Stephen asked:

First of all, I want to apologize for my bad English.

What should I do? Should I accept determinism, or believe in some sort of compatibilist sort of free will? (besides, I find the compatibilistic free will not satisfying).

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

The good news for you is that your wish can be fulfilled in any halfway liberal society, where the political powers grant you sufficient freedom to make your own choices. The difference between despotic and liberal laws is, roughly speaking, that the former direct you and inhibit the exercise of free will, the latter merely draw boundaries around it and prevent you from inhibiting the exercise of free will of others.

Now I understand that this is not the gist of your question. But it is the only proper philosophical way of looking at free will. There are just two ways in which your free will can be constrained: By other people and by the condition of life itself. Being a human animal restricts the exercise of your free will to the possibilities you have as a creature. The existence of political power structures may encroach further on your personal liberty. But even the most brutal of these cannot control the minutiae of your life and therefore will leave you with the ability to make day-by-day choices of your own.

The other problems – such as causal chains, fate, determinism, the supposedly logical truth of notions such as ‘it’s all in the chemistry/physics’, ‘it’s all in the genes’ and (religiously) ‘all is written’ are mere suppositions. You need to look at them closely to discover if they are proved or circumstantially derived – or even just say-so. The latter include fatalism, pre-destination, ‘all is written’ and cannot enter serious discussion. One would wish that the claims for genes and chemistry were under similar strict scrutiny, because they are also unproved and not validated. But even though they pose as scientific pronouncements, they are derived from highly insecure data that support them in a wholly spurious way, i.e. by the deliberate twisting of the data in that direction. But if a scientific statement cannot be validated, then probity should dictate that it be dismissed as either false or mere conjecture. We (the general educated public) are very much at fault for swallowing silly slogans and not demanding that they are backed with appropriate proofs.

The situation with causal chaining is not much better. We are altogether too besotted with Cartesian mechanism, materialism, mathematics and (reductive) method to keep our eyes and ears open for self-contradictions. For the problem that hovers in the background, without being acknowledged, is the belief that science is in possession of comprehensive theories of life and mind, genetic and evolutionary processes. But this is only an assumption, indeed presumption! The context here points to a confusion – held equally by the general public, philosophers and many (though not all) scientists – between a research agenda and established factual knowledge. You will have met with many examples yourself-such as scientists appearing on the public media with provisional and/or tentative findings, and not infrequently wild conjectures, which they discuss in terms strongly suggestive of certainty.

And so to come to the nuts and bolts: We assume today, without proof, that life is sourced wholly from chemistry. We assume, without proof, that mind and brain can be put into analogy with computers. We assume, without proof, that genes code for subjective characters. And finally we assume, without proof, that evolution is a fully-understood process of generating and proliferating life forms.

I have repeated here the words ‘without proof’ to underline the predicament in which we find ourselves. Namely that all these issues have a certain amount of evidence supporting them, but all of it is ambiguous and requires interpretation, which can only be done from the bedrock of a prior conception of what we are looking at. The trouble is, however, that the same evidence also supports the case for other interpretations. Accordingly we must choose – which is a wholly subjective feature of research! And so we have chosen, to stay with the example of genes, to interpret wholly inconclusive data from genetic research to push the notion of the causal chaining of subjective characters. I wonder of course how wise a decision it was, because the result has been a widespread resurgence of belief in quasi-supernatural powers and of ourselves as their victims.

Moreover, when I say ‘we’, I mean the modern scientific western civilisation. Yet science is not monolithic; and you could easily find points of view about genes, life, evolution and neurophysiology which differ from the current paradigm. For example,

a significant percentage of scientists in the life sciences (usually hands-on biologists and medical biologists) dissent from the fashionable biomolecular theories for precisely the reason that the latter thrive 100% on conjectures and are unable to clinch their propositions with proofs. But for reasons which I find difficult to explain, ‘we’ have for the time being chosen to give them our vote.

For you, in the throes of anguish about free will, this may be cold comfort. But I would urge you to develop a healthy mistrust of dogmaticism in your reading. You seem to have read too many texts all saying the same thing. Vary your intellectual diet – it’s healthier for independence of mind! For example, when you hear of criminals, gamblers, explorers or poets that their genes made them what they are, start thinking critically and rationally about what is being proposed here. Think of the recipe in your kitchen that shows you how to bake a cake with powders, sugar, essences etc. That recipe cannot help you with turning the baking powder into a snail. Genes are recipes in precisely the same sense. They specify the chemical products required to build a body. But now you are asked to believe that, somehow, intelligence is added to compounds of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen etc.! I hope you can see just how absurd an idea this is. Moreover, there is no code for life on the gene set, so how come the proteins and other chemistry end up being alive?

To summarise: There is no proved connection between any chemical product in your body and your wish to exert your free will. There is no proved connection between any code on your gene set and your thoughts and emotions. Moreover there is no proof that any physics cause whatever has a bearing on your will, emotions, desires, thoughts and ideas. The real causes are an interplay between empirical facts and your perception, which is essentially a process of internal evaluation of their meaning to you and may engender those subjective responses – from feelings to intellectual cogitation.

The physics/ chemistry supposition in contrast suffers from the starkly obvious facts that all chemical elements are utterly lifeless. Accordingly adding up two or two billion compounds does not change the picture. They may add up to a pebble, but not to a thought! So you are faced ineluctably with the problem of finding something other than a physics item that must be added to the chemistry to make it behave in a different way from the known behaviour of the same chemical products. This ‘something to be added’ is not known. It defines the moment of truth. Wittgenstein wrote that ‘what we don’t know we should not talk about’, but we babble about it endlessly. So now you understand why I stress the immense gulf between a research agenda and proof, and how easily we confuse the two.

My last comment concerns the psychological aspect of this issue. We have been brainwashed for thousands of years to the belief that divine authorities have complete knowledge and complete control over our subjective as well as objective lives. This is difficult to dispel in just a few generations. And thus, in our godless era, we have enthroned science instead. At least science has made an effort to awaken us to the need for proving such outrageous impositions; but the temptation for broadcasting ideas that cannot be proved, and for dogmatising about issues which ordinary people do not understand, remains a strong as ever. You may wish to take this with a grain of salt, but it has a lot of historical weight behind it.

If you feel up to it, I suggest you read my book

http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Life-and-Mind–A-Philosophical-Quest1-4438-4071-8.htm,

which is devoted wholly to these kinds of problems. There is also an essay of mine about genes in the Pathways E-Journal

http://www.philosophypathways.com/newsletter/issue180.html

which you might find relevant to your worries.

My last word is: Free will is the defining criterion of the living state. Even a worm knows the difference between life and non-life and will enact appropriate choices guided by the random circumstances of its little life! Yet we humans pretend we have no choices? Well, ask for proof in future. Not for propositions, conjectures, hypotheses, syllogisms and circumstantial suggestions, but – for proof!

Jürgen Lawrenz at PhiloSophos.org

Answer by Craig Skinner

Your English is fine.

What are you to do?

Here’s what. Accept that there are no good arguments for libertarian free will, accept compatibilist free will, and be satisfied with it.

Arguments for libertarian free will.

1. Kant’s ‘two worlds’ account – in the phenomenal world we are creatures bound by the causal laws of nature, and as such can have no free will: but we are also agents who transcend the phenomenal world and act in the noumenal world, not bound by natural law, and can choose, by an act of will, to do (or not do) one of a range of things irrespective of the deterministic goings on in our brains at the time. Few accept this two worlds metaphysics, and a ‘two perspectives’ approach to one world doesn’t work.

2. Modern libertarians appeal to fancy physics in the brain to somehow get round determinism without lapsing into randomness – quantum or chaotic microevents. But however fancy, it boils down to determinism or randomness or both.

Compatibilist free will.

All the free will you need. You do as you wish. Your wishes are determined by your character, needs, ambitions and plans, all internal to you, so the decisions are yours, and no doubt there are deterministic brain states and events corresponding to these reasons. I agree with Hume that far from being blocked by determinism, free will requires (internal) determinism, otherwise we have only chance and caprice. You express concern that we may be ‘helpless, bound into a strict causal chain’. Try ‘helpfully bound into a strict causal chain’. How otherwise could we make anything happen at all in a physical world.

Being satisfied with it.

What are you missing out on that libertarian free will allegedly provides. Alternative options (AO). It is true that at the moment of my free choice, there is only one option, the one I wish and choose, there are no AO, I could not have done otherwise. But the deterministic internal process includes consideration of AO until all are rejected in favour of the one I want and choose. Why would anybody wish to do other than what she wants and chooses to do? It seems that libertarians would like, at the instant of decision, for a given state of the physical world, including my brain, that there be AO in the way things unfold. Back to Kant again. To me it is incoherent. Don’t worry that Humean free will gives you problems with moral responsibility. It doesn’t. The decisions are yours and you are responsible. As a compatibilist for years I have carried on making decisions as usual, some good, some bad, some making me ashamed and intent on doing better next time, which feeds back into the processes determining my future decisions so that (sometimes) I indeed do better, whilst continuing, of course, to freely make some new bad choices.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.org

Answer by Peter Jones

I think you sum up the problem well. The difficulty of making sense of either Freewill or Determinism, as extreme metaphysical positions, are well known, and they lead most philosophers, theologians and even many scientists to some form of compatibilism. You may find this position unsatisfying, but it does at least satisfy logic.

Freewill Determinism is what Kant calls an antinomy. It is a pair of counterposed metaphysical theses where both can be refuted. Antinomies are undecidable. This would be the reason why you cannot find a good, rational and conclusive argument for Freewill. You will not find one for Determinism either. If you ever found one there would egg on the faces of a million philosophers.

You might like to examine the view of Erwin Schrodinger. He investigated this problem and concluded that the only sensible thing to believe is a form of compatibilism. This would be the sublation or reduction of the two categories Freewill and Determinism for a more profound view than either. Specifically, he endorsed the nondualism of the Hindu Upanishads, for which all categories of thought can be sublated for a fundamental view. Freewill and Determinism would become two ways of looking at a single phenomenon, each of which would be unsatisfactory and which would need to be combined (thus rejected) for a correct view.

This compatibilist view is difficult, but it works and cannot be refuted. It depends crucially on the idea that the universe is a unity. Here is an extract summarising Schrodinger’s view from the editors introduction to the book The Volitional Brain Towards a Neuroscience of Freewill (Ed. Libet, Freeman, Sutherland).

Schrodinger encapsulated the problem of consciousness in the form of two premises:

* My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the laws of nature.

* Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

To avoid a contradiction here, he said, the only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt I am the person, if any, who controls the motion of the atoms according to the laws of nature. [t]his would lead you to say, Schrodinger provocatively suggested, Hence I am God almighty.

It is not possible to develop this idea here but in mysticism it would be the standard solution for this sort of problem. The problem is solved by appealing to the identity of all things. To see how it works you have to ask yourself, if you were God, omniscient, perfect, unlimited, then in what sense would you have freewill? Your actions would be completely determined by your identity, and they would be strictly determined precisely because they are wholly free and unlimited. The distinction between Freewill and Determinism would break down at the limit.

This form of compatibilism is the one we would have to refute in order to make a conclusive argument for Freewill or Determinism. It cannot be refuted, and so no such argument is possible. It is an antinomy. Note that Schrodinger sees no conflict between this compatibilist view and the natural sciences. Rather, it is his unwillingness to deny the scientific evidence that leads him to this view.

Peter Jones at PhiloSophos.org

Mckenzie asked:

Does Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue as a mean relative to us imply that he really is an ethical relativist? Why? or, Why not?

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

No, Aristotle is not a relativist. You must not confuse relativity with relativism.

In simple terms, Aristotle says that virtues, for example moderation in eating, are relative to a person. This means that “moderation” has a different context for different persons. For example an athlete such as a wrestler must eat more food than you or I. There is no offence to moderation involved.

The point is that this virtue, although it may change from one person to another, is part of his doctrine of the mean because the mean is at the bottom of good and ethical living.

With all the virtues on his balance of the mean, the same arguments apply. Bear in mind he is looking for what benefits people and society.

Immoderation is therefore a vice in the context of individuals who over-indulge. This is bad for them, but also for others because sickness may result and the person becomes a burden on everyone else.

Aristotle’s doctrine is essentially aimed at cultivating good social habits. The relativity here is based on nothing other than the different abilities of people to practise ethical living. It may depend on their skills, income levels etc.

But it is not the same as relativism. It simply says that good ethical practice has different levels of achievement depending on who is doing it.

Whereas relativism is something very different. It relates to the customs and traditions of different cultures. Let me give you an example:

In one community the religious dogma in force may result in the community practising ritual murder. For instance some tribes in India used to burn the widow of dead man alive. That was their custom. As far as the tribe is concerned, it is the right thing to so. It is, in a word, a cultural value for them.

In our modern enlightened society, we view this practice with horror. The cultural values in our community exclude ritual murder.

And now the upshot of this is that our community leaders would criticise the other community for their barbaric practices. They would say this is not a cultural value, but an unmitigated evil.

Relativism comes in at this point, when for example anthropologists try to remain neutral and not criticise the ritual murder. They might say: All moral values depend on humans; and therefore no single group has a genuine right to call another barbaric or evil. In the long run, all cultural values have the same source and are therefore equal

So relativism is actually an extremely dubious intellectual position, because in effect it removes the concept of value from social living.

However, Aristotle wrote his Ethics with the wishes and fears of every human being in mind, no matter what their tribe or community. No person wants to be tortured, raped, murdered, enslaved etc. So here is a foundation for social virtues that Aristotle rightly thought would be universally acceptable.

So you see that the aim of Aristotle was not to allow inhumane behaviour (relativism), but to promote humane behaviour at the highest level that a society may reach. In the course of his thinking about ethics he understood that some principles apply to all human beings alike.

His concept of virtue is for a common good in every community. The highest human good is happiness. The goal of the Ethics is to determine how best to achieve happiness. A central part of this doctrine is the doctrine of the mean.

I believe that Aristotle developed something really fundamental for the benefit of mankind in society. His ethics are primarily designed to make people conscious of themselves in what they strive for–why they have certain goals and aspirations in life; and just as importantly, what kind of good and evil must be known to achieve these goals.

So in conclusion, Aristotle is nowhere near relativism in his doctrine. In fact I think he would call relativism itself an intellectual evil that stands in the way of making humans more humane.

Caterina Pangallo completed her BA Honours degree in Philosophy at Sydney University. Her main interests are political thought, ethics, and social relations, as well as the historical development of these ideas.

Velvel asked:

How intelligent do you need to be to study philosophy?

Answer by Peter Jones

This is a great question. Not particularly would be my answer.

It may seem obvious that the more intelligent we are the quicker we will make progress and the further we will go. But it is possible to be too clever for our own good, and then to go very quickly a long way in completely the wrong direction.

The problem is that the more clever we are the better we will be at defending our prejudices with sophistry. We see the evidence for this all the time in the literature. Better to be a bit simple-minded but dispassionate and honest. Then we forced to simplify the issues to the point we can understand them, and cannot distort them to our own ends by fancy footwork.

In the end the answer would probably depend on what sort of philosophy we want to do, and what exactly we mean by ‘intelligence’. I would say that we don’t need to be above averagely intelligent to succeed at philosophy, just as long as we are sufficiently intelligent to be able to see the essential simplicity of the issues. Being highly intelligent may lead us to make the issues more and more complicated and put any understanding forever out of reach.

The advantage of not being particularly intelligent is that we are more likely to go slowly and cautiously, and thus to naturally follow Descartes’ rule for philosophical progress, which seems to me very good advice.

‘We ought to give the whole of our attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts, and remain a long time in contemplation of them until we are accustomed to behold the truth clearly and distinctly.’
Rene Descartes – Rules for the Direction of Mind Rule IX

Very intelligent people tend to ignore this advice, and the result is that philosophy is made to seem like we would have to be equally intelligent to understand it. It’s like asking how intelligent we would have to be to understand a steam-train. It would all depend on what sort of understanding we want, and whether we would prefer an explanation from the driver or a theoretical physicist. How intelligent we would have to be to understand the explanation would depend on who we ask.

Peter Jones at PhiloSophos.org

Lisa asked:

What was Kant’s position regarding free will. Was he a libertarian or a soft determinist?

Answer by Craig Skinner

He was a libertarian, although neither term was used in the context of discussion on free will in Kant’s day.

Hume had argued that free will and determinism are compatible, indeed that without (internal) determinism there could be no free will, only chance and caprice: my actions are internally caused (determined) so that I can do what I want to do, but what I want is determined by my character, ambitions, plans etc., and no doubt there are deterministic goings-on in my brain corresponding to these. Of course at the moment of my free choice, there is only one option, the one I wish and choose, there are no alternative options, I could not have done otherwise. This view was later dubbed ‘soft determinism’ by William James (as opposed to honest hard determinism which says we don’t have free will at all).

Kant felt that this Humean ‘free will’ without alternative options was a ‘wretched subterfuge’. He felt that, to be morally responsible, we need (and have) a more radical free will whereby at the moment of choice we can choose, by an act of will, to do (or not to do) any one of a range of things, irrespective of the deterministic goings-on in our brains at the time.

Kant, like Hume, was an admirer of Newton and the new mechanical philosophy of nature, and regarded the natural world or world of appearances (the phenomenal’ world) as deterministic. So how did he square this with his libertarian view?

Modern libertarians postulate fancy brain activity involving quantum or chaotic microevents which somehow (they say) get round determinism without amounting to randomness. I am completely unconvinced. It seems to me that however subtle the brain activity, the outcome ultimately is either deterministic or random (neither of which supports a libertarian version of free will), or both.

Kant took a different tack. He agreed that we (including our brains) are creatures in a phenomenal world knowable to us through our senses, and bound by deterministic natural law, and as such we can have no free will. Since free will ddoesn’texist in the natural world, we can’t know of it by observation. But we are also agents who transcend the phenomenal world, and act in the ‘noumenal’ world or world-in-itself, knowable a priori by the intellect. As such, we are not bound by natural law, and can act freely according to our will, so that we can have full-blooded free will with alternative options.

Few people go for Kant’s two-world metaphysics, and I ddon’tthink a ‘two-viewpoints’ or ‘two-perspectives’ approach to one world does the trick.

My view is that we are stuck with Humean free will. And that’s good enough for me. I want my choices and actions to be determined by ME, whether we think of this in terms of events in my brain or of my motives, reasons and intentions.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.org

Smith asked:

Is the question whether or not a particular true belief counts as ‘knowledge’ merely vague or a matter of degree? If you think it is, what problem does that solve?

Answer by Peter Jones

Hello Smith,

I find your question difficult to disentangle but here’s a few thoughts.

Philosophy does not explain how we know things. Russell considered the question of how we know things to be the most difficult in philosophy but I feel this was mistake. Philosophy (as he did it) cannot answer this question. It has to be answered by self-examination.

What you do know is that nobody else can know if you know something. So you are the only person who can decide what you know. All this stuff about justified true beliefs is a red herring in my opinion. If we do not know that a belief is true then we do know that it is not knowledge.

In response to your first question I would answer that ‘matter of degree’ and ‘vague’ are not different things. We either know something or we don’t. For the second I would say that an approach to knowledge via the idea of ‘true belief’ solves no problems.

I do not believe it is possible to understand ‘knowing’ by analysis. Rather, I would agree with this ancient sage.

‘All men desire to know, but they do not enquire into that whereby one knows.’ Kuan Tzu (4th-3rd century B.C.)

Peter Jones at PhiloSophos.org

Gershon asked:

Herman Hesse in ‘The Glass Bead Game’ describes a game which is played only by individuals of the very highest intellectual attainment. There is no point or purpose to the game other than the game itself and its aesthetic beauty.

What is the difference between philosophy and the Glass Bead Game? Is there any difference, ultimately?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Except that you used Hesse’s novel as a foil, I would have ignored your question. If you re-cast it by saying that ‘higher mathematics is a game only played by individuals with the highest intellectual attainment …’ etc., you would see at once that comparing it with philosophy will make anyone who reads your question wonder what you think philosophy is!

However, the background to Hesse’s novel touches on a particular issue of philosophical thought that goes back to Bacon and Leibniz and their endeavours towards an efficient compartmentalisation of knowledge. Bacon promulgated the idea in his Great Instauration that knowledge must be organised according to a hierarchy of related subject matters. E.g. biology as the science of life might first be subdivided into organic and inorganic, then each of these into further branches and so on through as many specialisations as may be necessary. The end result is an enormous tree with many branches that is basically the sum of our knowledge in that branch of science. Once such a hierarchy exists, it can always be added to, even new branches formed.

Leibniz took this one step further by showing that all studies would benefit from such compartmentalisation. In his Ars combinatoria he argued that the ultimate goal would be to collapse the tree into a single symbol which represents all the knowledge incorporated in any one of these trees. The convenience of this, he felt, was that no-one would have to analyse assured knowledge again, but just use the symbols in various combinations for the purpose of discovery and innovation. According to him, it would give us the certainty that all knowledge can be reduced to calculation. He once said, there is no need to argue about science, art, religion, sociology etc. Let us take our symbols, sit down and then, ‘gentlemen, let us calculate!’

The last step was taken by the French philosophers around Diderot, who implemented this programme in their Encyclopaedia. Since then we have become so used to it, we can’t imagine any more how hard it was in those days to get hold of exact knowledge.

Leibniz undoubtedly got the idea of symbols integrating complexes of knowledge from the way we write down simple equations which include implicitly many complicated prior steps that no longer have to be worked out, because the formula already presupposes their results.

No you can see that Hesse used precisely the idea of Leibniz’s symbols in his novel. It doesn’t matter how we depict the symbols. Formulaic symbols, playing cards, glass pebbles – whichever takes your fancy! As a mathematician, Leibniz was aware that mathematicians derive great aesthetic pleasure from the effort of reducing many arduous steps of calculation into one elegant formula. The change made by Hesse is, of course, that his game is played with glass beads which represent the values of these symbols to the civilisation; and the point of the game is that shuffling them around in a competitive manner as in a game of chess, can yield surprising juxtapositions. But you should nonetheless take note that as a game it does not purport to enrich those symbols (aka values), but only to play with them.

A game, therefore, pure and simple. Hardly a philosophy! Moreover ultimately a bit on the silly side. I would question whether Hesse’s glass bead game has any aesthetic component at all. Creativity is not re-arranging values; and aesthetics is not an intellectual pastime, but an experience that should uproot you from precisely the lazy ‘taking for granted’ of cultural values that is implied in Hesse’s game.

When you walk into a museum full of paintings, sculptures, ancient artefacts from death masks to weapons, musical instruments and laundry bills, you are in the presence of an exhibition planned with the same care and ingenuity as Josef Knecht’s fancy games – a game of relations, analogues and indeed values in juxtaposition. But you would not walk around the gallery and claim for the organiser that this is philosophy, would you now? Nor would you take home with you an aesthetic experience of the gallery. Values as such have no aesthetic component! Only works themselves, as individuals, can do that for you!

Jürgen Lawrenz at PhiloSophos.org