The (Gene) Devil Made Me Do It
Some scientists think we have no real free will, that our behavior and beliefs are dictated by our genes. (Then, they cannot be upset with me for thinking they are just so full of beans; my genes prevent me from seeing the light.)
This theory is just one of many avenues to deny human exceptionalism, of course, because it makes the claim that we are not moral beings, but merely so many gene-dictated automatons. And, ironically it opens the door both to "anything goes" morality, and also, the imposition of a terrible tyranny against those perceived to have a predisposition to heterodox beliefs and behaviors that those in power disdain.
Along this line, some public intellectuals believe that we may one day prevent crimes before they occur by analyzing brain scans and gene make up. This could mean that people are detained and "re-educated" who have done nothing wrong. This Wired commentary, byline Jennifer Granick, (too) mildly objects: "Looking at scientific advances like these, legal scholars are beginning to question the foundational principles of our criminal justice system. For example, University of Florida law professor Christopher Slobogin, who is visiting at Stanford this year, has set forth a compelling case for putting prevention before retribution in criminal justice. Two weeks ago, Slobogin gave a talk based on his book, Minding Justice. He pointed to the studies showing that our behavior is predetermined or strongly influenced by biology, and that if we can identify those biological factors, we can predict behavior. He argues that the justice system should provide treatment for potential wrongdoers based on predictions of dangerousness instead of settling for punishing them after the fact.
It's a tempting thought. If there is no such thing as free will, then a system that punishes transgressive behavior as a matter of moral condemnation does not make a lot of sense. It's compelling to contemplate a system that manages and reduces the risk of criminal behavior in the first place.
"Yet, despite last week's announcement from the Max Planck Institute, neuroscience and bioscience are not at a point where we can reliably predict human behavior. To me, that's the most powerful objection to a preventative justice system--if we aren't particularly good at predicting future behavior, we risk criminalizing the innocent."
That would just be the beginning of our problems if we decided to let "the scientists" cast aside the concept of free will.
Labels: Human Exceptionalism. Free Will.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 11:36 AM
23 Comments
23 Comments:
Just an aside - ever heard of "Free Won't?"
The reason some scientists say that we don't have free will is that they did some experiments where people were hooked up to machines and could raise their hands or not, and if they decided they were going to their brains reacted *before* they actually raised their hands, but the brain didn't react the same way if they changed their minds - "free won't." They had the ability to override the initial reaction.
Some consciousness studies show that photons of light behave in erratic ways that they relate to free will - if light has the ability to experience free will, then human beings do, too. The brain is a great computer but it's not the software, just the hardware.
Anyway, if someone is predisposed to commit crimes, how can you change that person just by interfering before hand? The "free won't" theory requires some measure of freedom of choice, so you can't use that as a basis.
It's a theory that makes no sense and doesn't explain the weird things that happen to people daily. Some people are just determined to see themselves as nothing but educated meat.
Free will has been known to be logically problematic for a long time. We are automatons -- get used to it. Look inside a human head, you see neural machinery. Dualism is in disrepute -- if there is some nonmaterial, nonmechanical self, how does it interact with the brain? Descartes thought it was through the pituitary gland, and there haven't been any better ideas since then. So your brain is mechanical, and what you think is determined by genes and by the environment, because that's all there is.
That being said, I don't think free will is a notion we can dispense with lightly. Even if we don't have it from the strict scientific worldview, we have to act as if we do. We are moral beings as well as automata, and that is a very difficult concept to get your head around.
mtraven: If we are automotons, why post here? None of us can help what we believe. You have your views hard wired by genes and synapses. We almost always disagree, but so what? It's all genes and synapses.
As you recognize, by denying free will--which does not necessarily imply dualism, by which I think you mean a soul and a body--you deny that we are moral beings. And there are many pure scientists who deny the kind of genetic/enviromental determinism you embrace. People can choose.
Besides, if all we are is neural flesh, as we once discussed, we can't pretend to be anything, can we? I mean, why would we? None of it matters a tinkers damn anyway.
"Based on looking at how humans work, I can't see how they can work beyond the physical, so only the physical must exist."
"Based on looking at how cars work, I can't see how they can't drive themselves, so humans must be superfulous."
Good point Wes. Does mtraven believe that the word please has some special affect on the neurons?
I find that many scientist discussing free will have very poor philosophical backgrounds and seem to miss some basic concepts.
Free will consist of the freedom to say no and freedom of means. The free "won't" has been taught by classical and scholastic philosophers for centuries.
"If there is no such thing as free will, then a system that punishes transgressive behavior as a matter of moral condemnation does not make a lot of sense. It's compelling to contemplate a system that manages and reduces the risk of criminal behavior in the first place."
As if anyone has a treatment for violent offenders. In reality, preventive management could consist of taking a 15 year who has signs of a predispositio to violence (family history, truancy etc) and putting him away for 30 or 40 years or at least until science comes up with a reliable treatment.
These folks hint that the new system will be more fair because it is more scientific. Fairness is not even a consideration for creatures without a free will.
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"If we are automatons, why post here?" -- because we are the kind of automatons who like to do that. Saying it's all genes and synapses doesn't trivialize "it", unless you think genes and synapses are trivial -- I don't. Why should being made out of flesh mean that we don't matter?
And if we're not made out of flesh, what are we made out of? Dualists have an answer for that one, but as I said, there are insurmountable problems with dualism.
mtraven, aren't you into "choice"? Weren't you upset with me for saying that all of our choices are pressured and are not really our choices at all? But now you seem to be on my side, agreeing that we are automatons. That doesn't mean that we aren't moral creatures, morality is our foremos major influence, indeed, it's the only influence, if morality is understood in the largest sense. Morality is a cause, though these days it isn't very effective.
We are automatons who make choices. Even if we are wholly mechanically determined, our minds are so constituted so we have goals, alternative futures, and apparent choice. This is hard to understand and probably not something I can explicate in a blog comment. Try reading Dennett's work on free will, like Freedom Evolves or one of his online papers.
As for the politics of it -- we are automatons who like to be autonomous, to make our own choices rather than have them imposed from outside (although outside influences always affect them). Our autonomy and choice-making ability are sort-of illusory and tentative, which is why we have to work so hard to defend them.
Hmm, it seems to me you contradict yourself, mtraven. Genes are just one determining factor in our lives, as well as nutrition, family structure, wealth, neighborhood, friends, books and movies, and all of the moral/physical universe.
I actually agree with Wesley that none of us can help what we believe, but not that our views are hard wired by genes and synapses. It's more than just saying that moral approval influences our choices, for even regarding subjects for which there is an anything goes attitude, we still make choices based on morality, because morality is another word for reality. Reality is the expectation of the next moment of being, based on the beliefs we have about the way things are now and the way they should probably be. It is created out of our consciousnesses, which our self-consciousnesses have only a glimpse into and don't know 100% (hence us being surprised sometimes by the unexpected). Our consciousnesses thus create the physical matter in which they "live".
This is monism or idealism, and also like Schopenhauer and Heidegger and modern physics, like John A. Wheeler's later work "It from Bit". It's also my favorite theologian Jonathan Edwards theory of matter, he is of course famous for "Freedon of the Will" which has a contradictory title, but is an extension of Luther's "Bandage of the Will" and also Calvin and Augustine and, if I may, Jesus.
Also Robert Pirsig's Lila and his Metaphysics of Quality almost gets it right, but never quite goes all the way.
So we still have choices, but we are not in control of who the person is who is making them, that person makes the choices he has to make, based on his past and circumstances. But with graceful circumstances, we will make choices that lead to changes in our character, so that our next choices might be different than they otherwise would have been. We are a huge part of each other's graceful circumstances, we create each other's characters, by education and reward and punishment. Forgiveness and also humility come from recognizing that people are products of grace, or the lack of it. And our obligation to help each other follows from this understanding too. A person's life story isn't over when they are conceived, sometimes it isn't over until long after they have died, when they stop having a known influence on the rest of us.
I see that Wesley was mocking mtraven when he said that none of us can help what we believe, so I guess I don't agree with him after all. I believe that none of us can help what we believe, which is why education and propaganda and advertising and culture are so important to keep an eye on, and our influence on each other's thoughts and beliefs shouldn't be ignored.
mtraven: You said, "...we are automatons who like to be autonomous, to make our own choices rather than have them imposed from outside (although outside influences always affect them)."
This is utterly oxymoronic. This is why pure materialistic thinking is lacking. Truth is more than that which can be measured. The Buddhist doctrine of Karma, I think, has great truth behind it--yet you could never prove it scientifically. And this is why scientism and all purely mechanistic views of human life are inadequate. They explain the part, but not the whole. Indeed, I think they miss the depth, the most interesting parts.
"the imposition of a terrible tyranny against those perceived to have a predisposition to heterodox beliefs and behaviors that those in power disdain."
I've been in favour for a long time of classifying people who hold beliefs like this defective and open for organ harvesting.
If you don't believe you have free will (which isn't even a coherent thought, because beliefs are free will go together) then you can't care if you are harvested for organs. Caring implies desire and desire implies will.
So we should campaign to havest the organs (to alleviate human suffering obviously) from people who advocate such positions on the grounds that they can't care about having it done to them anyway because they are dub human.
John Howard: If none of us can help what we believe, what good does it do to keep an eye on propaganda? We keep an eye on propaganda precisely because we CAN help what we believe, we can decide what is factual and what is fictional, what is wrong and what is right. Indeed, we seek truth to the best of our ability to discern it precisely because we are not merely flotsam and jetsam floating along in the current.
Going forward, our beliefs can be changed, usually by other people communicating with us. But at every moment, people are bound to believe what they have been led to believe, and that's what they believe until something changes them.
And the changes to people's beliefs aren't random or chaotic but rationally caused by outside events and prior circumstances, as well as things like propaganda and education, the whole point of which is to change what people believe.
A person can't control what they believe to be true just by willing themselves to believe something, and we can't will ourselves to will either. There are techniques like denial that might succeed in altering their beliefs, but they might not succeed, also.
"A person can't control what they believe to be true just by willing themselves to believe something"
On the surface this claim is true, but I would contend that it conceals a misunderstanding.
It is true that you cannot believe something by force of will, but what you can do is make a decision to research and investigate something with an eye to determining if it is true.
Overtime and through research (depending on the evidence and the willingness to consider it) you will come to believe differently through something that started in an act of will, although not directly caused by it.
mtraven:
"Dualism is in disrepute -- if there is some nonmaterial, nonmechanical self, how does it interact with the brain?"
I'm totally with you on that. Dualism doesn't make sense - there's no "nothing" out there for a disembodied thing to exist in, and the brain is responsible for our urges, drives, and so on and so forth.
Of course, pure materialism doesn't jive, either - we all have consciousness, and we know it because we know what's going on inside our own heads, so we know that we know things - I have to giggle here, it does sound ridiculous but it's true.
I still think the answer is at the other end of the spectrum there - panexperientialism jives more with me than materialism. If everything is ensouled, or has a spark of life, then we don't have to ask those difficult questions of, "Where do we come from? How can pure material think and feel? What happens when we die?" Those things all make total sense, the need for spirituality and/or meaning and morality in humans is explained, there's no lame "how does the mind connect to the body" problem, and we still have our free will and our choice.
I think people over-stress the whole "free will" problem. It's not really a problem - we should just accept the fact that we have it and go with it, without trying to find ways to undermine it.
It is true that you cannot believe something by force of will, but what you can do is make a decision to research and investigate something with an eye to determining if it is true.
If we are willing to. That requires both an outside prompting to get off our tush and research something, as well as a pre-existing willingness to. In otherwords, some people will make that effort, and other people won't, and for rational reasons, it isn't chance, it isn't arbitrary. Some people are lazy and stubborn, some people are full of initiative. They have those qualities because of their genes and their experiences. But even a genetic pre-disposition to stubbornness combined with an upbringing that caused severe closed-mindedness doesn't mean that cannot be persuaded to change their minds about things, it just requires something very persuasive.
And even after doing all that investigation, there is no way to will yourself to believe something about the results that the results, and your education, do not lead you to believe.
A free will goes against Reason. Belief in free will negates cause and effect and renders ourselves morally impotent, nothing we say matters, since people's wills are under their own control anyhow. Recognizing that we control other people's wills, not our own, suddenly connects us to the rest of humanity and makes our actions important again.
But "controlling" another's will makes them a slave. At most we can influence another's will.
Right, bad word choice. We can't control anybody's will, our own or someone else's. I just mean, our actions have more of an effect on other people's wills than our own will. Other people have more of an effect on our will than we do ourselves.
What I really mean is that we are just one of thousands of influences on another person's will, so no one influence "controls" them, but nevertheless they are controled completely by outside influences, most of which have already been internalized into their character and habits. I can't make anyone buy Cocoa Puffs, because other influences might be stronger toward Cheerios. But we do know that their cereal preference doesn't spring up from inside them at their own willing, arbitrarily, they make their "own" choice due to influences they did not control, whether they know it or not.
john: "Recognizing that we control other people's wills, not our own, suddenly connects us to the rest of humanity and makes our actions important again."
Well, that's weird. Why should we have greater control (or influence) over other people than ourselves? I think you are wrong.
BUT, wrong in an interesting way -- the SELF-control we have is rather similar to whatever control or influence we have over others. That is, we can exhort ourselves to behave in certain ways, but we can't really force ourselves to (for instance, right now I am telling myself I should be working rather than posting this).
So rather than free will, what we really have is the ability to propagandize ourselves.
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