Subject: Free Will - compatibilist reply to Bryan Caplan

From: [email-masked] (ASP-Disc)
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 16:17:05 -0500

From: William G M Adlam <[email-masked]>

I disagree with several of Bryan's points:

Section 1 (definition)

"A being has free will if, given all other causal factors...it posesses 
the ability to choose more than one thing."

I don't know what 'ability' means here.  Usually if I say something is able to
do something, I mean it will do it if it chooses to.  I don't think you want 
to say that a being with free will will choose to do something iff it chooses 
to choose to do it.  Or iff it freely chooses to choose (which under this 
definition implies an infinite causal chain of choices).  So what do you mean 
by ability?  I hope you'll excuse me for continuing to criticise your essay 
on free will when I don't understand what you mean by it.

Section 2 (causality)

"I observe uncaused changes during my every waking moment, whenever I 
contemplate my own choices."

I believe that you observe changes whenever you contemplate your own 
choices, and that you believe them to be uncaused.  But it looks like you 
are saying that you observe that the changes are uncaused.  I grant that you
often observe no cause, but I doubt that you ever observe that your choices 
have a property of 'uncausedness'.

This section does not mention the argument from physical causality.  This 
runs as follows:  Every physical event is governed by the laws of physics.
An action, such as pushing a button, is a physical event and so must have 
been caused by another physical event (such as the contraction of muscles in
my arm).  This event must also have a physical cause, and so on.  But it 
appears that pressing the button was caused by a mental event (my decision 
to press it).  Therefore, either:

        1) The mental event did not really cause the physical event.
           ("Free will is an illusion.")

or      2) The mental event was also a physical event.  Therefore it had 
           a physical cause.  ("Free will exists but our actions are 
           nevertheless determined.")

It has been suggested (I think by Roger Penrose) that the quantum mechanical 
effects of a system observing itself cause brains to behave differently from 
everything else in the universe.  (I don't think this is so, but it's not 
impossible.)  I can see that this might make events on a microscopic scale
in the brain follow slightly different laws, but I don't see what other 
effects there could be.

Section 3 (randomness and quantum mechanics)

Quantum indeterminacy does not affect your arguments on free will.  It does, 
however, counter the argument "People are unpredictable, but machines/the 
universe/whatever aren't.  Therefore people have free will but computers/
things made entirely of matter and energy/whatever can never have it."  (I 
don't think this would be an acceptable argument even if physics were 
completely deterministic.)

Section 4 (more causality)

You assert, again without any supporting argument, that choices are uncaused.

Section 5 (what we choose)

I agree that we choose much of our mental and bodily behaviour.  I don't 
think it's usual to choose one's beliefs.  There are several occasions when, 
if I had been able to, I would have chosen to believe that I would never die.
You said "thinking about free will is voluntary, but seeing what is in front
of my face when my eyes are open is not."  So you think that having 
(involuntarily) read your message, I had the choice of whether to think about
free will?  That's certainly not how it seemed to me!

Section 6 (four arguments)

6A (observation)

I agree that observation is an important, but not conclusive, argument for
free will as I understand it.  I observe that I made a choice, and that I 
acted as I intended.  When this consistently happens for a particular type of
choice, I conclude that I have free will i.e. that when I choose A, I then do
A.  There are some things I've never chosen to do, so I really don't know if,
for example, I have the free will to cut my arm off with a hacksaw.  (My guess 
is that I usually don't but perhaps might under very stressful situations.)

However, you also claim that observation (or generalisation from observation) 
shows explicitly that choices are uncaused (and also unrandom).  I have never
observed this uncausedness which you think is (1) a property of all your 
choices and (2) amenable to direct observation, with no possibility of error.
That is why I am not convinced by your argument.

6B (truth)

"It might be the case that those micro-particles coincidentally make me 
believe true things, but then the truth would not be the ultimate causal 
agency acting on me."

Firstly, why coincidentally?  Is it not also possible that a collection of
micro-particles might tend to believe true things due to some or all of 
the reasons below:
1) In the course of evolution, human ancestors which by chance had good rules
   for believing true things made fewer mistakes and ended up producing more 
   offspring, and humans have inherited these good rules.
2) As people grow up, they learn by trial and error that some types of 
   reasoning lead to conclusions that are later confirmed by observation and
   others do not.
3) People carefully consider what might be true or what might count as 
   evidence that something is true.
4) People notice that some people often make statements that are later 
   confirmed, and they ask them how they arrived at their conclusions.

I don't think any of these is incompatible with determinism.  If people can
plausibly be caused to believe justified statements, for reasons like these,
this argument is not relevant.  However, if beliefs are caused by a variety of
stimuli influencing an imperfect brain, this would explain why many of our 
beliefs are not true.

Secondly, you say that the truth is the ultimate causal agency acting on 
your beliefs.  But you denied that your choices were subject to any causal 
agency, and said that you chose your beliefs.  And if your beliefs aren't,
after all, caused by anything, there can't be any rules controlling them,
including rules that increase the chances of their being justified.

6C (initial plausibility)

You are saying that free will is more initially plausible than everything 
else.  Free will in the sense that I understand it (doing what you choose) is
not particularly obvious, and as I mentioned above, sometimes it is shown to
exist and sometimes not to, depending largely on the difficulty of what it is
you choose.  Free will in the sense of uncausedness of choices is not 
initially plausible to me.  In fact, it is very implausible: something either
happens completely at random, subject to no rules, or it doesn't, and if not 
it must be nonrandom in some way, and that way is a rule (either stochastic or
deterministic) describing its behaviour.  Not only does it not seem plausible
to me that choices or anything else behave like this, it doesn't even seem 
logically possible - certainly I can't imagine anything remotely like it.

6D (thought experiment)

"The equation is so good that it even incorporates our reaction to the 
equation, our reaction to knowing that it incorporates our reaction, and so on"

There is nothing in determinism that suggests such an equation could exist.  
Determinism implies that you can tell someone you are going to predict their
behaviour, at least stochastically, and then succeed in doing so, but does not
claim that you can control the actions of a sufficiently stubborn subject.

For example, suppose you have agreed to take part in an experiment where you
have lots of sensors and complicated equipment attatched to your head, leading
to a very powerful, expertly programmed computer, which displays its results 
to one of those brilliant neurophysiologists.  Determinism predicts that you 
could play a game of scissors, paper, stone and no matter what you did, the 
computer would predict your final choice and the neurophysiologist would be 
sure to win, at least on average.  Your equation would imply the much stronger
claim that the neurophysiologist could reveal his/her choice before yours, but
would still win.

You then ask "why should the equations be unable to compensate for the 
subject's knowledge of the prediction?"  Because this would often cause a 
negative feedback loop: predicting the subject will decide to do something may
then _cause_ the subject to change his/her mind, which causes the equation to 
give a different prediction.  Presumably you think firstly that if you go 
through this cycle enough times the equation's prediction and the subject's 
choice will converge (they will agree on what the subject is going to do) and 
secondly that it would be possible to incorporate the whole series into a
single equation without changing the subject.  Neither of these follows in
any direct way from determinism.

The argument here about probability is a circular one referring to free will 
in my sense: if a choice determines an action, than once the choice has been
made the action is certain to happen.

Section 7 (objections)

7A (difficult choices)

I partly agree with you here: saying a decision is difficult to make often
means there are strong emotions involved, and this is not directly related to
free will.  However, some people find it 'difficult' to decide what to order 
in a restaurant, not because thay are agonising over dramatic economic or 
personal consequences of their choice but because they are trying to guess 
which dish will taste best.  I'm not trying to be flippant, just pointing out
that there are other sorts of choices which can be described as hard.

7B (is free will universal?)

I remember reading in New Scientist a few years ago (a 1st April edition, in
fact, but I decided it was serious) an article (rather philosophically 
confused, as I remember it) suggesting that at least one of the ancient Greek
civilisations didn't believe in free will because in their legends the gods 
kept on influencing people's decisions (remember Hercules going insane and
murdering people?  And, come to that, Siegfried being influenced by a love 
potion?  And even God making the Pharoah especially stubborn so he could have
an excuse to plague the Egyptians?)  To get back to the point, I think you'd 
have to be unusually dim (or unusually impotent) not to notice that your 
choices were affecting your actions.  To be able to imagine (let alone 
directly perceive) the uncausedness of one's decisions is rather more difficult.
At any rate, I've never managed it.

7C (regularity)

How regular people's behaviour is may say something about what rules govern
it, it doesn't address the question of whether behaviour is caused or not.

7D (inexplicability)

I don't agree with the definition of 'choice' that you introduce at this 
point.  And the second paragraph implies the sort of infinite regression I
alluded to earlier: you have to choose what to base your choice on, but you
have to choose how to make that choice, and so on.

Section 8 (conclusion)

You repeat, in effect, your claim that you can observe that your choices are
uncaused and nonrandom, and that you are more sure of that observation than
of anything else.  Apart from the question of political freedom, I don't see 
what any of the new claims introduced in this section have to do with free 
will, but unfortunately I still don't know what you mean by the phrase.  So I
apologise if you don't think I'm properly addressing your arguments.

                                                                Bill Adlam