out one thing: There is something deeply suspicious about those who would verbally deny what they inevitably presuppose in practice. Whitehead called this a "performative contradiction," and I think the thoroughgoing determinist is guilty of such a contradiction. It seems to me hypocritical to deny free-will and then go about living your life as if you are making choices, as I assume Sam Harris does.

Are you the real socrates?

[s0crates]

I don't tend to think of free-will as defined by compatibilist as a free well that allows somebody to be a moral agent.

I suppose it would depend on how the compatibilist defines free-will. To be sure, some compatibilists hold that a person could not have done otherwise when he makes a "choice" (as per determinism), yet his decision was still free because it was unrestrained. On that common caricature of compatibilism, I would agree with you that this is not genuine free-will, however I think that is an overly simplistic picture. This caricature of compatibilism is not my view.

I begin with the assumption that I do have a free-will. I do deliberate about different courses of action, anticipate consequences, and make choices. We all do. Anybody who would deny this is guilty of intellectual dishonesty. To deny your own ability to choose is, as I said earlier, to "verbally deny what we inevitably presuppose in practice." It is hard for me to take anybody seriously who would do that. We should assume what we cannot help but to assume, which is that we can and do make choices.

The sticking point here is the deterministic claim that things cannot be other than what they are, because everything that happens is the result of antecedent causes. They see a mechanistic universe where every outcome is inevitable. If choices are so inevitable, then we seem to have a problem. It seems we are at impasse here because we inevitably assume we are making choices, yet our choice too is inevitable. So what went wrong?

My view is that this is a ridiculous oversimplification. The apparent contradiction we have here relies on a hopelessly reductionistic view of reality. If we truly appreciate the complexity of the various systems involved (minds, cultures, etc), the sticky problem dissolves. Our cognitive and social lives are rich and nuanced emergent phenomena. They may in some sense be reducible to the mechanistic workings of molecules in our brains, but these mechanism are a far cry from the simple cause and effect workings of billiard balls that the determinist makes them out to be.

Biochemistry and neuroscience can explain our cognitive lives mechanistically (perhaps), but they are working at a lower level. The consciousness we experience, which involves the feeling of making choices, happens at a higher level.

Perhaps an analogy would help. Consider a video game like Mario Bros. It can be explained entirely in terms of computer code. It is digital, which is to say it is nothing more than a series of zeros and ones. However we all know there is more to Mario Bros. than zeros and ones. We know Mario has a red hat, overalls, and a mustache. We know he can jump obstacles, smash bricks, and so on. The Mario we know is the higher level Mario, and the computer code that causes the emergent phenomena we know is the lower level. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The emergent reality can be explained entirely in terms of the lower level reality that causes it, however the emergent phenomena can only be described and understood on the higher level.

I consider the determinist who relies on neuroscience and biochemistry to explain the mind to be comparable to the person who reduces Mario to zeros and ones, and the libertarian (defender of free will) to be comparable to the average person who would describe Mario in terms of his picture and his movement. Both are right, but they are dealing with different levels of reality. The former is dealing only with the constituent parts that cause the emergent phenomena, but the latter is dealing with the emergent phenomena themselves.

The metaphor is of course only a crude one, because the causes of our minds are much more complicated than a simple computer program, but the point is that the whole (our minds which make choices) has unique characteristics which cannot be seen if we reduce it to its parts (neurons, hormones, etc).

I hope this helps.

[alexey]

Dont respond to me, Peter, respond to quotes by these people

...

That's right. Sam Harris doesn't think we have free will. He thinks we have an illusoin of free will.

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-.../dp/1451683405

In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates—with great intellectual ferocity and panache—that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. If he is right, the book will radically change the way we view ourselves as human beings.

Sam Harris argues not that we don't have it but that the very concept of free will is incoherent.

Some lectures by Daniel Dennett that you may find interesting:

Daniel Dennett - Free Will Determinism and Evolution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrCZYDm5D8M

DDaniel Dennett lecture on "Free Will" (Edinburgh University)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKLAbWFCh1E

Sam Harris on the distinction between his views and Dennett's:

Free Will and “Free Will”
How my view differs from Daniel Dennett's
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/f...-and-free-will

...
Dan and I agree on several fundamental points: The conventional (libertarian) idea of free will makes no sense and cannot be brought into register with our scientific picture of the world. We also agree that determinism need not imply fatalism and that indeterminism would give us no more freedom than we would have in a deterministic universe.
...
Fans of Dan’s account—and there are many—seem to miss my primary purpose in writing about free will. My goal is to show how the traditional notion is flawed, and to point out the consequences of our being taken in by it. Whenever Dan discusses free will, he bypasses the traditional idea and offers a revised version that he believes to be the only one “worth wanting.” Dan insists that this conceptual refinement is a great strength of his approach, analogous to other maneuvers in science and philosophy that allow us to get past how things seem so that we can discover how they actually are. I do not agree. From my point of view, he has simply changed the subject in a way that either confuses people or lets them off the hook too easily.
...
Dan seems to think that free will is like color: People might have some erroneous beliefs about it, but the experience of freedom and its attendant moral responsibilities can be understood in a similarly straightforward way through science. I think that free will is an illusion and that analogies to phenomena like color do not run through. A better analogy, also taken from the domain of vision, would liken free will to the sense that most of us have of visual continuity.
...
While color vision survives close inspection, our conventional sense of visual continuity does not. The impression we have of seeing everything all at once, clearly, and without interruption is based on our not paying close attention to what it is like to see. I argue that the illusory nature of free will can also be noticed in this way. As with the illusion of visual continuity, the evidence of our confusion is neither far away nor deep within; rather, it is right on the surface of experience, almost too near to us to be seen.
...

There is also evidence that belief in free will is important, so personally I would favour Daniel Dennett's approach of carefully unraveling incoherent and outdated religious/popular psychology understanding of free will to replace it with a more philosophically/scientifically sensical view, rather than simply trying to dismantle it altogether like Sam Harris.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0129125354.htm

It is well established that changing people’s sense of responsibility can change their behavior. But what would happen if people came to believe that their behavior was the inevitable product of a causal chain beyond their control -- a predetermined fate beyond the reach of free will?
Surprisingly, the link between fatalistic beliefs and unethical behavior has never been examined scientifically -- until now. In two recent experiments, psychologists Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia decided to explore this knotty philosophical issue in the lab, and they figured out an innovative way to do it.
...
The results were clear: those with weaker convictions about their power to control their own destiny were more apt to cheat when given the opportunity as compared to those whose beliefs about controlling their own lives were left untouched.
...

[Jumbo]

Boy, soc, I am with you 1000% on the "been there-done that angle", philosophy wise.

BTW, the most mixed (as compared to "very positive") teaching (an adjunct role for me) experience I ever had was one semester of psych 101 (undergrads). Holy Moly the ego on some of those wet and green males.

There's stuff you stated, soc, that mirrors some of my own thinking to date. While I and others here wrote rather extensively on this topic just a few months ago (Peter and alexy were in the thread, too, but I don't remember which one) I will try to add or repeat some comments on areas of this that are of interest to me, and how I prefer a different conversation then the old saw you allude to of "does free will exist or not" and then the (once again) people mixing it in with "god/ no god" arguments one way or another.

Mainly what I had stated was that my framing these days seeks it's "own freedom" from these, as you said, too simplistic, binary, extreme all-or-nothing or "one size fits all" points. With me, "free will" ---or maybe something more like "range and practicality of options, abilities related to perceiving, processing, and responding to relevant input and the associated cognition, autonomy in making selections versus consequences as influencers, and what forces shape to what degree such choices that are made" ----is all something I find involves matters of scale/degree/continuum and other details of its construct in various contexts.

There is also a "Christian God angle" I do find interesting, within that framing, too.

[PeterMP]

I begin with the assumption that I do have a free-will. I do deliberate about different courses of action, anticipate consequences, and make choices. We all do. Anybody who would deny this is guilty of intellectual dishonesty. To deny your own ability to choose is, as I said earlier, to "verbally deny what we inevitably presuppose in practice." It is hard for me to take anybody seriously who would do that. We should assume what we cannot help but to assume, which is that we can and do make choices.

I understand the concept of emergent properties.

But emergent properties aren't magic. There still has to be some mechanism by which they happen. There is a process by which the 0s and 1s of Mario Brothers are converted into the actual game.

Do you think your own starting point (that you do have free will) biases your conclusion?

Bacteria can make "choices" about things like what carbon sources they use:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac_operon

"The second control mechanism is a response to glucose, which is transported into the cell by the PEP-dependent phosphotransferase system. The phosphate group of phosphoenolpyruvate is transferred via a phosphorylation cascade consisting of the general PTS (phosphotransferase system) proteins HPr and EIA and the glucose-specific PTS proteins EIIAGlc and EIIBGlc, the cytoplasmic domain of the EII glucose transporter. Transport of glucose is accompanied by its phosphoryation by EIIBGlc, draining the phosphate group from the other PTS proteins, including EIIAGlc. The unphosphorylated form of EIIAGlc binds to the lac permease and prevents it from bringing lactose into the cell. Therefore, if both glucose and lactose are present, the transport of glucose blocks the transport of the inducer of the lac operon. This process is called inducer exclusion.[2]"

As part of this process is an emergent multistable state:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1868986/

And bacteria anticipate changes in their environment:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/a...ection=science

Would you say these bacteria have free will?

[Fergasun]

Thank you for this thread. I now understand why people watch TMZ, and ridiculously simpllistic movies. I'm sorry that my brain does not have the capacity to understand much in the thread other than the feeling that we are a bunch of 1's and 0's in the Mario Bros. game arguing over whether it is possible to shift places and move around. Some of the 0's and 1's say "yes, we can move around; but we have to stay in the video game, therefore we cannot move around" other of the 0's and 1's say "ohhh boy I'm moving around, I can move around all I want!", and still a third group of the 0's and 1's say "we can move around, not all we want... but we can move around... and why are we fighting, there's BOWSER!" and then the first group says... "what are you talking about, there is no Bowser, there is no Mario, there is no video game, our existence is an illusion."

[Jumbo]

Did you know that one of the prominent members of Sha Na Na was named Bowzer. You think that occurred by "chance?" Then by what mechanism?

[s0crates]

I find it pretty ridiculous when neuro-scientists think themselves qualified to speak on ethics. Their discipline may have a lot to teach us, but I find they often overstep their bounds. It would be like a chemist thinking himself qualified to be an art critic because he understand the chemical composition of the paint.

Boy, soc, I am with you 1000% on the "been there-done that angle", philosophy wise.

Thanks for that. I have often been tempted to do what Ludwig Wittgenstein did in his later works, and just respond to the objections of fatalists against ethics with a simple "this is what we do."

The determinist's folly is to deny something which we all know to be true. Show me a fatalist who does not continue living his life as though he were deliberating and deciding, and I will reconsider my position. Until such time, his arguments strike me as mere sophistry.

[Special K]

This thread is over my head...

I feel like a 5th grader walking into a Philosophy 500 class

[s0crates]

I understand the concept of emergent properties.

But emergent properties aren't magic. There still has to be some mechanism by which they happen. There is a process by which the 0s and 1s of Mario Brothers are converted into the actual game.

I did not deny that emergent properties are the result of some mechanism. In fact I agree completely with that view.

My point is that the emergent properties are not reducible to that mechanism, or at least not without losing something in the reduction. This is because the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

To give another example, water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, which are composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons, which are composed of quantum particles. Water has unique properties that hydrogen and oxygen do not have. Most obviously it is liquid at room temperature, whereas its constituent particles are gases. When you reduce water to its constituent parts, you have actually removed its emergent properties.

This is a simple tinker toy example of emergence, but it should serve well enough to make my point clear. The mistake of reductionism is to assume that the whole can be entirely described in terms of its parts, when the whole has properties that the parts do not have. It would be like saying water cannot be a liquid because it is made of two gasses.

Such is the mistake of determinists in my opinion. They have reduced the human mind to its constituent parts, and thereby taken the emergent properties of that mind (such as the ability to deliberate and decide) out of the discussion.

Returning to my previous Mario Bros example: Analyzing Mario in terms of the computer code is well and good for the computer programmers, but it is of little use to somebody actually trying to play the game. Likewise with cognitive scientists who have explained the neurological processes that result in our cognitive lives: They have explained a lot about how the brain works, but it is of little use to somebody who actually has to confront the world from a conscious perspective.

Do you think your own starting point (that you do have free will) biases your conclusion?

I think that any complete account has to cohere with the obvious. I repeat, I think it is foolish to deny in words what you always assume in actions.

Would you say these bacteria have free will?

Of course not. I would however say that bacteria cannot be fully understood if we disregard the biological level and speak merely in terms of chemistry or physics.

---------- Post added January-11th-2013 at 01:45 AM ----------

I'm sorry that my brain does not have the capacity to understand much in the thread . . .

This thread is over my head...

I feel like a 5th grader walking into a Philosophy 500 class

I think part of the problem is that the posters in this thread already have a good grasp of the rudiments of the issue and are taking them for granted. I know I am probably guilty of as much.

For those that are not well-versed in this topic but are nonetheless trying to keep up, I will try to explain the basics. There are two opposing views at work here: determinism (fate) and libertarianism (free-will).

Determinism: The determinist's point of view is a very old one. This is basically just fatalism, which is the view that everything that happens is fated to happen the way it does. Everything is destined to happen the way it happens and could not have happened any other way. In the old days, those who believed in fate attributed it to God's design and God's will. Calvinism is an example of this. Nowadays determinists tend to be atheists, and they attribute fate not to God's will, but instead to the fact that our actions are simply the result of prior causes. Some of them also like to get into detail about these causes by analyzing our brains and how we evolved and developed (this has become very popular, especially among those arguing against religion).

Libertarianism: Against this camp we have libertarianism, which has nothing at all to do with the political party, but is instead simply an assertion that people have free-will and can decide to do one thing or another. Libertarians believe that our decisions are not preordained. In the old days philosophers would say that God gave them free-will, but nowadays they usually argue from our experience of deliberating and making decisions and feeling as though we could have done otherwise. Theirs is the argument from the old Terminator 2 movie, which says there is "no fate but what we make." This view has strong intuitive appeal. Some of us would say it is common sense.

There is also a middling view which is called compatibilism. The compatibilist thinks there is some way to reconcile fate with free-will. That is to say they are somehow compatible.

Many people think this debate has far-reaching ethical implications because they assume that we can only be responsible for our actions if we have free-will. If we are fated to do what we do, they reason, then we cannot possibly be responsible for what we do. Others hold that this implication is not necessarily as obvious as it seems. For example, suppose we were fated to hold each other responsible?

That's it in a nutshell for any beginners and layman trying to follow the debate.

[PeterMP]

Thank you for this thread. I now understand why people watch TMZ, and ridiculously simpllistic movies. I'm sorry that my brain does not have the capacity to understand much in the thread other than the feeling that we are a bunch of 1's and 0's in the Mario Bros. game arguing over whether it is possible to shift places and move around. Some of the 0's and 1's say "yes, we can move around; but we have to stay in the video game, therefore we cannot move around" other of the 0's and 1's say "ohhh boy I'm moving around, I can move around all I want!", and still a third group of the 0's and 1's say "we can move around, not all we want... but we can move around... and why are we fighting, there's BOWSER!" and then the first group says... "what are you talking about, there is no Bowser, there is no Mario, there is no video game, our existence is an illusion."

I'd say you have a pretty good understanding of this thread.

The rest is just vocabulary.