More Free Will Stuff: Comments From the Studio Audience

Michael, a physicist in the studio audience, had a lot to say about the last two posts on free will. His comments were well thought out and substantive (who says scientists don't know how to write?), so I thought I'd post them here for all to see, and for me to respond to.

My reaction is 180 degrees from yours. What possible point does moral responsibility have if I have no free will? What possible benefit is it to the world or to myself or to you if you assign moral responsibility to actions over which I had not choice, because I choose not to flagellate myself about those actions? Such a thing would seem to be a sort of moral version of an untestable hypothesis. Absolutely nothing in the world is changed by your decision to assign moral responsibility to me for my actions, then if you didn't assign any responsibility.

That's an interesting point. The push you're making here has vague shades of American Pragmatism--you're asking, in a nutshell, why this is even a question worth considering if we agree from the start that nothing substantive will change in the universe one way or the other. I share that concern, which is why I'm reluctant to embrace anything but semi-compatibilism. As you said, much of the free will discussion is, at this point, made up of almost entirely untestable hypotheses (e.g. that quantum level indeterminacy is enough to make us free). The advantage about embracing semicompatibilism, it seems to me, is that it doesn't have anything to say one way or the other about the tension between freedom and causal determinism. What semicompatibilism offers, then, is an explanation of how we can intelligibly assign moral responsibility (whether or not this assignment itself is a free action is irrelevant--we only care whether or not it is intelligible) while at the same time remaining neutral about genuine alternative possibilities.

The only positive purpose I can think of for assigning moral responsibility for actions is if my doing so might change my future actions in a future similar situation. But you have hypothesized that this is impossible. So why would you or I ever choose to assign moral responsibility for actions I cannot control?

I'm not hypothesizing one way or another about whether or not your actions are free (though if pressed I'd say it's more likely that they're not than that they are)--again, that's the point of semicompatibilism, as far as I'm concerned. Fischer would say that you're suffering from a conceptual confusion when you ask "So why would you or I ever choose to assign moral responsibility for actions I cannot control," because you can control your actions in the relevant sense. Remember, he wants to make a distinction between regulative control (which you may or may not have), and guidance control (which you certainly do have). The whole point of the stories about the locked room, the evil neuroscientist, and your drive to work is to show that there is some real sense in which you can be said to have control over your actions, even if at no point did you have robust alternative possibilities.

I am really enjoying your blog and checking it every few days. If I am missing something important about this, please let me know. Also, if there are any reasonably accessible books on this topic I could read, I would love a recommendation.

So glad to hear it! Sometimes I wonder if anyone is actually reading this thing; glad to know that at least one person is. I'll throw up a book list in a separate post when I'm done here.

If you have any good things to read on the libertarian point of view I would appreciate those. I am a PhD physicist who has worked a lot on quantum effects in superconductivity, and on quantum noise. When you write I've yet to see a libertarian account that impresses me as much of anything except wishful thinking (they also tend to make pseudoscientific style appeals to quantum mechanics) I have to tell you that it does seem possible that the loophole in determinism is in quantum mechanics.

I think it is important to realize that the "billiard ball" determinism of classical newtonian physics does not extend to QM. I believe it is at worst an open question, and at best clear enough, that QM is NOT deterministic. So if the physical universe is NOT deterministic, then free will creates no conflict with physics.

Ok, good. I've always wanted to ask a real live physicist about this (you people are so tough to find): is QM indeterministic in the sense that we can't predict the actions of the particles (i.e. their behavior really is a necessary product of the past plus the laws of nature, but in such a way that we are unable to predict it), or in the sense that the behavior really is indeterministic? Do we even know?

In any case, I'm not convinced that any amount of quantum indeterminacy is sufficient for freedom in any relevant sense of the term. This intuition has two primary sources. First, it seems (at least from what we know so far) that quantum indeterminacy "cancels out" when we get to macro-level structures; that is, while it might be the case that the behavior of particles at the very, very, very small level cannot be reliably predicted, this has no impact when you get a large group of particles together, as for every particle that randomly "swerves left," another randomly "swerves right." By way of analogy, we might picture a large office building dedicated to producing 'widgets;' while we might not be able to predict with absolute certainty what any individual worker in the office is doing at any given time, we know that the company as a whole (i.e. at the macro scale) is doing some particular activity (i.e. producing widgets). Is this or is this not the case? I'll admit that I haven't had much formal instruction in quantum mechanics, and most of what I know is the result of having lived with a physics major for four years in college, and having done a fair bit of reading on the 'net.

Let's suppose for the sake of argument, though, that indeterminacy doesn't really cancel out at the low level--a typical libertarian line would be something about how the brain is a sufficiently complex system that it is affected by minute variations in quantum structure that simply don't affect less complex systems--and that there really is a degree of randomness at the macro level. Even if this is the case, I'm still not convinced that we can get from there to a robust kind of freedom. After all, it doesn't seem to me that the fact that my brain is influenced by random events in its microstructure gets me any closer to being "free" than the fact that my brain is just a big deterministic electro-chemical machine. In order to get real freedom out of randomness, we'd have to explain just how it is that randomness at the quantum level somehow ceases to be truly "random" at the macro level, yet still retains enough indeterminacy for some aspect of my consciousness to influence it. I'm not saying that this won't happen, but there are a whole lot of "ifs" in there.

I don't understand the appeal of a theory that gives us free will in determining what we think of some actions, but no free will over any actual actions. First it is puzzling, if I ask you what you think, it is deterministic what you will tell me, since that is an action. Then it seems random whether your conversation about such a thing has any meaning at all. If you tend to be honest, then it is an amazing coincidence that your beliefs (over which you have free will) just happen to align over your predetermined statements about your beliefs.

I'm with Searle on this one (not that I know anything about him beyond what you said.) If you ask me if I have free will, I choose to say yes. It is hard to even parse what is going on if I "choose" to say no.

To me it seems clunky to separate free will about what I believe from determinism about what I do. And especially if the motivation to do so is what is at best an unproven and at worst a mistaken idea that physics, as far as we know, is deterministic. As far as I know, QM theories in which a wave function collapses on observation are NOT deterministic. Attempts to make them deterministic (for example, hidden variable theories) have failed.

Anyway, great stuff! Thanks!

Mike

Again, the appeal is in reconciling our intuitions that A) the universe is deterministic and B) we are free and/or morally responsible for our actions. It [semicompatibilism] is not a separation of beliefs from actions per se, but a separation of alternative possibilities / could have done otherwise kind of control from the kind of control necessary for us to feel that we'd be justified in attributing responsibility.

Thanks for the comments, Mike! Keep 'em coming!