The Platopus makes a good point about compatibilism (the view that some worthwhile kind of free will is compatible with the standard deterministic account of the world given by physics).

One argument holds that there isn’t effectively any difference between compatibilists and those who deny the reality of free will. Both deny that radical (or ‘libertarian’) free will exists. They agree that there’s no magic faculty which interrupts the normal causal process with volitions. Given that level of agreement, isn’t it just a matter of what labelling strategy we prefer? Because it’s that radical kind of free will that is really at issue: that’s what people want, not some watered-down legalistic thing.

That’s the argument the Platopus wishes to reject. He accepts that compatibilism involves some redefinition, but draws a distinction between illegitimate and legitimate redefinition. As an example of the latter, he proposes the example of atoms. In Greek philosophy, and at first in the modern science which borrowed the word, ‘atom’ meant something indivisible. There was a period when the atoms of modern physics seemed to be just that, but in due course it emerged that they could in fact be ‘split’. One strategy at that point would have been to say, well, it turns out those things were never atoms after all: we must give them a new name and look elsewhere for our indivisible atoms – or perhaps atoms don’t actually exist after all. What happened in reality was that we went on calling those particles atoms, and gave up our belief that they were indivisible.

In a somewhat similar way, the Platopus argues that it makes sense for us to redefine freedom of the will even though we now know it is not libertarian freedom. The analogy is not perfect, and in some ways the case is actually stronger for free will. Atoms, after all, were originally a hypothesis derived from the purest metaphysics. On one interpretation (just mine, really), the early atomists embraced the idea because they feared that unless the process of division stopped somewhere, the universe would suffer from a radical indeterminism. Division could not stop until the particles were of zero magnitude – non-existent, and how could we make real things out of items which did not themselves exist? They could not have imagined the modern position in which, on one interpretation (yes) as we go more micro the nature of the reality involved changes until the physics has boiled away leaving only maths.

Be that as it was or may be, I think the Platopus is quite right and that the redefinition required by compatibilism is not just respectable but natural and desirable. I think in fact we could go a little further and say that it’s not so much a redefinition as a correction of inherent flaws in the pre-theoretical idea of free will.

What do I mean? Well, the original problem here is that the deterministic physical account seems to leave no room for the will. People try to get round that by suggesting different kinds of indeterminism: perhaps we can get something out of chaos theory, or out of quantum mechanics. The problem with those views is that they go too far and typically end up giving us random action: which is no more what we wanted than determined action. Alternatively, old-fashioned libertarians rely on the intervention of the spirit, typically with no satisfactory account of how the spirit makes decisions or how it manages to intervene. That, I submit, was never really what people meant either: in their Sunday best they might appeal to the action of their soul, but in everyday life having a free choice was something altogether more practical; a matter of not having a knife at your throat.

In short, I’d claim that the pre-theoretical understanding of free will always implicitly took it to be something that went on in a normal physical world, and that’s what compatibilism restores, saving the idea from the mad excrescences added by theologians and philosophers.

Myself I think that the kind of indeterminism we can have, and the one we really need, is the one that comes from our power to think about anything. Most processes in the world can be predicted because the range of factors involved can be known and listed to begin with: our mental processes are not like that. Our neurons may work deterministically according to physics, but they allow us to think about anything at any time: about abstractions, remote entities, and even imaginary things. Above all, they allow us somehow to think about the future and enable future contingencies (in some acceptable sense) to influence our present decisions. When our actions are determined by our own thoughts about the future, they can properly be called free.

That is not a complete answer: it defers the mystery of freedom to the mystery of intentionality; but I’ll leave that one for now…

Share this: Facebook

Email

Reddit

Twitter

More

Tumblr

Pinterest



Pocket

LinkedIn



