"Intuitively, Determinism is False"
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Wednesday, November 22, 2006 at 10:16 AM
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4 Comments |
I sometimes hear people say things like, "I can just see that I have libertarian free will." Now I take it that someone has libertarian free will just in case someone has free will, and that free will rules out determinism; so the claim implies that some of us can just see that determinism is false.
I don't know how to respond to these intuition reports. Here's why.
I can conceive of someone thinking something like this: "It's just obvious to me that I am morally responsible for some things, and I couldn't possibly be morally responsible unless I have alternate possibilities available to me. But if determinism is true, I couldn't have alternate possibilities available to me, so determinism is false." This line of thinking makes sense to me. To be sure, I reject one of the premises, but I could concieve of myself thinking along these lines; indeed, many of the great thinkers in the free will literature have done just this.
Performing a deduction and arriving at indeterminism is one thing. But how could someone's having free will of the sort that rules out determinism be immediately obvious? What is it like to have such free will?
Here is an inadequate response: "I lift one hand. But it seemed to me at the moment of decision that I could have decided to, and in fact lifted the other. Nothing I know rules out my lifting either hand. So determinism is false." In response, I note that even if determinism were true, we would not expect an agent to know which unique future is determined. Given this ignorance, of course it feels like "anything is possible" given the state of the world and the laws of nature. We don't know what the state of the world at a time really amounts to, nor do we grasp the laws, so of course every manner of things seem compossible with them!
The intuitive indeterminist has a challenge, then, and it is to present a positive phenomenological case for there being free will: to pick out some feature of qualitative experience (and not a mere lack of experience) that indicates the falsity of determinism.
I don't know what such a quale would be.
4 Comments:
at 11:31 AM said... Merleau-Ponty seems likely to have done this. Heidegger seems likely to have done something along these lines.
Unfortunately, I don't know either author well enough to assert with confidence they do. I assume you know them better than I. Do they offer something along the lines of what you are looking for?
at 11:44 AM said... Hey Andrew - great blog! Couple thoughts: Keith Lehrer has a nice little article titled "Can We Know that we have Free Will by Introspection?" (J Phil, 1960) in which he addresses some of the issues you've raised. In the article, he remains officially noncommittal on the question whether introspection can give us adequate evidence for the falsity of determinism, but he thinks that the experience of deliberation gives us adequate evidence for the claim that we have free will, i.e. for the claim that at least sometimes it is true both that "I could choose to do X" and "I could choose to refrain from doing X." Van Inwagen, of course, has argued along similar lines in his Essay; and you might want to check out Warfield and Coffman's "Deliberation and Metaphysical Freedom" piece in the 2005 Midwest Studies, which is also relevant.
As Lehrer suggests, our ignorance of a (hypothetically) determined future counts against our introspective evidence for (libertarian) freedom only to the extent that we are persuaded by skeptical arguments of this sort generally, e.g. skepticism regarding the past, our sensory experiences, other minds, etc. In each of these cases, it's true that our experiences (memory, senses, "empathy", deliberation) would be the same even if the skeptical scenarios obtained (there was no past, no external world, no other minds, no libertarian freedom). But why should that count against the relevant experiences' being adequate evidence? Most of us (non-skeptics) don't think it counts against the first three; why should it count against the last? So the argument is roughly this: I deliberate (there's the phenomenological component); I could not deliberate unless I believed myself to have the power to do X or refrain from doing X. "But if determinism is true, then that belief is mere illusion," comes the response. True - and so all the worse for determinism (compare: "but if we're brains in vats, then your belief in an external world is mere illusion." True - but my belief in an external world is not mere illusion, a la Moore, etc.). Could that be at least the beginnings of a positive argument, in your view?
Beckster at 4:32 PM said... I disagree with the original question. Whether or not we decide that an original outcome was 'determined,' it is incontroversial that we still experience choice, and choose. We must still engage in decision making processes and make decisions. From a 'heavenly' point of view, all of human history, past and present, may be laid out like a finished painting, but this has no effect on our free will.
An intelligent response, I hope?
Noumena at 7:16 PM said... Kant makes gives an argument for what we would call libertarian free will in the infamous (and very obscure) `Fact of Reason' passages of the second Kritik. I argued in this term paper that we can use Heidegger's notion of `worldliness' to make sense of this argument.
Heidegger defines `worldliness' by reference to the way human existence is `entangled-disclosed, thrown-projecting, being-in-the-world which is concerned with its ownmmost potentiality in its being together with the ``world'' and in being together with the others'. Granted, not the most transparent definition in the world, but that's Heidegger for you. As I understand it, the idea is that human existence is characterised by taking an interest in our surroundings.
Now we pick up Kant's `Fact of Reason' argument as follows: Reflecting on this taking an interest, we recognise that only an autonomous being can genuinely take an interest in its surroundings. But, on Kant's definitions, a being is autonomous iff it has libertarian free will. Note that this is not, strictly speaking, an appeal to intuitions about agency.
What's fun about Kant is that you can be both a thoroughgoing determinist about everything empirical and still have libertarian free will for persons. Sorting this out requires a delicate but well-established discussion of Kant's metaphysics.
