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40 mins by The Free Will Show


[Music] welcome to the free will show i'm one of your hosts taylor c and i'm
your other host matt plummer in the last episode episode zero we introduced you
to the show in this episode we'll have a discussion about what free will is and
why it's important so taylor what is free will anyway that's a big question and
uh there's not exactly universal agreement on the answer to that question if
you ask 10 different people what free will is they'll give you 10 different
answers and same might be true if you ask 10 different philosophers what free
will means so maybe it's worth just saying some of the options here what people
could mean when they're talking about free will and then we could sort of home
in on what we're going to talk about throughout the show so one time this was
back in the days when i was a barista i was talking to someone in the cafe and
was talking about studying free will and this person said uh it's so obvious
that we have free will of course we have free will watch and he picked up his
phone and he dropped it and said look obviously i have free will i just
exercised it so one conception of what it is to have free will is something
like having the ability to make choices or to perform actions on the basis of
one's choices especially if you're not being told to do it or forced to do it
by someone else you're not being constrained either by morality or by the laws
you have a certain kind of freedom to make your own choices some people think
of that as what free will means but i don't know what else do you think of when
you think of free will i think of very similar things and this actually lines
up with some psychologists who have done research on this where they're
studying folk beliefs and they just and they're in their labs they ask people
what what do they think of when they think of free will and they meant the
people who have been studied mention a lot of the things that you just
mentioned like the ability to make decisions or choices doing what you want to
do acting without any kind of constraints nobody's holding you back being able
to deliberate and then act on the basis of your deliberation or even doing
something intentionally all these things were mentioned as what people
think about when they think about free will that makes sense if you do
something accidentally and unintentionally it's not something you did
freely or with free will yeah or if you know you want to do something but
somebody's holding you back that's kind of like a constraint and you're not
able to do what you want to do yeah your ability to act according to your
will so it seems like even though there is disagreement about what exactly
we mean by the term free will there's a cluster of related ideas or
concepts and for a lot of people anyway it hinges on some kind of control
right having free will is having some kind of control over one's actions or
one's behavior more generally maybe inactions or omissions count as part of
a person's free will we could have free will with respect to omissions
perhaps [Music] so another thing that a lot of people think of and this is
where a lot of philosophers like when they're debating what it is to have
free will and what would be a threat to our having free will this is where
a lot of philosophers focus some people think of free will as having the
ability to do otherwise or having alternative possibilities alternative to
what you actually do so one metaphor that some philosophers working on free
will like to invoke is this idea of walking through a garden of forking
paths so as you're walking through this garden you come to a fork in the
path then you can choose to go to the left or you can choose to go to the
right and yeah no one's forcing you to go one way rather than the other
maybe you desire to go one way rather than the other and you get to choose
you get to go whichever way you want so you have these alternatives
throughout this garden you can select whether you're going to go down one
path or the other so having that kind of control over our behavior where at
various points in our lives we get to decide between two courses of action
and it's sort of up to us which way we go that's what a lot of people think
free will amounts to yeah absolutely and that that kind of lines up or
segues nicely into a discussion about determinism one of the reasons that
people are one of the things when people have focused on alternative
possibilities is this idea of whether or not alternative possibilities are
compatible with determinism normally we could how deeply do we want to or
how specific do we want to be with this with the idea of determinism right
now yeah maybe not too much because we'll get into that in more detail in
the next episode yeah so i guess the easiest way to to describe it is that
there's some kind of cause that happens that determines what happens
afterwards yeah maybe you could think of it this way given the cause or
given the initial state or condition there was only one possible future
there was only one way things could have developed from there so if you're
talking about physical or causal determinism we're talking about the laws
of physics being deterministic well then take any kind of total state of
the world at any time together with the laws you'll get a unique uh
determinate future there is only one way the future can develop from there
so that to a lot of people uh seems to call into question this idea of
having alternative possibilities it seems to sort of light up one path
through the garden as being the only real so it's like the difference
between a garden that has multiple options of which way you can go and have
you ever seen a labyrinth right so labyrinths look like mazes with lots of
different ways but really there's only one way through at least the the the
idea of the labyrinth that i've seen in other places yeah are all
labyrinths supposed to be like this is that like something that's makes a
difference between a labyrinth and a maze i have to do that i'm not sure
about that either so somebody told me this once so i whatever they say it's
got to be true yeah um but yeah so there's this the kind of garden that
only has one path through it right rather than lots of different paths and
so that would be kind of the analogy with determinism whereas the garden of
working paths is the analogy with alternative possibilities yeah maybe to
forestall a little bit of conclusion confusion we could at least say um we
could say that we don't from our point of view given what we know we might
not think that there's only one kind of possible future it might feel to us
like we have uh a genuine choice between various alternatives even if
determinism's true it wouldn't feel like you were being forced all the time
even if the world were deterministic so some people when they hear
determinism they think well our world obviously isn't deterministic because
we make choices all the time and certainly feels like we are choosing
between genuine alternatives but that could be the case even if determinism
is true yeah and i think when we have our future episode where we discuss
determinism hopefully that will become more clear yeah one of the other
things that at least philosophers have talked a lot about about what free
will is is this a not just control over your actions but it's a special
kind of control and that's the control that's required in order for us to
be morally responsible for our actions so at this point it might be helpful
to talk a little bit about what moral responsibility is in order to explain
how free will is the control necessary to be morally responsible yeah that
i think that would be helpful and we can come back to this question of
whether we think more being morally responsible uh is going to require
alternative possibilities or not because that's one big sort of dividing a
question that divides possible positions about free will and moral
responsibility um so i guess we could first distinguish between being
morally responsible for some bit of behavior and being held morally
responsible for it so a kind of rough way of distinguishing these things is
to say to be morally responsible for some bit of behavior is for um is for
it to sort of reflect on your moral record perhaps now some people will
disagree with that that but at the very least it sort of um tells a little
bit about you in a way that an accidental bit of behavior wouldn't count
against for your record so maybe maybe a less controversial way is maybe
reflecting on your character or some philosophers call it your quality of
will where there's something that your behavior reveals about you as an
individual rather than maybe that's less controversial than record yeah
yeah you don't have to think that there really is this record out there
where you've got you know positive marks and negative marks for every
action you've done but i mean i think that idea is helpful for thinking
about what it is to be morally responsible whether or not anyone else is
around whether or not anyone's going to praise or blame you for that bit of
behavior um if you're morally responsible for it it reflects on you in a
certain way so maybe it would be helpful to think of an example here do you
have a good go-to example of an a bit of behavior that someone's morally
responsible for uh yeah so the first thing that pops into my head is my
interactions with my kids for some reason sometimes i tell them at night to
go brush their teeth and they look me right in the face and i know they
haven't brushed their teeth yet and they're like i already brushed my teeth
so they lie to my face so you know that's what kids do sometimes it's their
interactions with kids and parents and so they they know better that
they're older and so that reflects on they're not part yeah yeah so that
reflects on on their character and i guess that's part of my job as a
parent is to try to train them in a way that their character evolves and
they don't just lie about silly stuff like whether or not they brush their
teeth yeah yeah you could even as a listener think about the last time you
felt indignation about something that someone else did um or felt
resentment towards someone in your life probably you're taking that person
to have done something uh that was wrong and uh they knew better they
shouldn't have done it and they are somehow blameworthy for having done
that wrong thing now that's when we're talking about being morally
responsible i mentioned we're going to distinguish that from being held
morally responsible right whether you whether you blame someone else for
something or not right that you take them you take it that they are morally
responsible if they um well that's a separate question anyway from whether
you hold them responsible so what is it to hold someone responsible well i
mean very roughly right if someone is praiseworthy for something and you
you praise them for it you're holding them morally responsible by uh
overtly praising them holding them to account in a positive way or you know
in the negative case when someone is blameworthy and you blame them you're
holding them to account you're holding them morally responsible yeah and
these ideas are closely linked with with rewards and punishments as well so
sometimes when we hold people morally responsible we think that they should
be punished for what they've done if it's bad or rewarded for what they've
done if it's good and these things don't line up so you can be held
responsible for something that you are not responsible for and vice versa
right so in unfortunate cases of injustice someone can be punished for
something that they didn't do that would be a case of holding someone
responsible when they aren't actually morally responsible yeah right or you
could you know fail to convict to the right person and the guilty person
could be out there blameworthy but not being held to account so right they
don't line up perfectly unfortunately yeah so we've got these ideas of
praise and blame um of punishment and reward and one one thing that is
important for moral responsibility is this idea of basic desert that in
cert in some sense what you did reflects on that character like we talked
about with being morally responsible and as such it it you deserve what you
get whether it's blame or praise or reward or punishment and this is this
idea of of basic dessert it's it's different than um i guess we should make
a distinction between sometimes praising or blaming something someone can
have beneficial results right and sometimes we praise and blame somebody
even when there's no beneficial results just because they deserve it yeah
so my kids are younger than yours so you're probably not doing this anymore
but i might praise my kids for their good behavior without thinking they're
actually praiseworthy for it or i might blame them for bad behavior to sort
of uh to sort of build up their character um that would be a kind of
instrumental reason for holding them responsible even if they're not
actually responsible yeah yeah that's a good example because it brings
about these good results that you want the kind of behavior that you want
in the future right maybe it's worth pausing to even say how important the
idea of moral responsibility is and the idea of holding each other
responsible is it seems like a lot of our relationships presuppose that the
people we're in relationships with um that they are morally responsible
certainly the examples we've given of uh you know like legal sanctions like
punishing someone uh that presupposes that they uh ought to be punished it
seems like yeah at least certain kinds of punishment uh seem to presuppose
that people deserve to be punished for their wrongdoing you might think
there's some instrumental reasons for some kinds of punishments but maybe
not all but even like praising and blaming on a smaller scale where it
doesn't really involve a reward or a punishment per se just whether you're
going to be grateful to someone or going to be resentful towards them right
these kinds of attitudes uh i don't know they're very pervasive in our
interpersonal relationships so it seems like being morally responsible is
really important it would be bad in some sense it would definitely alter
our conceptions of ourselves if it turned out that we didn't have the kind
of control over our actions such that we could be morally responsible for
what we do oh yeah absolutely because in a certain sense we're we're
relational beings and part of the relationships that we have with with
other people involves these these ideas of praise and blame and um basic
dessert more responsibility we we think that we owe it's almost a sense of
what we owe to each other like if you have a friend then that friend even
though you don't have an explicit agreement they they owe something to you
of being like um true to you like not stabbing you in the back or being
there for you when you need them and when they're not and you're like i
thought you were my friend and you blame them because they weren't there
for you when you needed them or uh something like that yeah and if for some
reason you didn't blame that friend or you didn't take them to be
morally responsible right that would be a very different kind of
friendship from typical friendships you'd almost be maybe we'll get
into this in a future episode but you'd almost be taking this objective
stance towards them where you weren't seeing them really as a person
that you can relate to interpersonally you'd see them more as an object
so it seems like these certain attitudes especially resentment and
gratitude and the others that we've mentioned are really important to
our relationships yeah so that's the importance of more responsibility
let's talk a little bit about what the importance or significance of
free will is anyway what like why do should we even care about free
will yeah i guess we've already been making the case for if if free
will is the control that's required to be morally responsible well it's
really important that we have free will if we're going to be morally
responsible and we care about that a lot so that's one thing yeah
another thing you could think of is uh there are several different all
uh what's the word i'm looking for several different good things that
kind of come with free will that are often mentioned if you read a book
about free will then they'll they usually have a section of the
importance of free will for other things that human beings value a lot
things like autonomy creativity those kinds of things so we we value
autonomy in that we want to um autonomous just means self-rule we want
to be able to like call our own shots and to be able to um be something
other than someone else's puppet right don't want to be a robot either
something that's been programmed to act in various ways at least on
honest it seems like a natural take on robots would be to say that
they're not really autonomous because uh well there's some kind of
heteronomy involved there's someone else that's giving rules to the
robot that it has to follow it doesn't get to call the shots for itself
yeah we also value free will because of creativity it seems that
there's something special about being able to create in whether it's
art or music or whatever that requires the kind of control that we've
been talking about with free will that uh if if a robot was programmed
to paint a picture it just wouldn't be as cool as a human being who
just came up with you know yeah think of your favorite your favorite
famous painter um like cezanne or whoever a robot that paints the same
thing i'm i'm not going to be as impressed i'm going to be more
impressed with the person who programmed the robot yeah maybe that's a
very sophisticated way of bringing about the painting is by programming
the robot to execute it yeah yeah there is a this might be a fun rabbit
trail to explore later on but there is in isaac asimov's famous story
the bicentennial man there is this robot that can make artwork but this
like sets this robot apart from all the other robots so you might think
now there's a question about whether this robot is really programmed
like other robots or whether it really has free will but the you know
the typical conception of a robot uh at least at the time of the
recording of this episode right is that robots aren't really creative
yeah so yeah maybe we should have a whole episode on just uh ai and
robotics and free will that would be cool definitely another reason why
free will is important uh there's this idea of agency do you want to
say a little bit more about reason and agency sure yeah so if we can
understand reasons for acting one way rather than another and can act
on the basis of those reasons then we're gonna count as uh rational
agents in a way that you know maybe um some non-human animal that uh
performs bits of behavior but not on the basis of reason maybe on the
basis of instinct or something like that wouldn't count as at least not
as robust of an agent as a typical human agent would and we might think
well we care about these things that set us apart from other species
especially our rationality as it gets implemented in action sometimes
people talk about practical reason or practical rationality that seems
valuable for a host of reasons we can do a lot of stuff because of our
our agency our practical reason that other types of beings can't do
that that might be valuable yeah yeah another thing that isn't
important about free will that free will seems like it allows is this
idea of virtue so if if virtue is something that's valuable uh let's
just think of like a particular virtue like honesty um if some someone
had an inability to tell the truth or excuse me let's do that the
opposite if someone had an inability to tell a lie like they just
couldn't there was no way they could tell a lie it wouldn't it seems
like it wouldn't be as valuable as someone who actually has a choice
about whether or not to tell a lie or tell the truth especially in a
situation where it cost them think of that movie um the invention of
lying right and that in that universe uh if you haven't seen the movie
just imagine a world in which everybody always tells the truth and no
one's ever even heard of lying so everybody's just always telling the
truth yeah so nobody even understands what lying is at the beginning of
the movie and so it's like not really a virtue if you don't have a
choice about whether or not to tell the truth right yeah you wouldn't
praise uh the honest person uh for being honest if they couldn't help
it like even if they wanted to lie even if they knew what lying was
they they couldn't do it it seems like they couldn't develop the verge
the valuable virtue of honesty yeah yeah so maybe honesty is just one
of many virtues think of courage moderation whatever you take the
virtues to be coming to have these virtues might require cultivating
them fighting temptation and if you do those things freely it seems
like it's more valuable that you've perfected this virtue in yourself
whereas if you just happen to come to have what we call the virtues or
if you came to have them but in an unfree sort of way it wouldn't be as
valuable or valuable at all perhaps yeah that's a good example so if you think
about someone who has a serious problem with alcohol or drugs or whatever and
they're fighting temptation they seem there's something praiseworthy about that
where um they like like the alcoholics really craving alcohol one night and
ends up fighting the temptation and not having a drink like there's something
that's praiseworthy about that whereas a normal person who's not an alcoholic
decides not to have a drink and you're just like oh yeah whatever it's not
praiseworthy at all right um so this this idea of being able to withstand
temptation and at in the acquisition of virtue or even you could think of two
different people fighting with a vice whatever pick your favorite vice one of
them overcomes the vice through effort over the course of you know maybe years
and the other one takes a drug or maybe undergoes hypnosis and as a result of
the hypnotic suggestion no longer has the vice uh just sort of instantly right
you might think the absence of that vice is valuable in the first case in a way
that isn't in the second maybe more praise to fight it yeah definitely and that
kind of uh leads into the next good thing that is associated with with free
will and love so if you imagine the same kind of scenario where we get the love
potion or whatever you're interested in someone else you get the magic love
potion and sneak it into their their drink one day and they look at you after
the potion and then they love you that there's there's something that's val
that's valuable that's missing in a case like that where whereas it's different
when you have a normal case like when you and your wife were first met and
started to hang out and your love grew right based on choices that you guys
made right yeah it doesn't even strike me as counting as love even if you have
all the same kinds of feelings even behaviors attitudes towards another person
if it all came from a sort of love potion rather than through interacting with
the person over time and you know behaving yeah with each other in ways
that are free having everyone seems central to accounting is love yeah it
seems like there's something that i don't know how if we want to go into
historical about love that it requires these the choices that the the two
beloved make over and over again that kind of builds this thing whereas you
just can't have it right at the very beginning with a love potion or
whatever right perhaps there's such a thing as love at first sight but
maybe not i guess that's what you're mentioning when you're talking about
how historical you want to get with love if to count as love there has to
have been a history of interaction before it can't really happen at first
sight yeah but certainly if the even if love at first sight were possible
if it were caused by something that undermined a person's agency it seems
to count against it really being a case of love yeah yeah definitely okay so
that's the the the things that we normally associate with free will that show
the significance of free will without free will we don't have autonomy
creativity agency virtue love that's why it's important that's why we we think
it's important to talk about worth having a podcast about yeah worth having a
part like free will's this important concept so we need to talk about it let's
let's move on now to talk about some misconceptions about free will because
there are a lot of misconceptions about free will if you read anything online
about free will sometimes people think of free will versus determinism so why
do you why do you think that that's a bad way of thinking about free will yeah
so i see this a lot from from scientists who have haven't studied the
philosophical literature on free will um there's a sort of pitting of free
will and determinism against each other so you have to choose are you going
to say we have free will or are you going to say that determinism reigns
it's like that there's determinism in physics or in the brain you know when
we study neuroscience so why is this a misconception well this just assumes
a controversial thesis about free will namely that it's incompatible with
determinism so a whole lot of philosophers are what we call compatibilists
about free will and determinism they think it could be that both
determinism is true and we have free will so either they have a conception
of free will that you know is different from the garden of forking paths uh
kind of conception of free will we talked about earlier or they think we
could even have that garden of working paths type of control freedom even
if determinism was true so that's a a robust position in debates about free
will and if you just think you have to choose either free will or determinism
without doing the the philosophy here you're you're misconceiving of the debate
so you shouldn't pit those things against each other even if at the end of the
day you think there's a good reason to be an incompatibilist i think free will
and determinism really are incompatible we shouldn't assume that at the outset
we should take all of the uh positions and arguments you know take them into
consideration before we decide that these are incompatible yeah this is not a
new idea philosophers have have been thinking about whether or not free will is
compatible with determinism for hundreds and hundreds of years yeah millennia
yeah a long time another misconception that you might run across with free will
is this idea that free will versus causation that free will requires some kind
of miracle i've i've read a few things and i i don't want to bash scientists
too much um but i read a couple scientists talking about free will and they
kind of thought this that if we have free will then it's got to be something um
that's outside of the scientific laws of the universe it requires like we have
these fundamental laws of physics and they think that free will requires us to
violate those laws of physics so that it's some kind of miracle right i think
part of the problem here is is the first problem that they're thinking that
free will and determinism are incompatible and so we'd have to if we were to
have free will and if the world is deterministic we'd have to somehow go
against the laws of nature that would require a miracle yeah there's also this
this idea that if something is caused then it was determined and that's a
mistaken view at least it was widely held for since the sort of enlightenment
era until the last uh hundred years or so but in recent times lots of
scientists as well as philosophers take seriously the idea that there could be
probabilistic causation or indeterministic causation so just to say that
something's caused doesn't mean that it was determined or that the laws
required it so if you yeah once you once you understand that then you shouldn't
put free will and causation against each other yeah and an example of something
that scientists think that is not determined but it is caused it could be
something like a geiger counter so the geiger counter is picking up it forms a
signal based on particles that are given off by radioactive material and
according to at least the latest science that i've heard there there isn't an
explanation for the whether or not that particle that's released by the
radioactive material is determined so if you had the exact same situation with
all of the same material then it might give off the particle at a different
time and each time the particle is given off it makes the click on the geiger
counter so we could say that that's an example the geiger counters clicks of
something that's caused by the particles from the radioactive material but it's
not determined it's probabilistic or indeterministic or however you want to say
that right yeah i mean currently physicists are divided on whether to take um
the laws to be deterministic or not the majority uh interpret this kind of case
in the way that you just described it as probabilistic or indeterministic you
could interpret that as just a sort of limitation of our knowledge we just
don't really know all of the conditions well enough to know uh what will result
and so really there could be determinism there but that's a sort of minority
view among contemporary physicists yeah yeah so the last misconception we'll
talk about is that and this i think it's related to this last one we've been
talking about is that free will requires some kind of immaterial soul so it
requires that at least for agents that are going to count as having free will
that we have some non-physical part so substance dualism is one view about at
least human persons that says we are really two types of substances together uh
human beings taken holistically are both immaterial mind and material body so
there's two substances immaterial or mind and then body or matter and we have
not only our physical bodily material parts but we have this immaterial soul or
mind that's not sort of reducible reducible to the material parts including the
parts of our brain so if free will required that view that would be i mean
maybe that wouldn't make it less interesting to talk about free will but it
would certainly make it so that we couldn't have free will on a lot of views in
the philosophy of mind a lot of views about what human persons are because
substance dualism although it's been widely held throughout the history of
philosophy it's it's definitely not the majority position anymore and uh gets a
lot of flack from contemporary philosophers of mind um so what yeah go ahead
yeah i was just going to say and some people kind of dismiss the idea of free
will because of this association they're like well yeah free will requires the
soul or substance dualism and substance dualism is an outdated theory about
human persons right that nobody holds anymore so that means we don't have free
will anymore or that i guess we never had free will right yeah so why is that a
mistake well i guess the only reason for thinking that an immaterial soul would
be necessary for us having free will is because you're thinking that free will
is going to require an action on our part that's not explainable in terms of
the physical stuff that makes us up but of course you might think we have a
certain kind of control over our actions maybe the control required for moral
responsibility even if uh we're entirely physical beings right maybe we can
explain control by reference to the decisions we make and maybe we can explain
that by reference to elements of our uh of you know aspects of neuroscience
yeah either way it is controversial to say the least that free will requires a
soul or substance dualism because so many philosophers are not soul theorists
or substance duelists and yet they think that we've got some kind of free will
that's either materialistic or just based on the matter that humans are made of
right and even many of the substance duelists that i know they don't take their
view of free will to hinge on that aspect of their view that view from
philosophy of mind so it it doesn't seem like anyone's taking there to be this
tight connection between our having free will and our having souls but that is
a common yeah like you said a common misconception by i mean it comes from the
sciences we don't want to pick on sciences there's a lot of interesting
connections between the philosophy of free will and the science of free will
and we hope to get into that in in detail but we do think that there are
misconceptions that if you're kind of only thinking scientifically and you
haven't gotten into the philosophical issues here you could you could be
confused about yeah absolutely all right so that wraps up our discussion of
what free will is and why it's important so in our next episode we're going to
talk about fatalism for knowledge and determinism and would you like to give a
teaser about our our special guest for the next episode yes sure so our next
guest will be uh john martin fisher the university professor in the university
of california system distinguished professor of philosophy at the university of
california riverside he's been writing for decades on free will and has trained
many students who are working now on issues of free will and he's written a lot
about the various threats to our having free will challenges to us um being
morally responsible having the the control required for moral responsibility so
he's the ideal person to talk about fatalism for knowledge and determinism so
these are three different uh three different avenues to calling into question
or having at least a certain kind of freedom so fatalism has to do with these
truths about what will happen in the future kind of restricting our freedom
foreknowledge has to do with not only truths about what will happen in the
future but the existence of an omniscient being who has foreknowledge of what
will happen in the future so think of divine foreknowledge here and then lastly
determinism which we've introduced in this episode right think of the laws of
physics constraining what the future will be like so these are all ways of
calling into question are having free will they've all been around for
millennia and it'll be helpful as part of this introductory season to have
these different challenges to free will on the table
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