"Is there a thesis of Determinism?"

He asks, while birds most likely chirp.

I will be giving a talk in Metaphysics soon (not this week but next). I will be discussing, among other things, P.F. Strawson's essay, "Freedom and Resentment" (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwstrawson1.htm).

I wanted to start this week by throwing out some teasers of what I will be talking about. Getting some early feedback will be helpful in getting me prepared and in anticipating possible concerns.

Early on in “Freedom and Resentment” Strawson says,

“Some philosophers say that they do not know what the thesis of determinism is. Others say, or imply, that they do know what it is. Of these some—the pessimists, perhaps—hold that if the thesis is true, then the concepts of moral obligation and responsibility really have no application, and the practices of punishing and blaming, of expressing moral condemnation and approval, are really unjustified. Others—the optimists perhaps—hold that these concepts and practices in no way lose their raison d’etre if the thesis of determinism is true. [ . . .] If I am asked to which of these parties I belong to, I must say that it is first of all to the party of those who do not know what the thesis of determinism is.”

Since Strawson does not make much of this point (I used to just read it as a coy nod to ordinary language philosophy’s scruples), I want focus this post on this question—that is, on whether there is a thesis of determinism that is intelligible, well-motivated, and substantive. By “substantive” I mean a thesis that gives us reason to believe we are discussing what the actual world, in its most general aspects, is really like—that is, whether determinism is telling us something true about the world we experience on a day-to-day basis and explain via our best science.

One fairly standard way of construing the thesis of determinism is as follows:

“Consider now the existence of certain events governed by natural laws. It appears as if any such events must occur. Given a prior state of the world that is governed by laws of nature, a unique state of the world is forthcoming. It is helpful to think of the laws of nature operating as mathematical functions and the antecedent events as arguments for these functions. Once the function and the argument (input of the function) are settled, the output is necessitated. To implement the mathematical analogy, let f(x) = 5x + 2 and the input of the function be 3. The output of f(3) is 17, a mathematically necessitated result relative to the function and argument. Just as any other result is mathematically impossible—a violation of the laws or rules of mathematics—any event other than the one that actually occurs, relative to the antecedent state of the world and the laws of nature, is naturally impossible. Only by supernatural interference could an outcome other than the actual one occur in a world with the identical prior state and laws. Determinism can then be defined as claiming that it is logically impossible that there are worlds with natural laws and pasts congruent with the actual world and yet with futures distinct from that of the actual world.”

Mark Bernstein, “Fatalism,” Oxford Handbook of Free Will, p. 68

This kind of thesis of Determinism might be called a thesis of Global Determinism. It works as follows:

(1) Start with any possible world W whose causal order is structured by laws of nature. (Assume, for the time being, that the concept, ‘laws of nature,’ is coherent and we know how to construe it. Laws of nature, according to this construal, would operate like mathematical functions in Bernstein’s sense: taking definite inputs as arguments, they would produce definite outputs).

(2) Assume that at some of level of description there are structurally homogeneous, basic particulars in W out of which all complex objects and relations in W are composed (we can assume, to make it easier to imagine, that these particulars are physical, but they need not be to carry through the argument). A definitely describable system of relationships among all of these particulars at some time t is a ‘Global Event.’ Global Events are the “arguments” upon which the laws of nature do their computational work. In the worlds in which these particulars are physical, we can assume that the character of a Global Event will be given by a complete description of the spatio-temporal arrangements of basic particles in fields of force (or whatever our best science tell us is the best idealization of a Global Event).

(3) Conclude that, in any such world W, the laws of nature must compute, at t, only one possible future (one future Global Event at time t2 ).

The reason this is “Global Determinism” is because what the thesis is quantifying over is worlds:

(GD): There is a world W such that if (1) and (2) are true of W, then (3) is also true of W.

If the actual world satisfies GD, then we live in a deterministic world. Do we have any reason to believe we live in a deterministic world? We certainly deliberate and make choices as if there were alternative possible futures, so at first glance we do not act like we believe that GD is true. Are we simply massively self-deceived?—believing one thing in the philosophy classroom (or the physics laboratory) and another in ordinary practical life.

I think the best way of approaching this question is to ask: does the thesis of determinism make sense of the phenomena that our best scientific and common sense theories (including ordinary psychology) explain?

Bernstein’s analogy between laws of nature and mathematical functions is helpful, if massively deceptive. The kind of function that could map a Global Event is, to say the least, slightly more complicated than a one-variable, two-term algebraic equation.

I am sure that those savvy with the computer science, mathematics, and physics involved can help me out, but it would seem that the orders of magnitude involved in computing a state description of the world or ‘Global Event’ would quickly lead us to, at best, intractable predictability problems and, at worst, paradoxes of infinity.

But let’s be philosophers about this. Sure, what we imagine here is impossible for us, but not for an Omniscient Mind or Super-Laplacean Computer. The issues I am raising are a problem for epistemology, not analytic metaphysics. Verificationism died a long time ago. Let it rest in peace.

Ok, so now we are relying on another concept, ‘Omniscient Mind,’ to make sense of the thesis of Determinism (at least in its ‘Global’ variety). Unlike us poor souls, the Omniscient Mind knows that the actual world is composed of basic particulars, knows the number of and relations among these particulars, and knows the function that computes Global Events in our world.

But wait? What use does an Omniscient Mind have for a function? It knows everything, after all. Presumably, it knows the future before it happens. Presumably, the concepts of past, present, and future are useless to it (as well as any computations among them). The Omniscient Mind just looks at the whole of space and time and absorbs it in one gulp.

But wait, what is the Omniniscient Mind 'looking' at? Whether or not the world has a beginning and/or an end in time and space is presumably just an ‘an empirical issue.’ Space and time might be infinitely ‘self’-contorting manifolds. So what would there be for an Omniscient Mind to ‘look’ at? ‘Looking’ implies figure and ground, things that come before consciousness and things that move to the background. But there could be no such definite perspectival structures in the scenario we are imagining: it would just be one inifinite series of one damned indistinguishable thing after another.

These problems are not new (I first encountered them, I think, in Sister Regina’s fourth grade class as we debated whether God can square circles or create rocks he cannot move).

We started this discussion of Determinism by worrying about whether our best beliefs about the ‘world as it is in itself’ might threaten the world as it looks to us when we deliberate in practical life. And yet, it turns out the world as it is in itself is not something we have a firm grip on. We have helped ourselves to some half-formed metaphysical concepts—‘Global Determinism,’ ‘Omniscient Mind,’ ‘Laws of Nature as Mathematical Functions’—but then, as we actually examine how to cash out these shibboleths of our philosophical fancy in precise terms, we quickly lose our grip on the concepts. Better to end where we started--that is, with what we knew perfectly well before we started philosophizing in the first place: that we live our lives by imagining possible futures, deliberating about which among them would be the best, and acting so as to realize as our choices (except when we are weak willed).

The metaphysical question at issue is what kind of world makes this notion of freedom intelligible and whether or not we are justified in believing we live in it; the question is not whether some fantastic thesis of Global Determinism threatens it.

What the Free Will Problem is About

In the effort to increase chatter on this blog, I will continue talking to myself. For a change of pace, this time I will be talking in a widely speculative and impressionistic fashion that is only dimly supported by facts.

The folks at The Garden of Forking Paths ask, "What is the Free Will Problem About?": http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2005/01/what_is_the_fre.html.

Unsurprisingly, the default choices were all surrounding whether something called "Libertarian Free Will" exists (my non-philosophers friends should note: this is a metaphysical idea; it has nothing directly to do with Libertarian Party politics). I'm no scholar of the free will problem, but I doubt anyone could give a satisfactory definition of "Libertarian Free Will," which, as I will argue, is part of the problem. The expression does, however, undoubtedly signify a cluster of vaguely related ideas about locating the ultimate origination and responsibility for an agent's actions within its Deep Self--i.e., the idea that each time I act freely it is a metaphysical fact that I--in a sense that needs to be spelled out--am the definitive causal source of my actions and the only thing that is morally responsible for them.

This notion of Libertarian Free Will is supposed to be incompatible with determinism because if every event, in including any of my actions, is preceded by a set of events in the past that can serve--in conjunction with the laws of nature--as a sufficient cause of my action, then I cannot be the ultimate originator of these actions. Because I cannot be the ultimate originator of these actions, the Incompatibilist picture says that I cannot be ultimately responsible for them. The Hard Determinist infers from this either that I am not ultimately responsible for these actions or that I have no free will. The Libertarian infers from this that determinism is false. The Compatibilist tries to tweak our understanding of the facts so that I am still perfectly responsible, despite lacking ultimate origination.

The entirety of the free will "problem" is, in my opinion, a result of the fact that this notion of ultimate origination and the picture of the Deep Self that lies behind it are deeply confused and artifacts of the way our culture has tried to construct notions of political and moral autonomy.

The free will problem should not be a question about deep metaphysical facts such as, "am I the ultimate causal source and locus of responsibility for my actions and self?" The free will problem should rather be a set of normative questions followed by a corresponding set of practical questions. The set of normative questions would be something like this: "how should I go about taking responsibility for this self?--how should I go about justifying my actions to myself and to others and to the world?--how should I go about endorsing my desires and their fruits in action?--what should the structure of my will be?--what are the desires I should desire to have?" The set of corresponding practical questions would simply be questions about what set of social institutions, laws, and moral duties best describes a program for implementing the answers to these normative questions.

This shift in perspective would make the free will problem a branch of normative and practical ethics, which is fine by me. The result is simply classic extistentialism, filtered through Harry Frankfurt's notion of a hierarchical will from "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" and some thoughts of Charles Taylor's in "Responsibility for Self" (Professor Dennett also seems to have something like this in mind towards the end of Freedom Evolves, so too do Professor White in his essays that touch on free will and Richard Moran at Harvard in Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge).

People are often unsatisfied by a focus on the normative and practical questions because they seem to leave out important factual issues that are necessary for free will. For example, we want to be assured that our selves are actually sources of causal creativity in the world--that is, we want to know that our choices make a difference and that the future is really a place of open possibilities, such that our choices decide between these possibilities and our actions serve to realize the results of our choices. We also want to be assured that we are in at least some sense the originators of our actions--that is, that we are the locus of doings in the world rather than just happenings. Determinism seems to threaten this picture of the self by reducing us to moving points in space through which wider causal stories flow, rather than allowing us to be the productive sources of these causal stories. It seems that, if these gloomy facts about the world are true because of determinsm, then the normative and practical questions raised above cannot even get off the ground: we are left with an empty phenomenology of free will that does not touch down in the reality of the world.

Now, as has been pointed out by naturalistic approaches to the free will problem (especially by Professor Dennett in Ch. 3 of FE, "Thinking About Determinism"), what we are imagining here about the threat that determinism poses to the self's causal creativity is simply contrary to fact. The parts of our brain that instantiate the decision-making faculties of our minds are of such a complexity that our actions are inherently not-maximally-predictable to cognizers in the outside world and even to ourselves prior to the formation of an intention-in-action (this is especially true of the gut-wrenching decisions made under uncertainty and emotional ambivalence, which seem to stir up something like chaos in the brain).

When we imagine a Laplacean God taking in the spectacle of our choices and smiling at our naivete, we are probably not imagining something coherent. It is still a very open question as to how to interpret Libet's experiments on the brain--i.e., an open question as to what kind of information about our decisions the observable spikes in Readiness Potential encode. Any Laplacean God--**who cannot read my thoughts**--is going to have to picture my actions as events under a certain description: if the dimensionality of the description is too low, then the Laplacean God runs into amplified quantum indeterminism; if the dimensionality is too high, then the Laplacean God runs into the fact that I eat Cheerios on Monday and Corn Flakes on Tuesday, despite the fact that the decisions are caused by the same equally foul mood each morning (i.e., a mood which keeps me from taking the time to cook some eggs). Some Libertarians, such as Robert Kane, are willing to grant all of this, but they then say that Libertarian Free Will demands not only in-principle epistemic unpredictability, but also in-fact metaphysical indeterminism. I say that a difference that can make no difference to us makes no difference: if we can't count whether the number of stars in the universe is odd or even because of deep physical limitations in our cognitive faculties that could never be remedied by technological advance, then there is simply no fact of the matter as to whether there is an odd or even number of stars in the universe (I get this example from Professor White).

Now, what this inherent unpredictability does not get us is "Ultimate Responsibility," because we are still being situated within a network of wider causal forces, all of which impact our decisions, and some of which we cannot even plausibly be held metaphysically responsible for (even if we must normatively take responsibility for them). What inherent unpredictability does get us, however, is individuality and openness to the future. The plasticity of the brain is such that I cannot be seriously taken as a 'robot' in the colloquial sense of a being that is inexorably implementing the program that nature has designed for its life. There is no such program, because at each instant my mental program is being rewritten in objectively undpredictable fashion, partly as a consequence of the decisions I make. Moreover, if the future is inherently unpredictable, then the fatalistic itch cannot get scratched (and some interesting metaphysical issues in the logic of tensed statements open up).

However, the flip side of all this is that "who I am" is not something that "I am . . ."--in any deep metaphysical sense--". . . responsible for," but it is something that "I must take responsibility for." The key practical question of free will becomes: how do I build self I am willing to take responsibility for? Here, the 'I' can be taken somewhat loosely, because in giving up Ultimate Responsibility, I am no longer as concerned with issues of autonomy: I can use the social and physical world as active tools in order to get the self I want. The issue becomes less one of personal power than "the experience of freedom," which is something like one's picture of the world under a certain value-laden description being realized.

The main challenge that remains to this picture of free will becomes dealing with the sci-fi extremes: is being a brain in a vat that is pumped with pleasant sensations a kind of self worth wanting, if all that matters is getting the "experience" of having one's values realized (Nozick's question in the "Experience Machine" thought-experiment from Anarchy, State, and Utopia)? Clearly, what we want is for the world to be a certain way as well. I have no response to this dilemma, other than to say that the normative question of free will is not just a question about what kind of self I should want to take responsibility for, but also what kind of society and world I should want to create.

Does determinism matter?

Hi all,

Had a thought today about determinism in P&E that I want to explore. In light of Heidegger's da-sein, can we put the determinism we get out of physical reductionism into the same place as external skepticism? That is, maybe we're brains in vats or being toyed with by an evil demon, but so what, it doesn't feel that way so it doesn't really affect our lives at all. Similarly, if we somehow found out tomorrow that our lives and actions and decisions ARE reducible to physical principles and everything is determined, it wouldn't change the way we live our lives since it never at any moment FEELS as if that is what is going on. I for one would still care about all the same things and still make conscious decisions and still have the same goals. I would still "take care" in the world, as Heidegger would say. For that is what it is to be human. If we lost this condition of "taking care" we could no longer be classified as human beings (da-seins).

Now, this is all being said under the assumption that we somehow discovered determinism was true without being able to use it to know in advance everything that was going to happen. Naturally, if we did we WOULD make some changes in our cares and decisions and goals. For example, if we could foresee that Harry was going to commit some heinous crime next week, we might find it in our power to prevent this from happening, but problems would arise immediately here.

One, we would also foresee that we try to prevent Harry from committing the crime, but he must somehow commit it anyway if we foresaw it. But then why go through the trouble of trying to prevent it? Or, if we DID successfully prevent it then what we foresaw was wrong. But to be fair to determinism and escape the immanent paradox, we never would have foreseen him committing the crime, we would have foreseen ourselves foreseeing the crime and preventing it, but not actually foreseen the crime happening.

Does anyone want to pick up on the next step here? Does this make sense or sound interesting? I know it is a lot like "Minority Report" but I've never seen it. No time to continue this at the moment, but I want to expose that there is still a paradox here, and also that moral issues are raised (as they always are when determinism is involved).