Any disagreements I have with your answers are so trivial that describing them is probably useless. I don't know if I would even characterize them as disagreements so much as perhaps a slightly different version of what you have written.
On the meaning of life, no disagreement at all. Sometimes I think that the key question in life is which short-term desires to deny in pursuit of longer term desires. It is a question I ask myself almost every day, all day long. The longer term desires are exactly the goals that evolution programmed my brain to pursue. Now that I have retired from what might be called a successful career and have four grown sons and a number of grandchildren, I wonder how much more I want to persuade my communities that I am a useful person and how much more I want to insure the success of my descendants.
On knowledge, again, no disagreement. Who can seriously argue that they have something better than the track record of science, which has accomplished things that seem miraculous to my primate brain? Still, I think much of scientific inquiry is a mystery, and that induction and deduction are used far less frequently than philosophers of science claim. Abduction, on the other hand, seems to me to occur regularly, but nobody understands how we abduct. That is, I think that scientists often think "X, Y, Z would make sense if W were true," but how does "W could be true" pop into their heads? I also think that discoveries often involve metaphors and analogies, and it also is not clear how scientists suddenly see analogical similarities.
On is there a god, I think it is important to specify which god(s). All of the gods proposed to date that I am familiar with are indeed unsupported by evidence, full of contradictions, and useless for explaining anything. For the most part, gods proposed to date all seem to have at least some characteristics of humans, which makes them look suspiciously like projections of the human mind. On the other hand, I would not rule out the possibility of something out there with intelligence that is so far beyond what we have that the being would appear godlike to us. Rather like Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law. The universe is a big place and a lot of time has passed that might have allowed the evolution of some super intelligence that has been able to meddle in our reality from a distance. The only "evidence" I have for such a super intelligence is that I have experienced a lot of weird things in my lifetime. Of course I am willing to accept that these are just weird things and have nothing to do with a godlike super-intelligence.
On politics, no argument at all. Which is why I find politics simultaneously interesting but depressing.
The morally right or wrong question might be the one question where my views diverge somewhat significantly from yours, but maybe not. My view, which I call, tongue-in-cheek, Real Utilitarianism, attempts to broaden the question of "What is good?" to "What is something good for?" I do not believe in timeless moral truths, the idea that certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are intrinsically good or bad. For me, the question "Is X good?" is meaningless, but that the question "Is X good for accomplishing Y" is meaningful and can be answered. So, if someone like Sam Harris wants to ask whether X promotes or detracts from human wellbeing or flourishing, that question might be answerable, although the answer might be really complicated, like, "X promotes (this particular kind of wellbeing) for these kinds of people under these conditions." Moral particularlism might be claiming something similar; I'm not sure. I have a paper in progress that explains why I think that both deontology and virtue ethics are actually special cases of consequentialism) and why Real Utilitarianism is the most sensible form of consequentialism.
On free will, I have mostly agreed critics of the concept, especially Robert Sapolsky. For the most part, it seems to me that philosophers who have argued for the existence of free will have not truly thought about what they even mean by "free will." I cannot take seriously those who think that there is a kind of free will that transcends naturalistic causality. However, I can certainly concede that there is a kind of "free will" if you define it as the ability to successfully self-regulate. Defined that way, it is not an either/or question, but, rather, a question of individual differences. Some people are better at self-regulation than others. This seems to me to be the kind of free will that Kevin Mitchell has written about, and even Sapolsky says that some people (e.g., addicts) are trapped by their desire for short-term outcomes and therefore lack the freedom to pursue healthier long-term outcomes. That is, individual differences in the ability to self-regulate are related to individual differences in achieving meaningful lives.
On consciousness, it is obviously an outcome of brain activity. But I have not yet seen a good explanation for how the brain does that, and I doubt that philosophers or psychologists will come up with a good explanation. I think it is more likely to come from electrical engineers than soft scientists or humanists.
On death, it is difficult not to be afraid of dangerous situations that might kill us because that is part of our biological inheritance. Given that eventual death is inevitable, I try to look on the bright side, that at least I can finally stop working so hard and be free from stress and suffering.
On happiness, of course we cannot achieve long-lasting happiness, particularly if we define happiness as pleasure. On the other hand, I often find myself in a state of contentment or acceptance, even when I am not happy. That is good enough for me.
Utopia? Of course not. I am curious what future civilizations will look like after I am long gone, which is for me the bitch about dying. Life is like reading a book without seeing how it turns out.
Should we bring more people into the world? This is a specific version of the question of what is morally good because it begins with the word "should." I would therefore counter with my question, "Good for whom or what?"
You'll be one of the first people I share it with when the paper is finished enough to be readable. You can get a preview here: https://sites.psu.edu/drj5j/real-utilitarianism/ I remember reading one of your posts on moral particularism. I need to go back and study it some more.
Good point on free will: "presencemaxxing", i.e. metacognition for emotional regulation and valued-based decision making in the presence of emotionally tumultuous and/or chaotic, uncertain and rapidly evolving circumstances as well as impulse-tugging is another instrumentally useful application of "free will" along with language games involving the law (consent, actions taken during duress, etc.). (meanwhile the philosophical debates are meaningless on account of just being signifier Escher-knots)
"Trivial disagreements" is a stretch. You laid out a full ethical theory in there, Real Utilitarianism, a specific account of free will as self-regulation, a fairly settled naturalist take on consciousness. That's several real positive commitments, stated with a fair amount of confidence.
The one bit that felt careful was the aside about a possible super-intelligence, some "weird" stuff you can't explain, held open instead of resolved either way. That's the only spot in the whole comment where you're actually withholding assent instead of asserting it. Curious why that one gets suspended and the rest doesn't.
You bring up two issues: (1) whether my views differ trivially or substantially from David's, and (2) how settled I am on my views. Concerning (1), my impression that my views are more similar to David's than different. It's all a matter of degree. Even Real Utilitarianism might turn out to be essentially similar to his moral particularism; we would have to study each other's views more carefully to figure out if that is true.
As for (2), indeed my views are fairly settled with a fair amount of confidence. Even for super-intelligence, I am inclined not to believe it. It actually seems more likely to me that we live in a computer simulation and that weird events are glitches in the system. I do consider myself a scientist, which means nothing is ever totally settled. I am always open to listening to arguments for a perspective that someone thinks is better than my perspective. I am especially open to views of consciousness, which I consider to be the strangest natural phenomenon on the planet. It is totally unclear to me how consciousness can arise from the physical workings of the brain and the role it plays (if any) in human behavior. Julian Jaynes enumerated a long list of activities that people think requires consciousness and then presents evidence that consciousness is not required for the activity. Truly a mystery imho.
These are all great except the free will one. What does "having the power to respond to our incentives" mean? Does this mean that I am not an alcoholic because I am just trying harder not to drink than the alcoholics? What does "power" mean in this circumstance? I do what I do because of who I am and I didn't consciously bring about who I am. We use blame, praise etc. as words about agents, not about etiology. I don't get the idea that punishment, reward and praise are inconsistent with free will pessimism. The idea I am exercising free will in not being a heroin addict is ridiculous. Strawson 1, Pinsof 0 - what you are describing isn't free will. It is compatibilism. Choice has nothing to do with free will - its where choices come from. I am watching a dirt dauber bring spiders back to its nest on my porch. It chose to hunt spiders instead of do something else, but is that free will?
Yes, you are getting at the reason why most people consider drug addiction a mental illness, and why most people (and most courts) think mental illness makes people less responsible for their actions. Just because people with mental disorders lack free will doesn’t mean that everyone lacks free will. Just because you didn’t consciously bring about who you are doesn’t mean you are incapable of making choices, in the sense of behaving in ways that are influenced by your internal simulations of threatened costs and promised rewards.
I could pick something more innocuous. I make choices, but I don’t choose my choices. Choices are an epiphenomenon. Free Will is a statement about where choices come from - an act of spontaneous self creation is what is ultimately required for free will. What you are arguing for is compatibilism - that the empirical truth of determinism is consistent with responsibility - and calling that free will. I have no problem with the idea that punishment and reward don’t require ultimate responsibility. We just pick a line of obvious causation (say mental illness) without noting that that isn’t a special category of causation phenomenologically. Its just we can’t see the more complex causation behind everyone’s actions while say frontal lobe damage is obvious and univariate. It was fated that I would be typing this comment at the moment of the big bang because the state of the world at Time B is entirely dependent on the causal web at B-1 in infinite regress. Choices are just what we see at the end of that process. Because we don’t know what causes us to think and act we think nothing causes us to think and act. That is free will. Saying “people hypothetically can do whatever if there is no gun to their head” is hardly free will. It is just saying that when causation becomes complex enough to pinpoint, we can just pretend there isn’t any. Much easier just to point out there is no free will, but does it really matter to anything that we care about?
I disagree that free will is a statement about spontaneous self-creation. When I say “he did it on purpose, of his own free will,” I’m not claiming that he pulled himself into existence by his own bootstraps. I’m just saying that he knew what he was doing and knew the consequences of his actions. And I disagree that we think “nothing causes us to act.” We correctly think that a variety of morally relevant things—intentions, awareness, sensitivity to potential consequences—cause us to act. If those morally relevant things were the causes of our action, then we are responsible for the action and chose it of our own free will. I think this is the most reasonable way to interpret our free will talk. I think this is the most reasonable way to interpret how our trial-by-jury system works. Jurors don’t say things like “the defendant’s actions were caused by nothing, therefore he is guilty.” No, they say things like “the defendant knew what he was doing, he was of sound mind, he was aware of the consequences, he committed the action intentionally, etc.” These are all factual claims that can be true or false—hence, the need for jurors to deliberate on them. Jurors deliberate on the actual causes of the defendant’s actions—not whether the defendant exists outside the causal structure of reality.
That is just a colloquialism. One probably borne of the fact that people don’t think very carefully about what free will would have to entail, not because people are natural compatibilists who have thought about determinism a lot. Although I may just think this because I grew up in religion. People do have a sense that people are creating themselves denovo every instant because it feels like we are. You hinted at this in your other points. When we deliberate between, say, having that third beer and not having it, we have no awareness of the causes that constitute that decision and it sure feels like it was born sui generis. People give all sorts of accounts for why they did what they did, but as you pointed out in another of your points, that is just self-justification or at best a partial apprehension of more complex, but no less determined, causation. I just don’t really see, in terms of what is going on causally, much difference between the choices a mentally ill person makes and the choices a non-mentally ill person makes in terms of one being more or less caused by unbidden forces rather than self created ad hoc. If you had perfect ability to ascertain the number and weighting of causal variables, you could predict everything. Did you ever watch Westworld? The Rehoboam machine did that and prediction felt an awful lot like control when it was nearly complete. One of my earliest atheistic observations growing up in church was that an omniscient omnipotent God would make the free will problem worse, not better, for this reason. I go to the gym and train every day, other people have a hard time doing any exercise at all. I don’t do this from my “free will” - I do it because I am composed in such a way that this is important to me and other things less important. Free will has to mean a whole lot more than overt and obvious coercion. It has to me you create yourself from nothing. See Strawson https://naturalism.org/philosophy/free-will/luck-swallows-everything
Great posts. The only thing I don't understand is the part about how an omniscient omnipotent God would make the free will problem worse instead of better?
How could you possibly have non-deterministic free will (that is the only thing worth calling free will) if a creator who knows everything ahead of time already knows how you'll turn out. The only mechanism of this knowledge would be an awareness of the causal factors and their interactive weight. If God has a plan, you are prewired to carry it out. If the Gospels were true could Judas have chosen differently? Of course not. We are all Judas. Some early Christians realized this and even in the Gospels there are hints that the Gospel writers in the voice of the Jesus character did too. Some noncanonical early Christian writers realized this dilemma.
except magical-incoherent boostrapping free will is a prevalent notion among non-experts, along with essentialism and dualism. i mean, literally most people subscribe to some version of islam, christianity, hinduism, and are indoctrinated with epistemically vicious theologies and tribal reasoning. i don't know if you just really really want to keep using the term 'free will', but i don't see in what sense, if determinism is true, is anything free.
it is completely acceptable in the legal system to think that if you weren't conspicuously coerced, and if you didn't have a host of conspicuous neurological / psychiatric conditions, then you deserve punishment for a crime *because* despite all the reasons-against you might've entertained, you did the crime *despite* still being equally able to do otherwise. this is literally what so many people believe, that no matter what 'influences' you, nothing can ultimately constrain or compel you to do anything, because you can always just step back and reconsider; 'just do it', you're this dignified 'agent' who literally has the final say, no matter the merely 'influencing' considerations, because people think that they're fundamentally separate from instead of being entirely of the physical universe.
however, it's never explained why a non-pathological brain mechanism outputting the do-crime sequence is relevantly different from the pathological brain mechanism outputting it. it's just brain mechanisms doing what they do necessarily, given that they are those brain mechanisms and not any others. sapolsky pushed this point by reminding you to ask 'how did you become that person that did whatever you did instead of something else?' if it's explainable, it's not free, and if it's not explainable, it's indistinguishable from arbitrary random spasms.
you're 'just' saying that he knew what he was doing and the consequences. ok, those are clearly meaningful and illuminating criteria, but notice that you're seeking an explanation, which is mechanistic, i.e. you are positing a configuration of state changes that work according to lawlike regularities. so are you also accepting that whatever he was doing and his knowledge are being necessitated by him *just being* the set of mechanisms that he is (instead of being a separate entity that is merely controlling worldly contingencies through a meat-machine), interacting with an environment that is just more molecules going beep-boop, neither of which anyone freely controls? like, what exactly is free in a deterministic universe? a major point of positing neurocognitive & any other kinds of mechanisms is that they are not free; a brain mechanism doesn't 'just' do whatever at any point of its operation; it only does x and not any other non-x options at each instance, precisely because it is the mechanism it is and not something else. the fact that biomechanisms are insanely complex and so lots of different things are done by similar organisms doesn't make them free in any sense.
galen strawson's basic argument works successfully against desert-entailing free will, regardless of if whether you think you are a brain or a soul or whatever.
People are guilty or not guilty as agents, not as people who could have done something else. I reckon to punish someone in hell forever because of how a God conspired to have the universe cause them wouldn’t be fair, but I am unsure why we need this free will talk to punish or reward actions. If someone has frontal lobe damage, that is disqualifying, but if they have a thread of 100 causes that came together in the right degrees and right combination to cause something, that isn’t disqualifying. Its external causation either way - one is just so diffuse we can imagine it is something else. We could just dispense with this altogether. People got along fine without free will belief for a long time without failing to reward excellence or punish wrongdoing. To chase people into eternity though, that is probably what free will belief is good for.
Yea, tacitly knowing how to do something, or knowing *to* behave a certain way (e.g. "I know not to mess with John Wick") is not the type of knowledge I'm talking about, and not the type of knowledge that philosophers generally discuss. I'm talking about factual knowledge or claims that can be true or false. For that kind of knowledge, science is the only game in town. Then again, the other kind of "knowledge" is also dependent on lots of empirical data and reasoning, in the form of sensory observations and unconscious inferences, so it's not wholly unscientific either. As for knowing "what it feels like" to be in love, I'm skeptical of that whole framing, as I think the hard problem of conscious is an illusion.
Yes, well, I just felt like being annoyingly pedantic.
I think the hard problem, or lack of one, is a separate question. I just think, for example, that even if you knew every scientific and empirical fact about schizophrenia, that you still wouldn't know *what it is like* to hear voices and see things like they do. Same for winning the super bowl or having small pox. I can use my imagination to guess what it would be like, but I still wouldn't know *what it is like* to the same degree as those who've experienced it, even if I knew every propositional fact about it. First-hand experience is a different kind of knowledge than facts. IMO.
Sure, I would translate this to: "no matter how much you learn about schizophrenia, you will not develop schizophrenia or the typical urges or dispositions of a schizophrenic person." Similarly, learning everything there is to know about heart attacks will not give you a heart attack. So I don't think knowledge of "what it's like" is factual knowledge. It cannot be true or false, any more than "get out of there!" can be true or false. Usually people think something has to be true to count as knowledge. If so, "what it's like" is not a type of knowledge. But this is just semantics, and if you want to call it "knowledge" be my guest. Just be clear about what sense of the word you're using.
Interesting. To me, *knowing* what it's like to be/do/experience something seems like it's obviously a type of knowledge, but that's probably a quirk of temperament/intellectual history. I never thought of knowledge as something that has to be true/false, just like knowing how to ride a bike isn't true/false. Just semantics, though, as you said.
I felt the same way when my kids were born. I've even written a poem about it that made its way into my book. I think you'll resonate with it, even though poems are bullshit :)
Pretty good jam, lemme just say on that last point:
I genuinely think there's more to life than death and sex. I'm making an educational music game and I don't have kids, and I don't feel devastated about life. Yes, a lot of people are like... Status zombies. Lots of drug addicts, and ego addicts. Sure, life is a bummer. But I'm fuckin sentient, I explore my environment and I create things, and when I see animals doing stuff I smile if I'm rested. Even the nasty humans.
There are many things in life that can give a person the same peace and joy you feel when you see your kid playing with toys. Hell, your kid playing with toys is one of them.
It's okay to lighten up and stay playful. I recommend it.
You left out a fair bit of nuance regarding the scientific realism debate. Opposing it is instrumentalism that states that science doesn't approximate truth but rather is a great tool to understand phenomena in accordance with our needs. Somewhere between is perspectival realism and constructive empiricism. Both grapple with the validity of theories and the perspectives of which they are employed.
I lean towards structural realism if we want to to understand the quantitative elements of the natural world. But knowledge is also experiential, subjective, and relational. Knowing what it is like to be Michael Jordan has a different epistemic nature than that of knowing Michael Jordan's measurables, stats, and biography.
Yes, thanks. I thought I’d briefly describe the position I like rather than list all the alternatives. There are lots of ways we use the word knowledge (e.g., “I know not to mess with John Wick,” “I know that voice,” etc.), but I’m focusing on propositions that can be true or false. “Don’t mess with John Wick” cannot be true or false—it’s not a factual claim—so it’s not the type of knowledge I’m talking about. I’m not talking about familiarity or acquaintance either: it’s easier to “get to know” someone by hanging out with them than by doing scientific experiments, obviously. I’d also put knowledge of “what it’s like” in that category—of things we loosely call “knowledge” but that don’t consist of propositions that can be true or false.
Reading the whole piece, I noticed that many of these apparently different answers make the same move: they return philosophical questions to the actual operation of living systems. Meaning becomes long-term goals, free will becomes responsiveness to costs and benefits, morality returns to emotion, and consciousness returns to neural processes. This makes me want to push one step further: are these explanations really independent, or have we simply stopped at different levels? If meaning, emotion, choice, relationships, and morality all participate in the operation of the same living system, perhaps what we should look for is not a separate answer to each philosophical question, but the common operating structure beneath them.
Thanks, yea that’s an insightful common thread. I think a complete scientific account of human nature would likely answer all or most philosophical questions.
Yes. And I suspect we need to go back to life itself. Many of the mechanisms we call “human nature” did not begin with humans. Perception, avoidance, acquisition, competition, and the maintenance of internal states all have much deeper biological histories. So a complete account of human nature may ultimately require us to first explain: what must a living system do in order to continue existing?
This is actually the direction I’ve been writing in for some time. I’ve already completed several pieces along this line, and over the next few months, the larger framework will gradually come into view.
Thanks man. Working on a proposal right now. Then I have to finish the proposal. Then I have to get an agent. Then the agent has to shop it around to different publishers. Then, if any buy it, I have to write the book. Then I have to wait for the publisher to print it which usually happens long after the book is finished. So not for a while. But thanks for the encouragement—I’ll get on that proposal.
I've got a philosophy degree, and have retained a deep fascination with the subject in the decades since. I've never known a philosopher to discuss "the meaning of life". They're far more interested in the meaning of "meaning".
Fair. But they do dance around it with topics like existentialism, ennui, Nietzche, nihilism, metaethics (parfit’s book was called “on what matters”), axiology, teleology, philosophy of religion, virtue ethics, etc. And nonphilosophers seem very interested in this question and generally look to philosophers to answer it.
Fantastic. Please write a book. I've read most of your blog posts and listened to most of your podcast episodes... I've also been reading about consciousness and just finished "Being You" by Anil Seth. One thing I'm still wondering about is why on earth the brain has the capacity to have the experience of "oneness with the universe" when under the influence of psychedelics. It seems so wildly out of proportion to what we would expect from a small chemical change and there is seemingly no obvious evolutionary reason for this capacity, even as a byproduct. After taking psychedelics, even Christof Koch was unsure how to fully account for experiences like this. Sam Harris says that it is so profound and odd that something like a handful of mushrooms, a few tabs of LSD or puffs of 5-MeO-DMT should produce that. It's like "reaching your right hand into your left pocket and pulling out the Andromeda galaxy." Does your explanation of consciousness account for why we can experience such an Extreme change in phenomenology?
Thanks for the kind words, Trevor. I started writing up a book proposal (just a book called "Everything Is Bullshit"), so that might happen at some point. As for your question about drugs, there's some great work by Ed Hagen on this. I'd recommend checking out our episode on Evolutionary Psychology (the Podcast) where we interview him. Basically drugs have anti-microbial and anti-parisitic properties that outweigh the costs of their neurotoxicity, so evolution made it rewarding for us to consume them in small doses. So that explains why drugs feel good. The feel-good response is plausibly an adaptation. But at the end of the day, they are neurotoxins designed to scramble neural communication. The plants evolved these neurotoxins to deter animals from eating them. So what the neurotoxin does, in small doses, is feel pleasant to us while also scrambling our brains. I suspect that is what's going on with psychedelics. If it weren't for our evolutionary history, the "one with the universe" feeling would be terrifying instead of pleasant, and we wouldn't be sitting here wondering about it. It would not be mysterious for a neurotoxin to produce terrifying confusion. Sure, it's mysterious why a neurotoxin would produce a pleasurable kind of confusion, but I think Ed Hagen solved that mystery.
I love the title… very unique. I just watched the Ed Hagen episode. Very interesting. I think I see your point. Regardless of how profound or life-altering (addiction cessation, significant reductions in depression and anxiety, loss of fear of death for terminally ill patients, enhanced creativity, experience of oneness with the universe) a psychedelic experience might be, the apparent metaphysical content doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about objective reality (death to my panpsychist intuitions). Given the tens of thousands of compounds plants and fungi have evolved and hundreds of neurotoxins, a few happen to fit the lock and key of our brains in remarkable ways. Even if mushrooms evolved psilocybin to punish fungivores for eating them, its beneficial and profound effects for humans are likely just unintended consequences of messing with the most complex object in the known universe.
I'm a philosopher & most of this is bang on, but I call bullshit on free will! IF people's intuitions actually aligned with "incentive responsiveness" (rather than weird supernatural things, folk psychological hobgoblins, & especially consciousness as some metaphysically special thing), THEN we'd hold people liable for crimes committed when they're unconscious (we don't), we'd consider algorithms & Waymos to have free will (I don't think anyone does), and we'd generally nod along with the research program of Daniel Wegner (people find it highly counterintuitive and threatening). Consciousness can be decoupled from the incentive-responsiveness (or "agency") part of behaviour, but when this happens people's intuitions are that free will disappears, i.e. free will is somehow bound up in reflective consciousness, the soul, spirit, etc. not merely agency, self-regulation, flexible behaviour, etc.
The compatibilist philosophers almost all try to establish we have some kind of sophisticated agency & then say we might as well brand it "free will", it's what we want anyway, it's what the legal system is based on, etc. But this is bullshit. The legal system (which is also bullshit) equates free will with consciousness, not agency. And if the thing they're saying is free will really did line up with people's intuitions, they should have no problem subbing out "free will" for a less loaded term. But they don't. There are huge incentives to maintaining the narrative that despite modern science and naturalistic explanation, we can still have free will. To me, that is not evil or anything, but it is prime bullshit.
Thanks for the friendly pushback, Jamie. To address your points, it seems to me like an unconscious person is not responsive to incentives. If you’re in a coma, I can threaten to punch you or whatever, but no matter how much I threaten you, you’re not going to respond to my threat. Same thing goes for a Waymo. I can threaten to set the Waymo on fire if it doesn’t run over my ex, but that is not going to change the Waymo’s behavior. I suppose we can imagine a contrived case where someone is unconscious but still responsive to incentives, but that seems overly contrived, because in real life, consciousness and incentive-responsiveness pretty much always go together. In fact, it seems plausible to me that part of the function of consciousness is to help us respond to our incentives—to help us plan courses of action, consider alternative courses of action, simulated the expected consequences of each course of action, and compare them against each other. So I think it’s quite sensible for us to think that consciousness and free will go together. They plausibly do.
I’ll grant you the Wegner thing—people do seem uncomfortable about that line of research. But I suspect what they’re uncomfortable about is the idea of some foreign entity—like an experimenter—manipulating them and getting them to act against their interests. Perhaps they envision their unconscious minds as such a foreign entity, and fail to recognize that their unconscious minds are them—or a part of them—and embody their interests. It seems more like confusion about where to draw the line between “me” and “not me” than a belief in uncaused choices. I agree there are incentives to reassure people that they still have free will. But I also think there are incentives to be a provocateur and say that free will is bullshit. I was personally swayed by the latter incentive, which is why I used to think free will was bullshit. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it just didn’t make sense.
Thanks, and sorry for my delayed response. I should have clarified in my first comment that by unconscious humans I was thinking of sleepwalking & other automatisms (rather comas, etc.). Call me a provocateur, but I've done some research on sleepwalking & the surprisingly complex & flexible behaviours some people perform, largely or completely unconsciously (depending on definitions). Admittedly those are pathological cases. But it's also true that everyone performs quite adroit behaviours even in deep sleep when they manoeuvre out of painful positions, adjust bedclothes, sleeptalk, etc. But this all sits within a larger program that sees consciousness as being not quite epiphenomenal, but only necessary for certain social cognitive tasks (e.g. communicating inner states, shared intentionality type stuff). Sadly though I'm yet to reap any incentives for this research.
Regarding free will, the definition I once came up with is something beyond genetics and environment that influences life outcomes. When I was younger my Dad told me there are three things that dictate how your life plays out - genetics, environment, and free will. I don’t know if anyone else has said this but I do think it fits with how a lot of people talk about free will. From this standpoint it is clearly made up and essentially a magical concept.
With that said, my view on free will evolved when I listened to your podcast on the subject. I had previously read Sam Harris’ book on free will and became convinced it was a myth. Then in the podcast Dave said something like “if I wanted to start waking up early every morning I could make myself do so, but if I broke a bone I couldn’t make it heal right away”. That made me lean toward more of a compatibilist position where we have something you could call “free will” but it’s interwoven with our genetics and environment, not a separate concept. However, I still think there’s a version of free will most people believe in that we don’t really have.
It's an empirical question whether people actually hold a false definition of free will. In evaluating that empirical question, we cannot just take what people say about free will at face value, because people often don't know what they believe, or claim to believe things they don't truly believe (e.g., theists bullshitting about free will to solve the problem of evil). I will grant that people might verbally pay lip service to some bullshit about free will, perhaps as a result of religious indoctrination or efforts to produce deepities. But when we look at a broader scope of empirical evidence--what actions people tend to punish, what factors cause people to lessen their punishments, what factors make people lose their desire to punish, what things jurors find relevant in reaching their decisions about mens rea or negligence or first vs. second degree murder, what behaviors elicit praise or condemnation from others, who people threaten to punish or promise to reward and why, what actions seem "voluntary" or "freely chosen" vs. accidental or involuntary, what aspects of a situation make an action seem more "voluntary" or make someone seem more "responsible" for it--it seems obvious to me that there is a lot of stuff here that needs to be explained, and it cannot be adequately explained by waving one's hands and calling it all a mass hallucination. Besides, how could such a mass hallucination have evolved in the first place? How did the first hallucinator gain a Darwinian advantage relative to her non-hallucinating peers? I have yet to hear a compelling answer to this question. I'm fine admitting that people sometimes say stupid things about free will. But I find it implausible that one of the most central aspects of our morality and legal system is based on literally nothing. That's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence--and, ideally, a really solid evolutionary psychology theory to explain the hallucination and all its various manifestations. I haven't seen anything remotely like that. By contrast, I've seen some really good, powerful theories about free will as a kind of incentive-responsiveness that seem to explain a lot.
Every decision you make has to be the result of prior causes. More specifically, every decision you make has to be the ultimate result of your genes interacting with your environment. There is a sense in which you make decisions, or it at least feels like you do, but the decisions are results of factors outside of yourself that you do not control. Your definition of free will was about your ability to respond to incentives, but ultimately do you really choose how you respond to an incentive?
Another way to look at it is that we do things based on emotions, but do we choose which emotions we feel? What might feel like a conscious choice tends to be an ex-post rationalization after we decide based on involuntary emotions. I think the concept of free will can be salvaged, I'm not rejecting it outright, but if you look at decisions in terms of ultimate causes then no one is really the author of anything that happens in his or her life.
Yea agreed that there isn’t exactly an “author” or a humunculus making our decisions. But there is enough integration and coherent agency to make notions of authorship a useful shorthand. I don’t think we need to choose the causes of our choices to make choices in a meaningful sense. And I don’t think we need to choose the appealingness of the options, or the vividness of their simulated consequences, to make choices in a meaningful sense. What matters is that we actually considered the options, and actually simulated their consequences, before acting. It’s not about whether an action had causes; it’s about whether the action had the right sort of causes—consideration of options, simulation of consequences, etc.—to meaningfully call it a “choice” and to sensibly hold the person “responsible” for it.
I think you cover the judicial and moral assessment aspects of free will quite well, but this omits the aspect of free will as a metacognitive tool - a tool which can change our evaluations of our capacity to choose.
There is quite a bit of recent research studying this aspect, demonstrating that belief in, or hearing assertions of the existence of, free will changes the decisions people make. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5239816/
In this way, free will can be understood in some ways similar to how you have described belief in God. These are cultural tools we have developed which can positively assist us in negotiating our environment and collaborating with others.
For the utilitarian-inclined, the question is not whether free will or God are true and existent. The question is: how are they useful?
Good post! There sure isn’t a one-size-fits-all philosophy, is there? As for the meaning of life, IMO those French philosophers living in occupied Paris got it right - the only meaning to your life is what you give it. Streets full of Nazis will make ya understand that, and at the rate the US is going we’d be wise to apprehend those lessons. God? Not if you believe in evolution. EOS. Religion is just another hierarchy for the power hungry to scale. And speaking of evolution, you mentioned child raising as an evolutionary behavior. For women it is but Robert Trivers, the famed evolutionary biologist (and madman) believed that for men the mere spreading of the seed is sufficient. While for women the burdens of procreation last much longer than the procreation itself, making women evolutionarily predisposed to be much more selective about partners. Everybody should read Trivers’ work. Fascinating.
My last thought - the people in life who seem to me to be the most miserable or unhappy are those who feel they did not fulfil their “potential” - whatever the fuck that is for them. So IMO there’s some correlation with lack of meaning in life and unfulfilled potential. But like Sartre and Camus said, that’s back to the individual. There ain’t a one-size-fits all.
Any disagreements I have with your answers are so trivial that describing them is probably useless. I don't know if I would even characterize them as disagreements so much as perhaps a slightly different version of what you have written.
On the meaning of life, no disagreement at all. Sometimes I think that the key question in life is which short-term desires to deny in pursuit of longer term desires. It is a question I ask myself almost every day, all day long. The longer term desires are exactly the goals that evolution programmed my brain to pursue. Now that I have retired from what might be called a successful career and have four grown sons and a number of grandchildren, I wonder how much more I want to persuade my communities that I am a useful person and how much more I want to insure the success of my descendants.
On knowledge, again, no disagreement. Who can seriously argue that they have something better than the track record of science, which has accomplished things that seem miraculous to my primate brain? Still, I think much of scientific inquiry is a mystery, and that induction and deduction are used far less frequently than philosophers of science claim. Abduction, on the other hand, seems to me to occur regularly, but nobody understands how we abduct. That is, I think that scientists often think "X, Y, Z would make sense if W were true," but how does "W could be true" pop into their heads? I also think that discoveries often involve metaphors and analogies, and it also is not clear how scientists suddenly see analogical similarities.
On is there a god, I think it is important to specify which god(s). All of the gods proposed to date that I am familiar with are indeed unsupported by evidence, full of contradictions, and useless for explaining anything. For the most part, gods proposed to date all seem to have at least some characteristics of humans, which makes them look suspiciously like projections of the human mind. On the other hand, I would not rule out the possibility of something out there with intelligence that is so far beyond what we have that the being would appear godlike to us. Rather like Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law. The universe is a big place and a lot of time has passed that might have allowed the evolution of some super intelligence that has been able to meddle in our reality from a distance. The only "evidence" I have for such a super intelligence is that I have experienced a lot of weird things in my lifetime. Of course I am willing to accept that these are just weird things and have nothing to do with a godlike super-intelligence.
On politics, no argument at all. Which is why I find politics simultaneously interesting but depressing.
The morally right or wrong question might be the one question where my views diverge somewhat significantly from yours, but maybe not. My view, which I call, tongue-in-cheek, Real Utilitarianism, attempts to broaden the question of "What is good?" to "What is something good for?" I do not believe in timeless moral truths, the idea that certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are intrinsically good or bad. For me, the question "Is X good?" is meaningless, but that the question "Is X good for accomplishing Y" is meaningful and can be answered. So, if someone like Sam Harris wants to ask whether X promotes or detracts from human wellbeing or flourishing, that question might be answerable, although the answer might be really complicated, like, "X promotes (this particular kind of wellbeing) for these kinds of people under these conditions." Moral particularlism might be claiming something similar; I'm not sure. I have a paper in progress that explains why I think that both deontology and virtue ethics are actually special cases of consequentialism) and why Real Utilitarianism is the most sensible form of consequentialism.
On free will, I have mostly agreed critics of the concept, especially Robert Sapolsky. For the most part, it seems to me that philosophers who have argued for the existence of free will have not truly thought about what they even mean by "free will." I cannot take seriously those who think that there is a kind of free will that transcends naturalistic causality. However, I can certainly concede that there is a kind of "free will" if you define it as the ability to successfully self-regulate. Defined that way, it is not an either/or question, but, rather, a question of individual differences. Some people are better at self-regulation than others. This seems to me to be the kind of free will that Kevin Mitchell has written about, and even Sapolsky says that some people (e.g., addicts) are trapped by their desire for short-term outcomes and therefore lack the freedom to pursue healthier long-term outcomes. That is, individual differences in the ability to self-regulate are related to individual differences in achieving meaningful lives.
On consciousness, it is obviously an outcome of brain activity. But I have not yet seen a good explanation for how the brain does that, and I doubt that philosophers or psychologists will come up with a good explanation. I think it is more likely to come from electrical engineers than soft scientists or humanists.
On death, it is difficult not to be afraid of dangerous situations that might kill us because that is part of our biological inheritance. Given that eventual death is inevitable, I try to look on the bright side, that at least I can finally stop working so hard and be free from stress and suffering.
On happiness, of course we cannot achieve long-lasting happiness, particularly if we define happiness as pleasure. On the other hand, I often find myself in a state of contentment or acceptance, even when I am not happy. That is good enough for me.
Utopia? Of course not. I am curious what future civilizations will look like after I am long gone, which is for me the bitch about dying. Life is like reading a book without seeing how it turns out.
Should we bring more people into the world? This is a specific version of the question of what is morally good because it begins with the word "should." I would therefore counter with my question, "Good for whom or what?"
Thanks, I like this idea of Real Utilitarianism. I’ll have to think more about it. Looking forward to your paper on it.
You'll be one of the first people I share it with when the paper is finished enough to be readable. You can get a preview here: https://sites.psu.edu/drj5j/real-utilitarianism/ I remember reading one of your posts on moral particularism. I need to go back and study it some more.
Good point on free will: "presencemaxxing", i.e. metacognition for emotional regulation and valued-based decision making in the presence of emotionally tumultuous and/or chaotic, uncertain and rapidly evolving circumstances as well as impulse-tugging is another instrumentally useful application of "free will" along with language games involving the law (consent, actions taken during duress, etc.). (meanwhile the philosophical debates are meaningless on account of just being signifier Escher-knots)
"However, I can certainly concede that there is a kind of "free will" if you define it as the ability to successfully self-regulate."
Nietzsche: 'there are only strong and weak wills.'
"Trivial disagreements" is a stretch. You laid out a full ethical theory in there, Real Utilitarianism, a specific account of free will as self-regulation, a fairly settled naturalist take on consciousness. That's several real positive commitments, stated with a fair amount of confidence.
The one bit that felt careful was the aside about a possible super-intelligence, some "weird" stuff you can't explain, held open instead of resolved either way. That's the only spot in the whole comment where you're actually withholding assent instead of asserting it. Curious why that one gets suspended and the rest doesn't.
You bring up two issues: (1) whether my views differ trivially or substantially from David's, and (2) how settled I am on my views. Concerning (1), my impression that my views are more similar to David's than different. It's all a matter of degree. Even Real Utilitarianism might turn out to be essentially similar to his moral particularism; we would have to study each other's views more carefully to figure out if that is true.
As for (2), indeed my views are fairly settled with a fair amount of confidence. Even for super-intelligence, I am inclined not to believe it. It actually seems more likely to me that we live in a computer simulation and that weird events are glitches in the system. I do consider myself a scientist, which means nothing is ever totally settled. I am always open to listening to arguments for a perspective that someone thinks is better than my perspective. I am especially open to views of consciousness, which I consider to be the strangest natural phenomenon on the planet. It is totally unclear to me how consciousness can arise from the physical workings of the brain and the role it plays (if any) in human behavior. Julian Jaynes enumerated a long list of activities that people think requires consciousness and then presents evidence that consciousness is not required for the activity. Truly a mystery imho.
These are all great except the free will one. What does "having the power to respond to our incentives" mean? Does this mean that I am not an alcoholic because I am just trying harder not to drink than the alcoholics? What does "power" mean in this circumstance? I do what I do because of who I am and I didn't consciously bring about who I am. We use blame, praise etc. as words about agents, not about etiology. I don't get the idea that punishment, reward and praise are inconsistent with free will pessimism. The idea I am exercising free will in not being a heroin addict is ridiculous. Strawson 1, Pinsof 0 - what you are describing isn't free will. It is compatibilism. Choice has nothing to do with free will - its where choices come from. I am watching a dirt dauber bring spiders back to its nest on my porch. It chose to hunt spiders instead of do something else, but is that free will?
Yes, you are getting at the reason why most people consider drug addiction a mental illness, and why most people (and most courts) think mental illness makes people less responsible for their actions. Just because people with mental disorders lack free will doesn’t mean that everyone lacks free will. Just because you didn’t consciously bring about who you are doesn’t mean you are incapable of making choices, in the sense of behaving in ways that are influenced by your internal simulations of threatened costs and promised rewards.
I could pick something more innocuous. I make choices, but I don’t choose my choices. Choices are an epiphenomenon. Free Will is a statement about where choices come from - an act of spontaneous self creation is what is ultimately required for free will. What you are arguing for is compatibilism - that the empirical truth of determinism is consistent with responsibility - and calling that free will. I have no problem with the idea that punishment and reward don’t require ultimate responsibility. We just pick a line of obvious causation (say mental illness) without noting that that isn’t a special category of causation phenomenologically. Its just we can’t see the more complex causation behind everyone’s actions while say frontal lobe damage is obvious and univariate. It was fated that I would be typing this comment at the moment of the big bang because the state of the world at Time B is entirely dependent on the causal web at B-1 in infinite regress. Choices are just what we see at the end of that process. Because we don’t know what causes us to think and act we think nothing causes us to think and act. That is free will. Saying “people hypothetically can do whatever if there is no gun to their head” is hardly free will. It is just saying that when causation becomes complex enough to pinpoint, we can just pretend there isn’t any. Much easier just to point out there is no free will, but does it really matter to anything that we care about?
I disagree that free will is a statement about spontaneous self-creation. When I say “he did it on purpose, of his own free will,” I’m not claiming that he pulled himself into existence by his own bootstraps. I’m just saying that he knew what he was doing and knew the consequences of his actions. And I disagree that we think “nothing causes us to act.” We correctly think that a variety of morally relevant things—intentions, awareness, sensitivity to potential consequences—cause us to act. If those morally relevant things were the causes of our action, then we are responsible for the action and chose it of our own free will. I think this is the most reasonable way to interpret our free will talk. I think this is the most reasonable way to interpret how our trial-by-jury system works. Jurors don’t say things like “the defendant’s actions were caused by nothing, therefore he is guilty.” No, they say things like “the defendant knew what he was doing, he was of sound mind, he was aware of the consequences, he committed the action intentionally, etc.” These are all factual claims that can be true or false—hence, the need for jurors to deliberate on them. Jurors deliberate on the actual causes of the defendant’s actions—not whether the defendant exists outside the causal structure of reality.
That is just a colloquialism. One probably borne of the fact that people don’t think very carefully about what free will would have to entail, not because people are natural compatibilists who have thought about determinism a lot. Although I may just think this because I grew up in religion. People do have a sense that people are creating themselves denovo every instant because it feels like we are. You hinted at this in your other points. When we deliberate between, say, having that third beer and not having it, we have no awareness of the causes that constitute that decision and it sure feels like it was born sui generis. People give all sorts of accounts for why they did what they did, but as you pointed out in another of your points, that is just self-justification or at best a partial apprehension of more complex, but no less determined, causation. I just don’t really see, in terms of what is going on causally, much difference between the choices a mentally ill person makes and the choices a non-mentally ill person makes in terms of one being more or less caused by unbidden forces rather than self created ad hoc. If you had perfect ability to ascertain the number and weighting of causal variables, you could predict everything. Did you ever watch Westworld? The Rehoboam machine did that and prediction felt an awful lot like control when it was nearly complete. One of my earliest atheistic observations growing up in church was that an omniscient omnipotent God would make the free will problem worse, not better, for this reason. I go to the gym and train every day, other people have a hard time doing any exercise at all. I don’t do this from my “free will” - I do it because I am composed in such a way that this is important to me and other things less important. Free will has to mean a whole lot more than overt and obvious coercion. It has to me you create yourself from nothing. See Strawson https://naturalism.org/philosophy/free-will/luck-swallows-everything
Great posts. The only thing I don't understand is the part about how an omniscient omnipotent God would make the free will problem worse instead of better?
How could you possibly have non-deterministic free will (that is the only thing worth calling free will) if a creator who knows everything ahead of time already knows how you'll turn out. The only mechanism of this knowledge would be an awareness of the causal factors and their interactive weight. If God has a plan, you are prewired to carry it out. If the Gospels were true could Judas have chosen differently? Of course not. We are all Judas. Some early Christians realized this and even in the Gospels there are hints that the Gospel writers in the voice of the Jesus character did too. Some noncanonical early Christian writers realized this dilemma.
except magical-incoherent boostrapping free will is a prevalent notion among non-experts, along with essentialism and dualism. i mean, literally most people subscribe to some version of islam, christianity, hinduism, and are indoctrinated with epistemically vicious theologies and tribal reasoning. i don't know if you just really really want to keep using the term 'free will', but i don't see in what sense, if determinism is true, is anything free.
it is completely acceptable in the legal system to think that if you weren't conspicuously coerced, and if you didn't have a host of conspicuous neurological / psychiatric conditions, then you deserve punishment for a crime *because* despite all the reasons-against you might've entertained, you did the crime *despite* still being equally able to do otherwise. this is literally what so many people believe, that no matter what 'influences' you, nothing can ultimately constrain or compel you to do anything, because you can always just step back and reconsider; 'just do it', you're this dignified 'agent' who literally has the final say, no matter the merely 'influencing' considerations, because people think that they're fundamentally separate from instead of being entirely of the physical universe.
however, it's never explained why a non-pathological brain mechanism outputting the do-crime sequence is relevantly different from the pathological brain mechanism outputting it. it's just brain mechanisms doing what they do necessarily, given that they are those brain mechanisms and not any others. sapolsky pushed this point by reminding you to ask 'how did you become that person that did whatever you did instead of something else?' if it's explainable, it's not free, and if it's not explainable, it's indistinguishable from arbitrary random spasms.
you're 'just' saying that he knew what he was doing and the consequences. ok, those are clearly meaningful and illuminating criteria, but notice that you're seeking an explanation, which is mechanistic, i.e. you are positing a configuration of state changes that work according to lawlike regularities. so are you also accepting that whatever he was doing and his knowledge are being necessitated by him *just being* the set of mechanisms that he is (instead of being a separate entity that is merely controlling worldly contingencies through a meat-machine), interacting with an environment that is just more molecules going beep-boop, neither of which anyone freely controls? like, what exactly is free in a deterministic universe? a major point of positing neurocognitive & any other kinds of mechanisms is that they are not free; a brain mechanism doesn't 'just' do whatever at any point of its operation; it only does x and not any other non-x options at each instance, precisely because it is the mechanism it is and not something else. the fact that biomechanisms are insanely complex and so lots of different things are done by similar organisms doesn't make them free in any sense.
galen strawson's basic argument works successfully against desert-entailing free will, regardless of if whether you think you are a brain or a soul or whatever.
People are guilty or not guilty as agents, not as people who could have done something else. I reckon to punish someone in hell forever because of how a God conspired to have the universe cause them wouldn’t be fair, but I am unsure why we need this free will talk to punish or reward actions. If someone has frontal lobe damage, that is disqualifying, but if they have a thread of 100 causes that came together in the right degrees and right combination to cause something, that isn’t disqualifying. Its external causation either way - one is just so diffuse we can imagine it is something else. We could just dispense with this altogether. People got along fine without free will belief for a long time without failing to reward excellence or punish wrongdoing. To chase people into eternity though, that is probably what free will belief is good for.
“Whatever our best science tells us.”
That’s only one kind of knowledge.
I’m a huge fan of science, but it didn’t tell you how to ride a bike or what it feels like to be in love.
Nice essay though.
Yea, tacitly knowing how to do something, or knowing *to* behave a certain way (e.g. "I know not to mess with John Wick") is not the type of knowledge I'm talking about, and not the type of knowledge that philosophers generally discuss. I'm talking about factual knowledge or claims that can be true or false. For that kind of knowledge, science is the only game in town. Then again, the other kind of "knowledge" is also dependent on lots of empirical data and reasoning, in the form of sensory observations and unconscious inferences, so it's not wholly unscientific either. As for knowing "what it feels like" to be in love, I'm skeptical of that whole framing, as I think the hard problem of conscious is an illusion.
Yes, well, I just felt like being annoyingly pedantic.
I think the hard problem, or lack of one, is a separate question. I just think, for example, that even if you knew every scientific and empirical fact about schizophrenia, that you still wouldn't know *what it is like* to hear voices and see things like they do. Same for winning the super bowl or having small pox. I can use my imagination to guess what it would be like, but I still wouldn't know *what it is like* to the same degree as those who've experienced it, even if I knew every propositional fact about it. First-hand experience is a different kind of knowledge than facts. IMO.
Sure, I would translate this to: "no matter how much you learn about schizophrenia, you will not develop schizophrenia or the typical urges or dispositions of a schizophrenic person." Similarly, learning everything there is to know about heart attacks will not give you a heart attack. So I don't think knowledge of "what it's like" is factual knowledge. It cannot be true or false, any more than "get out of there!" can be true or false. Usually people think something has to be true to count as knowledge. If so, "what it's like" is not a type of knowledge. But this is just semantics, and if you want to call it "knowledge" be my guest. Just be clear about what sense of the word you're using.
Interesting. To me, *knowing* what it's like to be/do/experience something seems like it's obviously a type of knowledge, but that's probably a quirk of temperament/intellectual history. I never thought of knowledge as something that has to be true/false, just like knowing how to ride a bike isn't true/false. Just semantics, though, as you said.
An excellant essay on tough but important topics.
Nice work—lots of good stuff in here.
I felt the same way when my kids were born. I've even written a poem about it that made its way into my book. I think you'll resonate with it, even though poems are bullshit :)
"It’s terrifying to have a child
when the guiding principle of your life
is
cynicism
at first you don’t quite understand
what to make of this little piece of living human
but then a new kind of love
blooms in your chest and in your brain,
different from every love you’ve known before
that’s the moment when
even though you
more than anyone
know that everything is just
the dance of molecules
and therefore
without meaning
you understand
at the same time
that this new love
is going to make you
better
happier
"
Pretty good jam, lemme just say on that last point:
I genuinely think there's more to life than death and sex. I'm making an educational music game and I don't have kids, and I don't feel devastated about life. Yes, a lot of people are like... Status zombies. Lots of drug addicts, and ego addicts. Sure, life is a bummer. But I'm fuckin sentient, I explore my environment and I create things, and when I see animals doing stuff I smile if I'm rested. Even the nasty humans.
There are many things in life that can give a person the same peace and joy you feel when you see your kid playing with toys. Hell, your kid playing with toys is one of them.
It's okay to lighten up and stay playful. I recommend it.
Yea not saying kids are the only source of meaning. But they’re a pretty big one for most people. Good luck with your music game.
What is knowledge?
You left out a fair bit of nuance regarding the scientific realism debate. Opposing it is instrumentalism that states that science doesn't approximate truth but rather is a great tool to understand phenomena in accordance with our needs. Somewhere between is perspectival realism and constructive empiricism. Both grapple with the validity of theories and the perspectives of which they are employed.
I lean towards structural realism if we want to to understand the quantitative elements of the natural world. But knowledge is also experiential, subjective, and relational. Knowing what it is like to be Michael Jordan has a different epistemic nature than that of knowing Michael Jordan's measurables, stats, and biography.
Yes, thanks. I thought I’d briefly describe the position I like rather than list all the alternatives. There are lots of ways we use the word knowledge (e.g., “I know not to mess with John Wick,” “I know that voice,” etc.), but I’m focusing on propositions that can be true or false. “Don’t mess with John Wick” cannot be true or false—it’s not a factual claim—so it’s not the type of knowledge I’m talking about. I’m not talking about familiarity or acquaintance either: it’s easier to “get to know” someone by hanging out with them than by doing scientific experiments, obviously. I’d also put knowledge of “what it’s like” in that category—of things we loosely call “knowledge” but that don’t consist of propositions that can be true or false.
Reading the whole piece, I noticed that many of these apparently different answers make the same move: they return philosophical questions to the actual operation of living systems. Meaning becomes long-term goals, free will becomes responsiveness to costs and benefits, morality returns to emotion, and consciousness returns to neural processes. This makes me want to push one step further: are these explanations really independent, or have we simply stopped at different levels? If meaning, emotion, choice, relationships, and morality all participate in the operation of the same living system, perhaps what we should look for is not a separate answer to each philosophical question, but the common operating structure beneath them.
Thanks, yea that’s an insightful common thread. I think a complete scientific account of human nature would likely answer all or most philosophical questions.
Yes. And I suspect we need to go back to life itself. Many of the mechanisms we call “human nature” did not begin with humans. Perception, avoidance, acquisition, competition, and the maintenance of internal states all have much deeper biological histories. So a complete account of human nature may ultimately require us to first explain: what must a living system do in order to continue existing?
This is actually the direction I’ve been writing in for some time. I’ve already completed several pieces along this line, and over the next few months, the larger framework will gradually come into view.
Dude I love your stuff. When are you gonna write the Everything is Bullshit book??
Thanks man. Working on a proposal right now. Then I have to finish the proposal. Then I have to get an agent. Then the agent has to shop it around to different publishers. Then, if any buy it, I have to write the book. Then I have to wait for the publisher to print it which usually happens long after the book is finished. So not for a while. But thanks for the encouragement—I’ll get on that proposal.
I've got a philosophy degree, and have retained a deep fascination with the subject in the decades since. I've never known a philosopher to discuss "the meaning of life". They're far more interested in the meaning of "meaning".
Fair. But they do dance around it with topics like existentialism, ennui, Nietzche, nihilism, metaethics (parfit’s book was called “on what matters”), axiology, teleology, philosophy of religion, virtue ethics, etc. And nonphilosophers seem very interested in this question and generally look to philosophers to answer it.
Fantastic. Please write a book. I've read most of your blog posts and listened to most of your podcast episodes... I've also been reading about consciousness and just finished "Being You" by Anil Seth. One thing I'm still wondering about is why on earth the brain has the capacity to have the experience of "oneness with the universe" when under the influence of psychedelics. It seems so wildly out of proportion to what we would expect from a small chemical change and there is seemingly no obvious evolutionary reason for this capacity, even as a byproduct. After taking psychedelics, even Christof Koch was unsure how to fully account for experiences like this. Sam Harris says that it is so profound and odd that something like a handful of mushrooms, a few tabs of LSD or puffs of 5-MeO-DMT should produce that. It's like "reaching your right hand into your left pocket and pulling out the Andromeda galaxy." Does your explanation of consciousness account for why we can experience such an Extreme change in phenomenology?
Thanks for the kind words, Trevor. I started writing up a book proposal (just a book called "Everything Is Bullshit"), so that might happen at some point. As for your question about drugs, there's some great work by Ed Hagen on this. I'd recommend checking out our episode on Evolutionary Psychology (the Podcast) where we interview him. Basically drugs have anti-microbial and anti-parisitic properties that outweigh the costs of their neurotoxicity, so evolution made it rewarding for us to consume them in small doses. So that explains why drugs feel good. The feel-good response is plausibly an adaptation. But at the end of the day, they are neurotoxins designed to scramble neural communication. The plants evolved these neurotoxins to deter animals from eating them. So what the neurotoxin does, in small doses, is feel pleasant to us while also scrambling our brains. I suspect that is what's going on with psychedelics. If it weren't for our evolutionary history, the "one with the universe" feeling would be terrifying instead of pleasant, and we wouldn't be sitting here wondering about it. It would not be mysterious for a neurotoxin to produce terrifying confusion. Sure, it's mysterious why a neurotoxin would produce a pleasurable kind of confusion, but I think Ed Hagen solved that mystery.
I love the title… very unique. I just watched the Ed Hagen episode. Very interesting. I think I see your point. Regardless of how profound or life-altering (addiction cessation, significant reductions in depression and anxiety, loss of fear of death for terminally ill patients, enhanced creativity, experience of oneness with the universe) a psychedelic experience might be, the apparent metaphysical content doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about objective reality (death to my panpsychist intuitions). Given the tens of thousands of compounds plants and fungi have evolved and hundreds of neurotoxins, a few happen to fit the lock and key of our brains in remarkable ways. Even if mushrooms evolved psilocybin to punish fungivores for eating them, its beneficial and profound effects for humans are likely just unintended consequences of messing with the most complex object in the known universe.
I'm a philosopher & most of this is bang on, but I call bullshit on free will! IF people's intuitions actually aligned with "incentive responsiveness" (rather than weird supernatural things, folk psychological hobgoblins, & especially consciousness as some metaphysically special thing), THEN we'd hold people liable for crimes committed when they're unconscious (we don't), we'd consider algorithms & Waymos to have free will (I don't think anyone does), and we'd generally nod along with the research program of Daniel Wegner (people find it highly counterintuitive and threatening). Consciousness can be decoupled from the incentive-responsiveness (or "agency") part of behaviour, but when this happens people's intuitions are that free will disappears, i.e. free will is somehow bound up in reflective consciousness, the soul, spirit, etc. not merely agency, self-regulation, flexible behaviour, etc.
The compatibilist philosophers almost all try to establish we have some kind of sophisticated agency & then say we might as well brand it "free will", it's what we want anyway, it's what the legal system is based on, etc. But this is bullshit. The legal system (which is also bullshit) equates free will with consciousness, not agency. And if the thing they're saying is free will really did line up with people's intuitions, they should have no problem subbing out "free will" for a less loaded term. But they don't. There are huge incentives to maintaining the narrative that despite modern science and naturalistic explanation, we can still have free will. To me, that is not evil or anything, but it is prime bullshit.
Thanks for the friendly pushback, Jamie. To address your points, it seems to me like an unconscious person is not responsive to incentives. If you’re in a coma, I can threaten to punch you or whatever, but no matter how much I threaten you, you’re not going to respond to my threat. Same thing goes for a Waymo. I can threaten to set the Waymo on fire if it doesn’t run over my ex, but that is not going to change the Waymo’s behavior. I suppose we can imagine a contrived case where someone is unconscious but still responsive to incentives, but that seems overly contrived, because in real life, consciousness and incentive-responsiveness pretty much always go together. In fact, it seems plausible to me that part of the function of consciousness is to help us respond to our incentives—to help us plan courses of action, consider alternative courses of action, simulated the expected consequences of each course of action, and compare them against each other. So I think it’s quite sensible for us to think that consciousness and free will go together. They plausibly do.
I’ll grant you the Wegner thing—people do seem uncomfortable about that line of research. But I suspect what they’re uncomfortable about is the idea of some foreign entity—like an experimenter—manipulating them and getting them to act against their interests. Perhaps they envision their unconscious minds as such a foreign entity, and fail to recognize that their unconscious minds are them—or a part of them—and embody their interests. It seems more like confusion about where to draw the line between “me” and “not me” than a belief in uncaused choices. I agree there are incentives to reassure people that they still have free will. But I also think there are incentives to be a provocateur and say that free will is bullshit. I was personally swayed by the latter incentive, which is why I used to think free will was bullshit. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it just didn’t make sense.
Thanks, and sorry for my delayed response. I should have clarified in my first comment that by unconscious humans I was thinking of sleepwalking & other automatisms (rather comas, etc.). Call me a provocateur, but I've done some research on sleepwalking & the surprisingly complex & flexible behaviours some people perform, largely or completely unconsciously (depending on definitions). Admittedly those are pathological cases. But it's also true that everyone performs quite adroit behaviours even in deep sleep when they manoeuvre out of painful positions, adjust bedclothes, sleeptalk, etc. But this all sits within a larger program that sees consciousness as being not quite epiphenomenal, but only necessary for certain social cognitive tasks (e.g. communicating inner states, shared intentionality type stuff). Sadly though I'm yet to reap any incentives for this research.
PS I like the DMN vs TPN consciousness idea, can't wait to read it.
I absolutely loved your conclusion and feel the exact same way 100%. Long live having and loving children.
Regarding free will, the definition I once came up with is something beyond genetics and environment that influences life outcomes. When I was younger my Dad told me there are three things that dictate how your life plays out - genetics, environment, and free will. I don’t know if anyone else has said this but I do think it fits with how a lot of people talk about free will. From this standpoint it is clearly made up and essentially a magical concept.
With that said, my view on free will evolved when I listened to your podcast on the subject. I had previously read Sam Harris’ book on free will and became convinced it was a myth. Then in the podcast Dave said something like “if I wanted to start waking up early every morning I could make myself do so, but if I broke a bone I couldn’t make it heal right away”. That made me lean toward more of a compatibilist position where we have something you could call “free will” but it’s interwoven with our genetics and environment, not a separate concept. However, I still think there’s a version of free will most people believe in that we don’t really have.
It's an empirical question whether people actually hold a false definition of free will. In evaluating that empirical question, we cannot just take what people say about free will at face value, because people often don't know what they believe, or claim to believe things they don't truly believe (e.g., theists bullshitting about free will to solve the problem of evil). I will grant that people might verbally pay lip service to some bullshit about free will, perhaps as a result of religious indoctrination or efforts to produce deepities. But when we look at a broader scope of empirical evidence--what actions people tend to punish, what factors cause people to lessen their punishments, what factors make people lose their desire to punish, what things jurors find relevant in reaching their decisions about mens rea or negligence or first vs. second degree murder, what behaviors elicit praise or condemnation from others, who people threaten to punish or promise to reward and why, what actions seem "voluntary" or "freely chosen" vs. accidental or involuntary, what aspects of a situation make an action seem more "voluntary" or make someone seem more "responsible" for it--it seems obvious to me that there is a lot of stuff here that needs to be explained, and it cannot be adequately explained by waving one's hands and calling it all a mass hallucination. Besides, how could such a mass hallucination have evolved in the first place? How did the first hallucinator gain a Darwinian advantage relative to her non-hallucinating peers? I have yet to hear a compelling answer to this question. I'm fine admitting that people sometimes say stupid things about free will. But I find it implausible that one of the most central aspects of our morality and legal system is based on literally nothing. That's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence--and, ideally, a really solid evolutionary psychology theory to explain the hallucination and all its various manifestations. I haven't seen anything remotely like that. By contrast, I've seen some really good, powerful theories about free will as a kind of incentive-responsiveness that seem to explain a lot.
Every decision you make has to be the result of prior causes. More specifically, every decision you make has to be the ultimate result of your genes interacting with your environment. There is a sense in which you make decisions, or it at least feels like you do, but the decisions are results of factors outside of yourself that you do not control. Your definition of free will was about your ability to respond to incentives, but ultimately do you really choose how you respond to an incentive?
Another way to look at it is that we do things based on emotions, but do we choose which emotions we feel? What might feel like a conscious choice tends to be an ex-post rationalization after we decide based on involuntary emotions. I think the concept of free will can be salvaged, I'm not rejecting it outright, but if you look at decisions in terms of ultimate causes then no one is really the author of anything that happens in his or her life.
Yea agreed that there isn’t exactly an “author” or a humunculus making our decisions. But there is enough integration and coherent agency to make notions of authorship a useful shorthand. I don’t think we need to choose the causes of our choices to make choices in a meaningful sense. And I don’t think we need to choose the appealingness of the options, or the vividness of their simulated consequences, to make choices in a meaningful sense. What matters is that we actually considered the options, and actually simulated their consequences, before acting. It’s not about whether an action had causes; it’s about whether the action had the right sort of causes—consideration of options, simulation of consequences, etc.—to meaningfully call it a “choice” and to sensibly hold the person “responsible” for it.
I think you cover the judicial and moral assessment aspects of free will quite well, but this omits the aspect of free will as a metacognitive tool - a tool which can change our evaluations of our capacity to choose.
There is quite a bit of recent research studying this aspect, demonstrating that belief in, or hearing assertions of the existence of, free will changes the decisions people make. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5239816/
In this way, free will can be understood in some ways similar to how you have described belief in God. These are cultural tools we have developed which can positively assist us in negotiating our environment and collaborating with others.
For the utilitarian-inclined, the question is not whether free will or God are true and existent. The question is: how are they useful?
Good post! There sure isn’t a one-size-fits-all philosophy, is there? As for the meaning of life, IMO those French philosophers living in occupied Paris got it right - the only meaning to your life is what you give it. Streets full of Nazis will make ya understand that, and at the rate the US is going we’d be wise to apprehend those lessons. God? Not if you believe in evolution. EOS. Religion is just another hierarchy for the power hungry to scale. And speaking of evolution, you mentioned child raising as an evolutionary behavior. For women it is but Robert Trivers, the famed evolutionary biologist (and madman) believed that for men the mere spreading of the seed is sufficient. While for women the burdens of procreation last much longer than the procreation itself, making women evolutionarily predisposed to be much more selective about partners. Everybody should read Trivers’ work. Fascinating.
My last thought - the people in life who seem to me to be the most miserable or unhappy are those who feel they did not fulfil their “potential” - whatever the fuck that is for them. So IMO there’s some correlation with lack of meaning in life and unfulfilled potential. But like Sartre and Camus said, that’s back to the individual. There ain’t a one-size-fits all.
Potential for what?
BIngo! That is exactly the fucking question each and every one of us has to figure out for ourselves.