There has been a lot of coverage of the topic of Free Will in a variety of blogs and technical sites in the last month. The fact that almost all of them present a variety of points of view, steeped in academic, and professional jargon would seem to obscure the sense that we are looking at a very large flame war (to use an old Usenet term).
Advocates of the idea that Free Will is an arbitrary ‘construct’ in which we ‘feel’ we have free will could justifiably be called the Materialists. Those who advocate the idea of Free Will would generally be in the side of those who think that there is more than what we can see.
OF course, this is only a stylized set to terms to describe a couple opposing Religious and political world views…it would be only a bit hyperbolic to suggest that this argument is fought by ‘progressive/left atheists and religious/conservatives…only a bit hyperbolic…
The thing which is interesting in this flame war is that neither of the two sides is homogenous… as with a number of other current cultural battles going on (Conservative/Progressive, Post Modern/Modern, Liberal arts/Sciences, etc.), a great deal of these fights take place out of the purview of mainstream discourse (i.e. us, and who we talk to…).
Free Will (And Why You Still Don’t have it)
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/free-will-why-you-still-dont-have-it
The human brain must respond to information coming from several domains: from the external world, from internal states of the body, and, increasingly, from a sphere of meaning—which includes spoken and written language, social cues, cultural norms, rituals of interaction, assumptions about the rationality of others, judgments of taste and style, etc. Generally, these streams of information seem unified in our experience:
You spot your best friend standing on the street corner looking strangely disheveled. You recognize that she is crying and frantically dialing her cell phone. Was she involved in a car accident? Did someone assault her? You rush to her side, feeling an acute desire to help. Your “self” seems to stand at the intersection of these lines of input and output. From this point of view, you tend to feel that you are the source of your own thoughts and actions. You decide what to do and not to do. You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain. All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge: this has always suggested that free will is an illusion.
The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated that activity in the brain’s motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab recently used fMRI data to show that some “conscious” decisions can be predicted up to 10 seconds before they enter awareness (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet). Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one’s actions.
On Neuroscience, Free Will, Morality, and Language
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/09/on-neuroscience-free-will-morality-and-language
I want to add two fairly verbose points to Peter’s post about how contemporary neuroscience very much does not close off debates about free will, no matter how many times or how condescendingly Sam Harris insists otherwise.
You don’t need to read any of that — in fact, you don’t need to know anything about the debate — to know that Harris is way too far out on a limb. Anyone who writes “there is simply no description of mental and physical causation that allows for [free will]” either hasn’t read enough or is being intellectually dishonest (see point #2 for more on this). Google Scholar shows 600,000+ articles that mention “free will” published in the last 18 months. The Wikipedia entry on the Neuroscience of Free Will has 16 sections and subsections and concludes that “there is no consensus among researchers about the significance of findings, their meaning, or what conclusions may be drawn.” Does it really sound right that all of these people just didn’t get the memo that the debate was self-evidently settled, as Harris snidely insists?
As for the content…
(1) It’s hard to escape the impression that Harris is engaging in philosophical debates the contours and stakes of which he doesn’t quite understand. He sometimes seems to confuse different technical concepts of “free will” and “rationality.” Argumentatively the confusion helps him, allowing him to dismiss one theory on the basis of convincing flaws in a related but distinct theory. But it makes it much harder to untangle what he’s claiming, why he thinks he’s so undeniably right, and how he thinks everyone else just hasn’t been paying enough attention.
The first theory is the psychoanalytic division between the conscious and the unconscious mind. We are motivated by desires and beliefs that we can’t admit to ourselves we have. Psychoanalytic structures like the id and ego obviously can’t get physically mapped on to parts of the brain, which makes psychoanalysis an incomplete theory, but it’s not a bad approximation for a lot of behavior. Psychoanalytic theory and “the talking cure” are almost totally dead in psychology departments — a June 2008 study in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association described psychoanalysis as “desiccated and dead” — but practicing psychotherapists still often have Freudian sensibilities about things like reaction formations. Psychoanalytic theory also helps explain why persuasion can work even when you know how it’s working on you, as in when you still kind of tear up at awkwardly schmaltzy movies. It also accounts for the counter-intuitive finding that introspection is often counterproductive, e.g., the more people work on their cognitive biases the more biased they’re likely to objectively become, and why people are so stunningly, horrifically bad at predicting their own future behavior.
