Specter of Reason

It is perhaps well known that there is more than one way of interpreting the phrase "free will" and that many scientists are very stubborn about how they are willing to interpret it.  Dan Dennett has recently (in the last several months) acknowledged that there are benefits to giving up the term, though also that there are serious costs and risks.  This has led to some speculation  by Gregg Caruso at Flickers of Freedom  about whether or not Dennett has shifted his position wrt compatibilism.  One commenter, Randall Harp, draws attention to this lecture from November 2013, in which Dennett makes and expands upon the same point (Dennett starts speaking around to 21-minute mark): This is entirely in line with Dennett's well-known views.  In fact, it's worth watching as a concise introduction to Dennett's thoughts on free will and moral responsibility.  He has not shifted his position and he still uses the phrase "free will" as he always has.  A...

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."  "Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd ...

One of Dennett's most well-known contributions to philosophy is the idea of the intentional stance .  This is supposed to be a template for understanding minds and rational agency.  However, Dennett's view of the intentional stance has shifted since he first began its formulation in the mid-1970s.  His earliest work on the topic indicates the following thesis:  An object is an intentional system just in case it is advantageous to regard it as such.  Here he is, in 1976 : An Intentional system is a system whose behavior can be (at least sometimes) explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the system of beliefs and desires (and other Intentionally characterized features--what I will call Intentions here, meaning to include hopes, fears, intentions, perceptions, expectations, etc.). There may in every case be other ways of predicting and explaining the behavior of an Intentional system--for instance, mechanistic or physical ways--but the Intentional...

Compatibilism is the idea that there is no conflict between determinism and free will.  Incompatibilism is the idea that free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe.  There's been a lot of discussion over which view is correct.  What's remarkable about the debate isn't so much the stubbornness or passion which has been exhibited by this or that party, but the fact that the very terms of the debate are controversial.  There is a great deal of confusion about what the key issues in the debate are and how we should be talking about them.  As a result, there is a meta-debate within the debate itself.  You cannot engage in the debate without also engaging in a debate about the debate--about what issues are at stake and about how the issues should be framed.  So here's what I want to do:  I want to explain why I think incompatibilists are doing a very bad job of framing the debate, and also why compatibilism is the most reasonable option on the t...

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Sam Harris' first book, the award-winning best seller, The End Of Faith . Over the past decade, he has earned a good deal of public acclaim and devotion, and for respectable reasons. Sam Harris is a gifted writer and speaker. His eloquence and clarity of expression are enviable. In addition, he has been an outspoken advocate of reason, critical thought and secular values when this has been sorely needed. For these reasons, I would like to see Harris as an ally and potential friend who, like me, wants to make the world more hospitable to atheism and reason. However, his attitude towards the decorum of professional philosophy is hurting the cause, and his own arguments are suffering, too. In his review of Harris' most recent book, Free Will , Daniel C. Dennett admonishes Harris for not doing his homework and not engaging with "the best thought on the topic." This sort of reaction to Harris is not uncommon from profession...

I still haven't explained why I think Harris' response to Dennett is embarrassingly bad.  It's not because Harris is wrong about free will.  It's about the arguments he gives and the tone with which he gives them.  But I'm not going to get into that in this post.  Instead, I want to discuss why Harris is wrong about free will.  I've recently laid out a brief argument on the topic, but I suspect that unsympathetic audiences are not likely to be satisfied by it.  They say they have a better grasp of how people think about free will.  I don't know what makes them think they're experts on the subject, but what I do know is that they seem very confused about the issues. Look at Jerry Coyne , one of Harris' sympathetic readers: "I still see compatibilism as a wasted effort by philosophers to save our felt notion that we have agency; that we could have chosen otherwise . . . . Even Nobel Laureate Steve Weinberg, a determinist if there ever was one, ...

I don't have the time, and don't see much of value, in posting at length about Dennett's recent review of Sam Harris' book, Free Will , or Sam Harris' reply.  I did, once upon a time , suggest that such a review from Dennett might be worth reading, though I quickly changed my mind, supposing that silence from Dennett would be better.  As it turns out, I'm not sure.  A lot of Harris' fans and supporters are still in need of argumentation to understand why Dennett (and others) think they are mistaken.  And Dennett is more capable than most when it comes to clearly and persuasively laying out arguments.  And yet, even after he has done so, he is accused of missing the point.  On top of that, his snarky tone--fully justified, in my opinion--is used against him.  So, in unsnarky terms, and without addressing particular moments in this debate, let me try to get to (and unravel) the bottom line. Harris' main contention is that there is a certain lived expe...

Thanks in large part to my recent email correspondence with L. A. Paul (see here and  here  for some background on that), I've formulated a position which, as far as I know, is novel in the philosophy of mind.  The basic assumption is this: (1) One knows *about* what it is like to X iff one knows some of the consequences and/or functional correlations associated with the experience of what it is like to X.   It follows that,  (2) one can know about what it is like to X without ever directly experiencing X.   This only requires that phenomenal properties have functional correlations (these can be statistical or accidental, and not intrinsic, of course) and/or that they are not epiphenomenal.  This is consistent with the common intuition that you can only know what it is like to X if you have some experience of X-ing.  (That is the new-knowledge intuition associated with Frank Jackson's Mary thought experiment:  When Mary the ...

I still haven't had a chance to look at Bruce Waller's book, Against Moral Responsibility   (2011) , but I've been reading about it and related topics in my spare time a bit over the past several days.  One reader, David Duffy, was kind enough to bring one of Waller's papers to my attention.  It's called "Empirical Free Will and the Ethics of Moral Responsibility"(2003).  In it, Waller claims that moral responsibility and free will are either conceptually wedded by definition (in which case, he says, we only get confusion) or there is some synthetic (empirical) connection between them.  He then argues that there is no such empirical connection. I question the claim that there is any confusion resulting from regarding a logical (analytic) entailment between moral responsibility and free will.  Unfortunately, Waller does not support his assertion here, though perhaps he addresses the issue in his more recent book.  I think the only conceptual confusion...

As I mentioned in a recent post , I'm not aware of any satisfactory arguments against Kant's demonstration that the freedom of the will can neither be proved nor disproved by pure reason.  Kant puts forward that argument in his Critique of Pure Reason .  Yet, in his Critique of Practical Reason , he makes a pragmatic argument for belief in free will: We need to believe in free will because it is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Kant's arguments are not just about free will.  They're also about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  Yet, these days, the latter two are not seen as practically required for morality.  We can have moral responsibility without eternal souls or Divine judgment.  But can we have it without free will? Kant was a deontologist--he believed that morality requires duty and dignity, and not just behavior calculated to maximize some quantity of happiness, pleasure or goodness.  Yet, even those pursu...