Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:01]
A
Expedia and visit Scotland. Invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in Scotland. The sweep of wild coastlines, quiet lochs and untamed landscapes, fresh cuisine that feels rooted in the land. Come experience the kind of stillness that stays with you long after you leave. Plan your Scottish escape today@expedia.com visitscotland we're
- [00:30]
B
not after ultimate moral responsibility. We're after proximal moral responsibility. That's what we want is like right now, given all of that right now, in the choices that are open to you, with the constraints that are there. What did you do? Why did you do it? And now the good fight with Jasia Monk.
- [00:56]
A
One of the great philosophical questions is about free will. About whether we as humans actually determine ourselves what to do in the world, how to lead our lives, what kind of decisions to make, or whether our feeling that we have to decide whether to say yes or no to that dinner invitation, whether or not to attend college, whether to pursue this kind of career or that kind of career, whether to have children or not, is just an illusion. But actually, perhaps it is all predetermined in some causal chain or at least driven by deeper genes and character traits and social influences over which we don't have full control. Well, today I invited a great philosopher to help us puzzle through these questions. Kevin Mitchell is an associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, and he is the author of a really great new book called Free Agents How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. In this conversation he generously gave us the 101 on the debate about free will, helping us understand how different traditions of thought about this have historically approached the topic, from so called determinists to compatibilists to libertarians. But he also explains his own theory, which is a genuinely new and interesting position. Actually, Mitchell argues the reason why we genuinely have free will is because evolution gave us higher order abilities to act and to decide that other organisms might not have. In the last part of this conversation we talked about two really interesting topics. We talked about artificial intelligence and what it would take for a being based on artificial intelligence to have free will. Could it be that ChatGPT or ChatGPT coupled in some kind of way with a robot that's able to move through the world, or ChatGPT coupled to that robot and some new form of agency that isn't just fulfilling what we humans wanted to do would qualify as having free will? And if it does, what does that tell us about the nature of free will in humans? And finally, we also had a Conversation about. About what actually turns on all of this. Whether we should think differently about questions like praising and loving our friends or our family members, or being willing to punish criminals who have committed murder, depending on whether or not we believe in free will. To get access to that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please support this podcast, go to jaschamonk.substack.com. Kevin Mitchell, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:19]
B
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
- [04:21]
A
So, you know, you have a book which engages with one of the oldest debates in philosophy and in theology, which is whether or not humans have free will. But you claim to be making an argument that is novel, which is hard to do in a debate that is that old, in which that much ink has been spilled, mostly physical ink, back in the day when philosophers and monks and others were trying to figure this out with ink on paper. Why do you think that to understand the ways in which humans do in fact have free will, we have to think about biological processes like evolution? And how is that answer different from how we fought about free will so far?
- [05:07]
B
Yeah, I think if you look at the philosophical literature or theological literature, either there's a lot of discussion that goes on, just sort of armchair thinking, right? Sort of trying to divine from logical postulates how we could have free will given this sort of supposed state of the universe and so on. And I guess my own feeling was that if we're thinking about this issue, we don't have to think about it in these really abstract terms. We can actually get quite concrete if we want to say, if the question is, do we really make decisions, or when we seem to be making decisions, are we in control of that? How could that actually come to pass, that those are biological questions? We can get into the neuroscience of decision making. We can get into the biology of control more generally. We can get into questions of how those kinds of systems could have evolved. How could it be that living things can act in the world in ways that, you know, non living physical things, they don't act, they're just involved in happenings. Right. So. So there's some deep kind of metaphysical questions there, but you can get a handle on them by really getting into the biological details and making the discussion a lot more concrete. And that was what I was trying to do.
- [06:25]
A
Great. So before we delve into your argument, perhaps you could lay out for listeners the kind of 101 of this conceptual space. When you read philosophical debates about free will, some of the terms you're going to run into are compatibilists. Libertarians, which is a very different meaning in philosophical context of debates about free will than it does in the political sphere. Determinists, you know, what are those main traditions, you know, what kind of answer do they give to this fundamental question of whether we actually, in a meaningful way have agency in the world?
- [07:05]
B
Yeah, it's funny. So the, I mean, first of all, the phenomena that we sort of observe is that we make decisions, right? We feel like we do. We're walking around, we're seeing other people make decisions, not only us, but it seems that, you know, other animals are capable of goal directed behavior. We can see them figuring something out, they might be conflicted about something, and then they decide. So there's a sort of a natural view that we are capable of making decisions. But then there's these challenges to it. And one of them, the sort of main one, is from what's called determinism. And that has various flavors to it. There's a really hardcore determinism which basically just says, look, it's all just physics. You know, you're made of atoms and molecules. Atoms and molecules obey the laws of physics. Those laws are deterministic in the sense that it's just the physical state of the system. Plus the laws of physics guarantee the next state of the system. Right? There's no leeway, there's no branching paths, there's no open future. It's just one kind of timeline forever.
- [08:12]
A
And part of intuition here is that if the world is truly physical, then the moment that the Big Bang happened, or if you're religious, the moment that God put the world in place, it is actually predetermined what's going to happen today. You might look like you're hesitating about whether to order the salmon or the steak for lunch, but in fact, if you're obeying the laws of physics, there is an objective answer to whether or not you're going to order salmon or steak for lunch before you make that decision. And if that's the case, if somebody with perfect knowledge about the laws of physics and about the particular atoms and neurons in your brain could already predict what you're going to happen, right? If it's predetermined, that's why it's called determinist, then surely the idea that we're choosing is an illusion. That's the kind of idea here, right?
- [09:02]
B
That's exactly the framing and you know, the way that you've said it, it's absurd on its face, frankly. And yeah, there's no evidence for it from physics which is good. But that's a very ancient kind of a question that goes back to the ancient Greeks. So the early Adamists, who were people like Democritus, for example, who actually proposed, rightly, that everything in the world is composed of atoms, things that couldn't be divided any further down. But Democritus had a very deterministic view of what happens. And his idea was the atoms, to use their phrasing, always fall in straight lines. But, you know, another Greek philosopher, Epicurus, absolutely realized that if that were true, then everything that you just said would follow from that. Everything would be deterministic, and two things would follow. First of all, all of your actions would be predetermined way, way, way in the past. But secondly, and this is more subtle, there wouldn't be any room for you to be doing anything. It would just all of the causes would be at the low level of atoms and molecules interacting with each other. And anything else, your desires, your intentions, your thoughts or feelings would just be kind of epiphenomena. They wouldn't actually be causal because all the causes are already exhausted by what's going on at the low level. There's no room in that scenario.
- [10:27]
A
Right?
- [10:28]
B
So that's the most extreme kind of version of, of determinism. But there's a few other sorts of varieties. One just comes from neuroscience, and this one is basically just says, look, yeah, you're having thoughts and feelings and desires and so on. But how could a thought possibly push physical stuff around in your brain? How could it make neurons fire? When a thought is immaterial and neurons firing is a real physical thing, isn't it just that your brain is doing things, you're not really doing anything. Your brain is in charge. And that's kind of weird way of thinking because it separates you from your brain, as if there's some immaterial you that you would want to be in charge, as opposed to the idea that actually when you're making a decision and your brain circuits are active, that's you using your brain to make a decision, right? As opposed to your brain making it. And then there's another version, which is interesting, which is that, okay, it sort of says, yes, you can think about things, you can have desires, you can build up intentions of what to do, you can do things for reasons, but those reasons completely derive from your past, right? They don't involve you right in the moment. It's everything that has occurred to you. It's your genetics, it's all of human evolution. It's Your experiences, everything that has configured your brain and your mind, really your psychology up to this very moment is, is then going to be what determines what intentions you, you build up when you encounter some new kind of scenario. And again, that kind of a view removes you from the equation in your. You are just not involved in real time in decision making. Again, it's a sort of a big, it's a big input output device. It's a sort of a stimulus response way of seeing what, what the brain is doing, which is advanced by people like Robert Sapolsky, for example, who I know you've spoken to before. But to my mind, without really much evidence that that's the case, of course there are these influences, very strong influences on our behavior from our psychology and predispositions and so on, even from our genetics. But those are influences. They're not completely predetermining everything, and they leave lots of scope for decisions to be made by you as a holistic entity.
- [12:56]
A
Yes. So Robert Sapolsky was on a previous episode of his podcast and there's in some ways an intuitive set of ideas that we know that socioeconomic class determines a lot of life outcomes. We know that psychological predispositions determine a lot of outcomes. We know that the level of intelligence you happen to be born with determines a lot of live outcomes. So it's tempting to say, well, perhaps that's just all there is to it. And that's the argument that Sepolsky takes, I think, quite far in his latest book, you know, as listeners who will go back to that episode will see, I'm quite skeptical of that for a number of reasons, as I believe you. There's a difference between acknowledging the fact that all of those things influence us, that we don't sort of completely self create de novo without any of those influences, and saying that therefore you're not morally responsible for anything. And one of the things that makes me very concerned about accepting that conclusion is that I think from a certain kind of political point of view, or just a moralistic point of view, it can seem very appealing because suddenly when somebody has done something bad, they're not really guilty. When somebody has committed a crime, we don't really have to hold them responsible. But the thing that falls out of consideration when you talk like that, and I think Tim Scanlon, who I've also had on the podcast in the past, makes that point very beautifully in his writing, among many others, is that you then can't really appreciate people for good things anymore either. Right. It might be tempting from a certain kind of progressive point of view, to say, oh, this poor murderer, you know, it's just his terrible childhood and he was born of the wrong genes and, you know, his influences on him were just bad. And so there's really no responsibility he has for that. If you're then consistent about that, that also means that you can't appreciate your partner for the kind things they do, your parents, for the generosity they may have displayed in raising you, your friend, for the wonderful virtues or qualities that make you cherish having them in your life. And in fact, in a certain kind of sense, it means you can't hold yourself responsible, you can't think about yourself, that you aspire to act in the right kind of way. So there's a lot of temptation and I think a lot of good reason to try and resist that kind of determinism. But of course, the fact that we might want to doesn't mean that we can if we're being intellectually rigorous. So what are, before we come to your arguments, the main traditions that try to take on this compatibilist challenge and perhaps let's start. And so this determinist challenge.
- [15:32]
B
Sure, sure.
- [15:33]
A
And perhaps let's start with a compatibilist tradition and then go to a libertarian one.
- [15:39]
B
Yeah, so the. Well, first of all, we have the free will sceptics who just say because of determinism we don't have free will. But then, like you say, there's a couple of kind of groups in the philosophical literature who have thought about this problem and defend the idea of free will, or at least defend the idea of moral responsibility. Some of them actually, without defending free will, which is interesting. So compatibilists, as the name suggests, think that either free will itself, or at least moral responsibility, is compatible with the idea that the world is completely deterministic. Now, I don't find those arguments compelling at all. I don't really even find them coherent, to be honest. But it's a. It's a major sort of position amongst philosophers and many scientists, and it sort of allows them to square the idea of their general commitment to physicalism or materialism or naturalism. At least there's nothing supernatural right in the world. So they don't have to posit a soul or a spirit or some magic ghost in the machine so they can square that view with the idea that, that we can still want to defend our moral responsibility. The real problem with that is that it doesn't explain how you could have any choice. Right. If you accept the real hard Physical determinism, then there aren't any choices there. There's just things that are happening. And the argument is that, okay, but if you were configured differently, you would have had different reasons for doing something. Therefore, you are the source of the causation of what happened. So it's a kind of an appeal to what's called a counterfactual scenario, this imaginary scenario in which you could have done otherwise if you had wanted to, and yet in the real universe, you never would have because nothing else would ever have been different. So it becomes an odd to my mind, slightly tortuous exercise in motivated reasoning because it's people trying literally setting out to defend moral responsibility, right? They literally just want to defend moral responsibility against determinism, when in fact they don't have to do that because determinism just isn't true. It doesn't hold. Physics doesn't say the world is like that. So, you know, in the one.
- [18:04]
A
Let me try and. Let me try and steel man that argument for me and see how you respond to it, right? I mean, I think that the intuition is the following one that, you know, how do I feel about my best friend? Why is it that I appreciate them? Why is it that I like them? Why is it that I praise them for their good actions? Why is it that I disdain my nemesis? Why do I think that they're a bad person doing bad things in the world? Now, if you tell me, well, it just so happens that this person's character is good and this other person's character is bad, right? It just so happens that they have certain predispositions which make one person inclined to be really altruistic and loving and really thoughtful about the world, and the other person knee jerk and reactive and mean. It's not clear to me that that defeats how I feel about them, right? I mean, to me, the object of moral judgment, moral value, is the person they are, right? Is the character they have. Now, it may not just be a particular action, right? If you say in general, this person is incredibly kind, incredibly altruistic, but on this particular occasion, somebody slipped a weird drug into their food unbeknownst to them. And that drug just has the effect of making people act meanly. I might say, all right, not gonna hold them responsible for that particular action because it doesn't flow from the deeper character, right? But to me, what moral judgment in human affairs is, is to say, do they have a kind of general character, the kind of general dispositions of a kind of general pattern of action which is praiseworthy which is attractive, which is appealing in various ways. And the people who are my good friends are people who I appreciate because I clearly answer that question in the affirmative. Now, if you tell me if it had a different mom and dad, or if the alleles had somewhat aligned in a different way when they're an embryo, or if they had gone through horrible experiences as a child that would have permanently psychologically maimed them, they wouldn't be like that. I'm willing to accept that. Right? I mean, I'm willing to accept that there's a good amount of luck in having created the person I appreciate. But the person that, you know, that I judge in a moral way is the person they are. And even though the person they are was shaped in all kinds of ways by luck and circumstance, that feels to me like the right object of moral judgment. And so that to me is kind of a strength of compatibilist insights.
- [20:29]
B
Well, yes, I think that's right. And I think that would be the compatibleist argument there. Right. However, there's a couple things being mixed up there, right? So there's the question of free will, which is I think you could say at any moment, are there choices available to you just in the way the universe could go? And among those choices, do you have control over what actually happens? Right. And those are questions that you can actually ask and answer without talking about moral responsibility, without talking about the meritocracy or praise or blame or what we find worthy of praise or blame, which are all, to me, secondary or tertiary kind of questions layered on top of that one. And when they get conflated like that, which a lot of the free will literature just takes free will and moral responsibility as the same question. Almost to me, that that leads to some confusion or it leads to people making arguments at one level, like the level that you just talked about there. The level of how in a social setting and in terms of relationships with other people, what you find, you know, praiseworthy or blameworthy about a person's character and then using that as an argument against a premise which is couched at the level of particle physics, right? And those two things just feel like a mile away from each other. So one of the problems, yeah, that's
- [21:56]
A
fair, But I think to be fair, that is a conscious move because I think what people like Scanlon would say is, who cares about the particle physics, right? Perhaps the determinants are right about the particle physics, perhaps they're not right about the particle physics. The choices we make have a lot of relevance in the world, irrespective of that. Right. And so the most trivial example of that that is given in the literature, as I call, is to say, if you're a waiter, should you respect the choices that your customers, your diners make for what to order for lunch or dinner? Now, let's say that it's true that the world is determinist, that an omniscient being would know in advance that somebody is going to get the salmon, and perhaps it's even true that that actually they would enjoy the steak more if it somehow arrived right. We still have reason to respect the choice of the person ordering one meal rather than another for all kinds of social and so on reasons. Right. And so in the same way, you know, at a much deeper level, you know, when you recognize that how I'm gonna feel about my friend or how I'm gonna feel about my nemesis doesn't actually turn on, you know, whether if some allele had hit another allele in a different way in the formation of their fetus, they would have acted differently. But I can sort of just move on from that first question. So it's not an answer to the first fundamental question, but it's an argument to say we don't need to bother with that first fundamental question because the thing we care about doesn't turn on it.
- [23:30]
B
Right? You're right. And I think if you could imagine a scenario in which there are people going into restaurants making choices about what to eat, and there are waiters making choices about how to feel about it under determinism, then that's fine. You get to make that move, right? You get to go from here all the way to there and say, I don't care about all the intervening stuff. I'm just going to talk about this at this level. But what I would say is, under compatibilism, if you're assuming a deterministic universe, how do you get there? There's no way to get the emergence of beings like us that seem to be agential decision making beings with real choices and using the kind of vocabulary that we talked about, choices, taking action, making decisions and so on, like none of that means anything in a deterministic universe. Nor do compatibilists ever supply an account of how such agents would emerge. They just take that for granted and then say, even if it were deterministic right now, we can still apply these moral arguments as you just did, and I accept those. I just don't think we would get there. There's no way to get there without some indeterminacy and thankfully, again, it becomes moot because the, you know, physics just doesn't say that the world is deterministic. It's just a misreading of the basic physics, actually, to think that
- [24:57]
A
talk us through the libertarian tradition on free will and then I think we'll have done enough setup. And you've been very patient in giving us this free will Course 101 to really understand where your intervention lies in your book and how you sort of scramble these categories.
- [25:13]
B
Yeah. So the traditional libertarian view is defending free will, but usually they're incompatibilists and they say if the world were deterministic, we wouldn't have free will. But the world isn't deterministic, and that has some scope for us to intervene in decisions and decide which way things go. Part of the problem with the sort of traditional libertarian view is that they have developed a kind of view of the way that the universe is, which is what I like to call determinism plus randomness, where it's like things are going along mostly deterministically, and then every once in a while a radioactive atom, you know, decays, or you get some quantum event or some little thing, some weird little random thing happens. Right. And then that little random thing can cause something to happen. And the problem with that kind of a view is that it doesn't explain how you are doing anything right. It leaves you open to this challenge. It's like either way, you're screwed. Either everything's determined at the low level and you're not making any decisions, or there are some random things happening at the low level, which are the things that determine what happens, in which case you as a whole entity are still not doing anything Right. So that's why libertarianism has always been kind of unsatisfactory, I think, to a lot of people, is because it doesn't yet answer the question of how you go from having some indeterminacy at low levels to the emergence of higher order structures. Right. Higher order systems, like living systems that have control of things at that high level. Actually, there's macroscopic causation going on. It's not all the causation bubbling, bubbling up. And that's the kind of picture that I want to propose myself.
- [27:07]
A
Thank you, that's really helpful. Because I was always somewhat confused about sort of the moral intuition behind libertarianism for exactly the reasons that you outlined. So just to go back on, why is it called libertarianism, I assume that it's in contrast to determinism. Right. Whereas the determinists think that the world is unfree in the sense that if you know everything about it at point A in theory, you could know everything about it in point Z. In the libertarian world, there's some degrees of freedom. In that world, there's going to be some random events such that knowing everything at point A doesn't actually tell you what's going to happen at point C. Now, in a way that says, well, look, if you don't know in advance what's going to happen, well, then perhaps we do have free will because somewhere along the way, people can make decisions that are different. You can't predict how people are going to act. But as you're saying, the problem is, well, is it the kind of action worth having? Right. Is it the kind of action that actually would make us think that we have free will? And if you're saying, well, look, it's not the case, good news, it turns out that the determinists are wrong. Let's say that you have a self conception as having made this really reasoned decision about whether or not to have children. You've reflected in a deep way about what your life goals are and what you really want to accomplish. And so you feel proud of your decision to have kids or not to have kids. Right. It really reflects yourself in a deep way. Now the threat comes in from a determinist and they say, ha, ha. Actually, you're deluded, you're an idiot. Right. It was always predetermined that you were gonna have kids because it's just a matter of how these atoms hit each other. And we could have known that all along. Well, okay, that seems upsetting. Now comes in, they say, well, great news, actually, it wasn't predetermined at point A whether you're gonna have kids or not. It's because of quantum physics and quantum mechanics and actually, you know, versus one random way in which one atom hit the other in a way that couldn't have been predicted. And that's why you had kids. And of course, the answer is, how is that any better? Right. How does that make me feel that that decision comes in any sort of more significant way from what seemed to be my reflection about the world, my values, my goals? Right. I mean, if that's the free will it saves, it doesn't seem to be a free will worth having.
- [29:21]
B
Yeah, exactly. That's always been the sort of classic problem. And it's partly why, you know, compatibilists say, look, it doesn't matter what the answer to determinism is. You know, either way, we can just have these discussions at a high level about moral behavior and talk about that. We don't need to, you know, think about what's going on at these. At these low levels. So, yeah, the problem with the libertarian view is it shows sort of where the freedom comes from in the world. Right? In in the sense that many things could happen just based on physics. But it doesn't answer the question, where does the control come from? Right. That's the question that's really interesting. How does a living being control what happens? Given that now many things could happen, how do I narrow that possibility space so that the thing that happens is the thing that I want to happen? That's the real challenge. And it turns out that actually that's what being a living thing is all about is. Is making things happen. That's like just almost the definition of life is that living things have that causal power as holistic entities. Right. It's not. It's not the power of any of their parts. It's the power of the whole thing to make things happen in the world. Generally, what they're making things happen. Sorry. Generally, what they're making happen is themselves. They're making themselves happen. That's. They. That's how they keep on living. Like, even a simple bacterium is constantly working against the laws of thermodynamics that say all of its parts should go into equilibrium with the universe, and it's taking in energy and working to make sure that they don't, so that it keeps happening as a set of processes that go through time. So that that question, you know, the sort of fundamental indeterminacy is just a prerequisite for control to emerge. That's just the start of the explanation. It doesn't give you free will off the bat. It just allows. It opens the door for systems that have that kind of macroscopic causal power to emerge.
- [31:27]
A
All right, amazing. So I think we've gotten people up to speed on some of the basic debates about free will. Now, one of the characteristics of this is that for the most part, these debates have been armchair debates, whether mostly in the form of philosophers or theologians. It was people sort of sitting thinking about the world in an abstract way and trying to grapple with these incredibly complicated questions. Now, your training, as I understand it, is as a biologist, as a neuroscientist. And so you take a different kind of empirical approach to this. This is not entirely novel. There's a bunch of people who've been trying to apply neuroscience and other disciplines to this debate. About free will. But you come up with an answer that is rather different from what at least I'd seen before. And that is to say, part of the answer here is evolution. That somehow, through evolutionary processes, what has emerged is some kind of capacity at higher level reasoning. Explain to us first of all what that process looked like, and then I'll push you a little bit on what exactly that means about how we should think about our ability to reason freely.
- [32:34]
B
Yeah, I mean, to me, you know, think about any biological phenomenon. Taking an evolutionary perspective on it is always a good idea because that's just how they came into being and it helps to understand them. And I think in this case in particular, you know, we're having these discussions about human free will and human cognition and consciousness. And, you know, it's so sophisticated where we have layers of, you know, language and sociality and morality on top of it. It's just an incredibly complex kind of scenario to try and understand off the bat. And there's an argument to be made that actually, let's start with just the very simplest kind of instantiation of something, doing something, right? The simplest living being that we can say is acting in the world. And let's try and understand that and ground some concepts that we're going to need to understand human cognition and then trace across evolution, this elaboration of these control systems, from single celled organisms to multicellular ones, to ones with nervous systems, to ones with much more complicated levels and levels of cognition and metacognition and so on. And so that's the arc that I trace in the book. And it really actually starts with the origin of life, what it means to be a living being at all, which, as I was just saying, is a living being what it is. It's an unlikely pattern of processes and activity. And you know, in bacteria, it's all sort of chemical metabolic reactions that are ongoing, that are all. It's a sort of a regime of interlocking, constraining processes with all this sort of feedback processes that link the whole thing into an ongoing pattern that just is the bacterium, right? That's what the bacterium is. And it's alive because it continues to be that way through time. And in order to continue to be that way, it has to do work, it has to take in energy. But the problem is that the world is often not cooperating. The world can be a hostile place. It can be a changeable place, which means that for organisms to persist for longer, it helps if they can take in information about the state of the world. And then act on that information in a way that's adaptive. So even the simplest organism, you could say first of all has purpose, right? Something that just is not present in the non living world. An atom has no purpose, the sun has no purpose. The whole universe has no purpose. But a bacterium does. And the purpose is to persist through time to survive and reproduce. And so because of that they get selected for functionalities that help them to survive in a changeable world where they can use information and then act on it. And you know, already we've got something, a kind of causation that's just not there in the normal physical non living world where, you know, a bacterium is sensing something out in the world like a sugar. And there's no physical transfer of energy or matter that's happening. It just detects something outside the cell and gives a little wiggle, this little protein inside the cell and then they think and act on that information in a, you know, actually in a context dependent kind of a way. Not a, not even just in a simple stimulus response, reflexive kind of a way. It's actually much more holistic, integrative kind of response. And so, you know, once you have that, you can kind of say at the most basal level, right? The most primitive level, we've got an organism doing things for reasons. We've got goal directed behavior, we've got information that has meaning for the organism. It's about something in the world, it's for something, it's used for adaptive responses. So it has value. And so all of those things, once you get those, then those concepts are grounded, then you can just elaborate, you're off to the races, right? We've got organisms doing things as whole entities. And from there you can just get more sophisticated, which is what happened gradually over evolutionary time.
- [36:46]
A
It's interesting to think of a bacterium as sort of goal, directive and purposive in this kind of way. And I look forward to hearing sort of what new levels of complexity and therefore perhaps freedom are introduced as we go up the. I don't know if that's the term, but people still use the evolutionary chain to more complex beings. But how exactly does this defeat the determinist argument, Right? I mean, presumably determinist is going to say let's stay at the level of a bacteria. Okay, fine, they respond to a stimulus. We're going to go left if a sugar is present on the left, and we're not going to go left if the sugar isn't present on the left. So that's different from an atom just sort of randomly knocking into things or a tree leaf blowing in the wind. But we knew that human beings were capable of those kind of decisions. Right. We knew it. Clearly, you know, if you're starving and somebody puts a stake in front of you, you're going to move towards the stake. Like that's not news to us. Right. The point is that the laws of the universe predetermined that you were going to be hungry at this point and that when somebody is going to put that steak in front of you and that those two things being the case, you're going to move towards the stake. And surely the same is true of a bacterium. Sure. The bacterium is capable of goal directed behavior in a way that an atom is not. But the goals the bacterium has the presence of the sugar or the absence of the sugar and the resulting move towards the sugar, not moving towards the sugar. Those are all predetermined. So how is it that this has changed anything about the kind of deterministic.
- [38:31]
B
Yeah.
- [38:32]
A
Account of a world.
- [38:33]
B
Yeah. So there's, there's two kind of sides to that argument, I think. One is that it, it's going back to the idea of physical predeterminism, that actually everything that was going to happen is just determined by the physical laws. You know, I, I mentioned that libertarians sort of would argue with that. Well, basically it's, it's just, there's no evidence for that from physics. But there's two, there's kind of two ways of thinking about that. One is this determinism plus randomness where the default state is deterministic, but occasionally you get these sort of incursions of random events. Right, but I don't think that's an accurate way to think about it. I think more generally it's just that you have a kind of a pervasive indefiniteness to the present state of things. There's just a limit to how precisely the physical parameters of a system are specified. It's nothing to do with observers or uncertainty or anything. It's just that the, the things themselves have a finite amount of information as a physical system at any point. So given that there's some fuzziness and some jitteriness at the lowest levels. It's just many things could happen. There's a kind of a, it's not that there are branching paths in the future waiting for us to choose. It's just a kind of a big fuzzy continuum. Okay, so we can say for our bacterium then that the reason, the whole reason why a bacterium could evolve in the first place is because. Because the causation is not exhausted at those low levels, right. Many things could happen based on the laws of physics. What that allows is that the way that a system is organized can have some causal influence, can have some top down causal influence and constrain the way that a system is, again, based on the principles of selection. In the case of a bacterium, I mean, we can say the same thing. Looking at our computers here, the way that they're physically structured constrains physically what goes on within them, right? It doesn't change the laws of physics. The electrons are still behaving as electrons, but they're constrained to do what they do because of, in that case, our design. In the bacterium case, it's evolutionary selection. So we can put I think the sort of really hard predeterministic thing aside and say, well, it wasn't predetermined from the dawn of time that the bacterium would be here and the food would be over here. However, that leads to a different kind of worry, which is that actually the bacterium, while it is making decisions, is doing it as an automaton, right? It's basically pre programmed. It's like a little robot. It's being pushed around by its parts. That's the concern, I think, and it's the concern when neuroscientists look inside you and do an FMRI scan and you know, a neuroimaging scan and say, oh, you only made that decision because this part of your brain was active. Well, you can say the same thing about a bacterium. The bacterium only moved towards the sugar because these proteins within it got phosphorylated and they, they linked to these other proteins and they linked to the motor that makes the bacterium move. And it's just a stimulus response machine. The bacterium is not doing anything. And I think, you know, there's some truth to that. Of course, a bacterium, while you can say it's doing goal directed behavior, it's not conscious of that, right? It's not aware of its goals. It can't think about its goals. However, it's actually much more sophisticated than you might think. So when we do, like our, you know, laboratory experiments, we have this tendency to control everything, right? We control everything that we're not interested in and we just change one thing in the environment at a time. So we have our little bacterium and we either put down some sugar or we don't. And when we put down some sugar, we can see this biochemical pathway acting. We say, look, that's the explanation, right? But the bacterium never encounters the world like that. It always encounters loads of things at the same time that it has to integrate. And maybe there's a threat in the same place, maybe there's some bad chemicals where the sugar is. It has to balance those options. It has to integrate with its own metabolic state, with its history, with how crowded the place is. So it's doing a much more holistic kind of a job where, you know, I think it, it's, it justifies thinking of even a simple bacterium as an agent as opposed to just a machine. And so that's where I think we get off the ground with a very basal kind of agency. I'm not saying bacteria have free will, you know, I reserve free will just for humans, just to avoid kind of confusion. But it's a start, right? It really is the entity as a whole thing. And also, I guess the other thing that's really important there is it's an entity with continuity through time, right? That's what allows it. That's why we should think of it as a self, as a being, is because it continues through time. It's not just a, a machine, a physical thing with a physical state in an instant that responds to things. The way it responds depends on its history. Now, for bacteria, it's mostly evolutionary history. As things got more complicated as we get multicellular organisms, especially with nervous systems, then they learned a new trick, right? Then they could learn as an individual about experiences in the world. They could develop new goals, not ones that they're not completely pre programmed by evolution. They're pre programmed to learn as individuals and then they can develop much more flexible and really genuinely more autonomous kind of behaviors.
- [44:10]
A
I love that this conversation is doubling as a remedial lesson, certainly to me in sort of the biological history of the emergence of higher forms of life. I have a bunch of responses to this idea about the bacterium, but let's follow the chain and then I'll sort of express where I find what you're saying convincing and where I still have questions. So you get a kind of goal directed behavior in even a single cell organism. But as you're saying, there's constraints on the extent to which an organism can reflect on its goals, can act on the basis of its own history, rather than just the things that through evolution have been baked into its genetic code for how to beh. What happens once we get multicellular organisms and what happens once we get animals and what happens once we get higher order mammals? Talk us through sort of how all of that happens, but more Importantly, how all of that allows something like free will to emerge.
- [45:14]
B
Yeah, so it's interesting if you think about a bacterium, the challenge that it faces in order to survive is to know what's out in the world and what should I do about it. So it needs to have some sensory systems, right? Which are just little proteins on the surface of the cell. It needs to have a motor so that it can move around in the world. But it also needs to have some policies. It needs to have some kind of knowledge about what's the right thing to do given what it senses. And most of those control policies are pre programmed by evolution. But as you get multicellular organisms that, you know, develop more complex bodies, well, first of all, they had, they face the same problems, right? The world is changing. They need to know what's out in the world, what should I do about it? So they need to develop sensory systems, things like sense of smell, things like vision and hearing and touch and so on. They needed to develop motor systems which in this case become more sophisticated because they're not just locomoting in the world like a bacterium does, like a, you know, like a rowboat where the boat, the shape of the boat stays the same. The shape of the animal can change, right? You know, so they, they're not just able to move in the world, they're able to act on the world. You know, for things with, with limbs or tentacles or wings or mouth parts or whatever it is. They can manipulate things in the world. So the possibilities for action just became much, much more open ended. And you know, that's really important because it's the open endedness of the possibilities that, that make cognition worthwhile. That's why evolution invested in it. Because there were so many opportunities there that evolution couldn't pre state what you should do in every scenario. It just gets too complicated, right? It's a combinatorial explosion of possibilities. So instead evolution said, well, you figure it out, right? You're on your own, go for it. I'll give you some basic kind of motivations and some basic policies. But after that you, you need to scaffold on top of that, right? So many kinds of animals are capable of that. And along the lineage that leads to humans, you go to vertebrates and then mammals and then primates and then humans. Those kinds of capacities got more and more sophisticated as the brain got larger. And there were, I mean, the important thing about that is that actually what you get as the brain gets larger is more internal processing. You get a greater separation between the sensors and the motors, right? I mean really simple animals, they might have. Either the motors and the sensors might be directly coupled to each other or they might have like one intervening layer of neurons or two intervening layers of neurons. As you get more complicated things, you get many, many internal layers, right? So you're the. The brain is processing much, much more information. It's building models of the world, it's building models of the self and it's learning from experience. Like in, you know, the last time I encountered something like this, I did X and X turned out well. So I'm going to do it again. And that is how we learn from experience. You know, it's called reinforcement learning, where rewards or punishments based on our past actions can inform future behaviors. So in that way, organisms became much more autonomous, much more self directed and much more able to plan for, you know, distant things in the future. And ultimately so what they're doing is they're not just acting for reasons, they're accumulating reasons, right? They're through their own experience in the world. And ultimately along that lineage, what we get to is creatures like humans who are capable of not just having a model of the world and a model of themselves, but also a model of their own mental workings, right? They developed enough levels of the neural hierarchy that the top levels are actually looking down at the workings of the lower ones and they're internally representing thoughts and beliefs and desires and so on. So there you get to, you know, consciousness, you get to what we call metacognition, even meta volition, where ultimately we're not just acting for reasons. We're able to think about our reasons, we're able to arrive at new reasons by the act of reasoning. And so we're able to think and we have to think in all these novel scenarios. It's just not possible to pre state every action under every conceivable scenario. That's why we have a brain, is to figure that out, right? So we don't know there aren't like preset weights that determine the outcome in every scenario. That's what thinking is for, is to figure out what those weights should be in this new set of combination of threats and opportunities and so on.
- [50:10]
A
So help me understand how exactly the complexity that emerges through evolution relates to the question of free will, right? I imagine that somebody like determinists is going to say, well look, we knew that the human brain is complex to begin with, right? It's not like that is a novel discovery all through this armchair debate about free will. We started from the Premise that, you know, the very puzzle is humans seem to be these incredibly complex beings. And when we're reflecting about things, it feels like, you know, all of these competing considerations are in our mind and we're reflecting on our purpose and our goals in life and all kinds of things. But in the end, you know, if you think that there is some. Some compatibist element to the world and perhaps we have to get into that part of the argument in greater detail, then that just all seems to be an illusion. Because, in fact, for all of that complexity, what you're ultimately going to do was predetermined. And so it seems in some ways to be an illusion. Now you're making the argument that actually atoms banging into each other in the world don't have any kind of real agency already. By the time we get to a bacterium, there is a real kind of goal, directedness, but not something you would call free will. Then you get multicellular organisms, more complicated animals, and finally humans and what's going on in their brain when they're trying to figure out what to do is all of these really complicated considerations, and they seem to be determinative of what we do. But a determinist is still going to say, okay, sure, this machine is now much more complex. We've gone from a really simple calculator, which perhaps is the equivalent of a bacterium, to the highly sophisticated laptop which I'm using to record this conversation. And there's obviously a huge difference in scale there. Right. But in the end, the pixels that my laptop displays are just as predetermined by things that are outside of its volition as the number that a much more simple calculator comes to when I type in 2 +2? So how is it that this complexity set, which feels like a degree in quantity, leads to the introduction of free will, which seems like a change in kind. It seems like a qualitative change.
- [52:35]
B
Yeah, yeah. So I think there's two ways to look at that in terms of freedom. You can think about it in terms of autonomy from the environment. Right. So how much causal power does an agent or an entity have in the world? How much is it pushed around by the world of brain versus how much can it push back? Right. And so what I would say is that we and, you know, multicellular animals, mammals and so on, are more able to push back on the world. And, you know, that's a. You could say that's sort of a vague. I mean, it's a little. It is vague way of putting it, but there Are actually you can think about, you know, very concrete ways of measuring that kind of thing. Like, for example, how much inter, how much information can you integrate at once? How many levels of a hierarchy, how much sort of higher order abstraction are you doing to think about things in the world? What's the time horizon that you're thinking over? What you know, I can do things right now that will affect events a year from now or two years from now. Right. And I can consciously do that. Whereas, you know, a little worm that's just wriggling around that doesn't even have eyes, for example, is not going to do that. Partly because it has no information about anything that's further away from it than like a centimeter. Right. You know, so. So they inhabit the here and now and they behave accordingly. They don't have cognitive systems for planning over long timeframes. Whereas what happened over our evolution is that we develop those capacities. And what that means is that we need the capacities to be able to adjudicate between goals, right? Because we have short term goals and long term goals, a lot of them will be conflicting with each other. There's opportunity costs. We can't do them all at the same time. So we need to be able to make at any moment and in real time, but also through time, we need to be able to juggle those things, prioritize, optimize our behavior and then follow through on it. Right. I mean, our behavioral decision making is not just momentary, moment by moment. I can do A or B and then I can do C or D and I can do E or F. It's like I can do A or B. I decided to do A and now that's going to take me a while, right. I decided to go to college to get a degree. That's four years. I'm going to have to continue holding that goal in my mind and that's going to constrain and inform my behavior on a daily basis. So we have agendas and commitments and policies that we build up through time. And you could say all of that allows us to be more proactive as agents in the world and less immediately reactive. Now, the problem with that is that while that I think that's a good valid argument, it doesn't meet the challenge that people could say, okay, fine, you're not being coerced by things outside you as much as more reactive organisms are, but you're still being compelled by things inside you, right? You still have all those psychological things
- [55:33]
A
because just to make it simple, right? And I think that's exactly the objection I was having in mind as you're giving this explanation. So I have your book in front of me. I certainly have agency in the way that a bacterium or even a worm does not. In that I can pick up the book, which is an excellent book, and I can sort of hold it into the camera and I can open up the book. Right. And I know that I am able to do all of those things. I can manipulate the book in these kind of ways. The question that bothers the free will skeptics is, but was it in some ways predetermined or was it in some ways inevitably downstream from, and my inclinations from the way my brain works that I was going to do that? And of course, you can extend that argument something more complex. Right. You know, I want to invest into my Individual Retirement Account. I want to put money into my iia, but, you know, invitations to go out drinking with my buddies are just too tempting. And by the time that the end of the month comes around, I just don't have the money to do that. You know, again, you know, in some ways this is due to my choices and so on, but perhaps it's in fact not due to my choices because I just don't have control over myself in the right ways. And that's to do with my genes or my upbringing or whatever. Right? Exactly. So, yes, I can manipulate the world. I can invest in the IAA and be really rich when I'm old, or I can fail to invest in my IIA and have very limited freedom of action when I'm old because I don't have the money to do anything. But the underlying worry is, well, isn't that, yes, I can make those choices and they have big consequences in the world 30 years from now. Possibly. But which of these choices I make seems like it may have been influenced by things that are not as fully under my control as I thought. So that's the worry, right?
- [57:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I like the way that you phrased it at the end there, because the way that you phrased it is completely uncontroversial. It's absolutely true that those decisions are influenced by things that are not under as much control as you thought. Potentially, if you thought you were in complete control and weren't constrained at all by prior influences. But that's a really, really far cry from saying no one has any control whatsoever at any moment. Right. You know, you're going from, I had less free will than I thought I had to. Everyone has zero free will. Those are just two extremely different propositions. And I don't think that the more extreme version is defensible, while the less extreme version is, like, kind of obvious in the sense that everyone agrees that we have these influences on our. On our behavior. They just have different views of what that means for things like our own kind of meta control. Right. And this is where metacognition and introspection come in and the question of the emergence of character. Because you could say we all have, like, personality predispositions, which is absolutely true. I mean, my previous book was all about. That was all about how the brain gets wired, how that shapes our psychology and so on. Right. But, you know, shaping our psychology in broad patterns, like how outgoing you are, how conscientious, how neurotic, whatever, is very different from saying those predispositions determine precisely what you're going to do in every exact moment. They don't. They don't have enough information to do that. Instead, they inform the emergence of our character through time, the way that we adapt to the world. And, you know, I've had sets of experiences and I've adapted to them in my way. Someone else might have adapted to them in their way, and that's fine. That's just how we come to be in the world, Right? That's how we come to be ourselves in the world. Now there's a question. Do we ever have any control over that, or are we just passive passengers in that process? And some people, like Robert Sapolsky, for example, would say all of that is just passive. It's just your genes, it's evolution, things in the womb, and then the accumulated effect of every experience that has happened to you.
- [59:27]
A
Right.
- [59:27]
B
I mean, that's the way that he phrases it has happened to you as if you had nothing to do with it. But in fact, if we're making choices in the moment, if there's some freedom and we have some control, then those are things that we chose. Right. You know, a lot of the time we're choosing actions, we're choosing environments, we're selecting, we're creating. We're building our own niches as we go along. We're choosing which friends to go out with, the ones that tempt us out at the end of the month. Right. So there's a very different view that you can have on that, which is, first of all, that the way that our character emerges is informed by our experiences, which are the result of our own choices throughout our lifetime. And secondly, there's another level on top of that, which Is that actually we can very actively ask ourselves, am I making the right kinds of decisions? Are these the right kinds of motivations that I should have going forward? You know, actually going forward, I want to be more responsible for in thinking about my future, and I'm going to decide to do that. And even though I know, like, I can recognize that I'm going to be tempted, I'm going to take an action by actually putting €100 in my IRA at the start of the month instead of at the end. Right. So, you know, you can. You can build those kinds of things. And we do that. You know, it's just clear that we think about our own character, we think about our own volition in this metacognitive, introspective kind of a way. And of course, like, some people do it more than others, and it can be effortful, but it's possible in principle to do that. And so the idea that, you know, right now, the configuration of my brain and mind right now that I wasn't involved in that at all, I just don't buy it. I'm just totally not convinced by that because there's so much evidence that, in fact, that's partly the accumulation of my own choices through time.
- [61:22]
A
So I'm going to say something that I think will half make you happy and half make you sad, but it's not deterministic. So we don't know exactly what we're going to say. I find what you're saying very convincing. I have trouble to see how it is as different as you claim from the tradition that you were quite dismissive of earlier, which is the compatiblest one. Yeah, right. It seems to me that what you're describing is the ways that make human life worthwhile, is the ways in which, clearly, in the ways that, to me matter, we do seem to be free. Right. I can reflect on whether to put the money in the IA at the beginning or the end of the month. I can reflect on the way my life is going as a whole and say, you know what? I have great friends, but I don't spend enough time with them. I should spend more time with them. Or you know what? I actually think that on reflection, my friends aren't the right ones. They don't share my values, and I should go and find new friends that share my values more closely. And that is what, to me, makes human agency important. Now, I don't see how your evolutionary argument tells us that this isn't somehow determined or that this isn't, you know, subject to some of the kind of worries that some of the skeptics about free will have. In fact, you might say the fact that this is all downstream from an evolutionary mechanism is one more thing that really constrains how we're going to act and how we are in the world, because we certainly didn't choose all of those branches in the evolutionary tree that sort of shaped all of those capacities and so on. But to me, you know, the argument, the argument the strongest is, but it shouldn't matter. The point is that you have a kind of higher order being that is capable of reflecting about the world, whose actions reflect not just the goal drivenness of a bacterium, but a much more complex, much more sophisticated sort of goal drivenness, which does come downstream, among other things, of this really complicated evolutionary process that has given us those faculties. So who cares whether or not in some sense it's deterministic? That's not what matters here. What matters is that my decision to meet up with my friend and have a glass of wine to many, in order to connect and to have a wonderful human experience comes downstream from my values, from my purpose, from my reflections on the world. And whether my values and my purpose, my reflection on what I should do in the world is itself somehow causally predetermined just doesn't seem that important. That to me is a compatibilist argument, and it sounds to me, and you'll explain to me where I'm going wrong, suspiciously similar to what you've been saying.
- [64:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you're right in the sense that actually, in terms of moral responsibility, I actually end up in a point that's very similar to compatibilists. It's just that the evolutionary view and the fact that it relies on some indeterminacy to emerge allows me to get there. That's the only difference, in a sense. But actually, at the end, you could say, well, what do we actually judge people morally responsible for? It's their actions, but it's also their character. It's why they did something. It's not just that someone did something, it's like they really. We judge them harshly when we think they had the wrong reason for doing something, right? And so what we're doing is we're ascribing some ownership, some responsibility for their character. And the thing is that under determinism, there's no way that they could have any responsibility for their character because they never were actually in control at any moment, because the same thing was always gonna happen, right? So that's why I find that argument incoherent. But I end up in the same point with respect to moral responsibility because we do hold people responsible for their moral character, not just for their actions. Their actions issue from that character. It's the character that we're actually judging a lot of the time. And I think, you know, the view that I've outlined there, which is a naturalistic way that you can have a system that actually has control in the moment and that has meta control and metacognition, you know, that's a, that's a scientifically plausible way that you could get a system like that emerging. And then you end up in that endpoint where, you know, we can think about moral responsibility that way. And I think, I mean the other aspect I would say is that some people use this term called ultimate moral responsibility. So you can't be held responsible if you weren't the ultimate cause of everything that you did. Which is to say that like it's almost a way of saying if there was any prior cause that influenced you that you weren't involved in, then you can't be held responsible. Like if you weren't responsible personally for all of human evolution, or if I mean to make it absurd, like if you personally didn't institute the Big bang, then you can't be held responsible for anything that happened since then. That's just kind of silly. We actually don't want. We're not after ultimate moral responsibility, we're after proximal moral responsibility. That's what we want is like right now, given all of that, right now, in the choices that are open to you, with the constraints that are there, what did you do? Why did you do it? That's what we care about when we talk about moral responsibility.
- [66:47]
A
But that distinction between proximate and ultimate moral responsibility is exactly what in my mind sounds like those compatibilist arguments, right? To say that as long as your actions right now reflect your character and your intentions and so on, who cares where that character and those intentions came from in the first place? Now, I understand that. I think you want to respond to that by saying, oh, but in fact it is important to note that your character and your responses and so on are themselves in some sense self created. Not fully self created, but that you had degrees of freedom in the past, actions you took that shaped your character and so on. So let me push on that a little bit and I think here I just haven't yet fully understood your argument, so I'd love for you to explain it to me in more detail. Perhaps just to re explain it, which is how does that evolution creates a system that is not deterministic. And I want to distinguish here between sort of levels of complexity that might be involved in a physical system and whether or not we should think of the people within that system as having freedom to act. Right, so the free body problem, right? We don't really know how to predict how free planets that are orbiting around each other are going to behave. It's too complicated. We can't figure it out. But it would be very strange to say that therefore each of these planets or one of these planets has freedom to decide where to move next. Right. Clearly each of these bodies are just acted upon in a way that pushes them in one direction to another. Now, given the complexity of the system, we find it impossible to predict which way we're going to go. But that doesn't mean that they can choose which way to go. And isn't that similar for our sort of reflections about what to do? I mean, that the machine we've created in our brain or the machine that evolution has created in our brain is so incredibly complex that it does have all of these higher order reflections and all of those neurons doing all of this complicated stuff. And so we may never be able to predict exactly what action that's going to lead to. The fact that we're not able to predict that doesn't mean that we actually have freedom in the end, like in one of the planets of a free body problem, you're either going to invest in the IAA or not. And perhaps that is in fact downstream from those predetermined things, which doesn't have to worry a compatibleist because it says, okay, but your action reflects the things that you ultimately care about in such a way that, you know, that's what matters. But you want to say, no, no, no. Somehow complexity translates into freedom in a way that I haven't quite followed.
- [69:42]
B
Okay, so again, there's multiple sort of levels of concern. There's the real sort of basal physical predeterminism, which is to say, how could it, you know, how does. In a sense, you know, it comes back to the question, how does indeterminacy help the argument, right? How does a control system emerge from this indeterminate thing where many things could happen? And what the organism is trying to do is narrow that down and make certain things happen. Right now it's doing that with noisy components, right? They're just jittering all around the place, even in a bacterium, little proteins, but binding and unbinding. And diffusing around the place. Right? So the problem for the organism is to try and control things as much as it can to the level it needs to. Right? So it doesn't need to control where every little protein diffuses. It can't do that. It just needs to, at a macroscopic scale, control the outcome at a level that is equivalent to it surviving or not surviving, it getting some nutrients or not getting some nutrients. Right. There's a level that it cares about, there's a level that evolution cares about. And below that, it doesn't have to micromanage, it just has to constrain. Okay? So control systems emerge in that way because they can, right? Literally. Because you could have several different kinds of organization of these things, and you're just going to lock into certain ones that tend to persist more, and then because they persist more, they'll persist more, right? And then they're the next stage of evolution and so on. So you get this kind of emergence of control systems that favor the persistence of macroscopic form and pattern, and then you just elaborate on those. And so in us, we have control systems that are, as we've been saying, you know, so much more sophisticated. They're operating over all kinds of information about the world, all kinds of information that we've gleaned from our own experience. So we know what to expect. We're making predictions, we're testing them out. We're thinking about the utility of various actions, the reward or punishment that we might get from those. We're weighing that all up and making an all things considered judgment as an entity. Right? For our reasons, not for the reasons of our parts. So we can say we're really not an automaton. We are a holistic, macroscopic entity with continuity through time that's acting for individual level reasons. But again, the control thing is still a problem, right? I mean, the funny thing is that the deterministic view for someone like Robert Sapolsky, for example, is almost saying you have so much control that you have no choice, which is just an odd place to land. Right? Whereas a more, I think, biologically realistic view is that we have some control, right? That we're trying to exercise as much control as we can, but we've still got noisy components. We're still making decisions with uncertain information and ambiguous kind of beliefs and conflicting desires in a world that's dynamic. In the process, as we're trying to make a decision, other people are making decisions, lots of stuff is happening. So there's just no way that that any of that could be completely predeterministic at the level of cognition, unless it were all predeterministic at the level of atoms. And it's not, right? So the idea that. And it's just so easy in the discussion to conflate those and to bounce from one level to the other, right? But if we think about, even from an economics point of view, thinking about decision making, you know, there's this theory of bounded rationality where we don't make fully rational decisions all the time, where there's just one right answer that our brain algorithm has to come to that could in some sense be pre stated as the optimal outcome. Because we don't have all the information, things are changing, right? And there's conflict. So we have to work through that conflict. We have to figure out what are the weights that are appropriate in this scenario for me. And there's some little bit of randomness at play sometimes in that, I mean, sometimes we know what we want to do, our will is settled. Like if we were in that scenario again, we totally, absolutely would do that thing again. It's habitual or it's very clear. Other times it's like we don't know at all and we don't have enough information or we don't care. Do you want a Coke or a Pepsi? I don't care. Like maybe some random noise in my brain kind of flips it one way or the other. That's fine. That's actually a super good way to make decisions when you don't have enough information. The important thing is that you make a decision, right? If you're indifferent, it doesn't matter what it is. And then we have like under conflict where we're like, you know what, I really, should I ask this girl to marry me or should we break up? You know, I mean, these are really conflicted. And you're going to work through those things with the information that you have and come to a decision. And whichever way it goes, it's going to be your decision, right? And you'll be able to defend the reasons that you had for making that decision. So yeah, it's like ultimately control is what we're aiming for, but the idea that we have so much control that we end up with no choice is just, like I said, it's a slightly odd position to end.
- [75:21]
A
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, I asked Kevin about artificial intelligence. What would it take for us to think that AI has free will? And what does that tell us about his arguments concerning free will in and finally, what follows from all of this for how we should lead our lives? Should we really think that how we treat our friends or whether we're willing to punish that murderer should turn on these philosophical debates concerning free will? If you want to get the answers to those questions, please help support this podcast. Please help us get out more ambitious content. Provide this community with these conversations by going to jasamung.substack.com and becoming a paying subscriber. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you too have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share to on Facebook or Twitter and finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [76:47]
B
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.