From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Fri 13 Jun 2003 - 11:30:10 GMT
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E-SKEPTIC FOR JUNE 11, 2003
Copyright 2003 Michael Shermer, Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine,
e-Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com and skepticmag@aol.com). Permission
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Here is the review I wrote for the journal Science (April 3, 2003, pp.
56-57), of Dan Dennett's latest book on the evolution of free will.
The Demon of Determinism
Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett. Viking, New York. 2003 Cloth. 347
pp. $24.95. ISBN: 0-670-03186-0.
Michael Shermer
Next to the question of God's existence there is arguably no greater
conundrum in Western thought than the problem of free will and
determinism, and the two are inextricably interdigitated. God's
omniscience and omnipotence means that the future is foreordained and
predetermined, which precludes free will. If we are volitional beings
then God is limited in knowledge, power, or both.
The French philosopher Rene Descartes suggested this way out: "We will
be free from these embarrassments if we recollect that our mind is
limited while the power of God, by which he not only knew from all
eternity what is or can be, but also willed and preordained it, is
infinite. It thus happens that we possess sufficient intelligence to
know clearly and distinctly that this power is in God, but not enough
to comprehend how he leaves the free actions of men indeterminate."1
The English author C. S. Lewis simply placed God outside of time: "All
the days are "Now" for Him. He doesn't remember you doing things
yesterday; he simply sees you doing them, because, though you've lost
yesterday, He has not. He doesn't foresee you doing things tomorrow; He
simply sees you doing them:
because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You
never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free
because God knows what you are doing."2
Removing God does not produce a resolution. By the nineteenth century
the Newtonian/Cartesian mechanistic world-view was codified by the
French mathematician Marquis de Laplace and has since become known as
Laplace's demon: "Let us imagine an Intelligence who would know at a
given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of
all things of which the world consists; let us assume, further, that
this Intelligence would be capable of subjecting all these data to
mathematical analysis. Then it could derive a result that would embrace
in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the
universe and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this
Intelligence. The past and the future would be present to its eyes."3
By the twentieth century science undertook to become that demon,
casting a wide "causal net" linking causes to effects throughout the
past and into the future and encompassing all phenomena throughout the
cosmos from atoms to galaxies. God and nature are deterministically
indistinguishable.
Why, then, do we feel free? What non-theological solutions have been
proposed to slay the demon of determinism? The simplest is also the
most subjectively appealing: I have free will and you don't. This
useful fiction serves us well in daily life and most of us act as if it
is true, but it is philosophically unsatisfying. At the other extreme
is the claim that the problem is an unsoluble one--a "mysterian"
mystery--where we are smart enough to conceive of the problem but not
smart enough to solve it. Science writer and mysterian philosopher
Martin Gardner, for example, says that asking Is there free will? is
like asking What is time? "Like time, with which it is linked, free
will is best left--indeed, I believe we cannot do otherwise--an
impenetrable mystery. Ask not how it works because no one on earth can
tell you."4 For such mysteries pragmatist philosophers like William
James and Charles Peirce argue that (1) in issues of extreme importance
to human existence, (2) when the evidence is inconclusive one way or
the other, and (3) you must make a choice, it is acceptable to take a
leap of faith (for example, that there is a God or there is free will).
But here we are back to free will as a useful fiction.
A popular solution of late appeals to quantum indeterminacy. Perhaps
the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the various indeterminant
effects associated with quantum mechanics provide a crack in the
deterministic armor for free will to emerge. It doesn't, for two
reasons: (1) quantum effects cancel each other out at the macro level
in which everyday phenomena (including free will occur, and (2) even if
it could be established that quantum uncertainties lead to random
neuronal firings this does not spawn free will; it just adds another
deterministic causal factor, only this one is random instead of
nonrandom.
This second critique was brilliantly outlined by the Tuft's University
philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in his highly-regarded 1984 book on the
subject entitled Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting.5
Dennett correctly notes that neither too much free will nor too much
determinism works. If our actions are completely determined or
completely random then we are not responsible for them. Where is the
balance to be found? In evolutionary theory, argues Dennett in his new
book Freedom Evolves. The author of the materialistic defense of
consciousness as a product of nothing more than neuronal activity in
Consciousness Explained, and of undiluted Darwinian theory in Darwin's
Dangerous Idea, has now turned his methodological naturalism to
extrapolating free will out of neural complexity and evolutionary
theory.6
Dennett strives, with some success, at being the scientist's
philosopher, an embodiment of the consilient approach promulgated by
evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson,7 through a "jumping together"
of data and theory from disperate fields. Thus, although he leans
heavily on the philosopher's stock in trade of logic, linguistics, and
thought experiments (that, while cleverly presen ted occasionally bogs
down in convoluted reasoning), Dennett's quiver includes evolutionary
biology, game theory, the computer game of life, cognitive
neuroscience, genetic engineering, meme theory, and more. Dennett's
thesis can be summarized as follows: (1) humans are evolved animals
without a soul but with free will; (2) we are the only species with
free will because we have a "self," a sense of being self-aware, and
even aware that others are self-aware, because (3) we have symbolic
language that allows us to communicate the fact that we are aware and
self-aware, and (4) we have extremely complex neural circuitry and many
degrees of behavioral freedom (a jellyfish, like a hot-air balloon, for
example, has one degree of freedom: up and down; we have many more),
and (5) we have a theory of mind about other selves who are also (6)
moral animals in the sense of having evolved moral sentiments, or
feelings of making right or wrong choices as members of a social
species, and with symbolic language we have the representational power
to reason with each other about what we ought to do, therefore (7) free
will emerges out of our deterministic world from the fact that we can
weigh the consequences of the many courses of action available to us,
that we are aware that we (and others) make these choices, and we hold
ourselves and them accountable.
In Dennett's materialistic philosophy free will is located in the
brain, of course, but where? In the "self," a metaphor for an
adaptation our brains evolved for monitoring what is happening in our
own and others' brains. But where is the self located? The answer is
not clear and Dennett's brilliant summary of the neuroscience in trying
to further clarify the neurophysiology of selfhood shows that wherever
it is, it is not in one location. Reaction-time experiments that
monitor different parts of the brain indicate that there is no
"Self-contained You." Instead, "all the work done by the imagined
homunculus in the Cartesian Theater has to be broken up and distributed
in space and time in the brain" (238).
Neuroscience research shows that we have a functional "layer" of
decision-making power that no other species has (this is not a brain
layer, but what Dennett calls "a virtual layer" found "in the
micro-details of the brain's anatomy"). For example, "a male baboon can
'ask' a nearby female for some grooming, but neither of them can
discuss the likely outcome of compliance with this request, which might
have serious consequences for both of them, especially if the male is
not the alpha male of the troop. We human beings not only can do things
when requested to do them; we can answer inquires about what we are
doing and why. It is this kind of asking, which we can also direct to
ourselves, that creates the special category of voluntary actions that
sets us apart" (251).
Dan Dennett is one of the most original thinkers of our time, and this
book brings a fresh perspective to an ancient problem. But is it true?
Will future commentaries on free will be mere footnotes to Dennett? I
doubt it. First, many general readers will not embrace Dennett's
tenets, especially humans as soulless evolved animals and consciousness
as nothing more than neuronal activity. Second, many philosophers
prefer a free will that is either a form of indeterminism or a
cognitive illusion because although it is hard to deny its subjective
reality it is equally hard to prove its existence. Finally, although I
accept the first six of Dennett's points (above) and agree that he has
thoroughly debunked the indeterminism argument, I remain unconvinced
that free will can ever be derived from determinism. I think the best
we can do is pseudo-freedom. In the complex world of human beings and
social systems the causes are so numerous and interconnected that it is
difficult--nigh impossible--to get our minds around the causal net in
its entirety. The enormity of this complexity leads us to feel and act
free, even if we are actually determined. Since no cause or set of
causes we select as the determiners of human action can be complete,
freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes.
1 R. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy Part I, 41 (1649).
2 C. S. Lewis, 1945. Beyond Personality (Macmillan, New York, 1945).
3 P. Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (Dover, New York,
1814 (1951)).
4 M. Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (William Morrow,
New York, 1983).
5 D. Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1984).
6 D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown, Boston, MA,
1991). D. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings
of Life (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996).
7 E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. (Knopf, New York,
1998).
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