This diavlog was great! One of the best ever for provoking new things to think about. Some semi-live blogged notes: First small thought that will make me muse for hours: given the difference in length for the nerve impulse to travel, how does it work that you feel your nose and finger touching each other at the same time? Is it the case that the brain is slow compared to the speed of the impulse travel? Or does it always buffer its inputs momentarily, in the hopes of being able to integrate sensations to give a bigger picture? (~23:30) (~32:00) The discussion about people retaining perceptions of (imaginary but described) people and the matches obtained by doing teacher evaluations after 30 seconds and after a semester lends lots of support to the old saw about first impressions mattering. I wonder if it also says something about the large amount of disappointment one feels when one's first impression is later dashed. Provoked lots of interesting ideas about crime, trials, and assigning punishment. Kind of science fiction-y for now, but it's intriguing to think about filtering a jury pool based on bias

BN:

Carl used to strike me as rather nervous ...

Having just marveled about this very thing in my other comment, all I can say is ... So much for the persistence of first impressions! Actually, this might say more about your unusually open and flexible mind.

I might like to be free of the kind of manipulation involved in some advertising -- I might regard such manipulation as diminishing my freedom without thinking that it would diminish my freedom sufficiently to excuse my committing a crime, for instance.

I dunno. I am inclined to think that much of what I see on TV, and not just the ads, offers plenty of justification for violent behavior. Mostly I'm kidding, but there is a real kernel here. Suppose you move from the ads we usually think about (for consumer goods) to ads advocating or attacking policies or politicians in a particularly vigorous way? Recall that the people working at some radio stations in Rwanda were convicted of crimes for inciting their listeners to violence; i.e., here was a case of the broadcaster, not the listener, being held accountable. Yes, I'm aware there was a lot else at play here, so I don't want

great talk, guys. thanks for all the info. fair amount of "meat" here so it makes it more interesting.
i think what Mike means regarding free will is that the question about a person being responsible for their actions is irrelevant because the system if information (their culture) that their brain is contained in is what is effecting the outcome of their actions. the brain is just a big calculator. a "criminal" brain would be like a part of a car that needs to be replaced (given medication) or just have the car taken off the road (jail) because it was built improperly (born retarded/psychotic).
i don't care if you don't have free will - i still want your brain system to stay away from mine....permanently.

Quoting fedorovingtonboop: i think what Mike means regarding free will is that the question about a person being responsible for their actions is irrelevant because the system if information (their culture) that their brain is contained in is what is effecting the outcome of their actions. the brain is just a big calculator. a "criminal" brain would be like a part of a car that needs to be replaced (given medication) or just have the car taken off the road (jail) because it was built improperly (born retarded/psychotic).
i don't care if you don't have free will - i still want your brain system to stay away from mine....permanently.

But our ordinary standards (as well as our more developed legal standards) make a distinction between those we wat to segregate from society and those we think deserve punishment. When someone escapes punishment by pleading insanity, he doesn't just get released into society.

i'm not really sure what your point is

Quoting bjkeefe: BN:

I dunno. I am inclined to think that much of what I see on TV, and not just the ads, offers plenty of justification for violent behavior.

Mostly I'm kidding, but there is a real kernel here. Suppose you move from the ads we usually think about (for consumer goods) to ads advocating or attacking policies or politicians in a particularly vigorous way? Recall that the people working at some radio stations in Rwanda were convicted of crimes for inciting their listeners to violence; i.e., here was a case of the broadcaster, not the listener, being held accountable. Yes, I'm aware there was a lot else at play here, so I don't want to debate the specific example too much. I'm just offering it to show how what you're exposed to by the media could, in principle, be viewed as the thing to blame, compared to your own reactions.

I certainly didn't have any intention to claim that the media could not bring about violence, nor that they would not ever bear responsiblity for inciting violence.
My claim had to do with non-rational manipulation and loss of responsibility. If some commercial, no matter how manipulative, tried to get people one-by-one

You try to explain our criminal procedures just by appeal to the desire to keep criminals away from those they might hurt -- free will doesn't matter at all to that.
My point is that this is an insufficient explanation of our actual procedures because these procedures clearly distinguish between protecting society from non-responsible but dangerous people and punishing responsible people (even if they don't continue to be dangerous).

Way fine DV. To me, this sort of plumbing of important topics related to thought, the mind, and the societal effects of variations in cognitive and decision-making behavior is the very best expression of the potential of BHTV. Very chilling the little comment about the power of "first impressions" in so deeply programming the attitudes of the electorate that they then become more or less immune from inputs of very important later information. Explains I think much about why, after such a long tenure of kid-gloves treatment by the awe-struck media, Monsieur Obama still enjoys a level of popularity essentially unrelated to his skill set. Equally relevant to Ms. Clinton who, having somehow been painted black through efforts of Gingrich et al, seems quite unable to shake the effects of early smears on her reputation. Thanks to MG for agreeing to participate and to CG for bringing him on. EW

Yeah, I agree. Generally speaking, I'm all about the definition of maturity being the state of accepting responsibility for one's own decisions (and actions), and yes, we do have to accept some restrictions on what we might like to do individually in order to make society work.

i'm not discussing laws at all - i'm saying we don't have free will regardless - so the technicalities don't matter as much and are not necessary for the discussion. what mike meant is that a humans' actions are based on their surroundings and their past experience just like a dog or a hawk. a human that makes a choice deemed incorrect by their society either has faulty wiring or didn't learn well enough. he means that whether they're "responsible" or "not responsible" - they don't have free will either way. whether we've categorized them correctly is a different argument.
there's no way the "some of us" can lack free will. we've known for 40 years that you can tell someone what they're about to do before THEY know what they're going to do. all the evidence suggests the no one has free will and that we're guided by largely unconscious processes. it seems you may be one of the people who Mike was referring to when he said "A lot of people don't like that."when pointing out this evidence. i didn't really even mention our judicial system and

Good post Bloggin, It seems to me too that though there may be some conceptual overlap in how we think of criminal responsibility on the one hand, and free will on the other, they are distinct issues. I mean, most of us don't hold lions, tigers, and bears morally accountable for their actions, but that doesn't stop us from cordoning them off from civilized society. We can similarly imagine that someone could be so insane that they wouldn't be accountable for their murders in any existential or metaphysical sense, but the sensible thing to do would nevertheless be to keep them in jail. So we can hold people criminally responsible while at the same time leaving to the side the issue of moral responsibility. Having said that, I find it interesting that you're a compatibilist. Most of the conversations I've had with people on this subject boil down to how the respective sides define their terms. So...it seems to me that people can be thinking of free will in a couple of different ways: A) The machinations going on inside the organism are all consciousness is, and could be explained

This was a fantastic wide-ranging discussion. One approach to jury bias would be to abolish juries. Most democracies do not have jury trials, and part of their theory is that trained jurists are better qualified than the public to judge. I know that to American ears this is anti-democratic blasphemy, but much of the rest of the world finds jury trial bizarre (although having watched so many American and British movies they may now see the point). Under a reformed system, however, judges could spend a couple of years in college learning about, addiction, early childhood development, adolescence, decision-making under stress, poverty as an influence on future behavior, etc. Judges would make better decisions on guilt and innocence, and the appellate process would continue to sort these issues out (thus reducing the power of any one judge). The jury system has the supposed virtue of the wisdom of the crowd of 12, the unanimity requirement for conviction, the deliberative discourse virtue, and the collective folk wisdom of a group of ordinary people. Jurors are also educated with brief lectures from a judge. And the current process of jury selection eliminates some juror bias. BUT, as

I found this to be an especially interesting aspect of the discussion. It seems to boil down to the importance of how to avoid suppressing empathy when self-interest and rationalization affect moral decision-making. I saw "American Gangster" last night. The Denzel Washington character knows right from wrong and believes in the general moral system (with some rationalizing), but he seems incapable of empathizing with the victims of the heroin epidemic that he helps create. He is capable of manipulating the moral code through rationalization, and then some mechanism kicks in that suppresses empathy. Politicians often act similarly. When Bill Clinton rushed to Arkansas to supervise the execution of a retarded inmate, he probably knew how morally grotesque his opportunism was. But he was able to "turn off" any empathy he might ordinarily have for the family of the executed man. Like the "American Gangster," he rationalized the moral code (knowledge) and empathy suppression followed. When George Bush engages in preemptive war with "collateral damage," a similar process of rationalization and suppressed empathy is in play. Both moral code and empathy are somehow suspended, although preserved for future activation. The day after bombing

You think apparently that we are wrong to distinguish in the law (and in ordinary life) between someone who responsibly does wrong and someone who is not responsible for the wrong they do. This would be a major revision of our ordinary views. Perhaps you are right, but if you base that on neuroscience, it sounds to me as though you've got an important neuroscientist against your view -- Gazzaniga himself: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9165?in=00:27:20 One assumption you seem to make is that free will and moral responsibility are impossible if determinism is true. This ignores the compatibilist position that I hold (poor benighted non-neuroscientist that I am) AND that GAZZANIGA HIMSELF appears to hold. He's a bit unclear here in his explanation, but what does seem pretty clear is that he doesn't foresee his law and neuroscience project issuing in the result that we are not morally responsible. To me it sounds as though he thinks(roughly) that people who understand the rules, understand that they are breaking them and are capable of controlling their impulses so as to conform to the rules, should be regarded as responsible and should be punished when they

Quoting Eastwest;71052

[B: Very chilling the little comment about the power of "first impressions" in so deeply programming the attitudes of the electorate that they then become more or less immune from inputs of very important later information.[/b] Explains I think much about why, after such a long tenure of kid-gloves treatment by the awe-struck media, Monsieur Obama still enjoys a level of popularity essentially unrelated to his skill set. Equally relevant to Ms. Clinton who, having somehow been painted black through efforts of Gingrich et al, seems quite unable to shake the effects of early smears on her reputation.

EW

It couldn't just possibly be that Obama (a) just comes across as more authentic (whether because he is or because he's a brilliant actor or whatever -- see Charles Fried's remarks about Obama i the diavlog with Josh Cohen) and (b) He's run a much better campaign (have a look at all the ridiculous excuses Mark Penn is always offering the media and the fact that the Clinton campaign only found out about the combination primary-caucus in TX a week or two ago). Besides, Obama's short elective resume was apparent

I agree with B-noggin' about Obama v. Clinton, but I also agree with East-West that the first impression experiments mentioned by Prof. Gazzaniga are chilling. Certainly many people may weigh lots of factors in ultimately making a political decision about a candidate, but the degree to which first impressions matter (the first 30 seconds as Gazzaniga said) is still stunning. I like to think I came to a rational conclusion about Obama, but I'm a bit humbled by the study of the students evaluating their teachers. I'm sure all the students at the end of the course who correlated so highly with the first-30- seconds group believed they had made quite rational decisions which they could back up with convincing arguments.

Yea it seems like "fedorovingtonboop" didn't realize what Gazzaniga was getting at. But I would like to query you a little more about combatilbilism. If free will, as you say, is the ability to control your impulses, then surely no one has it, right? It would be as you say "responsibility is not absence of causal determination, but the presence of the right sort of causal mechanisms." That explanation seems to say that some people's physical constituents cause them to murder, and some people's physical constituents cause them to give to charity. In either case, neither is particularly able to control what makes them do what they do. I'm not sure why one is more "responsible" for their actions than the other. The person who appears to be "choosing" to control their impulses is in fact just acting under the influence of a different type of physical constituent than the murderer is responding to. I posted on this earlier, http://bloggingheads.tv/forum/showth...71055#poststop but this post may be closer to the mark I was trying to hit. I'd be content with a response to either one.

i'm not talking about the law and i never focused on it because it's not interesting or important and i have no idea why you keep redirecting the conversation to something i haven't said, don't care about and isn't relevant. all these vague terms like "causal determinism" are outdated and unnecessary. you are not even discussing the issue i brought up.
-->the issue i was trying to discuss, because mike brought it up, is that since the brain makes a decision about .250 milliseconds before we're aware of it, what's the point of "blame"? he then essentially says that that is irrelevant because this magic "free will" would be "free from what?" all we've learned is that your brain is making decisions before you're aware of them. this doesn't excuse your behavior because your brain is still making the decision. the concept of "free will" is pretty much irrelevant because what are you being freed from? all we mean is that your unconscious brain is making all the decisions and other parts of the brain sometimes have the ability to abort those initial urges. then he pokes

Hi, OK, I'm interrupting regularly scheduled programming here just for a bit because the thread I wanted to respond to is now lost in the mists of time. I want to respond to Brendan (Even though I haven't been here long I can call you that can't I?) --- First of all, Yes, I was extremely interested and curious about your response. Thank you so much for responding-----In my mind, your phrase "mindless religious nuts" just was not jibing with the general tenor and content of the rest of your comments on the thread. It was dissonant. IMHO, the phrase is dicey. It touches upon issues of justice. Is it really even possible for this phrase to express justice? Does it really describe REAL people or is it just basically a made up phrase that doesn't really describe anyone when you really, really, get right down to it? You did a great job of answering the question and clarifying your position. I really loved what you said earlier in that same thread about people expressing their own opinions and not just repeating "talking points", about the importance of doing one's own thinking, etc. I loved what you said about rationality. Also, I am really

Do you think you are free from bias? I dare you to take one or two of the association tests in the link below: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ Enjoy; and prepare to be surprised about yourself.

for Brendan, I mean the unicorn that is the white horse with a horn coming out of it's head in the comment: I don't believe in the same unicorn that your don't believe in.

I think a lot more needs to be said about the experiment before we can take it to show that the final evaluations were so irrational -- that the students were "in the thrall" of their first impressions. Those first 30 seconds might reveal a fair amount about the teacher's style. The interpretation that the students were irrational may be the professor's favored interpretation (didn't they see how very much I improved after that first half minute?). Another possibility is that you were looking at the floor and talking into your beard in the firstlecture and that you pretty much continued to do that all the way through, even though you may occasionally have produced some very brilliant mumblings.
Those first 30 seconds probably do get alittle too firmly fixed in our minds, but perhaps the reason they do is that they contain a great deal more information than we imagine is possible. I'd suggest rerunning the experiment with really good teachers half of whom bumble about for the 1st minute and then revert to their normal very good teaching style. I find it hard

Quoting Jay J: Yea it seems like "fedorovingtonboop" didn't realize what Gazzaniga was getting at.

But I would like to query you a little more about combatilbilism.

If free will, as you say, is the ability to control your impulses, then surely no one has it, right?

It would be as you say "responsibility is not absence of causal determination, but the presence of the right sort of causal mechanisms."

That explanation seems to say that some people's physical constituents cause them to murder, and some people's physical constituents cause them to give to charity. In either case, neither is particularly able to control what makes them do what they do.

I'm not sure why one is more "responsible" for their actions than the other. The person who appears to be "choosing" to control their impulses is in fact just acting under the influence of a different type of physical constituent than the murderer is responding to.

I posted on this earlier,

http://bloggingheads.tv/forum/showth...71055#poststop

but this post may be closer to the mark I was trying to hit.

I'd be content with a response to either one.

Hi Jay,
What I mean by "impulse control" is probably a far more empirical, less metaphysical

Quoting fedorovingtonboop: i'm not talking about the law and i never focused on it because it's not interesting or important and i have no idea why you keep redirecting the conversation to something i haven't said, don't care about and isn't relevant. all these vague terms like "causal determinism" are outdated and unnecessary. you are not even discussing the issue i brought up.
-->the issue i was trying to discuss, because mike brought it up, is that since the brain makes a decision about .250 milliseconds before we're aware of it, what's the point of "blame"? he then essentially says that that is irrelevant because this magic "free will" would be "free from what?" all we've learned is that your brain is making decisions before you're aware of them. this doesn't excuse your behavior because your brain is still making the decision. the concept of "free will" is pretty much irrelevant because what are you being freed from? all we mean is that your unconscious brain is making all the decisions and other parts of the brain sometimes have the ability to abort those initial urges. then he pokes

YHMAH: Thanks for your kind words. I moved my reply down here, rather than attaching it to your post, out of the interest of de-cluttering the threaded view. I do hope some others chime in, and hopefully, they'll do it down here.

I want to respond to Brendan (Even though I haven't been here long I can call you that can't I?)

Of course. That's my name, and in fact, the way I prefer to be addressed. I use "bjkeefe" as a handle on the web for the purpose of disambiguation; e.g., most of these results aren't me. (A TV "reporter?" Shudder.)

Thank you so much for responding-----In my mind, your phrase "mindless religious nuts" just was not jibing with the general tenor and content of the rest of your comments on the thread. It was dissonant. IMHO, the phrase is dicey. It touches upon issues of justice. Is it really even possible for this phrase to express justice? Does it really describe REAL people or is it just basically a made up phrase that doesn't really describe anyone when you really, really, get right down to it?

As for my attitude about religious extremists being "dissonant," I don't know what to say. Maybe I'm a mass of contradictions. Maybe it's just a case

i can see i'm getting absolutely nowhere. this isn't some big mystery, i'm just spouting exactly what the leading researchers are saying. all this talk about compatabilism and such is one step removed from reality. try these books: http://www.amazon.com/Quest-Consciou...4483725&sr=8-2 http://www.amazon.com/Synaptic-Self-...4482954&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Mind-R...483026&sr=8-10 http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Mo...4483100&sr=1-2 ah, I just looked on wikipedia and i now realize why i have no idea what you're talking about. it's because you're a "philosopher"! i hate to continue being a jerk but i can't help it. ......philosophy has become obsolete due to the last twenty years of neuroscience, cosmology and quantum physics. everyone has moved on to strings and branes and neurons. the pic of thomas hobbs next to your title on wiki could be considered a clue. i know i'm not a nice guy at all but i have to inform you that calling yourself a "compatabilist" is not only pretentious (especially since i feel your off base) but it makes you seem behind the times. nobody uses these terms anymore! i think you should switch to hawking instead of hobbs.

Jim: I took a similar test about presidential candidates, and it was almost embarrassing how much I preferred Obama. Visualize a ruler: Obama was at 11 7/8"; the next two were at the midpoint, and Huckabee was at about 3". One interesting wrinkle: according to the test results, I slightly preferred McCain to Clinton. So much for such tests, I say. Easily explained by how focused I am on the primaries. But come November, if I had to, I know which lever I would pull. While sobbing, admittedly.

Quoting fedorovingtonboop: i can see i'm getting absolutely nowhere.
ah, I just looked on wikipedia and i now realize why i have no idea what you're talking about. it's because you're a "philosopher"!
i hate to continue being a jerk but i can't help it.

Well, self-knowledge is a good thing, even if, by your own theory, you can't control your impulses. I wonder what improvements might come about if you believed you had the freedom to control them...

......philosophy has become obsolete due to the last twenty years of neuroscience, cosmology and quantum physics.

Well, so you assert, and of course, I'm convinced, since I believe every anonymous poster who adopts the supremely arrogant tone of a college freshman. I'll simply note that one of your sources -- Steven Pinker -- clearly takes philosophers more seriously than you do (the section in _Stuff of Thought_ about Lakoff draws heavily on work by Richard Boyd, whom Pinker cites -- there's an assignment for you!)

the pic of thomas hobbs next to your title on wiki could be considered a clue.

I have no idea what page on wikipedia you are talking about -- whatever it is, it wasn't composed by me.

i know i'm

Quoting fedorovingtonboop: ......philosophy has become obsolete due to the last twenty years of neuroscience, cosmology and quantum physics. everyone has moved on to strings and branes and neurons.

Speaking as one who can become impatient with philosophers at times, and as one who prefers hard science whenever possible, I still have to say I couldn't disagree more. There will always be the set of questions can be addressed with science, and a set of questions that cannot yet be. Philosophers help us to think more clearly and critically about such questions. Often, today's philosophical questions are the seed for tomorrow's scientific investigations. And let's not forget the etymology. Philosophy means, literally, "the love of knowledge." While one does encounter the occasional philosopher who seems to think straining at a gnat is way too broad a question, there are plenty more who add considerable worth to human thought and discourse. Just to take two examples, I don't know how we'd begin to talk sensibly about love and ethics without philosophers.

"I don't know how we'd begin to talk sensibly about love and ethics without philosophers." ....uh, we'd probably use a marriage counselor, advice columnist, political scientist, or really a neuroscientist because there's not really anything more to "love" than chemicals. You see? Not necessary. They used to help but now-a-days there's no way you're going to find out about anything useful without theoretical physicists and cosmologists, etc.....you know, people who are actually smart. actually, hawking said philosophy was outdated himself, i believe in one of his books. There's a reason why you don't see any "philosophy" books making any waves like Pinker, Greene, Susskind. They'd get paid if they were worth anything.

jeez! I'm being ganged up on by bloggingheads trolls!
i said some people have "free won't" so you're getting it wrong again and also, i only become arrogant when trying to overcome another's arrogance (of inferring that they have earned the title "philosopher" and that if they had earned it- thinking that it would be a virtue) this argument isn't even addressing the issue i was initially talking about but i will say that the reason why i could tell you were a "philosopher" is because you're obviously not familiar with the most current research. there's nothing that says "college freshman" more than seriously calling oneself a "compatabilist (philosopher)" -anonymous

fed: You're entitled to your measures of worth. I do not think the only way to measure the worth of philosophy is by book sales and salaries paid, even if I agreed that no one makes any money doing philosophy, which I don't. I also do not happen to agree that neurology has yet had much useful to say about many aspects of the human condition. I would also say, especially in the particular case of love, that marriage counselors and advice columnists are, in my sense of the word, philosophers. The good ones, anyway. Finally, I'm not sure why you feel like you're being ganged up on by "trolls." If you make a statement in a public forum, you should expect dispute. That's sort of the point of having a forum -- to debate. It'd be kind of boring if we all agreed with one another, don't you think? If you can't take disagreement, I wonder why you bother to share your thoughts in the first place.

those were meant as digs...because both of you have, like, nine hundred posts and post first on every vlog.....perhaps you need a posting break?
why would i say that money is the only measure of success?.....again, it's called a "dig" i assume that by "neurology" you mean neuroscience and in that case....what planet are you living on?! have you read the material??? no free will, our unconscious brain controls everything, no specific module for language, no such thing as color? seriously?......not much to say? i'd say click on the links i left for the other guy because you're missing out on some vital info.

fed:

those were meant as digs...

If you really were just kidding around, okay.

i assume that by "neurology" you mean neuroscience and in that case....what planet are you living on?! have you read the material??? no free will, our unconscious brain controls everything, no specific module for language, no such thing as color?

I beg your pardon for my error in terminology. As for my awareness of the state of the art in neuroscience, I'll grant that I am not completely conversant. However, I do have some familiarity with the field, and it is my impression that it is about where biology was a couple of centuries ago; e.g., it is gathering observations, connecting one small piece of the puzzle with another, and like that. This is not meant to disparage the work, merely to note that it is very new. I am aware that one can show there are some unconscious processes going on before conscious actions, for example, but I hardly think it's at all proven that free will does not exist. I grant the difficulty of defining precisely what is meant by "consciousness" and "free will," but if you'll permit some looseness, there is no sure way to say what I will

i honestly can't take this anymore. i hate to sound like a snob both of you need
to do some reading and that's why i posted links.
think of it this way instead:
you're still making the decision ...just slightly before you're aware of it....that's it. "free will" is a secondary, metaphysical argument that adds an extra something that cannot be explained by science no matter what. it's not even in the realm of science.

fed:

i honestly can't take this anymore.

Promises, promises.

Thanks Bloggin, I think we both realize that we aren't going to persuade one another to change views now, at least not on a forum like this, but I was wondering if I could run by you my understanding of what a compatibilist believe about consciousness. In order to be a compatibilist, one has to also be a materialist (philosophical naturalist, reductionist, etc) and believe that consciousness is in principle explainable in terms of the natural sciences. If we had access to all 3rd person information (objective facts), we would be able to explain, step by step, not only the functionality of the brain, but subjective experience itself (the hard problem). I know we probably don't have the time or inclination to get into it in much detail, but does the above seem right to you?

I will try not to respond to your tone or to your assumption of some vast authority on philosophy and neuroscience.
Let me just direct you, NOT to a long list of books of my own suggestion, but rather to one of the books you yourself cited. Not only that, I won't just tell you to "read this book" more carefully -- I'll give you 5 pages out of that book. You tell me to go off and read _The Blank Slate_ above. As it happens I own the book and have previously read the portion on Determinism and Responsibility. I've gotten it out again and found the relevant section for you.
I'll direct your attention to pages 175-180 of _The Blank Slate_ In this section, he cites with approval the philosopher Dan Dennett, who classifies himself as a "compatibilist" and his book _Elbow Room_. Pinker then proceeds to take a very standard compatibilist line and to make arguments familiar from philosophical discussions of moral responsibility: He argues that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism -- as Gazzaniga did in this diavlog (albeit not so clearly as Pinker). Now I have just raised a problem for you

Quoting Jay J: Thanks Bloggin,

I think we both realize that we aren't going to persuade one another to change views now, at least not on a forum like this, but I was wondering if I could run by you my understanding of what a compatibilist believe about consciousness.

In order to be a compatibilist, one has to also be a materialist (philosophical naturalist, reductionist, etc) and believe that consciousness is in principle explainable in terms of the natural sciences. If we had access to all 3rd person information (objective facts), we would be able to explain, step by step, not only the functionality of the brain, but subjective experience itself (the hard problem).

I know we probably don't have the time or inclination to get into it in much detail, but does the above seem right to you?

Hi Jay,
Perhaps you don't have the time or inclination for a discussion of free will. My behavior in this forum has shown that I have time even for a completely worthless exchange over free will -- I would infinitely prefer having a real discussion with you.
In answer to your question, I think basic compatibilism just asserts that people could be

Bloggin', Yea I would totally dig a discussion over free will. I suppose it just seemed like we were reaching a...dead end, in terms of how much more could be said, and I didn't want to whip a dead horse. I thought that asking about your understanding of compatibilism may reveal the source of the disagreement, or reveal my hunch that we were at a dead end. And lo and behold, it appears to have opened up more possibilities. It usually helps to organize my thoughts the way I will below, but of course this is mostly for my benefit, we don't have to stick to any particular format. 1) It may be useful for us to decide whether our views on morality are realist or nominalist (i.e. moral skepticism: emotivism, error theory, prescriptivism, etc). I believe I fall into the moral realist category, but I may not, my views lean realist but they're not fully mature. I've seen you say a couple of times Bloggin, that you have "faith" that your insights about the world (or perhaps even about "life") actually match up with what's "out there." That's a pretty minimalist use of the word "faith" compared to the way it is normally used, but

Hi Jay,
Wow! You open up not just one can of worms, but several all at once! Unless you'd rather talk about moral realism, I think I'll try to put that aside for another day. I think PF Strawson's seminal paper "Freedom and Resentment" is helpful here. He points out that there are a number of nonmoral (or premoral) "reactive attitudes", like resentment, that involve assessments of responsibility beyond purely causal responsibility. If someone is pushed out of a window and lands on you, you don't resent him when you recognize that it wasn't his doing, even though he's causally responsible for your injuries. The most basic point I want to make here is that assigning this kind of responsibility goes deeper than morality, and deciding about the exact nature of moral obligation and moral facts can therefore probably be set to one side when we take up the issue of what this responsibility is.
Strawson further points out that this notion of "responsibility" and the reactive attitudes that include it are part of what it means for us to look at someone as another person. When we start to give, not merely one-off

Bloggin', Now we're getting into the juicy stuff! I think I have some clarifying questions, points, before I move on. Then you will probably have one or two clarifications, and maybe we'll finish this conversation in the next 10 months. You know how philosophy can get. I had thought that I was addressing the Ginet argument, though it was probably in a round about way. I agree with the formulation as far as it relates to free will (but I think it seems to accept the folk notion of responsibility, which I don't think I do). I would add that what I was trying to get at is that the formulation doesn't explicitly (or maybe I need to read it too) address what's going on inside the organism. I understand that the person can be a causal factor, and that the person's "will" can be carried out through a decision, even in a deterministic world. But if physical determinism is true, then the happenings inside the brain actually cause us to believe we have a will. It matters allot to me which direction things are going. In other words, is there a will, which the machinations of the brain respond to? Or do the machinations of the brain

Hello Jay,
I wonder if free will really is the issue you are concerned about. My main reason for wondering this is that the Ginet argument (which makes no appeal to the nature of the determining causes) is surely pretty much parallel to any argument from physical determinism. In both cases, you start with facts seemingly beyond the agent's control and say that these facts determine the choice quite independently of the agent -- the agent himself becomes irrelevant to the outcome ("his" action). In one case, these facts may be psychological laws and facts which themselves could not have been chosen by the agent (facts about the distant past). In the other case, you start with psycho-physical or physical laws and physical facts which are also taken to be beyond the agent's control. Yet in the former case, you don't see a problem for free will (if I read you correctly), and in the latter case, you do. What accounts for the difference? As I see it, the problem of free will -- or the apparently metaphysically intractable part of the problem (versus the more practical problem of educating people so

Hi Bloggin, Let me sort of work backwards from what you said in your last post: First, I would agree with the Churchlands completely if I agreed with them on the state of the world. For now, suffice it to say that if they are right about the state of the world, then I agree with their conclusion that there are no such things as beliefs, and that there is no such thing as a will. The thing is, many people agree with the Churchlands on the way world works, but disagree with their eliminative-materialism when it comes to propositional attitudes. I admit that their conclusion seems pretty counterintuitive, but I'm comforted by the fact that I don't see the Churchlands as denying "what-it's-likeness" as much as they are saying that what we see as our will or our "belief" is not what it appears to be. So in conversations about compatibilism v. incompatibilism, we're assuming the world is determined, which I'm sure I don't have to tell you. Now I want to get into what I mean by terms like "material determinism" or "physical determinism" or what have you. The reason I brought up Chalmers and Schopenhauer before is to

Bloggin, I'm going to be going out of town tomorrow afternoon and will probably be away from the computer over the weekend. Just wanted to let you know that I won't be able to keep up with the pace we've set over the last day or two. I'll probably be back in full force Monday night or early next week. For now, in case I haven't sufficiently explained my view, I've included a link to a Galen Strawson (P.F.'s son) interview. My friend sometimes says that we should be nimble enough to use a "line item veto" on philosophers, and I completely agree, since much of what they say ends up being jumbled into one view, when accepting parts of it may not compel you to accept all of it. I think my friend's advice is particularly applicable in the case of Galen Strawson, and his relation to my argument. The kind of a state of the world he talks about I find compelling even though I don't see the need to discount free will just because reality may not fit with some popular notion of it. Even if there are only

A materialist or physicalist determinism would say that not only our impulses, but also our thoughts, inclinations, emotions, etc are all the secondary result of more primary causes in the brain. True enough the environment would play a huge role there too, but all those environmental influences would have their own, reducible, micro influences as well. This is what I meant when I talked about how important it is which direction things are going.

Hi Jay, I think what you are describing is epiphenomenalism, not materialism. The epiphenomenalist about mind would say that mental phenomena are non-material, causally impotent phenomena which are themselves caused by material facts or events. If epiphenomenalism is true of mental phenomena, then, yes, there's no free will. But epiphenomenalism is deeply implausible and unsatisfactory. The epiphenomenalist has trouble understanding psycho-physical "interaction" from one direction, but acts as though he has no trouble understanding the interaction from the other direction. If it's hard to see how mental states could affect physical states, then why is it any easier to see how physical states could cause mental states? Either there's a problem for both directions or for neither direction: epiphenomenalism is just inconsistent. Non-eliminative materialists do not regard

Hi Bloggin, I'm on my way out of town and I see that you replied, and I've got time for one drive-by post before I leave. First of all, thank you for setting me straight on materialism. I had heard about mind-brain identity before, but I had not understood that all forms of non-eliminative materialism held this view and didn't see a causal process between the physical and mental. But you've got to forgive a guy for missing this. I mean, at least some forms of non-eliminative materialism believe in emergence right? That is to say, consciousness is not present in material per se, it...emerges (?) after certain configurations of matter are present. I suppose it is believed that although consciousness is not present in matter itself, but comes into existence when matter configures itself in a certain way, at the same time consciousness it not CAUSED by matter, but instead is identical to it. You got to admit, that's not, well...obviously intuitive. The eliminative-materialist story seems to make more sense to me because of what I've just said. But I'm not committed to the view. I think we both realize that we're mostly saying what follows from certain premises, rather than

Thanks for the Galen Strawson interview. I've read about his argument before, though I haven't read anything directly by him. I certainly agree with him that determinism is something of a red herring. The real problem behind the "problem of determinism" is this notion that free will involves being causa sui. I think Strawson is basically right that THIS is essentially what Libertarians (of the metaphysical, not the political variety) seem to want, and I think he's right that this radical version of free will is really incoherent. Here, for future reference, is Strawson's argument:

I suppose it’s possible that you might have acquired the first want, that’s the want for a want, because you wanted to! It’s theoretically possible that you had a want to have a want to have a want. But this is very hard to imagine, and the question just rearises: where did that want come from? You certainly can’t go on like this forever. At some point your wants must be just given. They will be products of your genetic inheritance and upbringing that you had no say in. In other words, there’s a fundamental sense in which you did not and cannot make yourself

First of all, thank you for setting me straight on materialism. I had heard about mind-brain identity before, but I had not understood that all forms of non-eliminative materialism held this view and didn't see a causal process between the physical and mental.

Just a quick note of correction for the moment. I didn't say that all materialists are identity theorists. Many are token-token identity theorists (or were last time I looked). Usually this is formulated in terms of the identity of physical events and mental events.
The type-type theorist says that all mental events of a certain sort (e.g., pain) are physical events of a single sort (in the hackneyed example, C-fibers firing).
The token-token theorist notes that many uncontroversially physical objects (like chairs) can't be defined in this way. There are metal chairs and wooden chairs and beanbag chairs, and they can all be quite different shapes and sizes. The token-token chair theorist would say that "chair" is not physically definable, but that each and every chair is identical with some physical object. The token-token theorist of mind says that each particular mental event is identical with some particular token physical

Hi Bloggin, I was looking forward to the trip, but I've got spring break coming up soon, and will be able to make it then, thankfully. I want to add a thing or two as well: 1. I am beginning to see that IF I could accept the form of materialism that you're...advocating (?) I would then be able to see compatibilism as coherent. 2. But the issues I talked about in my last post are sticking points. The types of non-eliminative materialism you laid out in your last post are interesting, and may be something we have to delve into...also I appreciate the care that is being taken to have everything on the table. For now though, I would like to try and have the categories be a little more broad, and hopefully that will work. In my last post, I think I touched on three types of materialism: a)Eliminative Materialism: at least as it concerns this discussion, this is eliminative towards propositional attitudes. b)Panpsychist Materialism: this view would hold that everything is physical, but that includes the mental. This would preclude, however, drawing a line in nature where consciousness "emerges," and would hold that SOME form of experience (however low-level) permeates nature. c)Reductive Materialism: at least at it concerns this

Great! Now we've got a couple of different lines of argument going at once! I agree that Galen Strawson denies a form of free will that many of us aren't striving for when we talk about free will. But he does use an approach I endorse, and that is that he concedes that perhaps our common practices don't match what is true about the world. If we say there is no such thing as responsibility, that doesn't mean that society will stop using the idea. When we're in our armchair, we're just trying to ascertain the way things are. I happen to think that society would be better off if it had started by setting up a system of rewards and punishments, and putting people away who demonstrated that they're a threat to the safety of those around them, rather than needing some sense of moral responsibility (however robust or nominal) to be possessed by the accused. However even if I could be convinced that I'm wrong about that, it wouldn't change my belief that philosophy is under no obligation to make sense of our common practices, as much

Jay,
I'm going to skip evaluating father relative to son, because it's a side point and because my view would be in partial agreement with you and partial disagreement. Let me just say that, though I have big disagreements with Peter Strawson about what philosophy is supposed to do (simply explore our conceptual scheme and stop there pretty much), I think "Freedom and Resentment" is a great and deservedly influential paper. For one thing, as I pointed out before, it shows that the notion of responsibility goes considerably deeper than "morality" -- and that thinking of agents as responsible is so deep a part of how we look at ourselves and each other that it's very hard to see how we could actually put Galen's view into practice in our lives. Galen seems to accept this point to some degree himself.
I think one can uncritically accept too much of common sense -- but one can also uncritically and arrogantly reject common sense out of hand. I would rather start with common sense but take a critical approach to it. Think of a science popularizer who tells you that common sense

Hi Jay,
I'm glad you can make your trip later anyway. I've long been fond of panpsychism. Haven't read GS's defence, but I was long ago attracted by Nagel's defense. Of course, pansychism kind of replaces one mystery with another, so I think it's probably too early to decide in its favor. The mystery for the panpsychist is how you can have just a tiny bit of (nearly unconscious) consciousness and how such atoms of consciousness can fit together to form a full-fledged consciousness. Panpsychists probably don't get out of questions about "emergence" in other words.

Quoting Jay J: c)Reductive Materialism: at least at it concerns this conversation, wouldn't the varying types of this view all hold that there is some time in the history of the universe where consciousness experience is not in existence, and then when arrangements of matter become sufficiently organized, conscious experience "emerges?"

OK so only 'a' and 'b' make sense to me. Or I should say rather, only 'a' and 'b' are coherent to me. Especially since I now have to face the fact that 'c' seems to posit something that is both "emergent" and "uncaused." That isn't easy for a person to get their head around is it?

Careful! I didn't say

Hey Bloggin, It feels kinda anti-climactic when conversations like this can boil down to something so simple, but I guess what I am objecting to is the use of he word "moral" in front of the word "responsibility." I don't deny the kind of responsibility Strawson talked about, and at least at times in this exchange I feel like I agree with the type of responsibility you're talking about. But as far as the law goes, at least in the academic discussions I've been involved with, it seems like DMR is important to people. Also our legal system treats people who are deemed mentally ill differently than those deemed mentally "competent." I know I'm not telling you anything new here, I'm simply drawing a conclusion based on that reality, and that's that it seems like there is more than a practical distinction is being made in the law between people who are able to understand what they're doing and those that lack some key capability. When someone is deemed mentally incompetent, and perhaps sent away to a mental facility, it then seems like our system has made a decision somewhere along the

Hi Jay, The meaning of the term "moral responsibility" should be understood primarily in contrast to causal responsibility. If someone throws me out the window and I land on your head and kill you, then I am causally responsible for your death. If I survive, no one would hold me "responsible" in another sense-- no one would think it made sense to punish me for that or even to resent me for that. Come to think of it, I suspect that "moral" here probably means "of, pertaining to, or acting on the mind, feelings, will, or character" (dictionary.com's seventh definition). In other words, when I'm thrown out the window, the explanation of my killing you dosn't go back to my will or character, but only back to my body. "Morality" isn't directly being invoked at all. Now I doubt you would actually deny that there is a distinction here, whatever you would like to call it --or would you? We could call it "personal responsibility" or whatever you like -- the essential thing is that it is not merely causal responsibility of any sort (i.e., it's a more specific sort of causal responsibility). I don't know what Maher has in mind. I suspect he's reacting to those people

Hi Bloggin, The fact that you see token-token identity (and those others you referred to) as having something going for it serves as evidence enough for me to look into it. Do you have a link that would help a layperson like me get started? Having said that, until I do look into it more, it looks to me that the versions of materialism you've told me about still have a problem, given what my concerns were before. If emergence is a problem for panpsychism, it's definitely one for reductive-materialism. And if each view fails, we may have to throw our hands up and be agnostics about the issue. But for the time being, it seems that this too is boiling down to the point in philosophy where one's gut tells them what to think, and this is a point where it's difficult to adjudicate between...instincts. See to me panpsychism, if it has one at all, has a much smaller emergence problem than materialism. Experience at a very low level has been referred to as "microexperientiality" and at a higher level, it's been called "macroexperientiality." Granted I don't have a razor-sharp image in

Hi Jay,
I'm not fond of token-token identity theory -- I prefer the less "reductive" approach that I attributed to Boyd. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is always a good resource. Here's the whole entry on physicalism. You'll see they talk about token-token physicalism. My views are closer to what they discuss under "Emergentism" and "supervenience".

Quoting Jay J:

Having said that, until I do look into it more, it looks to me that the versions of materialism you've told me about still have a problem, given what my concerns were before. If emergence is a problem for panpsychism, it's definitely one for reductive-materialism. And if each view fails, we may have to throw our hands up and be agnostics about the issue.

That's sort of close to what I'm advocating. For purposes of a discussion of free will, we shouldn't get too far into a discussion of physicalism and consciousness. It's not really a matter of throwing up our hands, but of bracketing the issue so far as possible. However plausible or implausible the physicalist views I've been talking about are in their handling of the separate issue of consciousness, we need only focus on their consequences for

Hi Bloggin, *I see the distinction between causal responsibility and the kind we need people to have to prosecute them. I just don't think the word "moral" is a warranted descriptor of the word "responsibility" in this case. I know this might seem to some like splitting hairs, but I see it as pretty important. The topic of moral realism and moral skepticism might have something to say about it, and the word 'moral' means something to me other than just the kind of responsibility we're talking about. I have no data that tells me that everyone else agrees with me on what the word moral means, but I guess what I have is an inductive argument: most people in the United States are religious, although most of the rest of the 1st world isn't as religious as the U.S., it seems that most people are not hard core materialists. In other words, many people have vague notions about what "more" there is in the universe. Buddhism is big in the Asian developing countries, and they have some idea abut karma and the like, Christians of course have a divine command theory or believe that morality is

Bloggin, This is the second half of what I just tried to post, But I was told that it was too long... *So that leads me to DMR, which Galen seems convinced that this is what people mean. I'm not as convinced as him, but I think he may be closer to being right than his dad. Now, you said several times that I am asserting that people who believe in DMR are requiring people to be "self-created." I don't think that's exactly fair. The issue of being self created is a PROBLEM for DMR, but that doesn't mean that most people have CONSIDERED the problem. So your question seems to be getting at whether people are right to believe what they do, not whether they actually believe it. *As far as evidence goes, well it would probably be pretty inductive. Let me first try to clear away some more of the brush. You mentioned that the liberty of potentially formerly crazy people is completely separate from what we've have been discussing. I don't agree. I'll cop to being unclear and possibly inviting your interpretation, but I don't think it's completely separate from what we've been talking about. Let me try

Bloggin, On eliminative materialism, I had thought that there were ways to be eliminative about propositional attitudes without being eliminative about the fact that it's like something to be me. I may have been wrong about that, but I thought this was the category the Churchlands fell into. But even then the problem I've been raising about non-eliminative and non-panpsychist materialism was one of coherence, rather than whether I saw the premises of each as something I could believe. Once again I may have been too vague, but I choose the word coherence because "validity" seemed too strong. In any case, I was trying to contrast coherence with the soundness of the premises and instead focus on whether the premises looked to me like they flowed. It seems like eliminativism says, A) There was this stuff. B) This stuff did a whole bunch of things. C) This process caused an illusion. I may object to the conclusion drawn above, but it seems like it flows more than: 1) There was this stuff. 2) Now there is some other stuff. 3) The stuff from #2 is identical to #1, even though #1 was around for a while without #2. I understand your point about the vitalists, but I just don't find that analogous

On eliminative materialism, I had thought that there were ways to be eliminative about propositional attitudes without being eliminative about the fact that it's like something to be me. I may have been wrong about that, but I thought this was the category the Churchlands fell into.

I would find that a very peculiar and unmotivated position to take. Dennett doesn't try to eliminate propositional attitudes -- he takes some sort of functionalist view -- but he takes an eliminativist position with respect to qualia (though he tries not to "eliminate" anything that would be part of common sense (the term "quale" is obviously a technical term). I can't see why the Churchlands would eliminate propositional attitudes in the name of materialism and then accept dualism at the last minute on the grounds that they can't eliminate qualia. I haven't read anything by the Churchlands in a very long time, so I guess I can't be absolutely sure, but I can't see why they would move to this view. Here's SEP's Eliminative Materialism entry.

It seems like eliminativism says,

A) There was this stuff.

B) This stuff did a whole bunch of things.

C) This process caused an illusion.

Since illusions

Jay,
I didn't mean to settle anything much by pointing to Dictionary.com. I just meant to point out that the connection between "moral responsibility" and "morality" is less direct than you seem to assume. The term "moral" has many meanings -- many of these meanings are going obsolete. People used to speak of the "moral sciences" -- the less exact sciences, not Ethics alone. People still speak of a "moral certainty" -- meaning the kind of certainty we have about everyday empirical claims -- the kind of certainty relevant to a court of law rather than to a mathematician or even a physicist. "Moral development" primarily means "development of character" -- whether that character is particularly characterized by morality. I'm suggesting that "moral responsibility" means that one's character is responsible for the actions and consequences in question as opposed to one's body or impossible circumstances or mental illness or understandable ignorance. In other words, I think part of the confusion you worry about goes no deeper than our ignorance or confusion about the etymology of the word "moral." Perhaps we should rename it "agent-responsibility" or "character-responsibility" -- I'm happy to take up that nomenclature if you'd like.
As for religion, DMR is still

It's big of you to agree to the name change. Now get on the phone to all the compatibilists in the world (yawl are in some club right?) and tell them that "Jay J" wants "agent-responsibility" to be a new term in the system. It feels a little nit-picky of me now that you've so easily conceded, and it appears obvious now that I agree with the type of responsibility you've been advancing. But I had not known for sure that the type of responsibility we were discussing would boil down to this, perhaps I should have known, but I didn't. Anyway, this is an example of a long exchange on a blog which has resulted in agreement, a rare occurrence for me. My other remaining post in this thread that you will reply to later may be less necessary now. My thoughts on DMR and whether or not the law has this notion imbedded in it seems more and more tangential. But I did I talk about what I meant by rewards and punishments on the one hand and protection of society on the other. Perhaps that issue will be put to bed

Hi Bloggin, Starting with what you said last in your last post, you said: "Consciousness and its connection to the material world remains rather mysterious." I agree with that, let's go with that sentence. Now based on that sentence, I want to say that any philosophy of mind that takes both consciousness and the material world seriously has several...land-mines to avoid. These land-mines are idealism, dualism, epiphenomenalism, eliminativism (yes I think this too is a land-mine, more on that later), etc. When people are thinking about which move to make next, they may wonder if this move will cause them to step on a land-mine. Sometimes philosophers will accuse one another of having stepped on one of these land-mines, even when the person who advanced the view believes that they've avoided the land-mines. At this point it's hard for me to re-trace exactly the context this arose in, but I think this is what I was getting at when you told me that my worry didn't apply to materialism. You're probably right, technically, but I think I perceived that the mystery you referred to was rearing its ugly head, and that perhaps a land-mine wasn't being avoided carefully enough...anyway, if you're

You mentioned that the liberty of potentially formerly crazy people is completely separate from what we've have been discussing.

I hope I didn't really say THAT. What I should have said (whether I said it clearly or not) is that there are many more issues involved than just the issue of responsibility, so any view we may have about the practical issue of protective detention will say little about the issue of responsibility. There are too many other controversial issues involved.

If protection of society were our main concern, we wouldn't feel that it was "unjust" to keep someone in jail after they had been rehabilitated.

If it were our ONLY concern, then we wouldn't be concerned about the injustice. If on the other hand justice and individual rights are among our values, then we'd at least be torn.

Because we would pause before wondering whether their liberty was worth more than the risk they were to society at large. I may not have explicit proof off the top of my head, but I think it's at least not true that society has explicitly gone to a "protection of society" metric and discarded

Bloggin, A reason to keep people in jail, even those who have been rehabilitated, is to deter others, which would in turn serve to protect society. I'm not sure if we agree on whether this is the best way to go about things or not, but it seems that we agree that it's a coherent picture. I don't think your view is necessarily inconsistent with retributive theories of punishment, I suppose it just depends on which theory you see as working best. It's just that these theories seem to try to get at some of the inherent badness of crimes and punish accordingly. I don't think there's anything automatically wrong with these views, but I just don't know that I can get at what crimes are "deserving" of what kind of punishment. I only feel confident that I can get at which types of violent people are a threat to society and the ways to remove them from society. I'm not saying any and all people who believe in retribution are buying into what I'm attributing to it, but I prefer a deterrence theory myself. I'm not saying protective custody (I hope I didn't say that) is the

Hi Jay,
You've been busy. Didn't you sleep last night? Back to commenting on your comments:

But going back to the sequence above, if something comes before something else, and the thing which comes later is somehow said to rely on what was there before, causation seems to be implied. If something is identical to something else, then it seems that what comes later was there all along, and we only missed it. In other words, if A is around and then B springs from A, I am compelled to say that A caused B. If A is around and then B springs from A, but we say that they are identical, well then I'm compelled to say that B was there all along at least in some way. In my mind this applies whether we're talking about chemistry to life, or brains to consciousness.

What are "A" and "B" here? If A is chemistry and B is biology, then clearly A and B are not identical. This doesn't show very much though. Even the type-type identity theorist about life would admit that biology is a proper part of chemistry -- not identical with the whole of chemistry, but only that part that deals with self-replicating molecules like

Hi Jay,
Didn't mean to run you ragged -- I was assuming that you had control over when you posted. Now that I know otherwise, I'm not sure what to do. I'm afraid I've already posted a reply on our other thread. I did it in ignorance -- which on my view means that I did it excusably. On your view, this may be irrelevant -- worse yet, maybe you'll have me locked away from my keyboard to protect society. I hope it's OK if I make a quick observation, and let you think it over in the time between this post and your next one (NO HURRY!). I'm beginning to suspect that your concern is not with what is normally called "moral responsibility" at all, but rather with what I might call "moral authority." I feel called upon to refrain from doing what is morally wrong, even if it would be in my own interest. This feeling that morality has some claim on me, and on everyone else, a claim we can't escape by just pointing out that we don't care about morality, is what I'd call a sense of moral authority. The question of moral authority is whether or not this

Hi Jay,
I find I want to respond briefly to something I didn't comment on the other day:

On Eliminative Materialism, I appreciate the link. The link does appear to say that some eliminativists limit their view to eliminating aspects of what we would call the 'easy problem' rather than experience altogether.

Afer reading the above and writing my main response I went back and checked the EM entry in SEP that I'd referred you to. Since Eliminativists are materialists, it would be inconsistent of them to admit that a materialist view of the world leaves out anything real -- any genuine part of the world. That would make them dualists. If some psychological state cannot be accounted for in materialist terms, then the materialist must deny that this psychological state (or rather our understanding of it) is a genuine part of the world. I'm not sure how you are understanding "experience". Assuming only that it is a mental state or process, I would expect the eliminativist to take the line he takes with all mental states and processes: that they are commitments of a deeply confused and mistaken "folk theory" of behavior, which ultimately we will

Hi Bloggin, I understand myself to be offering a coupe of different arguments, and perhaps one of which I've only clearly formulated recently. I'll grant that I see you as bearing the burden of proof, since I haven't understood myself to be advocating for a lack of free will necessarily, as much as against particular versions, based on certain premises. I'll try to summarize very briefly what I'm getting at, and maybe you can tell me where it fails: 1) The "easy" problems of consciousness all seem to arise through the conduit of experience. 2) Since experience composes the "hard" problem, and since this problem remains unsolved, we can't be confident that our understanding of things like "beliefs" and "will" would hold up after the hard problem was solved, since what's going on in the hard problem may determine what's going on in the easy problem. 3) When I talk about a lack of confidence, I'm not only talking about a lack of certainty, since we lack certainty on virtually everything. Instead I'm saying that the hard problem looks like a huge outstanding problem, such that when it has it's say, no telling what will change. 4) The problems I've been raising

Hi Bloggin, Your logic on eliminativism is impeccable. I agree 100%. Eliminativism comes with some very serious bullets to bite. I was trying to limit the conversation to what the theories have to say about free will, and whether they retain coherence all the way down. I may have given eliminativism too much credit, but it seems to me that denying free will is a less ambitious claim for a materialist system to make, therefore it makes things easier perhaps. Again your logic is impeccable, but that doesn't cause me to believe that all eliminativists follow this logic. I didn't mean to say that the entry you included says that eliminavists explicitly retain experience as irreducible, rather that they don't all deal with this. You may be completely right that they would also deny experience, but it doesn't seem too fanciful to me to think that a philosopher would be eliminative about some things but not about others. I should not have been so sloppy in my language to suggest that the entry demonstrates this, because what I meant to say was instead that the entry as stated at least would bear

Hi Bloggin, I've enjoyed the exchange. I just gotta learn to relax, that's all. I sometimes feel like I need to respond, respond, respond. I appreciate the low-key approach to the exchange as well...Thanks for giving me time. I agree with the concept, so far as I know, of "agent-responsibility," (I prefer not to use the term "moral responsibility" since I think that when we're in our armchair, the word "moral" entails more). But I come at this mostly through my gut. It seems to me that some people can respond to constituencies other than their reptilian impulses. If that's the case, then some people would be able to respond to incentives in society and our practices may still make some sort of local sense. I just think it becomes problematic when an explicit commitment to determinism is made, but perhaps I need to read up on non-reductive supervenience.

Hi Jay,
Thanks for all the replies. I think I'll try to consolidate my replies into this message.
I'm aware that your objections to free will were not objections to free will per se, but rather to its compatibility with something else. That something else is not so much determinism, as I see it, but materialism (or at least materialism of a certain sort). But that incompatibility is still something that requires argument. What I claim to have established is that your argument that the two are incompatible (offered in an early post and supplemented in later posts by your emergence argument) does not establish its conclusion that there is any incompatibility. I showed this (I believe) by pointing out that your initial argument relied upon epiphenomenalism, which would be inconsistent with materialism. You tried to argue that the materialist in a way has to invoke epiphenomenalism (this is your emergence argument), so the problem still stands. I replied by showing that your emergence argument "proves too much" -- by which I mean that the argument as it stands must be invalid, since it reaches false conclusions in other cases where it applies (the case of

Hi Bloggin, *I think one of the reasons that you perceive that I view your version of free will as more minimal than you see your view, is because I see your view of *moral* responsibility as more minimal than you see it. If you're OK, at least for the time being, with calling this "agent responsibility" then I'm completely OK with it. However to me, if one is a moral skeptic, then even if Strawson's DMR were correct, one could still believe in a robust free will and not believe in *moral* responsibility at all. But where we are right now seems fine, since they could very well agree with what we've decided to call "agent responsibility." *Apparently I didn't know what "proves too much" meant. The invalidity you say that my argument possesses is said to do with biology, life, and chemistry. I have said that I don't see an analogy between these things and the emergence of consciousness, but you have replied that you were making no such analogy. The reason I thought you were making an analogy is that it must be analogous if this example shows that I'm out of line in other areas. So for now, can

Your logic on eliminativism is impeccable. I agree 100%. Eliminativism comes with some very serious bullets to bite.

I don't think that's what I was arguing. Rather I was trying to explain the motivation behind eliminativism. I was doing this to explain why it seemed to me that the partially eliminativist theory you imagine, while a logical possibility, would be completely unmotivated. It would be straining at gnats while swallowing elephants.

You may be completely right that they would also deny experience, but it doesn't seem too fanciful to me to think that a philosopher would be eliminative about some things but not about others.

Well, described that way, it's not fanciful at all. As I pointed out, Dennett could be regarded as a kind of eliminativist when it comes to "phenomenal qualities" (though not about consciousness, which he puts entirely on the "easy" side of the line). And it would be logically possible for someone to eliminate belief and desire without eliminating phenomenal qualities, but as a position it doesn't make sense. It would be like rejecting the evolution of all non-hominid species based upon little outstanding problems in the theory, but insisting that Man alone did

You asked for an explanation of "proving too much" etc. Let me do that as a separate bite-sized post. The point is a logical one and I will illustrate it in a field far from that we've been considering. Consider someone who makes the following argument against the morality of homosexuality:
Homosexual sex uses an organ for something other than its "intended" purpose.
Therefore it is unnatural.
Therefore homosexual sex is wrong. One way to criticize this argument is to show that it "proves too much." Hands are clearly not "intended" (whether by evolution or God) for standing. So standing on one's hands is "using an organ for something other than its intended purpose. If we accept the above argument about homosexuality just as it stands, then we are also committed to the claim that handstands are immoral and wrong. Yet most people (even those who offer the above argument about homosexuality) do not believe handstands are wrong or "unnatural" in any bad way. If you don't accept THAT conclusion, then, as a matter of logic, you have to admit that the argument does not establish its conclusion. But the arguments are of exactly the

Bloggin, Your example about homosexuality shows a person who lays down a rule and then has a hard time when someone points out behaviors (that the homophobe has no problem with) which would also violate the rule. The problem I'm having is that in order for you to believe that I've done that, it seems that you have to have read my words out of context. The context that I was always writing in was one of the emergence of consciousness, not causation in general. I would not be shocked if you could produce a quote or two which would bear your interpretation of what I've said, but we were always talking about consciousness, rather than things which can be understood purely in 3rd person terms. I don't know what to say about the people who used to deny that "life" could be understood in the terms we do now, other than that I don't see the relevance. I will say though, that if you are talking about life as some category that is separate from consciousness, then the category seems fairly imposed. I'm not suggesting that there are no differences

Bloggin, If there is a significant distinction between biting a bullet on the one hand and straining at gnats while swallowing elephants on the other, then I'll be happy to concede the point. You pointed out the technical definition of "validity" in one of your recent posts, so you must understand well the distinction between the validity and the soundness of a line of reasoning. If I've overlooked a problem of validity eliminativism has, then I'll cop to it. But for certain, I was never arguing for the soundness of Eliminativism. The thing is though, it seems that most of your arguments about Elimnativism target the soundness or perhaps even the usefulness of Eliminativism. I have no beef with you here. However I am still a little confused on the difference between my partial eliminativism and philosophers who are eliminative about some things and not about others. Maybe you're saying that there is no difference. If so, then I'm no longer sure what we're arguing about here, since I never set out to say that partial eliminativism was a motivated position.

Hi Jay, Here's the argument I'm referring to:

1) There was this stuff.

2) Now there is some other stuff.

3) The stuff from #2 is identical to #1, even though #1 was around for a while without #2.

It isn't an explicit argument, but there does appear to be an implicit argument based on the indiscernability of identicals (A=B only if A has every property B has). The argument alludes only to "stuff" and the fact that one "stuff" was around before the seemingly "other stuff" came about. So, since the premises nowhere invoke something special to consciousness, if this argument works against consciousness being physical, then it works against living processes being chemical processes (since chemistry preceded life). Of course, the solution to the mystery is that, sure, chemistry was around before life, but the kind of complex chemistry involved in life was not around all the time. What looks like a vast and incomprehensible leap on one level can be understood on the level of chemistry as the gradual evolution (not in Darwin's sense) of more complex chemistry. We don't currently fully understand how such a thing could happen with consciousness, but it wasn't long ago that we didn't

Hi Bloggin, It seems to me that much (but not all) of our problem here is semantic. My line of reasoning you quoted was in the context of arguing over identity theories, emergence, etc. The problem I was having is that the example of biological processes being identical to chemical processes seems to be different from at least some identity theories of mind, because when the discussion is chemistry to biology, the name "biology" refers to something which presumably is different enough from what is thought of by "chemistry" that a new name is warranted. Granted, we can view biological processes as being identical to chemical processes, but what we have decided to call biological processes are *caused* by chemical processes (at least more...fundamental chemical processes). You told me early on that at least some identity theories of mind avoided problems of causation from 3rd person to 1st person, but it seems to me that simply asserting identity doesn't get you around problems of emergence. In the area of chemistry to biology, we can talk about how this or that happens and causes some other thing to happen. We can't

Quoting Jay J: Bloggin,

If there is a significant distinction between biting a bullet on the one hand and straining at gnats while swallowing elephants on the other, then I'll be happy to concede the point.

You pointed out the technical definition of "validity" in one of your recent posts, so you must understand well the distinction between the validity and the soundness of a line of reasoning. If I've overlooked a problem of validity eliminativism has, then I'll cop to it.

But for certain, I was never arguing for the soundness of Eliminativism. The thing is though, it seems that most of your arguments about Elimnativism target the soundness or perhaps even the usefulness of Eliminativism. I have no beef with you here.

However I am still a little confused on the difference between my partial eliminativism and philosophers who are eliminative about some things and not about others. Maybe you're saying that there is no difference. If so, then I'm no longer sure what we're arguing about here, since I never set out to say that partial eliminativism was a motivated position.

Hi Jay,
Was out of town for a bit, so I'm only getting

Hi Jay, This final statement confuses me:

If rejecting compatibilism is different than saying that determinism and free will are incompatible, then I need to repent and revise...

Certainly compatibilism is normally understood as the claim that free will and determinism are compatible. What I've been saying is that determinism has nothing to do with materialism. Determinism says that, given the full state of the world at one time, the laws of nature determine only one possible future -- the appearance that the future consists of an indeterminate tree of branching possibilities that could go either way is only appearance. Materialism is not really involved -- the laws of nature and the state of the world could be entirely mental, so far as determinism alone is concerned. Now, as Strawson points out, determinism in this sense could be false without particularly rescuing free will. Perhaps there are branching possibilities, but if these branching possibilities are just a matter of chance, then we may still not have free will. I tried to finesse this (and accomodate your desire to talk about materialism in connection with free will) by redefining "compatibilism' as the compatibility of

Hi Bloggin, First I'll quickly clarify what might have been a cryptic statement in my last post. I said, "If rejecting compatibilism is different than saying that determinism and free will are incompatible, then I need to repent and revise." What I meant is that perhaps a rejection of determinism will result in one saying that they reject compatibilism, since they don't accept determinism, they wouldn't classify as a compatibilist. This might be different from rejecting, in principle, the compatibility of determinism and free will, if determinism were accepted. I agree with you that we may be able to talk more directly about free will and determinism. I had focused on materialism since that seems to be a common deterministic outlook, but I think you're right that they can be treated separately, at least for the time being. I'll try to explicate what I see as a few fundamental issues between us: *I don't agree that the "hard problem" can be set aside when talking about the coherence of determinism. The "easy" problems arise in the backdrop of the hard problem. In other words, we can't imagine any of the easy problems existing without raw experience existing. In that case, who knows

Bloggin, I'm not a fan of eliminative materialism (EM) at all. I guess I got too cute for my own good in bringing it up to begin with, but I've been trying to back that up ever since, when I tried to make sure and say that I wasn't commenting on how sound the idea struck me. So for the record, I don't like EM, and this subtopic isn't as interesting to me as the other we have going now about determinism in general. ... Remember Micheal Moore's movie "Sicko?" Well allot of people were like "You think CUBA has it good compared to the United States?!" When for me it was more like "Man even CUBA has a heath care system appraoching ours, that's sad!" My mention of EM was more in the spirit of my reaction to 'Sicko' rather than thinking Cuba was being held up as better than the United States. As I said, I've been trying to back it up ever since, and was never arguing for ANY form of EM as an actual possibility. And I also have never seen an eliminativist say that they aren't eliminative about experience. But I also haven't seen all elminativists say they

*If the bronze is analogous to chemical processes, then we're left scratching our head about just what has happened in terms of the appearance on the scene of consciousness, and of biology for that matter. If we have claimed to have fully explained biological processes in terms of chemical processes, then it must be that a chemical somthing happened and caused something we feel comfortable calling a biological something. If I'm off base here, then I dispute the orthodoxy that we've fully explained biological processes.

We've gotten very deep into materialism -- deeper than we need to, I think. Let me see if I can make my original point more simply. Your problem about matter and free will is based in dualist interaction problems.
Suppose I decide to move my arm and as a result my arm moves. I see my arm move and as a result I believe that my arm has moved. My decision and my belief are mental events and the movement of my arm is a physical event. A dualist believes that the mental states are non-physical states. In the story I just told, a mental state caused a physical state

Hi Bloggin, *For the record, I'm a big believer in methodological naturalism. It's when we set foot in the philosophical realm that I dispute this or that naturalistic claim. I'm happy to admit that I'm off base about chemical processes and biological processes, but I add that I dispute that biological processes have been fully explained, if in fact a causal story isn't traced from the bottom up. I'm not suggesting that science needs re-ordering, I'm only saying that the interpretation that biological processes have been fully explained is not something I would endorse. If our current scientific picture of the world tells a causal story I've neglected, then you can tell me about it. *I don't agree that there are no interaction problems for the materialist. If this were true, it would mean a great mystery in the philosophy of mind was solved. Materialism can define away the mystery, but that doesn't make the problem go away. Mental processes like decisions are not obviously understandable completely in terms of 3rd-person, observable, physical processes. I think every single theory has interaction problems. Acting as if everything is simply a physical process doesn't make anything more intelligible

I think the dualist goes a step further than the materialist. The materialist may admit that it's hard to see how mental states are ultimately physical, but the dualist in effect insists that the mystery is not resolvable. The materialist may admit we don't fully understand, but he starts working on the problem, with a certain amount of success in the "easy problem" of functional states and propositional attitudes. In any case, I think my point about free will still stands. The dualist has the problem of fitting non-physical causes into a seemingly complete system of physical causes. This problem is FAR more general for the dualist than any issue of free will, but insofar as the will is a non-physical cause according to the dualist, there will be a problem of how the will can achieve anything in the physical world. This isn't quite the problem of free will, since your will could affect the physical world while still being very unfree -- we might call it the problem (for dualists) of the EFFECTIVENESS of the will, or maybe the problem of free motion.
I don't see how the materialist faces this

Hi Bloggin, I guess our disagreement has allot to do with whether it makes sense to bracket the issue of interaction when looking at free will. My contention is that determinism can't make sense of a decision existing according to its rules, if in fact that decision is said to posses causal power and to be free. I said a little earlier that I don't hold panpsychism responsible for explaining the emergence of consciousness since it simply posits consciousness as existing. But I also added that I don't think panpsychism has solved some sort of mystery either. Similarly, if materialism posits consciousness as explainable in terms of materialism, that's fine with me. But if a materialist says that their idea is compatible with something like free will, I think they're using a ill-prepared concept as their base. So long as the problem of the relation of mind to matter is unexplained, I'll probably continue to think that. I don't think materialism can just declare that mind is material and be done with it. I'll grant that they don't necessarily need to explain interaction, but if they then go and say that their

Hi Jay, I just noticed your reply -- hope it hasn't been there for a long time.

You have said that perhaps we should be talking about determinism in general, rather than materialism in particular, but at this point it seems like "six or half-dozen."

I'm a bit puzzled by this, since it seems to imply that materialism is a form of determinism and I don't see materialism as any form of determinism. Determinism, as I understand it, is the view that a full specification of the state of the universe at one time determines one and only one future -- i.e., our sense that more than one future is possible, given the present state of the world, is just a matter of our own ignorance of the full state of the world or the laws of nature. The possibility of multiple futures is epistemic, not metaphysical, according to determinism.
Materialism just says that minds are made of matter and that mental properties are explicable in terms of physical properties. It is perfectly compatible with indeterminism -- i.e., with the real, metaphysical possibility of many alternate futures.

You mentioned that every theory of mind does some

Bloggin, I am not asserting that a lack of certainty is the problem with compatibilism; I'm saying that I don't see warrant for confidence. This is different. The former is vulnerable to something as obvious as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and this isn't my argument. My argument is that the cart has been put before the horse... that an unfinished project needs finishing before there can be warrant for confidence in the truth or intelligibility of compatibilism. Also, I can imagine the compatibilist story. Perhaps I should have been more forthcoming about this before. I acknowledge that compatibilism includes your nature as one of the things which determines what will happen in the future. I see that. What I am saying is that you have to look backwards a bit and explain how on earth your nature and deliberations got to be what they are now given a deterministic world. If the conditions of the past determined with 100% certainty what your deliberations and nature now are, then I don't see any warrant for confidence that your nature and deliberations are any freer than the people who you say lack "agent-responsibility." I don't think this involves

Hi Jay,
Much of what I've been trying to do is to distinguish two quite different arguments against "free will" and answer them separately. One of these arguments is based on issues regarding the relationship between mind and matter (or mental states and physical states). The second concerns determination of the future by the past. As I've tried to point out, the conclusion of the former argument is not at all the same as the conclusion of the latter. The conclusion of the first argument seems to be that the will (if there is one) cannot be effective at all in the physical world. My deliberations, as mental entities can't affect whether or not I move my arm (a physical outcome). Suppose that this issue were completely resolved. Would the will be free? Not necessarily -- my will may be effective in the physical world, yet hard determinism could be true. So this effectiveness of the will is not sufficient for freedom of the will.
Is it necessary? On the dualist assumptions that generate the problem, apparently not -- at least if we restrict ourselves to decisions that remain entirely on

Hi again, Jay,
As I said above, I don't regard the issue you are discussing here as tangential -- I've been trying to put aside a separate issue to get to this one. I also certainly didn't regard my sketch of a compatibilist position in my previous post as a total answer to the incompatibilist's concerns, but only as a sketch of how things look to a compatibilist, like myself. I start with Nagel's description of the problem of free will (in View from Nowhere), that I want to be the source, not just the scene of my actions. Think of a car moving down the highway. If you didn't know any better, you might think the car was itself the source of its movements -- whether it turns right or left or stops might seem to be up to the car. But actually, we know that, though the motive power belongs to the engine, we need to look inside the car to understand why it goes left or right. The driver is really the source of the car's route (though, if the car were not working, the driver might not be able to control the

Hi Bloggin, I don't think your analogy about the baseball bat is applicable. It is perfectly intelligible that a bat would strike a ball, but it is not perfectly intelligible that a "true self" would be the result of a deterministic process. You wanted to suppose that it is the case that a true or essential self exists, but see this is the very thing I don't want to grant. There's an interesting article on the webpage of the philosopher Neil Levy, it's the one near the top of the list and it's titled, "The Luck Problem for Compatibilists." I want to stress that he doesn't go nearly as far as I want him to, but he builds off of Nagel's notion of moral luck. Levy has in mind moral responsibility, and we've already shelved that issue, but I thought that perhaps he says some of what concerns me only perhaps more eloquently. But I don't blame you if you don't read it: http://au.geocities.com/neil_levy/neillevy.html When you talk about how I'm privileging the first cause in a chain, I think this would apply if it were obvious that this true self that you speak of is

Hi Jay,

I don't think your analogy about the baseball bat is applicable. It is perfectly intelligible that a bat would strike a ball, but it is not perfectly intelligible that a "true self" would be the result of a deterministic process. You wanted to suppose that it is the case that a true or essential self exists, but see this is the very thing I don't want to grant.

Starting from your last sentence above, I wonder how you react to my argument last time. I tried to show that the notion that we were unfree (constrained by our desires) depended upon there being such a true self. If there isn't one, then it seems to make no sense to say that we are constrained at all, since there is nothing that can be constrained -- nothing that is trying to do one thing and being held back or steered in the opposite direction. If there is no essential self or if this essential self has no goal of its own beyond its desires, then I don't see how we make sense of the notion that we are unfree. If there

OK, I'm back to address the Levy article -- or rather the kind of concern raised in the Levy article. We'll see how far we need to get into quoting passages and critiquing his argument in particular.
In my view, freedom is freedom for the "true self" -- and the true self is our rational faculty, in my view.
One way that reason can fail to be free is when I realize that I have most reason not to smoke, but addiction and weakness of will prevent me from acting on that reason. Deliberation produces a clear answer to what I ought rationally to do, but that deliberative realization is ineffective.
But what about cases where "brain washing" or other sorts of manipulation prevents me from even seeing that I have reason to do something. If someone can keep me from recognizing my best reason, then he can manipulate me, and I am also less free. For example, if I'm really bad at critical thinking, then others can manipulate me with invalid arguments, emotional appeals, anecdotal evidence and twisted statistics. If I deliberated correctly, I might act on that deliberation (no weakness of will), but I am being kept from seeing my best

Hi Bloggin, Well it's taken me lot longer to reply than I predicted. Sorry about that. I got caught up in some other stuff and have gradually been thinking about what to say. First, on the essay you've responded to: I feel I should have been more specific about what I was using the argument for. I feel badly that you wrote as much as you did in response, since I was operating under the assumption that "DMR" was still on the shelf and I had hoped that my declaration that I would have gone a lot further than the writer would communicate what I was hoping to. I can see that I either should have been allot more specific or I should not have posted about the essay. So maybe what I say in the remainder of this post will make it more clear what I saw as relevant in the essay I referred to, or maybe it won't. I hope at least it will be relevant to your other post, and I feel more confident that it will pertain to our overall discussion. I've been thinking about how you said that determinism is not the same thing as fatalism, and I think that