“Consciousness
is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of,
because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of...How
simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like
asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something
that does not have any light shining upon it...Consciousness can seem
to pervade all mentality when it actually does not.”
Julian
Jaynes (1976)
Here's the Problem
Sartre said we are “condemned to be free.”
“It’s true. I said that.”
Maybe he was right, but after thinking about the
naturalistic/psychological theories explored by Daniel Dennett and
Daniel Wegner, it is better to say we are condemned to feel
freer than we are.
“THAT’S better.”
One of the largest obstacles Dennett and Wegner’s theories of
consciousness face is the uneasiness they can produce in people that
are accustomed to thinking in conventional ways about their own
choices and behavior. This uneasiness is a symptom of thinking in
extremes and painting a threatening caricature of a theory, rather
than trying to understand how new theories about consciousness can
still hold on reality and not completely destroy a kind of freedom
worth having. Granted, anxieties are understandable. Tensions exist
between our traditional sense of self and the scientific worldviews
humans have developed by observing nature. Consciousness is a
frontier that Wegner and Dennett have started charting for the
purpose of scientifically resolving the problem of human freedom in a deterministic universe. If we choose to follow them, and are met
along the way with discoveries that surprise, scare, or even
disappoint us, then our demands about the reality we want to be
living in are unrealistic. (Good lord, you want your cake and you
want to eat it, too?).
“But, reality is scary. And cake isn’t.”
Like landing on an unmapped island, we can expect to feel dissonance
between the actual reality we face and the ripe content of our
desires and imaginations. For this reason, it is vital that we trust
our reliable instruments to help us find the connection between the
dark islands and the rest of the known world. Whether the reality of
consciousness turns out to be pleasant or well-received becomes a
matter of taste, and what we discover becomes a fact to acknowledge
regardless of how it treats emotional palates.
Before attacking the issue, it is important to understand the field
of debate and its basic arguments. The problem of human freedom is
summarized by drawing attention to the conflict between the
deterministic laws observed in our universe and the distinct feeling
of agency we have toward most of our actions. The logical
conclusions derived from observing deterministic laws of nature can
be used to formulate an argument like this:
The Problem of Human Freedom
P1. All physical events are caused by previously occurring physical
events.
P2. Every human action is a physical event.
P3. Given P1 & P2, every human action is caused by previously
occurring physical events.
P4. If actions are caused by previously occurring physical events,
they are not free.
THEREFORE, human actions are not free.
P1 is well-established already. The laws of physics have a long
history of reliably identifying physical causes that determine
physical events. Skepticism may haunt every inference of causation,
but it is reasonable to assume that all events have causes, apparent
or subtle. Therefore, the assumption is safe, backed by common
sense, Occam's razor, and
centuries of scientific observation. So if P1 is true, the premise
implies that it is rational to believe the physical world is
deterministic.
The core problem of human freedom is introduced by P2-P4. P2
operates on the assumption that all human actions are physical
events. The work of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and
evolutionary biology paints an increasingly physical picture of human
action and behavior. Therefore, in an effort to remain consistent
and steer clear of dualistic metaphysics, I take it for granted from here on that all
events in the universe, including human actions, are only physical
events. If this is the case, then P3 is true and human action is
caused by prior physical causes.
The argument in P4 is known as incompatibilism,
and claims that if an act was determined by previously occurring
events, then the act could not have been otherwise. If an act could
not have been otherwise, then it cannot be free, so acts that are
determined by previously occurring events cannot be free.
Incompatibilism implies that the freedom felt in human action does
not align with the principles of determinism in the world. This line
of thinking leads to theories that, in trying to establish a source
of agent-caused free will, often find themselves wandering into the
alluring dualism of the “Cartesian Theater.” This is because
determinism appears to be a direct assault on the normal concept of
human freedom, the idea that humans themselves are the cause
of their own actions.
(Dennett coined “The Cartesian
Theater” as a disparaging term for the dualist materialism that
still remains in many modern materialistic theories of consciousness.
Cartesian dualism implies that consciousness operates through the
interaction of an immaterial soul with the material body…originally
via the pineal gland of the brain.)
So now we have a serious dilemma. Our best reasoning tells us the
world we inhabit and the processes responsible for everything in it
(humans included) is deterministic, and yet we still feel like we are
the ones causing our actions. How can this be?
What the incompatibilist dilemma assumes is that freedom cannot exist
in a deterministic world. However, incompatibilism operates on a
definition of freedom that is needlessly inflated. In fact, P4
should be amended to state that the kind of freedom many people
expect themselves to have cannot exist in a deterministic world, but
this does not rule out a kind of freedom worth having. This
different version of freedom is more realistic and compatible
with the forces of determinism and evolution. And it deserves an
explanation.
How it Happened
The evolutionary theory of consciousness I want to talk about posits
that consciousness is an ability evolved from the human knack for
communication and cultural expression and is responsible for our
sense of freedom. We experience this sense of freedom when our prior
thoughts align themselves seamlessly with the actions we perceive
ourselves making. What this implies, unsavory to some tastes, is
that consciousness and freedom are not irreducibly separate faculties
of the mind. Instead, they are integrated cognitive systems that
serve an evolutionary purpose, and like any physical adaptation, they
can be deceived. So the freedom we experience is an “illusion”;
that is, something that appears a certain way without making its
actual structure apparent. Both Dennett and Wegner provide arguments
and evidence that propel a particular angle of this theory. In
Dennett’s case for consciousness and freedom outlined in his book Freedom Evolves, the
diverse facets of evolution hold most of the answers to the
fundamental problems of free will. Wegner, on the other hand, looks
to empirical studies on human psychology to shed more light on what
consciousness actually is and why we experience it the way we do.
According to Dennett, freedom is an evolved concept that owes its
nature to our shared beliefs about it (Dennett 9). Freedom is real
in the same sense that other cultural ideas like “true love” or
“good and evil” are real. They are involved and significant to
the way we live our lives, present and dynamic in our folk
psychology, but they do not exist as emergent, separate, and
irreducible entities. In other words, they do not belong to some
extra-physical realm (a la Descartes), and like many things still
outside the current scope of human understanding, certain features of
freedom and consciousness are often exaggerated.
“Look…I know I fucked up, OK?”
Dennett explains the evolution of freedom by tracing its origins back
to the first stirrings of life on the planet. This approach avoids
the kind of speciesism that obscures the actual history of
consciousness as a phenomenon that evolved out of the species-neutral
processes of early life. The kind of freedom discussed here is not
exclusively human, nor was it ever “complete” at any one time we
started noticing it. This fact helps shed more light on why people
may not like this “ersatz” freedom that was not supernaturally
bestowed upon them by gods or demons, but rather evolved through them
and the basic structures that are shared by the simplest of
organisms. Consciousness is not some celestially ordained human
superpower. It is a growing, evolving capacity evinced at different
levels by all living things in a system of natural selection. And it
was here, in some form, from the beginning.
The Game of Life developed by John Horton Conway is a useful analogue for thinking
about freedom evolving in a deterministic universe. This simulation
offers a helpful perspective for understanding how the design steps
leading to the freedom we observe today could have occurred without
the repeated influence of a creator’s hand (Dennett 53). The game
consists of an infinite grid that can be populated with any
configuration of square cells. These cells can either be “on” or
“off,” simulating the cell’s state of life or death. The cells
interact with their eight vertical, horizontal, and diagonal
neighbors by following four basic rules:
If a cell has fewer than two living neighbors it dies, simulating
the effects of isolation.
If a cell has more than three living neighbors it also dies,
simulating the effects of overpopulation in a resource limited
environment.
In accordance with rules 1 and 2, any living cell that has two or
three living neighbors survives into the next round or “generation.”
Lastly, any dead cell that has precisely three living neighbors
becomes live again for the next round, simulating birth.
In its simplest forms, the Game of Life simulation is not
particularly interesting. The basic constructions of squares appear
to function in very limited ways when they are not forced to interact
with one other in the same plane. However, when the complexity of
the game increases, fascinating patterns begin to emerge. When
multiple cell groups are introduced and are allowed to confront each
other, the interactions become an apt model for how the evolution of
life systems operates in early stages of development. Remarkable
instances of self-replication can result, like the ones discovered by
Conway’s theoretical version of the game that became a
self-reproducing Turing Machine. Since the game’s
invention in the 1970’s, computer programs were designed to
effectively extend the simulation. But, the complexity required to
generate a Turing Machine and other more computationally expensive
arrangements still exceeds what is practical (according to Dennett,
the screen displaying a Turing-enabled Life World would need to be
approximately one kilometer across) (Dennett, 48). Interestingly, if
the complexity needed for such an arrangement could be reached, the
size ratio between the functioning whole of the game and the
individual square “cells” would become similar to the size ratio
of an actual organism to its constituent atoms (Dennett, 49). At
these levels of design complexity, the Game of Life becomes all the
more reminiscent of the natural world. Since the fuel of evolution
is the very crowdedness of a particular environment (more
confrontations yield more cases of change and mutation), the
probability of spontaneous cases of design rises alongside the
increased complexity of environmental conditions. The Game of Life
is an informative theoretical analogy for thinking about evolution.
It can be used to show how freedom, as a repeatedly re-designed
function of cellular life, evolved from the basic avoidance
structures of early organisms into the more robust cognitive systems
we see operating today.
What this picture of human freedom shows us is nothing short of an
unfathomably complex system of avoidance that has been billions of
years in the making. So what accounts for the knee-jerk aversion to a
freedom that was “blindly” designed by forces of evolution that
follow complex but predictable rules? The answer is a lingering fear
that leads people to perceive determinism as the ultimate threat to
human agency. Both Dennett and Wegner have a ready response to this
fear, claiming that even though consciousness and the freedom it
affords us are experienced as illusions, this realization changes
nothing about our cognitive abilities or our moral responsibility.
A Happy Determinism
Determinism can be seen as a problem for human freedom when it is
understood to imply the inevitability of actions and events. The
first step out of this quicksand is realizing that nothing about
determinism necessitates the inevitability of actions and events. If
the word “inevitable” really does mean “unavoidable,” as
Dennett stresses, then the fact that evolution produces avoidance
equipment in abundance exposes the blatant contradiction in claiming
that determinism means inevitability (Dennett 58). There is nothing
unavoidable in my being able to circumvent a menacing dog in the
street. I have the ability (if I happened to be suicidal) to
intentionally avoid my avoiding of the threat. However, this ability
to avoid the dog (or override my impulse to do so) is still
determined in every sense by the evolutionary processes responsible
for my cognitive equipment. Because of this, the evolution of
avoidance is key to distinguishing determinism from inevitability.
“Relax, buddy-bud, it's just a thought experiment.”
Dennett engages an important objection to this in Freedom Evolves
that is worth mentioning. If avoidance is determined, how can it be
authentic avoidance in the sense of being able to actually change the
outcome of an impending event? This objection confuses what
constitutes an impending event. This can happen when retrospectively
examining a situation that has already occurred. When conceptualizing
a sequence of events in memory, it is tempting to say that the
outcome was going to happen but that it somehow changed causal paths.
The reality is that whatever happened was determined to do so by the
conditions in place when it transpired. What actually occurs becomes
the actual outcome in both deterministic and indeterministic
worlds. Furthermore, the only authentic avoidance is
determined avoidance, since the only real avoidance systems that
exist are determined by evolutionary processes. An indeterministic
case of avoidance would look something like an act of god or an
instance of magic, and it is fair to say that invoking these
explanations indicates an obvious lack of important information about
the event. Therefore, because the deterministic processes of
evolution are the only reason we can avoid anything at all,
determined avoidance is the only really authentic kind of avoidance.
Another worthwhile objection expresses contention about the role of
chance in deterministic avoidance. Determinism, at the outset, seems
to exclude chance.
“C'mon. If everything is determined, what is left to chance?”
Once again, this objection confuses the notion of deterministic
chance that Dennett provides a way of thinking about. According to
Dennett, chance does not need to be “causeless” in the sense that
a chance event pops into being literally from nowhere. Furthermore,
chance should not be considered excluded from determinism, because
separating chance from determinism leads to the same kind of dualist
thinking that we are trying to avoid in the first place. Chance can
still exist in a deterministic world and follow all the rules of
necessity, possibility, and causation that we commonly observe. A
chance event can be thought of as something that occurs with causal
connections that are either too complex or too minute to be
scrutable. Take rolling dice for example. We normally consider a
proper dice roll to be an indeterministic chance event. In fact, our
wagers depend on its legitimate randomness. However, the outcome of
the dice roll depends entirely on miniscule deterministic forces at
work on it from the time the dice leave the dealer’s hand to the
time they settle on the felt table of a casino. Variables like wind
resistance, trajectory, tiny variations in the surface of the dice,
and so forth into the vast complexity of the physical universe all
stack up to determine the outcome. In other words, chance
events are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. The whole
point of chance, however, is that no one knows enough of this highly
detailed information to make an accurate prediction. Therefore,
events that occur with complex and practically untraceable variables
take on the appearance of chaos. For all practical purposes chance is epistemically tamper-proof, and effectively as opaque as any
indeterministic randomness. Physicists refer to this as deterministic
chaos. This appearance, however, can be called an illusion when it
leads us to infer indeterminacy where there is none. This kind of
thinking may require a different understanding of the normal notion
of chance, but it is necessary for accurately grasping the forces
that determine the extent of our freedom, which is a function of our
external and internal physical environments.
There are reasons beyond the tidiness of scientific uniformity to
favor determinism over indeterminism. Imagine finding yourself in a
violent lightning storm. A five-acre field stands between you and
the shelter of your country home. Would you rather traverse this
field knowing that a bolt of lightning could strike anywhere, anytime
with no possible causal explanation? Or would you prefer a
deterministic world where staying low, avoiding tall metallic objects
and bodies of water would actually decrease your chances of being
struck?
Maybe.
The deterministic world is the only world where effective
avoidance is even possible. How can you avoid a completely chaotic
and indeterministic event? Granted, lightning is for all practical
purposes unpredictable in both deterministic and indeterministic
worlds, but at least scientific knowledge is possible regarding the
tendencies of the phenomenon in deterministic worlds, providing us
with opportunities for genuine avoidance. Even full predictive
knowledge of the phenomenon is theoretically possible in
deterministic worlds, if only for a LaPlacian Demon (Dennett 28).
(LaPlace’s Demon refers to a
thought experiment that originated in 1814 from Pierre-Simon LaPlace.
Theoretically, if a being possesses complete information about the
atomic and subatomic levels of reality in a deterministic universe,
the being could explain and predict any past or future event with
absolute precision.)
So there’s no cause for wonder why a world in which my head could
explode for no reason at all would be less appealing than a world
where rational explanations are prevalent and available. An
indeterministic universe would leave us much more stranded for
knowledge because it would keep us from knowing about the world. In
the deterministic world we live in, our epistemic horizons are
comparatively broader.
Yes it's true, indeterminism = Scanners.
Even more progress toward a “happy” determinism is made when it
is understood that determinism does not imply fixed natures. It is
natural to fear that determinism results in inability to change one’s
character or lot in life, but nothing about determinism merits this
anxiety. As Dennett points out, no contradiction exists
in saying something can be determined to be mutable, unpredictable,
or apparently chaotic (Dennett 90). Just because the laws governing
the micro-events that determine our possibilities are largely outside
our control does not mean we are without the capacity to influence
the kind of people we become. It is all a matter
of design. Human beings have evolved the ability to learn, improve,
and change. Hence, we are determined to have an ability (evidently
increasing) to change our natures and thus have some amount of
influence over the outcomes in our futures. The actual extent of
this freedom might not be quite what we are used to believing, but
we’re better off avoiding delusions of grandeur. If freedom is a
spectrum, humans are located somewhere on it, moving (it is hoped) in
a direction of increase. The fact remains that determinism results
in a future (not a nature) that can be, in principle, known and thus
is fixed in some important sense. However, humans are not LaPlacian
Demons. We live within soft epistemic boundaries that make it
improbable enough to thoroughly predict our own futures, so we
experience our prospects as subjectively open, which makes us feel
free. If this produces the hollow feeling of something left to be
wanted, then consider it a reality check.
“Take that, unreasonable expectations about life.”
Human beings have a natural tendency to overestimate their
capacities. Our capacity for freedom is no exception. This impulse
has traceable evolutionary benefits. Confidence and illusions of
control bring social rewards (e.g. political power, successful
mating, stronger social networks and support systems). But what
accounts for this exaggeration, and is it necessarily wrong? What
about the value of a conceptually flexible free will? A free will
that is sensitive to our beliefs about it? In this case it really
does matter what we think about free will, because (like concepts of
“true love,” or “evil”) free will is entirely politically
defined. This is one of Dennett’s ongoing concerns. Rather than
only peering into the complex features of the physical
universe to discover the secrets of some mysterious freedom, (as some
versions of Libertarianism attempt to do), why not seek an
explanation that is more socio-cultural than metaphysical? Does
being free depend on our sense that we are in fact acting
freely? Is it simply a shared belief (like the value of money) that
could disappear off the face of the earth as soon as everyone ceased
to give it credence? Could our sense of freedom collapse like a
troubled economy? How free we are (or equivalently how free we think
we are) depends on how the progressing ideas of human intention,
agency, and responsibility evolve over time within human culture.
And this ideological evolution is only a continuation of a vast
biological system of adaptations that have been hard at work since
the dawn of life on this planet.
In this new light, freedom becomes
a concept-dependent cluster of cultural information that causes us to
have specific beliefs about what we are and what we are capable of
(Dennett 176). So it becomes obvious why people are disposed to
overestimate their freedom: natural selection favors it. If this is
the case, as Dennett puts it, freedom is no different than our other
shared beliefs about things like love or money. It is a meme fighting for survival in the grand arena of contemporary ideas, and a concept applied to specific areas of our lives to serve a
cultural function, be it justice, morality, self-esteem, or any of
the practical benefits of believing we are free. So if freedom
really is one massive shared illusion, the issue becomes profoundly
psychological. Given the expanding scientific knowledge humans are
gaining about themselves and the demystification of consciousness and
self, the goal of securing for ourselves a kind of freedom worth
wanting becomes a matter of making calm rational strides toward
understanding what free will is, rather than allowing our
imaginations to run wild in some quixotic swordfight with
determinism.
The urges to battle determinism have resulted in several objections
to Dennett’s naturalistic compatibilism. The objection he
specifically engages in Freedom Evolves is the quantum
indeterminacy theory of libertarianism.
Closing the Cartesian Theater
Libertarianism (the apolitical variety) is a popular philosophical
movement searching for a defense of indeterminism and to establish
moral responsibility in the form of final or ultimate human agency.
In order to solve the compatibility problem of free will and
determinism, this theory turns to the subatomic world to explain how
spontaneous freedom may be possible. What this requires is a vast
logical leap from the frontier discoveries of quantum physics to a
scantly explained induction about the indeterminacy of macro level
decision-making. The instance of the theory Dennett takes issue with
was formulated by Robert Kane
and proposes that a libertarian freedom is the only way for human
beings to be the ultimate source of their decision-making and thus be
authentic moral agents. The idea is that if human action were only a
mechanical function of a deterministic universe, then moral
responsibility would cease to be meaningful. The only way for an act
to qualify as moral is for the causal chain of action to end at some
nexus of what Kane has termed “Ultimate Responsibility” (Dennett
99).
In other words, people only deserve credit for compassionate or
charitable acts if they are the ones doing them, and not
merely subjects involved in the serendipitous steps of a massive
causal continuum. Libertarians have developed extravagant ways to
pin down a stopping point in the dangerously spiraling causal chain
of human action. These attempts have resulted in dualisms that try
to isolate some notion of the agent self from the surrounding causal
chain. The problem with this line of reasoning is that it usually
requires an extremely fancy explanation that becomes increasingly
improbable with every embellishment, or it necessitates a mystical
resignation, a “passing of the buck” to some other problematic
entity or force. Kane’s version of the theory tries to more
clearly formulate an argument for indeterminacy, but in the end it
still delegates the explanatory tasks to the obscure concepts of
quantum chaos. This results in a story of free will that is fraught
with plot holes. He attempts to ground the indeterminism of human
action in the internal conflict of desire and intention that occurs
when someone deliberates over a decision. This “conflict of will”
results in multiple intersecting feedback loops of moral feelings,
ambitions, motives, and other mental input that generates a chaotic
system from which a decision to act is selected and outputted. The
fact that this chaos is still deterministic chaos is something Kane
recognizes, so he proposes that the actual indeterminacy is
introduced via chaotic ripples emanating from the subatomic structure
of reality (Dennett 105).
According to Kane, the indeterminacy of our actions (not just the
deterministic randomness associated with the conflict of will) comes
from the quantum noise generated within the very physical structure
of our active neurons. This bona-fide indeterminacy introduces a
genuine chaos into our actions and allows the system to escape the
causal confines of determinism. A problem with this that
Dennett identifies is that it shouldn’t matter whether a
system is deterministically random or genuinely indeterministic.
They both accomplish the same result and there is no significant
functional difference between them. In a practical sense, an
indeterministic dice roll adds nothing over a deterministically
random one (because remember, we are not LaPlacian Demons). So,
quantum indeterminacy is a gourmet but pointless extra ingredient in
human decision-making.
Another more important problem is that Kane never adequately shows
how exactly a quantum fluctuation of physical matter contributes to
the indeterminacy of our actions and gives us freedom and ultimate
agency. Even if this indeterminacy breaks the normal causal chain
involved in a human action by stopping the regress at some flash
quantum event, how can this event be considered one’s own? There’s
no clear reason to assume that this moment of quantum fluctuation
belongs in any meaningful sense to an Ultimately Responsible agent,
just because the event occurs within the practical reasoning
structure of the brain (especially considering that the brain’s
practical reasoning structure was developed by deterministic
processes). What Kane is missing is a solid way for this quantum
event to not just occur within us, but actually belong to us
in a real identity-forming sense. Kane supposes that this quantum
randomness enables people to experience legitimate “self-forming
actions” (SFA’s) that contribute to a person’s character and
decision-making behavior. However, as Dennett argues there’s no
real way to discern a legitimate SFA from an illegitimate one, which
means this indeterminism theory offers no better way to verify or
quantify a person’s agency (Dennett 117). Given all of this, the
question remains: why should we have any reason to consider
indeterministic actions more our own than deterministic ones?
“Whatever, dude. You just don’t get it.”
Like extra margarine or artificial sweetener, Kane’s sickly sweet
theory is something easily done without. The indeterminism that Kane
relies on to propel his theory is unnecessary and superfluous. Even
if this highly unlikely amplified quantum fluctuation does add an
element of indeterminacy to our self-forming actions, what difference
does it make? The fact that a vital distinction cannot be found, let
alone a thorough scientific explanation of the quantum physics at
work does not do much to recommend the quantum indeterminacy theory.
This is especially the case given that more coherent explanations are
available in the more clearly defined features of deterministic
macro-events. Kane’s theory amounts to a muddy dualism. It uses a
mysterious phenomenon to explain another mysterious phenomenon, and why
rely on conjecture about the subatomic world we still understand so
little about to explain consciousness? Using underdeveloped quantum
theory to explain philosophical problems like free will and agency is
precarious, because it leads to absurd conclusion-jumping. The supposed "quantum fluctuation" of Ultimate Responsibility is highly susceptible to exaggeration,
because it is so glamorously newfangled. As Dennett says,
something that can explain everything is in danger of being able
to explain nothing. The perception or experience of human agency
is a macroscopic phenomenon that can be understood in terms of
deterministic processes without indulging in the extravagance of
quantum indeterminacy. The theories of Dennett and Wegner help
define this emerging picture of consciousness and make progress
toward a more scientifically coherent view of freedom and the self.
Ladies and gentleman, it is now safe to exit the Cartesian Theater.
(Thanks for sticking around, and stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, which
will be posted next Sunday.)
