Humanism in Danger!

Tristan and Iseult

A Novel Idea

Among the gifts of the Middle Ages was the roman of the langue d'oil.  Stories like Tristan and Iseult were different from the chansons de geste of the langue d'oc.  Those had featured stereotypes -- brave hero, cowardly traitor, et al. -- performing iconic deeds symbolizing eternal verities.  Not only were the chansons symbolic; symbolism was very nearly the point of it all.

The knight pledges fealty to...
a woman?
The seal of Raymond de Mondragon
posted by Gilles Dubois

The roman was something different; something novel.  The central love intrigue of the roman leads to various invented episodes (which is why these were called "inventions" back in the day) and the characters evolve through interior conflicts, psychological situations, or invented circumstances, as did Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, Parzifal, et al.  This kind of story had no roots in the fables and tales of the literature of antiquity.  For one thing, the subordination of the knight to his lady would have been unimaginable.  

All of literature as we know it -- we might even say all of humanism -- stems from this idea of the character-who-changes through a series of events and encounters.  But it all hinges on the notion that there actually are interior conflicts, psychological situations, and the like.  It hinges, in short, on the freedom of the will.

Where There's a Way, There's a Will

Eliminative Materialism raised its pointy head in the 1960s to argue that there were no intentions, no beliefs, no ideas, but only the wind of physical causation blowing through the neural branches of the brain to create meaningless outputs.  Although it is silly tout court, it has been passed along in one form or another like a venereal infection, often with the breathless aspect of one who believes he has discovered it for the first time.  Or at least it's what all the kids at the Kool Kids' table say.  Many do not follow the logic of it all the way down to the bone as the Churchlands and others have done, but think they can pull one brick out of the house without the whole wall weakening and collapsing on top of them.

Yes, that's right, sports fans!  They're off the reservation, anxious to provide A.N. Whitehead with that "curious object of study."



It is deja vu all over again, as the great Yogi Berra once said.  Once more it is amateur hour in the theater of philosophy.  Trailing in the footsteps of Sam Harris, Patrick Haggard, and others, a congeries of atoms self-labeled for convenience "Jerry Coyne" was impelled by forces inevitably entailed by the Big Bang to output an editorial in USA Today, proving once again that those obsessed with religion wind up trashing humanism in their iconoclastic zeal:

Why you don't really have free will, Jerry Coyne

He reveals three conclusions of his thesis.

1. The will is not "free. 
2. There is no "will."
   And, when he writes: "we" are simply constructs of our brain,
3. There is no "you."

which must mean pari passu that there is no "Jerry Coyne." That's right.  He has asserted that he does not exist.  And since ex nihilo nihil fit....  Well, you fill in the rest.   

But wait!  "We" are simply constructs of our brain?  Whose brain? 

The Definition

The first error comes early, when inputs compel the coynean brain-atoms to output this string:

But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will."

Question: How hard can it be to deconstruct a proposition when you get to define the terms? 
Answer: Not nearly as hard as it would be if one used the actual definitions employed by the people who developed the concept in the first place. 

That the definition the coynean atoms were compelled to use is "simply ... the way most people think of it" is little help, since "most people" are unlikely to have thought about it at all, let alone to have thought about it rigorously and logically.  What if someone were to deconstruct evolution, saying  "Let me define what I mean by 'evolution.'  I mean it simply as the way most people think of it" and then go on to give some popular but simplistic misconception?  No one as well-versed in the science of evolution as the redoubtable Jerry Coyne would be (were he not simply a construct of his brain) would accept such amateurishness for an instant.  Nor should he do so when it is in a field wherein he is the amateur.   

Here is the definition of free will emitted by the coyne brain-atoms (Hold onto your hats):

When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely
and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation.

A simple curve

So free will is defined as "your ability to freely... choose."  Well, that's useful.  "Rose is rose is rose," but what this tells us is that one should not rely on what "most people think" when defining technical terms.  Goodness knows, "the way most people think of" simple would wreak havoc on simple curves in algebraic topology! 

A non-simple, or complex curve

So what is the traditional definition of liberum arbitrium?  It's ground we've covered before; but we'll repeat it down below.  It's not like the coyne atoms are breaking new ground here. 

A Test of Free Will

The brain atoms then propose:

A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice
— if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision,
with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules
 in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

If this is the coynean brain-atoms' notion of a practical test, one wonders what would constitute an impractical one.  But this sort of thing seems to be the norm among those whose brains practice philosophy without a license.  We cannot in practice rerun the tape. 

This is the dawning of the
age of Aquarius, or the
new Mayan calendar
or something

And "all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way..."?  This must include the molecule-heaps we call Jupiter and Mars.  So when Jupiter aligns with Mars (and the Moon is in the seventh house...)  Doesn't that all sound kind of astrologicalistic?

And it was in fact this idea -- that the actions of human beings were determined by the alignments of the universe -- that smothered natural science in the cradle even in ancient Greece, where it had briefly had a fighting chance.  Indeed, when the various cycles of the universe have returned to their original positions, the Great Year would end, the world would be destroyed, and a new age would begin.  (Hence, the Mayan calendar silliness.)  Socrates will be born again, be denounced again, drink the hemlock again when "all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way" again. (See Cleanthes, Chrysippus, et al. for details.) 

On the other hand, the less-superstitious Stephen J. Gould famously asserted that were the clock of evolution reset, totally different species would likely evolve than those we know.  Apparently, natural selection has free will, but we don't. 

John Adams once observed that atheists generally belong to one of two sects.  One ascribes everything to Fate (determinism).  The other ascribes everything to Chance (randomness).  Clearly, the coynean brain-atoms belong to the former sect, while the late Dr. Gould belonged to the latter.  The curious thing is that devotees of each sect will wave their own metaphysical banner as proof that theism is wrong.  It is wrong because everything is deterministic and nothing is due to chance.  Or it is wrong because everything is random and nothing is determined.  What this really indicates is that the truth or falsity of theism is entirely independent of whether Newton or Schrödinger wins the smack-down.

Coynean free will

The palmed ace, of course, is the set of preconditions.  Why should someone with the same knowledge, same purposes, same motivations not freely make the same choice?  Do we expect him to choose by random chance? Do the coyne atoms believe that a free choice must somehow be unexpected?  But a free choice is not unmotivated.  It is not purposeless.  It is a rational choice, not a random one.  One chooses deliberately, as the traditional "your money or your life" scenario beloved of sophomores everywhere clearly demonstrates.  That is why "scientific" experiments that test "choice" against "random chance" are not only missing the point, they are not even aimed at the point. 

The Argument from Determinism

Unable actually to rewind the tape, thus making the "practical experiment" completely nugatory, the coynean brain-atoms then provide "two lines of evidence" to suggest that such free will is an illusion.  They are the same lines as in the 1960s when this sort of thing began. 

we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics.
All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws,
which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe.

Uncertain who this is?

A little behind the curve on the physics, I guess.  Leaving aside that it is unclear which law of physics is violated if I choose to toss a stone, this argument relies on a metaphysical outlook that physicists began to abandon a hundred years ago.  The Newtonian clockwork universe does not hold up.  Beyond a certain time frame and certain demanded precision, calculations of planetary positions become indeterminate.

A crashing Bohr

Modern physics is grappling now with how to incorporate the observer into physical definitions and laws.  This may be as explicit as in quantum theory, where outputs are not deterministic but rather probability distributions.  But it is implicit in the very nature of natural science.  Everything we know about nature is what has been initially given to our senses, which makes it observer-relative from the start.  In this regard, the correspondence between Heisenberg and historian John Lukacs is instructive.  In the revolution of 1924-27, Bohr and Heisenberg overturned the old determinism of classical mechanics placed man back in the center of things. 

The proposition that {The world is lawful} is not the same as {The world is deterministic}. 

Back when aqueducts were the cutting edge of technology, people saw the world in hydraulic metaphors and gave us the scientific theory of humors.  So in the Machine Age, it was only natural to view nature as a collection of machines.  But that some aspects of nature can be imitated by a machine does not entail that nature is a machine.  We must not confuse a useful poetic metaphor for an ontological reality.   

Your secret master

The Argument From the Brain

When the coynean brain-atoms emit "your brain — the organ that does the 'choosing,'" a second palmed ace is revealed.  Namely, the assumption that an organ is an actor.  We might say "your hand — the organ that does the 'grasping.'"  There is some truth to it, but try saying "your hammer — the tool that does the 'nailing.'"  Like the hand and the brain, the hammer does nothing unless someone uses it.  In particular, no organ acts as an organ apart from an organism.  Try putting a brain in a vat and see how long it takes before it constructs a "me."  It is the whole being that exercises emergent properties, not any of its parts. 

The situation is complicated by people who live normal lives despite having very little brain.  The condition is called Dandy Walker complex and is a genetically sporadic disorder that occurs in one out of every 25,000 live births.  There have been enough such cases that Dr. John Lorber published a 1980 article in Science titled "Is the Brain Really Necessary?"  People born with parts of their brain missing will sometimes recruit other parts of their brain to perform the functions of the missing portions.  This again suggests that the brain is in the self, not the self in the brain.   
Chase Britton: Boy Without a Cerebellum Baffles Doctors
Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy
(h/t to the Codgitator and Joseph for these examples)

We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect
its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed
computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.

What it means to "impose" a will (nebulous or otherwise) on the "inputs" is unclear.  Is it nebulous to "impose" a nebulous gravity on a planet?  Gravity, like the will, is not separable from the physical body, but is itself not a material entity.  Gravity, reproduction, motion, will are just examples of powers various kinds of material bodies possess: inanimate, vegetative, animal, and rational.  Consider the problem of intention.   How can you look at something? 

The "inputs" to the brain are the sensations.  At every moment, the senses are inundated with a cascade of photons, air waves, odor molecules, and so forth.  Take photons.  Where I sit right now, my eyes are awash in photons bouncing off the computer screen, the tea cup next to it, an empty can of Dr. Pepper Diet Caffeine Free, a Roget's Thesaurus, a cell phone, a talking bobble-head doll of Albert Einstein, a bust of Beethoven, the back wall for the desk, pigeon holes with CDs, manila folders, and so on.  In terms of "inputs" all of these are going into my brain.  So how is it that what I "see" is the tea cup?  Somehow I can seine the whirlwind of otherwise meaningless photons and "privilege" those that have bounced off the tea cup.  IOW, I really am able to "impose" my will on the inputs.  Because there is nothing in the photons that can account for this.  And this involves only the sensory imagination, not even the rational faculties. 

This matter is discussed more fully in "Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas," by Walter J. Freeman, Dept. of Molecular and Cell Biology, U Cal Berkeley, Mind & Matter Vol. 6(2), pp. 207-234

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers
that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences
to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.

(Yup, he wrote that real computers are programmed by our genes.  However, TOF will ascribe that to poor command of English grammar rather than to bizarre metaphysics.)  But are our brains "computers"?  See Minds, Machines and Gödel, J.R. Lucas

As Searle has pointed out, there are no computers in material nature.  There is only plastic and metal and such.  What makes it a computer are the intentions of a user.  My tea cup, aforementioned, is a computer, presently executing the program "Sit there and hold my hot decaff tea."  You see, just as the ancients saw hydraulic models everywhere in nature, and the moderns saw mechanical models everywhere in nature, we post-moderns now see computers everywhere in nature.  The brain is now metaphorically a computer rather than a machine or a mixing bowl for the humors.  But a poetic analogy is not necessarily an equivalence. 
Is the Brain a Digital Computer? John R. Searle 

Words like "computer," "programming," "code" and so forth inherently point to something outside the brain; that is, they are teleological.  How can genes "program" a brain when genes have no intention? In a series of causal connections

→X→X→A→B→X→X→X→

where A represents the age of the tree and B represents the number of rings, what privileges A and B as the two end-points of a scientific law?  What makes A the cause and B the effect when there are a host of Xs that come before A and after B?  Answer: intention.  But if the human mind has no will, it has no intention, and so there are no scientific laws, only material concatenations.  

Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject "decides"  to push
 a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain
 activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it.

We've seen this "experiment" before.  Who ever supposed that a free exercise of will could not be predicted?  The "can be predicted" meant that 60% of the time the prediction was correct.  I could almost match that with a coin toss.  From a materialistic viewpoint, all that has been observed is a flow of blood in certain regions of the brain "associated with" a motor function.  It was the experimenter's free will intention to call that a "moment of decision."  However, an article in Nature tells us:

Das and Sirotin used electrodes to measure neuronal activity at the same time and place as blood flow in monkeys who were looking at an appearing and disappearing dot.  As expected, when vision neurons detected the dot and fired, blood rushed into the scrutinized brain region. But surprisingly, at times when the dot never appeared and the neurons remained silent, the researchers also saw a dramatic change in blood flow. This unprompted change in blood flow occurred when the monkeys were anticipating the dot, the researchers found. The imperfect correlations between blood flow and neural firing can confound BOLD signals and muddle the resulting conclusions about brain activity. 
"Brain imaging measures more than we think: Anticipatory brain mechanism may be complicating MRI studies," Nature (21 Jan 2009)

So what the experiment showed is that the subjects body, habituated to a routine task, anticipated that task by as much as a few seconds.

"Decisions" made like that aren't conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think
we've made them, then we don't have free will in any meaningful sense.

Of course, it means nothing of the sort.  Bodily anticipation of a known muscle motion is not a "decision." 

The traditional philosopher will quite happily acknowledge that some decisions really are automatic, unconscious, habitual, genetic, impaired by strong drink, and so on.  (Aquinas gives the example of a scholar absent-mindedly stroking his beard.  So it's not like these are brand new ideas.)  Most of life is lived on automatic pilot. No problem. 

Oh Noes!  What to Do? 

The most bizarre part of the column is that after telling us we have no free will, the coynean brain-atoms then tell us

So if we don't have free will, what can we do?

Well, according to the rest of the column, there is nothing that "we" can "do," because "we" is an illusion and so is the choice to "do" anything.  We will simply be blown hither and yon by the winds of Newtonian physics. 

And there are two upsides [to denying free will]. The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection.

If "me" is an illusion, it is difficult to figure exactly who will be realizing, wondering, and contemplating - or suffering the illusion.  If there is no free will, then whether the illusion of "we" suffers the illusion of wonder will be the result of physics and not a consequence of the denial, let alone an upside.  But that's sort of incoherence is what happens when you arbitrarily change one piece in the jigsaw puzzle of life.  The rest starts to not fit together right. 

Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.

In other words, the brain atoms have discovered that we are all sinners and "there but for the grace of God go I."  How "losing free will" will necessarily generate the illusion of empathy is left unsaid; as are the reasons this would impel "us" to build a "kinder" world. Can't "go about" doing diddly without first deciding to do it, and ex hypothesi, there ain't no deciding going on.  So whether a kinder world gets built is a consequence of the alignment of molecules in the universe, not of any illusory realization by an illusory "we." 

So What is Liberum Arbitrium?

philosophers have concocted ingenious rationalizations for why we nevertheless
have free will of a sort. It's all based on redefining "free will" to mean something else.

Of course, the perceptive reader will have noted how clever the philosophers were to have "re"-defined free will so many centuries before the winds of random causes blew through the coyne-atoms to output that random string.  Or could it be the coyne-atoms that have redefined free will using a tautologous definition?  What we shall do is remind our Gentle Reader of the original definition of liberum arbitrium, the one that lay behind all that philosophizing and theologicizing that so many are anxious to avoid. 

First, the will. 

As the diagram indicates, the Volition stands to the Intellect (Conception) as the Emotions stand to the Imagination (Perception).  So the will is a kind of appetite or desire; viz., the intellective appetite, analogous to the sensory appetites.  It is a "hunger" or "desire" for abstracted concepts.  This is one of the reasons that "experiments" in which the subjects twitch fingers or flip switches aren't testing the Will as such.  Bodily motions are not the proper object of volition (except to the extent that the intellective appetite may govern the sensitive appetites, cf. dieting.)

Proof that the Will is Free

1. It is impossible to desire what you do not know. 
2. Our knowledge of an end may be imperfect. 
3. Therefore, our desires toward it are imperfectly determined.
4. That which is imperfectly determined is free to some degree or another. 

We can test this by considering a case in which knowledge is perfect.  For example, that 2+2=4 is to one versed in arithmetic perfectly known.  The will has then no latitude (degrees of freedom) in "choosing"/"assenting to" it.  If however, we were given the proposition "Card X = card Y iff א(X) = א(Y)" the will would be free to assent or withhold assent to the extent that one had knowledge or not of cardinal arithmetic.  IOW, "free" is not meant in the Nietzschean sense (the triumph of the Will over the Intellect), but in the Aristotelian-Thomistic sense by which the Intellect is prior to the Will. 

The will's freedom follows from the quality of the information it receives from the intellect.  The fuzzier the knowledge, the freer the will.  But inasmuch as nothing in the physical world is as perfectly known as in mathematics, the will has "play" or "freedom" in virtually all circumstances.  It may help to understand "free" will in the same sense as "free" fall or a "free"-running river.   

The interested reader may refer to

Thomistic Psychology, Robert E. Brennan

Philosophy of Mind, Edward Feser

As well as two short blog posts:Ramble on free will, James Chastek


A thought experiment about determinism, James Chastek

Umm, Didn't We Get Off-Target?  

Not really.  The coyne-atoms took aim at a no doubt sincerely held illusion that free will was "religiose" and therefore double-plus ungood.  Because of this, free will is double-plus ungood, and rejected.  Otherwise, the grave insistence with which people insist that they do not exist, cannot think, cannot intend, etc. is incomprehensible.  But in taking aim at religion, they popped humanism square between the eyes.

Because literature not only makes no sense if eliminative materialism is true, the whole rationale of the roman becomes vacuous.  And we note in passing that many in that camp - at least on the Internet - seem to have a tin ear for literature and the literary way of thinking.  Did not Hume, after all, recommend burning all such books?