Of Philosophy and Science

There’s been a bit of a buzz in the blogosphere lately about the merits of philosophy, and whether it has anything to offer science or scientists. I’m guessing that some of it might be motivated by a resurfacing of the dust-up between Larry Krauss and David Albert prompted by Albert’s critical review in NYT.

Bee over at Backreaction complains about philosophers who don’t really understand the science they’re commenting on, and that as science continues to make progress in figuring out how the mind works, philosophers should just “get off the turf.”

PZ has a couple posts in which he bravely suggests that philosophical thought (such as displayed by Doolittle, a biologist and one-time colleague of mine) might help scientists avoid some common errors (and he interestingly distinguishes between technicians and scientists and argues that good scientific ability — by contrast to mere technical ability — is, in part at least, a form of natural philosophy).

Not surprisingly, however, several commentators appeal to Feynman (“Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”) and Dawkins, and to their general disdain for philosophy, to lament that PZ is giving in to mushy-headed woo, and that he’s dissing the bright steel blade of empiricism and data.

Anyhow, since I suppose I’ve got a dog in this fight, I thought I might as well throw out some thoughts:

1. The question is not whether we’re going to do philosophy; the question is whether we’re going to do good philosophy or bad philosophy.

A Gedankenexperiment on Speciation

You’re a biologist who realizes that the idea of immutable species – kinds of creatures arranged hierarchically and permanently – is long dead. You see that one type of animal can morph into another type, and (save for some limits on how quickly genes can change) there’s nothing to prevent any new trait from developing in a population of creatures. In other words, all the common people who think that there are real species of animals created by god are wrong.

What do you do? (Choose one.)

a) Realizing that the mutability of animals has profound implications for medicine and husbandry (after all, our doctors and veterinarians must take note, as they already do to some extent, of the fact that there is no real biological barrier between animals, and how can we give different treatments for different animals if there’s no biological difference between them?), you ponder and then write about what should be done in light of the evidence of evolution, suggesting reforms to medicinal practices and new ways to think about breeding various animals.

b) You spend your time concocting new definitions of “species” to replace the immutable kind species that no longer holds.

In my view, choice a) is eminently worthwhile, while choice b) is a complete waste of time. I am mystified that most biologists choose b).

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This post is pure snark. For context, see here and here.

Misunderstanding Compatibilists

Over at Why Evolution is True, Jerry is “mystified” by what motivates compatibilist philosophers. (And plenty of compatibilists — me included — respond with varieties of indignation and snark in the comments.)

It seems to me that Jerry is suffering from a couple of misunderstandings about compatibilism (misunderstandings that we’ve run into in the comments section here too, e.g., in my conversation with Ron Murphy).

Here are the false beliefs:

1) Compatibilism is driven by a prior commitment to the existence of libertarian (contra-causal, supernatural, dualist) freedom, which is then frustrated by the advance of science. Rather than just admit that we aren’t free, compatibilists respond to these scientific discoveries by “concocting new definitions of free will to replace the ghost-in-the-machine contracausal free will that no longer holds” (as Jerry puts it here).

2) Compatibilists wish they had libertarian freedom. They’re smart enough to realize that we don’t have have it, but they really want it so badly that they feel driven to cook up a weak-broth substitute so they can ignore the fact that we aren’t really free. They’re (perhaps unconsciously) pining for a world in which ghosts can violate the laws of biology and physics.

These are both wrong, wrong, wrong.

Compatibilists don’t want libertarian (contracausal, supernatural) freedom. We wouldn’t take it if you offered it to us.

To begin with, we tend to think that the very notion of libertarian freedom is probably incoherent, so you’re probably offering nothing but confusion.

Further, even if the notion is coherent, we tend to think that libertarian freedom would be useless. Why would I even want to be able to violate the laws of physics. (Unless it let me fly like superman, I mean . . . but that’s another matter.)

Compatibilist freedom is all the freedom we can make sense of, and is all the freedom we want. And we all have compatibilist freedom. And it matters not a whit that the universe is (effectively) deterministic.

And compatibilists have held this position for thousands of years. So it’s not like we’re dismayed at the revelations of modern neuroscience and physics. The results are interesting for understanding how our minds (and the rest of the world) work but as far as freedom goes, it’s largely irrelevant. Of course there are natural processes that produce our decisions and actions; that’s what we’ve been saying all along.

So it’s rather irksome to have a biologist suggest that we’re trying to save some pale ghost of supernatural dualistic freedom from the onslaught of modern science. It lumps us in with the view that we’ve criticized and rejected for centuries. And it suggests that we’re craving something that we’ve explicitly argued no one should want.

It’s even more irksome when the charge is leveled against someone like Dennett (or, to a much lesser degree, your humble blogger) who has been on the front lines attacking dualism. To appeal to my earlier analogy, we’re the ones spending all our time attacking the Santa myth, and Jerry’s accusing us of concocting new definitions of presents to replace the north-pole-elven-made toys that science has deprived us of.

Dennett is among the hardest of the hard-core physicalists. And Jerry wants to accuse him (and his ilk) of being a mamsy-pamsy closet wanna-be supernaturalist?

This is why Jerry’s post elicited charges of being a cheap shot, sighs of motherly exasperation, and so on. It’s a misrepresentation, whether willful or due to carelessness.

(For my defenses of compatibilism, see here, and here.)

If We’re Determined, Do We Choose?

In my earlier post on free will I listed four mistaken claims that pro-science folks tend to make about determinism:

If determinism is true (they say):

1. It doesn’t matter what I decide (because the outcome is already determined).
2. I don’t have any real choice (because what I’ll do is already decided).
3. I couldn’t have done otherwise (because the laws of nature determined my action).
4. I’m not really responsible for my actions (since they are the outcome of laws and circumstances that I had no control over).

I tackled (1) and (3) in my last post, but now I see Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne making mistake (2): They’re claiming that if my actions are determined by neurophysiology, then I don’t have any real choice in the matter, or at least no “free” choice.

Here’s Harris (quoted and endorsed by Coyne) attacking the compatibilist notion of freedom:

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.”

Now, where does this go wrong?

First, it is clear that we do in fact go through a decision-making process. We do sometimes consider different options and evaluate them, and this process of conscious deliberations results in our performing one action and not some other that we considered.

Determinism gives us absolutely no reason to question this obvious truth. So if this is all we mean by “choosing” then it is clear that we do in fact choose, and Harris’s rejection of the common person’s belief that “you choose what you want; you choose what you will to do,” is just a mistake.

Presumably Harris and Coyne will complain that this doesn’t count as a real choice, or a free choice, if determinism is true. They have to grant that we do go through the psychological process of choosing, but they suppose that the common person believes we have something more, that we have an ability to transcend the laws of nature when we choose.

Of course, it is true that the common person does believe that we have this libertarian (contra-causal, supernatural) form of freedom. This is because the common person is a dualist and so concludes that if the neurophysiology is doing the job, then it can’t be me who’s causing the action.

But once we reject dualism, what should we then say about “freedom” and “choice”? When I discover that I just am a deterministic neurophysiological process, should I say things like “I freely chose to go to the beach”? Or should I agree with the dualist that if the brain has produced the decision then it doesn’t count as a “real free choice”?

It seems clear to me that it would be foolish to abandon the word “choice” in a deterministic world. There is a very important distinction between acts that are the outcome of deliberation and those that are not. It is important to distinguish between cases where someone does something because she wanted to and cases in which she does not.

If we throw out the word “choice” just because folk-conceptions link choice with supernaturalism, then we’re going to need some other word to label what we do when we deliberate and select a course of action based on our desires and commitments. But it would be silly to introduce a neologism to do this work, since this is precisely what the word “choose” covers in our language. So let’s just prune away the mistaken assumptions about dualism and supernaturalism, and we can still retain the core concepts of “choice” and “freedom.”

For comparison, let’s imagine a conversation between two eight-year-olds about whether there are Christmas presents. Most of their classmates believe that all “real” Christmas presents are delivered by Santa, but Susie and Sammy both know that there is no Santa Claus. Susie is nevertheless quite happy to talk about the Christmas presents that she and her classmates got; she just knows that they were delivered by parents and not by magic reindeer.

Sammy, however, insists that no one has ever received a Christmas present in all of history. He agrees that there are toys in boxes covered in wrapping paper, but he says that to point this out is to “change the subject.” After all, he says, what all the other kids mean by Christmas presents is something that shows up on Christmas morning, that is for a particular child, that the child wants, that was built by elves, and that was delivered by Santa coming down the chimney after a magic sleigh ride. Further, he points out, almost all the kids agree that if there were no Santa, there would be no Christmas presents. (So they take the presence of presents to be a clear indication that Santa is real.)

Sammy goes on to argue that science rules out the possibility of elves at the North Pole and of flying reindeer, and so (Sammy concludes) Christmas presents are just illusions. When Susie points out that there obviously are gifts that children get on Christmas morning, Sammy chastises her for changing the subject. “That’s not what kids mean by Christmas presents. They mean a real present, that really is for them, and that they really want, and that came from a real Santa Claus flying behind real reindeer. If you want to make up some other name for that box you opened up the other day, you can, (call it a “boxed-toy-in-pretty-paper-for-a kid” if you want) but don’t pretend that it’s a real present, a Christmas present.

Susie agrees that the facts could be expressed without using the term “Christmas present” but she thinks it’s silly to do so. Most of the features that Sammy points to are in fact satisfied by the boxes they open on Christmas. They are gifts; the occasion is Christmas; etc. Why ignore all of this just because Santa isn’t real? Further, kids are going to think you’re crazy if you go around denying things they can see and feel; they’re going to think that you’re claiming there are no toys for kids in wrapped boxes. But Sammy (and Jerry) want none of it. They’re not content to point out that Santa doesn’t exist; they think we should also convince people that the presents aren’t real either.

To bring it around to the task at hand: Susie thinks that it makes more sense to talk of Christmas presents that require no magic and no Santa than it does to insist that the term is inextricably bound to a false account of gift delivery. The compatibilist likewise thinks that a substantial core of the meaning of “freedom” and “choice” remains even when we recognize the falsity of supernaturalism and dualism.

Consider, for example, what it would mean to ask someone whether she chose to have a child “of her own free will.” Clearly the relevant question is whether it was her personal desires and commitments that led her to have the baby, or whether there was some external form of coercion involved. If she had the baby because she desired a child, and after considering various pros and cons came to the conclusion that this is what she wanted to do, then she freely chose to have the child.

The eight-year-old complaining that he never chose to be born has a point; the mother complaining that she had no choice about having a child because the world is deterministic (despite her having done so because she wanted to, after deliberation, and without external coercion) does not.

So, where does Harris go wrong? It seems to me that the main mistake lies in the justification he offers for claim that we have no free choice. He says that you can’t be free to choose, because “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.”

But why should this worry us? Harris doesn’t flesh out the argument here (perhaps he does elsewhere?) but it seems that he has something like the following argument in mind:

(a) All your actions are the result of causes over which you have no conscious control.

(b) Therefore nothing that you have conscious control over is a cause of your actions.

(c) Therefore, your conscious mental processes of deliberation and deciding don’t make a difference; you don’t make any decisions that matter. It’s all done for you by the unconscious causes.

But this line of reasoning isn’t valid.

First, (b) doesn’t follow from (a). Obviously determinism does guarantee the truth of (a) because we have no control over the laws of nature or the state of the universe a billion years ago (and determinism says that our actions are the result of these causes). But this in no way implies that my conscious decisions aren’t themselves causes. According to the physicalist, these mental states are perfectly respectable physical causes. Yes, the mental states were produced by earlier causes, but that doesn’t somehow render them irrelevant or inert.

Second, given the falsity of (b), we find that (c) is false as well. Clearly we do make decisions, and clearly these decisions have an impact on what we do. We freely choose to act in certain ways, and that makes a difference. Indeed, (c) is essentially Mistake One that I addressed earlier.

The mere fact that dualists are going to think that these can’t be “real free choices” because they are the result of deterministic natural processes should be irrelevant to the physicalist. We shouldn’t throw out the psychological and moral baby with the dualist bathwater.

I freely choose, and so do you.

What Jerry Needs to Know about Freedom

Jerry Coyne, over at Why Evolution is True, has been arguing that determinism implies that we are not really free, and that the compatibilist account of freedom and choice fails to do justice to the common conception of free will. (I wonder whether he’d be uncomfortable learning that he’s agreeing with Kant, who called compatibilism a “wretched subterfuge.”)

It’s certainly true that the compatibilist account of freedom doesn’t fully capture what the common folk mean by “free will.” This is clear from the fact that the folk believe that we cannot be free if our actions are determined. So how do we decide which account is the “right” one?

Well, we could just slap different labels on the two different notions and leave it at that. Then pretty much everyone in the skeptical/atheist/pro-science community could just agree that we have compatibilist freedom, but we don’t have libertarian (contra-causal, transcendental, ultimate) freedom.

But there’s more to the debate. Incompatibilists like Jerry claim that the lack of libertarian freedom has serious and unsettling consequences. Compatibilists, on the other hand, argue that determinism doesn’t require any big adjustments in our understanding of our place in the world.

So, what scary consequences do the incompatibilists point to? Here’s a partial list:

IF DETERMINISM IS TRUE (they say):

1. It doesn’t matter what I decide (because the outcome is already determined).

2. I don’t have any real choice (because what I’ll do is already decided).

3. I couldn’t have done otherwise (because the laws of nature determined my action).

4. I’m not really responsible for my actions (since they are the outcome of laws and circumstances that I had no control over).

All of these claims are wrong.

“Theory” Is Not a Success Term

Time to start my series on common errors committed by the skeptical/reality-based community:

My response to Ed Brayton’s claim:

Theory is the highest level of certainty assigned to explanations in science.

No, there are good theories and bad theories, successful theories and failed theories. Caloric theory didn’t become a non-theory when it was disproven.

A theory (as the term is actually used in science) is a coherent structure of explanation (e.g., laws, causal processes, etc.). It is NOT a success term. Nothing passes from being a non-theory to being a theory once it becomes confirmed by experiment.

Of Freedom and Sunsets

A conversation over chez Jerry (in response to one “Insightful Ape”):

Free will (as I use the term) is exclusive to humans only in same sense that mathematics and music are exclusive to humans.

I reject any dualistic antideterministic supernatural notion of freedom.

And I’d be happy to give up the phrase “free will” for the sake of this discussion if it would help. (But the debate really is in the philosopher’s domain, and all philosophers understand the compatibilist notion of freedom that I’m describing, and a great majority of us subscribe to it. So this concession would be something like our allowing a creationist to use the word “theory” to mean a mere hypotheses, just so we could get to substantive issues.)

Let’s pick up your earlier example of the term “sunrise” for comparison. You and I agree that the the Earth orbits the sun, so in that sense the sun doesn’t rise. But now I hear a whole bunch of scientists (and others) saying now that we know that there’s no sunset and no sunrise, roosters will never crow (or at least not for good reason), and people will never go to sleep (or at least they wouldn’t if they were consistent), and so on.

And I want to say, Wait a minute! The relevant bits of sunrise and sunset are still there. It’ll still get light in the morning, the relative position of the sun will change, etc. etc. That’s what *matters* for all the stuff you’re talking about.

Here’s the parallel dialogue:

Insightful Ape: “Surely you don’t believe in sunrises do you? The sun doesn’t move.”

Physicalist: “Sure the sun doesn’t move, but it’s still going to get light at any given location at some particular time.”

IA: “But that’s not a sunrise.”

P: “Well, call it what you like. The important point is that roosters and bedtimes depend on the relative position of the sun. What do you want to call it when someone can first see the sun, and when they can last see the sun.”

IA: “Well, I wouldn’t make any distinction between any of the times; we’re just on a spinning Earth, and the sun isn’t moving.”

P: “But we *need* some sort of distinction to be able to talk about breakfast and bedtime, and to calm down the people who think that no roosters will every crow again! (Perhaps we could call it an ‘un-sunclipse’ if Blake will let us get away with it.)”

IA: “It’s strange. You admit that the Earth is spinning, and yet for some reason you still want to think that there’s a Sunrise. So you think that the sun is moving even though we all agree that the Earth is turning? Why don’t you just admit that there’s no sunrise? Look, here’s a ton of evidence that shows that the sun is basically stationary. No other star orbits around its planets, why do you insist on thinking that the Sun orbits the Earth?”

P: “Fine, the sun doesn’t rise!”

Peanut Gallery: “OMG! It’s going to be dark forever!!! We’re DOOMED!!!”

P: “No, there’ll be a sunrise tomorrow morning . . . “