Sam Harris and the bizarre implication of denying free will

Jerry Coyne quotes and comments Sam Harris on free will:

[Harris] Do we have free will? Answer: no. “The problem is free will is just a non-starter, philosophically and scientifically. Unlike many other illusions, there is no way you can describe the universe so as to make sense of this notion of free will.

You can describe the universe so as to make sense of free will. Classical philosophers did it quite nicely (Aquinas: Summa Theologica 1.83.1, Quaestiones disputatae de malo 6). The free will "problem" is largely a consequence of idiotic materialism and scientism. But Harris has such a deep buy-in to this nonsense he doesn't understand that there are quite coherent ways of understanding free will.

[Harris] Now there are many people who have artfully changed the subject and tried to get a version of free will that makes some scientific sense. [JAC: so true!] But this is not what people actually mean by free will. What people mean is that they—their conscious selves—are free to chose their actions You choose what you want; you choose what you will to do. . . they still feel that at every moment, there is freedom to choose. Now what can this mean? From the position of conscious awareness of your inner life, this can’t be true. Everything you’re consciously aware of, at every moment, is the result of causes of which you’re not aware, over which you exert no conscious control.”

Huh? "Everything you're consciously aware of.. is the result of causes of which you're not aware, over which you exert no conscious control'? Does that mean that Harris made that statement without being in conscious control? That would explain its incoherence!

[Coyne] Sam goes on to explain, in light of this notion, why we should not be nihilists; why we need to do something instead of existing passively. I am 100% on board with his answer, and am glad that he sees through those philosophers who, through redefinition, try to save “free will” by simply ignoring what nearly everybody thinks is free will. It’s time to admit—and that means telling the public—that contracausal free will doesn’t exist, and to coin a new term for those philosophical forms of “free will” that aren’t contracausal.

Gibberish. The absurdity of denying libertarian free will is evident in this observation:

The philosophical problem of free will is linked to the issue of hard determinism. Hard determinism is the view that all of our acts are completely determined by natural processes. A way to understand what this means is to imagine a Cartesian graph with the x-axis as time and the y-axis as some quantifiable variable that we "choose"- such as the number of calories in the lunch I choose to eat today, or the number of miles I choose to drive when I'm on vacation, etc.

If my "choice" occurs at time zero, and hard determinism is true, then there is one and only one possible line extending forward in time. I stress: hard determinism means that there is only one possible future. At every time x, y is determined. Every x maps to one and only one y. That's what hard determinism means.

If I have libertarian free will, then beginning at time zero there are many different possible lines extending to the right-- different possible futures-- representing different values of y (choices) at the same value of x. The graph of free choice over time looks like a horizontal bush that branches at time zero (now).

Now consider this: if hard determinism is true, and I have no libertarian free will, then there is one and only one value my 'pseudo-choice' can take at each time in the future. Therefore, no matter what I choose (or think I 'choose'), the future will be what it will be.

Therefore, why choose to go to work in the morning? My future salary (the y axis) will be the same regardless. There is only a single line.

Why choose to eat? My future health (the y axis) will be the same no matter, because it's determined and I have no libertarian free will to alter it.

Why write a blog post defending determinism? It won't affect the future in any way.

You see the point. Following the logic of hard determinism, we can't choose, so why do anything? What will be, will be.

Now of course, as you might imagine, a few materialists have spotted this catastrophe for hard determinism, and propose 'compatibilism', which is the view that determinism and free will are compatible.

The difficulty with compatibilism is obvious: if our acts are determined entirely by natural law, we cannot have free will because we have no control over natural law.

I'll post more on free will and determinism in a while. It's a fascinating question, and nicely demonstrates the idiocy of materialism/scientism.

Meanwhile, my suggestion to free-will deniers like Coyne and Harris is: just chill. Stop writing your inane blogs, stop pushing your idiotic philosophy. The future is determined, and you have no choice. Just sit back, chug a cold one, spend the day in your underwear, watch old movies. The future is determined.

Que sera sera, materialists.

Misunderstanding Understanding Jerry Coyne on free will

Jerry Coyne protests that I misunderstood his viewpoint on free will in a recent post. Coyne, who denies the existence of free will, had complained about a hit-and-run driver who dented his car in a parking lot.

I pointed out that, if free will is an illusion, Coyne has no justification to condemn the fellow who hit his car and drove off, because without free will the dishonest driver had no choice to do otherwise. If we lack free will, Coyne might as well complain to the manufacturer about the offending car as complain to the police about the offending driver. The driver, no less than the car, can't be held morally responsible for an act he was not free to choose.

I observed that the moral concepts of "good" and "bad" don't really apply to human acts unless free will is real. Without free will, morality doesn't make any sense.

Coyne:

The statement that “‘good’ and ‘bad’ don’t really apply to humanity” is Egnor’s own mistaken characterization of my views. Of course I see actions as “good” or “bad”, based on their salubrious or deleterious effects on individuals or society.

Coyne denies that the fellow who drove off after hitting his car was morally wrong. Coyne was merely upset that the guy was insalubrious.

Approbation and disapprobation are useful social tools, for, although we have no choice about how we act, we can influence howothers act by giving their behavior labels and sanctioning or rewarding them accordingly.

Coyne insists that he called the cops on the hit-and-run driver-- who 'had no choice about how to act'-- only to label the fellow's behavior and sanction him accordingly.

Presumably, if the driver had stayed at the scene and accepted responsibility, Coyne would offered him a biscuit or a small fish.

Indeed, I don’t believe in moral culpability: that term is without real meaning if one denies the possibility of free choice. But there can still be still “culpability” based on the effects of one’s actions. (I’d be glad to hear readers’ feelings about why we should retain the term “morality” if there is no free choice.)

 "Culpability" connotes moral fault. What Coyne means by culpability is simply "effect'. Acts certainly do have effects. If there is no free will-- if we are merely following instructions of one sort or another-- Coyne is correct that no agent, regardless of effect, is morally culpable.

Note to Coyne: your argument was a hard sell when it was used by the defense counsel at Nuremberg.

As for my using the terms “good” and “bad” as showing a “flicker of libertarian free will,” well, that’s just wrong. It’s bad for me, and bad for society, if people are allowed to damage other people’s property and then get off scot-free. Yes, the guy who hit my car had no choice in what he did, and I had no choice about reporting him, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not useful for me to report him.

Coyne insists that hit-and-run driving is not morally wrong. He insists that nothing is morally wrong. He called the police merely because denting his car and running off was "bad".

Coyne denies objective good and evil, so it's unclear what he means by "bad". Perhaps he means "ineffective in securing social cohesion". But if there is no objective moral good or evil, how can social cohesion be good, or social fratricide be bad?

When you strip reality of moral standards, nothing makes any sense.

[Egnor]—and no doubt many of his creationist colleagues—do indeed believe in libertarian free will: the “ghost in the machine,” as do many religious people.

I don't believe in ghosts, and men aren't machines. I do assert that man has free will. To assert otherwise is lunacy.

So those philosophers who say that few people are true libertarians are simply wrong. True libertarian free will is an essential part of many religions, and without it the foundations of faith would crack. And there are a lot of religious people. That is why I think that those philosophers who spend their time confecting ways to reconcile free will and determinism are wasting their time. There are more important jobs to do, like telling religious folks about determinism. In fact, even using the term “free will” helps enable religious belief.

Acknowledging free will is merely acknowledging the truth about man.

Coyne denies free will because free will doesn't fit nicely with his materialist metaphysics. Rather than jettison his non-sensical metaphysics, he jettisons free will. But he has no choice to do otherwise, so you can't blame him.

Finally, Egnor’s blathering continues to show that the people at the Discovery Institute have run out of arguments for Intelligent Design. They’ve lost the battle against evolution: they lost it in Texas, twice, they lost in at Ball State, and they’ve repeatedly lost it in court. Now, bereft of success, they’re reduced to pointing out what they see as inconsistencies or character flaws in evolutionary biologists. (Remember when they allied me with Nazis, racists, and eugenicists simply because I visited John Scopes’s grave and said I’d like to shake his hand?) But it would at least behoove them to understand what their opponents are saying before they attack them.

We are devoted to challenging philosophical materialism. Pointing out the absurdity of the denial of free will-- a denial that follows naturally from philosophical materialism-- is fitting and proper, and I must say that Coyne makes the refutation of philosophical materialism uncommonly easy and, rather often, entertaining. 

If there is no free will, there is no innocence.

Atheist biologist Jerry Coyne claims that we have no free will.

Coyne, with my commentary:

You Don't Have Free Will

By Jerry A. Coyne

The term "free will" has so many diverse connotations that I'm obliged to define it before I explain why we don't have it. I construe free will the way I think most people do: At the moment when you have to decide among alternatives, you have free will if you could have chosen otherwise. To put it more technically, if you could rerun the tape of your life up to the moment you make a choice, with every aspect of the universe configured identically, free will means that your choice could have been different.

This is a reasonable definition of libertarian free will.

Although we can't really rerun that tape, this sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics.

"Laws of physics" are simply regularities, not agents, so 'they' cause nothing. Free will isn't a regularity, so free will is not governed by the laws of physics.

What's hard about that?

Your brain and body, the vehicles that make "choices," are composed of molecules, and the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by your genes and your environment.

An utterly fact-free assertion. We know surprisingly little about the molecular basis for thought. So obviously we don't know that "the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by your genes and your environment". We don't even have a coherent materialist theory as to how molecules and thoughts relate. 

Admittedly, lack of coherence doesn't stop materialists. 

Your decisions result from molecular-based electrical impulses and chemical substances transmitted from one brain cell to another. 

The opposite is more likely: molecular-based electrical impulses and chemical substances in your brain both influence and result from your decisions. That was the conclusion of Benjamin Libet, the pioneering neurophysiologist in the study of mind-brain interactions (more about Libet below).

These molecules must obey the laws of physics, so the outputs of our brain—our "choices"—are dictated by those laws. 

"Laws" dictate? Nonsense. Laws are the form we give to regularities in nature. Laws aren't agents. 

E=mc2 didn't "dictate" the atomic explosion in Hiroshima. The scientists and soldiers who built and detonated the bomb "dictated" the explosion. They freely chose to do it.

Headline: "Japanese Furious at E=mc2 For Destroying Hiroshima" 

Laws cause nothing. Laws. aren't. agents.  

(It's possible, though improbable, that the indeterminacy of quantum physics may tweak behavior a bit, but such random effects can't be part of free will.)

If quantum indeterminacy (an ensemble of probability-weighted outcomes) is random, so is natural selection, which, according to Coyne, is manifestly non-random. Oops. 

And deliberating about your choices in advance doesn't help matters, for that deliberation also reflects brain activity that must obey physical laws.

Note to Coyne: applying your materialist error to preceding events doesn't correct the error.

To assert that we can freely choose among alternatives is to claim, then, that we can somehow step outside the physical structure of our brain and change its workings. That is impossible. Like the output of a programmed computer, only one choice is ever physically possible: the one you made. 

Then why, Jerry-the-computer, did you 'decide' to get out of bed this morning? If you had stayed in bed, then it would have been 'the only choice possible', because it was the one you made. You couldn't have gotten out of bed, if you didn't get out of bed. And you couldn't have stayed in bed, if you didn't stay in bed.

Huh?

As such, the burden of proof rests on those who argue that we can make alternative choices, for that's a claim that our brains, unique among all forms of matter, are exempt from the laws of physics by a spooky, nonphysical "will" that can redirect our own molecules.

Why should sane people have the "burden of proof"? Shouldn't the guy who thinks that he-couldn't-have-gotten-out-of-bed-if-he-didn't-get-out-of-bed have the burden of proof?

My claim that free will as defined above is an illusion leads to a prediction: Our sense of controlling our actions might sometimes be decoupled from those actions themselves.

The vast majority of our actions occur without full consciousness: we don't think of moving each leg muscle when we walk. Pre-conscious activation and coordination is mediated in many areas of the brain-- the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, for example. Yet the decision to walk across the street is freely made, even though the specifics of the act are coordinated without our immediate intent.

Recent experiments in cognitive science show that some deliberate acts occur before they reach our consciousness (typing or driving, for example), while in other cases, brain scans can predict our choices several seconds before we're conscious of having made them. Additionally, stimulation of the brain, or clever psychological experiments, can significantly increase or decrease our sense of control over our choices.

Coyne's reference here is to the line of research that began with Ben Libet, the pioneering neurophysiologist at UCSF in the mid-20th century who studied the link between awareness and brain states. Libet found that many simple voluntary decisions to move were preceded by several hundred milliseconds by activation of a region of the cortex adjacent to the motor area. Libet also found that this activation could be aborted, by the free will of the subject.

Coyne seems unaware that Libet was a property dualist and a strong defender of libertarian free will.

So what are the consequences of realizing that physical determinism negates our ability to choose freely? 

Denial of free will has consequences?

Well, nihilism is not an option: We humans are so constituted, through evolution or otherwise, to believe that we can choose. 

That's a nihilist claim about man. Except that Jerry has broken free of evolution, unlike you. 

What is seriously affected is our idea of moral responsibility, which should be discarded along with the idea of free will. 

Pour your coffee on Jerry's laptop, and see if he sticks to his claim that 'moral responsibility' should be discarded.

If whether we act well or badly is predetermined rather than a real choice, then there is no moral responsibility—only actions that hurt or help others. 

Jerry's arguments are hurting me. It's like a pounding between my temples. 

That realization shouldn't seriously change the way we punish or reward people, because we still need to protect society from criminals, and observing punishment or reward can alter the brains of others, acting as a deterrent or stimulus. What we should discard is the idea of punishment as retribution, which rests on the false notion that people can choose to do wrong.

I see. What Jerry proposes, based on his scientific discovery that we have no free will, is that our traditional notions of moral responsibility-- culpability and responsibility, guilt and innocence-- be discarded, and replaced with a rat-gets-cheese-or-electric-shock system of rewards and punishments. Skinner replaces the Decalogue. 

The obvious consequence is this: if there is no culpability, then there is no innocence. If the goal of the justice system in Coyne's dystopia is "protection", there is no need to predicate punishment on conviction for a crime. Pre-crimes become the logical basis for punishment. Why punish errant determinism when you can prevent it? Shock the rat if he 'thinks' about stepping out of the maze. It's a hell of a lot more efficient. 

If there is no free will, there is no culpability, and there is no innocence. There are merely cages and rats and cheese and wires. 

The absence of real choice also has implications for religion. Many sects of Christianity, for example, grant salvation only to those who freely choose Jesus as their savior. And some theologians explain human evil as an unavoidable byproduct of God's gift of free will. If free will goes, so do those beliefs. 

Coyne finally gets to the real reason he denies free will. He hates Christianity. 

But of course religion won't relinquish those ideas, for such important dogma is immune to scientific advances.

Christianity is the basis for all modern science. Modern science arose only in the civilization steeped for a thousand years in Christian theology and Christian philosophy and Christian ethics. Modern science is essentially Christian natural philosophy. Nature is created in accordance with rational laws by a Creator who is not nature itself, but Who has a Mind that has created man in His image with the vocation to understand those created laws. 

Atheism's contribution to science is non-existent, except for gulags and body-bags. 'Everything came from nothing and survivors survived' isn't a scientific programme, but it sure kindled some nasty politics.  

Finally, on the lighter side, knowing that we don't have free will can perhaps temper our sense of regret or self-recrimination, since we never had real choices in our past. No, we couldn't have had that V8, and Robert Frost couldn't have taken the other road.

Jerry Coyne had no choice but to write his idiot essay. He feels better about it. 

Although science strongly suggests that free will of the sort I defined doesn't exist, this view is unpopular because it contradicts our powerful feeling that we make real choices. 

The view that free will doesn't exist is unpopular because it is crazy, and it would lead to a totalitarian nightmare. 

In response, some philosophers—most of them determinists who agree with me that our decisions are preordained—have redefined free will in ways that allow us to have it. 

Determinists don't want to look too crazy.

I see most of these definitions as face-saving devices designed to prop up our feeling of autonomy. To eliminate the confusion produced by multiple and contradictory concepts of free will, I propose that we reject the term entirely and adopt the suggestion of the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky: Instead of saying my decision arises from free will, we might say, "My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand."

 The internal force he doesn't understand: his soul.  

If you want a glimpse of the mere craziness of materialism, the denial of free will is a great place to look. When you're done, go ahead and have yourself a piece of cheese. 

Did Benjamin Libet's experiments show that free will is an illusion?

Materialists such as Jerry Coyne often invoke the experiments of Benjamin Libet when they deny free will. Libet was a neuroscientist at the University of San Francisco during the latter half of the 20th century who did pioneering research on the neurobiology of consciousness.

Specifically, Libet was interested in the correspondence of electrical signals from the brain (measured by electrodes taped to the intact scalp in awake volunteers) and the contents of consciousness. His most famous experiments involve measuring electrical activity in the brain when volunteers were asked to move their wrist. The volunteer would look at a moving clock and note the exact time (to the millisecond) that he consciously decided to move his wrist. Libet compared the timing of the brain activity with the timing of the volunteer's decision to move. He consistently found that the brain activity (he called it the readiness potential) preceded the conscious awareness of a decision to move by a couple hundred milliseconds. The timing typically went like this:

Readiness potential... 400 milliseconds... awareness of intent to move... 200 milliseconds... move wrist.

Other researchers have repeated Libet's experiments, with similar results, and recently researchers have used fMRI to carry out Libet-like experiments. The fMRI studies show that there are often brain activations that precede the conscious decision by several seconds.

Free will-deniers like Coyne have cited Libet's experiments as scientific evidence that free will is an illusion, and that "voluntary" decisions are really generated by electrochemical processes in the brain, without our consent of knowledge. Our sense of free will is an illusion- a post-hoc belief imposed by our brain, which is really making the "decisions".

Coyne:

The experiments show, then, that not only are decisions made before we’re conscious of having made them, but that the brain imagery can predict what decision will be made with substantial accuracy. This has obvious implications for the notion of “free will,” at least as most people conceive of that concept. We like to think that our conscious selves make decisions, but in fact the choices appear to have been made by our brains before we’re aware of them. The implication, of course, is that deterministic forces beyond are conscious control are involved in our “decisions”, i.e. that free will isn’t really “free”. Physical and biological determinism rules, and we can’t override those forces simply by some ghost called “will.” We really don’t make choices—they are made long before we’re conscious of having chosen strawberry versus pistachio ice cream at the store.

Coyne and his materialist allies couldn't be more wrong.

Libet himself was a strong defender of free will, and he interpreted his own experiments as validating free will. He noted that his subjects often vetoed the unconscious "decision" after the readiness potential appeared.

Libet:

Do we have free will?




I have taken an experimental approach to this question. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical change in the brain (the ‘readiness potential’, RP) that begins 550 ms before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350–400 ms after RP starts, but 200 ms. before the motor act. The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function could still control the outcome; it can veto the act. Free will is therefore not excluded. These findings put constraints on views of how free will may operate; it would not initiate a voluntary act

but it could control performance of the act. The findings also affect views of guilt and responsibility.


But the deeper question still remains: Are freely voluntary acts subject to macro-deterministic laws or can they appear without such constraints, non-determined by natural laws and ‘truly free’? I shall present an experimentalist view about these fundamental philosophical opposites...

Potentially available to the conscious function is the possibility of stopping or
vetoing the final progress of the volitional process, so that no actual muscle action ensues.
Conscious-will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even
though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes. Conscious-will
might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs. 

The existence of a veto possibility is not in doubt. The subjects in our experiments
at times reported that a conscious wish or urge to act appeared but that they sup-
pressed or vetoed that. In the absence of the muscle’s electrical signal when being
activated, there was no trigger to initiate the computer ’s recording of any RP that may
have preceded the veto; thus, there were no recorded RPs with a vetoed intention to
act. We were, however, able to show that subjects could veto an act planned for per-
formance at a pre-arranged time. They were able to exert the veto within the interval
of 100 to 200 msec. before the pre-set time to act (Libet et al., 1983b). A large RP pre-
ceded the veto, signifying that the subject was indeed preparing to act, even though
the action was aborted by the subject...

The role of conscious free will would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act, but
rather to control whether the act takes place. We may view the unconscious initiatives
for voluntary actions as ‘bubbling up’ in the brain. The conscious-will then selects
which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort,
with no act appearing.

Libet even observed that his experimental confirmation of free will accorded with the traditional religious understanding of free will:

This kind of role for free will is actually in accord with religious and ethical stric-
tures. These commonly advocate that you ‘control yourself ’. Most of the Ten Com-
mandments are ‘do not’ orders.

How do our findings relate to the questions of when one may be regarded as guilty
or sinful, in various religious and philosophical systems. If one experiences a con-
scious wish or urge to perform a socially unacceptable act, should that be regarded as
a sinful event even if the urge has been vetoed and no act has occurred? Some relig-
ious systems answer ‘yes’... But any such urges would be initiated and developed in
the brain unconsciously, according to our findings. The mere appearance of an inten-
tion to act could not be controlled consciously; only its final consummation in a motor
act could be consciously controlled. Therefore, a religious system that castigates an
individual for simply having a mental intention or impulse to do something unaccept-
able, even when this is not acted out, would create a physiologically insurmountable
moral and psychological difficulty... 

Indeed, insistence on regarding an unacceptable urge to act as sinful, even when no
act ensues, would make virtually all individuals sinners. In that sense such a view
could provide a physiological basis for ‘original sin’!

Libet concludes:

My conclusion about free will, one genuinely free in the non-determined sense, is
then that its existence is at least as good, if not a better, scientific option than is its
denial by determinist theory. Given the speculative nature of both determinist and
non-determinist theories, why not adopt the view that we do have free will (until some
real contradictory evidence may appear, if it ever does). Such a view would at least
allow us to proceed in a way that accepts and accommodates our own deep feeling
that we do have free will. We would not need to view ourselves as machines that act in
a manner completely controlled by the known physical laws.

Coyne and his allies misrepresent Libet's findings. Libet concluded from his experiments that we do have free will-- the ability to veto pre-conscious intentions-- and he noted that the veto appeared to be freely chosen, without any neurophysiological evidence for neurophysiological determinism.

Libet's finding that there appear to be pre-conscious intentions that sometimes precede conscious intentions is unsurprising. We experience such intentions constantly. We walk from place to place without consciously thinking of the intricate details of the walk-- the path, the coordination of muscles, etc. We often get where we're going with remarkably little conscious attention to the process-- think of how often you drive home from work without consciously thinking much about the route, or even about other cars, traffic signals, etc. When we type, as I am doing now to write this post, we typically don't think about the individual motion of our fingers. In fact, performing a skillful act like typing or playing a musical instrument or driving requires that our actions be automatic and unconscious. That doesn't mean that our typing or walking or driving is not freely chosen. It means that much of our deliberate behavior is the result of a combination of a free choice to act and an elaborate preconscious and unconscious system of intentions that enable the freely chosen act to happen efficiently.

Libet proposes (based on his work) a common-sense model of free will: our unconscious is a bubbling sea of velleities. We freely choose the impulses we wish to enact by prescinding from a veto, and we freely choose the impulses we wish to suppress by vetoing the act. Libet found experimental traces of the unconscious impulses (the readiness potential) and experimental confirmation of the freely-chosen veto (the conscious choice unaccompanied by corresponding electrophysiological activity). He even noted that his experimental results validated a particular traditional religious understanding of moral choice-- that sin is in the act, which is freely chosen, not in the temptation, which can arise without our choice. He even proposed a neurophysiological model of original sin!

You may ask, at this point: why do Coyne and his materialist allies utterly misrepresent Libet's experiments? Why would materialists cite the work of a researcher who scientifically confirmed free will, and even confirmed the traditional religious view of culpability for sin? Why would materialists cite experiments that confirm the opposite of their claims? Perhaps materialists don't understand the science, or perhaps they never bothered to try.

Whatever their reason for misrepresenting Libet's work, materialists' invocation of research that validates free will is likely a consequence not of their acquaintance with the science itself (Coyne seems blissfully unaware of Libet's actual experiments and conclusions), but a consequence of the metaphysical biases that materialists bring to the issue. You can see the same metaphysical bias and denial of the plain implications of the science in their denial of teleology in evolutionary biology.

For materialists, it's metaphysics first, and evidence later, if at all. 

Determinism and free will

I have a strong interest in the question of free will. The philosophical issues are fascinating, and the implications for our society are enormous. The denial of the reality of free will undermines our basic freedoms and undermines our social order. Aside from the assertion that God does not exist, it's difficult to think of a more destructive assertion than 'we have no free will'.

But what precisely is the debate about free will all about? Here's my understanding of it.

There are two sets of yes-or-no propositions in the debate about free will that form the framework for the debate.

The yes or no propositions are:

Is determinism true?

Determinism is the belief that our actions are necessitated by present and past events, consistent with the laws of nature.

One can describe the determinist position with an x,y graph.  The independent variable (x) is time, and the dependent variable (y) is an option of behavior or thought. There are an infinite number of such graphs, representing the spectrum of options we have available. If determinism is true, then all graphs consist of an unbranched line.  There is only one possibility for future behavior. That option is determined by past events and the laws of nature. Our belief that we have genuine options is an illusion. Our behavior and thoughts are determined.

Indeterminism is the denial of determinism. Indeterminism is the belief that our actions are not necessitated by present and past events, nor by the laws of nature. We have genuine choices, and could have chosen to do other than that which we do.

One can also describe the libertarian position with an x,y graph.  As with determinism, the independent variable (x) is time, and the dependent variable (y) is an option of behavior or thought. There are an infinite number of such graphs, representing the spectrum of options we have available. If indeterminism is true, then all graphs consist of branched lines.  There is more than one possibility for future behavior, and we choose it. That option is not determined by past events and the laws of nature. Our belief that we have genuine options is not an illusion. Our behavior and thoughts are our choice, in some real way.

Of course, indeterminists don't believe that our choices are utterly without influences from the natural world. Any number of natural conditions influence our choices, obviously. We tend to choose differently when we are drunk than when we are sober, etc. But, at a fundamental level. at least some of our choices  are genuine choices. We could have done otherwise, but chose not to.

The second yes-or no proposition is:

Is free will compatible with determinism?

Compatibilism is the belief that both determinism and free will are compatible. All of our acts and thoughts could be determined by past and present events and by the laws of nature, but we could genuinely claim that out acts and thoughts are free to some extent.  Note that compatibilism does not imply anything about the truth of determinism or free will. It merely states that they are compatible in a logical sense.

Incompatibilism is the  belief that both determinism and free will are not compatible. All of our acts and thoughts could be determined by past and present events and by the laws of nature, but then we could not genuinely claim that out acts and thoughts are free to some extent. Note that incompatibilism does not imply anything about the truth of determinism or free will. It merely states that they are incompatible in a logical sense.

As you might imagine, the questions that arise from this issue are protean. I'll post on some of the more interesting ones.  But I raise two questions now:

If hard determinism is true, then can we trust the opinion 'hard determinism is true' to be true? After all, we came to that belief without choice, enslaved to the past and to physics. Why would we credit physics with the capacity to ascertain metaphysical truth?

The other question is this:

If hard determinism is true, why try?  Why do anything? If the future is set according to the past and the laws of nature, then what will be will be no matter what you do. Why make any effort at all? Why not just sit on the couch, open a beer, and let the inevitable happen?

As you might imagine, I'm a libertarian incompatibilist . I believe that free will is real, and that determinism is wrong, and that determinism is incompatible with free will.

The issue is fascinating, and very important.

Why does anyone pay attention to P.Z. Myers?

P.Z. Myers has a characteristically incoherent post on free will. I've included my comments:

I was compelled to post this

December 6, 2011 at 2:04 pm PZ Myers

I said I didn’t want to say anything about free will, and I still don’t, but Massimo Pigliucci weighed in, and Jerry Coyne responded, and so did Sean Carroll, and of course I created a free will thread for everyone else to talk about it, so I guess there’s a fair bit of momentum behind it all.

I don’t understand why free will was getting all tangled up in indeterminacy vs. determinism, since that seems to be a completely independent issue.

There are philosophers who believe that free will and determinism are not incompatible. I think they're wrong.

Free will and determinism are linked. If all human acts are determined-- i.e. completely in accordance with past events and the laws of physics-- then there is no room for libertarian free will. Human will can change neither the past nor physical laws.

Myers:

I’ll sum up my opinion by agreeing with Jerry Coyne:

[Coyne] Of course, whether the laws of physics are deterministic or probabilistic is, to me, irrelevant to whether there’s free will, which in my take means that we can override the laws of physics with some intangible “will” that allows us to make different decisions given identical configurations of the molecules of the universe. That kind of dualism is palpable nonsense, of course, which is why I think the commonsense notion of free will is wrong.

Absolute gibberish. Coyne's idiotic view that we have no genuine libertarian free will entails three consequences:

 1) Our acts are determined by agency (history and physics) over which we have no control. We bear no responsibility for our acts.

2) Our acts are determined by agency (history and physics) which have no reference to truth. A neurochemical reaction isn't "true" or "false". It just is. If our acts and thoughts are neurochemical, and we have no genuine choice in our opinions, then our opinions can be neither true nor false, anymore than  mixing chemicals in a beaker can be true or false.

If determinism and lack of libertarian free will are true, we can't meaningfully argue that they are true.

3) If the past and physical law fully determine our future, then what happens to us has nothing to do with our "choices". Just history and physics. What happens, happens. The future is set- only one outcome is possible, and we can't choose it.

So why bother to do anything? Why does Myers bother to post on his blog? What shows up on his blog is determined by the history of the universe and the laws of physics. He can change neither. Why do anything?

Myers:

My mind is a product of the physical properties of my brain; it is not above them or beyond them or somehow independent of them.

If Myers' mind is a product of his brain, it is by definition something other than his brain. What is it?

... birds chirping...

And how is it that a physical object (Myers' brain) has reference to something external to itself? This is the classical problem of intentionality. Myers brain doesn't mean anything. It's just a few pounds of meat. But Myers means things. He writes about them daily.

Where does the meaning come from?

Myers:

It doesn’t even make sense to talk about “me”, which is ultimately simply yet another emergent property of the substrate of the brain, modifying the how the brain acts. It is how the brain acts.

Perhaps Myers can inform the payroll department at the university that his "me" doesn't really exist. They can stop cutting paychecks to emergent properties of brain substrates.

I think consciousness is a product of self-referential modeling of how decisions are made in the brain in the absence of any specific information about the mechanisms of decision-making — it’s an illusion generated by a high-level ‘theory of mind’ module that generates highly simplified, highly derived models of how brains work that also happens to be applied to our own brain.

Let's take it one bit of gibberish at a time:

I think consciousness is a product of self-referential modeling of how decisions are made in the brain...

A self-referential model presupposes a self. Decisions presuppose a decider. Myers' explanation for self presupposes self. Back to the drawing board.

...in the absence of any specific information about the mechanisms of decision-making —...

Myers has no clue about how any of this works. None. Zippo. But he's sure it's materialistic, and people who disagree with him are fools who believe things on faith.

...it’s an illusion generated by a high-level ‘theory of mind’ module...

A delusion presupposes a self which is deluded. Thus the delusion cannot create the self.

[... it’s an illusion generated by a high-level ‘theory of mind’ module] that generates highly simplified, highly derived models of how brains work that also happens to be applied to our own brain. 

Myers is saying that consciousness doesn't exist in the absence of a 'high-level theory of mind module'. So module-less people who don't contemplate theories of the mind-- children, disinterested or uneducated adults-- aren't, by Myers theory, conscious.

Myers is a fool. Why anyone-- me included-- pays any attention to this idiot is a mystery. One of the unresolved questions of science...

Morality Pills

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan, from the New York Times, with my commentary:

Are We Ready for a ‘Morality Pill’?

By PETER SINGER and AGATA SAGAN

Last October, in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by a van. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, more than a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. A second truck ran over her. Eventually, a woman pulled her to the side, and her mother arrived. The child died in a hospital. The entire scene was captured on video and caused an uproar when it was shown by a television station and posted online. A similar event occurred in London in 2004, as have others, far from the lens of a video camera.

There was widespread soul-searching in China about that incident.

Yet people can, and often do, behave in very different ways.

A news search for the words “hero saves” will routinely turn up stories of bystanders braving oncoming trains, swift currents and raging fires to save strangers from harm. Acts of extreme kindness, responsibility and compassion are, like their opposites, nearly universal.

Why are some people prepared to risk their lives to help a stranger when others won’t even stop to dial an emergency number?

Scientists have been exploring questions like this for decades.

Scientists are very late to the conversation. Philosophers and theologians and playwrights and poets and people in every imaginable walk of life have been exploring that question for millennia.

Scientists just began to wonder about it a few decades ago.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, famous experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo suggested that most of us would, under specific circumstances, voluntarily do great harm to innocent people.

Military commanders have known that since pre-history. Control of armies among civilian populations and vanquished enemies has always been a difficult problem. Atrocities, rape, and pillage are often the fruits of hard-fought victories, even among otherwise well-disciplined soldiers.

The same situational depravity has been noted during plagues and famines since antiquity.

Milgram showed us nothing new about human nature, but he reminded us of what we, in our modern conceit, had forgotten.

Singer needs to read more widely.

During the same period, John Darley and C. Daniel Batson showed that even some seminary students on their way to give a lecture about the parable of the Good Samaritan would, if told that they were running late, walk past a stranger lying moaning beside the path. More recent research has told us a lot about what happens in the brain when people make moral decisions.

"What happens in the brain" when people make moral decisions? Interesting, but not the crux of the matter. 'What happens in the soul' seems to me a more important question.

But are we getting any closer to understanding what drives our moral behavior?

Closer to understanding morality with science? I doubt it.

Here’s what much of the discussion of all these experiments missed: Some people did the right thing.

Most people who knew about the experiments didn't "miss it". The fact that some people acted morally, and some did not, was the published conclusion of the studies. That fact has been widely discussed.

Singer seems to have missed it.

A recent experiment (about which we have some ethical reservations) at the University of Chicago seems to shed new light on why.

Singer mentions no ethical reservations about the human subjects in Milgram's experiments, who were probably emotionally devastated knowing afterward that they cooperated with torture. Would you want to live with the knowledge that you were someone who has been cited for decades as a classic example of human depravity?

Singer's concern is, however, for the rats.

Researchers there took two rats who shared a cage and trapped one of them in a tube that could be opened only from the outside. The free rat usually tried to open the door, eventually succeeding. Even when the free rats could eat up all of a quantity of chocolate before freeing the trapped rat, they mostly preferred to free their cage-mate. The experimenters interpret their findings as demonstrating empathy in rats. But if that is the case, they have also demonstrated that individual rats vary, for only 23 of 30 rats freed their trapped companions.

I'm not acquainted with the details of the study. It would seem to me that there could be all sorts of reasons for one rat opening the cage of another (a desire for warmth or sex, an instinct to form a colony, etc), and "moral" considerations are only applicable to a few of them.

For an act to be moral, it must be, in classical terms, an act of the intellect. It must involve abstracting the universal aspects of a sense-datum-- it must involve some kind of abstract thinking. "It is sad to be stuck behind a door" (an act of the intellect) is a different mental act than the perception of a door (a sense-datum) and wanting to open the door (an act of the appetite-- which is the animal analogue of the human will).

The notion that an animal's mental act of sensation and appetite sheds light on the human mental act of the intellect and the will is dubious. Singer makes no mention of this limitation, and shows no awareness of it.

The causes of the difference in their behavior must lie in the rats themselves.

Of course. Where else would it lie?

It seems plausible that humans, like rats, are spread along a continuum of readiness to help others.

Some people are by nature helpful to others. Others not. This is news to Singer.

There has been considerable research on abnormal people, like psychopaths, but we need to know more about relatively stable differences (perhaps rooted in our genes) in the great majority of people as well.

Has Singer ever heard of psychology, sociology, theology, ethics, literature, and history? Much of human inquiry since the dawn of civilization has concerned itself with understanding the spectrum of normal human behavior.

Undoubtedly, situational factors can make a huge difference, and perhaps moral beliefs do as well, but if humans are just different in their predispositions to act morally, we also need to know more about these differences.

It's been studied since the dawn of man.

Only then will we gain a proper understanding of our moral behavior, including why it varies so much from person to person and whether there is anything we can do about it.

There is much to learn, but probably not from rats.

If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a “morality pill” — a drug that makes us more likely to help? Given the many other studies linking biochemical conditions to mood and behavior, and the proliferation of drugs to modify them that have followed, the idea is not far-fetched.

All sorts of things we ingest and perceive influence our mood and likely influence our moral acts. I'm certainly more disposed to courtesy when I'm well fed, haven't had too much coffee, haven't read Pharyngula recently, etc.

If so, would people choose to take it?

It seems immoral not to take the pill. If it were immoral not to take it, then the moral decision to take the morality pill could be influenced by a proto-morality pill. If the decision to take the proto-morality pill were a moral decision, then then the moral decision to take the proto-morality pill could be influenced by a proto-proto-morality pill. If... you see where this is going.

At some point you still have to make the moral decision, cold turkey, unless they put the pill in your drinking water.

But if they put the pill in your drinking water, then the decision to put the pill in your drinking water would be influenced by a pill...

It's morality pills, all the way down.

Could criminals be given the option, as an alternative to prison, of a drug-releasing implant that would make them less likely to harm others?

That's already done with chemical castration for sex offenders.

Might governments begin screening people to discover those most likely to commit crimes? Those who are at much greater risk of committing a crime might be offered the morality pill; if they refused, they might be required to wear a tracking device that would show where they had been at any given time, so that they would know that if they did commit a crime, they would be detected.

See where materialism leads us? If we accept the inference that we're evolved rats, we implicitly ask to be treated like rats.

Fifty years ago, Anthony Burgess wrote “A Clockwork Orange,” a futuristic novel about a vicious gang leader who undergoes a procedure that makes him incapable of violence.

Quadriplegia can do that, as can amputation of hands and feet. Capital punishment tends to reduce recidivism as well.

The effectiveness of such measures is not debatable. The morality of such measures is of course debatable. But before we decide on the morality, we all have to take our morality pill. Not to do so would be immoral, which would mean that we should take our proto-morality pill first...

Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie version sparked a discussion in which many argued that we could never be justified in depriving someone of his free will, no matter how gruesome the violence that would thereby be prevented. No doubt any proposal to develop a morality pill would encounter the same objection.

The morality of morality pills would be influenced by ingestion of morality pills...

But if our brain’s chemistry does affect our moral behavior, the question of whether that balance is set in a natural way or by medical intervention will make no difference in how freely we act.

Is Singer seriously asserting that whether an act is influenced by our nature, or is influenced by a pill we are forced to take, has no impact on the free nature of the act that results? Acts born of nature and acts born of slavery are equally free? Diligently harvesting cotton on your own farm and diligently harvesting cotton on your slave-master's plantation are equally free acts?

If Singer made this assertion without understanding it, he'd be a fool. But Singer is no fool. He understands. What we see in such sophistry is an effort to degrade man to the ethical status of a rat in a cage. Pure evil.

You've been introduced to Peter Singer.

If there are already biochemical differences between us that can be used to predict how ethically we will act, then either such differences are compatible with free will, or they are evidence that at least as far as some of our ethical actions are concerned, none of us have ever had free will anyway.

Of course we have free will. The assertion that "we don't have free will" has no truth value if it is not made with some degree of freedom. The mere assertion of a proposition presupposes free will. Chemical processes alone can't be true or false, and thus can't be propositions.

In any case, whether or not we have free will, we may soon face new choices about the ways in which we are willing to influence behavior for the better.

The ethics does get sticky, but primarily because we accept implicitly Singer's odious materialistic view of man.

Human beings are composites of matter, soul, and spirit and are created by God in His image. We have free will, because He has free will.

Our free will is tainted by our propensity to sin and by our nature as composite creatures. We are not meat and we are not rats, but we are influenced by chemistry, because we are in one aspect material. Yet we are more than matter. We are soul and spirit as well. We can choose.

Moral culpability for our choices is complex question. We are influenced by material and immaterial things, and the influence can be very strong. Our acts are the outcome of a material and spiritual tug-of-war that each of knows intimately. To what extent are we morally culpable for a particular act? We can speculate, but we are not our own judges. Our moral culpability is finally a judgement that will be made by Another. He understands us, in part because He created us and He is one of us and He knows what we face. 

In the final analysis, mere chemical analysis of human neurotransmitters has little more to teach us about human moral decisions than chemical analysis of the ink on a page of a Shakespearian play has to teach us about Hamlet. We are not meat. We are not rats. We are embodied spiritual creatures.

Science predicated on the fallacy that we are rats and meat is pseudoscience, no less. The 21st century has its own phrenology, more technological but no less foolish than the phrenology of the 19th century. 

But that is not to say that there are no morality pills. One pill in particular has proven quite effective, when taken regularly. It is venerable, and has shaped civilizations. It has powers that transcend morality. Powers that seem miraculous. For millions of people it has transformed whiskey into furniture, and opiates into children's clothing, and promiscuity into fidelity. It's very expensive, but it's free for you. It was paid for already. 

And you don't need a prescription, just a desire. 

Jerry Coyne and Clarence Darrow on free will

Jerry Coyne continues his defense of his view that hard determinism is true and that we have no free will with a paean to Clarence Darrow.

Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), a Chicago attorney who lived only two blocks from where I now reside, is one of my heroes. You’ll surely remember him as the defense attorney in the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925, the man who conducted a brutal cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan about the veracity of the Bible. 

But the Scopes trial was only one case in a long and distinguished career, one in which Darrow fought relentlessly for the underdog, whether that be socialists, laborers, or blacks. He took on many unpopular causes, and was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. 

I don’t have the space here to recount his many achievements, or explain why I admire him...

Coyne provides some video highlights of his hero, and continues.

[Coyne] Reading Darrow’s writings, and his closing argument in the Leopold and Loeb case, I was struck by how often Darrow brought up his view that criminals have no choice about their actions... Darrow’s philosophy is evident in his moving speech for Leopold and Loeb:

[Darrow] Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood. . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain. But I do know that if back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power then it is an infinite chance which man cannot solve.

[Coyne] That was not a rhetorical strategy: Darrow really did believe that. 

Here’s another quote from Darrow on the “delusional” nature of free will:

[Darrow] “There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.” 

Coyne provides Darrow's money quote:

[Darrow]The reason I talk to you on the question of crime, its cause and cure, is because I really do not in the least believe in crime. There is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. I do not believe there is any sort of distinction between the real moral condition of the people in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other. The people here can no more help being here than the people outside can avoid being outside. I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be. They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible. [emphasis mine]

Coyne:

Darrow was prescient in realizing that the lack of free will had serious implications for the criminal justice system. If you want to read more about his views on free will, see Tamler Sommers’ short essay, “Darrow and determinism: giving up ultimate responsibility.“

Coyne is right. Darrow was indeed prescient in his insistence that the assertion that we lack free would would have profound implications, on the criminal justice system and on our civilization.

Deterministic denial of free will, and the denial of the relevance of actual guilt and innocence in the conduct of human affairs, would shortly assert itself with force in several of Darrow's socialist utopias, both of the German national socialist and the Soviet international socialist types. Hannah Arendt, in Origins of Totalitarianism,  noted the essence of totalitarian rule:

Totalitarian rule confronts us with a totally different kind of government. It defies... all positive laws... but it operates neither without guidance of law or is it arbitrary, for it claims to obey strictly and unequivocally those laws of Nature or of History from which all positive laws always have been supposed to spring... Its defiance of positive laws claims to be a higher form of legitimacy... [and] can do away with petty legality. Totalitarian lawlessness pretends to have found a way to establish the rule of justice on earth, something which the legality of positive law admittedly could never attain.

Arendt concludes:

Totalitarian lawfulness, defying legality and pretending to establish the direct reign of justice on earth, executes the law of History or of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior.

Arendt understands that it is precisely the concept of guilt under law that totalitarians extinguish. In the totalitarian state, positive law (actual laws as enacted) are not the standards of state action against the individual. The totalitarian state is uninterested in whether an individual has broken statutory law-- uninterested in actual legal guilt for having committed a statutory crime. The totalitarian state is interested in Natural and Historical Law, which is not statutory but rather ideological.

In a totalitarian state, a cold-blooded murderer is not guilty if his act is in accordance with Natural Law. His victim is not innocent if his life in a violation of Natural Law. Positive law-- actual guilt according to written laws-- is irrelevant to totalitarianism. The state treats individuals in accordance with "higher" laws of Nature and History.

Darrow's (and Coyne's) embrace of hard determinism and denial of free will is not merely the denial of guilt under the law. It is the cornerstone of totalitarianism. It is the denial of innocence. If no one is guilty under the law, then no one is innocent under the law. The state, in the Darrow/Coyne utopia, is not an agent of retribution under the law, but an agent of sequestration, rehabilitation, and deterrence (to use Coyne's chilling words).

In Darrow's and Coyne's deterministic utopia, actual guilt for having committed an actual crime is no longer the sole justification for legal intervention. Without law based on actual guilt or innocence, it is the responsibility of the criminal justice system ("justice"?) to sequestrate and deter-- that is, to stop deviance before it occurs.

Darrow again:

I do not believe there is any sort of distinction between the real moral condition of the people in and out of jail.

Why do Darrow and Coyne believe that the failure to distinguish between the people in jail who committed actual crimes and the people out of jail who did not commit crimes would necessarily lead to fewer people in jail? If there is no moral distinction between people who break the law and people who abide by the law-- if it does not matter to the criminal justice system whether an actual crime has been committed-- then there's nothing to stop the state from incarcerating people for the purpose of sequestration, rehabilitation, and deterrence ("Arbeit macht frei"), regardless of whether they have broken any law. 

In Darrow's and Coyne's determinist utopia, one suspects that prisons would fill up briskly. But why speculate?  Suspects generally outnumber perpetrators. Were the gulags and the concentration camps ever lacking for rehabilitatees?

Retribution, for all its distasteful connotations, respects man's dignity. It pays a man back for what he has done-- no more, no less. It is the only moral basis for criminal justice. It should of course be tempered with mercy (an old Judeo-Christian idea), but the concept that the criminal justice system should only intervene against an individual when that individual has actually committed a crime and been judged guilty thereof is a cornerstone of human liberty.

Sequestration and deterrence without adjudication of legal and moral guilt are methods appropriately limited to livestock management.

Human liberty depends on recognition of free will. The deterministic denial of free will, which eschews retribution and replaces it with sequestration, rehabilitation and deterrence, leads not to utopia but to Dachau. 

I have to answer Jerry Coyne's silly blog post. I have no choice.

Jerry Coyne, with my commentary:

When did morality and moral responsibility begin?

Readers here will know that, being a determinist, I’d prefer to dispense with the term “moral responsibility,” replacing it with the simply idea of “responsibility.” That’s because I don’t think we have dualistic free will that would allow us to decide between doing “right” and “wrong”. If that’s the case, then why add the adjective “moral,” which implies that one does have a choice? 

If we have no free will, we can't choose our acts. If Jerry Coyne has no free will, he didn't choose to write his blog post. Jerry's blog post was determined by natural history and physical laws, not by anything intelligent.

And, as most of you know, I don’t think this omission would overthrow society.

Right. Morality has noting to do with the social order.

We’d still put people in prison for bad behavior (but for sequestration, rehabilitation, and as deterrence, but not for retribution), and could also praise them for good behavior—for praise is an environmental effect that can change someone’s behavior or impel others to act well—but we would be less likely to see people as good or bad by “choice”.

The problem with Jerry's plan to suppress bad behavior by sequestration and rehabilitation, rather than by retribution, is that being sequestered and rehabilitated have nothing to do with having actually committed a crime.

You can be sequestered and rehabilitated for all sorts of things, including for the suspicion that you might commit a crime, or because it suits the ends of the people who sequester and rehabilitate.

Retribution at least has the virtue that it is a punishment for a crime actually committed.

If there is no moral responsibility, not only is there no guilt. There is no innocence.

And the prison system would be run more humanely, involving studies about the best way to change people’s behavior or the best way to deter other people’s latent criminality. 

Changing behavior and deterring latent criminality doesn't depend on conviction for an actual crime. Lots of folks behave badly and have latent criminality, yet they've committed no crime. Jerry has a (humane) prison cell waiting for them.

What I’d like to ask here, though, is when humans supposedly became morally responsible—if that’s what you believe. 

We always hear that “unlike humans, nature is amoral.” You can’t say that the actions of animals are moral or immoral—they just are. When a male lion invades another group and kills the cubs, when a chimp tears another chimp to bits, those are just bits of nature, and aren’t seen as wrong. And the amorality of nature is touted even by those who realize that our primate relatives show rudiments of morality, making it likely that some of our moral instincts were inherited from our pre-hominin ancestors. So why, when a stepfather kills his stepchild (something that, presumably is not something he decides to do “freely”), that is morallywrong, but when a lion does it, or a chimp kills an infant, it’s just nature, Jake.

Jerry's atheism and materialism leaves him no way to distinguish behavior in animals from morality in man. This upsets Jerry.

Now the idea of ethics—a codified set of rules to which we adhere for various reasons, usually as a form of societal glue—clearly was concomitant with the rise of human society and language. But much of our morality is surely based on evolution.

None of our morality was based on evolution.

I’m not saying that those evolved principles are the right ones to use today: clearly in many cases, as with xenophobia, they aren’t. But some of them remain salubrious, including reciprocal altruism, shame, guilt, and so on.

Evolution explains xenophobia, altruism, shame, guilt and salubriousness. And it explains their opposites. It's flexible.

So why can we do wrong but chimps can’t? 

If a chimp wrote Jerry's silly blog post, the chimp would be doing wrong.

In other words, is it really true that all of nature, including primate societies, must be seen as amoral, while human actions must be judged by this thing called “morality”?...

                                                                                 ***

Jerry's confusions are the result of his silly assumptions. Jerry is wrong about man. Man has a spiritual soul, created by God. Man has free will.

So why does Jerry, who freely asserts that he lacks free will, suffer such pointless confusion?

Jerry is suffering from the consequences of his presuppositions. He assumes that man lacks free will and is nothing more than an evolved animal. This view leads to all sorts of contradictions and nonsense, which leaves Jerry with no choice but to be upset.


(Cross-posted at Evolution News and Views)

"... why would it write a book?"

A letter to the editor in the New York Times Book Review regarding Sam Harris' silly book "Free Will", in which Harris argues that libertarian free will is an illusion. (from the 7/29/12 print version-- I don't have the link)

To the Editor: 

I am puzzled by Sam Harris's argumet. If we are not the authors of our actions, who (or what) wrote Harris's book? The book says that all human action is produced by purely physical processes and causes, even the writing of the book itself. How can the physical produce such an insight, and why would it write a book? How can physical processes produce a work that says that the physical is the basis for all human thought and action? These physical workings certainly seem to be a good simulation of a conscious being. And the most puzzling question of all is why it would find the need to write a book to tell us of its hegemony.

Lawerence A. Berger
Carmel, New York
The writer is a graduate student in philosophy at the New School.

[Emphasis mine] 

Heh.

To deny free will is to affirm free will. If the opinion that free will doesn't exist is determined by the physical, then the opinion that free will doesn't exist has no truth value. It's just meat drippings.

Materialism is such crap.  

'You are tricked into thinking that you are a you'

Daisy Yuhas' review of Bruce Hood's new book in Scientific American, with my commentary:

The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity 

by Bruce Hood. Oxford University Press, 2012 (29.95) 

"Self Illusion"? What could the author possibly mean? Oh, I hope this is not another one of those books that claims that the self doesn't exist...

When a newborn baby's eyes scan a room, Hood writes, the infant does not decide where to focus. Instead inborn cognitive mechanisms respond to the environment and focus the baby's attention. 

Of course the infant decides. A newborn lacks developed intellectual faculties, but he certainly has will and certainly carries out willful acts.

"Honey, that new machine in the crib is making that crying noise again. Could you get up and insert it a bottle into its intake orifice..."

Later in life, the child develops self-awareness and the conviction that he consciously controls his body and brain. Yet what if this belief does not reflect reality?

Who is it who "develops self-awareness and the conviction..."? Self-awareness and convictions are acts of intelligent agents, not acts of meat machines.

Note that the author can't even speak about mental acts without presuming a real self, even a real self to be deceived.

In The Self Illusion, Hood argues precisely that. After exploring various definitions of self--a soul, an agent with free will, some essential and unique set of qualities--he concludes that what we experience as a self is actually a narrative spun by our brain.

So the brain is the real self? Then we have a real self, embodied in neurons. And if the brain is not the  real self, just who is it that the brain deceives? Does the brain deceive the brain?

What gibberish.

Since we have no real self, I suggest that the publisher demand that Hood's brain, not Hood himself, sign the royalty checks.

To see why, consider an experiment in the 1980s by physiologist Benjamin Libet. He showed that neural activity reveals what an individual will do before that person becomes conscious of having made a decision.

Libet's experiments are fascinating. They suggest that our intentions to act are motivated by unconscious processes. Of course, most of our acts are driven in large part by mental processes of which we are only dimly aware. Are you aware of each muscle you are using at this moment? Are you aware of each muscle you use when you walk or talk or type or eat? Yet you are certainly conscious of doing each of these things.

The automatic nature of most of our routine acts is obvious. That does not mean that we are soulless automatons driven by electrochemistry and duped into believing we have selves.

It means that we are each an ensouled creature, a composite of soul and matter, with a complex intellect and complex will. Unconscious or pre-conscious acts make it possible to function in the world. If we had to consciously invoke each tiny thing we did, we would be incapable of efficient acting. That doesn't mean that we are robots, or that we don't have "selves".

Perhaps our sense of free will is just a way for our brain to organize our actions and memories, as Harvard University psychologist Dan Wegner has argued. Building on Libet's and Wegner's work, Hood proposes that our sense of self is an after-the-fact organizational trick for the brain.

Libet was a property dualist who, on the basis of his science, emphatically believed in free will. He noted that experimental subjects who demonstrated brain activity several hundred milliseconds before being consciously aware of a decision to act retained the ability to cancel the act. Libet's experiments substantiate free will, and support a dualist, not a materialist monist, understanding of the mind.

Many scientists and philosophers, usually of a materialist bent, misrepresent Libet's work. Libet had deep disdain for materialism.

As with a just-so story, our brain synthesizes the complex interactions of biology and environment to create a simplified explanation of who we are.  

So our brain is the agent deceiving us? Who is the brain deceiving? Itself? Perhaps Dr. Hood's brain is deceiving itself that it is deceiving itself? Double-deception. Maybe his brain is deceiving itself that it is deceiving itself that it is deceiving itself. Triple-deception!

Note to publisher: don't send Hood's brain the royalty check, either. It's not to be trusted.

Hood likens this fragile, malleable creation to a spiderweb being tugged in many directions at once. In the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, for example, college students transformed into brutal guards who abused fellow students playing inmates. A milder illustration comes from the questionnaires used to assess personality traits: respondents alter their answers when imagining themselves in different social contexts. Hood argues that our protean personalities allow us to adapt to new surroundings. 

Who is it who adapts, protean-personality-wise?

Although Hood believes the self may be the greatest trick our brain has ever played on us, he concludes that believing in it makes life more fulfilling.

On whom is the brain playing a trick? Who is it who believes the brain's 'trick'? Whose life is made more fulfilling? Does the brain trick the brain to believe the brain's trick?

I'm getting a headache. Or my brain is getting a headache, or maybe it's just tricking me that I have a headache, or maybe it's just tricking itself that it has a headache...

The illusion is difficult--if not impossible--to dispel. Even if we could, why deny an experience that enables empathy, storytelling and love?

Welcome to idiot materialism. I assure you, this is the best it gets. Materialist theories of the mind are all pretentious self-contradictory crap, moron philosophy dressed up like science.

Materialism is nonsense.

You are real. You have a soul. You are created and loved by God. 

Frank Pastore on Free Will

Theologian Frank Pastore has some fine common sense on the issue of free will.



The denial of free will is perhaps the most bizarre delusion of materialists. That's saying something, I realize. But to deny that we are agents who choose, and to assert that all of the agency that causes our acts and thoughts is chemical and electrophysiological, etc., is just madness. Not only does such a view make nonsense of our culture and laws and moral sense. It is self-refuting. If free will is an illusion, then the assertion that free will is an illusion is a mere chemical reaction, with no more truth value than salt dissolving in water can be "true" or "false".

But materialists cannot admit that we have souls, and they are willing to speak nonsense rather than admit the error of their silly ideology.

When machines collide

Jerry Coyne is upset that someone damaged the fender of his car, and then drove off.

Coyne:

Last Saturday afternoon I parked my car in front of my building at work; I usually use it on the weekends and then leave it at work in case I need to use it during the week. On Wednesday I looked out the window of my lab (I can overlook the car, which is nice) to see a huge dent in the front fender on the driver’s side. Going down to investigate, I saw that it was indeed a large, fresh dent, which I photographed this morning.

The hit-and-run driver was nowhere to be found. Luckily, a passerby saw the collision, and got the guy's license plate number and left a note. Coyne called the cops.

Coyne titled his post "The good and bad of humanity". The cognitive dissonance is amusing. After all, Coyne has argued emphatically that man has no free will, and "choices" are really determined entirely by biochemistry and history. So "good" and "bad" don't really apply to humanity. If Coyne is right about free will, then the guy who drove off has no more moral culpability than the car he was driving. The cars and the driver and Coyne himself have no free agency at all. If determinism is true, no other event was possible.

Coyne's soulless deterministic world is merely an arena in which chance and physics and chemistry play. We're all meat machines, incapable of free will. So a machine is angry that a machine driving a machine damaged his machine.

The only flicker of libertarian free will in Coyne's deterministic dystopia is when someone dents his fender.

Atheism is never having to say you're sorry

Commentor oleg's got his panties in a bunch:

1. You [must] apologize for calling me a thug. Which I am not.

Actually, I didn't single him out as a thug. I called all atheists thugs, at least the ones who censor, intimidate, etc. Seems pretty obvious.

If oleg believes in freedom of speech, and abhors atheists' efforts to censor criticism of their creation myth (Darwin's theory) in public schools, and abhors atheists' censorship of public prayer at high school graduation ceremonies and censorship of any expression of religious belief in a public forum (they only seem to censor expressions of Christianity), I'll be delighted to walk back my assertion that he is a thug. Oddly, I haven't heard oleg express committment to these rudimentary defenses of freedom. If I've missed them, he should let me know.

Amusingly, oleg (inadvertently of course) brings up another matter in which atheists are worthy of ridicule. I've written a recent post on determinism and free will, and it's a chortle to apply atheist arguments to oleg's pout.

Atheism, in modern form, is essentially philosophical naturalism, which is  a viewpoint nearly always accompanied by determinism.

Determinism is the view that we have no libertarian free will. All of our "choices" are illusory. We are material bodies in a material universe. Our acts are all determined by our material history-- laws of nature, chance events, etc. We have no genuine freedom.

Of course, oleg's request for an apology presumes two things:

1) I could have chosen not to call oleg a thug. But atheism/determinism denies that I had a libertarian choice.

2) I could choose to apologize. But I have no choice to do so. I'm determined by material processes. Que sera, sera.

Of course, nobody really believes that crap. Not even atheists. But it's part of the liturgy. Until someone calls you a name.

Atheists have three consistent characteristics:

1)  Philosophical stupidity, to the point of ceaseless self-refutation.

2)  Inveterate propensity to the use of censorship and force.

3)  Oleaginous sense of victimhood. Which is odd for an ideological cult whose only unique contributions to human affairs have been the Reign of Terror, the Gulag, the Killing Fields, and the governing institutions of North Korea.

People have been so mean to atheists!

But heck, oleg, I can't apologize to you. For anything. How can a chemistry set apologize to a meat robot? Can litmus paper apologize for turning blue? Can baking soda apologize to vinegar for making a salt ('I'm sorry.... that was so base of me')?

And atheists assert that there is no objective moral law with a Source independent of man. Morality is merely subjective opinion, you say. To what objective standard of morality would I appeal in my apology?

And how can I apologize if I have no free will? Everything I do is caused by laws of physics. I can't choose to apologize, any more than I chose to call you a thug. Free will is an illusion.

Which all works out well for atheists, in the larger sense. If atheists had to apologize for atheism, they would do nothing but apologize. Merely apologizing for Dawkins' chapter on the cosmological argument in the God Delusion would take centuries. '...forgive me for mangling logic...'. That's why atheists don't have confessionals.

Can you imagine apologizing for Stalin?

But don't trouble yourself, oleg, with apologies for state atheism or apologies for atheism's mangling of philosophy and ethics. Your own ideology insulates you from accountability.

Atheism is never having to say you're sorry.

How to stop spree shootings

Another spree shooting, at a college campus in Oregon. At least ten people dead, and many wounded. Please pray for the victims and their families.

There is a simple way to stop this. To stop it completely. Two things:

1) Stop reporting spree shootings in the media. These bastards are imitators, and they vent their hate and anger in a way that will give them total power (for 15 minutes) and will make them famous. Stop making them famous. The press should agree: The scumbag's name should never be mentioned. No name, and no pictures. Make the killer an non-person. Tear up his manifesto--never let it see the light of day. Never mention his name. Report about the shootings once, briefly, and then never again. The media is driving this. The media is a hateful psycho's ticket to immortal fame. Take that away and the shootings will stop.

2) Eliminate gun-free zones. Gun-free zones are spree-killing magnets--nearly all spree killings are committed in gun-free zones, for the obvious reason. A spree killer wants two things: immortal fame, and 15 minutes to vent his hate with complete power over his victims. Deny him the power. Make sure there will be people around him who will shoot back--immediately. And he won't know who. Bad guys with guns are only stopped by good guys with guns (they don't quit voluntarily), and gun-free zones simply ensure that the good guys with guns will arrive at least 15 minutes late--time to kill, time to have complete power. Take that power away. Allow responsible citizens to be armed in schools and other places where spree shooters choose to kill.

Of course the media will never stop reporting on this stuff, and as long as there are dumb-fuck Democrats there will be gun-free zones.

But don't believe for a minute that spree shootings can't be stopped. They can be stopped, quite easily. We just choose not to. 

A schoolgirl as a human shield...

Atheists employ a panopoly of strategies to suppress dissent-- gulags and firing squads where they actually run things, and professional destruction, fake invocations of "consensus", insistence that critics 'just follow instructions', and lawsuits to shut people up when they lack the levers of absolute power.

 In the Cranston High School lawsuit, atheists use a schoolgirl as a human shield.

To wit, from commentor 23cal:

You mock Mr. Eberhard for realizing that the situation has nuances.

I didn't mean to mock him. I meant to say that he is a totalitarian thug.

As he noted "The students sued, the school won." He said, "When I was told about the possibility of students all wearing these shirts on the same day I initially said there was nothing wrong with it......I still don’t care if the students wear the shirts individually, but I’ve changed my mind about how the administration should react to a mass event like that. They should stop it."

Totalitarian thug.

In spite of his initial "free speech" reaction, Mr. Eberhard apparently realized there is both a legal and a safety factor involved.....as the court decision pointed out.

Why put free speech in scare quotes?

Atheists' initial reaction to free speech is to endorse it generally.

Atheists' final reaction to free speech is to deny it specifically. "We believe in free speech, but..."

Regulating speech is indispensable to atheists' agenda. Musn't have too much dissent. Everywhere that atheism has ascended to state power, freedom of speech is the first right under the atheist boot. The prayer mural case and the emerging move to censor the students' t-shirts is a microcosm of a century of atheist politics.

"Free speech", except...

He obviously isn't as cavalier about the safety of kids as yourself.

I wouldn't use a teen-aged girl as blow-back-bait in a lawsuit.

Of course, for you, displaying some atheist hate and harassment is leagues more important than a little student safety, especially if the student whose safety is in question doesn't subscribe to your preferred religion.

Atheist concern for Jessica's safety begins oddly after the court ruling.

The godless were delighted to use the little tool to litigate the hell out of the citizens of Cranston, cynically shoving the 16 year old into the midst of a highly charged federal lawsuit, luring the teen with flattery and fame and press conferences and awards and a scholarship fund.

When the innocent citizens on the receiving end of the lawsuit got pissed, atheists howled "student safety!". Can't you see she's an innocent child? How dare you question our motives and tactics? Don't you dare say anything that will upset her. Are you threatening her? Brutes!

In one appeal case, the decision included, “the district judge will be required to strike a careful balance between the limited constitutional right of a high-school student to campaign inside the school..... and the school’s interest in maintaining an atmosphere in which students are not distracted from their studies by wrenching debates over issues of personal identity.”

The only person distracted by the prayer was Jessica. So perhaps she can find it within herself to ignore the t-shirts, unable as she was to ignore the mural.

The Constitutional rights of the students and citizens in Cranston apparently depend on just what Jessica is capable of ignoring. Such a responsibility for her to bear...

"...the courts are struggling to define just where the expression of hostile views becomes harassment. And so far, even when they have allowed ... speech, the courts have shown some sympathy to the needs of.... students to be protected against harassment."

"Free speech", except... . Now you're beginning to see why atheists use the scare quotes. Free speech is ok, unless atheists start to feel harassed.

In your "burn them at the stake" attitude, there is no recognition of "the needs of atheist students to be protected against harassment." As a matter of fact, you clearly do not want them protected at all.

Protected from prayers on t-shirts?

Your uncaring and short-sighted statement, "When I was a kid, bullying meant that someone beat you up" illustrates this very well.

I never grasped the "prayer" kind of bullying. And I was an atheist when I was a kid. I thought prayers were boring, but I never got chased home from school by one.

Under your definition, stealing your lunch money through intimidation or being pushed around in a circle of kids isn't bullying, because you weren't actually beaten up. The concept is absurd.

Stealing and pushing are theft and assault. Both are crimes.

Is wearing a prayer on a t-shirt a crime?

The courts have used whether "wearing the shirts would cause “substantial disruption” in ruling about mass wearing of T-shirts.

Jessica again gets to decide on the rights of others. If she is 'substantially disrupted' by the sight of t-shirt prayers, the feds move in. If she manages the stress with equanimity, students get to keep their First Amendment rights. Let's hope she's in a good mood.

You are welcome to your opinion on this, but you refuse to recognize that others, such as Mr. Eberhard, are also welcome to their opinion.

I welcome Mr. Eberhard's opinion, unless he writes it on a mural or on a t-shirt, or makes me feel bad, in which case I'll sue.

To label his position of "for safety, for legal precedent, against disruption" as being against free speech, is a gross misrepresentation, especially when he says in the quote of his that you provided that he considered both and felt one outweighed the other.

"Free speech", except...

I happen to agree that it is acceptable for the students to wear T-shirts bearing the prayer en masse;

That's big of you. We Christians will consult you again next time we want to speak.

however, I also recognize the POTENTIAL for disruption and harassment to which you turn a blind eye.

"Free speech", except.. except... except...

When you consider the existing bullying, harassment, ostracism, threats of assault, rape, and death from a number of these very same students who no doubt will be in the vanguard of those wearing these T-shirts, anyone but a fool can see the very real POTENTIAL for disruption, harassment, and violence.

Bullying and threats of assault, rape and death are crimes, proscribed in statutory law.

Jessica dragged a prayer into court, so the punctilious little gumshoe will certainly bring her putative assailants and rapists and murderers to justice. Please let me know when she files charges with the police and starts formal legal proceedings.

In the unlikely event that the teen prayer prosecutor shows less interest in prosecuting threats to her person and life than she did to prosecuting prayer, it might lead a cynic to wonder if the "bullying and threats of assault, rape..." is a rhetorical ploy, not a credible allegation that would withstand legal scrutiny. 'How dare you Christians assert your First Amendment rights! Just look at what those monsters are doing to Jessica!' 'At long last have you Christians no sense of decency!'

Although I agree it is acceptable to have a mass wearing of the shirts, it is incumbent upon the administration to closely monitor the situation and to send home students if safety and disruption become issues.

The school could install video camera surveillance for prayer crimes.

I do not agree with Mr. Eberhard's revised opinion, but am fair enough to see it has an important and valid base.

Quite base. Hiding behind a teenaged girl in order to secure a legal imprimatur on your anti-Christian bigotry is about as base as it gets.

Too bad your ravening lust to go after atheists blinds you to the danger to an innocent 16 year old girl.

 "Lust" isn't the world I'd use for going after atheists. It's a grim job really.

Your callous disregard for the safety of kids in order to push your preferred ideology puts you in a poor light, Sir.

I've never used a kid as a human shield. I don't hide behind schoolgirls. Throwing this kid into a concocted public maelstrom in order to secure a judicial imprimatur on anti-Christian hate is a tactic ladled from the moral cesspool that is atheism.

What kind of people hate and censor their friends and neighbors, and send out kids to take the flack?