WrongBot

There are two popular theories about free will which are incompatible with each other and with reality. The positive position is that we, as human beings, have this magical thing called free will that is independent of physics and causality, which allows us to make truly “free” choices. The negative position is that we are mere particles, and so there is no free will and life is meaningless.

The error in both of these theories is that they are conflating two propositions which are actually independent of each other:

1. Human beings can do whatever they want.
2. The decisions of human beings are not wholly deterministic.

The positive position is that both of these statements are true. The negative position is that they are both false: our decisions are deterministic, therefore we cannot do whatever we want.

But hold on a second, and let us see if we can use some Science here. Proposition 2 is false. The decisions of human beings are wholly deterministic, because the universe is entirely deterministic.¹ Does this mean that Proposition 1 is also false, as the popular negative position holds?

Of course not. Your actions are entirely determined by your wants. All determinism tells us is that our wants themselves are entirely determined by physical processes. This even has the advantage of being intuitive²: even when I do things I don’t want to do (like math homework), I have some greater want in mind that makes them worthwhile (like graduating from college).

You can do whatever you want. But as the staggeringly important philosopher Robert Nozick has observed,

No one has ever announced that because determinism is true thermostats do not control temperature.

This position is known as compatibilism.

1: Some accounts of quantum mechanics disagree, but the lack of determinism in those accounts certainly has nothing to do with human decision-making processes.

2: Though please remember that intuition is not any kind of proof, and not very good evidence either.

As soon as a philosopher begins talking about mental states as though they are fundamental or uniquely important things and not convenient abstractions for talking about particles bopping around in a particular way, you should know you’re in trouble. It’s an unfortunately common variety of motivated thinking to come up with a grand theory of the universe that just happens to have the theorizer in the center; be wary.

While this is good advice, it is not really a counter-argument. There are arguments against dualisms in general, but I will instead be focusing on specific errors in these next couple posts, on the grounds that dealing with them is both more straightforward and more entertaining.

So. Mary’s Room is a thought experiment first formulated by Frank Jackson as follows:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

(Via Wikipedia)

Or, to put it another way, Mary is a person who has complete and exhaustive physical knowledge of everything about color and how humans perceive it, but who has never experienced it herself. If she then experiences it, can she be said to have acquired some (non-physical) knowledge she didn’t previously possess?

This thought experiment has been the subject of a great deal of debate among philosophers of mind. Which is silly, because the answer is trivially and obviously no.

Mary’s complete and exhaustive physical knowledge of human color perception must include knowledge of how her own brain experiences colors. The human brain deals with experiential knowledge as well as explicit verbal knowledge; I know how to ride a bike, but this has nothing to do with my knowledge of gyroscopes and angular momentum. But this does not and should not lead us to say that my knowledge of how to ride a bike is somehow non-physical. It is merely represented and processed differently by my brain.

And yet somehow people have been arguing about this (usually badly) for more than 20 years. Five or ten minutes should really be enough. Let’s move on.

Tomorrow: I do not understand Chinese.