What’s Wrong with the World

There is a more advanced version of the finger moving experiment where the scientist put a transcranial magnetic stimulator over his motor cortex and was able to produce a single, precise movement of his right foot moving inward. When he tried to override this effect and move his foot outwards, his subjective experience was that he changed his mind and voluntarily moved the foot inward. From this he concluded that free will is when part of the brain figures out what is happening in another part of the brain and takes possession of it. Hat tip: one of Dr. Feser's commentators

While they are both interesting experiments, they mostly pose a problem for a simplistic view of free will. There is still a more complex question of how deliberate choices accumulate into altering the unconscious matrix of the brain, which is supposed to be the driver for all our behaviors. Cashmore also raised the point in his article that the "illusion" of free will has a valuable social utility, which is sufficient reason to try to maintain it.

Cashmore also raised the point in his article that the "illusion" of free will has a valuable social utility, which is sufficient reason to try to maintain it.

But he thinks this (the social utility) is deteriorating and that the belief is becoming "more trouble than it's worth."

Besides, I don't believe in maintaining fictions for the sake of social utility (aka noble lies). And, I suspect, neither really does Cashmore. Though it's an interesting question why someone who doesn't believe in free will should care about knowing the truth...

When he tried to override this effect and move his foot outwards, his subjective experience was that he changed his mind and voluntarily moved the foot inward.

Who are all the "hes" in this sentence?

The studies he's talking about, which are also discussed at length by Daniel Wegner, prove a lot less than advertised. Under certain conditions, we can induce the experience of conscious willing even though the agent is making decisions under the compulsion of external factors. And.....what is supposed to follow, exactly? Do we conclude that there are no such things as physical objects because it is possible to induce false perceptual experiences? Conclude that there are no such things as minds because people are prone to overuse intentional explanations? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain....

It was an experiment Rodolfo Llinas performed on himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodolfo_Llin%C3%A1s

"Oh, and Cashmore also apparently thinks it's an argument against free will that the actions of the will are not caused. Um, no, that's part of the definition of free will."

One shouldn't confuse the fact that an action is undetermined with the fact it is uncaused. For example, when one looks at any of the diverse, wacky quantum effects that seem undetermined, it doesn't follow that they pop out of nowhere. Dr. Feser put this very well in his book Aquinas (which I regrettably do not own, but I found the quote on another blog).

“It is also sometimes suggested that quantum mechanics undermines the principle of causality insofar as it implies that the world is not deterministic. But the Aristotelian does not regard the world as deterministic in any case (determinism being a view associated with the mechanical conception of nature Aristotelians reject), and thus does not hold that every cause must be a deterministic cause. As the analytical Thomas John Haldane has noted, if we can appeal to objective, non-deterministic natural propensities in quantum systems to account for phenomena they exhibit, this will suffice to provide us with the sort of explanation the Aristotelian claims every contingent thing in the world must have.”

Ergo, thinking of free will as something uncaused is a mistake. Everything short of God has a cause. Whether it is deterministic or not is the real question.

Well, but what Cashmore is reviving is simply the old, old false dilemma: Either your actions are fully caused by something other than yourself or else they are random, but in neither case are you free. I suppose Cashmore's only originality lies in supposing that they could be a bit of both (hence his "trinity" of forces).

Since I know that Thomism is compatible with libertarian free agency, I assume that a Thomist would reject this false dichotomy as contemptuously as I would.

1st. Cashmore seems lucky that nature has caused this belief to occur in him, for it would be interesting to hear his explanation of how he would go about discovering that the belief is true, given that its outcome is determined as well.

2nd Lydia, I find your statement that Thomism is compatible with libertarianism curious since Thomas doesn't think that the AP condition is necessary to free will. If he did, he'd have to reject his view of divine simplicity and the beatific vision. At best Thomas (and Augustine) are source incompatibilists, but not Libertarians.

Wellll, I suppose that gets us into the question of whether an AP condition is necessary for libertarian free will in the extreme situation of the beatific vision. I tend to think of libertarianism more in terms of whether the person is merely a "conduit" for other causal factors or is a true originator of action.

As for your #1, I was waiting for someone to say, "Poor bloke. I guess he can't help it," but I wasn't going to be the first to say it. :-)

Lydia:

This is a good thread. I'd like to address myself to Perry's claim that Thomism is incompatible with libertarianism, which I deny as a Thomist like Ed Feser, and which Perry and I have discussed in the past.

Like many other theological traditions, both within and outside Catholicism, Thomism holds that the blessed in heaven are incapable of sin. But it does not follow that the blessed are unfree because they no longer have open to them any range of APs that would be sinful. Neither does it follow that, because they are irrevocably confirmed in their choice of God, they have no APs for good to choose from. To be sure, they have no alternative to seeing God as he is, and thus, according to John the Divine, "becoming like him." In Eastern-Christian language, they have no alternative but to be "divinized," because that what their sempiternal blessedness consists in. But given as much, it could well be the case that the ways in which divinization is manifest in the blessed, and experienced by them, are different from person to person, and from stage to stage in the blessed life of each person. That is what I believe, and that is generally affirmed by Orthodox theologians. And if so, then it could well be the case that the blessed have libertarian freedom to choose among a range of APs that would be correspond with those ways.

Like some other such theologians, however, Perry holds that the Catholic dogma of absolute divine simplicity (ADS), of which Aquinas is the most systematic expositor, precludes APs for good among the blessed. That is what I deny. ADS does not exclude different ways for divinization to be manifest in and experienced by the blessed, for the blessed are not absolutely simple. So, qua absolutely simple, God could eternally and unalterably will that his nature or essence be refracted in indefinitely many ways among the blessed, without losing its ad intra absoluteness. And if the modes of divinization are or could be plural, then it is quite conceivable that each blessed person in heaven could effectively and freely choose from among a range of APs that, while not uncountably infinite, would still be appropriate to the individual.

Michael,

The question is not if divinization can be manifested in different ways, but if there are different objects of choice to choose between. If created goods are out since they can never satisfy a la Augustine, then this leaves us with uncreated goods, of which there is only one, God. To speak of “refraction” glosses the matter as epistemological so that persons would think they are choosing different objects, but in fact, they weren’t. The question is what, not the how of existence. This masks the problem and seems out of line from Aquinas who denies that the AP condition is a necessary condition. Plenty of Thomists for a very long time have been quite clear on this so it is hardly a controversial reading. This tradition is so strong that it includes persons like Scotus, who denies it as well, though on different grounds. (See Simon Gaine’s treatment in his, Will There Be Free Will in Heaven?) In any case, your case lies on proving that Thomas thinks that the AP condition is necessary to free will, specifically in the case of Christ’s human free will and to the saints in heaven.

Lydia,

My point was not that he could not help the beliefs that nature produced in him, but that he has no way of finding out if they are true. If nature doesn't give a sh&! about truth, then why think that his belief is true? Nature produced the opposite belief in me. Without privileging his position, why think that the belief produced in him is true and the one nature produced in me is false?

@Lydia:

You write "...what Cashmore is reviving is simply the old, old false dilemma: Either your actions are fully caused by something other than yourself or else they are random, but in neither case are you free. I suppose Cashmore's only originality lies in supposing that they could be a bit of both (hence his "trinity" of forces)."

I cannot resist pointing out a similarity here between scientism and postmodernism. Postmodernists often make rudimentary mistakes in reasoning, but express these mistakes in a way that disposes the reader to think that something profound has been said. Oftentimes you get arguments that boil down to: "Historically, people have disagreed about X therefore there are no true claims regarding X." Most people can recognize that this is a howler, but when you express the same feeble argument as "The historical dialectic has yielded a shifting and fundamentally unstable multiplicity of inherently undecidable and equivalid contraries" it becomes, through some strange alchemy, a devastating rebuke of objectivity.

Likewise with Cashmore, Wegner et al. At bottom, their "arguments" amount to nothing more than "Sometimes, the experience of conscious willing is misleading and due to external factors. Therefore, experiences of conscious willing are systematically misleading and always the result of external factors." When you express it this baldly, most people can see the fallacy for what it is. Yet, when the same pitiful argument is tricked out in neuroscientific garb it suddenly morphs into a soul-destroying super-weapon.

Bullshit is bullshit, even when "tough-minded" analytic philosophers do it.

Perry, I suppose that's why some of this ilk are talking more and more about "epistemic nihilism."

(Gentlemen, please do keep the uses of the s-word out of the comments, even with symbols above the numbers. Thanks.)

Untenured, what I'm seeing more and more is a kind of pseudo-analytic philosophy. It bears the livery but has not the authority. Sloppy, shallow, and uninformed, it bills itself as "tough-minded" on the basis of such sophomoric credentials as a hatred of religion.

In the case of this article, what particularly struck me was the complete lack of any original research or important new ideas. The studies mentioned have been bruited about by others and much-discussed. They aren't Cashmore's own work, by any means! What Cashmore added was merely a reference to "stochasticism," thus reviving the old "either your acts are random or they are deterministic" thing (which goes back at least to Hume, if I recall correctly), plus some anti-religious bigotry and a little riff on Lucretius. And he spent six tightly-packed pages on this! His "figure" is a joke. How in the world does this rate being published in a peer-reviewed science journal? I thought scientists were supposed to, you know, make discoveries and stuff and publish those, not rehash things, add the word "stochasticism" and a little sneering at religion, and stir. I knew that there are politicized areas of science, but I guess I had thought there were higher standards outside of those areas. My faith in scientific peer review is more shaken than ever.

@Lydia: My apologies for the colorful language. This isn't just a problem with scientific peer-review, I think it impinges on philosophy as well. We must remember that a substantial number of analytic philosphers have explicitly ceded this territory to what they conceive of as "science." I'll bet dollars to donuts that in five years time, we'll have post-Quinean philosophers publishing papers in philosophy journals which explain how hard determinism is part of our "best theory of the world" despite the fact that its underlying rationale is risible. Heck, Daniel Dennett has already parlayed this general tactic into a lucrative career: spout off some impressive sounding empirical data, cloak a shoddy argument in it, declare victory and sneer with self-satisfaction.

Cashmore also raised the point in his article that the "illusion" of free will has a valuable social utility, which is sufficient reason to try to maintain it.

*giggles* Because we don't have free will, but it's handy for us to think we do, we should CHOOSE to promote the illusion.... *snicker*

If you really want to see the problems with these neuro"scientific" "refutations" of free will, you can do no better than to read Al Mele's Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will.

I assume you all know how to get to the Amazon page, but here is a review of his book by Manual Vargas:

http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17385

The question is not if divinization can be manifested in different ways, but if there are different objects of choice to choose between. If created goods are out since they can never satisfy a la Augustine, then this leaves us with uncreated goods, of which there is only one, God … The question is what, not the how of existence.

But every what is the effect of some how. An existence is always the outcome of an act, which because ab initio it may be differently effected – the how – may eventuate in different actualities – the what. That’s why there are different whats. So the differences among ways of divinization would seem to be the crux of the matter. Given a single good there may be many different ways to achieve it. I may get to the apple by climbing the tree or a ladder. That I have no choice about wanting the apple – that my desire for it is an utterly simple datum - does not mean I have no decision to make about how to get it. So likewise surely it is different to sing, "Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus" than it is to sing, "Dominus Deus Sabaoth," even though the intent of both utterances is the same - to worship - and even though their worship has the same object.

If Benedict is different than Francis and Gabriel, it follows that the timbres of their voices as they sing the Hosanna must also differ; likewise also with their inflections and interpretations of the score. And these differences would perdure (indeed, must ramify – such is the ineluctable challenge of choral song)(and the material of the irreducible jazz inherent in all creaturely performance), no matter how immaculate their unisons (not to mention the permutations of their organum, polyphony, harmony, polyrhythmy, and so forth!). Note that “unisons” is plural. No actual unison is like any other, for the same reason that no actual triangle is the Platonic triangle, and that no creature is God. If in Heaven creatures are disparate – if there, i.e., they actually exist – they must differ in their ways of being, including their ways of praising God.

By the same token, furthermore, Benedict’s iterations of the Sanctus must differ slightly each from the other, or they would not be different iterations. There are infinitely many equally beautiful ways for Benedict to utter the Sanctus in his own peculiarly Benedictine fashion; and therein lies the necessity of his freedom, for in order to utter any one of them – i.e., in order for there to be a Benedict anywhere in Heaven - someone must choose and enact but one of these ways from among all of them at each moment of his Heavenly career. If Benedict himself is not making this choice, then the song he sings is not properly his own, is not a Benedictine song at all, but that of the agent for whom Benedict is then but an instrument. In that case, Benedict fails to worship; in fact, he fails to be Benedict at all.

Finally, more than one Benedictine performance of the Sanctus must eventuate in Heaven, if Benedict himself is to be there; for Benedict is not a static entity but a life, a career of causally ordered moments, each of which enacts a peculiarly Benedictine form of existence – each of which is, i.e., a per-formance. If this enactment is not happening, Benedict is not happening. If there were only one Heavenly enactment of Benedict, his existence in Heaven would be as finished – over and done with – as the moment in which he decided to write out his Rule is today finished, over and done with here on Earth. I.e., Benedict would be, not alive everlastingly in Heaven, but dead everywhere forevermore.

Take away all differences in ways of divinization, and you take away all disparities of Heavenly actuality. You end then with but one iteration, uttered once by one being. But if all the iterations of the Sanctus were really just one, and if all those who uttered it were utterly the same, there would be no talk in Scripture of countless multitudes of angels and saints singing forever in Heaven. Revelation would instead tell us that when we achieve the beatific vision we will achieve nirvana: no breath, no life, no song, but rather an end to creaturely existence, and a perfect stillness and silence. Not an equal music, indeed not music at all, but rather perfect death.

If God is infinitely Good, then there are infinitely many goods that may be variously actualized (in just exactly the same way that there are infinitely many ways the Sanctus may be sung, or a triangle drawn, or a moment lived). So that no matter how many of the goods in God’s storehouse of potentialities creatures had ever already realized, there would still remain therein infinitely many more. Only thus could our future in Heaven be characterized as life, or as everlasting.

When I said, "An existence is always the outcome of an act," I should have said, "A creaturely existence is always the outcome of an act."

Whenever you see "tough-minded", quietly substitute "thick-headed".

Foxfier,
I thought it was clear I don't actually agree with Cashmore about free will being an illusion, hence the use of scare quotes. There are two points to make, one being that the awareness of choosing follows after the actual decision was made within a part of the brain, or to quote Rodolfo Llinas, we live under the tyranny of our neurons. This obviously doesn't mean there is no choice being made, it just happens before we are conscious of it.

The second point is whether the action chosen by the tyrannical neurons is determinate or indeterminate. Of course it is some of both, the brain is a mixture of layered structure and fluidity, and while evolution does reward accuracy, it also rewards flexibility and places severe energy constraints on how much the brain can expend in being accurate.
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/oct/06-brain-like-chip-may-solve-computers-big-problem-energy/

Step2-
you were clear! It's still a hilarious statement.

It should be noted that Libet himself does not think that his experiment ruled out conscious free will. He thinks rather that the function of the conscious will is to prevent an already planned operation from proceeding. On Libet's model, most of what we do is planned by pre-conscious routines, and most of that planning is good enough that it passes without change through the wicket of conscious evaluation, and proceeds to execution. This would account for the fact that researchers were only able to predict 60% of decisions before the subject reported a conscious decision. Under Libet's interpretation, 40% of the time consciousness vetoed the decisions presented to conscious awareness for final approval by pre-conscious routines.

A moment's introspection will reveal that this is very like what we experience. Most of the time we make decisions automatically, without second guessing them, and are even aware of them in only the vaguest terms. Learning would do us little good, otherwise, and much more of our behavior would be characterized by the fits and starts, halts, confusions, and changes of course that we experience when confronting a novel or problematic situation. It is only when novelty or difficulty arises, or the attention is aroused artificially (by, e.g., participation in an experiment) that the conscious veto really kicks into high gear. My guess is that the aroused consciousness vetos the 40% of decisions that the researchers could not predict, while in a more normal, relaxed state it probably vetoes almost none of the millions of decisions that have to be made to run an animal body.

I think, too, that while things like "I now choose to lift my arm" are perfectly legitimate examples of choices, it would be much more challenging (to understate the case) to run studies that would even make a decent _pretense_ of showing that something like, "I choose to convert to Buddhism" or "I've decided to accept that job offer" is dictated by sub-conscious routines.

Kristor -
He thinks rather that the function of the conscious will is to prevent an already planned operation from proceeding. On Libet's model, most of what we do is planned by pre-conscious routines, and most of that planning is good enough that it passes without change through the wicket of conscious evaluation, and proceeds to execution.

Oooh, that sounds interesting-- it sounds like it might mesh rather nicely with what I know of Catholic moral philosophy, where moral beings have free will. *files into the thought playpen*

Foxfier:

Yeah.

Under Libet's account, conscious volition is exerted always by a will to refrain from x; and to refrain from x is always implicitly to favor some ~x. Cf. Lent. Cf. also the aetymology of "decision:" to decide is to cut off.

Biological systems - indeed, cybernetic systems generally - seek their ends not directly, but rather by avoiding error. An organism cooking along merrily on autopilot will sooner or later run into trouble. But until that trouble manifests in its concrete experience as some sort of pain - pain being an error signal - the organism is unlikely to change course (because changes of course are costly). So if God heeds our prayer that he lead us not into temptation, he will provide us an early scandal, that will function to divert us from the paths we now blithely follow toward irrecoverable disaster.