I guess my question for a view like this, that incompatibilism is driven by philosophers misunderstanding ordinary talk, is that it seems like the folk are also confused about their concepts. Why, for example, when you tell them a story about how all of their actions are causally determined do they question whether those actions were free/have incompatibilist intuitions? One would think that if the OP was right, people would just recognize this is a silly question or not see any conflict whatsoever.
Hey, thanks for reading. And good question. First, note that whether people seem to have compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions depends on what questions you ask them and how you frame it. Work in experimental philosophy gets you all kinds of different results.
From what I’ve seen, though I admittedly haven’t looked into this literature that much, it seems to me likely that when you explicitly frame it in terms of a philosophical debate about free will, you, you get respondents’ hackles up. They start getting confused, depart from their linguistic intuitions, and start to sound like incompatibilists.
In contrast, when you keep the scenarios much closer to everyday practice and don’t frame it in terms of an abstract philosophical question they barely understand, you get them to use words in the ordinary, everyday way, and they sound like compatibilists.
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As a side-note: This is a well-known phenomenon in epistemology too, by the way. In everyday life, I think we’re all epistemic contextualists. We know how to use the word ‘knowledge’ just fine and think, correctly, that we know all kinds of mundane things.
But then as soon as you start examining the knowledge in the classroom, it seems to dissipate. Suddenly you can get students to become subject-insensitive invariantists and admit that they don’t actually know anything… until they leave the classroom and suddenly know things again!
All this to say: I think people’s linguistic intuitions are much more informative in some settings than in others. Looking at how they use language unreflectively in everyday settings can be very informative. Looking at how they react when forced to reflect on their concepts is often less so.
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It’s worth noting too that people barely understand the thesis of causal determinism. It doesn’t matter how clear I am about this in class, my students will continue to think that causal determinism is the same as fatalism (see my other post on this if you’re unsure what I mean by this).
They’ll also talk about determinism in terms of “other things controlling them,” which is, of course, extremely misleading at best, in terms of “not being in control of their actions,” in terms of “choices being illusions,” and so on. No surprise, then, that you get confused intuitions!
Well we don't just get confused intuitions, we also get information which I'd like to see you address. People rightly think we are controlled by circumstances beyond our control if determinism is true and their intuitions are that free will is incompatible with that. As you say, that is a misleading way of putting it but underlying it is a truth that they recognise. And their intuition that choice is an illusion is because they know options are alternative possibilities and their intuition is that those alternatives *branch* off the past as it was prior to the choice. People's intuitions are that we have "no choice" if determinism is true. If you tell people alternative possibilities don't branch they don't get it at all, their intuitions are so strong that genuine alternative possibilities are branching.
In the free will debate, incompatibilism normally means not that you deny choice, but that you deny that people are morally responsible for their choices. I consider myself an incompatiblist but do not disagree at all with what you say here. Of course, the term "free will" has meaning of the kind you define even if human behavior is wholly accounted for by deterministic physical law. I'm an incompatibilist because I think that determinism means people aren't morally responsible for their choices. I lay out my position in some detail here: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/against-moral-responsibility-and?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Hey, thanks for this! Glad to hear you agree with a lot of it. That said, I'd actually give a very similar analysis of the concept of moral responsibility, though: Of course people are morally responsible. If we look at the facts on the grounds, moral responsibility is a matter of whether it makes sense to praise and blame, punish and reward, encourage and deter. Sure, some philosophers have wanted to reify the concept into some kind of magical property attaching to the soul or something, or to give analyses of its conditions of possibility that were informed by a mistaken supernaturalist worldview.
But ordinary people with no philosophical background have engaged in these practices across cultures and religions without necessarily having any particular metaphysical justification, let alone agreeing on that justification. For this reason, I tend to think it's a mistake to read those philosophical doctrines into the practice. I think those philosophers were, as I say in this piece, bewitched by language, esp. by the tendency to reify concepts by assuming they must correspond to unchanging essences.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your piece. I'm about to leave the house, so I can't read it now, but I'll try to get to it this weekend and will try to report back soon!
My argument is that people do make choices, but they aren't responsible for the self who makes them, which was formed by interactions between genes and environment over which people have no control. This way of seeing things has consequences for the way that we practice moral behavior and criminal justice. It's a well-developed philosophical position. I hope you read my article and engage with me about it.
I don't aim to be picky about phrasing. But it sounds to me like you are making s separation between persons and selves that is unwarranted! What is this self, as you conceive of it?
Right. People think it could make sense for a good God to punish us after we are dead for what we have done. No need for belief in God for this, it's just they imagine that is perfectly possible. We are not morally responsible in the strong sense people believe in.
If compatibilism is a naturalist cope, then everything is. Personhood, self-hood, consciousness, will, pretty much EVERYTHING. (maybe you point this out, haven't read more than 25% yet, I get too provoked by this shit lol (the incompatibilists), but I'm gonna read. Seems like great stuff!
This makes sense to me, though I do think that incompatibilists free will deniers are still making an interesting and worthwhile point when they say “choice is an illusion.” Perhaps they are unmooring the word choice from its colloquial definition, but how else are they meant to convey the very un-colloquial idea that what feels like a choice was also causally determined to happen? We don’t really have the vocabulary for this.
I also think that while our colloquial definitions of words do a good job of distinguishing coerced and uncoerced actions, most non-philosophers, if you asked them what choice meant vis-à-vis determinism, would think it implies libertarian free will. But that’s just my hunch.
Hey, thanks for the comment! I'm sad to report that your hunch is wrong, though! There's good work that's been done in experimental philosophy to test non-philosophers' intuitions about free will and determinism, and they're all over the place. Different studies get different results, too.
Now this might just be my own bias, but I tend to think that when the questions are asked properly, i.e., when they aren't explicitly framed in terms of determinism but instead in terms of choices, desires, necessity, is when you get the best results. And from those studies I've looked at, those questions usually get you compatibilist intuitions!
Framing or in terms of choices, desires, necessity is explicitly choosing a frame that lets people choose whatever they want instead of forcing them to use their brain.
"Now suppose you’re in a situation where you have to perform some voluntary action. You need to go to work or stay at home. Ever been in this kind of situation? They happen all the time, right? Seems like we might want to communicate about them sometimes. Maybe we should come up with a word to refer to those! And hey, what do you know, I have just the word: CHOICES. These are CHOICES. They can’t be illusions; they’re right there in front of us. I’m literally making some right now!"
The problem is you are talking about a situation in which you have two options A or B. In this case stay home or go to work. These are alternative possibilities. But assuming determinism only one of those is possible, given the way the past was prior to the choice and the laws of nature. It won't do to just say choice is compatible with determinism, this needs explaining.
I think when we ask "do we have free will" we are referring to an illusory version of having a choice, so I would say we don't have free will. I agree choice isn't an illusion, but the thing is we *are* under an illusion about choice.
Thanks for reading and commenting. You say "It won't do to just say choice is compatible with determinism, this needs explaining." But this is what I'm trying to explain: "Making a choice" simply means something like "being faced with multiple options and acting on one of them." And *that* clearly is compatible with causal determinism.
Of course, if causal determinism is true, then there's only one physically possible way for the choice to have gone. A superintelligent non-physical mind could have predicted how I would choose. But that doesn't remove the fact that there's a choice that I must make: the process by which the determined outcome will occur is precisely that of making a choice!
You end by saying that "choice isn't an illusion, but the thing is we *are* under an illusion about choice," but I'm not sure what you think the illusion is. It's worth noting, by the way, that I think there is a clear sense in which we can still be said to have had the ability to do otherwise, but let's not get into that right now. I might write about it soon!
The illusion is branching alternative possibilities.
Below is an argument that shows why choice is *apparently* an
illusion if determinism is true.
1) Choice is to select from options.
2) Options are alternative possibilities we can select in the
situation.
3) Determinism says there is only one option we can select given the past prior to the choice and the laws of nature.
4) There are no alternative possibilities in the situation, if
determinism is true.
5) Choice is an illusion if determinism is true.
That argument intuitively looks right because we intuitively view the alternative possibilities as branching. I'm not saying it is right. I'm saying it is how we intuitively start out, we are under an illusion that alternative possibilities branch off the past as it was, before reflection. In the free will literature, it's standard for "genuine alternative possibilities" to refer to branching alternatives. So, illusory alternatives are what we call "genuine"
and alternatives compatible with determinism are viewed as not genuine.
Excellent piece! For those who want to dig even a little deeper into the subject with firm believer in free will Immanuel Kant on their side, feel free to read:
Not that I disagree with anything here, but it feels like it sits uneasily alongside your pieces on personal identity: I suspect people's usage of concepts related to free will are about as clear as their usage of terms related to personal identity, but there you took the view that on the basis of subtle philosophical paradoxes that never apply in normal life, people are mistaken about their clear intuitions, and the supposed referrent of "myself" doesn't actually exist.
I think an incompatibilist would take basically the same attitude you take there, towards free will: yes, there's a naive version that we can mostly refer to unambiguously in normal circumstances, but also there are some thought experiments that show that it's probably not as simple as the naive view suggests and if those paradoxes sufficiently undermine the naive view, we have to question whether the concept people think they're referring to in normal circumstances is actually coherent.
Hey, thanks not only for reading and commenting, but for reading carefully enough and taking it seriously enough to look for consistency in my views! Much appreciated!
I think my views on personal identity and on free will are very closely related, actually. In my pieces on personal identity, I say that there are true claims about persons, i.e., true claims about the referent of names like "Phil," personal pronouns like "I," "me," and "mine," and concepts like "person," "individual."
The question, though, is *What makes these claims true?* And the answer, in my view, is that there's a vaguely defined series of interrelated physical and mental events. And because it's vaguely defined, we can locate weird edge cases where there's just no answer to the question whether some person is me.
So if, in addition to thinking that I'm Phil, we have some account of *what makes it true*, e.g., that there must be some indivisible, separately existing soul or something, then we might wrong about that. But if we just think that I'm Phil, then we aren't wrong about anything. I am Phil!
Now let's turn to free will. My claim here is almost exactly analogous. Whether causal determinism is true or false, there are true claims about free will. It's true, under certain circumstances, to say that I did something freely, that I could have done otherwise, and that I'm therefore responsible for my actions.
But the question, again is *What makes it true?* And the answer, in my view, is that there are actions that are voluntary as opposed to involuntary. They're under a kind of control that involuntary actions aren't, meaning that we can meaningfully influence them by such practices as praise and blame, reward and punishment, encouragement and determent, etc.
So if, in addition to thinking that I'm writing this reply to you out of my own free will, we have some account of *what makes it true*, e.g., that I must be able to originate actions in a way that is uncaused by anything, then we might be wrong about that. But if we just think that I'm replying out of my own free will, then we aren't wrong. I am!
I think the main reason I see a tension is in how you frame it: in the personal identity, the edge cases are sufficient to title your post, "you don't exist"--while in the free will case, you seem happy to ignore the vagueness and edge cases to declare that free will obviously refers to this cluster of things that mostly always go together.
That is, your standard for "personal identity is real" seemed to be, "facts about personal identity are language-independent", but it seems here you're declaring that free will is real and backing it up with the fact that there is a language-dependent distinction between voluntary and involuntary acts.
To be explicit, I think "voluntary" actions exist on just as much of a spectrum as personal identity cases, and if one asks what this voluntary aspect *actually consists in* we can probably construct paradoxes for any particular answer just as well as we could for personal identity... Somewhere between "heart beating" and "decided to buy a house" we'll find actions I undertake whose voluntary quality is subject to dispute. And if I consider hypothetical cases like hypnotism, where I might undertake an action that at the time I defend as voluntary, but then find out I was hypnotized into doing, I become unsure what I actually mean by "voluntary".
Arguments like this convince me that the "voluntary/involuntary" distinction is comparably language-dependent as the "me/someone" distinction... In which case, following your usage in the personal identity case, I'd expect you to say that free will isn't real.
Do you just disagree about the comparison I'm making between those two cases? Do you think there are non-linguistic facts that distinguish between voluntary/involuntary? If not, then I'm still confused; if so, I'd be curious to hear what you think those facts are, and how they get around the threshold/vagueness objections you raised against personal identity.
Hey, thanks for another very thoughtful comment. No, I don't object to the comparison at all; on the contrary, I think it's very apt! In fact, I point out somewhere in one of the replies, either out here or on Twitter, that there are limit cases where it's no longer clear whether our concept of personal identity applies, so there are limit cases for our concept of free will.
In both cases, I think there's a similar story: There's an underlying reality consisting of physical events, mental events, and relations between them. This reality presents various kinds of patterns. Because of those patterns, it's very useful for us to think of this reality in terms of stable substances and accidental changes, so we've evolved cognitive and perceptual systems that do just that.
And of course, our concepts reflect the way we perceive and conceptualize the world. Our concepts, including those of personal identity and of free will, impose sharp boundaries on what is really a much more fluid tapestry of causal relations. For this reason, there'll be all kinds of weird limit cases for all of them.
So ultimately, the difference you're pointing to in the way I'm framing the two pieces is just a rhetorical one. I think that, among the lay readers I'm primarily trying to reach, almost everyone believes that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for their continued existence over time.
For this reason, it seems natural, rhetorically, to say "Hey, you're mistaken about something!" (Though note the subtitle of my piece on personal identity: After claiming that you don't exist, I immediately add, "Or at least, not the way you thought you did." That is, you *do* exist! You're just a bit mistaken as to how!).
In contrast, I think that, among those same lay readers, there might be more of a tendency *already to be a little unsure* about how to understand the problem of free will and determinism. I think a bit part of that is just that the debate here has gotten a lot more mainstream over the last twenty years or so.
So for this reason, it seems natural to take a tone of reassurance: "Don't listen to those silly public intellectuals, like Sam Harris, and religious apologists, like Ravi Zacharias, that if causal determinism is true, you aren't free. They're just confusing the issue."
I enjoyed reading this a lot as a compatibilist - in particular your choice to use Wittgenstein fascinated me. I believe his argument to be highly relevant in this discussion. Reading this provoked me to think further on philosophical language confusion. Although I am in agreement with Wittgenstein that we often abstract the language we use so much so as to lose the essence of the way we use it in a functional sense, I do not think that this necessarily entails we are wrong to do so or we are confused to do so. I think the point of ‘confusing language’ is to reach a different perspective understanding of such words as ‘free will’. I think the way you titled the section ‘who is will and why is he free’ explains exactly this. However, I believe we reached a compatible conclusion (somewhat generally) due to this preliminary ‘confusion’ of language and we are not guided out of it by common sense like a fly from a bottle but instead we try to make this common sense compatible with our now more abstract complicated theory. I wondered if you agreed with me from your piece with this line of thinking or whether you thought Wittgenstein’s nuanced but almost condescending manner of confusion/clarity in language since you use him as your defence of compatibilism?
Glad you liked it, though I must say I’m not entirely sure I understand the question… Are you basically just asking if we’re sometimes justified in bending language? If so, I’d say: sure, if we’re aware that we’re doing so.
But I think Wittgenstein' would say that the philosophers get confused because they don’t realize they’re stretching or distorting language in various ways, thus leading them into all kinds of confusion.
This is a good, clear articulation of why compatibalism just makes sense!
I just published an article discussing a slight nuance on the compatibilist view of free will, I’m curious about your thoughts on the approach I take in it (where an analogy to probability shows that opacity is the important trait that makes our choices free).
Hey thanks so much. Also, very cool! From the title of your piece alone, I suspect we agree on just about everything. I'll read it soon and check back in!
Thank you! About halfway through your piece, btw. I got tired and had to stop. Now I'm working on some other projects, but hopefully I can finish later today. I have a few thoughts already.
I would say its less on quantum mechanics than neuroscience that gives me more pause.
In the end, I am all in the compatibilism camp, but there are some issues regarding the functioning of the brain (as per Sapolsky) and determinism that raise some moral questions that ai cant answer properly
Thanks! I' haven’t read Sapolsky’s book, but I’ve listened to him talk and listened to people talk about his views. I agree with the science of it, of course.
Strictly speaking, the contemporary physics tells us about might not be a deterministic one. There’s debate about how to interpret quantum mechanics. But in any case, it isn’t one in which we seem to be able to fit acts of the will that aren’t the product of antecedent causes.
Or maybe I should say: If we could fit those kinds of acts of the will into our picture of the world, they’d turn out just to be random. There might actually be a logical rather than an empirical roadblock here: The very concept of an act of the will that is neither caused nor random might be just incoherent.
In any case, though, as I point out around the start of the first section, the question about whether we have free will isn’t a scientific one; it isn’t one about what the world is like. It’s a conceptual question: what do we mean, what have we always meant, by this concept of free will?
And here, neuroscientists, computer scientists, physicists, can’t help us. In my view, at least, the way to approach these kinds of questions is to start from the philosophy of language and then conduct any further analysis.
I must confess myself disappointed, sir. I was expecting wildly contrarian takes each week, undermining the beliefs of us οἱ πολλοί, and yet here you are, defending common sense!
Now, seriously, I confess I have difficulty understanding the imcompatibilist argument. Even accepting the universe is deterministic (which is much to accept; to my extremely limited knowledge, I think Quantum Mechanics points in the opposite direction), that would at most tell you that given x,y,z... the outcome has to be a,b,c. I don't see how that would negate free will: one is free to choose among available options at each moment, but one is *not* free to choose his or her preferences, goals, contextual pressures, etc... which will make one go for one option instead of the other. A few meters from me there's a whisky bottle, and nothing is preventing me from drinking it. But I'm a teetotaler, so I obviously won't be taken a sip. Am a to be regarded as an unfree robot for this?
I think you make a very good case for mixtification with words (which I suspect is a very Continental thing to do). The article did also update me a bit, positively, towards Wittgenstein. I haven't read him, but in all the intellectual encounters where he appeared he was always being used as a legitimation for Postmodern relativism and reducing everything to language games (which feels ironic, in the context of your post).
Okay, back now! So first, I'm very dismayed at the perception you have of me! I don't mean to be a contrarian at all. On the contrary! I'm a big fan of common sense philosophy, and this is really reflected in my love of ordinary language philosophy, which has a lot in common with that school of thought. Some of my first loves were R.M. Hare, L. Wittgenstein, and J.L. Austin, all of whom are ordinary language philosophers!
The kind of analysis I give of free will is actually very similar to my analysis of the self: Of course there's free will. But what makes that true is a linguistic convention. There's some more or less vaguely subset of the causal order that we designate by that term. And when we say, of something within that subset, that it was willed freely, well, then, by definition, we say something true!
Similarly, my view is: Of course there are persons! But what makes that true is a linguistic convention. There's some more or less vaguely defined subset of the causal order that we designate by that term, as well as by proper names like "Phil" and "Manuel" and by personal pronouns like "I" and "he." And when we say, of something that's clearly in the subset designated by "Phil," that it's Phil, we say something true!
I've very happy I've helped you have a more positive outlook on Wittgenstein. It's unfortunate that he's been coopted by so many peddlers of nonsense, though it's in part his fault for not writing in a very structured way. Wittgenstein himself is definitely worth engaging with. For all his flaws, there's no question that he was a genius. I might recommend a good introduction to him instead of diving into the Investigations yourself, though!
(I guess where I might come off as radical is in what I think about ultimate reality. Of course our conventional ways of speaking are true. Where I'm radical is in my account of *why* they're true, or of *what makes them true*.
In the case of selves, it isn't that there are souls or other continuing entities that are necessary and sufficient conditions of the application of our naming conventions, but that there are vaguely defined series of interrelated mental and physical events.
Similarly, in the case of free will, it isn't that there's some kind of noncausal ability to originate actions, but simply that some of our actions, though caused, involve our beliefs, desires, and values).
I feel an important difference though is that while people have strong intuitions about their self (even if they don't believe in souls), most don't worry much about free will in the abstract.
Hm, maybe, yeah. I definitely think that what I say about the self might seem a little more radical than what I say about free will. But for me, the two sets of views are very closely connected!
Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read and comment. I appreciate it greatly. About to go on a long walk with my girlfriend. Will try to respond soon!
QM is deterministic save the non-theorized/non-mechanistic collapse assumption, which, if real, would just mean that stuff sometimes happens that's entirely untethered from any kind of existing states of affairs. if determinism is true, then no one is "free to choose among available options", because there those don't exist. you're just hypostatizing your vague mental simulation. if reality is deterministic, then always only one states of affairs is possible; the actual one.
it's an error to confuse never-obtaining counterfactuals with true generalisations based on vague mental simulation. it's a true generalisation that humans can drink stuff that's within reach. but regardless of whatever explains your particular instance of not drinking the stuff within your reach, it's not the case that you could've drank it if in actual fact you didn't. i recommend amy karofsky's book 'a case for necessitarianism' for excellent analysis of all kinds of contingentarianisms.
There is no sense in which the will is free and no mechanism by which a free will could interact with deterministic physical matter. It's a nonstarter. We may feel free to the extent we are ignorant of causality, and in that gap is where the experience of freedom and responsibility lie. In other words, mostly yes. compatibalism is a cope, but it's just as often pre egotistical bullshit on par with religion - people "*needing*" a cheat code on the universe.
There is no sense in which the will is free, but we may feel free to the extent we are ignorant of causality. Ethics and responsibility exist in that ignorance gap.
'Causal determinism' is another product of linguistic confusion and means nothing outside of a framework in which 'cause' and 'effect' are given meaning. It was Wittgenstein, of course, who realized this. Maybe an article about that would be informative considering how the likes of Sabine Hossen-whatever and her fanboys represent the majority of people who are too dumb to understand the difference between 'is' [metaphysical nonsense/language abuse] and 'is modelled as' [useful, but with none of the deep philosophical implications, so to speak]
since no notion of 'control' plays any part in explaining how (or why, if there are why-explanations, which i'm not convinced of) control mechanisms work just the way they do & not in any other ways, emergent ‘control’, 'responsibility', 'desert', 'selves', 'choices', 'options' are only patterns at certain complex macro-mesoscales, eg. hypersocial apes' linguistic coordination mechanisms, which are nevertheless confused, not truth-tracking & disintegrate into confabulation, bad explanations & gibberish upon prompting for elaboration.
control is epiphenomenal in the sense that it’s just what happens *because the mechanisms we are* work the way they do, (trivially) independently of emergent descriptions. the OG analogy is the cellular automaton. emergent patterns don't explain anything, as they *just are* the fundamental patterns occurring all at once. so 'more may be different in many different ways.' vary the number & kind of existents, connections, interactions, and there may be awesome complexity. BUT the outcome isn't explanatory.
so i just don't understand what compatibilists want it to do. if you accept causal determinism, you accept that always only one thing can happen; the thing that's necessitated by something other than itself. if you say there's randomness, that's just unexplainable occurrences that are informationally unrelated to existing states of affairs. at least libertarian free will is clear, just the positing of 'choices' as simple, irreducible, unexplainable, singular special events. brute contingency is just posited, or there's a story like 'you just are the agent that chooses x & not non-x', which may require some supernatural hidden informational order, like in mormonism, saying that x chooses y and not non-y because of their essence if they want to avoid arbitrariness. (ofc, why that essence? no explanation? still seems arbitrary then!) oh you 'respond to reasons, which are information that 'counts in favor' (why do you interpret/interact with any reason x way rather than non-x ways?) right... sounds unintelligible, vacuous & thought terminating, but ok! but with compatibilism i don't see the clarity!
I find some conventions among philosophers, like subtle insinuations, peer pressure, dominance displays & other nifty rhetoric like ‘what we (who?) want’ and what ‘the folk’ mean (who? how do you know? why is that relevant?), shirley, ‘THE ONLY kind of free will WORTH WANTING’ (???)... unappealing and inferentially ~worthless, and i hear these all the time from compatibilists.
I guess my question for a view like this, that incompatibilism is driven by philosophers misunderstanding ordinary talk, is that it seems like the folk are also confused about their concepts. Why, for example, when you tell them a story about how all of their actions are causally determined do they question whether those actions were free/have incompatibilist intuitions? One would think that if the OP was right, people would just recognize this is a silly question or not see any conflict whatsoever.
Hey, thanks for reading. And good question. First, note that whether people seem to have compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions depends on what questions you ask them and how you frame it. Work in experimental philosophy gets you all kinds of different results.
From what I’ve seen, though I admittedly haven’t looked into this literature that much, it seems to me likely that when you explicitly frame it in terms of a philosophical debate about free will, you, you get respondents’ hackles up. They start getting confused, depart from their linguistic intuitions, and start to sound like incompatibilists.
In contrast, when you keep the scenarios much closer to everyday practice and don’t frame it in terms of an abstract philosophical question they barely understand, you get them to use words in the ordinary, everyday way, and they sound like compatibilists.
—-
As a side-note: This is a well-known phenomenon in epistemology too, by the way. In everyday life, I think we’re all epistemic contextualists. We know how to use the word ‘knowledge’ just fine and think, correctly, that we know all kinds of mundane things.
But then as soon as you start examining the knowledge in the classroom, it seems to dissipate. Suddenly you can get students to become subject-insensitive invariantists and admit that they don’t actually know anything… until they leave the classroom and suddenly know things again!
All this to say: I think people’s linguistic intuitions are much more informative in some settings than in others. Looking at how they use language unreflectively in everyday settings can be very informative. Looking at how they react when forced to reflect on their concepts is often less so.
—-
It’s worth noting too that people barely understand the thesis of causal determinism. It doesn’t matter how clear I am about this in class, my students will continue to think that causal determinism is the same as fatalism (see my other post on this if you’re unsure what I mean by this).
They’ll also talk about determinism in terms of “other things controlling them,” which is, of course, extremely misleading at best, in terms of “not being in control of their actions,” in terms of “choices being illusions,” and so on. No surprise, then, that you get confused intuitions!
Philippe
Well we don't just get confused intuitions, we also get information which I'd like to see you address. People rightly think we are controlled by circumstances beyond our control if determinism is true and their intuitions are that free will is incompatible with that. As you say, that is a misleading way of putting it but underlying it is a truth that they recognise. And their intuition that choice is an illusion is because they know options are alternative possibilities and their intuition is that those alternatives *branch* off the past as it was prior to the choice. People's intuitions are that we have "no choice" if determinism is true. If you tell people alternative possibilities don't branch they don't get it at all, their intuitions are so strong that genuine alternative possibilities are branching.
In the free will debate, incompatibilism normally means not that you deny choice, but that you deny that people are morally responsible for their choices. I consider myself an incompatiblist but do not disagree at all with what you say here. Of course, the term "free will" has meaning of the kind you define even if human behavior is wholly accounted for by deterministic physical law. I'm an incompatibilist because I think that determinism means people aren't morally responsible for their choices. I lay out my position in some detail here: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/against-moral-responsibility-and?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Hey, thanks for this! Glad to hear you agree with a lot of it. That said, I'd actually give a very similar analysis of the concept of moral responsibility, though: Of course people are morally responsible. If we look at the facts on the grounds, moral responsibility is a matter of whether it makes sense to praise and blame, punish and reward, encourage and deter. Sure, some philosophers have wanted to reify the concept into some kind of magical property attaching to the soul or something, or to give analyses of its conditions of possibility that were informed by a mistaken supernaturalist worldview.
But ordinary people with no philosophical background have engaged in these practices across cultures and religions without necessarily having any particular metaphysical justification, let alone agreeing on that justification. For this reason, I tend to think it's a mistake to read those philosophical doctrines into the practice. I think those philosophers were, as I say in this piece, bewitched by language, esp. by the tendency to reify concepts by assuming they must correspond to unchanging essences.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your piece. I'm about to leave the house, so I can't read it now, but I'll try to get to it this weekend and will try to report back soon!
My argument is that people do make choices, but they aren't responsible for the self who makes them, which was formed by interactions between genes and environment over which people have no control. This way of seeing things has consequences for the way that we practice moral behavior and criminal justice. It's a well-developed philosophical position. I hope you read my article and engage with me about it.
are there people who make choices on one hand, and selves that make choices on the other?
It's people have selves that make choices. Perhaps my phrasing could use refinement, but I don't think there's any incoherence here.
I don't aim to be picky about phrasing. But it sounds to me like you are making s separation between persons and selves that is unwarranted! What is this self, as you conceive of it?
You read my article right? Here's the link again: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/against-moral-responsibility-and?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Right. People think it could make sense for a good God to punish us after we are dead for what we have done. No need for belief in God for this, it's just they imagine that is perfectly possible. We are not morally responsible in the strong sense people believe in.
If compatibilism is a naturalist cope, then everything is. Personhood, self-hood, consciousness, will, pretty much EVERYTHING. (maybe you point this out, haven't read more than 25% yet, I get too provoked by this shit lol (the incompatibilists), but I'm gonna read. Seems like great stuff!
Hahahah thank you!
We could not have evolved as a species without unwarranted hope, including hoping to be able to meaningfully effect our circumstances.
not unwarranted
This makes sense to me, though I do think that incompatibilists free will deniers are still making an interesting and worthwhile point when they say “choice is an illusion.” Perhaps they are unmooring the word choice from its colloquial definition, but how else are they meant to convey the very un-colloquial idea that what feels like a choice was also causally determined to happen? We don’t really have the vocabulary for this.
I also think that while our colloquial definitions of words do a good job of distinguishing coerced and uncoerced actions, most non-philosophers, if you asked them what choice meant vis-à-vis determinism, would think it implies libertarian free will. But that’s just my hunch.
Hey, thanks for the comment! I'm sad to report that your hunch is wrong, though! There's good work that's been done in experimental philosophy to test non-philosophers' intuitions about free will and determinism, and they're all over the place. Different studies get different results, too.
Now this might just be my own bias, but I tend to think that when the questions are asked properly, i.e., when they aren't explicitly framed in terms of determinism but instead in terms of choices, desires, necessity, is when you get the best results. And from those studies I've looked at, those questions usually get you compatibilist intuitions!
If you choose loaded questions that enable people to choose what feels good, they will. Who knew?!
No idea what you're trying to say here, sorry.
Framing or in terms of choices, desires, necessity is explicitly choosing a frame that lets people choose whatever they want instead of forcing them to use their brain.
...???
Hello Philippe,
"Now suppose you’re in a situation where you have to perform some voluntary action. You need to go to work or stay at home. Ever been in this kind of situation? They happen all the time, right? Seems like we might want to communicate about them sometimes. Maybe we should come up with a word to refer to those! And hey, what do you know, I have just the word: CHOICES. These are CHOICES. They can’t be illusions; they’re right there in front of us. I’m literally making some right now!"
The problem is you are talking about a situation in which you have two options A or B. In this case stay home or go to work. These are alternative possibilities. But assuming determinism only one of those is possible, given the way the past was prior to the choice and the laws of nature. It won't do to just say choice is compatible with determinism, this needs explaining.
I think when we ask "do we have free will" we are referring to an illusory version of having a choice, so I would say we don't have free will. I agree choice isn't an illusion, but the thing is we *are* under an illusion about choice.
Hey Stephen,
Thanks for reading and commenting. You say "It won't do to just say choice is compatible with determinism, this needs explaining." But this is what I'm trying to explain: "Making a choice" simply means something like "being faced with multiple options and acting on one of them." And *that* clearly is compatible with causal determinism.
Of course, if causal determinism is true, then there's only one physically possible way for the choice to have gone. A superintelligent non-physical mind could have predicted how I would choose. But that doesn't remove the fact that there's a choice that I must make: the process by which the determined outcome will occur is precisely that of making a choice!
You end by saying that "choice isn't an illusion, but the thing is we *are* under an illusion about choice," but I'm not sure what you think the illusion is. It's worth noting, by the way, that I think there is a clear sense in which we can still be said to have had the ability to do otherwise, but let's not get into that right now. I might write about it soon!
The illusion is branching alternative possibilities.
Below is an argument that shows why choice is *apparently* an
illusion if determinism is true.
1) Choice is to select from options.
2) Options are alternative possibilities we can select in the
situation.
3) Determinism says there is only one option we can select given the past prior to the choice and the laws of nature.
4) There are no alternative possibilities in the situation, if
determinism is true.
5) Choice is an illusion if determinism is true.
That argument intuitively looks right because we intuitively view the alternative possibilities as branching. I'm not saying it is right. I'm saying it is how we intuitively start out, we are under an illusion that alternative possibilities branch off the past as it was, before reflection. In the free will literature, it's standard for "genuine alternative possibilities" to refer to branching alternatives. So, illusory alternatives are what we call "genuine"
and alternatives compatible with determinism are viewed as not genuine.
Excellent piece! For those who want to dig even a little deeper into the subject with firm believer in free will Immanuel Kant on their side, feel free to read:
https://mathiasmas.substack.com/p/kants-moral-philosophy-a-comprehensive?r=3elpqi
Thank you kindly! I'll try to read your piece soon, but the list of pieces commenters are telling me I should read is getting long!
Not that I disagree with anything here, but it feels like it sits uneasily alongside your pieces on personal identity: I suspect people's usage of concepts related to free will are about as clear as their usage of terms related to personal identity, but there you took the view that on the basis of subtle philosophical paradoxes that never apply in normal life, people are mistaken about their clear intuitions, and the supposed referrent of "myself" doesn't actually exist.
I think an incompatibilist would take basically the same attitude you take there, towards free will: yes, there's a naive version that we can mostly refer to unambiguously in normal circumstances, but also there are some thought experiments that show that it's probably not as simple as the naive view suggests and if those paradoxes sufficiently undermine the naive view, we have to question whether the concept people think they're referring to in normal circumstances is actually coherent.
Hey, thanks not only for reading and commenting, but for reading carefully enough and taking it seriously enough to look for consistency in my views! Much appreciated!
I think my views on personal identity and on free will are very closely related, actually. In my pieces on personal identity, I say that there are true claims about persons, i.e., true claims about the referent of names like "Phil," personal pronouns like "I," "me," and "mine," and concepts like "person," "individual."
The question, though, is *What makes these claims true?* And the answer, in my view, is that there's a vaguely defined series of interrelated physical and mental events. And because it's vaguely defined, we can locate weird edge cases where there's just no answer to the question whether some person is me.
So if, in addition to thinking that I'm Phil, we have some account of *what makes it true*, e.g., that there must be some indivisible, separately existing soul or something, then we might wrong about that. But if we just think that I'm Phil, then we aren't wrong about anything. I am Phil!
Now let's turn to free will. My claim here is almost exactly analogous. Whether causal determinism is true or false, there are true claims about free will. It's true, under certain circumstances, to say that I did something freely, that I could have done otherwise, and that I'm therefore responsible for my actions.
But the question, again is *What makes it true?* And the answer, in my view, is that there are actions that are voluntary as opposed to involuntary. They're under a kind of control that involuntary actions aren't, meaning that we can meaningfully influence them by such practices as praise and blame, reward and punishment, encouragement and determent, etc.
So if, in addition to thinking that I'm writing this reply to you out of my own free will, we have some account of *what makes it true*, e.g., that I must be able to originate actions in a way that is uncaused by anything, then we might be wrong about that. But if we just think that I'm replying out of my own free will, then we aren't wrong. I am!
No problem! Really enjoying your pieces!
I think the main reason I see a tension is in how you frame it: in the personal identity, the edge cases are sufficient to title your post, "you don't exist"--while in the free will case, you seem happy to ignore the vagueness and edge cases to declare that free will obviously refers to this cluster of things that mostly always go together.
That is, your standard for "personal identity is real" seemed to be, "facts about personal identity are language-independent", but it seems here you're declaring that free will is real and backing it up with the fact that there is a language-dependent distinction between voluntary and involuntary acts.
To be explicit, I think "voluntary" actions exist on just as much of a spectrum as personal identity cases, and if one asks what this voluntary aspect *actually consists in* we can probably construct paradoxes for any particular answer just as well as we could for personal identity... Somewhere between "heart beating" and "decided to buy a house" we'll find actions I undertake whose voluntary quality is subject to dispute. And if I consider hypothetical cases like hypnotism, where I might undertake an action that at the time I defend as voluntary, but then find out I was hypnotized into doing, I become unsure what I actually mean by "voluntary".
Arguments like this convince me that the "voluntary/involuntary" distinction is comparably language-dependent as the "me/someone" distinction... In which case, following your usage in the personal identity case, I'd expect you to say that free will isn't real.
Do you just disagree about the comparison I'm making between those two cases? Do you think there are non-linguistic facts that distinguish between voluntary/involuntary? If not, then I'm still confused; if so, I'd be curious to hear what you think those facts are, and how they get around the threshold/vagueness objections you raised against personal identity.
Hey, thanks for another very thoughtful comment. No, I don't object to the comparison at all; on the contrary, I think it's very apt! In fact, I point out somewhere in one of the replies, either out here or on Twitter, that there are limit cases where it's no longer clear whether our concept of personal identity applies, so there are limit cases for our concept of free will.
In both cases, I think there's a similar story: There's an underlying reality consisting of physical events, mental events, and relations between them. This reality presents various kinds of patterns. Because of those patterns, it's very useful for us to think of this reality in terms of stable substances and accidental changes, so we've evolved cognitive and perceptual systems that do just that.
And of course, our concepts reflect the way we perceive and conceptualize the world. Our concepts, including those of personal identity and of free will, impose sharp boundaries on what is really a much more fluid tapestry of causal relations. For this reason, there'll be all kinds of weird limit cases for all of them.
So ultimately, the difference you're pointing to in the way I'm framing the two pieces is just a rhetorical one. I think that, among the lay readers I'm primarily trying to reach, almost everyone believes that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for their continued existence over time.
For this reason, it seems natural, rhetorically, to say "Hey, you're mistaken about something!" (Though note the subtitle of my piece on personal identity: After claiming that you don't exist, I immediately add, "Or at least, not the way you thought you did." That is, you *do* exist! You're just a bit mistaken as to how!).
In contrast, I think that, among those same lay readers, there might be more of a tendency *already to be a little unsure* about how to understand the problem of free will and determinism. I think a bit part of that is just that the debate here has gotten a lot more mainstream over the last twenty years or so.
So for this reason, it seems natural to take a tone of reassurance: "Don't listen to those silly public intellectuals, like Sam Harris, and religious apologists, like Ravi Zacharias, that if causal determinism is true, you aren't free. They're just confusing the issue."
Hope this all makes sense!
Interesting, that makes sense, though I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of how lay readers feel about free will.
Where are you inclined to disagree?
I enjoyed reading this a lot as a compatibilist - in particular your choice to use Wittgenstein fascinated me. I believe his argument to be highly relevant in this discussion. Reading this provoked me to think further on philosophical language confusion. Although I am in agreement with Wittgenstein that we often abstract the language we use so much so as to lose the essence of the way we use it in a functional sense, I do not think that this necessarily entails we are wrong to do so or we are confused to do so. I think the point of ‘confusing language’ is to reach a different perspective understanding of such words as ‘free will’. I think the way you titled the section ‘who is will and why is he free’ explains exactly this. However, I believe we reached a compatible conclusion (somewhat generally) due to this preliminary ‘confusion’ of language and we are not guided out of it by common sense like a fly from a bottle but instead we try to make this common sense compatible with our now more abstract complicated theory. I wondered if you agreed with me from your piece with this line of thinking or whether you thought Wittgenstein’s nuanced but almost condescending manner of confusion/clarity in language since you use him as your defence of compatibilism?
Glad you liked it, though I must say I’m not entirely sure I understand the question… Are you basically just asking if we’re sometimes justified in bending language? If so, I’d say: sure, if we’re aware that we’re doing so.
But I think Wittgenstein' would say that the philosophers get confused because they don’t realize they’re stretching or distorting language in various ways, thus leading them into all kinds of confusion.
This is a good, clear articulation of why compatibalism just makes sense!
I just published an article discussing a slight nuance on the compatibilist view of free will, I’m curious about your thoughts on the approach I take in it (where an analogy to probability shows that opacity is the important trait that makes our choices free).
Hey thanks so much. Also, very cool! From the title of your piece alone, I suspect we agree on just about everything. I'll read it soon and check back in!
Thanks so much for your reply!
Also: I’ve really been enjoying your articles on personal identity as well. :)
Thank you! About halfway through your piece, btw. I got tired and had to stop. Now I'm working on some other projects, but hopefully I can finish later today. I have a few thoughts already.
Great article !
I am more aligned with you view, but Sapolsky’s point is very well articulated and I would love to see some more science oriented rebuttals.
I would say its less on quantum mechanics than neuroscience that gives me more pause.
In the end, I am all in the compatibilism camp, but there are some issues regarding the functioning of the brain (as per Sapolsky) and determinism that raise some moral questions that ai cant answer properly
Yeah, there's definitely some stuff to say about the moral side of things. Might write on that in the future, actually!
Thanks! I' haven’t read Sapolsky’s book, but I’ve listened to him talk and listened to people talk about his views. I agree with the science of it, of course.
Strictly speaking, the contemporary physics tells us about might not be a deterministic one. There’s debate about how to interpret quantum mechanics. But in any case, it isn’t one in which we seem to be able to fit acts of the will that aren’t the product of antecedent causes.
Or maybe I should say: If we could fit those kinds of acts of the will into our picture of the world, they’d turn out just to be random. There might actually be a logical rather than an empirical roadblock here: The very concept of an act of the will that is neither caused nor random might be just incoherent.
In any case, though, as I point out around the start of the first section, the question about whether we have free will isn’t a scientific one; it isn’t one about what the world is like. It’s a conceptual question: what do we mean, what have we always meant, by this concept of free will?
And here, neuroscientists, computer scientists, physicists, can’t help us. In my view, at least, the way to approach these kinds of questions is to start from the philosophy of language and then conduct any further analysis.
And here I thought you rebuked Wittgenstein and his cult lol. Good article.
Thanks so much! I'm not a fan of the cultishness around Wittgenstein, but I do like him!
I must confess myself disappointed, sir. I was expecting wildly contrarian takes each week, undermining the beliefs of us οἱ πολλοί, and yet here you are, defending common sense!
Now, seriously, I confess I have difficulty understanding the imcompatibilist argument. Even accepting the universe is deterministic (which is much to accept; to my extremely limited knowledge, I think Quantum Mechanics points in the opposite direction), that would at most tell you that given x,y,z... the outcome has to be a,b,c. I don't see how that would negate free will: one is free to choose among available options at each moment, but one is *not* free to choose his or her preferences, goals, contextual pressures, etc... which will make one go for one option instead of the other. A few meters from me there's a whisky bottle, and nothing is preventing me from drinking it. But I'm a teetotaler, so I obviously won't be taken a sip. Am a to be regarded as an unfree robot for this?
I think you make a very good case for mixtification with words (which I suspect is a very Continental thing to do). The article did also update me a bit, positively, towards Wittgenstein. I haven't read him, but in all the intellectual encounters where he appeared he was always being used as a legitimation for Postmodern relativism and reducing everything to language games (which feels ironic, in the context of your post).
Okay, back now! So first, I'm very dismayed at the perception you have of me! I don't mean to be a contrarian at all. On the contrary! I'm a big fan of common sense philosophy, and this is really reflected in my love of ordinary language philosophy, which has a lot in common with that school of thought. Some of my first loves were R.M. Hare, L. Wittgenstein, and J.L. Austin, all of whom are ordinary language philosophers!
The kind of analysis I give of free will is actually very similar to my analysis of the self: Of course there's free will. But what makes that true is a linguistic convention. There's some more or less vaguely subset of the causal order that we designate by that term. And when we say, of something within that subset, that it was willed freely, well, then, by definition, we say something true!
Similarly, my view is: Of course there are persons! But what makes that true is a linguistic convention. There's some more or less vaguely defined subset of the causal order that we designate by that term, as well as by proper names like "Phil" and "Manuel" and by personal pronouns like "I" and "he." And when we say, of something that's clearly in the subset designated by "Phil," that it's Phil, we say something true!
I've very happy I've helped you have a more positive outlook on Wittgenstein. It's unfortunate that he's been coopted by so many peddlers of nonsense, though it's in part his fault for not writing in a very structured way. Wittgenstein himself is definitely worth engaging with. For all his flaws, there's no question that he was a genius. I might recommend a good introduction to him instead of diving into the Investigations yourself, though!
(I guess where I might come off as radical is in what I think about ultimate reality. Of course our conventional ways of speaking are true. Where I'm radical is in my account of *why* they're true, or of *what makes them true*.
In the case of selves, it isn't that there are souls or other continuing entities that are necessary and sufficient conditions of the application of our naming conventions, but that there are vaguely defined series of interrelated mental and physical events.
Similarly, in the case of free will, it isn't that there's some kind of noncausal ability to originate actions, but simply that some of our actions, though caused, involve our beliefs, desires, and values).
I feel an important difference though is that while people have strong intuitions about their self (even if they don't believe in souls), most don't worry much about free will in the abstract.
Hm, maybe, yeah. I definitely think that what I say about the self might seem a little more radical than what I say about free will. But for me, the two sets of views are very closely connected!
Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read and comment. I appreciate it greatly. About to go on a long walk with my girlfriend. Will try to respond soon!
QM is deterministic save the non-theorized/non-mechanistic collapse assumption, which, if real, would just mean that stuff sometimes happens that's entirely untethered from any kind of existing states of affairs. if determinism is true, then no one is "free to choose among available options", because there those don't exist. you're just hypostatizing your vague mental simulation. if reality is deterministic, then always only one states of affairs is possible; the actual one.
it's an error to confuse never-obtaining counterfactuals with true generalisations based on vague mental simulation. it's a true generalisation that humans can drink stuff that's within reach. but regardless of whatever explains your particular instance of not drinking the stuff within your reach, it's not the case that you could've drank it if in actual fact you didn't. i recommend amy karofsky's book 'a case for necessitarianism' for excellent analysis of all kinds of contingentarianisms.
There is no sense in which the will is free and no mechanism by which a free will could interact with deterministic physical matter. It's a nonstarter. We may feel free to the extent we are ignorant of causality, and in that gap is where the experience of freedom and responsibility lie. In other words, mostly yes. compatibalism is a cope, but it's just as often pre egotistical bullshit on par with religion - people "*needing*" a cheat code on the universe.
There is no sense in which the will is free, but we may feel free to the extent we are ignorant of causality. Ethics and responsibility exist in that ignorance gap.
'Causal determinism' is another product of linguistic confusion and means nothing outside of a framework in which 'cause' and 'effect' are given meaning. It was Wittgenstein, of course, who realized this. Maybe an article about that would be informative considering how the likes of Sabine Hossen-whatever and her fanboys represent the majority of people who are too dumb to understand the difference between 'is' [metaphysical nonsense/language abuse] and 'is modelled as' [useful, but with none of the deep philosophical implications, so to speak]
since no notion of 'control' plays any part in explaining how (or why, if there are why-explanations, which i'm not convinced of) control mechanisms work just the way they do & not in any other ways, emergent ‘control’, 'responsibility', 'desert', 'selves', 'choices', 'options' are only patterns at certain complex macro-mesoscales, eg. hypersocial apes' linguistic coordination mechanisms, which are nevertheless confused, not truth-tracking & disintegrate into confabulation, bad explanations & gibberish upon prompting for elaboration.
control is epiphenomenal in the sense that it’s just what happens *because the mechanisms we are* work the way they do, (trivially) independently of emergent descriptions. the OG analogy is the cellular automaton. emergent patterns don't explain anything, as they *just are* the fundamental patterns occurring all at once. so 'more may be different in many different ways.' vary the number & kind of existents, connections, interactions, and there may be awesome complexity. BUT the outcome isn't explanatory.
so i just don't understand what compatibilists want it to do. if you accept causal determinism, you accept that always only one thing can happen; the thing that's necessitated by something other than itself. if you say there's randomness, that's just unexplainable occurrences that are informationally unrelated to existing states of affairs. at least libertarian free will is clear, just the positing of 'choices' as simple, irreducible, unexplainable, singular special events. brute contingency is just posited, or there's a story like 'you just are the agent that chooses x & not non-x', which may require some supernatural hidden informational order, like in mormonism, saying that x chooses y and not non-y because of their essence if they want to avoid arbitrariness. (ofc, why that essence? no explanation? still seems arbitrary then!) oh you 'respond to reasons, which are information that 'counts in favor' (why do you interpret/interact with any reason x way rather than non-x ways?) right... sounds unintelligible, vacuous & thought terminating, but ok! but with compatibilism i don't see the clarity!
I find some conventions among philosophers, like subtle insinuations, peer pressure, dominance displays & other nifty rhetoric like ‘what we (who?) want’ and what ‘the folk’ mean (who? how do you know? why is that relevant?), shirley, ‘THE ONLY kind of free will WORTH WANTING’ (???)... unappealing and inferentially ~worthless, and i hear these all the time from compatibilists.