Five Lashes With the Whip of Philosophical Jargon

… for you, Dr. C. For trying to make us think bad things about free will. I tell you, I will not give it up.

For those of you not following the diabolical Dr. C’s assault on what should be left unassaulted … he lines up almost perfectly with the hideously logical Galen Strawson (pity his father, Peter), whose philosophy can be (and is) summed up in a numbered list by Wikipedia:

1. We do what we do, in a given situation, because we are what we are.
2. In order to be ultimately responsible for what we do, we have to be ultimately responsible for what we are — at least in certain crucial mental respects.
3. But we cannot, as the first point avers, be ultimately responsible for what we are, because, simply, we are what we are; we cannot be causa sui
4. Therefore, we cannot be ultimately responsible for what we do.

To which I respond by retreating to hide behind the ultimate defense against philosophy I don’t like: before you can do anything with the idea (note that I did not say the ‘question’) of free will, you must first solve the mind-body problem. And, while you’re at it, explain consciousness.

As punishment for broaching the subject at all (such bad taste; one might just as well fart in a crowded elevator), I sentence Dr. C to read all of the following. First (because he dismisses quantum issues in his post), this from a review of the book,  Non-locality and Possible Worlds: A Counterfactual Perspective on Quantum Entanglement, by Tomasz F. Bigaj; reviewed by Michael Dickson in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

First, it is not entirely clear how to handle counterfactual reasoning in an indeterministic context. Suppose that while you are flipping a coin (which we will suppose to be a fundamentally indeterministic event for this discussion — ex hypothesi, nothing in the actual world is causally sufficient to determine the result of the flip), I hum a bar of Ode to Joy. My humming (again, ex hypothesi) has no causal influence on your coin-flipping. You get heads. If I had not been humming, would you still have gotten heads?

Logical intuitions seem to differ on this point. Some argue that, because your flip was indifferent to my humming, you would still have gotten heads if I had not been humming. My humming, or lack of it, could not have affected the outcome. Others argue that we cannot affirm that the flip sans humming would have resulted in heads, because the result is in fact not determined by anything — it was completely indeterministic. The (imagined) trial flip sans humming must be considered to be another, independent flip of the coin, the result of which we cannot predict. I’ll call advocates of this view ‘transworld-indeterminists’. Yet another ‘intuition’ is that the counterfactual in question is itself indeterminate in truth-value. (For the sake of full disclosure, the present reviewer takes this position.)

… Bigaj (p. 187) proposes two ways to evaluate the relevant counterfactual. According to the first (which Bigaj calls ‘C1′), the counterfactual ØP []® Q (‘if P hadn’t occurred, Q still would have occurred’) is evaluated by considering the worlds that match the actual world at all space-time points except those in the forward light cone of P. In this case, those worlds are required to match in the region B, and thus Q must occur in those worlds (assuming that Q occurs in any non-P worlds that otherwise match the actual world, i.e., assuming that the non-occurrence of P does not causally or otherwise necessitate the non-occurrence of Q). The second way to evaluate the counterfactual (‘C2′) involves considering worlds that match only on the backwards light cone (and its interior) of P. In this case, there is no requirement that those worlds match the actual world on Q (which is not in the backwards light cone of P), and thus the relevant counterfactual will in general come out false. Chapter 5 considers these two ways of evaluating counterfactuals in some detail, and announces the negative result that there do not appear to be any compelling reasons to adopt one or the other.

… This semantic-locality condition (SLOC), as Bigaj says, “claims to reflect some common intuitions regarding the non-existence of casual influences between space-like separated events when the acting event is indeterminsitic, i.e. not causally conditioned by its absolute past” (p. 271). We should add, however, that the causal influences that are being ruled out here are necessary (deterministic) connections between spacelike-separated events. SLOC is clearly consistent with merely indeterminstic influences. (On the other hand, under certain assumptions, one can argue that in the context of quantum theory, deterministic and indeterministic theories are equivalent for some purposes, particularly the evaluation of locality. This point could have been discussed profitably in this book.)

… But consider two possible worlds, w_j and wk. In wk, there are two primary points of departure, each of which involves a miniscule change in the state of a non-chaotic system, and involves very little influence on the future states of the universe. (Imagine, for example, a tiny thermal fluctuation within a system that is nearly in thermal equilibrium.) In wj, there is a single primary point of departure, at the same spatio-temporal location as one of the points of primary departure for wk, but the event snowballs so that the future light-cone of this event is vastly different from the actual world. Do we really want to say that wj is at least as similar to the actual world as wk?

Well, do we, Dr C?

(Is he screaming yet?) Here, a few more lashes:

Suppose that an action’s antecedent probability, as determined by the microphysical laws, always coincides with the combined strength of certain microphysically constituted factors, inclining the agent to perform the action. Although agent-causes by hypothesis act freely, and thus are not constrained by the inclining factors, it would be very peculiar if the strength of these factors were not reflected by the relative frequency of choice. Arguably, this relative frequency will in the long run tend to coincide with the antecedent probability. Consider the class of possible actions with a certain antecedent probability; 0.68, say. On the present hypothesis, each of these actions is such that its agent is antecedently “inclined to 68 percent” to perform it. It seems reasonable to assume that these actions will tend to be freely chosen in 68 percent of the cases, at least if the relevant class of possible actions is large. Contrary to Pereboom’s claim, then, it is far from clear that we should expect evidence of the effect of the agent-cause to show up in the frequency of choice. (It remains, of course, for the agent-causal libertarian to explain why the antecedent probabilities match the strength of the inclining factors.)

That was book reviewer, Erik Carlson, arguing against the hard incombatibilist, Derk Pereboom.

Finally, tell us what Buridan’s Ass would do without free will?

And finally, finally, realize that if you get rid of free will, you can never again make any statements that include either the word, or the idea of “ought” (to which word, I believe Dr. C to be rather attached).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/