Old news for the doggedly intellectual but still interesting.
Defending free will: A fruit fly makes choices (Reuters, By Julie Steenhuysen, CHICAGO | Wed May 16, 2007)
Lacking external input, Brembs said he had expected a pattern of entirely random movement or noise -- akin to static on a radio that is tuned between stations. Instead, the flies showed a pattern of flight that was generated spontaneously by the brain and could not have been random.
"The decision for the fly to turn left or turn right, which it changes all the time, has to come from the design of the brain," Brembs said. ...
George Sugihara, a mathematical biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego..., said the pattern of variability shown by the fly's choices revealed a non-linear signature -- something typical of many biological processes.
"We show free will 'can' exist, but we do not 'prove' it does," Sugihara said.
"Our results eliminate two alternative explanations of this spontaneous turning behavior that would run counter to free will, namely randomness and pure determinism," he said in an e-mail.
He said the results address the middle ground between simple determinism -- the brain as an input-output machine -- and utterly random behavior.
"We speculate that if free will exists, it is in this middle ground," he said.
On the other hand, if I think I don't gots it, you better watch your wallet, or I'll gets it!
Scientists say free will probably doesn't exist, but urge: "Don't stop believing!" (Scientific American, Jesse Bering | Apr 6, 2010)
One of the most striking findings to emerge recently in the science of free will is that when people believe—or are led to believe—that free will is just an illusion, they tend to become more antisocial. ...
Vohs and Schooler’s findings reveal a rather strange dilemma facing social scientists: if a deterministic understanding of human behavior encourages antisocial behavior, how can we scientists justify communicating our deterministic research findings? In fact, there’s a rather shocking line in this Psychological Science article, one that I nearly overlooked on my first pass. Vohs and Schooler write that:If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.
Perhaps you missed it on your first reading too, but the authors are making an extraordinary suggestion. They seem to be claiming that the public “can’t handle the truth,” and that we should somehow be protecting them (lying to them?) about the true causes of human social behaviors. ...
If [a] deterministic understanding of [a licentious] man’s behaviors leads you to feel even a smidgeon more sympathy for him than you otherwise might have had, that reaction is precisely what Vohs and Schooler are warning us about. How can we fault this “pack of neurons”—let alone punish him—for acting as his nature dictates, even if our own nature would have steered us otherwise? What’s more, shouldn’t we be more sympathetic of our own moral shortcomings? After all, we can’t help who we are either. Right?
In fact, a study published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that simply by exposing people to deterministic statements such as, “Like everything else in the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules” made them act more aggressively and selfishly compared to those who read statements endorsing the idea of free will....
7 comments:
In fact, a study published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that simply by exposing people to deterministic statements such as, “Like everything else in the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules” made them act more aggressively and selfishly compared to those who read statements endorsing the idea of free will....
My verdict is that there can be no compelling argument for determinism of any strong sort unless we have a robust and coherent view of causation, which we do not. Instead, we have social scientists and journalists who say things like that. I'm sure you noticed that exposing people to the statements made them act more aggressively. But what sort of research findings could justify that claim? Not anything less than close to 100% correlation, I'd say. For, short of that, we don't come close to explaining their behavioral shifts just by appealing to their exposure to the statements. Even if there were an extremely high correlation, it wouldn't follow that the statements made them do anything. Why should we be tempted for even a second to abandon the 'folk psychological' sort of account at we would ordinarily give, i.e., that lingering on these statements and their implications altered these people's moods, disposing them to act differently than they would? And wouldn't we need to explain the difference between these people's reactions and other people's by appeal to how they understood and interpreted the statements and their implications? That doesn't undermine determinism, of course, but it does show that we aren't going to get very far in thinking about determinism when our habits make us talk so carelessly about causation and psychology in the first place.
In The Quantum Enigma (by Rosenblum and Kuttner, not Smith), the authors strongly suggest that quantum physicists want to actively downplay the discoveries of quantum physics directly from a worry about the sort of philosophical conclusions they fear most people will draw. Namely that they'll suspect consciousness may have a fundamental role in the universe.
And of course, there's the reports Jerry Fodor and his co-author made when writing their book criticizing natural selection. (Basically amounting to, 'Even if you're right, even if your argument is strong, you should keep your mouths shut because you'll embolden people we don't want emboldened.')
djr:
I agree, which is why, perhaps despite appearances, the freewill thing is only a subsidiary interest of mine. Causation as such is a much more interesting topic for me, but, as I say, my latest teaching gig behooves me to focus on will, etc., and besides, they don't give million-dollar Templeton grants for causation as such!
Crude:
I will have a look at their book, thanks!
"He said the results address the middle ground between simple determinism -- the brain as an input-output machine -- and utterly random behavior.
"We speculate that if free will exists, it is in this middle ground," he said."
That's pretty much how I'd expect a materialist or detreminist to phrase it -- they can't comprehend that "free will" isn't even on the same axis as determinism.
I don't really know what 'free will' is supposed to be, so I don't know whether it's supposed to be on the same axis as anything else. For that matter, I don't know what an axis is, either. To be sure, I am genuinely puzzled by the problem; I find the randomness objection to 'uncaused cause' versions of libertarianism pretty decisive, but I don't quite think we can have a non-revisionary understanding of human action if we believe that every action or decision is necessitated by some prior event.
As so often, though, I find that animals are good to think with. Just as they convince me that consciousness and intentionality shouldn't require some sort of utterly non-physical, mental thing, they also make me wonder just how problematic it would be if every action or decision has a cause. So far as I know, nobody suggests that my dog has free will. Yet my dog certainly engages in goal-directed actions that flow from his own psychological dispositions, and I can engage in meaningful interaction with him (if you're wondering, yes, I do spend too much time gleefully anthropomorphizing my dog, but my considered view of what's really going on with him is not a product of it; if you don't believe me, read some stuff about dog behavior). Of course, my dog lacks psychological capacities that I have, and some of the capacities that we share are more complex in my case. So how much would we really lose if the only 'freedom' I have in comparison with my dog is a complex, higher-order ability to shape my own actions, habits, and dispositions in light of reasons that I can recognize?
The answer is: I don't know. I'm not a wholehearted compatibilist. But even in my dog's case, I doubt whether the standard determinist picture of a string of events necessitating one after the other is really quite right. So I'm confused about this problem, but I'm fairly sure that one reason why it's such a problem for us (and wasn't for, say, Aristotle) is that the event-causal picture is so deeply entrenched for us. And it troubles me that even the most elaborated defenses of an agent-causal account (e.g., O'Connor) seem to leave the event-causal story in place for everything except rational agents -- whereas it seems to me that we probably ought to be looking for an agent-causal story across the board. But of course, I haven't got much of an idea what that would look like...
In other news, Elliot, I thought of you when I read this review:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22750
Their first edited collection is pretty good.
Rather, I have only a faint idea of what it would look like:
http://books.google.com/books?id=rZxei7mN1gUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=revitalizing+causality&source=bl&ots=wU5CHs9diD&sig=0rZvcWkruT3SvI35lF3rFz28ylY&hl=en&ei=1eViTffPJ83ngQfT5IX6AQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&sqi=2&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
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