Nirmukta » Tom Clark

Free Will Skepticism: Where Are the Skeptics?

Tom Clark — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:07:36 +0000

Note: This article first appeared in the CFN Newsletter for September - October 2009.

There’s nothing that skeptics enjoy more than a good debunking. Set up a big fat target and let the fun begin: How could anyone believe that nonsense? Or pose an apparently insuperable challenge: prove that you have paranormal powers and we’ll give you a million bucks. Thus far, no takers.

Among those leading the skeptical charge (my apology for omissions) are James Randi, founder of the Randi Educational Foundation; Michael Shermer, head of the Skeptics Society and author of Why People Believe Weird Things; Joe Nickel and others at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, publishers of Skeptical Inquirer; physicist and science-defender Lawrence Krauss; Massimo Pigliucci, host of Rationally Speaking; neurologist Steven Novella who heads the New England Skeptical Society and hosts Neurologica; and of course America’s favorite exploders of supernatural shibboleths and fashionable nonsense, Penn and Teller on their show Bullshit!. None of these guys are to be trifled with if you have the least propensity for wishful thinking. Their critical gaze has shredded every imaginable quackery, from Bigfoot to birthers, spoon-bending to séances, vaccine scare-mongering to visitations from the dead. If there’s no solid empirical evidence for it or if it’s logically suspect, they’re all over it, and then it’s all over for the wishful thinker. This of course fulfills an important function for the culture: keeping it intellectually honest, or at least less dishonest.

Given all this, it’s striking that the skeptical community pays relatively little attention to one of the weirdest beliefs going: that human beings have contra-causal free will.[1]

Although the actual prevalence of this belief is just now being researched, it’s probably safe to say that many folks suppose that our choices transcend natural causal laws in some respect, such that we are miniature first causes, like God. Sitting inside each of us is an unmoved mover, an immaterial soul or mental agent, that gets to pick and choose among courses of action without itself being determined in its choices. But of course there’s no evidence for such a supernatural thing. We are natural, physical beings through and through, and our choices, dependent as they are on the workings of our brains, cannot transcend the laws of cause and effect that hold elsewhere in nature. This doesn’t mean we aren’t rational and moral beings (a good deal of the time anyway), but we aren’t contra-causal. Nor is it logically possible to be self-caused in any ultimate respect, which is pretty much what contra-causal free will requires.

Most scientists and philosophers have long since given up on immaterial agents with contra-causal free will, also called libertarian free will or strong “agent causation.”[2] Some in the philosophical community even describe themselves as free will skeptics. Being academics, they of course disagree on many of the fine points (huge, from their perspective) of what’s called action theory, but none put stock in uncaused causers. But such skepticism has thus far not found a strong public voice in the wider community of skeptics and their leaders mentioned above. Why not, one wonders?

Before speculating about this, I should mention that a few skeptics have trained their sights specifically on libertarian free will, which is most encouraging. The hosts of Reasonable Doubts - Jeremy Beahan, Luke Galen, and David Fletcher - aired a three part series on free will and determinism (episodes 29, 30, 34) which did a good job of showing the logical and empirical difficulties of belief in uncaused causers. (Note: I was interviewed during the second half of the second show, but my contribution mainly echoed what the hosts had already concluded in the first half of the series.) Even better, they discussed the significance of the challenge to free will, of how giving up belief in human causal exceptionalism can affect beliefs about credit, blame, punishment, merit and inequality in ways that help promote a more compassionate and cause-cognizant (and therefore smarter) culture.

So why isn’t contra-causal free will being vigorously targeted by skeptics, given its manifest implausibilities, implausibilities at least equal to alien abduction? An unlikely possibility is that they aren’t aware of the issue. Given the historical prominence of the free will question, plus the increasing pressure science is putting on the idea of our being first causes, most skeptics have likely thought about human freedom. Michael Shermer, for one, discusses free will in his book The Mind of the Market (pp. 235-8) in the context of defending compatibilist versions of it, those compatible with determinism. Free will has also been discussed occasionally on some skeptic blogs (see note 1), so it isn’t invisible to the skeptical community.

Another possibility is that skeptics suppose there’s little to be gained by broaching what’s often called one of the great unsolved questions of philosophy. Why rehash old debates about free will? But the debate about whether we have contra-causal free will is pretty much settled, at least in the academic and scientific communities: we don’t. The puzzle of free will now mainly consists in how we might rethink our notions of self, freedom and responsibility in light of the death of the soul, and what this implies for our responsibility practices, for instance in criminal justice. These are momentous questions that skeptics can help bring to the fore by prying the public loose from their supernatural notions of self and freedom.

A third possibility is that skeptics are well aware of the weirdness of contra-causal free will, but reluctant to publicly challenge a belief so central to Western culture. To do so would open a rather large can of worms: If we’re fully caused to do what we do, what happens to personal responsibility? Are we just puppets of fate? Do killers go free? Do billionaires deserve their riches? These are questions that skeptics might be reluctant to take on, even though challenging a free willer might prove entertaining. Imagine Penn Gillette asking:

You believe what? Let me get this straight, you think you can just choose to lose weight/stop smoking/get rich? You think we have that kind of power? Prove it!

But, having had his fun, he’d then have to reassure everyone that it’s OK not to have free will. To debunk free will responsibly requires that the skeptic articulate good reasons why we don’t need to be exceptions from cause and effect, otherwise people might go away supposing that everything’s permitted or that their choices don’t make a difference. Given the undeserved but widespread dislike of determinism as the nefarious subverter of human dignity (see here), putting people at ease about it is not a trivial undertaking, and might give skeptics pause.

This points up the fact that many of the weird beliefs debunked by skeptics over the years haven’t been particularly central to our self-concept or our culture. It isn’t a problem for most of us that we haven’t been visited by aliens, that the Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist, that Reiki healing is just the placebo effect, and that we don’t have paranormal powers. What’s more of a problem than any particular belief is the gullibility, illogicality, wishful thinking and confirmation bias that permits such nonsense to flourish. As champions of rationality, empiricism and critical thinking, skeptics are, thankfully, fighting the good fight against the temptations of unreason and the supernatural. May their ranks increase.

Should they turn their attention to beliefs in contra-causal freedom, they’ll find the same cognitive failings in play, but as we’ve seen, the stakes are considerably higher. Free will skepticism isn’t to be undertaken lightly, which may explain why few leading skeptics are undertaking it in their magazines, lectures, blogs and podcasts. Still, as the philosophically savvy crew at Reasonable Doubts demonstrates, if you’ve considered what life would be like after free will, and understand its viability and indeed its virtues, then you’ll be in a position to offer the necessary reassurances. We can, it turns out, be responsibly skeptical of the widespread, weird belief at the core of the Western conception of self: that we somehow transcend the causal laws of the natural world that brought us into being.[3]

TWC, September 2009

Notes

[1] A web search turned up some online discussions related to free will by skeptics, including blogs at Skepchick (Free will, Free will as illusion, Does free will exist?, Train delays, horoscopes and free will), Neurologica (Decision Making in the Brain) and Skepticblog (So many choices). Also found were Implications of no free will at the Skeptic.com discussion board (starting with a post on the virtues of realizing we don’t have free will) and Does free will exist?, on a South African skeptic discussion board. But I didn’t find any major articles debunking belief in contra-causal free will.

[2] There is a small but resilient minority, including David Hodgson and Tibor Machan, that won’t give up on strong agent causation, partially because they suppose Western civilization depends on it.

[3] Not having done an exhaustive search of the skeptical literature, there’s undoubtedly more skepticism out there about free will than I’m aware of. So, be skeptical about my assessment in this article.

The Case for Naturalistic Spirituality

Tom Clark — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:48:34 +0000

This article first appeared here.

Because most folks are dualists, the idea of naturalistic spirituality still seems a contradiction in terms. Spirituality is generally thought to involve “higher planes,” souls, spirits, and other supernatural phenomena. How can naturalists, including atheists, take spirituality seriously without violating a core tenet of their worldview, that no separate supernatural realm exists? Very easily, as Andre Comte-Sponville artfully argues in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. Spirituality properly understood has nothing essentially to do with the supernatural, and is far too important a matter to leave to religionists and new-agers. To do so would have naturalists ignore central questions of life’s meaning and purpose, of how we can best live together given the ultimate nature of things, and what our relation to that nature is. None of this requires or implies god.

This book is a delight and inspiration, without the least condescension or self-seriousness, beautifully direct, personal, touching, and profound. Comte-Sponville writes with the ease and assurance of someone who has thought deeply on these matters, and indeed he’s been writing and speaking for years on godless spirituality. The Little Book is the distillation of his wisdom, which is heir to both West (Spinoza, Pascal, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein and some modern French philosophers unknown to most American readers) and East (Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Vedanta). Although he has no animus against faith, so long as it’s not imposed, his primary objectives in the book’s three chapters are to show that 1) we don’t need theistic religion for a viable ethics or community, 2) there are good reasons to believe god, traditionally conceived, doesn’t exist, and 3) spiritual experience is a naturalistically valid mirror of basic existential truths. We are embedded in an impersonal, self-subsistent, untranscendable and value-less reality - Spinoza’s Nature, the All - therefore values and meaning are human-relative affairs. But understanding and feeling that we are rooted in an ultimately mysterious non-human absolute can, by temporarily stripping away the self, afford us the peak spiritual experience of immanent unity. Naturalistic spirituality shows us that our lives, finite, conditioned and purposeful, open into the eternal, unconditioned and purposeless.

Living in the post-modern, irreligious age (at least in France!), we must, he says, avoid the twin temptations of sophistry, that truth has no claim on us, and nihilism, that morality has no claim on us (Nietzsche: “Nothing is true, everything is allowed”). We are therefore enjoined to follow the Enlightenment in its insistence that there are truths and ethics to be had independent of religion. These are secured by fidelity, fidelity to rationalism: “to reason, to mind, to knowledge,” and to a progressive, practical humanism: “Our primary duty…that of living and behaving humanly.” Because impersonal nature affords us no recourse, this is a contingent, fallible project, but for that reason all the more worth pursuing:

Nothing can guarantee the triumph of peace and justice or even any irreversible progress. Is that any reason to stop fighting for these things? Of course not! On the contrary, it is a powerful reason to go on paying the utmost attention to life, peace, justice…and our children. Life is all the more precious for being rare and fragile. Justice and peace are all the more necessary, all the more urgent, because nothing can guarantee their ultimate victory. (54)

Comte-Sponville provides a concise survey of the traditional arguments for god and their insuperable shortcomings, then goes on to give additional reasons for why it’s very likely (although not ultimately provable) that god doesn’t exist: there’s no good evidence he does; the untoward amount of evil and suffering in the world; the sheer mediocrity of the human animal (is such a creature the best god could do?), and the fact that theistic beliefs so patently conform to our deepest wishes. That god is all-good, and provides us with everything we could possibly want, is an excellent reason to suspect he does not exist! Given these reasons for doubt, it’s of the first importance that society keep church and state separate, allowing space for the right not to believe. He ends the second chapter saying:

Freedom of thought is the only good that is perhaps more precious than peace, for the simple reason that, without it, peace would simply be another name for servitude.

The book contains much that’s personal to the author, which makes good reading and good sense. After all, even if they are informed by philosophies and traditions, spiritual matters are deeply personal - they are one’s own grappling with meaning and existence. In the 3rd chapter, he describes a transformative mystical experience that, as he puts it, let him finally understand what as a philosopher he’d been lecturing and writing about all these years. The elements of the experience are described as suspensions - suspensions of thought, of time, of the ego, “the tiny prison of the self.” This permits an opening into the self-less present:

What a relief, when the ego gets out of the way! Nothing remains but the All, with the body, marvelously, inside of it, as if restored to the world and itself. Nothing remains but the enormous thereness of being, nature and the universe, with no one left inside of us to be dismayed or reassured, or at least no one at this particular instant, in this particular body, to worry about dismay and reassurance, anxiety and danger… (149)

He points out that mystical experiences and the spirituality they express and inspire make a personal god, holding out hope for future salvation, unnecessary. Nature, being, the all, the absolute, reality (he says use whichever word suits you) is immediately sufficient, present and perfect, that is, without defect. Faith, belief, dogma, hope and fear play no role, so religion in the traditional sense becomes irrelevant. Nor is there any conflict between our best analytical and empirical modes of knowing - what we can pin down about nature - and the personal existential realizations stemming from experiences of unity. Such spirituality has nothing to fear from science.

All told, Comte-Sponville, a true humanist and universalist, gives us a philosophically and anecdotally rich account of how those without faith can remain authentically ethical and engaged in life, even as it opens onto infinity. The human project is part of reality, but in no sense does it encompass reality, which rather encompasses us in its mystery. We have to make our peace with this, perhaps even find fulfillment in the fact we aren’t the measure of nature. Naturalists looking for enlightenment will find in this book an inspiring, profound expression of the spiritual possibilities inherent in their worldview.

Tom is Director of the Center for Naturalism, an organization dedicated to promoting Naturalism as a complete and fulfilling worldview.

The Moral Consequences of Objectivism

Tom Clark — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:26:41 +0000

(Editor’s note: This article appeared here first posted by Tom Clark in May, 2005. Images were added by the editor from sources linked to.)

The Objectivist Center and the Ayn Rand Institute, organizations devoted to safeguarding and disseminating Ayn Rand’s legacy of radical libertarianism, did an effective job of letting the world know about her 100^th birthday in February (2005). Op-eds about Rand’s philosophy appeared in newspapers across the US and abroad, celebrating the sovereignty of the individual and condemning the infringements of big government on personal freedoms.

Running a Google news search using the terms “free will” and “determinism” will pick up a good number of such op-eds, and you can find their sources here and here. It turns out that Rand’s Objectivism includes among its tenets a strong commitment to free will and rejection of determinism (unless it’s the determinism of self-determination). Here’s a taste from an op-ed in the Freelance Star of Fredericksburg, by Michael S. Berliner, board member of the Ayn Rand Institute:

Her philosophy, Objectivism, upholds objective reality (as opposed to supernaturalism), reason as man’s only means of knowledge (as opposed to faith or skepticism), free will (as opposed to determinism–by biology or environment), and an ethics of rational self-interest (as opposed to the sacrifice of oneself to others or others to self).

And the Boston Globe ran a piece by Edward Hudgins, director of the Objectivist Center, that quoted Rand herself: ”As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.”

The irony, of course, is that there’s no way to square Objectivism’s ostensible commitment to scientific objectivity, reason, and anti-supernaturalism with the idea of a self-made soul. Science shows that individuals in all their aspects and capacities are fully a function of their environmental and biological determinants, not literally self-made. True, once we become autonomous, rational agents, it’s usually our own desires that determine our choices, including some choices that may influence our very character and values. But the capacity for such self-modifying choices, and their direction, for good or ill, can always be traced back to influences that were prior to both our character and our choice-making capacity. Such tracing is at the heart of empirical explanation; it’s what science does for a living, partially. This is to say that, on a scientific understanding of ourselves, our autonomy and its uses are fully natural and fully determined, ultimately arising out of conditions that were not within our control.

The Objectivist insistence on the idea that individuals are causally privileged in some sense, that they have strong, metaphysical free will, seems designed to shore up Rand’s radical individualism. Without it, we are less the heroic gods of free market capitalism, throwing our wills around, and more the humble, interdependent, lucky or unlucky creations of biology and culture, some of whom harbor considerable delusions of grandeur. To give up such delusions wouldn’t be to give up either our real individuality or our real powers as human agents, but simply to place them on a more realistic, scientific footing. And being scientific (or not) about ourselves has moral consequences.

For there’s a link between Objectivism’s unscientific homage to the self-made self that takes ultimate credit (or blame), and the ruthless egoism of Rand and many of her followers.(1) Indeed, egoism becomes the cardinal virtue in “the ethics of rational self-interest” (mentioned in the op-ed quote above), which supposedly reflects our self-caused nature to look out mainly for ourselves. But there are two errors here in addition to thinking we’re ultimately self-made.

One is to suppose that in empirical fact we are merely self-interested creatures. But we aren’t; there are many altruistic bones in our body.(2) Second, it’s to commit the naturalistic fallacy of arguing that if we are selfish by nature, that means we should be selfish. But there is no direct implication from a natural is to an ethical ought. Instead, we have to justify our moral claims, in this case the virtue of self-interest, not simply point to our natural inclinations. True, if we were literally incapable of altruism, that would render moot any moral injunction to nurture thy neighbor (this could be called the “feasibility constraint” on morality). But since it turns out we are capable of altruism, arguments for it might possibly gain purchase on us, and fortunately they often do.

So a science-based, objective understanding of ourselves calls into question the basic premises and conclusions of Randian Objectivism: that we are self-made, exclusively self-interested, and morally required to pursue our self-interest and eschew altruism. In championing the myth of human contra-causal exceptionalism, the followers of Ayn Rand are simply reflecting the beliefs of the vast majority in the US and the world about free will. But in taking the myth to such extremes, they show how belief in the supernatural, self-choosing self can sometimes have morally unpalatable consequences.

1. See Cathy Young’s portrait of Ayn Rand in Reason, which shows how Rand’s ideology of willpower erased any capacity for sympathy.

2. There is a growing literature on reciprocal altruism as an adaptive component of our evolved moral sense. See for instance Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, ch. 7, “The evolution of moral agency” and Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul, ch. 7, “Ethics as human ecology.”

The author is the director of the Center for Naturalism

Worldview Naturalism

Tom Clark — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:18:13 +0000

If you don’t believe in anything supernatural - gods, ghosts, immaterial souls and spirits - then you subscribe to naturalism, the idea that nature is all there is.

The reason you’re a naturalist is likely that, wanting not to be deceived, you put stock in empirical, evidence-based ways of justifying beliefs about what’s real, as for instance exemplified by science. You probably (and rightly) hold that such beliefs are usually more reliable and more objective than those based in uncorroborated intuition, revelation, religious authority or sacred texts. Kept honest by philosophy and critical thinking, science reveals a single manifold of existence, what we call nature, containing an untold myriad of interconnected phenomena, from quarks to quasars. Nature is simply what we have good reason to believe exists.

We can see, therefore, that naturalism as a metaphysical thesis is driven by a desire for a clear, reliable account of reality and how it works, a desire that generates an unflinching commitment to objectivity and explanatory transparency. Supernaturalism, on the other hand, thrives on non-scientific, non-empirical justifications for beliefs that allow us to project our hopes and fears onto the world, the opposite of objectivity. As naturalists, we might not always like what science reveals about ourselves or our situation, but that’s the psychological price of being what we might call cognitively responsible, of assuming our maturity as a species capable of representing reality.

To be a thorough-going naturalist is to accept yourself as an entirely natural phenomenon. Just as science shows no evidence for a supernatural god “up there”, there’s no evidence for an immaterial soul or mental agent “in here”, supervising the body and brain. So naturalism involves a good deal more than atheism or skepticism - it’s the recognition that we are full-fledged participants in the natural order and as such we play by nature’s rules. We aren’t exempt from the various law-like regularities science discovers at the physical, chemical, biological, psychological and behavioral levels. The naturalistic understanding and acceptance of our fully caused, interdependent nature is directly at odds with the widespread belief (even among many freethinkers) that human beings have supernatural, contra-causal free will, and so are in, but not fully of, this world.

The naturalist understands not only that we are not exceptions to natural laws, but that we don’t need to be in order to secure any central value (freedom, human rights, morality, moral responsibility) or capacity (reason, empathy, ingenuity, originality). We can positively affirm and celebrate the fact that nature is enough. Indeed, the realization that we are fully natural creatures has profoundly positive effects, increasing our sense of connection to the world and others, fostering tolerance, compassion and humility, and giving us greater control over our circumstances. This realization supports a progressive and effective engagement with the human condition in all its dimensions. So we can justly call it worldview naturalism: an overarching cognitive, ethical and existential framework that serves the same function as supernatural worldviews, but without trafficking in illusions. By staying true to science, our most reliable means of representing reality, naturalists find themselves at home in the cosmos, astonished at the sheer scope and complexity of the natural world, and grateful for the chance to participate in the grand project of nature coming to know herself.

The author is the director of the Center for Naturalism