Transcript
Speaker: Today we are continuing our conversation on the problem of free will. Now it is the case that we already have dedicated a whole lesson to this just to one view, hard determinism.
Speaker: But I do want to recap very quickly what happened at the end of that lesson because there is a very important philosophical lesson to be learned.
Speaker: So basically the lesson was um on causal determinism, the view that Every event is caused by prior events in conjunction with the laws of nature. Basically, everything that happens is forced on us by the laws of physics and the way things were.
Speaker: So that led a lot of people to accept a view known as hard determinism, basically rejecting the idea that we have free will.
Speaker: But then we looked at objections to causal determinism and, you know, you would think to yourself, hey, look, there's some problems with causal determinism.
Speaker: That means that the threat to hard determinism is gone. Sorry, the threat of hard determinism is gone. Well, if only things were so simple,
Speaker: The alternative to causal determinism is something that we can call indeterminism. That is where there is a little bit of randomness into the mix such that all events are either deterministic, right? They have to happen or they are probabilistic, meaning that some events are such that there's you know only a 50% chance they will occur or something like that, right? So that's what we get when we add into the mix something like quantum mechanics.
Speaker: And the whole point of this argument that I reviewed at the end of last lesson is to get us to realize that whether determinism is true or whether indeterminism is true doesn't actually make a difference for free will.
Speaker: According to this argument, Those are your two options. And under both options, you actually do not have free will. If determinism is true, then everything that happens has to happen. And that includes your choices.
Speaker: And if indeterminism is true, that's actually not better because that just means that some things are just chance occurrences or random events. And that is, i mentioned in the last lesson, almost, at least to me, worse because it looks like there's a coin in your head that's flipping and that's how you make decisions. If you want to say that your choices are quantum, that's just even weirder than determinism.
Speaker: Those are your two options, by the way, determinism or indeterminism. And so what we're left with this is a realization that on any picture of reality that is actually available to us via physics, we don't have free will.
Speaker: Now what is the philosophical lesson that we're supposed to learn from this? It is the following. There are some philosophical conclusions that there are many ways to arrive at.
Speaker: What I mean by that is that hard determinism, even though one possible way at arriving at that view is through causal determinism, it is not the only way to arrive at it.
Speaker: In fact, There have been many threats to free will over the millennia and i want to do a quick sidebar and go over some of these.
Speaker: But the lesson here that I want to insist upon is that just because we have some doubts about causal determinism, it doesn't mean you get to have free will for free. There is no free lunch in philosophy, so to speak. You always have to argue for your position and you always have to look for other potential threats and rebuttals and objections to the position that you're trying to defend. So again, you don't get free will just because it doesn't seem like causal determinism is true. It's true. A lot of physicists have given up on the idea.
Speaker: But there are still yet other threats to free will. And let's look at them throughout time here. The very first one, apparently, as far as we can tell, comes from Epicurus, who was the founder of a Hellenistic school of thought now known as Epicureanism.
Speaker: So I typically call this the ancient problem of free will. ah because it was in antiquity that it was around.
Speaker: And what Epicurus noticed was that, first of all, he accepted something known as atomism or atomistic philosophy. And that's basically the belief that All that exists are atoms, which are a little indivisible ah entities, and they form compounds. And these compounds are the planets and people and rivers and everything that we see.
Speaker: and what Epicurus noticed is that if everything is just atoms bouncing around, making compounds, and then those compounds eventually dissipate, like when we die, well, if that's all everything is,
Speaker: there seems to be no room for free will. it just It's just the case that everything happens as a result of atoms randomly bouncing around with each other.
Speaker: Picture a pool table, a billiard table, with a bunch of you know billiard balls bouncing around around infinitely. And sometimes they make nice patterns, right? Like compounds. But then eventually they fall apart and everything is just... due to you know like geometry by the way the greeks loved geometry so it's very fitting in any case Epicurus noticed that and he didn't like it. So he actually added an element ah to the... basically he just started believing in a new thing which he called the swerve. And the swerve is just a little bit of randomness that he included into reality. And he said that this randomness is what made room for free will.
Speaker: Now, we don't have to get into how, um you know, it doesn't really seem like randomness equals free will. ah But that's just what Epicureus said way, way long ago.
Speaker: And if you want to look into this further, you can look up atomistic philosophy or atomism and its relation to the problem of free will. You can also, by the way, look up Christian versions of threats to free will.
Speaker: There is the problem of divine foreknowledge, which I had mentioned before, as well as theological determinism, also known as theological fatalism. So you can check out those if you want to know more about the ancient problem of free will.
Speaker: We are covering the modern problem of free will. This came about... through various factors, lots of different strands of thought ah unified to sort of bring about a flurry of writing on free will during the modern period. We did cover sort of the poster child for why the problem of free will sort of came back to the fore. That would be Laplace and he has his demon named after him. So that would be causal determinism.
Speaker: But also as we discussed in the last lesson, the social sciences were coming into being. and they claimed to predict ah human behavior eventually if they got enough data with perfect accuracy. And if that's the case, you know, it begins to feel like, hey, you know, we're not really as free as we thought.
Speaker: And then, by the way, I should also mention the ah highly influential and enduring and controversial writings of Baruch Spinoza.
Speaker: Spinoza influenced the radical Enlighteners a lot. He even influenced the non-radical Enlighteners in the sense that everyone was trying to respond to him, or at least a lot of people were trying to respond to him.
Speaker: In any case, all of that brought about the modern problem of free will. Some buzzwords you can look up if you'd like are causal determinism, also external forces. Maybe you remember Baron Dolbach who would talk about how we're not aware of all these things outside of ourselves that seem to be shaping who we are.
Speaker: So that is the modern problem of free will. Then there is a newer version of the problem of free will. I am not aware of any name that seems to work for it, any single name that everyone agrees upon for this new problem of free will.
Speaker: So I'm going to call it the psychobiological problem of free will. And that's because it comes from both the social sciences like psychology, but also more biological sciences like genetics. And basically, even though many of these sciences have abandoned this idea of perfect prediction that we equate with causal determinism, instead they've moved through more probabilistic models.
Speaker: Nonetheless, there's a lot of insights from these fields, including psychology, genetics, sociology, behavioral economics. And all of these insights or many of these insights suggest that we are not the drivers of our behaviors and even beliefs and ah you know moral systems. They seem to be actually in large part either external or internal, but in ways that we are not aware of.
Speaker: And so what does that mean? Okay, well, I'll give you one, maybe a more very jarring example. And that comes from a book by John Hibbing and colleagues named Predisposed.
Speaker: And the subtitle kind of says it all, Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences. In it, the authors provide evidence that things like genes, which we're not in charge of, right, we don't get to choose our genes, but they actually have an influence, a very strong influence on the kind of political ideology that you ultimately endorse.
Speaker: Now, a lot of people think, i mean at at least I think they think, that They sort of looked at the liberal positions and the conservative positions and they thought about it real hard, you know, and then then they decided they decided, you know what, I'm a conservative or a liberal or whatever, right?
Speaker: Well, what Hibbing and colleagues are saying is no, that's not the case. It seems to be that your genes are play maybe the predominant role in you know your political viewpoints.
Speaker: That is extremely concerning. i think we're comfortable with genes influencing like our height and our skin tone or whatever. But when we hear about it influencing or them influencing our political ideology, that just sounds... you know It sounds so invasive. In any case, lots of findings so that we are not as in charge as we think we are. And I will actually talk about some of these a little bit later in the lesson.
Speaker: But... We are in the modern period of philosophy and so we need to learn about these, the the terms that are relevant to this time period.
Speaker: So here we go. Let's dive into the modern problem of free will. I'm going to teach you this the way that it was taught to me and the way it was probably taught to my teachers who taught it to me.
Speaker: And it's going to be in terms of a set of sentences. There are three claims that at least at first glance seem to all be true.
Speaker: But here is the kicker. They can't all be true. They form an inconsistent set. So you have to reject at least one of them.
Speaker: mean, I guess one of them is the answer. So, okay. Here are those three claims. Again, in the beginning, they all look to be true, but they can't all be true at the same time.
Speaker: Causal determinism is true. Humans have free will and causal determinism and free will are incompatible.
Speaker: Now again, today we might say, hey, causal determinism isn't true or it's not clear that it's true. It's not obviously true, that's for sure. Well, again, we're in the early eighteen hundreds It was all the rage at the time. And so that view appeared true to many people.
Speaker: It also seems intuitively true that we have free will. When you go to crumble cookie or whatever, and you choose whatever cookie you want to gorge on, it feels like it's coming from you, right? you It feels free.
Speaker: And when you think about it, it seems like causal determinism and free will are not compatible with each other. They can't both be true. Okay, let's look at the three solutions. Again, it entails denying one of the claims mentioned previously. We've already covered hard determinism extensively last time and the hard determinists basically deny that we have free will.
Speaker: And if you are a hard determinist in the 1800s, typically you, you know, embrace causal determinism as your reason for why you are denying free will.
Speaker: So, okay, that's, that's, ah we've already covered that plenty. Let's, let's put that one down. Now we are covering two new views today. Libertarianism is the first one. Sometimes it is known as metaphysical libertarianism to distinguish it from political libertarianism.
Speaker: In any case, libertarianism basically denies that causal determinism is true. Now, this is in the early 1800s, so they were saying something quite radical at the time. but They were saying, no, not everything that happens has to happen. Humans have causal powers. They can make things happen that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
Speaker: So that is the libertarian position in a nutshell. And the compatibilists, now this is a weird view um that takes maybe some some getting used to.
Speaker: i think it's actually really intuitive once you get it, but you don't always get it right away. Anyway, okay, so compatibilists deny that free will and causal determinism are incompatible. In other words,
Speaker: They actually think that some sort of determinism is necessary for free will. So not only are they not incompatible, but you need a bit of determinism for an action to genuinely be free.
Speaker: We will examine that view a little bit later. ah Let's just start here with libertarianism. I feel like it's the view that people are rooting for maybe.
Speaker: And so let's get right into it. And then we'll come back to the compatibilist strategy. so okay, libertarianism. It's the view that yes, humans do have free will, never mind what the hard determinists say.
Speaker: Moreover, these choices that humans make, at least some of them, not all of them, but some of them, they can be not determined in the sense that they were not forced upon you by prior events and the laws of nature. And they're also not random. There is no coin being flipped in your head, right? So ah They held these views and of course if they were around in the early eighteen hundreds this would entail that they rejected causal determinism. They said no it's not true that every event that happens has to happen.
Speaker: Some events are basically you know they wouldn't have happened had it not been for humans making them happen.
Speaker: And so that is a little bit different from standard causal determinism. There are at least little pockets of freedom. Sometimes humans make free choices and free actions. And that is what makes it that not every event has to happen.
Speaker: Right? Okay. You probably want a visual representation of this and I'm happy to give it to you. But the main point here is that libertarians believe that humans can make things happen that wouldn't have otherwise happened. Okay, here is my visual representation. Let's begin with causal determinism. Of course, that's every event um that occurs has to occur because of prior events plus the laws of nature so event one necessarily caused event two which necessarily caused event three that's what the hard determinist believes basically everything including your choices has to happen
Speaker: Okay, well, let's get into a more concrete example here. The hard determinist would say something like the following following event happened exactly the way it had to happen.
Speaker: let's just say someone against their own better judgment and the better judgment of their friends, consumed copious amounts of beer. And this led to public drunkenness, which eventually led to a severe hangover.
Speaker: this is, first of all, not nice. You shouldn't do this. But secondly, according to the hard determinist, This is a necessary causal chain.
Speaker: Once that person drank all that beer in public, they were definitely going to be drunk in public and they were definitely going to be hungover the next day. That is the order of things. That's how it works. If you've never been hungover, kudos. I hope you never drink such copious amounts of beer.
Speaker: Okay, well, that is the hard determinist picture. And they might even say, hey, you know what? Everything, actually, they it's not the case that they might say. They will say that everything that led up to that person drinking a whole lot of beer was also determined. Such that, you know, whatever emotional state they were in, that also had to happen. And that led to them, you know, drinking all that beer, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: That's all the hard determinist picture. Here is where the libertarian comes in They say, hey, you know what? It's true that a lot of things that happen have to happen. That's obviously the case with things like planetary motion, right? What we do down here doesn't really have anything to do with like Mars's orbit um and with a lot of other things.
Speaker: Maybe weather patterns and tectonic plates and whatever, right? Those just happen because they happen. Have nothing to do with us. But some things humans can control. There are some little pockets of agency.
Speaker: or agency meaning that a person can make something happen that otherwise wouldn't have happened they have causal powers they can cause things to happen so in particular the libertarian says something like you see this action right here at that moment where a person decides to drink a whole bunch of beer That didn't have to happen.
Speaker: That person could have chosen to do otherwise. It was actually this moment right here where there was an opportunity to alter the causal chain such that things could have gone differently.
Speaker: No public drunkenness, no hangover, because they could have chosen to not drink two liters of beer or whatever this is. This is like two gallons of beer. I don't know what it is, but it's a lot. So there are moments in time where the libertarian believes that we can alter causal chains.
Speaker: Let me be very precise here, though, because a lot of people misinterpret this. You don't get free will for free. That reminds me of the, is it a bumper sticker? And the people that say freedom ain't free.
Speaker: Whatever. I don't know how where that came from, but it's true in the case of the libertarian. Freedom ain't free. You actually have to work to be able to be free, according to maybe not all, but most libertarians, maybe not even most, but the ones that I'm talking about. They do think that you need to work at it.
Speaker: Put another way, humans have the potential for radically free actions, but you have to learn how to make your mind capable of these radically free actions. For example, a person that we will soon become very well acquainted with named Immanuel Kant argued Well, he first of all argued that if you just follow your desires, right, if you just whenever you have a desire, you act on it, that's actually a form of enslavement to nature. In fact, that's not very different from what animals do.
Speaker: So, you know, he says that's that's not freedom. Just acting on your desires whenever you feel like it, that is not real freedom. Real freedom needs to be cultivated.
Speaker: You need to make it happen through things like education, self-discipline, reflecting on moral principles. That is how you acquire the capacity to override your desires, your instincts, your automatic reactions, your automatic patterns of thought. You can say, no, let me think about this in a completely free way and you can be guided by rationality to take whatever action you truly choose is best for you.
Speaker: And so that is what people like Immanuel Kant say that you have the power to develop this ability. Maybe a lot of people don't.
Speaker: ah Maybe you haven't yet, but you can, says Kant. And so you should try to do that so that you can enjoy true freedom, right? So that is the libertarian position in a nutshell. And notice how good it is, right? It might be kind of a high bar.
Speaker: It's a challenge to achieve freedom. But if you have it, well, it would solve so many issues that we've covered in this class. So we'll get to those later.
Speaker: But there you go. That is the fairly standard libertarian position, at least during this time period.
Speaker: Let's now move into the compatibilist way of looking at things. Now you have to do kind of a mental shift here because the compatibilists have basically a different definition of free will.
Speaker: First and foremost, compatibilists do believe we have free will, but that is where their similarities with libertarians end.
Speaker: Because, according to compatibilists, free will actually requires some sort of determinism and hence free will and some sort of determinism are compatible.
Speaker: Okay, why am I saying some sort of determinism? That's one thing that I really want to clarify at this point because one of the most famous compatibilists was the aforementioned David Hume. You all remember him from probably several lessons at this point.
Speaker: But Hume was a very famous compatibilist and explicitly explained his views on free will. And he was around before people like Laplace and before causal determinism had really been sort of enunciated as clearly as Laplace did.
Speaker: And so, you know, it's not the case that Hume was talking specifically about causal determinism. Hume, what he really meant... is he was thinking about little necessary connections, little causal chains.
Speaker: Let me be very precise here. Whenever it is the case that you have, let's just say, a desire, and that desire determines your choice, and that choice determines your action, that's free will, according to David Hume.
Speaker: Notice that is a little causal chain. Your Desire determines your choice and your choice determines your action. And so that is ah free. That is what freedom requires, according to David Hume.
Speaker: That's the first thing I wanted to say. and the second thing I wanted to say is that this is obviously a a a kind of free will. Obviously, when we act on our desires without being impeded, right whenever we have a crumble cookie,
Speaker: because we wanted to and no one stopped us. That's a kind of freedom. But notice that this is a very low bar. It is a much lower bar than the libertarian bar for ah free will.
Speaker: For the compatibilists, basically everyone has free will, right? Everyone's wanted a cookie and eaten one at some point. And if you haven't Stop this video right now and go eat a cookie.
Speaker: But the libertarian, it's you know possible that you might live your entire life and not really cultivate the kind of freedom that the libertarians are talking about.
Speaker: So these are very different views on free will. let me try to persuade you of compatibilism very briefly because maybe you need it and i think it will help you understand the view a little bit more in any case so the compatibilists you know what the libertarian view on free will It doesn't make sense.
Speaker: It's kind of a crazy view, says the compatibilist, because they want your decisions to not be determined. Remember, the compatibilist wants your choices to be determined by your desires and values and stuff like that. And for them, that's what real freedom means. And what they're saying about the libertarians is like, you know what? What they're saying isn't even...
Speaker: rational it doesn't even make any sense so let me give you ah an example that definitely doesn't come from one of these uh compatibilists it just comes from me but i hope it paints the picture for you that works for you here we go imagine that today for some reason that it is that it is unclear to you you decide to dress like a clown and become a murderer Now that is a very extreme ah change in your behavior. Hitherto this moment, you had never ever wanted to dress like a clown and kill people.
Speaker: But now for some reason, that is what you're doing. And you are confused by it. You're like, oh man, that's I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing. By the way, some ah killers from the past have left notes in effect saying something like that. They're like, I'm confused as to why I'm doing what I'm doing.
Speaker: So i' not completely impossible. In any case, um this is my example full of a compatibilist argument. Let me show you what I mean.
Speaker: The compatibilist is going to argue against libertarian free will in the following way. They're going to say that the very idea of your actions not being determined makes that a crazy view.
Speaker: In particular, or more specifically, The compatibilists say that the libertarian requirement that free actions be non-determined or indeterminate amounts to requiring that free actions be unpredictable.
Speaker: So that's what the compatibilist strategy of arguing is. When the libertarian says that your actions should not be determined, you know what they mean is something quite specific but the deliberate the compatibilist is going to say think about what an indeterminate action is it is unpredictable and something that's truly unpredictable would be foreseen even by the person doing the action in other words
Speaker: If you go ahead and pick up, you know, a clown outfit and put it on and start killing people and are and are surprised by your own behavior, well, that is the epitome of an unpredictable action, right? You are just like, oh what am I doing here?
Speaker: And so according to the compatibilist, that's what the libertarian counts as a truly free action because it is literally not determined. It is not determined by your desires. You don't want to be doing it. It is not determined by your values. You have, you you're horrified by your own behaviors.
Speaker: And so that is the compatibilist argument. Clearly, if even the individual performing the actions is surprised by the actions, that cannot to be free will.
Speaker: So that's the compatibilist argument in a nutshell. Um... the libertarian definition of free will doesn't make any sense. Now, my example is sort of nuts and crazy. And I hope, though, that it paints for you sort of the the exaggerated version of what the compatibilist argument is. Let me tone it down now a little bit and make it more philosophically ah similar to what someone like David Hume argued.
Speaker: So here is Hume. According to Hume, free will does not mean that our actions are not determined. That's what the libertarian says and again, they think that definition is kooky.
Speaker: Instead, of freedom means acting according to your own desires, beliefs, values, and intentions without external coercion. In other words, when you have a desire to do something,
Speaker: and it aligns with your values and intentions and beliefs and nothing stops you from doing that thing, that's what freedom really means.
Speaker: Now, earlier I said that that's kind of a low bar for what counts as a truly free action. But what the compatibilist might say is that that's the only bar. The high bar is a crazy bar and it doesn't actually make any sense to try to even get over that high bar So that compatibilist is basically saying that, you know, an action, just you're over complicated in freedom.
Speaker: An action is free when our desires and beliefs and values and intentions determine our choices. And then our choices determine our actions and we can bring about these actions unimpeded.
Speaker: That's the simple definition of freedom. And that happens to be the real definition of freedom, say the compatibilist. And so I hope you can see here that there's a little deterministic chain there between desires, beliefs, values, and intentions and choices and actions.
Speaker: So that little deterministic chain is required for genuine human freedom. Hume is explicit about this, by the way. i have here a quote when he is describing causation.
Speaker: Here is the language that he uses. There must be a constant union betwixt the cause and effect. That is how he is talking about causation when one thing necessarily causes another thing.
Speaker: And that is the exact same language that he uses when he's talking about our behaviors in in that are in line with our motives. Quote, the union betwixt motives and action.
Speaker: So for Hume, he is very, very clear. Freedom only makes sense when we see this necessary pattern of causation between our desires and choices and actions. You need some sort of deterministic chain for real freedom.
Speaker: And whenever our desires determine our choices and our choices determine our actions, we are enjoying free will. And hopefully that is eating a cookie out of your free will.
Speaker: My friends, those are the two new views that we are covering in this lesson. I want to very quickly pivot now to some objections to compatibilism and then we'll take a break but it is important to while you still have compatibilism in your mind ah to look at objections to it because i feel like it takes a little bit to get those plates spinning on compatibilism and so while it's fresh in your mind let's take a look at some objections actually these objections might even help you
Speaker: understand the view a little bit. So let's look at these now and then later on we will cover we will cover objections to libertarianism. Here we go. Objection number one, full disclosure. This is a long quote from a former teacher of mine. am I biased? I hope not. I don't know.
Speaker: You be the judge. His name, by the way, is Mark Balliger and he wrote several books actually on free will. Let me begin with this quote now where he is actually going to be talking about the views of other people on compatibilism, beginning with the aforementioned Immanuel Kant.
Speaker: The 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant called Humean compatibilism petty word jugglery and a wretched subterfuge. Let me pause already.
Speaker: hume you know, was giving his views on freedom and ah Kant is not liking any of it. Petty word jugglery means that Kant thought that Hume was just messing around with words, redefining things because, you know, Hume wanted us to have free will. So he just kind of messed with the definition so that it's really easy to have free will. That's what Kant says.
Speaker: And a wretched subterfuge, like he's trying to pull one under you. And of course, Hume was a skeptic and it's actually not clear what Hume was trying to do in some cases. not necessarily that he was hard to interpret, but what were his goals? What were really his views? it's ah It's kind of an interesting area of scholarship. But the point here is, Kant says Hume is playing with words.
Speaker: He's avoiding the real issue. Here's another philosopher that Ballinger mentions. The 19th century American philosopher William James said this, Compatibilism is a quagmire of evasion, under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered.
Speaker: No matter what the compatibilist means by free will, there is a problem, an issue of fact and not of words So pausing here again, William James, famous philosopher slash psychologist, is saying, look, what the compatibilists are doing is changing the subject.
Speaker: That's what he means by quagmire of evasion. What people want to know is do we have libertarian free will? That high bar of free will. That's what the real problem of free will is about. Do we have that kind of robust radical free will?
Speaker: And what the compatibilists do is redefine free will so that it's a much weaker variety and say, yeah, yeah, we have it. yay And of course, William James, like Immanuel Kant, is having none of it.
Speaker: They say the compatibilists are just avoiding the real issue. These are strong words, but notice that Kant and James are not saying that compatibilism is false.
Speaker: They're saying it's irrelevant. They're saying that compatibilists are just playing around with words and evading the real issue. And that's exactly what I'm saying, says Mark Balliger in his book on free will.
Speaker: So to summarize here, the argument isn't even that compatibilism is false. Maybe one way you can think about this is that there's libertarian free will and there's compatibilist free will. And it's sort of really obvious that we have compatibilist free will. It's such a low bar that most of us, whenever we get a cookie because we want it, have compatibilist free will.
Speaker: The more interesting question is whether we have the stronger, the more robust, the more radical version of free will, which is libertarian free will.
Speaker: So that is an objection from actually just not Balogar but also Kant and James that compatibilism is sort of changing the subject away from what we are actually interested in. That's one objection.
Speaker: The other objection comes from a book that I read by a historian named Yuval Noah Harari and it involves some pretty gruesome actions being done to rats.
Speaker: Yeah, there's no easy way to say this. Let me just start here with a quote and um I'll explain whatever I have to explain. Scientists have now made remote control rats. Okay, I guess I'll stop there because that's already bananas.
Speaker: um Yeah, they put a bunch of electrodes in their brains and they can basically make them do whatever you want, right? They're in ah a rat maze and they can make them turn left. They can make them turn right, go up a ladder, go down a ladder, whatever, right?
Speaker: So these are remote control rats and you can ah go to YouTube and probably find a video of it if it hasn't been taken down. ah so yeah, these these exist.
Speaker: Continuing, when animal welfare activists voiced concern, Professor Sanjeev Talwar of the State University of New York, one of the leading robo-rat researchers, dismissed the concerns, arguing that the rats actually enjoy the experiments. After all, explains Talwar, the rats work for pleasure and when the electrodes stimulate the reward center in their brain, the rats feel nirvana.
Speaker: To the best of our understanding, the rat doesn't feel that somebody else controls her and she doesn't feel and that she is being coerced to do something against her will.
Speaker: When Professor Talwar presses the remote control, the rat wants to move to the left, which is why she moves to the left. When the professor presses another switch, the rat wants to climb the ladder, which is why she climbs the ladder.
Speaker: After all, the rat's desires are nothing but a pattern of firing neurons. What does it matter whether the neurons are firing because they are stimulated by other neurons or because they are stimulated by transplanted electrodes connected to Dr. Talwar's remote control?
Speaker: If you ask the rat about it, she might well have told you. Sure, I have free will. Look, I want to turn left and I turn left. I want to climb a ladder and I climb a ladder.
Speaker: Well, that is disturbing a a scenario. The reason why I bring this up is because even though it seems like, you know, the ah picture of free will painted by the determinists, sorry, the compatibilists is, you know, makes sense.
Speaker: Remember, they accuse the libertarians of having a picture of free will that doesn't make any sense. We can do the same to the compatibilists. Doesn't it seem like it's not enough that our desires determined our choices and our choices determine our actions for freedom?
Speaker: Because our desires, as the RoboRats show, can be manipulated. You don't get to choose your desires. And that kind of seems to matter.
Speaker: If I were to, for some take
Speaker: put an electrode in your brain and make you rob banks and give me the money, you might feel like you want to do it. That is actually how it would work according to these robo-rat experiments.
Speaker: But that would obviously obviously not be free will. And so the fact that we can't determine our desires and maybe even our values according to people like John Hibbing,
Speaker: That sort of is concerning, right? It seems to be the case that maybe the higher bar for what free will counts as ah is is a good idea. we We need a higher bar because this low bar sometimes results in and us having to call and we would have to say the robo rats are free, right? According to the compatibilists. But that's I don't want to say the robo rats are free. And so that means that compatibilism can't be true.
Speaker: So in sum, we have two objections here to compatibilism. The first one is that compatibilism changes a subject. People like Kant and James and Ballagher, they're saying that when compatibilists redefine free will, they aren't solving the problem. The problem is, do we have radical freedom?
Speaker: Right? That's what we want to know. And by changing the definition, they aren't answering that question. The compatibilists are just evading the real issue.
Speaker: So the real question is not, can I act according to my desires, like the compatibilists say? The real question is, could I have acted otherwise?
Speaker: Am I capable of robust, radical freedom? That's what we want to know. The second objection is inspired by the Robo-rats.
Speaker: It seems like, you know, we don't want to say that the Robo-rat has free will because obviously their desires are being manipulated by the researchers.
Speaker: Well, the same could be said about us. We know that all kinds of things influence our desires and our mood and our you know thoughts.
Speaker: And in that case, it seems like our desires and thoughts don't come from us. So it doesn't feel like even if these thoughts and desires determine our choices and our actions, it doesn't feel like enough for true freedom.
Speaker: Just because it feels like we're acting voluntarily and we don't feel any coercion and we experience ourselves as free, that isn't what we want to say you know amounts to true freedom.
Speaker: We need a higher bar for what counts as a truly free action. Those are the objections to compatibilism Let's take a breather here before we move into the objections to libertarianism.
Speaker: If we were to end the lesson right now, might seem that compatibilism both doesn't answer the right question and even if it did, it's kind of a ah bad definition of free will.
Speaker: And it would seem by default that libertarianism wins, right? Well, that is the philosophical lesson that I was trying to get at in the beginning of this lesson. That we don't just get a view for free. There is no free lunch in philosophy. You have to argue for it and you have to argue against any possible objections to it. And so in that spirit, we now have to look at issues with libertarianism and but in particular problems with libertarianism. Now I'm going to begin with a broad class of problems that if I could summarize in a nutshell.
Speaker: It's basically this. Some libertarians have a view of the mind, of the human mind, that is just unrealistic.
Speaker: It is not clear, in other words, how we can cultivate the kind of radical freedom that they're talking about. be it through education or reflection or whatever, it's not clear that it is achievable. It is unrealistic, in other words.
Speaker: So that is the first thing I want to talk about. Here are some reasons why you might doubt how our capacity for genuine freedom.
Speaker: The first point I'm going to pull from Saint Augustine who was around 1600 years ago. He basically thought that because of original sin that Adam and Eve committed,
Speaker: We are cognitively degraded. We are not as sharp. We are not as free. And hence, we can't really achieve the kind of radical freedom that the libertarian wants us to have without God's grace. If God gives us his grace, then yay, we got it. But I want to take St. Augustine's idea and going to drop the original sin stuff and the God's grace stuff because in effect we don't need it to make the point here. Psychologists have known now for over a century that the human mind is riddled with cognitive biases, We are self-deluded. We think we know more than we know.
Speaker: Sometimes, this is my favorite one, sometimes the environment influences our thoughts and behaviors and we don't notice and we go ahead and pretend that we were in charge the whole time, right? So there's all these things.
Speaker: issues with the human mind that we are now aware of that clash with the conception of the human mind from honestly even 100 years ago, right? But definitely 400 years ago in the case of someone like Descartes or 200 and, you know, change in the case of someone like Kant.
Speaker: So that's one issue. It just maybe is not even possible given that we are equipped with a human brain. Here is a related issue.
Speaker: Maybe today we are far too distracted by our digital technologies to achieve something known as attentional autonomy.
Speaker: That just means that you have control over where your attention goes. This is an ancient concern. Christian monks worried about this a thousand years ago.
Speaker: And if they had it bad back then, How much worse is it for us today when we have people that are addicted to screens? And I mean addicted. I saw someone looking at three screens on an airplane recently.
Speaker: The screen that is in the back of the seat in front of you, they're... game whatever it was a nintendo switch or something like that and their ipad that is three screens that's a high degree of addiction there and i don't know i don't know what to tell you maybe we're actually in a worse place than monks were a thousand years ago as far as getting control over where their attention goes i got one more for you Where would you even go? Like what institutions exist that teach you self-mastery?
Speaker: I am not quite sure. So in a nutshell, maybe we don't even have the right equipment for achieving self-mastery given the kind of brain and mind that we have.
Speaker: Moreover, even if we did have the right equipment, we don't know where to go to learn self-mastery. It's almost like philosophers came up with a destination on the map, but no real path on how to get there.
Speaker: And no discussion about what to do when the equipment you have is insufficient to get you there. So a lot of problems here basically boil down to maybe it is psychologically unrealistic of Kant to think that, hey, yeah, we can get us to, you know, radical freedom. You just have to work hard at it and you'll get there.
Speaker: That's one issue. On the topic of institutions, I know some people think to themselves, well, it's the university. That's where you learn the internal goods of disciplined study, right? Through a lot of ah you know time at the university, you can learn critical thinking and greater self-awareness, and you can eventually achieve self-determination.
Speaker: Oh, that that we're so, right? But Chad Wellman, in his wonderful book, After the University, gives us a history of the university system.
Speaker: And he basically makes the case that the university system has never really really been a very good steward of the internal goods of study. In other words,
Speaker: The university system has never been great at developing critical thinking and self-awareness. Instead, they tend to privilege external goods of study, right? They want to get you into a good job, right? Career placement.
Speaker: They worry about things like social mobility, making sure you earn more money than you were before the university. Maybe they spend a whole lot of time focusing on sports. A lot of people go to college and just spend a ton of time on sports rather than developing self-awareness and other things like that.
Speaker: So it's not clear that the university will get you to where you want to be. There have been academies in the past like Plato's Academy that seemed to focus on this kind of thing that we're talking about.
Speaker: But Plato's Academy is gone, of course. And so now it's not clear that you have anywhere to go to develop self-mastery. And if you don't even know what it feels like, how would you know when you've achieved it?
Speaker: lot of philosophical puzzles there. But let me move on to a different issue with libertarianism. And this is going to take us out of our beautiful timeline here. and we are supposed to be in the 1800s.
Speaker: But I'm going to present you now with some evidence that gives rise to the psychobiological problem of free will. This is of course from the last century or so. And so it's a little bit, you know, out of synchrony with what we're doing. But what's really interesting about it is that if we're going to take libertarianism seriously, we have to look at any issues that might arise with the view.
Speaker: And the findings from the social sciences just simply are relevant here and we have to look at them. So let me introduce you to this idea by saying this.
Speaker: Philosophers and scientists have expressed one of two things. Some of them express outright denial that something like libertarian free will is possible.
Speaker: Others express more of a subtle skepticism. They say, I'm not sure that, you know, free libertarian actions actually exist in the world.
Speaker: It is at least not obvious to them that they are the case. I should mention though, that sometimes the language that they use is not exactly the the full phrase libertarian free will. Sometimes instead they'll say agent causation, where it is the self that is causing choices and actions, right? So whenever you see agent causation, you can just think to yourself, I think they mean libertarian free will.
Speaker: So that would be um fairly accurate most of the time. John Dorris is one important figure in this philosophical movement, and he has now several books in which he cites dozens and dozens of studies, usually from social psychology,
Speaker: that he claims should give us pause about believing there is such a thing as agent causation or the way he terms it, self-directed behaviors.
Speaker: Now, if you just read this literature in social psychology, you will come to see what John Dorris is talking about. Social psychologists for over a century now have been demonstrating that the environment seems to play a greater role in our behavior than things like character traits or our beliefs or our values or our rationality.
Speaker: In a very famous study, several seminary students, in other words, people that were studying to enter the clergy, to be part of the clergy, were part of a psychology experiment where they had you know a bunch of tests run on them to see you know what their personality is and what their relationship to God is, what kind of like religious views they hold.
Speaker: And basically, they took all this information and then they put them through a little test. They had someone, um as they were moving from one building to another, they had someone slumped over and they looked like they were in need of help, right? They were coughing. Of course, this was an actor and this was all in an experiment. They wanted to see what these seminary students would do.
Speaker: What's really interesting is that the reason why they were moving from one building to another is because they were going to give a talk on the Good Samaritan. If you don't know the Bible story on the Good Samaritan, the irony is devilish, right? It's about a man who is left for dead and a bunch of people that should have stopped to help him didn't. But it was someone from an ethnic group that was not very well regarded. that actually stopped a Samaritan.
Speaker: And so that's like, you know, the lesson you're supposed to stop for people in need. In any case, who ended up stopping for this man in need while while they were traveling from one building to the next? So which of the seminary students actually stopped?
Speaker: It turns out that if you were to look at character traits, like how generous they are or how compassionate they are, that wouldn't explain who stopped. If you were to look at beliefs, that wouldn't explain who stopped. their' Their kind of relationship with God, that also wouldn't be very predictive of who stopped.
Speaker: What would be the most predictive of what would cause a student or sorry, a seminary student to stop is how much time they had. Some of them were told that they were running a little late. They should go really fast to go give this talk.
Speaker: Others were told they had just enough time to get there. Go ahead and head on over. And another group was told, hey, you got plenty of time. Well, it turns out that the more time that you felt you had, the more likely they were to stop to help this person.
Speaker: In other words, it is the situation you find yourself in the time constraints that you are in that predict your behavior. Or we can even say that cause your behavior. It is not your character traits. It is a situation that you're in.
Speaker: That is just one famous study that I just kind of ran through. But mean, that's what you sort of need to do with these. There's so many of them that it's kind of hard to stop and kind of explore each one individually because it is an onslaught.
Speaker: In many instances, it seems that the situation's effect on our mood is what drives us to act in certain ways. If you watch a funny video before some you know someone drops some papers in front of you, you are more likely to stop to help them ah pick them up than if you didn't watch a funny video.
Speaker: If you are smelling delicious cookies, you are similarly more likely to to be helpful to someone who needs help. On hot days, there's a lot of literature about the effect of the weather on helpful behavior.
Speaker: Basically, hot days are bad for everybody. If you need help on ah on a hot day, good luck, because you're probably not going to get it. It's even the case that crime goes up on hot days.
Speaker: Maybe my favorite study ah from this bunch on mood is the one with the lawnmower. In one study, there were people who needed help and there were was two sets of participants.
Speaker: One set of participants were just in a normal environment with no loud lawnmower and the other were, you know, had an opportunity to help someone, but there was a really loud lawnmower nearby.
Speaker: And yes, it turns out that the ones who were in the presence of the lawnmower were less likely to help someone in need than those who were not.
Speaker: Because as we all know, lawnmowers are annoying. So actually, I don't know, by the time that you watch this, there might be like electric lawnmowers that don't make a lot of noise. I'm talking about really loud gas powered lawnmowers. So yeah, those are some of my favorite studies. And when I kind of run through them like this, people are unconvinced. So I do want to give you a little bit of food for thought to help you realize how weird the social psychological literature is
Speaker: And I'm going to go all over the place, right? Let's just see what sticks. So you can kind of see what people mean when they say, I'm not sure that the kind of brain that humans have is, you know, it's realistic to assume they can achieve something like radical freedom.
Speaker: Okay, here is a classic study. There were two groups of subjects and they were told to listen to radio editorials. A radio editorial. Let me tell you first what a radio is. Anyway, um a radio editorial is basically an opinion piece that you would hear through the radio. Now, you probably don't do this anymore, but that's what people used to do.
Speaker: Okay, there's two groups. One group was instructed to move their head up and down, allegedly to check for audio quality. Let's call this the nodding group, right? they're They're saying yes, right? They're nodding up and down.
Speaker: Another group was told to move their head side to side. Let's call this the shake group. They're shaking their head. They're saying no. Okay, well, whatever, right? It's...
Speaker: What should that matter when it comes to figuring out whether or not you agree with the opinion that you're listening to on the radio? Shouldn't it not matter what you're doing with your head?
Speaker: Well, you wish the nodding group was more likely to be approving of the editorial while the group that was shaking their head was more likely to be disapproving of it.
Speaker: That is freaking bananas. What you're doing with your head shouldn't impact whether or not you agree with someone's opinion, but it does.
Speaker: And so that is extremely ah uncool to learn about because now you're going to be self-conscious about what you're doing when you're hearing someone's opinion. Make sure you're not shaking your head or nodding. Okay.
Speaker: In two recent studies, and I just mean in the last 10 years, researchers found that deeper voices gave political candidates an advantage over those with relatively higher pitched voices, unless... They are running against a woman.
Speaker: Let's just think about the two guys running against each other. The guy with a deeper voice is going to have a little bit of an advantage. Why would that matter? That shouldn't matter, but it does. And if you ask these people, hey, why do you like this person more?
Speaker: They're totally not going to say, oh, because they have a deeper voice. They're going to invent some rationale, some fabrication as to why it is they like this candidate more.
Speaker: So we are strangers to ourselves, right? we We say one thing, even though it's not really the reason why we believe it.
Speaker: Interesting. Let's look at these bridges now. In another study, people were asked um to basically help out with ah and an experiment and they were asked in one of two kinds of bridges. So on the left here, we have a scary bridge. Let's call it a scary bridge. um It's, you know, it's kind of shaky and it's a long drop down and I wouldn't want to cross over one of these. I'm a little bit afraid of heights, just so you know.
Speaker: And on the right hand side, we have a non-scary bridge. It's just a i think it's actually for a Zen garden. So it's like the epitome of non-scary bridges. Anyway, so in both of these situations,
Speaker: an experimenter, I'm going to say what this person looked like because it's part of the experiment. And again, this is from like a couple of decades ago. So um they would probably not um be approved by an ethics board today. But um in the experiment, quote, an attractive woman end quote, went up to subjects to ask them to participate in the, basically they had to fill out something like a questionnaire.
Speaker: Okay. After they were done with the questionnaire, the woman who would ask the men, they were all men, um hey, do if you want, you know, if you want to talk about this some more, here's my phone number, feel free to give me a call.
Speaker: Okay, so who's going to call the woman more? The people who met her, the men who met her on the scary bridge or the men who met her on the non scary bridge?
Speaker: If you think about it, it shouldn't matter. What does that have to do with anything? But it it does matter. It turns out that the participants who were on the scary bridge called her at a higher rate. And the researchers think that it's because there was a lot of like, you know, emotional intensity, right? They had just crossed over a scary bridge and you have a lot of like intense feelings going on.
Speaker: And then you meet this woman and so they ended up confusing their, you know state of emotional arousal with attraction for this woman. In other words, they were so amped up that they thought, oh, it must be this woman that's making me feel this way. i love her. No, I don't know about I love her, but I'll give her a call. That sounds like a good idea.
Speaker: And so we confuse how the environment makes us feel with how we feel about people. That's not a good sign at all, right?
Speaker: Speaking of how we feel and not being aware of it, take a look at these eyes for me. All right, good. You are now ready to take a test without cheating.
Speaker: Kinda, maybe. Apparently in a bunch of studies, I'll give you three right now, displaying eye images like that, basically having a poster with eye images on them,
Speaker: has been associated with a bunch of stuff. Here's one, increased generosity. I won't tell you what these economic games are like, but basically, if you put eyes on the wall, people will be more generous.
Speaker: If you put eyes on the wall, there'll be more donations in one of these economic games. And if you put eyes on the wall, again, it's just eyes on the wall, people will litter less That is very, very, very strange. Apparently, even though we know that those eyes don't belong to anyone, there's no mind behind those eyes, we still activate those parts of our brain that are aware of being watched, basically.
Speaker: And so we behave a little bit better. All of this, all of these studies, they should make you feel a little weird. It's kind of like the environment creates or forces, maybe force is too strong of a word, but influences you in a way that you're not aware of and that you kind of blithely go along with. you just kind of You know, you you almost reject the idea that the environment makes you act in a certain way. And you say, no, I always, you know, clean up after myself in one of these cafeterias. I never leave litter behind or I'm always generous.
Speaker: But it turns out that it's really just a situation that you're in that makes you behave the way you do. I have um one more for you. It's kind of extra crazy.
Speaker: We'll even call it the cognitive bias of the day. It's called choice blindness. And this refers to the phenomenon in which people are blind to their own choices and preferences.
Speaker: What in the world could this possibly mean? How could you be blind to what you choose? That doesn't even make any sense. Well,
Speaker: You're right that it doesn't make sense, but that doesn't mean we don't do it. So in one study, subjects were given a survey about their political and moral positions on social issues.
Speaker: When the survey survey was completed, the subjects returned the clipboards. Right. So let's just say you're doing the survey, you fill it out and you give it back to me before concluding the experiment.
Speaker: The experimenters, in this case me, returned the clipboard to the subjects and asked them to explain a few of their views. In other words, you fill out the survey, you give it back to me, and then I give it back to you.
Speaker: And I say, hey, can you explain some of these? All right, so far so good, right? This is totally not interesting at all. Here is the surprising finding.
Speaker: Subjects gave explanations for their choices, even though their choices had been changed. When you gave me your questionnaire, it was sort of like a magic trick. It was ah a little switcheroo that I did on you.
Speaker: And with this trick questionnaire, i was able to alter your responses to the survey. But most of the participants didn't notice and they happily went on to defend their non-choices.
Speaker: This should make you feel some kind of way, right? You just filled out this questionnaire on your political views, which people take pretty seriously. And then ice i changed your answers. And then i showed you in this questionnaire, look, you you said this right here.
Speaker: First of all, you should have noticed. Oh, that's not what I said, but most didn't, right? Greater than 50% did not notice their answers had been changed. And then here's the real kicker.
Speaker: You defended your views. You just made up reasons for why you believe things you don't actually believe. Oh, that is not cool, right?
Speaker: So that's some of the social psychological literature. If you couple that with some of the findings from the biological sciences like genetics, you start to think to yourself, what do i even do?
Speaker: The environment influences me. My genes influence me. Where is the me in all of this? What does the self even do?
Speaker: And for reasons like this, like arguments like the ones that I've been giving you here, some neuroscientists, Michael Gazzaniga is one example,
Speaker: They think that this 17th century idea of free will, it just doesn't survive the findings of modern science. We should basically, according to Getzanica, give up on this whole idea.
Speaker: To close things off, let's talk about the work of Daniel Wegner. Daniel Wegner was a social psychologist who was convinced that free will is an illusion and he provided a psychological model of why it feels like we have free will even though we don't.
Speaker: So, Wegener believes that there are multiple systems associated with the production of an action. One psychological system presents the idea of a voluntary action to consciousness and also produces the action. So this is kind of hard to follow without a diagram.
Speaker: So here I have a diagram. If you look on the left, there is a system of systems, right? there is There's basically some boxes there. And one of them says unconscious cause of thought.
Speaker: And the other one says unconscious cause of action. And they're communicating with each other. Basically what this means is that there's parts of the brain that we are not consciously aware of that are doing a lot of like, you know, the behind the scenes planning, right? They plan your thoughts or they produce your thoughts and they plan your actions.
Speaker: then as those thoughts and actions are, you know, sort of materializing, the thought itself becomes part of your conscious experience. In other words, you think to yourself, I'm going to raise my hand down.
Speaker: and the action materializes right you end up raising your hand all that you're aware of is the thought i'm going to raise my hand and you perceive your hand being raised and so to you it seems like the thought of you wanting to raise your hand is what caused you to raise your hand but that is just an apparent causal path That is not the real reason why you had that thought and behaved in that way.
Speaker: That was all due to unconscious mental processes. So, this whole system operates in a non-conscious way and the self plays no causal role. The self is just hanging out, not really doing much of anything other than taking credit for what's going on.
Speaker: All the self is aware of is the idea of a voluntary action, which again, it didn't produce but just passively received. And of course, the self is also aware also aware of the perception of its body engaging in some behavior. You are aware that your hand is moving.
Speaker: But again, the self also didn't produce that movement. It was just passively received. And so what is really bonkers about all this is that from our conscious experience,
Speaker: It feels like we intended to perform the behavior. And this feeling, this intention makes us assume the self is the cause of the action. But this is just a little causal story that we tell ourselves. It's not really what's going on.
Speaker: it is a confabulation, a fabrication. That at least is the theory of Daniel Wegener. so much to think about here.
Speaker: But if we were to leave things off right now, right where we stand, it would seem like we don't have basically any kind of free will. Compatibilist free will a sort of a a nonsensical kind of free will because we can't control our desires. and We're not fully in charge of them.
Speaker: Libertarian free will seems impossible too. And hard determinism, well, I mean, That has its own problems, ah which we haven't really dived too far into, but that seems to be also not really you know likely.
Speaker: it seems to clash at least with our intuitions about how it is that we go about the world. So I guess what we have to do even go even deeper Next, we're going to cover the views of one libertarian thinker.
Speaker: And we've kind of been hinting at him for many, many lessons now. His name is Immanuel Kant and his philosophy is one of the most challenging that we will see in this course.
Speaker: I recommend you have a big cup of coffee before the next lesson. I'll see you then.
