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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. If any of you have read my book, The Big Picture, you know I make a big deal in there about different ways of talking about the universe. This is a very old idea that’s been talked about in different ways itself as it were, but the point is that there is sort of a way of talking about the universe at the fundamental physical level, or you might talk about a wave function or quantum fields or something like that, and then there are emergent levels on top of that. There’s sort of a biological level with our cells and organs, and so forth, individual organisms. There’s kind of a human level with psychology, and there’s even supra human levels, where you talk about sociology or politics, or economics, or whatever. And everyone kind of agrees that those levels exist, but the relationship between them can be a tricky one. In particular, there can be a little bit of reluctance in some circles to think of human beings as stuff that just obeys the laws of physics.

0:01:01 SC: Now on the other hand, there is a tendency in other circles to, what I would call, overclaim the extent to which we should just think of ourselves as things obeying the laws of physics. In the sense that we should not abandon or modify the vocabulary of fundamental physics, even when we talk about individual people. As I explained in the book, you obviously need to have consistency between how we talk about people and how we talk about particles, but the vocabularies, the ideas that we may use might be very different. Nowhere does that become more obvious than in the discussions we have about free will. And of course, there are different definitions of free will, blah, blah, blah. But regardless of your favorite definitions, there’s an interesting amount of work to be done trying to establish how we should talk about people. How we should think about them, how we should involve values and morals and ethics, how we should punish them, how we should assign praise and blame. So today, we’re talking to Jenann Ismael, who’s a philosopher at Columbia University, about this exact problem.

0:02:06 SC: About how to think about human beings while accepting the fact that human beings are part of the physical world. This is very much in my wheelhouse in terms of interest, it’s not so much my wheelhouse in terms of expertise, so it’s a very useful conversation for people like me who care about connecting humanity to the fundamental laws of physics. In some way, it’s the last element of a trilogy. In the last three podcasts, we’ve had Dan Dennet, and then Sara Imari Walker, and today Jenann. And in the talk with Dan, we talked about the very general idea of connecting the scientific image to the manifest image. In the talk with Sarah, we did that in the case of life. Where is the dividing line between non-life and life? How do you make those connections, how do you make that transition? So today, in some sense, we’re doing that with people. How do you draw that difference between what’s a person, what’s not a person, what does it matter to be a person, all while respecting the rules laid down by the fundamental laws of physics?

0:03:09 SC: I also wanna mention, before we dive into the conversation, that I’m going to be traveling to Australia and New Zealand at the end of February. I usually don’t mention my trips and talks and things like that on the podcast, but maybe I should do it more often. So anyway, end of February 2020, for those of you listening in the future, I’m going to be in Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, giving some talks sponsored by Think Inc. Sadly, it’s not free, but I don’t often go to Australian and New Zealand. So this is a chance to see me. If you wanna buy books, you can do that. If you wanna get books signed, if you already have them, you can do that. And you can look at the web page for Think Inc., which is the organization putting on these talks. It’s thinkinc.org.au, for Australia, and there I am. Anyone down there who might be listening, I hope to see you there. So this is gonna be a good conversation at the boundaries of physics and philosophy. I don’t think there are any such boundaries. I think there’s a middle ground, and that’s solely where we are today. So, let’s go.

[music]

0:04:25 SC: Jenann Ismael, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:27 Jenann Ismael: Thank you for having me.

0:04:29 SC: So free will is a topic that people talk about a lot. And everyone has an opinion about it, right? It’s an amazing extent to which people have very fervent opinions. I worry a little bit that a lot of the debate comes down to definitions, so I actually personally try to avoid talking about free will that much. But you wrote a whole book about it, was that like a courageous act [chuckle] to dive into these waters where everyone has a pre-existing opinion?

0:04:56 JI: I think I didn’t actually go diving into the waters having a kind of dog in the fight about what I thought about it. I mean, I think, for me it comes out of the places kind of in our worldview, especially a physicalist worldview, where it’s clear there’s something that we don’t understand. And I think, for me thinking about free will, it was sort of a placeholder for that sense of agency that we have. Everybody, even pre-theoretically, even before they decide on a definition of what free will is supposed to be, when they’re presented with the fact of determinism, feel shocked, and in some cases offended. And so, it’s clear that there’s something in the concept of determinism that clashes even pre-theoretically with our sense of who we are and the way that we fit the cosmos. And because I’m not a moral psychologist, I’m not a philosopher with already a dog in that fight, I just felt like there was something clear that needed to be understood.

0:05:57 SC: And relating it to physics is a bit… Is that what you do in the book.

0:06:00 JI: Relating it to physics, yeah. The reason for relating it to physics was because physics gives us a sort of regimented context, both within which we can raise the question in a precise form, and then see about trying to address it.

0:06:00 SC: And I think, so probably many listeners are familiar with the general landscape of arguments that on the one hand people say, “Well look, we have laws of physics, they’re impersonal, we don’t get to overrule them just ’cause we’re a person, we’re not Cartesian dualists. And therefore, everything is determined. There’s no free will.” And there’s some other people who say, “Yes, but we can be compatiblists about laws of physics and free will. There’s some emergent properties, some higher levels… ” These are things that I say in my own books. So just to spoil the end of the movie here, why don’t you situate yourself within that context a little bit and then we’ll back up and try to fill things in?

0:06:00 JI: Okay, I think I do. I do think that a certain kind of freedom is completely compatible with the laws of physics. I tried not to get into this sort of positioning myself with respect to the philosophical landscape because what I tried to do in the book is actually… I understand, and I believe and think that physics is gonna change our conceptions of what kinds of thing we are and how we fit into the world. So instead of starting with some definition of what free will is and seeing whether physics matches that, I try to understand what physics is telling us about ourselves and what sorts of freedom if you think of yourself as a physical thing in the physical world you end up having without really arguing that that’s what we…

0:07:39 SC: Have always meant.

0:07:40 JI: Have always meant or pre-theoretically, whether it fits our conceptions of freedom…

0:07:46 SC: By pre-theoretically, you’ve used this term, it means before we think very hard about…

0:07:51 JI: Yeah. Intuitively, without… Before you settle on philosophical view about what freedom would have to be.

0:07:58 SC: Right. In the manifest image, in the folk psychology or whatever.

0:08:01 JI: Yeah. Before you get sophisticated.

0:08:03 SC: Okay. But so you do want to say… I mean your book’s title is ‘How Physics Makes Us Free’, so you’re not on the side that says there’s no such thing as free will.

0:08:11 JI: That’s right. Although, the title of the book is ambiguous in all kinds of ways that are intended. So for example, how? The way in which physics makes us free. So the specific kinds of freedom that physics gives us.

0:08:24 SC: That’s right. So rather than saying do or do we not have free will, it’s what does it mean to say or what does it mean to have or feel that we have this kind of freedom…

0:08:31 JI: In what kinds of ways… Right. In what kinds of ways do we have freedom if we conceive of ourselves as physical things in the physical world.

0:08:38 SC: Okay. So now, everyone has made up their mind whether they agree with you or not already, but let’s still nevertheless fill things in. I did recently do podcasts both with Ned Hall, where we talked a lot about possible worlds and a little bit about causation, and one with Dan Dennett, where we talked a little bit about free will and things like that. But in both cases, they were whirlwind tours of a lot of territory, so this is our chance to dig in a little bit more. So don’t think that all the interesting things have been said. People have been thinking about these things. So you have a very simple organization in your book where you sort of first talked about what it means to be a person, to have a self compatible with the laws of physics, and then you start talking about what it means to have agency, to be able to cause things and do things. So does that sound like a sensible organization for the discussion as well?

0:09:25 JI: Yes.

0:09:25 SC: Or we first talk about the self? Okay, good. What does it mean to be a person, to be a self, to be an agent if we know that we’re just a bunch of atoms obeying the standard model of particle physics?

0:09:36 JI: Right. Lots of questions there.

[chuckle]

0:09:39 JI: I mean I think the thing that seems to me characteristic of the self is what I take from Descartes’ original discussion. So Descartes says, when he introduces the notion of the self into philosophical discourse in the way that it appears today, he says, “What is this thing, this eye whose existence is made known to me in the every act of trying to deny that it exists.” So in a way, what he’s doing is he’s saying, “I’m not starting with any idea of what I am, except that I am that thing whose existence I cannot myself deny.” And it seems to be suggested, if you start to peel apart the layers in the argument there, that “What I am” is first and foremost, the owner of a reflexive consciousness. So what I try…

0:10:29 SC: Someone who thinks about themselves.

0:10:31 JI: Someone who is able to entertain thoughts about themselves as the subject of thoughts.

0:10:36 SC: Yeah.

0:10:36 JI: Right. So what I do in the book is spend the first part of the book trying to understand how a consciousness of that kind arises. So instead of starting out with a view of particles in the void and trying to say which particle or configurations of particles would answer to that description, I started out with particles in the void and try to come to some understanding at first of the emergence of complex systems, and then the emergence of things like cognizers, and then the emergence of the kinds of things that have the cognitive organization that allows them to think about their own thoughts and think about themselves as the subject of thought. And then that gets to be the environment within which we have the sort of ‘I thoughts’ that can raise questions about themselves and their place in the world, and ultimately questions about free will.

0:11:30 SC: And so, just so people don’t get too distracted, but your consciousness per se, is not your target here, right? You’re not tackling the hard problem of consciousness.

0:11:38 JI: No. Deliberately avoiding it.

0:11:40 SC: Good. But we would like to say… So okay, good. So we’re particles in the void, which is a poetic way of saying we are things that obey the laws of physics, and those things come together to make self-conscious creatures, agents, I don’t know what your favorite word is. So let’s… Okay. Let’s indulge ourselves a little bit. What do you say or think about the actual process that that happens over time?

0:12:06 JI: You mean about the… Like in the long term evolutionary history of the emergence of the self?

0:12:09 SC: Yeah.

0:12:11 JI: So I mean in various…

0:12:11 SC: By the way… Sorry. For any question I ask, please answer the most interesting version of the question that I was trying to ask. Fill in the gaps that I don’t necessarily mention. Yeah.

0:12:21 JI: Okay. So a very potted sort of schematic view about how one might think of the emergence of agents is, we start out with systems that… Sorry. We start out with particles that band together into self-organizing units. Eventually, the units, at least the ones that are selected for it, have to do more complex things that require them to do things like metabolize energy from the environment. It turns out to be advantageous for creature… For systems like that, systems that is to say, that have to gather energy and metabolize it, to be able to gather information and track their… And control and track their own movements through the landscape. Turns out to be… It turns out… Sorry, later, that more and more sophisticated ways of gathering and utilizing information lead from very simple sorts of systems like amoeba, through things like worms, through things like dogs and cats, and ultimately, to creatures like us, who have a very special kind of equipment that’s specifically designed to process and gather large bodies of information, put that information to use in the service of guiding behavior.

0:13:36 SC: Patricia Churchland once pointed out to me a recent paper from people who are studying C. Elegans, the little round worm, the model system in biology, were they… ‘Cause we know all the neurons, and we’re still trying to figure out what they’re good for what they do. And the claim was this one neuron, it’s job or at least half of its job was to distinguish self from other. It basically told the little C. Elegans worm whether a certain force acting on it was exogenous or endogenous. And the grandiose claim was that that was the birth of self-awareness in creatures. And whether or not that’s specifically true, that’s the kind of explanation you’re signing on to, very, very scientific-based one.

0:14:16 JI: That’s exactly right. I think for me it’s a more kind of cognitive-based distinction, the distinction between self and world. So minds like ours, minds that is to say where a large part, a large amount of the neural machinery is devoted specifically to processing and routing information, are best described in cognitive terms, that is using the information theoretic vocabulary that comes naturally when you’re describing minds. And the process goes something like this. We are… What’s first in the order of awareness is perceptual information. The perception information contains a lot of information about us and our situation in the environment. We spend a lot of time or the brain spends a lot of cognitive energy separating the information that’s about the way the environment is on its own independently of us from information about the way in which we’re situated in the environment. And that process of kind of separating self from world, or better separating information about self from information about the world, is the process in which our notions of ourselves and our notions of the world does the objective environment through which move get articulated and firmed up.

0:15:35 SC: So do you, in the process of writing the book or just thinking about this and doing research, how much biology literature do you read, do you dig into evolution and neuroscience and things like that, is that relevant?

0:15:48 JI: It’s relevant for sure. I didn’t do much of it in the book. It’s the little potted history I told about the emergence of cells. I mean, that’s a story that’s biological through and through. The questions of what are selected for and the routes by which creatures like us developed, that’s entirely biology. The neuroscience… I tend to think, for the reasons that I said, that the more important and immediately relevant vocabulary for understanding the kinds of creatures that we are in ways that we will recognize from a first person perspective, is cognitive science. And I tend to think the neuroscience is relevant, but in evolutionary terms, it’s really our brains with the low level process… The low-level neural processes in our brains, such as they are, were selected because they support the sort of high level cognitive processing that they support. And so, I tend to think that it’s more illuminating for my purposes to talk about the cognitive processing and think of the low level neural processing description as falling into place.

0:17:00 SC: So the difference, the distinction is neuroscience is really about the neurons and how they hook up, whereas cognitive science is more high-level structures in the brain?

0:17:08 JI: And specifically, structures that are described in functional terms in terms of the way that they route information.

0:17:14 SC: Okay. But I guess my job, since I’m broadly sympathetic to what you say, my job for the purposes of this conversation is to channel the people who are not. I’ll probably do a crappy job at that but I’ll get it my best shot. So just in terms of vocabulary in that potted history, there’s a whole bunch of things that creep in. There’s a bunch of atoms that are bumping into each other, but then we start using words like usefulness and purpose and stuff like that. Is there a philosophy problem associated with the legitimacy of using those words?

0:17:45 JI: So, there is. I mean one of the… One wants to start with the most austere physical description that one can and earn one’s right to use notions like purpose by adding structure into that setting. There’s a long history of people sort of illegitimately and uncritically employing words that one only earns one’s right… Sorry, that have a proper place only once one’s got a mind forming intentions, and so on, in place. And then using that to describe the actions of or the behaviors of atoms in the void or something farther down the biological phylogenetic scale. So one has to be very careful about that, the right order in which to do things is to start with a very austere non-purpose-laden vocabulary. Introduce notions of purpose as they become applicable, so there are very stripped down notions, purpose that come into effect in applicability when you have systems that were selected and depend on doing things like getting food and avoiding prey. And you get more articulate notions as you get cognitive systems in place. And even more sophisticated, and ultimately, the ones that matter for the human being, notions in place when you have creatures that are deliberately representing to themselves possible situations, forming long-term goals, and choosing between them on the basis of information and desires and so on.

0:19:27 SC: Okay, so I think that that helps understand the stages at which these different terms become useful. But let’s, again, be a little hard-nosed and say, “Why is it even legitimate?” Couldn’t someone just say that using a vocabulary of purposes is just giving in to illusions? There’s no purposes in the laws of physics, so what legitimates using that at even at a higher level?

0:19:56 JI: So I’m gonna take a leaf from your book and say there are no cats.

0:20:02 SC: Like I said, I’m on your side already. [laughter]

0:20:03 JI: Yeah, no I mean there are no cats at the fundamental level.

0:20:05 SC: There are no cats at the fundamental level.

0:20:05 JI: In principle, we could describe things all in terms of just the vocabulary that physics uses. It wouldn’t be very illuminating, and especially, to the extent that the goal here is to find structures and creatures that we recognize from a first person point of view as applicable to ourselves in our mental lives and our actions. Then we are gonna have to introduce that vocabulary at some stage.

0:20:30 SC: Right. Okay, and even if we don’t solve the problem of consciousness, there’s still… We still need a rough picture of what’s going on in our brains, right?

0:20:40 JI: Of course.

0:20:41 SC: You talked a lot about Daniel Dennett’s views in the book, and you sort of agree with them largely but not entirely, but what do we need to take from how the brain works to be able to have this discussion about agents making choices?

0:20:53 JI: We need a broadly functional understanding of the emergent processes that support things like decision. So we need to be able to think of ourselves as collecting information, storing that information, making decisions based on information. None of that requires solving the problem of consciousness, in the sense that it’s come into the philosophical literature and come to be known as the hard problem. The hard problem is specifically the residue that’s left over after you give a complete functional description of the brain.

0:21:27 SC: Yeah. So as long as we know how to talk about the brain in terms of what it does, pushing our bodies around and making decisions and so forth, we don’t need to worry about niceties about the experience of the redness of red and so forth, right? Okay.

0:21:42 JI: That’s right. Yeah.

0:21:44 SC: But the brain… But an important insight here is that we are not little homunculi. We’re not unified. Whether it’s evolution or neuroscience or cognitive science or philosophy, there’s a lot of reasons to believe that it’s kind of a mess inside our brains. Kind of unruly, a corporation is actually how you put it, right?

0:22:03 JI: That’s right, yeah. So I think, yes and no, or yes but no. So it’s absolutely true that at the bottom level we’re not unified at all. There’s nothing in physics but particles. We’re made of collections of particles, they’re bound together in loose coalitions and configurations. We gain and lose them all the time. And even when we look at the mind using cognitive vocabulary, at the bottom levels we’re a bunch of sensory motor sub-systems cobbled together to produce emergent behavior. But what I argue in the book, and what I think is correct, and what I think is essential to having a concept of self of the kind that we do, there is a kind of late edition to this loose coalition of sensory motor sub-systems that has the structure of something like an executive board that collects the information and oversees and makes things like all things considered, decisions about what to do. And I think that when we’re not just operating on the basis of responding to hunger or appetites, but we’re actually taking all of our desires into account and making an all-things-considered judgment about what to do, the “I” there, who yields the decision after taking all those things into account, that to me is a unified thing. And its role is precisely to unify or to in some sense collectivize the operations of all of the low-level parts.

0:23:41 SC: Did I ever tell you about the time I took LSD?

0:23:44 JI: No. [laughter]

0:23:46 SC: Jennifer, my wife, wrote a book on the science of self. And we were told that if we really wanted to… She was told that if she really wants to understand the science of self, she has to take LSD and see how that affects yourself. And she was told that the ego dissolves and so forth, and yourself is not there. And so, as a good scientist and husband, I went along and we did this together, but we both agreed at the end of the day, there’s still an “I”. There’s still some final, maybe not decision-making process, that’s too laden, but like you said, an executive board like the editor who puts the different drafts together in Dennett’s language.

0:24:21 JI: That’s right. Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. I think, for me, things like a jury are a good module. So, in some sense, if you walk into a jury room, it’s like a cacophony of different voices arguing and competing, but when the jury issues a decision, the decision is issued in the voice of the jury, not in any one of the jurors. So it’s absolutely true, I think that if we reflect on what our mental lives are like, a lot of times it’s as noisy and as unruly and as a jury with as little apparent unity as a jury. But when we issue a decision, it comes from the jury as a whole, as a body. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we are, we as subjects of decision and intention and so on.

0:25:13 SC: And we are used to this way of thinking all the time when it comes to corporations or nations or something like that. We say a nation made a decision. Even though there’s a bunch of voices going on, at the end of the day, laws are passed or actions are taken.

0:25:25 JI: Right. And let me point out that, given the early questions that you started with, namely that the world ultimately dissolves into a bunch of little particles, the notion of an organization is exactly the right one in that we need to understand higher level emergent sorts of systems.

0:25:43 SC: In what sense? Can you elaborate on that?

0:25:46 JI: We are organizations of the bits of which matter is made.

0:25:51 SC: Okay.

0:25:51 JI: Yeah.

0:25:52 SC: Right.

0:25:52 JI: So we are composed of those bits, but those bits become us only when they’re organized in a very particular way.

0:25:58 SC: I guess one of the arguments used by free will deflationists, or whatever their label is, is if you could pinpoint where in the brain a decision was being made and understand that process either in Physics or in Neuroscience or just in Biology, then we should stop calling it a decision being made in some sense. I guess, that’s the point of view that people who get very excited about Libet’s experiments would take.

0:26:26 JI: Yep. I don’t even know what to say to that. [laughter] That just sounds so absurd to me. It seems to me when you pinpoint that, if there is a particular locus of decision that can be identified, and I also… I see no reason a priori to suppose that those processes aren’t completely distributed. But if we could find a particular point that’s the locus of a decision, it seems to me you’ve just identified the neural basis for decision.

0:26:51 SC: Right. But there’s… I just wanna… I totally agree. But I would emphasize the philosophical importance of the move being made here. We… Just because we correlate what we call the decision to something going on in the brain, doesn’t mean that the decision went away, right?

0:27:08 JI: Right.

0:27:08 SC: It’s still there at that level of description. Is that… It’s still the correct emergent higher level way of talking. Is that a fair…

0:27:15 JI: That’s exactly right. You’ve just found what the sub-structure of decision looks like at the neural level.

0:27:20 SC: Right. Okay. And just to sort of finish up the thread that I was pursuing earlier, even vocabulary words like intentionality, purpose, like we said before, these are our best ways of talking about what the self is doing in some sense.

0:27:40 JI: That’s right, yeah. But as you said, we wanna be very careful that we don’t import those words before we’ve earned the right to use them. So I think in particular… So you talked about purpose before. I think those do come in a very natural way out of biology, but notions like intention, when it’s used in the philosophical sense with an S, it imports a notion of meaning that involve normative conceptions of what counts and doesn’t count as getting the right meaning, that are very difficult to understand strictly in biological terms. There I think you need something like a social environment. So that leap from understanding purpose to understanding intention in this rich sense, I think requires a little bit more than simply situating the biological self in the environment and understanding its kind of commerce with its environment.

0:28:39 SC: Can you maybe say more about the role of the social interactions there?

0:28:44 JI: Yeah. So it’s… I don’t know how much more I can say that can be illuminating. But… So when I talk about normative notions of meaning, this means that you can use vocabulary in a way that counts as right or wrong. In a way that historically has proven very difficult to cash out simply in terms of functional interaction between a biological organism and the environment. When you put a system like us in a social environment and you have it communicating, that is exchanging information, with other systems that have their own first personal point of view, there’s a lot more structure in that situation. A lot more structure to start thinking about things like getting it right and getting it wrong and using a meaning in a sense that allows it to be passing inter-subjectively. That sort of setting, I think brings with it new things that aren’t just there with a biological or with a purely biological setting.

0:29:45 SC: Good. So we seem to be getting this picture where the self is emergent out of a noisy collective of individual biological things going on that individually are not selves but come together to make us. And yet there’s some decision maker process anyway at the end of the day that gives us an identity as something that makes choices. So can we pinpoint at the exact stages at which that vocabulary becomes useful, like are cats selves, are worms selves, are bacteria selves?

0:30:18 JI: So two different questions here. One is the conceptual question about exactly what do we require when we think that in order for that vocabulary to become applicable. And then there’s the empirical question about which of the animals along that spectrum exhibit those characteristics. There’s so much. I started thinking about this, I looked into the literature on animal cognition, and there’s just so much we don’t know.

0:30:45 SC: It’s a mess. [laughter]

0:30:47 JI: Yeah. So I think the empirical question…

0:30:49 SC: That’s why we should become physicists. It’s much easier than biology.

0:30:52 JI: It’s so much easier. Right, right. But I think there are empirical questions that we just don’t know the answer to. And I certainly don’t know the answer to. As with the conceptual question, it depends what you mean by a self. There’s rudimentary notions of self that don’t require anything like the formation of thoughts about oneself. We can define those, identify them and those mark important transition points. There are other important transition points that come later. And I think it’s… I prefer not to make choices about where exactly along those series of transitions, the notion of the self becomes applicable, certainly for the purposes of understanding the kinds of selves we are, the kinds of selves that possess the cognitive equipment to entertain those Cartesian thought. I, this thing whose existence is made known to me in the very act of trying to deny that it exists, those are plausibly only human.

0:31:42 SC: Okay.

0:31:42 JI: That’s not certain. There’s a lot that we don’t know about higher animals, especially things like whales and dolphins. But it seems to be associated with the whole cascade of capacities that do seem to be uniquely human. So I’m inclined to think that they are characteristically, and perhaps uniquely, human.

0:32:28 SC: But just so people don’t get too excited by this, not necessarily human you can imagine?

0:32:32 JI: Of course. Yeah. Of course.

0:32:33 SC: There’s nothing like a spiritually special about us in this point of view.

0:32:37 JI: Of course. Yeah.

0:32:38 SC: Yeah, But okay, let me… I’m gonna deviate from our topic here because this opens a little can of worms that is still really, really interesting. I did a solo podcast on morality, where I talked about how… Well I tried to come up with the moral viewpoints that I particularly had that would get the most disagreement from my audience, or at least from people who cared. So one of them was on vegetarianism. I’m not a vegetarian, but I do have this strong feeling that non-vegetarians, such as myself, do a crappy job of giving a philosophically respectable defense of not being vegetarian, like why… So the question in my mind is, why is it bad to kill people but it’s okay to kill cows and eat them, right? I think that’s sort of a necessary thing that everyone should have an answer to if they eat meat.

0:33:28 JI: I seem to remember talking to you about this the other day…

0:33:30 SC: Yeah, I want to get to… ‘Cause you have the world’s best most sophisticated decision procedure about what to eat and what not to eat. But the…

0:33:38 JI: As we were shoveling.

0:33:39 SC: As we were eating.

0:33:41 JI: Yeah. So I mean, I can tell you my own story.

0:33:45 SC: Yeah, please.

0:33:46 JI: I was a vegetarian for about for 24 years.

0:33:48 SC: Okay.

0:33:50 JI: And it was an article of David Velleman’s that turned me, and it came actually though in the context of having thought a lot about the self. So I became a vegetarian when I was quite young, for the reason that I didn’t understand why it was okay to kill cows for example, but not okay to kill humans. Having come to a kind of relatively articulate understanding of what it was for there to be a self, I read this article by Velleman in which he gives this argument almost in passing at the end of the piece that seemed spot-on right to me. So I’ll tell you about the argument in a second, but I wanna preface it by saying that this is an argument that it’s different in kind to kill cows than it is to kill human beings, but it doesn’t in any way license you in making cows suffer.

0:34:42 SC: Sure. No, I made that very, very clear. Suffering bad, try to avoid that, and that’s a separate issue, whether there’s some moral imperative just not even to kill the cow.

0:34:51 JI: Right. Okay, so here’s a way of assessing… I’m gonna speak in terms of the value of a life, but I mean that just in the economics sense. Adding up the kinds of value that there can be in a life. For all kinds of creatures. Any creature with a sort of experiential self, one can think… Surely, one can count whether a moment, the quality of a moment for that creature’s good or bad, and you can count over any extended period the aggregate of the quality of moments or you can assess the value of that period in some way that’s a function of the quality of the moments that compose it. But for creatures like us, creatures that have a conception of their past and their future, creatures that represent to themselves goals and plans that extend over large periods of time, we don’t just have a notion of the value of the life as a unit or longer periods in that life, that’s simply a matter of aggregating the quality of the moments in it.

0:35:56 JI: In fact, and I think this is entirely right, and this was Bellman’s point in the article, we have a conception of the good of a life or the good of some extended period of a life that’s entirely orthogonal to the quality of the moments that compose it. And even people sometimes will take this point away from discussions like the ones that Kahneman gives when he’s distinguishing two notions of self. He calls them the experiencing self and the remembering self.

0:36:24 SC: This is Daniel Kahneman thinking fast and slow.

0:36:26 JI: That’s right. And he’s got a beautiful TED talk on this, but the way that Kahneman spins it, and I’m partly gonna say this because I’m gonna take it, I’m gonna disagree with Kahneman here. He says, for example, when you go on a vacation, there’s the notion, there is the quality of the vacation that you get by summing up how much you enjoyed every moment of the vacation, but then there’s the story that you tell afterwards. And the story you tell afterwards is in some sense dissociated from the quality of the moments. You might have enjoyed every second just sitting on the beach doing nothing, but the kind of vacation that people tend to tell stories about and assess in this kind of remembering way as the good vacations are the ones that are chock-full of activities and have all kinds of things that they can tell people at a dinner party that’s more than, “I just sat on the beach for a while.”

0:37:14 JI: Many of which… Sorry. Many of which were not even that enjoyable when assessed in terms of the quality of the moments that made them up. So Kahneman thinks that there’s some sort of… Or suggests in the way he speaks about it that there’s some sort of in-authenticity involved in evaluating from the point of view of the remembering self as though…

0:37:33 SC: Retrospectively, yeah.

0:37:34 JI: Yeah, you’re just telling a good story. I don’t think that’s right. I think what’s going on there is that we each do have these just two orthogonal dimensions of value and we are weighing them against one another every moment of our lives. So when you’re making a decision, for example, say a decision… Say you woke up this morning, you’re in New York, it’s… Well, not a beautiful day, but it’s a nice enough day.

0:38:00 JI: You can do two things, you can spend the day doing nothing much, but wandering around maybe having a lazy afternoon in a cafe or you can do some New York things, the kinds of things that one is supposed to do in New York, the kinds of things, exciting things you can tell people about afterwards, or you can make a contribution to some sort of ongoing project, those weigh against one another. I think when you’re an academic, these sorts of conflicts come up. You can work on a book, something that matters to you very much, but isn’t gonna maximize the quality of the particular moments that make up the day, in that sense of that they’ll be individually enjoyable, but you will be doing something that matters to you and something whose value has a different kind of value for you. So I think for human beings, we have these two relatively independent notions of value, and that when we think about the value of a human life or an extended period of a human life, it’s really that second dimension of value that’s coming into play.

0:39:07 SC: Sorry, remind us, which was the second?

0:39:10 JI: The kind of value that has to do with plans and projects, and not with the intrinsic quality of the moments. That can…

0:39:19 SC: Right. With keeping past and future in mind?

0:39:22 JI: Keeping past and future in mind. It’s also the kind of value that, when we think in terms of relationships, there might be some people that you enjoy sitting at a table with, but there’s also the kinds of relationships that span a good period of time. And part of the value of the relationship is that they have a certain kind of past and they have a certain kind of future. I think, again, those are notions of value that are to some extent intention with an orthogonal to one another. When a human being dies, a human being who’s invested a certain amount of time and a certain amount of energy in ongoing plans and projects, and who has ongoing relationships and so on, there’s a kind of loss involved in that, that’s not just the loss of more good moments.

0:40:12 SC: Right. Not just the integral of all your happiness over time or whatever.

0:40:15 JI: That’s right. And for other people there’s a loss too because they have invested a certain kind of continuing relationship with that person. And it’s the kind of loss that’s not remediable by having another person come in to the world. We’ve collected over the course of our lives a very specific set of experiences, kind of thought about and contemplated, we’ve squeezed out of those experiences a conception of who we are and the things that we value and the things that we care about. All of that is lost when a person is lost in the world. Now, arguably, when it comes to cows, and I would be willing to revise this if we found out that cows have the kinds of minds that we did.

0:40:55 SC: Of course.

0:40:56 JI: But if the empirical hypothesis is right, that cows really don’t have that kind of a conception of their pasts and futures and plans and projects, a cow doesn’t even do much in terms of carrying over information from one moment to the next, it just has experience. It enjoys a good meal. It enjoys a sunny day.

0:41:22 SC: Yeah, no one is denying that cows can have a quality of life moment to moment, that can be good or bad.

0:41:24 JI: Right. So, on the presumption that that’s all that their lives are like, then I think the kind of loss that happens in the world when a cow is killed is just that there’s no more continuing experiences in that particular stream of consciousness or experience. And that sort of loss is no worse than not bringing another cow into existence. It is remediable by the existence of other cows [chuckle] and so on. So, when people say the farming industry is responsible for the lives of more cows than there would be without it, that’s exactly right, that’s true. It’s also sadly responsible for a lot of suffering, but putting that aside, I think there isn’t a reason not to kill a cow of the same kind that there is not to kill a person.

0:42:20 SC: This is wonderful. Clearly, I need to read this article by Wellman because I think what you just gave me is a much more careful and sophisticated version of what I actually said in the podcast that somehow… And you reminded me of it when we were talking about intentions and purposes and so forth, somehow human beings… The reason why it’s bad to kill a human being is not just because their lives end, but because they had plans for the future and they had memories of the past and you can reason… And again, this is an empirical idea that could be overruled if we learn more about cows or octopus’ or whatever, but you can reason counter factually with human beings. You can imagine the future, and you can say like, not just teach the dog not to do something, but actually say, “Okay, if you do this tomorrow, I will reward you.” That’s not a way you can talk to the dog, right? And this ability to protect ourselves in the future is something that, as far as I can tell, is unique to human beings and does draw a dividing line between the ending of a life of a human and an animal.

0:43:19 JI: Yeah, and I think it’s also, to me, equally important that there’s a certain way in which we are products of our past, and carry our past with us, and carry our unique personal paths with us in ways that arguably, and again, this is an empirical question, that other animals, at least some other animals, and probably cows, don’t. So, there’s a passage in Death of Ivan Ilyich, where Ivan Ilyich is dying and he’s remembering, he’s going through memories, and he’s saying, “How can I die? When I die… ” Of course, this isn’t Tolstoy’s beautiful language, but it’s the part that struck me, where he says, “When I die, how can there not be something that remembers his mother’s ruffling skirts when he was young in the world?” And I think there’s something really poignant about the fact that when we die, the collection of very particular experiences and thoughts, and not just the collection, but the selection that we’ve somehow pulled together into our own story of who we are and kind of rescued from the flotsam and jetsam of our own lives, that that will be gone and that won’t be replaced. To me, that’s who we are and it’s a very special sort of loss, I think.

0:44:44 SC: Good, so this is a very worthwhile digression, but okay, we’re still… We’re trying to have…

0:44:51 JI: Free will.

0:44:51 SC: Free will, putting the bow on this idea of where the self comes from and what it is. So, we distinguish between the self of a cat and the self of a human being or a cow.

0:45:00 JI: Actually, can I say one more thing?

0:45:02 SC: Sure.

0:45:02 JI: It connects directly with what I just said. I mean, I think part of the problem for understanding free will really is understanding how to get ourselves into the causal chain between stimulus and response. And I think it’s… When people talk about free will and they’re thinking in terms of, well, if you just look at kind of the brain, if you look at the physical landscape, all you see are the causal chains passing through the brain. You don’t see any little homunculus, you don’t see any self entering in there and…

0:45:09 SC: No choices to be made.

0:45:09 JI: Right. I think, what I just said about what we… The kinds of creatures we are, the kinds of minds that we have, that we kind of collect and distill out of the things that happen to us a body of beliefs, and values, and memories and so on. I think that stuff is stored in the brain. And that stuff, when we make a decision, comes to play this pivotal role and is brought to bear in the pathways between stimulus and response. And it comes to play the role of deciding whether to move… Or play the causal role of making a difference between whether we move left or right, whether we do this rather than that. To me that’s clue to understanding how it is that we get ourselves into the causal chain. It’s not something that you see just by looking at the neural level processes in the brain. You have to understand the information that’s stored in the brain. And how that information was extracted from a very personal history of past experiences.

0:46:32 SC: And does that also help explain not just different between humans and cows, but the difference between humans and computers? Could I make a complicated-looking computer that I personally could not predict the behavior of, but nevertheless, would not want to attribute free will to?

0:46:46 JI: Well, I go two ways on this. I think it’s not at all inconceivable that we would be able to build computers that would have exactly this structure.

0:46:55 SC: Yeah, I’m not thinking, sorry, I’m not thinking in principle what we could do some day.

0:47:00 JI: Oh okay.

0:47:00 SC: Honestly, on my computer, I can write the program where I’m not able to predict what the outcome is going to be, but probably, my Macintosh laptop is not gonna be said to have free will just because I did that.

0:47:11 JI: That’s right. No, that’s right. Yeah. There’s no internal decision-making process of a kind that chooses its own goals and develops its own personality and so on from what you put into it. We are those kinds of things. Nature gives us inputs, but we do have this self, this role in choosing and making our own selves, and choosing goals and so on, and values.

0:47:32 SC: And some day, we could build a computer or an Android that could also have those capabilities.

0:47:35 JI: Exactly, yeah.

0:47:36 SC: And from what you said before, I gather it would not necessarily be a bright line that gets crossed from not having those capabilities to having them. You sort of creep up on it.

0:47:47 JI: I think so. I mean I think there are, again, going… There are all kinds of empirical questions about whether there is some threshold, some kind of cognitive organization that really does mark a kind of transition between, for example, pre-linguistic and post-linguistic creatures. And that seems to be a candidate for good divide between these higher representational capacities that do seem to me to be required for things like free-will, decision, choosing values. That…

0:48:25 SC: Okay. Alright. Well, this has given a lot to think about. We have the self on the table. Did I leave anything out as far as the self is concern because I want to move on to causality, agency, and choice.

0:48:35 JI: Nothing I can think of.

0:48:35 SC: We can always come back. Great. So, okay. Let’s… With all that in mind, good. The classic argument, which I think is not right, against free will is just based on determinism. If everything is determined, than our choices are determined, we’re not making those choices in some sense. Now there’s a… Do we wanna spend two minutes putting aside the question of whether or not the laws of physics are deterministic or not?

0:49:00 JI: Sure.

0:49:00 SC: Are they? [chuckle]

0:49:01 JI: Probably not. This is it…

0:49:02 SC: I think they probably are though. Right?

0:49:04 JI: Yeah. Actually…

[overlapping conversation]

0:49:06 SC: As in many worlds are, I think that they are. That’s why it’s a hard question. Yeah.

0:49:10 JI: Depends what you mean by determinism in part. So, I learn from… I follow you in all matters of that kind, but yes. The question of how relevant that is to the debate about free will is probably the one we wanna talk about here.

0:49:27 SC: Right. Probably just to say, maybe the very quick version of it is, in Newtonian physics, physics was deterministic. Quantum mechanics brings that into question, but whether or not quantum mechanics is deterministic has nothing to do with free will because it’s not us making the quantum choices in any sense. It’s not that the laws of physics are deterministic, it’s that there are impersonal laws that would be relevant to this question. Is that fair?

0:49:53 JI: That’s fair. I mean I think what I said before about the trick is to get us into the causal chain. This brings it out. So, if you’re working in a Newtonian regime, one thinks that we don’t make the decisions because everything is determined by the initial conditions of the universe. In a quantum regime, in the context where people think there really are indeterministic underlying events, we don’t… It doesn’t help to say that indeterministic underlying events together with the laws of nature determine what we will do. What we really need to understand is how we…

0:50:28 SC: We. Yeah.

0:50:29 JI: Determine.

0:50:30 SC: And there’s one way I put it sometimes. If you’re going to use words like I, and we, or you in the sentence, then then you have to stay using the vocabulary of people doing things. You can’t suddenly switch to a vocabulary of electrons bumping into each other and obeying the laws of physics.

0:50:46 JI: That’s right.

0:50:47 SC: Okay. Good. So, determinism versus non-determinism is not the question at all, so much so that for the rest of the conversation we can just pretend the world is deterministic at the fundamental level and still talk about whether it’s nevertheless possible to make decisions and have an effect on the world?

0:51:04 JI: Yes.

0:51:05 SC: And there’s a famous argument, maybe this is a good place to start, the consequence argument against free will. And you have a very nice summary of it in your book, if you can remember. You wanna say what that is?

0:51:17 JI: Sure. For philosophers listening to the podcast, they’ll note that there are much more complicated versions of it. I like the very simplest one ’cause I think it gets the… The persuasive force of the argument comes out most clearly. The argument goes like this: Laws of nature to get… Sorry.

0:51:42 JI: If the world is deterministic, the laws of nature together with the initial conditions of the universe determine our actions, logically determine our actions. Laws of nature are not under our control. Initial conditions of the universe are not under our control, therefore our actions are not under our control.

0:52:02 SC: Sounds pretty good. Sounds like a good argument. Like all of the individual statements sound good. And it’s a valid conclusion, right?

0:52:07 JI: That’s right.

0:52:08 SC: So is the way to proceed to say which of those premises you’re going to disagree with? Or do you sorta wanna deny that it’s a relevant way of thinking at all?

0:52:19 JI: So, I’ve come to think something that I didn’t… I noted in a footnote, but didn’t emphasize at all in the book. I’ve come to think it’s actually crucial to really seeing what’s going wrong with the consequence argument.

0:52:35 SC: By the way anyone contemplating buying your book should know that in the middle of the book, there’s a chapter called, ‘An Appendix for Slackers.’ [laughter] So if you didn’t… If you found some of the philosophical niceties in the first half of the book a little bit too intimidating, there’s a nice summary in plain language, which I thought was very, very helpful.

0:52:49 JI: I think there’s even parts of the chapters where if you don’t have the stomach for it, I signal that there’s gonna be a little bit of picky philosophy coming.

0:53:00 SC: That’s okay. We don’t mind that.

0:53:01 JI: So you can… Yeah. You can get through it, [chuckle] without having to slug through all of that. But the point that I’ve come to think is really important is everybody presents the consequence argument. And in fact, most discussions of free will, speaking of entirely pre-relativistic terms. And so when they say things like… Usually the consequence argument just says the past together with the laws of nature determine how we’ll act. That’s actually not true in the relevant sense when we translate it into a relativistic context. And the reason is that any given person’s past or any… Or the past of any given situated system, even in a deterministic context, does not actually, as a matter of physical law, determine anything that falls at even a finite fraction of a second into its future. And that can seem like it’s maybe being a little picky because it turns out that what you need to add in order to get something that fully, as a matter of law, determines the action are events that are what are called the absolute elsewhere. And it can seem…

0:54:14 SC: Outside the light cone?

0:54:15 JI: Outside the light cone. And it can seem like that just means that we don’t know as a matter of… That we, the situated agents, can’t know the facts that are already in place, but on their way to affecting us and such, that if we knew what they were, or for any being that could determine what they were, would determine our actions. And I think that’s just the wrong way to think entirely, that we’re not to simply acknowledge that it’s not true even in a deterministic context, that the past of any situated system determines its future. And that there’s no good sense in which those facts, the facts that are needed to be… That need to be added in order to determine their future are already in place.

0:55:00 SC: Well, but the past of the universe determines what’s going to happen next.

0:55:05 JI: When you say that, what are you thinking? You’re thinking that there is some point of view on the universe as a whole that’s kind of all encompassing.

0:55:15 SC: I am, yes.

0:55:16 JI: And that… By what right do you do that? I mean I unders…

0:55:21 SC: Well, certainly, I don’t know it. I don’t have access to it, right? But from a God’s eye view, it’s there, would be the argument.

0:55:31 JI: In literal terms, there is no God’s eye view.

0:55:33 SC: There is no God’s view. Okay. Yeah.

0:55:34 JI: In literal terms, there isn’t. What there is is…

0:55:36 SC: Especially the people who usually deny the existence of free will, don’t want to admit that God is looking at the whole thing.

0:55:41 JI: Well, and a little bit stronger. So even if you think, formally, there’s got to be some constructible external dimension from which the past of the world is fully determined, there is no global present in the universe, that’s not even well-defined. This external point of view is in some sense doing something very anti-relativistic.

0:56:01 SC: Yeah. And I’m not really moved by that to be honest, because I can choose… This is gonna get a little technical. But what relativity tells us is there’s no unique way to divide space-time into slices of constant time. Different people will divide it differently. So what I want to say, and maybe there’s some sophisticated reason why I shouldn’t and you’ll tell me what it is, but what I wanna say is, “That’s okay. Pick a way. Slice up the universe in two moments of time.” And I can imagine knowing what is going on, on one slice of constant time, one space like hyper-surface as we say, and that determines everything inside its domain of dependence, everything in its future and past. Isn’t that good enough for what we wanna do here?

0:56:43 JI: So it depends. For the purposes of free will, what one wants to understand is what lies in the causal past in a sense that can act as a constraint on your action. That’s the whole force of the consequence argument. People are thinking the past is fixed and beyond our control. For those purposes, I think one ought to stick to the relativistically well defined path, the things that possibly could constrain and that are beyond your control, and that can constrain and act causally as influences on your decisions.

0:57:19 SC: But doesn’t that mean that whether or not the consequence argument works is different in Newtonian physics than in relativity?

0:57:26 JI: Good, okay. The reason I started with the relativistic setting is ’cause I think it’s a little easier to see what’s going on in that setting.

0:57:36 SC: Okay.

0:57:37 JI: I think it is still true in the… It is true, sorry, in a Newtonian regime that you can say there is a fact about the total state of the world, whether or not we know it. It’s a little complicated to unpack what I want to say about that in… In literal terms, but I think what I want just… I’ll put it very briefly. It’s not the case that there’s ever in space and time a nomologically sufficient body of fact in Newtonian setting to determine what you’ll do. Before any collection of facts can be nomologically linked to an event or action at some future time, you need to add that there are no other facts or events in addition to those that you’ve already accounted for.

0:58:27 SC: You’re gonna have to define the word nomologically for us?

0:58:29 JI: Nomologically means as a matter of physical law.

0:58:31 SC: Yeah, okay.

0:58:32 JI: Okay. So it’s not the case that there’s ever anything in the relevant sense in a Newtonian regime that is, as a matter of physical law, sufficient to determine an action at some future time. In order to get that, you have to add this negative fact that there are no other facts in place. And the status of those kinds of negative facts, which we probably shouldn’t go into a conversation about right now, is the thing I think on which you can hinge the denial that there’s ever anything fixed and already in place… There’s ever enough fixed and in place to determine an action as a matter of physical law.

0:59:16 SC: Okay, I would, that’s a very interesting argument that I’m gonna have to think about, but it’s a different one than I expected you to give, maybe just because I’m prejudiced by what my own argument is. I would have said something like the premises of the consequence argument make perfect sense if you’re Laplace’s demon, if you could in principle know everything about the past and had perfect calculational ability. But none of us is, so the way that actual human beings get to actually talk about the world, given the information we actually have about it, the laws of physics and the past do not determine the future because that’s not the kind of law-like behavior we have access to in the macroscopic emergent world. Is that a family cousin to what you said? Or…

1:00:01 JI: It’s a family cousin, except I’ve come to think that it’s really important that there’s…

1:00:05 SC: Okay.

1:00:05 JI: Not even, and it’s clearest again in the relativistic context, there’s not even information that could in principle be accessed by a Laplacian demon that would be sufficient to determine what you will do at some future time, if that demon lies in your own past.

1:00:24 SC: Yeah, okay, interesting ’cause I just say, “Well, you’re not Laplace’s demon, so I don’t care.” And you’re saying, “Even if you are Laplace’s demon, it’s not enough,” so that’s a stronger argument certainly.

1:00:33 JI: Yes, yeah, it’s a stronger argument.

1:00:34 SC: Okay, and so is that it? Is that your, that’s why the consequence argument doesn’t work?

1:00:40 JI: No, what that does, so a lot of this is ground clearing.

1:00:44 SC: Yes.

1:00:45 JI: It clears away the thing that people always want to say in these contexts, whenever you come up with the high level description that I think that you have emphasized and that I tried to give in the book of what it is to make a decision and what that looks like through the lenses of physics. People will very often, and for the reasons that you say, given the kind of information that we have, and so on, that it makes sense to describe things at that level, people will… Hard liners will always come along and say, “Yes,” but in principle there’s this microscopic description. And what I just said is an argument to clear that away, and say, “As a matter of physics it’s not even true,” and that places the emphasis where I think it should be for the purposes of talking about processes, like decision and understanding ourselves and so on, namely on the high level processes that you emphasized…

1:01:36 SC: Okay, good.

1:01:36 JI: And that I emphasize in the book.

1:01:38 SC: So in some sense you’re saying, even if I buy everything you want me to buy, it still doesn’t work. You’re saying…

1:01:43 JI: It still doesn’t work, and doesn’t work as a matter of physics. I think the tenor of those arguments is very often, “Oh, you soft humanistically… ” [chuckle] People, you’re just not understanding the physics, and the retort is…

1:01:55 SC: Yeah, did you say that to me? It’s true. [chuckle] And I do understand the physics.

1:02:00 JI: Yeah. [chuckle]

1:02:02 SC: Okay, alright, so let’s take that as at least, I don’t wanna, I’m not judgy here, but that is very straight, I think it’s a very understandable response to the consequence argument. So where does that leave us? What does it mean, given our previous discussion about what it means to be a self and have intentions and so forth, do we need to do more work to understand what it means to make a choice? What it means to have a causal impact on the world?

1:02:26 JI: Yes. So the notion of causation is one that’s absolutely central to these discussions. So the way that I set it up in the book, and which I really do think is right for addressing the conversation as it’s played out in the philosophical literature, and probably in a lot of people’s minds when they first encounter the argument in public discussions, people are importing causal notions into their understanding of the physics that in some ways I think the physics itself doesn’t employ those notions, doesn’t support the employment of those notions in that capacity, and it’s important to talk people through the ways in which notions of physical law and notions like causation really do get literal application in physics. And I think what happens, so I’ll say a little bit I think about what people are thinking. When they think of notions of natural necessity, they have in mind causal notions borrowed from their experience of pulling, and pushing, and yanking. And they think that when you say that some event in the past, or some collection of events in the past, or as in the consequence argument the past itself as a matter of physical law determines some event or some collection of events in the future, is they’re imagining that there’s a sort of causal force emanating from the initial conditions of the universe and pushing later events into place.

1:04:05 JI: Now as a matter of just physical law, and I know this is something that you’ve talked about on podcasts, the physical laws themselves are entirely time reversal invariant, which means they don’t have a built-in direction of determination. If the past determines the future in the deterministic context that Newtonian mechanics provides, just equally and in exactly the same way, the future determines the past. So the notion of nomological or law-like determination isn’t strong enough to get us the kind of asymmetric relation of determination that we want.

1:04:43 SC: Causes precede effects.

1:04:43 JI: Yeah, so people are thinking in causal terms, they’re importing those causal notions into their understanding of physical law. So that’s illegitimate. But let’s look at the notion of causation then and see whether we can understand in literal terms how causal notions get in and whether it’s right to say… That our past causally determined our futures. And there there’s a lot of work to be done. And I try to do it in the book. It’s a kind of extended notion of the ways in which causal notions have changed over the course of physical, physics coming to understand them.

1:05:23 SC: It is weird to me… We talked to Ned Hall about causation a little bit. I’m writing a paper on causation right now. It’s amazing to me the extent to which this very simple kind of every day thing that Aristotle put at the center of everything 2500 years ago is something we still don’t understand. And partly, it’s because we know a lot more physics now and there’s work to be done mapping the physics on to the folk wisdom or the manifest image. But there were people like Bertrand Russell who said the best thing you do is just get rid of the notion of cause and effect.

1:05:55 JI: That’s right.

1:05:56 SC: And you and other people have said, “Well, that’s going too far.”

1:05:58 JI: Yeah. So, the reason that Russell said that was the one that I just pointed to you together with a lot of collection of other niceties of the physics, but the pre-theoretic notion of cause, the notion of cause the common sense brings to its understanding of the connections between events. There’s nothing like that if one just looks at the fundamental equations of motion. So, that’s why Russell said we should push it aside with the advancing tides of science. It’s [chuckle] the sign of an image or a science if it uses notions like that.

1:06:31 SC: We all wish we could write like Bertrand Russell.

1:06:33 JI: We do.

[chuckle]

1:06:33 JI: Gosh, yes. But rightly, many years later, Nancy Cartwright came along and pointed out that in fact the notion of cause is not dispensable for purposes of understanding the difference between relations between events. In particular, correlations of a kind that are entailed by law, that we can use a strategic route to bringing about ends with ones that aren’t. And that’s absolutely central to understanding how it is that we can intervene in and affect the world. It’s absolutely central to practical reasoning.

1:07:15 JI: And so then that began a long philosophical project of trying to recover from these time symmetric underlying laws together with auxiliary facts about the world; how it is that we can re-import causal notions into physics. And that’s something that’s coming to focus more in a kind of revolution in causal thinking that’s happened in the last 25-30 years, and that’s really done a whole lot, I think, to make respectable, and to firm up, and to separate from all of the phenomenological associations, the notion of cause and make it something that we can use in a firm and precise way in scientific context.

1:07:52 SC: And I think a lot of this whole discussion really involves, again, levels and emergence, in the sense that we made a lot of progress on fundamental physics, and the image we’re left with of fundamental physics is very, very different than our image of the everyday world. And there’s at least a little bit of temptation for people to say, “Well, but fundamental physics is right, that’s the language we should use.” And others, including I guess us, and Dan Dennett, and other people are saying, “But no. There’s really… ” And Cartwright. “There’s useful information in these patterns that we notice in the macroscopic world. So, sure, you could be Laplace’s demon, or maybe you could be Laplace’s demon and make predictions, but not only are none of us actually Laplace’s demon, but nevertheless we do not lack the ability to make predictions because there are emergent patterns that only work at the higher level.” And it’s just not only wasteful, but wrong to pretend that those patterns are no longer real.

1:08:53 JI: In fact, in many cases, they’re the more illuminating ones. And not just because they’re simpler to use for constructing predictions, but partly for reasons that point back to what I was saying about the emergence of creatures like us. In order to understand how a world that’s governed at the micro-physical level by things like Newtonian laws produces the kinds of systems that we are. You need to understand something like evolution. And you need to understand that what evolution selects for is very often high level processes. So, I think the more illuminating pattern is gonna be the one that pays attention to the kinds of processes that the evolutionary mechanisms select for.

1:09:37 SC: Evolution doesn’t care about atoms in some sense?

1:09:40 JI: And if you look around us, the sorts of systems that we see around us aren’t a representative sample of the possible configurations of atoms that you would get by re-combining them in any which way. They’re very particular kinds of collections of them. And in order to understand why those ones exist and not others, you need to understand what they do. And how…

1:10:01 SC: Yeah. So there’s true understanding.

1:10:02 JI: Yes. Exactly.

1:10:03 SC: Yeah. Okay. So, we have a vision of what selves are. And they’re these messy things that have adapted to be able to have intentions, and purposes, and function in the world in certain ways. And we have a little bit of notion that it still makes sense to talk about having a causal impact on the world. Is there a way in which we talk about the causal impact of selves? Let’s say, do we conclude then at the end of the day, human beings have causal effects on the world in different ways than cows do. And this is something that we can label freedom of choice?

1:10:38 JI: Is it okay if I back up a little bit?

1:10:41 SC: Of course.

1:10:41 JI: ‘Cause there is something that we didn’t say when we were talking about causation that I think needs to be said, which is that this cleaned up notion of causation is a very kind of permissive notion, but one thing that it doesn’t have built-into it is the kind of notion of compulsion that comes from our every day notions of cause. What it does is effectively, if you take a set of variables and you fix some of the gross constraints in the environment, and you intervene on one of the variables, the causal information is information about the effects that intervening on that variable has on the other variables in the network. So, we can talk in a kind of way that is entirely neutral and crosses levels about one thing having a causal impact on another thing.

1:11:32 JI: And I think when we’re talking about freedom of the will, we’re really trying to understand how the kinds of voluntary behaviors or the kinds of intentions that we form can have a causal impact on the environment. This notion of causation is very well suited to play that role. But it’s not different in kind than the kind of causal impact that say a cow can have by kicking over a bucket…

1:12:00 SC: Cows can make things happen, yeah.

1:12:01 JI: Cows can make things happen. So I think when we’re talking about free will, we’re specifically interested in the ways in which our intentions and decisions can impact the movements of things in the world.

1:12:13 SC: Okay. And so, I just wanna say elaborate on that. [chuckle] What is special about intentions and decisions that distinguishes the way a human being is talking from the way a cow acts?

1:12:25 JI: Okay, so again, I’m gonna go back to the earlier discussion. So, when I said that there is a way where you can look at any kind of mind as just a part of the causal landscape that the causal paths pass through. So, I like to think about, because it’s one of the models of the mind that’s fairly well understood and that’s discussed a lot in the biological literature, think of a frog brain instead of a cow brain.

1:12:49 SC: A frog, okay.

1:12:51 JI: So frogs have these really well-developed evolutionarily beautifully designed mechanisms, which are such that a certain kind of pattern hits its retina, it will snap out its tongue because that kind of pattern typically indicates a passing fly and the tongue will snap it out and bring it up. And so, there’s some sense in which the behavior of the frog is a product of things that it does, but in another sense, it’s not because the frog’s brain has been designed in evolutionary time in order to produce that response in the presence of the stimulus. Human minds are different for a lot of the reasons that we said. The things that we do aren’t simply a product of the ways in which the hard structure in our heads was designed by evolutionary processes. Our minds were designed to be these sort of information sucks. We pull up information that’s collected, not over evolutionary time and built into the hard structure of our brains, but over personal time and built into the soft structure of our brains. And when we make a decision, it’s those bodies of information, and those bits of information, again, that haven’t just been collected and made an impact or imprinted on our brains, but have been collected and sorted through and contemplated and from which we’ve extracted hopes and dreams and so on. Those are the things that get brought to bear on behavior.

1:14:18 JI: So, I like to put it in terms of what goes on in our minds in contra-distinction to what goes on in a frog mind or possibly a cow mind, generically and characteristically, in context when we’re making decisions, plays a pivotal role in what we end up doing. And by that I mean, irrespective of what stimulus is, what goes on in our minds is gonna make a difference to doing A or doing B. For a frog, every time that kind of stimulus passes by, it’s gonna produce the same behavior, and it’s gonna produce that behavior without any self-conscious rumination on its part.

1:15:02 SC: I think this is a really, really crucial point. I mean, animals can learn things. You can train rats to run mazes and so forth, but all animals, including human beings, have impulses, instincts, natural things, but maybe human beings have this unique ability to overwrite our natural impulses just by thinking about it, just by cogitation or reflection or whatever, not by necessarily being trained. And that changes what we mean when it comes to choice and free will.

1:15:33 JI: That’s right, and it may be more of a graded scale than is indicated in those brief remarks.

1:15:40 SC: Absolutely, yeah.

1:15:41 JI: We know things like, that cows can construct maps of mazes and things like that. So there’s surely some kind of rudimentary information processing and something that looks like decision and representation going on in the minds of all kinds of lower animals.

1:15:57 SC: And does this also help us understand the cases of… In free will discussions, there’s famous cases of people who had a brain tumor that forced them to do something in a very predictable way that they just couldn’t help it in some sense. And is it fair in those cases to say, “Those people don’t have free will because they can’t help but do that in a predictable way?”

1:16:20 JI: Not with respect to those behaviors. So we’re particularly… Where we exhibit our freedom in the most highly developed form is in the context of decision when we’re making deliberate choices, and it’s precisely because those are the kinds of cases that engage this whole machinery of bringing hopes and dreams and all of the things that you identify with from a first personal point of view to bear. We don’t control the reflexes that our knees show.

1:16:46 SC: No.

1:16:48 JI: And so it’s really, it’s anything that bypasses those decision processes.

1:16:52 SC: Yeah, we don’t control our heart beats.

1:16:53 JI: Exactly.

1:16:53 SC: There’s plenty of non-controlled things…

1:16:54 JI: Exactly.

1:16:55 SC: But then as long as there are some controlled things. Okay.

1:16:58 JI: And controlled specifically by that first-personal decision level processes.

1:17:03 SC: Okay. And I guess, just to sort of wrap it up then, clearly, this whole discussion has a relationship to questions of moral responsibility and blame and praise and things like that. Is it just a one-to-one correlation, if to the extent that we have free will, we have responsibility for our actions, or is it more subtle than that?

1:17:24 JI: It’s a lot more subtle.

1:17:26 SC: It’s always more subtle. That’s a rhetorical question. [laughter]

1:17:28 JI: I think this is… This really… But it’s complex and subtle in a way that reflects the real complexity and subtlety of questions of moral responsibility. So it’s a feature of this kind of account rather than a bug, that it recognizes that there’s some extent to which who we are is a product of the reflective processes. But it’s also true that’s partly not and in many cases, people really don’t have the right opportunities to develop the kind of autonomous self that makes them responsible. So, all of the cases that you think of as the great cases when you’re thinking about moral responsibility, people who had horrible upbringings, they’re impaired emotionally, they’re impaired cognitively, they’re in one way or another handicapped from really developing the sort of self-determination that one thinks one needs, those really are great cases. I think…

1:18:27 SC: Yeah, people are far more tempted to say it’s not their fault for some reason or another.

1:18:30 JI: Exactly. Exactly.

1:18:33 SC: And it’s perfectly valid that in some cases that would be right. It’s not their fault. And that’s a hard question…

1:18:38 JI: Or not wholly their fault.

1:18:39 SC: Yeah. Exactly. Right.

1:18:40 JI: And in all of the ways in which you feel yourself pulled two ways or probably ways in which the facts are pulling in different directions.

1:18:48 SC: Do you think… Is there an argument to be made that if you didn’t believe in free will, it would be hard to have discussions about morality and responsibility at all? [chuckle] Like after all, if we’re just determined by everything, then how could you blame anybody for anything?

1:19:06 JI: That’s a hard one. Yeah. I mean praise and blame… I blame my car when it doesn’t do the thing I want it to do. Moral praise and blame.

1:19:16 SC: Moral praise. Yeah.

1:19:18 JI: Yeah. Moral praise and blame in a sense that licenses punishment. Again, maybe there are social uses for these things even if they’re not… So, even if you can’t give a philosophical argument that something deserves to be praised or blamed. So, I don’t have a clear answer to those things. Above my pay grade.

1:19:38 SC: That’s fine, but the rubber does hit the road in these philosophical discussions when it comes to legal questions. Who gets blamed? Who do we say is, had the ability to do otherwise? That philosophical question is very, very relevant to who we put in jail and who we don’t.

1:19:56 JI: For some people, some people might say it’s irrelevant that the legal system is there to create deterrence and constraints that condition or keep other people from doing bad things, irrespective of whether the people we punish deserve it in that fully…

1:20:15 SC: Well, maybe the safer thing to say is that people having those discussions would benefit from a more nuanced philosophical understanding of the underlying.

[chuckle]

1:20:22 JI: Absolutely. Yeah. 100% absolutely. And because both of us and all good thinking people think there is such a thing as free will, then those discussions should be deeply steeped in trying to understand the sorts of control that we have and cases where we fail to have that kind of…

1:20:41 SC: So, I always like to end on an optimistic note, to the extent that that’s realistic given the subject matter. So, you already mentioned the last 25 years or whatever, a revolution in reasoning about causality. Clearly psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience are moving in an amazing speed. And even philosophy, I would argue, is seeing a lot of progress. Do you think that in these issues of the very broad program of connecting physics to our emergent every day lives, we’re making real progress, and is the progress seeping out into the larger world?

1:21:15 JI: For sure, I think we’re making progress. I think this is really a kind of golden era for a genuine, scientifically respectable, naturalistic, view of the human being. There’s been… For a long time, these sorts of naysayers, and including people who present themselves as defenders of science. You say there is no such thing as free will, we’ve just got to open our eyes and so on. But I think now there really is coming into focus a really plausible and persuasive view of the human being with all of its enchantment and amazing-ness and so on. Is it seeping out into the wider world? Funny enough, I think it’s probably seeping out into the public more quickly than it is into philosophy.

1:22:02 SC: Ah-ha. I did not know that. Okay.

1:22:02 JI: Which is still rooted in very traditional ways of thinking as the human being and thinking of… Thinking of enchantments in a way that’s anti-scientific.

1:22:12 SC: Isn’t the, if I remember the survey that David Chalmers did, don’t most philosophers classify themselves as compatibilists when it comes to free will?

1:22:23 JI: I think they do. Yeah, I think that’s right.

1:22:25 SC: Okay, okay. But still, but you’re saying in the general project of connecting the underlying scientific image to the every day life, they’re still falling behind.

1:22:34 JI: Still falling behind.

1:22:35 SC: Still a little bit enchanted. Yeah. Alright. Well, okay, good. It’s good that there’s still room for progress. Otherwise we wouldn’t have anything to do.

1:22:40 JI: Exactly right.

1:22:41 SC: It’s a very optimistic message. Alright. Jenann Ismael, thank you so much for choosing to be on The Mindscape Podcast.

1:22:47 JI: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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