Jerry Coyne debated theologian John Haught.
Both paties agreed to the debate being taped, but it seems Haught didn’t like the outcome and now doesn’t want it to be shown. Further more, some people have emailed Dr. Robert Rabel, head of the Gaines Center for the Humanities, because he had agreed to Haught’s turnaround, and Rabel didn’t like that. So he’s now threatening to take legal action against Coyne, accoding to Coyne.
Theologians can be really dumb sometimes.
Other coverage:
Sam Harris has another post on consciousness: The Mystery of Consciousness II.
While we know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms, we do not know why it is “like something” to be what we are.
Well, this is my stab at it.
Here’s an analogy. Take a long loose spring and connect it rigidly at both ends, and then impart a wave motion on the spring. What is the wave? In one sense it is only the motion of individual parts of the spring that together, because of the physical laws governing that motion, describe a wave in space. Though we can describe the wave – precisely, mathematically – we cannot capture that actual ‘wave’. We can record it on camera; we could copy it in another spring, or the same spring over time. But what we can’t do is capture the actual wave. Take away the spring, or simply stop its motion, and the wave magically vanishes.
This is how I see consciousness. Not, trivially, ‘brain waves’, though they are one aspect of consciousness – it’s output, maybe its ‘waste’, as heat is from an engine.
The one significant difference is that in consciousness the device (brain) in which this ‘wave’ is occurring is able to monitor itself – at least in terms of some vague abstracted representation of its inner operation. Just as the pressure in a balloon is the vague representation of the motion of the particles it contains, so consciousness is a representation of what’s going on in the brain.
The brain (like the entity it controls) is complex, so it’s no surprise that a representation of it would be complex too – at least one would expect complexity if that representation is to prove useful, but not so complex in use that it becomes so cumbersome it proves use-less.
An over-simplified analogy (for this would not(?) count as consciousness) would be if the spring was made of a network of microchips (retaining the connected elasticity of the spring) that could monitor accelerations and produce an overall vague representation of the action of the spring, as represented by some higher abstract level system (as an IQ figure summarises related but different task performances). What does it feel like to be a micro-chip spring? Would different waveforms emerge as different ‘thoughts’ or mental experiences?
In a sense the wave in the spring is an illusion – there is no ‘wave’ that is independent of the spring’s motion; it has no physical actuality itself, unlike the moving particles of the spring (avoiding any deeper physics and philosophy regarding the particles that make up the spring). Even if a micro-chip spring is monitoring its own (brain) wave activity, there is no actual wave.
Perhaps there is no real consciousness in actuality. As materialists we already accept there is nothing else but the ‘matter’ we are made of (whatever form it takes). Perhaps consciousness is only the residual analysis of the activity of (only part of) the brain, by (only a part of) the brain. So complex, yes, that it fools the entity that is ‘experiencing’ it into feeling it is something else, something additional.
This feeling of something additional seems crucial, and is possibly the cause of the feeling of consciousness, the feeling of what it is like to be something. Where does this feeling of something being additional come from? I think the clue is in the ‘only part’ aspects of what is being perceived and what is doing the perceiving. And I think it is related to the evolutionary process that got us to where we are today; and, significantly, to where we were, whenever we first realised we were conscious.
This ‘awakening’ is one that happens to us as individuals, during development, but it is so far back into our infancy, and maybe back to the early stages of brain emergence and development, in the womb, that at the time we don’t have the language, or the other experiences of self or others, that are required to register it – and certainly not enough to remember it in any senss that is meaningful to an adult. The awakening may happen gradually, or it may be a pretty sharp event, a spark – we simply don’t know.
And this awakening has a parallel in the wider sense of human culture. We have no cultural memory of when we humans (or our non-human ancestors), as individuals, and as communicated among ourselves culturally, became conscious and culturally self-aware.
So, what would it feel like to an entity (trying to avoid anthropomorphic sentiments) that had recently started to monitor its own behaviour, and then realised that, wow!, it can ‘see’ itself monitoring itself!? Wouldn’t it ‘feel’ just like this? Wouldn’t it feel like (given the unity of that feeling) that there is something that it is like to be that entity, to identify with it, to call itself, ‘I’?
Now, think of the micro-chip spring being able to have some autonomous control over its behaviour. Wouldn’t it have to develop strategies for controlling its wider entity that accounted for the fact that it didn’t have, couldn’t have, full and instantaneous control of every aspect of itself. At the limit this is a measurement problem: to monitor itself ‘completely’ it needs to monitor the monitoring system too, which would require more capacity to monitor, which in turn would require monitoring, and so on. Like all biological systems there’s a balance – and we seem to have reached ours, for now. We have limited ‘consciousness’: limited awareness and control of the wider entity that is represented by ‘I’.
A related question: What would it have felt like if our two brain hemisphere’s had been more independent, so that ‘I’ became ‘we-two’? What would that consciousness feel like? And what if we-two shared some of our self-awareness, say, but less of our motor capabilities? Or if our motor capabilities were unified, but our planning systems (our intent) were independent? Maybe evolution would have ditched these latter oddities and settled on a unified consciousness (how would a push-me-pull-you escape from threats?)
The split brain patients give us some clues, but if you ask them they don’t reveal two independent ‘consciousnesses’ – one half of the brain may be independent to some extent, but appears to be sub-consciously independent (i.e active, so not ‘un-conscious’ as in brain dead) – at least that’s how it appears from the outside. I wonder (haven’t quizzed those experienced in this area) if the other brain half is a locked in but otherwise self-aware identity.
As with the wave in the micro-chip spring I think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, and as such can be explained (eventually) by processes in the brain. The hard problem, what then remains of it, is like trying to capture the wave that the spring’s motion describes – or trying to attribute the higher level representation (in the micro-chip spring’s central control/nervous system) of the wave, as if the wave itself actually exists.
Finally I’d like to consider this higher level representation that I think we have, which we call consciousness. I don’t think its anything like as precise and as acute as we often like to think it is. When we talk of memories, when we recall them all the indications are that they consist of nothing more than states in the brain, probably distributed over parts of the brain. Any one memory (e.g. a face) seems to require memory ‘bits’ from many neurons, and many of those neurons may be used in forming other higher level conceptual memories too. We often get confused about memories – someone mentions the name of a person we met once, and we have a vague recollection of their face – but that recollection may be incomplete, or may even contain elements of one or more other people, so that when we meet the person again they are not quite as we remember them. We mis-remember incidents too.
We know to some extent that the act of recollection is itself somewhat an act of re-building, re-remembering, re-enforcing – and in the mush and complexity and chaotic activity of the brain we should know that our thoughts are bound to be pretty random in their content. The amazing thing is that they are precise and accurate enough (over time, shared and compared, recorded and repeatedly re-analysed) to build long standing concepts, ideas, philosophies, sciences, religions.
An additional thought that comes to me here is that this is why Plato conceived his Forms concept – the many actual and messy and very real shapes with, on the whole, three sort of sides, eventually distills out into the pure form of the triangle. It is the pure triangle and the mathematical model of it that is the approximation to messy reality of real near-triangles, rather than real triangles being approximations to pure forms, as if those pure forms exist in any objective reality. All the precise mathematical theory of our science, the assumed infinite precision of the pure maths, is never experienced in actuality. We can hold vague conceptual notions like ‘infinity’ in our heads, but do they represent anything real? We struggle too with zero, nothingness – just ask a physicist about the nothingness of space.
All this gives me the impression (and being a thought in my brain is also fairly vague at this moment, needing further development) that consciousness and its virtual particles, it’s thoughts, are just illusory phenomena. That they are patterns described by actual physical particles in the brain is where the real physical material objectivity lies. Consciousness, as we perceive it, is a representation of that activity, and nothing more.
Kant could critique ‘pure reason’ so easily because it is so insubstantial – there is nothing there in and of itself. All there is is experience. What we think we know about evolution tells us that our ancestors were experiential creatures – experience comes before and is prior to consciousness, and as such is more real in every sense: in the sense above, that consciousness is at most a pattern of behaviour, or a higher level model of that behaviour; and in the sense that evolutionarily our experiential heredity is far more engrained and powerful than our mental heredity. Mentally, on cosmic scales, we are novices. Our parochial view makes it look a big deal. When we consider our genius we have only ourselves to compare. No wonder our view is skewed.
The predominance we have given to reason, thoughts, consciousness, I feel has come about because when we first became aware, that consciousness is what we were most acutely aware of. Our thoughts about our physical experiences seem to show us that those physical experiences are fleeting passing phenomena: they change, moment to moment, and as we age. But our self-awareness unity seems to be the thing that persists, and as such adds to the illusion that it is a thing in itself, rather than a representation of the overall, average, statistically consistent patterns, in a material brain.
This is a review of the points covered in this paper:
Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates by Björn Brembs.
Thanks to Bruno for the link.
The paper dismisses the ‘real’ (metaphysical) free-will of dualism and theism (the soul?), but is more specifically aimed at giving a scientific account of free-will, but one that is not constrained to a completely illusory free-will as suggested by determinism.
It is not as clear as this paper claims that the universe is not deterministic. It might not be, but we as human animals have a specific difficulty in establishing this.
I’m quite happy to say we don’t know what ultimate reality is, if there is an ultimate reality. I’m quite happy to say we can’t be sure that the universe is actually deterministic. But all of science seems to be based on determinism. Well, at least it depends on causality. There is the notion of causality without determinism, but this seems a bit of a cheat. In most respect causation and determinism can be used interchangeably.
This paper seems to be based on the conflation of underlying state of affairs (the universe is deterministic or not) and what humans can deduce from it (to humans the universe is indeterminate).
So throughout I’ll try to distinguish between these:
Determinism, non-determinism – the extent to which fundamentally the universe is deterministic in the sense that any event is caused by one or more other events in a causal chain so that the outcome is determined by prior events. This is really an ontological position, about what the universe is and how it behaves. There are variations.
Determinacy, indeterminacy – the extent to which any one part of a deterministic system can or cannot know all about (and possibly may know nothing about) some other part. This determinacy is essentially an epistemological notion, in human terms, or an informational notion in a more general sense.
2 – The rejection of determinism
I don’t see any reason to suppose that current science demonstrates that the universe is non-deterministic. Section 2 is not very convincing in its rejection of determinism since at least some of the examples specifically do not refute determinism. The ‘chance’ aspects of quantum mechanics are not unanimously agreed to be non-deterministic – though our limited understanding of it may give us the impression it is non-deterministic. Double slit experiments do not speak to determinism or non-determinism – they only imply that our models (wave v particle) are insufficient alone to describe such phenomena.
Even Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does not refute determinism as clearly as some people make out. Determinism isn’t about being able to actually measure what will happen, it’s about what does happen as the result of an event that occurs. There are all sorts of details that are confusing about the ‘measurement’ of a particles position and velocity, to do with what is actually doing the measuring (and lots of nonsense about it being a conscious being, as opposed to mere interaction with anything, including other particles).
The real issues of determinism are not to do with quantum mechanics. There’s the possibility that quantum mechanics phenomena are deterministic. The problem is more fundamental than current science can explain. For example, if this universe is deterministic then was it too ’caused’ or is it just deterministic from the Big Bang onwards. An infinite regress of deterministic universes seems to be unpalatable for some reason, but I can’t figure out why. It’s not as if we have direct experience of anything outside our universe to come to any opinion about whether infinite regress is de rigueur for universal creation systems or not. We’re simply in the dark on all of this.
So, what we are left with is that the universe appears deterministic, and much of our classical science uses that fact – and brain science is classical science down to the level of molecules and the chemistry of the brain. There’s no convincing argument that quantum mechanics is truly non-deterministic, as opposed to simply being indeterminate. Applying quantum ideas to brain science is just as much a shot in the dark as the ‘metaphysical’ free-will it is supposed to avoid. deterministic models are sufficient for brain science, until such time as real evidence to the contrary appears
3. Behavioural variability as an adaptive trait
Some scholars have resorted to quantum uncertainty in the brain as the solution, providing the necessary discontinuity in the causal chain of events. This is not unrealistic, as there is evidence that biological organisms can evolve to take advantage of quantum effects. For instance, plants use quantum coherence when harvesting light in their photosynthetic complexes.
There are forms of indeterminism that are still causal. I’m not sure where this discontinuity in the causal chain might be.
This doesn’t do anything but introduce the above uncertainties in our understanding of physics, but this doesn’t refute determinism at this level. If some quantum event occurs in a plant, and that causes a molecule in the plant to absorb some light with the consequential result of photosynthesis in action, then that quantum event ’caused’, ‘determined’ that the reaction would take place. What quantum uncertainty fails to do in such cases is explain how anything is remotely certain or predictable.
But to attribute this to free-will is no different than talking about sodium ions. Whether one particular sodium ion makes it through a sodium channel in a particular neuron will ‘determine’ whether that neuron fires or not – and if that particular neuron constitutes a tipping point in some micro decision that the brain makes, then that micro-decision will fire or not, and that in turn will contribute to the way a larger decision occurs. Quantum events are so far below the level at which we can analyse human decisions that for any particular decision they are not worth considering. There is sufficient indeterminacy in any classical assessment of the brain without having to look for quantum effects to explain indeterminacy.
Quantum events are a fundamental part of electronics, but you can bet that most proponents of free-will very specifically do not attribute consciousness and free-will to electronic systems – i.e. computers.
Moreover, and more importantly, the pure chance of quantum indeterminism alone is not what anyone would call ‘freedom’. ‘For surely my actions should be caused because I want them to happen for one or more reasons rather that they happen by chance’. This is precisely where the biological mechanisms underlying the generation of behavioural variability can provide a viable concept of free will.
Part of the problem here is that this paper is essentially re-defining free-will in a materialistic scientific sense, and yet still requires a ‘degree’ of freedom to describe personal agency. But on the whole this paper still makes ‘real’ free-will just as illusory as is described by determinism.
Biologists need not resort to quantum mechanics to understand that deterministic behaviour can never be evolutionarily stable. Evolution is a competitive business and predictability is one thing that will make sure that a competitor will be out of business soon. There are many illuminating examples of selection pressures favouring unpredictability…
‘Unpredictable’ to who? To the animals that are in the middle of the evolutionary process. The selection pressures are deterministic pressures that drive individual animals behaviour, but those behaviours can still be adequately indeterminate to other animals, and, to a great extent, to themselves. This is a fine example of conflating non-determinism with the indeterminacy of knowledge (information) to an individual entity.
Escape behaviours are analysed at a macro level of a complex individual, and at best the response of bulk areas of the brain of the a complex individual. The C-start example is illustrating the causal complexity of events – the snake does ’cause’ or ‘determine’ that the fish responds to the snake’s advantage. This is hardly a refutation of determinism.
Note that if the Mauthner cell was to respond to ‘randomness’ then its response would be non-deterministic, and the fish would not respond with the C-start behaviour so predictably – the snake has learned (in the evolutionary sense) to take advantage of that predictable response, the determinacy of the outcome of an action. The whole notion of non-determinism is its own demise, or else nothing would be predictable at all. The unpredictability of behaviour we find in biological systems can be sufficiently described by indeterminacy of complex classical systems.
All the examples in section 3 are examples of how deterministic systems are subject to influences that to those systems are indeterminate; so looked at in isolation it looks like the system has some unpredictability. But that does not mean it isn’t part of some wider system were all the component events are ‘determined’ by prior events.
In evolutionary terms it is put as random mutation and natural selection. But here the ‘random’ mutation is only apparently random to us, because of the vast complexity and the inaccessibility of the DNA that is mutating. But for any DNA molecule that mutates there will be an obvious causal event at the molecular level that caused that molecule to mutate (e.g. chemically driven mutation), or it might result from some atomic decay process, maybe triggered by a passing subatomic particle. Some of these physical events at this level are at the forefront of particle physics, but do not as yet refute a deterministic mutation, and so do not imply that evolution is a non-deterministic process.
The best adapted survive (the natural selection bit) because of causal events in their environment (their environment includes their own bodies; and brains, for entities that have them).
4. Brains are in control of variability
These observations suggest that there must be mechanisms by which brains control the variability they inject into their motor output. Some components of these mechanisms have been studied. For instance, tethered flies can be trained to reduce the range of the variability in their turning manoeuvres.
Well, then the training has causally determined that their behaviour should change, by mechanisms relating to how all animals with brains learn (see Eric Kandel and others on memory, learning, conditioning).
Variability is not shown to be non-deterministic by this section. In fact it gives some good examples to support the deterministic world view – even though the determinism is many levels removed, to the extent that most animal behaviour patterns are statistical outcomes of extremely complex causal systems.
5. What are the neural mechanisms generating behavioural variability?
Instead, a nonlinear signature was found, suggesting that fly brains operate at critically, meaning that they are mathematically unstable, which, in turn, implies an evolved mechanism rendering brains highly susceptible to the smallest differences in initial conditions and amplifying them exponentially [63]. Put differently, fly brains have evolved to generate unpredictable turning manoeuvres.
Instability is not non-determinism. It just means that a particular system or part of a system is finely tuned to respond (be caused to change) by small changes to its inputs (its environment). It is still a deterministic system, just less predictable to other systems nearby, particularly those trying to predict the outcome based on immediate stimulus alone. Of course there are all the precursor developments that put the system into that unstable state. The various learning and conditioning examples given by Eric Kandel illustrate the variability of neuronal systems depending on the frequency and type of stimulus. This does not mean that within these neurons the processes are not deterministic.
6. Determinism versus indeterminism is a false dichotomy
Together with Hume, most would probably subscribe to the notion that ’tis impossible to admit of any medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity’ [75]. For example, Steven Pinker (1997, p. 54) concurs that ‘A random event does not fit the concept of free will any more than a lawful one does, and could not serve as the long-sought locus of moral responsibility’ [76].
OK.
However, to consider chance and lawfulness as the two mutually exclusive sides of our reality is only one way to look at the issue.
The problem here is that this paper is confusing ‘determinism’, the underlying mechanism that ‘drives’ events, with ‘indeterminacy’, the inability of any system (including but not restricted to humans) to ‘determine’ or predict what a particular outcome will be.
The unstable nonlinearity, which makes brains exquisitely sensitive to small perturbations, may be the behavioural correlate of amplification mechanisms such as those described for the barrel cortex [74].
OK…but…
This nonlinear signature eliminates the two alternatives, which both would run counter to free will, namely complete (or quantum) randomness and pure, Laplacian determinism.
No it does not! The stability or instability of particular mechanisms only relates to how sensitive a system is to being ‘determined’ to change by deterministic precursors, it’s stimulus inputs, and its current state in detail. This has been a problem for psychology – the treatment of the brain as a black box. Various stimuli can illicit the same bahaviour, and the same stimuli can illicit different behaviour – even in the same subject – because there is insufficient knowledge about what’s going on inside.
These represent opposite and extreme endpoints in discussions of brain functioning, which hamper the scientific discussion of free will.
They only hamper the science in that many philosophers and theists want there to be some magical ‘real’ free-will that is outside the causal reach of a deterministic universe, and those philosophers and theists are in some cases getting involved in the debate (Bill Klemm being an example of a theist scientist who lets his theism dictate his view in this regard). So this issue of the nature of free-will at a more fundamental level is important, and ongoing.
Instead, much like evolution itself, a scientific concept of free will comes to lie between chance and necessity, with mechanisms incorporating both randomness and lawfulness.
Here the term ‘chance’ can just mean trivial ‘inditerminacy’, but it does not refute philosophical determinism upon which all science is based.
The Humean dichotomy of chance and necessity is invalid for complex processes such as evolution or brain functioning.
In the sense that the distinction is unimportant once the general notion of determinism is accepted and the science moves on, regardless of what some philosophers and theists want to be the case. Brain science can proceed with a deterministic model – it can hardly be said that this model has been exhausted.
Such phenomena incorporate multiple components that are both lawful and indeterminate.
This seems more correct, using the term: ‘indeterminate’. It can be said that it is all lawful (obeying physical laws) and as such any part of it, and the interaction of that part with any other, produces a determinate outcome; but we cannot determine that outcome, primarily because of the complexity.
This breakdown of the determinism/indeterminism dichotomy …
The dichotomy is not determinism/indeterminacy, but determinism/non-determinism. It’s perfectly reasonable in a deterministic universe for it to have parts that are indeterminate to other parts – i.e. one part cannot ‘know’ about another part until such time as the second part impacts on (‘determines’ change in) the first part.
Stochasticity is not a nuisance, or a side effect of our reality. Evolution has shaped our brains to implement ‘stochasticity’ in a controlled way, injecting variability ‘at will’. Without such an implementation, we would not exist.
Yes, fine – if ‘stochastic just means unpredictably variable to us. This is not refuting determinism.
A scientific concept of free will cannot be a qualitative concept. The question is not any more ‘do we have free will?’; the questions is now: ‘how much free will do we have?’; ‘how much does this or that animal have?’. Free will becomes a quantitative trait.
This is really about the extent to which an animal (or any system) is autonomous, in the sense of the extent to which complex processes inside it (mostly its brain, for an animal) ‘determine’ its behaviour. For a more autonomous system it is less immediately dependent on its environment for its behaviour than is a less autonomous one. But both are completely deterministic in that all the processes on the inside and outside are governed by deterministic physical laws – always depending of course on the extent to which low level determinism actually does prevail.
7. Initiating activity: actions versus responses
This is more about the extent to which systems are indeterminate, not about the underlying determinism.
8. Freedom of choice
For instance, isolated leech nervous systems chose either a swimming motor programme or a crawling motor programme to an invariant electrical stimulus [78–80]. Every time the stimulus is applied, a set of neurons in the leech ganglia goes through a so far poorly understood process of decision-making to arrive either at a swimming or at a crawling behaviour. The stimulus situation could not be more perfectly controlled than in an isolated nervous system, excluding any possible spurious stimuli reaching sensory receptors unnoticed by the experimenter. In fact, even hypothetical ‘internal stimuli’, generated somehow by the animal must in this case be coming from the nervous system itself, rendering the concept of ‘stimulus’ in this respect rather useless.
This is expressing only how difficult it is to account for actions within neurons. The inner action of a neuron, with all its internal processes controlling the expression of neurotransmitters, the migration of triggers up and down the inner pathways, such as those determining gene expression and inhibition, all the outside details of what allows the action potential to fire, the stimuli that determine how and when it grows synapses in the local learning memory process, etc. A neuron is already a complex system. It doesn’t matter how precise an external stimulus may be, the subsequent outcomes will be variable. But that does not mean that the countless molecular events going on inside and around the neuron are not deterministic.
Yet, under these ‘carefully controlled experimental circumstances, the animal behaves as it damned well pleases’ (Harvard Law of Animal Behaviour) [34].
This itself is just an expression of the indeterminacy of the measured system, not that it actually does have ‘real’ free-will, or that the underlying physics is non-determinate.
Seymour Benzer, one of the founders of Neurogenetics, captured this phenomenon in the description of his first phototaxis experiments in 1967: ‘ … if you put flies at one end of a tube and a light at the other end, the flies will run to the light. But I noticed that not every fly will run every time. If you separate the ones that ran or did not run and test them again, you find, again, the same percentage will run. But an individual fly will make its own decision’.
Distinguish ‘real’ free-will from indeterminacy. That each fly ‘will make its own decision’ is an expression of this indeterminacy, not only in the minds of the experimenters, but also to the fly. The fly does not ‘know’ or decide of its own ‘real’ free-will – it simply ‘behaves’ in accordance to the multitude of complex deterministic operations that are going on inside its tiny little brain, and within that brain’s 100,000 neurons. One hundred thousand neurons in a fruit fly! How the hell is a simple light box experiment supposed to expose the determinism or non-determinism of the underlying countless number of molecules within each of those neurons to an extent that would make the fly behaviour ‘non-determinate’? The behaviour is only ‘indeterminate’ due to this complexity.
All these experiments are bulk property statistical experiments, at least on some scale. When trying to measure the behaviour of flies with a light box the outcome is bound to be a statistical measure of the indeterminate behaviour of countless deterministic events at the scale of the neuron, and below that at the molecule, and below that of the atomic and subatomic activity.
John Searle has described free will as the belief ‘that we could often have done otherwise than we in fact did’ [92]. Taylor & Dennett cite the maxim ‘I could have done otherwise’ [93]. Clearly, leeches and flies could and can behave differently in identical environments.
But the crucial point here is that they could not know that they could have done otherwise, or that they would have done.
In some cases we may loose nearly all our autonomy. A man falls off a cliff and smashes on the rocks below. I say, “Wow, once he started falling, did he have to die?” and John Searle says, “He could have done otherwise.” – What? he could have used his free-will to fly back up to the cliff? We acknowledge some obvious restrictions to our free-will.
In other cases what’s going on when a bunch of neurons spark around in our heads and ‘decide’ to raise our left hand or right hand, the notion that we ‘could have done otherwise’ doesn’t really capture the internal complexity of that event, and certainly doesn’t demonstrate ‘real’ free-will, and certainly doesn’t refute determinism.
While some argue that unpredictable (or random) choice does not qualify for their definition of free will [2], it is precisely the freedom from the chains of causality that most scholars see as a crucial prerequisite for free will.
This confuses indeterminacy, chance (whatever that is) and ‘real’ free-will – unless of course we re-define free-will just to mean outcomes of complex deterministic yet indeterminate systems.
9. Consciousness and freedom
It thus is no coincidence that we all feel that we possess a certain degree of freedom of choice.
Because we cannot determine all the micro-deterministic events that drive our internal decision making processes. It’s quite plausible, and consistent with classical deterministic physics, that a system that is limited-self-aware (has some data about itself, but cannot monitor most of itself, particularly its central control system) that it has some representation of itself as spontaneously making decisions.
It makes sense that depriving humans of such freedom is frequently used as punishment and the deprived do invariably perceive this limited freedom as undesirable.
We only feel this is the case because we have innate (determined by evolution and development) physiological drives that emerge as emotional desires to have freedom of motion. One feature that distinguishes most animals from plants is that they must move to survive – to hunt and to avoid being hunted. It seems a good evolutionary adaptation to make restriction of movement an undesirable situation that the whole body fights against – again expressed in some animals, particular humans, as an emotional discomfort in having freedom of movement restricted. But again, not refuting determinism
The concept that we can decide to behave differently even under identical circumstances underlies not only our justice systems.
The circumstances are never the same! Every time an organism responds to some stimulus it changes the organism, which, in whatever minor degree it may be, has the potential to change the response next time the stimulus is applied. And all the time, time is ticking by and the environment is changing.
But be careful, because this link to justice is part of the problem – our illusion that we have ‘real’ free-will can lead to injustice by attributing all responsibility only to the individual. Thankfully there is at least some consideration of extenuating circumstances in many cases – at least in sentencing if not in judgement of guilt.
Electoral systems, our educational systems, parenting and basically all other social systems also presuppose behavioural variability and at least a certain degree of freedom of choice.
This tends to our desire for freedom in that it allows our complex brains a psychological freedom. Many people do question the extent to which democracy implies real freedom (and even question the notion of freedom). It may be that its greatest importance is that it makes us feel free, so satisfying our psychological and physiological desire for freedom of movement – which translated into more abstract terms used by humans means political freedom.
The data reviewed above make clear that the special property of our brain that provides us with this freedom surely is independent of consciousness. Consciousness is not a necessary prerequisite for a scientific concept of free will.
This is a good point – but note that ‘free-will’ here is the re-defined free-will, which from my perspective is still subject to deterministic physical mechanisms. But I agree they are distinct. A system can be autonomous (free) to some degree without being conscious. A tossed stone is free to fly through the air and fall to the ground – but of course this then begs the question of what the ‘free’ in free-will really means. Can a system lack all autonomy (not sure that can be the case) and still be conscious? Not so sure about that one.
We sometimes have to work extremely hard to constrain our behavioural variability in order to behave as predictably as possible.
Yes. Which shows that our will is not as free as we would like it to be. Which begs the question, for the religious, that if God wanted to give us free-will, why is it so un-free from deterministic constraints?
Therefore, the famous experiments of Benjamin Libet and others since then [2,4,5,98–100] only serve to cement the rejection of the metaphysical concept of free will and are not relevant for the concept proposed here.
Here the ‘metaphysical concept of free-will’ is referring to what I’ve been calling ‘real’ free-will. But Libet’s experiments do not cement the rejection of ‘real’ free-will, and I’d have thought they were of interest to this re-defined ‘scientific’ free-will, in that they refer to the timing of brain events and choices made, and the conscious awareness of those choices.
Conscious reflection, meditation or discussion may help with difficult decisions, but this is not even necessarily the case. The degree to which our conscious efforts can affect our decisions is therefore central to any discussion about the degree of responsibility our freedom entails, but not to the freedom itself.
This is the interesting point when it comes to responsibility and the autonomy of an individual. If two men are walking towards me and one attacks me and the other then defends me, then I can attribute immediate causation (identify the most significant entities in the causal chain of events). I can say that the action of one and not the other determined that I had a nose bleed. But there may be many prior causes that determined why I was struck by the first man, and this is where responsibility and determinisms and the extent of autonomy come into play.
10. The Self and Agency
In contrast to consciousness, an important part of a scientific concept of free will is the concept of ‘self’. It is important to realize that the organism generates an action itself, spontaneously. In chemistry, spontaneous reactions occur when there is a chemical imbalance. The system is said to be far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Biological organisms are constantly held far from equilibrium, they are considered open thermodynamic systems. However, in contrast to physical or chemical open systems, some of the spontaneous actions initiated by biological organisms help keep the organism away from equilibrium. Every action that promotes survival or acquires energy sustains the energy flow through the open system, prompting Georg Litsche to define biological organisms as a separate class of open systems (i.e. ‘subjects’; [101]). Because of this constant supply of energy, it should not be surprising to scientists that actions can be initiated spontaneously and need not be released by external stimuli. In controlled situations where there cannot be sufficient causes outside the organism to make the organism release the particular action, the brain initiates behaviour from within, potentially using a two-stage process as described above. The boy ceases to play and jumps up. This sort of impulsivity is a characteristic of children every parent can attest to. We do not describe the boy’s action with ‘some hidden stimuli made him jump’—he jumped of his own accord. The jump has all the qualities of a beginning. The inference of agency in ourselves, others and even inanimate objects is a central component of how we think. Assigning agency requires a concept of self. How does a brain know what is self?
This paragraph describes the illusion of self and free-will quite well. That the processes that initiate action are sometimes predominantly, and on a small time scale maybe wholly, attributable to internal processes, is the cause of our illusion. Those internal processes are still deterministic at the lower levels, with various collections of internal events coming together to trigger an externally visible behaviour. It’s the fact that we the observers, and sometimes the subject that is performing the behaviour, are not aware of the precursor internal causes that it looks so spontaneous to us – and this is the root of attribution of the concept of free-will. Free-will seems more like a psychological perception than a reality.
One striking characteristic of actions is that an animal normally does not respond to the sensory stimuli it causes by its own actions. The best examples are that it is difficult to tickle oneself…
This is still a comparison of outcomes from deterministic sequences of events. It relates to the complexity of the system and the availability of internal feedback that makes tickling oneself different than being tickled by someone else. If you doubt this distinction then look up Dead Hand (definition 1).
Thus, in order to understand actions, it is necessary to introduce the term self. The concept of self necessarily follows from the insight that animals and humans initiate behaviour by themselves.
As a general convenience in many circumstances I’d agree that this is a good model for such complex systems as humans with the degree of complex indeterminate autonomous behaviour we exhibit.
It would make no sense to assign a behaviour to an organism if any behavioural activity could, in principle, be traced back by a chain of causations to the origin of the universe.
I would agree with this to some extent. In the mugger example I gave above I don’t have to trace causes back to the Big Bang to determine that the most predominant immediate cause of my pain was the mugger, not my defender. This is simple cause and effect, nothing to do with agency in the free-will sense.
In my house the circuit breaker keeps tripping. I discover that unplugging my fridge prevents this, but unplugging all other appliances doesn’t. I blame the fridge and replace it. The problem persists with the new fridge. On further investigation I find the fault is with the wall socket behind the fridge – plug anything there and the breaker trips. This illustrates the problem with the simplistic notion of free-will and personal responsibility. Sometimes we do have to look further than the immediate agent for the behaviour we witness. It might save hanging the wrong man – or in my case replacing a working fridge.
An animal or human being is the agent causing a behaviour, as long as no sufficient causes for this activity to occur are coming from outside the organism.
And here lies the tricky bit. Sometimes those apparent spontaneous and ‘freely-willed’ actions of animals and people are pre-determined by circumstances that conspire to form the decision making process we are witnessing in the present. We could blame a drug user for ‘choosing’ to do drugs – but if such a person is from an abusive drug-taking family then what would we expect them to do? That a man born and raised in Iran is a strident Muslim need be no surprise to us in the West – though Christians don’t necessarily see their route to Christianity being so conformal to prior causes. That a child spontaneously leaps around or shouts odd words might be an indication he has Tourette syndrome, whereas some observers might think him rude. Many human undesirable behaviours previously attributed to free-will have subsequently been attributed to specific conditions beyond the control of the subject. The free-will model – particularly the religious one associated with sinning – isn’t that helpful a model.
Agency is assigned to entities who initiate actions themselves. Agency is crucial for moral responsibility. Behaviour can have good or bad consequences. It is the agent for whom the consequences matter the most and who can be held responsible for them.
And so it is believed by Libertarians, and fundamentalist theists alike. There are no limits to how this simplistic view of our animal nature can be used to limit our freedoms, in the very act of declaring them free.
11. Why still use the term free-will today?
By providing empirical data from invertebrate model systems supporting a materialistic model of free will, I hope to at least start a thought process that abandoning the metaphysical concept of free will does not automatically entail that we are slaves of our genes and our environment, forced to always choose the same option when faced with the same situation.
I do think the ‘materialistic model of free will’ shows the ‘real’ (metaphysical) free-will model to be illusory – or at least illustrates it not to be so straight forward we can go on attributing blame and dishing out punishment willy-nilly. But I do think we can accept quite easily that we are slaves to our genes and environment – but to an indeterminate extent that makes this particular piece of knowledge non-constraining psychologically. As put earlier in the article, but not quite expressed in this sense, it’s the indeterminate nature of games that make them interesting. Flipping a double headed coin is not as interesting a game as flipping a normal coin – and in the case of the latter it makes no difference how deterministic the outcome is from a point of view of the physical laws of the universe, because to us it’s indeterminate. So, we cannot say we are always ‘forced to always choose the same option’, because we are not – the options are determined, but indeterminate to us: psychologically this is free-will. We may be constrained by determinism to make a specific choice on a specific occasion, but the same determinism, effected by other subsequent states, may result in a different choice next time. This time based indeterminacy makes arguments that ‘I could have chosen otherwise’ quite meaningless.
In fact, I am confident I have argued successfully that we would not exist if our brains were not able to make a different choice even in the face of identical circumstances and history.
We have not the slightest clue about rerunning history, but if determinism pertains then history cannot be rerun, but if it could then we’d end up with the same outcome. Only if the universe is truly non-deterministic could it be said that running the universe again would result in different outcomes – but doing so would result in a different universe altogether, at least one in which the person wanting to try this would not exists, and probably the earth would not exist either. If quantum indeterminacy was at work then even with the same starting state we would end up with quite a different universe. The only sense in which this notion of rerunning history and making different decisions makes sense is in fact if ‘real’ free-will was something above and beyond and independent of the otherwise deterministic material reality of the universe.
In this article, I suggest re-defining the familiar free will in scientific terms rather than giving it up, only because of the historical baggage all its connotations carry with them. One may argue that ‘volition’ would be a more suitable term, less fraught with baggage. However, the current connotations of volition as ‘willpower’ or the forceful, conscious decision to behave against certain motivations render it less useful and less general a term than free will.
Fair points. Deciding what to call it is tricky, given the baggage.
Finally, there may be a societal value in retaining free will as a valid concept, since encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating [103]
But this is a misconception about what is implied by it, as illustrated by Jesus and Mo. And if determinism is the case, and free-will is illusory, then is it really scientifically sound to deny this because some people will entertain this misconception and think they can cheat?
Look at it this way. If I decide to save a drowning man then I was driven to it, deterministically, by all be genetic, developmental, personal societal history and the current state of my brain as I weigh up the danger to myself and the pleas of the drowning man – my action is determined in that sense. But if I say, ah well, what does it matter, I cannot help leaving him to drown – then it’s determined that I do say that, and yes, this then is the determined outcome. Whichever action I take is the determined action. And it may well be that initially the acquisition of determinism as a philosophy of the mind does lead to the outcome that the man drowns. But then so could the ‘real’ free-will model, in that it can be used as an excuse too: he shouldn’t have been messing about near dangerous water, it’s his fault he’s drowning. And in all this either excuse may be a psychological mask for a fear that is preventing me saving the drowning man – my brain deterministically invented excuses either way.
In the end we just do what we do. The psychological approach we have towards it is itself determined. The point is that it is indeterminate to us, so we go on appearing to make choices, and apparently sometimes rationalising those choices later, and that rationalisation is itself a deterministic process going on in the brain.
So the extent to which this entity, me, is autonomous and can make decisions, seems to be down to influences that drive me one way of another. That I will change is inevitable – until my component parts dies and distribute so that there is no longer any value in the concept of ‘me’. That I will change in a way that suits my biological drives is not under my control, beyond this degree of autonomy. I cannot help, it seems, but view the world this way, and go on making the case for determinism this way. Unless this entity, me, is persuaded to some other point of view – entirely deterministically though as yet indeterminate to me.
I no longer agree that ‘ ‘free will’ is (like ‘life’ and ‘love’) one of those culturally useful notions that become meaningless when we try to make them ‘scientific’ ‘ [96]. The scientific understanding of common concepts enrich our lives, they do not impoverish them, as some have argued [100]. This is why scientists have and will continue to try and understand these concepts scientifically or at least see where and how far such attempts will lead them. It is not uncommon in science to use common terms and later realize that the familiar, intuitive understanding of these terms may not be all that accurate. Initially, we thought atoms were indivisible. Today we do not know how far we can divide matter. Initially, we thought species were groups of organisms that could be distinguished from each other by anatomical traits. Today, biologists use a wide variety of species definitions. Initially, we thought free will was a metaphysical entity. Today, I am joining a growing list of colleagues who are suggesting it is a quantitative, biological trait, a natural product of physical laws and biological evolution, a function of brains, maybe their most important one.
Yep. That’s more like it. The trouble is Björn, you can’t help it. You are driven to this point of view by the deterministic causal universe.
Father Edward Daly is in favour of relaxing the celibacy rules.
As an atheist I’m not too bothered what the rules of the club of Roman Catholic priests might be, but as a humanist I’d support their freedom of choice to be celibate or not as their personal religious conscience takes them.
But there’s something hypocritical about a bishop who thinks the rules should change for the expedient reason of encouraging more priests by the relaxation of the celibacy rule. This is another instance of what in secular terms is common sense, but in theistic terms is a denial of what the church considers essential church dogma. I wonder what the bishop thinks about contraception. Is he equally flexible on that score? My suggestions on that come shortly, if you’ll pardon the expression.
Well, according to the article the rule was brought in for both spiritual and pragmatic reasons, “Historians have contended that the move was partly for spiritual reasons, but was mainly to ensure estates held by clerics would pass back to the church upon their deaths rather than to offspring.” so no change in convenient policy making then, as long as you can attach some holy reasoning to it. So, what spiritual reason does Father Daly have for his proposed change that might excuse his earthly one? “..under the guidance of the holy spirit…” Well as a catholic it appears he still has access to the hot line to god and is waiting for a call that contains the answer.
I find it odd that the holy spirit works this way and gives such varied messages to so many different religious listeners. It’s as if the messages are encrypted and each theist has his own decryption key which coincidentally provides a specifically different but to them coherent message for each listener.
The move by the Vatican to make allowances to Anglican marrieds to join the RC church reminds me of the skulduggery that has sometimes plagued the football transfer market. Anglican priests are offered a bung of non-celibacy to make the transfer.
A say again, from a secular view all these pragmatic changes make perfect sense. But to push so many church rules as spiritual dogmatic requirements, as essentials to the faith, for years, centuries even, and then to change them for non-spiritual reasons of convenience, just highlights the bollocks that is the RC church anyway.
So, if you’re a relaxed Roman Catholic and you find some rule particularly inconvenient, write to your bishop and suggest that you would like it changed because it is a bit of an inconvenience to you; but promise you will wait for a call from the holy spirit in the expectation that a spiritual reason will be provided in due course. For example, a condom could be considered a symbolic representation of your celibacy: you’re not shagging a women but cloaking your penis in a holy shroud. With luck, in time, the Vatican will come around to the idea that this symbolic representation should become a literal one, just as a wafer actually becomes the body of Christ, and wine his blood. Then you’ll be able to add real spiritual ecstasy to your very mortal human experience.
And, a bunus: that’ll solve the problem of AIDS in Africa! And, the RC church gets all the credit! Result!
I tell you, this theological stuff is easy. I sometimes wish I were religious. Making up holy shit is great fun.
Stephen Law is to debate William Lane Craig on “Does God Exist?”.
Some time ago Richard Carrier was lured into a debate with Muslim theists which was supposed to propose something like “We can prove God exists”, but at the last minute was changed to “We cannot prove God exists” (can’t remember the details). Carrier went from looking at an easy ride to being knocked out by a sucker punch because he played their game. His opener at the actual event should have been, “I concede we cannot prove God exists, so my opponents win the debate. Now, let’s get down to some interesting points about philosophy and science: this is why I don’t believe in God.”
The title of this debate pretty neutral, but I’d recommend a similar tactic with WLC: that SL doesn’t get into playing WLC’s game, or even necessarily trying to rebut his points. He should simply present his own case, pretty much ignore WLC, and just dismiss his argument totally with fundamental philosophy.
One of WLC’s moves is to concentrate on the ‘failure’ of science to disprove God’s existence, as though atheists think that possible or necessary.
The key points for me are as follows…
We humans have found ourselves to be thinking beings, and this awareness appears to have been sprung upon us some few thousand years ago, at least as far back as we can tell from philosophical and religious writings and artifacts. And with the hindsight of evolution this thinking capacity appears to be a recent acquisition, and we’re not as good at it as WLC likes to think he is, particularly with regard to the metaphysics of things outside our common experience.
The only tools we find provide knowledge consistent over wide areas of our understanding of reality are all tools of science. And science can demonstrate many instances where introspective thinking and the invention of fanciful theistic explanations of events are woefully incorrect and often incoherent. Whatever we think reality might be our only route to it is through science. That someone believes there is a God has no bearing whatsoever on the actual existence of a God, no matter how inventive their logic, because there logic will always come back to the dependence on the presupposition that there is a God – to do the revealing, to inspire or command the authoring of religious texts.
If there’s any proving to be done, or any evidence required, the responsibility is entirely on the theist to provide it. Everything we do come to know about this universe shouts out at us that there is some causal universe that conforms to various patterns, which we understand as the laws of physics. If theists like WLC want to take a pop the limitations of science, then he has to accept that these very limitations apply to him too – he cannot demonstrate a superior capacity to know stuff.
These laws are so pervasive, so in-your-face, every moment of every day conforms to them – except, supposedly, with respect to God, astrology, ESP and a few other unsubstantiated ideas. These latter beliefs are the exceptions – but where is the evidence to support them?
Because they are the exceptions the null hypothesis is that everything conforms to the laws of physics, just as we find, evidentially, empirically. Even our own existence, according to evolution, conforms to these laws; and what’s more, shows us that our predecessors were empirical sensory animals. Our cognitive abilities appear to lie on the same continuum that our physical attributes do, from our evolutionary past. Our particular self-aware introspective cognition is such a late addition we should be very wary of supposing it to be the pinnacle of creation, the precise and acute tool that WLC thinks his mind is, rather than a fallible tool, a temporary blip in an evolutionary history of one particular species. Our intellect appears to be just one more product of evolution, with a primary purpose of helping us survive. There’s no reason to believe that it has any greater capacity than that, no particular reason that it should give us access to some metaphysical supernatural – except to the extent that this very limited intellect mistakenly thinks we can.
These other ideas, these metaphysical speculations, constitute the alternative hypotheses. They have never been demonstrated, with either rationally sound argument or substantial evidence. They remain unsupportable, though irrationally believed to be true. The null hypothesis, that everything conforms to whatever our understanding of physics is, or comes to be, remains intact.
WLC can dress up his arguments all he likes. He can complain that atheists cannot disprove God as long as he likes to hear his own voice profess it – but that’s irrelevant. He misses the point of science entirely. He doesn’t get that science shows us the limitations of our brains to reason about the inaccessible without supporting evidence; and in doing so overestimates his own capacity to know things he claims are true. WLC is just pissing against the wind – and his followers haven’t noticed this because they are too busy admiring his rhetorical big dick.
I do hope (against the odds) that SL doesn’t get bogged down in his favourite ‘problem of evil’ argument. It’s unlikely to survive the irrationality of WLC. Though the problem of evil as dealt with by SL’s ‘God of Eth’ may be convincing to rational minds, it won’t make a dent on the minds of believers if they don’t want it to.
SL should stick to basic philosophy and our current understanding of science. He should call WLC out on the presuppositions that underpin WLC’s otherwise persuasive rhetoric (persuasive to the gullible at least). SL should be thorough in his philsophy and should not try to debate theology. He should just ignore any temptation to try to win the debate and be content with letting his rational arguments land on a few theistic yet open ears.
Fingers crossed.
Update: coincidentally appropriate Jesus and Mo cartoon. WLC thinks he knows more than he can, as do many theists. But to be fair, I’m not a professional philosopher either, so who am I to judge WLC, or my own philosophical capabilities. We have to remain sceptical about our own ability to know stuff – not something WLC seems to suffer from.
You wonder if you have free-will. You think you have a choice, “Should I type and ‘x’ next, or a ‘y’?” You decide on ‘y’ and type it. So, you have free-will?
Your typing of x or y does not demonstrate free-will, only the feeling of free-will. That we have free-will may seem obvious, but we must challenge the obvious, as we do with everything we investigate in science – Quantum Mechanics is hardly obvious, but the evidence dissuades us from denying it. Though it may feel obvious to us that we are performing acts of free-will it isn’t actually clear that we are – not in the sense that we commonly understand free-will.
What you are describing, when saying, “I choose to type ‘y’ ” is decision making; and any computer, and even a fridge thermostat, makes decisions. So decision making is compatible with the illusory free-will model of human behaviour.
The Nature of the Illusion
If you were an automaton that responded to external and internal stimuli in accordance with the laws of physics, but part of your brain activity hid the complexity of these interactions to a great extent, what would it feel like when your brain involuntarily announced it was to make a choice, and then made one entirely by causal means? It would feel like you had free-will and freely made the choice? How would you distinguish the difference between this causal deterministic system and one that had the traditional free-will? Any reality of free-will falls out of reach because you can’t distinguish it from the actions of an automaton that has only limited access to its own internal processes and has evolved to think in terms of free-will.
We don’t have any difficulty acknowledging that a tennis racket is not part of us. But it very soon becomes subsumed into our mental feeling as being an ‘extension’ of us when we are in a game.
For some people they become the car they drive. I’ve often found I can read the ‘body language’ of other cars on the road, even if the driver is obscured by reflections on the windscreen. And I’ve been told by other people that they experience this too. Because we can’t easily explain why we feel we are so in tune with a mechanical system doesn’t mean it’s not a mechanical system.
What if that system is our own brain-body system? Since we’ve grown up to become familiar with it, would it be surprising to think that we feel we are it, it is us? Would it be surprising that free-will could be just some means by which an organism interacts with its environment and its own self – an efficient means of monitoring and control that avoids the need to monitor every little detail when trying to predict what will happen next and what to do next?
Some might say that if we can’t distinguish the difference, then it doesn’t matter, let’s call it free-will. Well, most of the time the difference doesn’t matter. Those that think free-will is illusory don’t suddenly shake off the free-will feeling in their daily lives. If it’s such an ingrained psychological phenomenon then it would be difficult to ignore. It takes some effort to think about the consequences of free-will not being what we normally think it is.
We are known to have many feelings that something is the case, when in fact it isn’t. Some of the more obvious instances are when we experience optical illusions, and they are so commonly experienced as such and acknowledged as such that we no longer have the problem appreciating them as such. Many other illusions are harder to analyse, but there are still plenty of them. We know our perceptions are not reliable in many cases.
We know, for example, that bulk matter consists of atoms that individually and in combination are mostly empty space. But the illusion of my solid flesh feels real to me. We don’t have a problem holding these two models of matter in our minds. We are not yet used to holding both models of our behaviour: we are fleshy automatons, but we feel like we have free-will as if it’s some capacity that’s totally independent of the material causal world.
The Alternative Hypothesis
So we know that when investigating aspects of human behaviour we can’t take it for granted that our feelings on the matter are correct. On top of that, everything we know about the universe is based on science, and the fundamental physics that underlies it all – at least that’s our most consistent view. There is no evidence of anything that might be the vehicle for some sort of independent free-will. Dualism remains a speculative idea with no data to support it.
So, if free-will is to be proposed as something extra in this context, extra to the causal physical universe, then it becomes the alternative hypothesis that requires the evidence to support it. The null hypothesis is that the brain is like everything else we find in science – working according to fundamentals of physics. There then remains nothing to support the notion of a real and independent free-will other than the feeling that we have it – the ‘obvious’ that is being challenged.
The consequences of free-will being illusory are many. First, it causes a bit of a problem for those theists who insist it’s a necessary part of their relationship with God. Another is that it can lead to a humanistic view of human behaviour that doesn’t rely on a theistically sourced or motivated compassion. And it avoids many of the pitfalls of an atheistic free-will. It can also be a problematic view for some people – such as some existentialists who dwell on what they perceived to be inevitable nihilism – but I think they haven’t thought it through enough.
What is left of free-will – what is it under a naturalistic physicalist materialist view? It is the specific behaviour of a complex system that has elements of self-awareness, the latter of which is only partial and vague and doesn’t allow the detailed examination of the incredibly complex dynamic interactions within the brain and with its wider environment.
What To Call It
We can still call it ‘limited free-will’, as some people do. But then we must be prepared to keep on explaining what that means in detail. Since we haven’t evolved the need to interpret our autonomous behaviour to any greater extent than we already have it appears ‘free-will’ is a term and a corresponding conceptual notion we are stuck with psychologically. And we have a psychological aversion to being considered automatons – we tend to think of such creatures as zombies. So, we’re in a bit of a fix really, and we don’t have the free-will to get ourselves out of it. Perhaps over time external and internal naturalistic events will accumulate to drive us, against our will, to accept that free-will as we normally think of it is illusory, so that there’s no need to change the name – we just think of it as not being the current common concept of something independent of the material world.
Why can’t we use inner reflection to identify our real nature, sense every impulse of our working brains, and explain from a first person perspective the inner workings of our minds, or spot the owner of our free-will? How far can meditation take us in our discovery of ourselves? What can we learn about life the universe and everything by just thinking?
This is my current view on these issues.
Information
There are some fundamental problems that we don’t appear to be able to overcome. Any system, no matter how simple or complex, cannot contain a complete description of itself.
When you reduce information to its basic level, the lowest common denominator, the lowest level of representation that allows a distinction between one state and another, it is a binary representation. And in a binary representation the lowest level of physical distinction, the substrate on which the information can be held, is the presence and absence of sub-atomic particles or their states. How far physics takes us down this road is a technical detail. The limits of distinction between states of matter, or perhaps states of space itself, are details for physicists to investigate. But ultimately, information is contained in states of systems.
A corollary of this is that with the heat death of the universe comes the loss of all information, because there is nothing left on which to record the information, there is nothing left from which distinguishable states can form – and of course no one around to read and add meaning to any information there might have been.
Until that time comes we can flip back into our macro current world and consider, for example, a memory device that contains one bit of information – 0 or 1 – and in taking on one of those values it has a state. What would it require for that system to be self aware? At the very least it would need another bit to record the state of the first bit. But to be useful to any degree it would need to be self aware over time. If it was to record the last three states, to have a ‘memory’ of itself, it would need four bits in total – one for the current actual state, and three to record successive prior states. And this is before it starts to process, to think about, itself in any significant way – so far the system is only memorising a finite number of its own states. But already it’s self-awareness is incomplete – it knows now about the state of its main bit over three time periods, but knows nothing about the states of its three other bits.
Expand this to any system: it can contain only limited information about itself. The massive redundancy in some systems allows them to contain information about crucial parts of themselves, parts worth monitoring. Computer systems can be self-checking. But only to a degree – what checks the checkers? Even if we allowed each sub-system to check the other sub-systems in a mutually complete checking system then there would be nothing left, no remaining capacity, to do any actual work. There are limits to how much a system can be self-aware. It is a compromise between doing useful work and being self aware.
Regarding animal brains in this way would mean that any animal in principle could have some degree of self-awareness. If it is able to sense itself, sense it’s internal workings (its ‘thoughts’, which amounts to information about a small part of it’s own processing capabilities), as well as its body and environment, and if it has a memory in which to record data, and a system that can examine that memory and make inferences about the past, the present, and the future, and use those inferences to drive further behaviour, then it is self-aware. But any such animal system is restricted, in the limit, by the basic physics that limits the means of containing information. Information, after all, is nothing more than states of systems.
That’s not to say the brains of humans or any other animal are anything like restricted in this sense to any practical degree. There may well be masses of capacity left in a human brain for self-monitoring. But that’s not to say that capacity can be used, or in fact has evolved to be used.
Low Fidelity Introspection
There is a problem with the fidelity of the information that our brains process – the brain isn’t that good at examining itself, despite our otherwise useful self-awareness. Our best evolutionary inferences suggests the brain is self-aware to the extent that it offers some adaptive advantage in dealing with our environment. It isn’t clear that there is any particular advantage to being more acutely aware of our inner selves. So it doesn’t look like our brains are built for self-awareness to any greater degree than we currently experience.
We can exercise our physical bodies to some extent, and the same is clearly true of our brains – we learn stuff. But just as our physical bodies are limited, so we can’t learn to fly unaided, for example, so then we should expect similar limitations for our brains. Where is the evidence that we can in fact exercise our brains to perform ESP, true transcendentalism, out of body experiences, and so on. There appear to be limits to what the brain can achieve, and without contrary evidence there would appear to be a practical limits on what we can do with self-awareness.
Our bodies and brains have evolved mainly to enable us to survive in our environment. And bodies evolved before brains became significantly complex. So we are mainly physical empirical beings that sense and manipulate our environment; and self-awareness is a late addition, and is restricted to very few species, the most prominent users being, it seems, we humans. Why would we continue to think that it is capable of some of the magic attributed to it by ancient mysticisms.
We don’t have specific sensors, like our eyes or ears, that can look into our brains to examine its state. Though the brain is a system of neurons, it doesn’t actually have any nerves dedicated to sensing itself, in the way we have touch sensors around the body – that’s why some brain operations can be conducted with a conscious patient.
What we appear to have is some rudimentary conscious sub-system that allows us to monitor and manipulate the system as a whole. But as an instrument it’s quite flaky and prone to error. So much so that’s it’s difficult to isolate individual thoughts, to really understand what our concepts are. We have quite a history of philosophy that’s been trying to figure this stuff out; and more recently a psychology that’s been concentrated for the most part on a guessing game about what’s going on inside our brains by reflecting on the meaning of behaviours observed on the outside. The history of the attempts by psychology to second guess what’s happening in the brain is reminiscent of a cold war spy novel – we know something fishy is going on inside the wall, but we don’t quite know what.
Don’t get me wrong, our brains are equipped to perform some pretty amazing conceptual generalisations. We can go far and wide in our imaginations. But one of the complaints often made about neuroscience is that its tools, such as fMRI scans, are nowhere near precise enough or informative enough to tell us anything useful about consciousness. But when did you last use your own introspective mind to scan itself for tumors, potential aneurysms, or which part of your brain is being used during speech?
Our introspection is limited to a very cursory examination of our ongoing experiences, the vague recollections of some of our memories, and creating generalised plans for the future. When we think we are achieving something really clever with our minds you can bet we are using external enhancements to aid us – making notes, recording thoughts as audible messages, sketching diagrams. And when we want to create some complex plan we figure it out over time, recording steps, manipulating and fine tuning the plan, and finally executing it step by step by referring to our documentation. We can’t hold a detailed complex plan in our heads.
Nor can we claim any truth to expansive imagined entities, like God, since all our ideas about God are concocted inside limited human minds. The fact that a finite human brain can conceive of some supposed infinite being, as some Muslims like to portrait God, is not evidence that such an entity exists or could exist. Thhis conception is only a fuzzy idea inside a human brain and has no correspondence in reality – unless of course there is independent empirical evidence that such a being exists. So some of the proofs of God’s existence we often come across are bogus from this point of view alone.
Illusions of Personal Experience
Our brains are concept mashup machines. Thoughts whirl around our brains, often with little directed control. Some of us are more spontaneous than others (read ‘erratic minds’), but even the most well practiced meditating monk can’t control their thought processes so easily, and that’s after years of practice. You might get a few control freaks who think they are in total control of their own minds, but what is more likely is that their straight jacketed minds are in control of them.
Some people are fooled by concepts like ‘the infinite’, and think that because we can hold these vague concepts in our heads they actually give us access to the content of those concepts in some way, as if we really can grasp the infinite. But we need to acknowledge that the human brain is a limited capacity physical system. It has many constraints on what information it can hold. Everything it knows about the external world is an approximation.
Personal experiences, like sunsets, are internal experiences. The total experience of a sunset is still occurring inside a human head, still within the limits of the information that the brain can contain and process. The awe inspiring feelings of wonder, of being at one with the universe, are still contained within that physical head. The feelings of pain that humans suffer is still the internal representation of the action of the nervous system and its effect on the body – and even then the effect on the body is only meaningful in that the body’s response is also, in turn, detected by the sensory system. All brain activity, including massive seizures and other overwhelming mental phenomena are still constrained by the physics of the brain in action. Out of body experiences are contained imaginary experiences inside a human head. There is no evidence that they represent or correspond to any actual mechanism for viewing ones own body from a location, other than from within, looking out. Transcendental experiences are fuzzy events in the brain. There is no evidence that any transcending of any other kind is actually occurring.
Prospects for Self-Awareness
It may be possible for animals, in principle, to be far more self aware than humans are now. Despite the fundamental limitations of self-aware systems I wouldn’t think even human have reached full capacity to know ourselves. Perhaps the introspection of meditation is a small step in that direction. But though it does give access to first person data, it doesn’t have the fidelity of scientific instruments, such as those of neuroscience. Meditation is pretty vague in what it tells us about ourselves, though it does seem to gives us greater autonomous control, to a limited degree.
Perhaps transhumanism can enhance human brains to allow us to do better. We already enhance ourselves, directly, with spectacles, walking sticks, crutches, artificial limbs. With a stethoscope I can listen to my own heart beat with greater fidelity than relying on feeling my pulse. Some blind people can be given rudimentary sight by having a camera system stimulate the tongue with electrical impulses (which causes adaptations in the brain to interpret the sensory signals as vision). There’s plenty of scope for enhancing human physical and mental capabilities for the purpose of increasing our self-awareness abilities.
We already enhance our brains externally. The collective fields of science allow us to combine millions of tiny increments in knowledge into vast repositories of data and engineering capability. Could humans ever have designed and built a 747 without the repository that has accumulated over the last few centuries? Could a single brain ever do it even given all those resources? Team work, in the present and over generations, is how we currently play out a limited transhumanism – we already ‘transcend’ (here in a very practical sense) the basic biological humans that we once were. What we haven’t achieved yet is the enhancement of our self-awareness by enhancing our brains. Though there are chemical means of achieving some improvement now, through psychotropic drugs, it’s not a permanent enhancement, as might be a biological or genetic change.
Maybe there’s hope for us to become more usefully self-aware and even more self-controlled, and hence even more autonomous. But that autonomy is not the traditional free-will we often feel it is.
[This is part of a set: Thinking]
In the matter of philosophy, such as that of consciousness, the origins of the universe, theism, one of my biggest bugbears is when philosophers tell us something is obvious – and by philosophers I do include professional ones, for which the mistake is almost unforgivable. If it were all obvious we wouldn’t be having philosophical discussions, as we’d all be of one mind, one faith, or none. The game would be over.
Some of the more ‘obvious’ uses of the word that are clearly mistaken in my view is when the lovely Jehovahs Witnesses stand at my door, look around and say, “Look, this is all so wonderful, it’s obvious there must be a creator.”
The opposite is to claim a view to be ‘absurd’ (or perhaps what is meant is that it is ‘obviously absurd’), as when Muslim Hamza Tzortzis, scourge of the debating scene, says things like “..and this would lead to an absurdity as it would imply that the universe created itself.”, when first, there’s no such necessary implication from his argument, and it’s not as if he knows what is absurd or not, or what is obvious or not, in the matter of the creation of universes. This is probably the most common flaw in attempts by Muslims to ‘prove’ God exists – they feel their assumptions are obviously true.
Atheists philosophers aren’t immune to it. In a discussion with scientist Peter Atkins, the philosopher Steven Law tried to point out that empiricism wasn’t important in some cases, because it was obvious, for example, that if Peter Atkins claimed to have something stuffed up his jumper it would be easy to just look – which sort of makes you wonder what a professional philosopher thinks empiricism is. What Law thinks is obvious is not so much so in the end, and I wonder that he doesn’t get that. What happened to the critical thinking he promotes so assiduously?
And proponents of free-will and the nature of the self are probably the biggest culprits, including atheist Raymond Tallis, in that they feel that how humans experience personal subjectivity is an obvious indication that it’s a real representation of human nature; when most of them know full well that feeling that ‘something is the case’ in matters at the edge of our understanding does not imply that it is obviously true. Many proponents of free-will will happily admit that many other illusions are illusions despite how it feels, but their particular feeling that they have free-will is obviously correct. It’s obvious their double standards are absurd (oh bugger!)
There are countless examples of proponents for some idea or other claiming it is obvious, when the argument itself belies that claim. Where we are of quite different world views it’s even more important to avoid that mistake. What may be patently obvious to me as an atheist, about the nature of the world, clearly isn’t obvious to most theists; and the obvious presence in God in the lives of theists is clearly not so obvious to atheists.
Questioning what is obvious to ourselves is probably the most difficult thing we do. We are challenging our inbred reliance on intuition to examine what might be counter intuitive. Nit picking is essential in this task, and if you have someone tell you something or other is obvious, then that’s the point to challenge – pick that nit. And if you find yourself claiming something is obvious, you need to think deeper about what it is you find so obvious.
Surely all this is obvious, isn’t it? Do I really need to state it?
Duglas Adams (h/t Dawkins)
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on a gas covered planet going round a nuclear fireball, and think this normal, is obviously an indication of how skewed our perspective is.
Update: Frank Jackson interview by James Garvey
“I had been a dualist for years. I was taught by Michael Bradley, and he had some good arguments for dualism. I always thought it was a plausible view. As I say in the beginning of ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, we dualists don’t really need an argument to say that consciousness doesn’t fit into the physicalist world view. It’s just intuitively obvious.”
A shameful example of how personal preconceptions and bias have not only been abandoned by a philosopher, but how it has produced thirty years of paper and megabytes and neuronal confusion. Another example of how philosophers deal with the obvious.
The thought provoking Lesley has provoked some thoughts, which, in line with her post, has given me the urge to write them down.
I’d agree with the sentiment of spiritedcrone’s comment – that writing is prayer; though from an atheist perspective I’d say writing and meditation, or simply productive exploratory thought, are part of the same process, and writing is the foundation of all productive thought, including philosophy, maths, science, poetry, prose, fiction. If we are flexible enough with the medium then any of the visual, audio, tactile arts fall into the same pattern.
The point being that to write (or paint…) is simply a means of recording and organising one’s thoughts for a productive purpose. Even if that’s in a personal journal that no one else ever sees – and in this respect a blog is a brilliant medium for sharing some of our thoughts, whether we offer them up as words of wisdom, or as appeals for interaction. We are our own librarians.
I’m often struck by how often I have thoughts I wish I could record, but don’t have the means. Driving and listening to a radio broadcast and knowing that some of my ideas will be gone by the time I can record them. I often walk listening to podcasts, and for repeated ones I know that on a previous hearing I had a thought about some point but can’t recall it. Despite this frustration, so far, I’ve resisted carrying a separate voice recorder, to record my thoughts, because I’d have to spend further hours transcribing them. I’m waiting for the thought-transcription gizmo – maybe an app on the iPhone version 20.0. Or a separate device – the iThink?
I feel that without writing, my life would be an endless stream of fleeting events and ephemeral thoughts that would rarely lead to anything. I want to feel in control of my thoughts, and writing gives me this control. And this from someone who thinks there is no free-will – at least not as many of us normally think of it. I want (ok – this organism has a biological urge) to learn something from the electrical impulses that flit through my brain. The biological mush between my ears doesn’t have the appropriate fidelity when it comes to recording ideas. We need other tools.
How many of us who are parents have held on to the treasures that are the school work of our children.
My father was keen on electronics in its early days. I have a notebook of his, with jottings and drawings. It’s not prose. My wife has notes and the odd letter of her mother’s, tucked into her mother’s bible. They’re the only writings we have from them, and as little as they are they are valuable to us. It seems so little. But, archaeologists drool over any fragment from the past of human inscription – even if it’s only the scraping of lines on a bone. We take what we can get.
How many are lucky enough to have family treasures of writings from dead parents or grand parents, or even ancestors you never knew? How many are published? What does it feel like to be a descendant of Darwin, for example?
Transcribing our thoughts, from cave paintings, through hieroglyphs, to writing as we know it, has been maybe the greatest invention of human beings. Writing has given us the capacity to do more than simply conceive of continuity. It has made it real for each of us, within our personal lives; and for some it has made them effectively immortal, at least to others if not themselves.
One theme comes out in comments by some Muslims on recent programmes about Islam, “Why pick on Islam?”
I’m not a fan of any faith, given that they all have dodgy interpretations. But Islam seems to be at the centre of many faith conflicts. I just happened to catch a few recent episodes of BBC Radio 4’s Beyond Belief.
Try these episodes, while you can:
07 Feb 2011 – Sunni/Shia Tensions – Islam v Islam
24 Jan 2011 – Ayodhya – Hindu v Islam
17 Jan 2011 – Egypt – Christianity v Islam
In addition to the victim question, “Why pick on Islam?”, there’s also the other element, of minimising the extent to which Islam is often interpreted in a violent manner, such as the persecution of apostates, as described in the 17 Jan episode.
Maybe Muslims feel they are the centre of criticism. But maybe that’s because there is plenty to criticise.
I think that sometimes those that criticise Islam are seen as Islamaphobes, as if they make stuff up about the extent to which homophobia exists in Islam; or about or how women are viewed; or about how kafirs are viewed; or about how kids are indoctrinated in faith schools; or about the political nature of Islam. As if there is no rational reason to be concerned about Islam, or the reluctance to criticise Islam.
I’ll be interested to see what is shown in this programme, Dispatches: Lessons In Hate & Violence , beyond this clip.
Be prepared for the backlash of denials. It’s happened before, here in 2007, where complainants managed to convince the police that Channel 4 had it wrong. It appears that if the religious make enough noise, if they can be offended enough, their voices will be heard. But, it didn’t end there. There is, or was at that time in 2007, a distinct bias towards tolerating Islamic intolerance. As shown here.
It’s not just police that are in denial. Every Islamist’s favourite non-Muslim Brit, George Galloway, can be relied on to back them, no matter how vile they are. Here, from 2008, is his response to another dispatches programme that had similar evidence. The ridiculous GG doesn’t get how biased he is here. GG seems to lose the plot entirely, and takes on the manner of a berating Islamist speaker. Does GG really think those investigated would say what was recorded under cover if it had been in the open? And GG has the nerve to lecture on interviewing, while making his own political speech. He’s right of course, that there are extremist Zionists and Christians. Some of the crazies on the recent Louis Theroux story from the West Bank, and his reports on US Christians attests to that. But to use this to sidestep the points made in the programme on Islam is just bollocks.
I wonder if the new programme will help the government reconsider its position on faith schools. Sure, most faith schools won’t be like this. But faith schools, indeed faith itself, facilitates this. Because faith, ultimately, relies on accepting stuff on authority. The ultimate authority may be claimed to be God, but in practice it’s the authority of those that claim the authority to interpret the words of God.
And when a religion inherently advocates strong sanctions against those within the religion that criticise it, or against those that want to leave it, or against those that fail to meet its most stringent requirements, then that adds to the stranglehold it has on reason, criticism and scepticism. And when it uses the mechanism of taking offence to attempt to censor non-Muslim criticism of Islam, the results are fiery. I wonder what claims of Islamaphobia will emerge, and to what extent various non-Muslim organisations and individuals ignore the points made in the programme because of their phobia of Islamaphobia – heaven forbid that a post-modern liberal relativist give up their relativism for the sake of common sense and evidence.
So, I’ll look forward to the responses to the Dispatches programme as much as the programme itself.
[This is part of a set: Thinking]
Confirmation bias is such a tricky one that it requires persistent vigilance.
Scientific American for November carries the story based on Marc Hauser’s problems, the nature of which hasn’t been made clear yet. Some suspect fraud, but the more generous view is confirmation bias.
Two factors make combating confirmation bias an uphill battle. For one, data show that eminent scientists tend to be more arrogant and confident than other scientists. As a consequence,they may be especially vulnerable to confirmation bias and to wrong-headed conclusions, unless they are perpetually vigilant. Second, the mounting pressure on scholars to conduct single-hypothesis-driven research programs supported by huge federal grants is a recipe for trouble. Many scientists are highly motivated to disregard or selectively reinterpret negative results that could doom their careers. Yet when members of the scientific community see themselves as invulnerable to error, they impede progress and damage the reputation of science in the public eye.
The very edifice of science hinges on the willingness of investigators to entertain the possibility that they might be wrong.
The best antidote to fooling ourselves is adhering closely to scientific methods. Indeed, history teaches us that science is not a monolithic truth-gathering method but rather a motley assortment of tools designed to safeguard us against bias.
As astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife and co-author Ann Druyan noted, science is like a little voice in our heads that says, “You might be mistaken. You’ve been wrong before.” Good scientists are not immune from confirmation bias. They are aware of it and avail themselves of procedural safeguards against its pernicious effects.
[my emphasis]
At least it’s reassuring that scientists are keeping an eye on each other, given the difficulty of keeping an eye on oneself. It’s about the best we can expect. And given this is the case, it illustrates the paucity of any ‘other way of knowing’.
More on Marc Hauser here.
Discovery Institute has Michael Egnor asking this question…
What Do New Atheists Actually Believe?
And he has some specific questions…
1) Why is there anything?
2) What caused the Universe?
3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?
7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
8) Why is there evil?
Well, here are my answers…
1) Why is there anything?
We don’t know.
It’s not that this question is nonsense, it’s simply that we don’t have access to the data that would answer it. From a philosophical perspective we have no firm response to the solipsist. The best we can do is say that what appears to be the case most forcefully to our minds and senses (given our senses might be an illusion of the mind) is that the material world is so convincing that we might as well use it as a model for reality until we figure out a better one that actually fits with those facts that the ‘apparent’ material world imposes on us.
For example, if we were entirely mental phenomena (or a single phenomenon) why can’t we get past the apparent material death of another mind (or my illusion of another mind)? The material non-supernatural explanation fits this and many other problems so easily that it’s a sufficient model for now.
The rest of the answers are given with respect to this point of view.
2) What caused the Universe?
We don’t know.
So far we, and our instruments, haven’t had physical presence far beyond our solar system, and in person not beyond the moon. So, all our observations of this universe are restricted to theories based on remote (in time and space) observations. Some theories have mathematical reasoning to lend them some weight. But really, we don’t know.
3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
We don’t know. We’d need to resolve problem (2) to get any further with this. We observe regularities, but we can’t explain them in any deep sense.
4) Of the Four Causes in nature…
We don’t know.
This is philosophy going beyond the bounds of available or accessible knowledge and is more akin to theology.
Specifically, do final causes exists? Well, if we could answer some more questions on causality that would be a start. But then we come up against the same problem of accessibility of the data. And, the question isn’t clear on the meaning of the term ‘final cause’.
5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
Given (1) this can only be answered in atheist materialist terms, and within that context the understanding of matter and how life is just a formation of matter in action, and from there on to evolution. I’ll keep this short, but would be glad to expand on request.
All matter responds to interaction with other matter. Things bounce. At some basic levels we have explanations for this – such as the coming together of atoms of my skin with those of the table, where despite that fact that atoms are mostly space, the electric and nuclear forces stop atoms merging or flowing through each other. At yet deeper levels of understanding the particles may be disturbances in fields. I’ve no idea why there are fields.
Basic life is complex formations of matter. We still don’t know anything concrete about the beginnings of life, abiogenesis, but the basic hypothesis is that early replicators began the process – try thinking of something like growing crystals, though even this seems an inadequate analogy. The problem with all of this, life, is that we only have life on this planet to examine, that the origins are in the distant past, and anywhere the same process began spontaneously it would be consumed by local chemical reactions or organisms.
Form there, simple single cell life forms react in very complex ways compared to simple elements and molecules – but their responses to contact with other inanimate matter and other living organisms is basically physical and chemical. They go around bumping into stuff, and when they do, chemical reactions on their surfaces give rise to further activity.
Complex cells formed by the combination of different single celled entities – i.e. mitochondria. Complex multi-cellular organisms formed cohesive bodies and functionality was subsumed to different organs. In a soft celled multi-organ organism think of the combination like a turtle and its shell. The inner soft and delicate organs don’t need protection from the environment if outer organs are dedicated to that task – e.g. skin.
So, at this stage we have complex systems, of which one component is a nervous system that co-ordinates activity for the organism as a whole. Not all organisms use this approach – e.g. plants. But there seems to be a relationship between the motor capabilities of the organism and the complexity of its nervous system.
Given that one aspect of the nervous system is to respond to the environment in order to direct processes in the organism, and to direct it’s motion, required to find food, one natural outcome is that the organism should be able to detect itself. No point in eating your own arm is there. And this is the basis for self awareness, which most organisms have to some degree if they have a nervous system that samples the environment.
Mammals have multi-mode senses – sight, hearing, touch… And these need co-ordination if they are to be useful. The chicken egg answer is that complexity of nervous system and co-ordination of senses probably evolved together, each effecting the development of the other.
It seems a natural progression that when an organism gets to a certain degree of complexity this self-sensing can include sensing the very internal processes of the nervous system itself. In us this isn’t complete, since there’s a big part of our sub-conscious nervous system of which we’re not aware. But basically subjectivity is simply what it appears like when an organism senses it’s own nervous system in action.
6) Why is the human mind intentional…
(5) pretty much answers this.
7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artefact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
It’s a subjective (see 5) conceptual product that has evolved in a social sense, but is based on biologically evolved feelings of empathy and sympathy.
See here for more detail.
8) Why is there evil?
There isn’t, in any objective sense, any more than there is moral law (see 7).
Evil is simply a classification of behaviour that humans typically ascribe to the behaviour of other humans.
Sometimes it can be conflated with suffering generally, such as the consequences of natural disasters, but that notion is only the concoction of those religious people who think natural disasters are associated with demons or with divine retribution. Remember this?
The floods that have devastated swathes of the country are God’s judgement on the immorality and greed of modern society, according to senior Church of England bishops.
Religiously induced stupidity.
We don’t ascribe the term ‘evil’ to things that animals do which if performed by humans would be classified as evil. This is again due to the confused thinking of the religious who think that humans have some special gift, or some special place in the universe, or some special relationship with some god or other, and that some or all of these misconceptions give special meaning to human actions we generally disapprove of.
Perhaps the main point I’d want to make in all this is that theists are in exactly the same position as atheists for a lot of the fundamental stuff. They don’t know. But what they do is make up an answer with no substantiating data and claim that to be the case. They think that the combination of ancient tradition and pseudo-profound language gives credibility to their view, but it really exposes their gullibility to ancient stories from a time when such ignorance was excusable for lack of any reasonable data.
There has been no evidence for religious claims that can be substantiated by third party examination. All subjective personal claims about religious experience have plausible explanations in a materialist world view, where various results of brain sciences can replicate or account for those experiences.
On Lesley’s post Peter Rollins – What is Religion? I’ve been trying to understand what Rollins is saying, without much success. But in the ensuing comments I claimed that love is just something that humans do – my intended implication being it is nothing to do with a god, or specifically God.
Kathryn asked, “Why do you think this [love] is something humans do? Do you think it is a genetic fluke, or is there some purpose?”, and I wanted to give a more complete response than I could in a comment on Lesley’s post.
It’s a fluke in one sense: the sense that it just turned out that way due to evolution, without any intentionality or direct design or purpose. But that ‘fluke’ is not to be confused with ID critiques of evolution that say evolution relies on impossible odds. Fluke, luck, random events, whatever we might call them, have a part to play in evolution, but the theory of evolution shows that other forces, such as natural selection, play on those flukes in order to cause some change that persists.
The significant point from an evolutionary perspective is that traits that have some benefit in some sets of circumstances are more likely to survive.
Some simplistic examples to make the point and put love in context (for sexually reproductive species)…
A genetic condition (e.g. a mutation) that caused infertility would not be passed on to the next generation at all. Another mutation that didn’t effect fertility but did remove sexual lust would also die out quickly in most animals (though humans, with our cognitive abailities, could overcome this). An emotion like love may not be as necessary at all for short term survival, but may be necessary in some species for greater group cohesion, or perhaps mother-infant bonding. Both fertility and lust are necessary for reproduction in sexually reproductive animals, but love isn’t.
But we can still see how love can provide a greater benefit than not experiencing love, for some species.
Fertility we count as a physiological trait, love as an emotional one, but lust we see more as something of both physiological and emotional – so, where’s the divide between physical trait and emotional trait? When you get down to the chemistry of what’s going on in the brain they are, all three, physiological traits, each with their own contribution to the survivability of a species (along with all other influences). We have no reason to suppose that love is anything other than this, and certainly no evidence that it has any special meaning or value outside the context of humans that, using our brains, give it meaning and value. it’s not something we need to associate with God, despite that fact that theists tend to raise it to the level of the divine.
Evolution doesn’t have a purpose as such – and so there is no purpose for love. There is a trivial descriptive sense in which, looking back, we might use a purposive description – e.g. ‘the purpose of this gene sequence was to cause that trait to emerge…’ (again, a simplistic view of genes) But this isn’t purpose in the sense of an agent intentionally causing some trait to appear for particular purpose of his. We are used to attributing purpose to the things we do, and we can mistakenly attribute purpose to complex causal chains that are otherwise hard to describe. It can be helpful to describe causal chains with such anthropomorphic framing of purpose – but we need to be careful that we understand that this purpose isn’t real, it’s a metaphor for causality.
So, there is nothing in our evolutionary past which could predict, in any reasonable sense, that love would turn out to be a trait that a particular species valued highly. There are clues available to the hindsight we have acquired through the development of the theory of evolution, based on our understanding of empathy and attachment that bond animal parents to young, and in some cases parents to each other. Insects have a very specific type of bond to their fellows nest, which is basically chemical. So, love (or its simpler animal parallel) isn’t necessary for all animals to be evolutionarily successful – though for larger animals with more complex brains it may be particularly beneficial. We think it’s beneficial for us – so much so we have learned to value it highly.
In this sense love is just what humans do, without it having any directive purpose. It’s one of the many things we do, along with hate, fear, lust, empathy and many other traits. They all boil down to having emerged through our evolutionary history, and having been developed in our intellectual and cultural history.
Perhaps a better phrasing might be love is just what humans did in the past as a more refined development of empathy, but which we do now with more purpose and intent as we have come to appreciate it and value it.
We can reasonably explain the relationship between some of these things we do, in this simplified evolutionary context…
Personally and subjectively we like the feeling of love, and we dislike the feeling of fear. Our empathy makes us appreciate the same perspective in others, so we want love for others as well as for ourselves, and part of that is that we get additional pleasure from giving love, and even more from reciprocative love. And conversely we dislike fear, we dislike seeing fear in others, and so we want to alleviate the fear we see in others. And, on top of that we dislike seeing others cause fear, because of our empathy for the victims; and in a simple sense, just as a mother responds to defend her young with the animal equivalent of anger, so we respond with anger towards those that cause fear. These are strong innate emotional responses, honed in our history, with their origins lost in myth.
Many of our basic emotions have parallels in other animals, but have been developed into more refined concepts by us, probably because of the concurrent development of our language and our brain’s ability to be more acute in our understanding of these emotions and the concepts we form about them. Just as a musician can develop a more acute sense of musical notes (an analogy Kathryn uses).
The problem is we don’t often consider the simpler animal basis for our complex emotions – partly because of our ignorance of the evolutionary perspective. This ignorance was understandable for most of human history in which our reach back to the past was only ever measured in terms of a few generations. We could only develop myths out of that ignorance – ironically using the very creative imagination that later allowed us to come up with the science that helped us discover more plausible explanations.
The weight of those myths persists, and is maintained in varying degrees by a continued ignorance of the significance of what evolution is telling us, along with the willing, and sometimes not so willing, indoctrination in and bias towards those myths. Even those theists that have an understanding of evolution find it hard to accept the full implications of evolution and related ideas when they challenge their theological beliefs – they sometimes express a fear of the consequences of following the ideas through – e.g. the fear of the nihilism of atheism, in the absence of God.
To help a theist put this in perspective, consider some of the cosmological ideas that are floating around – many of which theists use as examples of how science has its own myths. In some respects our old myths parallel the current speculations about our cosmological origins – the old myths were speculations in the absence of data, just as some of our cosmological ideas are speculations in the absence of data. In some cases the mathematical theory of the latter replaces imaginative theology of the former, and so cosmologists might feel their theories have a greater legitimacy than theologies. But there may come a time, when we are better informed, when some our current cosmological speculations seem more like myths. So, this is how now atheists see theologies as outdated myths.
The deep history of religion is interesting, but I’m still largely ignorant about it. One particular book on my reading list is The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright. It appears to put the contingency of Christianity in perspective, effectively explaining the myth. It’s the historical perspective that I need to know more about; and I suspect many Christians need to know more about it too, but without their own theological bias. If ever there was a case of the winners getting to write the history, theology is it – I don’t think much of the history of theology sees the light of day. I don’t know to what extent history of theology is taught in this respect. The book’s website gives a good sampling of the book and is worth a read.
No, I’m not referring to the up-coming England match. It’s a much more serious issue than that. Or at least Christians think so.
Even my very fair minded liberal Christian friend Lesley is concerned, after reading this article in GQ
When saying ‘damning’, who or what does Lesley think is being damned? The nation, for it’s loss of faith? Or those that remain Christians, for this reason, “Their case was too weak, their opposition to divorce and abortion and gay people too cruel, their evidence for their claims nonexistent.” It does sound a little like role reversal; you know, the rapture of irreligion, and the left behind of the faithful, stuck at the bus stop on a cold wintery day not knowing the last bus has been cancelled.
This point is right, “…it’s only natural that we should dismantle the massive amounts of tax money and state power that are given to the religious. It’s a necessary process of building a secular state, where all citizens are free to make up their own minds.”, which will make it fair for all. But I can understand the fear in the CoE at losing privilege.
When I read this and what followed, “Really? Let’s list some of the ways in which Christians and other religious groups are given special privileges,…” I realised that it was religious privilege that the article was damning after all.
This was particularly damning of Mormons in ’78, “Until 1978, the Mormon Church said black people didn’t have souls. (They only changed their mind the day this was made illegal, and God niftily appeared to their leader to say they were ensouled after all.)”
This “In response, Carey and the Church of England demanded Christians be allowed to break the law” and the recent nonsense at the Gen Synod continues to be damning of the CoE now. And don’t get me started on RC and Islam.
Why do we have to resort to law to demand equality from religions? Christians are often quick to tell us of their valiant role in the abolition of slavery and their many other fights against injustice. OK all Christians, put up or shut up. Stop all prejudice and privilege – voluntarily! Let the ABC call for this now (I won’t hold my breath – he’d rather have Sharia). Let’s move to a secular nation, in education and government, that’s equal to all. You’ll be surprised how quickly atheists lose interest in your religion. Hold on. That’s precisely what Christians are afraid of isn’t it. Silly me.
The feelings of persecution even extend to the repeated mistake of thinking atheists want to abolish religion. This is from a comment by Chris, “The New Atheists seem to think a secular society is one that rejects religion” – No, quite wrong. That’s what Christians think New Atheists seem to think. You being a case in point 🙂 We (atheists new and old) know what it means, and you too would know that we know, if only you knew more about New Atheists, and old atheists.
Chris, “In fact, most countries with a secular constitution see secularism as protecting religion.” – Try telling that to Christians in America, with it’s very purposeful secular constitution. I can’t figure out why even having such a specific constitution isn’t clear enough. Oh, hold on. Got it. After centuries of selectively reading the Bible Christians are primed to read a constitution and see in it the very opposite of what is written.
And, what’s more Chris, when you’ve figured this out, could you let Tony Blair know: “Tony Blair warns that Christians must speak out in ‘aggressively secularist’ age” – The problem is, Tone, Christians and other faithful have been speaking out all too loudly for centuries now. “But he has since converted to Roman Catholicism and set up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to “promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions”. “ – Well, Tone, religions might have earned a little respect if they hadn’t been partying on so loudly themselves, indulging to excess in privileges, and then hypocritically protesting as the hurt and offended when the neighbours open a window and shout at them to be quiet while everyone gets some peace.
Preacherwoman isn’t keen on Johann Hari from GQ (God Quits? God’s Quiet?, Garrulus Quadrigae?), pointing out his selective use of data. She makes a fair point. We do have to be careful not to impart our bias. But wasn’t that the main point that the article went on to make, i.e. the whining by Carey and others about persecution, when religion has so many privileges? Hasn’t religion always been biased?
It’s not just Carey. This is from Cristina Odone, “Afraid to be a Christian? Who can blame you? The authorities, the media and the chattering classes are forever trying to run you down. We don’t have to brave the Colosseum, with its rapacious lions; we don’t have to wear an identifying badge; or meet in secret – yet.” – What?! Let’s form two queues – one of atheists who want a secular nation with freedom to think and choose our world view without favour to any, and another one of atheists who want to ban religion. I’m sure Carey and Odone think we’re all in the near empty latter. They’re confused by this secular call for freedom. Being so familiar with the centuries of persecution by the religious they think that once they lose power they’ll be burned at the stake.
“Christians need to be as strident as Muslims” she says. Well, that makes a change from Christians bemoaning how strident a few atheists are. But again she makes the mistake of bias again. The strident atheists are calling for freedom for all, and would protect the rights of Christians and Muslims alike – we’re just saying we won’t protect the current privilege of Christians or Muslims, and won’t give in to the strident calls for privilege. The stridency isn’t the problem, it’s what one is calling for that counts.
“But there is no doubt that many are afraid to be Christian. They will watch anxiously today as Shirley Chaplin will fight the NHS in an employment tribunal.” – For heaven’s sake, is there no end to the whining. Thankfully the tribunal saw sense.
But Chaplin “…had the support of a number of bishops who claim that Christians are being persecuted in an increasingly secular society.” How very Christian. I really do think some won’t be satisfied until there’s a Colosseum in Trafalgar Square, “Ha! to a mosque at Ground Zero. We Brits will show you how to be persecuted. Bring on the lions.”
I’m sometimes asked if I’m spiritual. Of course I’m not spiritual in the theistic sense, being an atheist, but there are atheists who consider themselves spiritual beings: Carl Sagan, Sam Harris, for example. I don’t think I am, but I do have a sense of wonder and awe about the world, whether it’s about our cosmological origins, or the new ideas in earthly sciences.
I guess this is the closest I’d come to heaven – being surrounded by fascinating people figuring out what makes the world go round, and how to make it go round better. Their enthusiasm is palpable.
For all Christians go on about what their God gives them it just seems pretty lame compared to discovering new stuff about the universe, or creating fascinating new content that solves very human problems.
Science Foo Camp 2009: by Nature Video.
I guess this un-conference format doesn’t make for easy video, and it’s by invite only. But I’d love to be a fly on the wall. Maybe that’s something that could come out of this type of event. We need a really cool new method of experiencing these events as if we were there.
Revelation
Some scientists and mathematicians can have experiences that can be considered revelations:
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8269328330690408516
The Harris religion and rape issue is inflaming opinion, still. This particular storm is about the comment he made in an interview with Bethany Saltman in 2006, and this particular sentence:
“I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.”
The Beginning
But let’s go back to where it started, with his book, Letter To A Christian Nation, 2006, which prompted the Saltman interview.
Naturally, for religious people that haven’t read the book but who like to pick up on the nasty things atheists say on their journey to eternal damnation in the next life, then the whole concept of comparing their precious religion with rape is pretty shocking. And it looks like Harris has handed them a stick with which they can give him a damned good thrashing.
Trouble is, in their rush to read only the bad, they miss the point. Here’s the section from the book where rape is first raised.
“As a biological phenomenon, religion is the product of cognitive processes that have deep roots in our evolutionary past. Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. There is, after all nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.”
Here Harris is clearly using it to point out that because something has natural origins we don’t have to think it acceptable behaviour now. It’s used as an analogy.
But it’s an analogy that many religious people don’t get. And because they don’t get it they’ve come over all of a froth, because of the dreaded word ‘rape’ – such a taboo word.
Analogies
My pop-psychology point of the day is that religious people are so used to selective reading when it comes to their holy books, so used to interpreting anything they read in order to give an affirmative bias towards their religion and a negative bias against anything that challenges it, that they are simply confused by analogies, not knowing when to read something literally and when to interpret it as an analogy, or even how to figure out what work the analogy is doing.
Here’s a case in point. Suem wonders why there is so much outrage over Xola Skosana’s sermon that included ‘Jesus with HIV analogy‘.
Suem asks,
“Don’t people understand that analogies and metaphors are not meant to be definitive statements”
No they don’t!
They don’t get The Flying Spaghetti Monster, or fairy analogies. Here the point of the analogy is not to liken God to the obviously ridiculous FSM or fairies.
The FSM analogy is about the reasoning that gets you from some hypothesis, such as there is a God, or there is an FSM, to a full explanation, a theology, and even descriptions of characteristics of this hypothetical entity, without any evidence whatsoever.
The whole point of picking obvious nonsensical entities as the object of belief is to show that the same reasoning or faith that gives you God can give you these others; and so the reasoning and the faith is a flawed way of acquiring truth about the entity.
So, similarly, the point of Harris using ‘rape’ in this specific case in his book is to show that the analogous aspects of religion and rape is that because they had evolutionary advantage at some point doesn’t make them beneficial now. Here rape is not meant to be analogous to religion directly.
Symbolically it’s like this:
A has some aspect X
B has some aspect X
A is religion.
Where B is rape, X is the past evolutionary benefit of religion and rape.
Where B is the FSM, X is the poor reasoning about theology of religion and the FSM.
So, here’s the argument.
A has aspect X, and is therefore good.
But B has aspect X, and B is clearly not good.
So, having aspect X is no indication of B or A being good.
The religious could save a lot of unnecessary argument if they took the trouble to figure out what the analogy is about.
The Harris – Saltman Interview
As if the religious hadn’t got hold of the wrong end of the stick already, Harris gives them another excuse to fume. And fume they do.
Here’s the 2006 article in which the next scene in the melodrama takes place. (Here’s a pdf).
Let’s have a look at what else he says before we get to the crutial point. Though many religious people might disagree with many of his points, there are some who do see his issues with religion when it comes to the more fundamental flavour. Here’s how it goes towards the end of page 1 of The Sun web site version:
Saltman:
Isn’t religion a natural outgrowth of human nature?
Harris:
It almost certainly is. But everything we do is a natural outgrowth of human nature. Genocide is. Rape is. No one would ever think of arguing that this makes genocide or rape a necessary feature of a civilized society. Even if you had a detailed story about the essential purpose religion has served for the past fifty thousand years, even if you could prove that humanity would not have survived without believing in a creator God, that would not mean that it’s a good idea to believe in a creator God now, in a twenty-first-century world that has been shattered into separate moral communities on the basis of religious ideas.
Traditionally, religion has been the receptacle of some good and ennobling features of our psychology. It’s the arena in which people talk about contemplative experience and ethics. And I do think contemplative experience and ethics are absolutely essential to human happiness. I just think we now have to speak about them without endorsing any divisive mythology.
Note that both genocide and rape are given as examples. Clearly Harris is referring to the analogy, as I described it above. Being a natural human behaviour does not mean that it has any benefit now.
But Harris isn’t saying benefit can’t be derived from religion. To go back to the book, Letter To A Christian Nation, Harris knows full well that some people do derive benefit from religion:
I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you now love other people in a way you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I do not wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out however, that billions of human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences – but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of nature
So clearly, despite what some critics claim, he doesn’t see all religious experience in the same light. But his main point is that overall it is detrimental to society.
I’ll skip ahead slightly in the interview, past the offending words, just to make it clear Harris isn’t a baby eater.
Harris:
Even Christian fundamentalists have learned, by and large, to ignore the most barbaric passages in the Bible. …[some details about specific problems]…Now, these people are not evil. They’re just concerned about the wrong things, because they have imbibed these unjustifiable religious taboos. There is no question, however, that these false concerns add to the world’s misery.
Saltman:
If we were to eliminate religious identity, wouldn’t something else take its place?
Harris:
Not necessarily. Look at what’s going on in Western Europe: some societies there are successfully undoing their commitment to religious identity, and I don’t think it is being replaced by anything. Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Australia, and Japan are all developed societies with a high level of atheism, and the religion they do have is not the populist, fundamentalist, shrill version we have in the U.S. So secularism is achievable…
See, he recognises some religions aren’t so bad.
…I think the human urge to identify with a subset of the population is something that we should be skeptical of in all its forms. Nationalism and tribal affiliations are divisive, too, and therefore dangerous. Even being a Red Sox fan or a Yankees fan has its liabilities, if pushed too far.
Saltman:
So you see Buddhist meditation not as a religious practice, but as something that can yield results.
Harris:
Clearly, there are results to any religious practice. A Christian might say, “If you pray to Jesus, you’ll notice a change in your life.” And I don’t dispute that. The crucial distinction between the teachings of Buddhism and the teachings of Western religions is that with Buddhism, you don’t have to believe anything on faith to get the process started.
Harris Hates All Religions?
Again I need to emphasise the fact that Harris does distinguish between degrees of religious fundamentalism and the associated harms. Remember that when we get to the crunch statement.
Saltman:
Do you think that there is such a thing as a peaceful religion?
Harris:
Oh, sure. Jainism is the best example that I know of. It emerged in India at more or less the same time as Buddhism. Nonviolence is its core doctrine. Jain “extremists” wear masks in order to avoid breathing in any living thing. To be a practicing Jain, you have to be a vegetarian and a pacifist. So the more “deranged” and dogmatic a Jain becomes, the less likely he or she is to harm living beings.
Jains probably believe certain things on insufficient evidence, and that’s not a good idea, in my opinion. I can even imagine a scenario in which Jain dogma could get people killed: I don’t actually know what Jains say on this subject, but let’s say they became unwilling to kill even bacteria and forbade the use of antibiotics.
…
Harris:
…They [evangelicals] have a great fear that unless we believe the Bible was written by the creator of the universe, we have no real reason to treat one another well, and I think there’s no evidence for that whatsoever. It’s just fundamentally untrue that people who do not believe in God are more prone to violent crime, for instance. The evidence, if anything, runs the other way. If you look at where we have the most violent crime and the most theft in the United States, it’s not in the secular-leaning blue states. It’s in the red states, with all their religiosity. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the United States are in Texas.
Now, I’m not saying that we can look at this data and say, “Religion causes violence.” But you can look at this data and say that high levels of religious affiliation don’t guarantee that people are going to behave well. Likewise if you look at UN rankings of societies in terms of development — which includes levels of violent crime, infant mortality, and literacy — the most atheistic societies on the planet rank the highest: Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark. So there is no evidence that a strong commitment to the literal truth of one’s religious doctrine is a good indicator of societal health or morality.
So, just to emphasise the point again. Harris does not see all religions as being as bad as each other. Harris does see people gaining some benefits from religion, though he thinks there are better ways. Harris does not think religion is the cause of all evil. Harris does not think all religion is evil. Nowhere does Harris actually call for the forced curtailment of religious belief. In all of this he is making very straight forward arguments about what he finds wrong with religion.
The Evil Atheists
Of course no discussion about religion is complete without a comment on the evil that atheists do. And nearly every religious person gets this point wrong. Saltman is playing devil’s advocate here of course.
Saltman:
Atheism doesn’t always go hand in hand with reason and compassion. Look at the destruction and violence caused by atheist ideology in China and the old Soviet Union.
Harris:
What I’m really arguing against is dogma, and those communist systems of belief were every bit as dogmatic as religious systems. In fact, I’d call them ‘political religions’. But no culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable or too desirous of having evidence in defense of their core beliefs. Whenever people start committing genocide or hurling women and children into mass graves, I think it’s worth asking what they believe about the universe. My reading of history suggests that they always believe something that’s obviously indefensible and dogmatic.
And just to re-state the point made countless times, none of this was done in the name of atheism. Atheism isn’t a dogmatic belief system that anyone does anything in the name of. And atheists are not claiming religion is the cause of all ills, or that all atheists are whitere than white. So, can we drop this red herring.
The Magic Wand of Harris
OK. Let’s get to the main point. The offending place is top of page 2.
Saltman:
Your analogy between organized religion and rape is pretty inflammatory. Is that intentional?
Harris:
I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology. I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario. I think we do the world a disservice when we suggest that religions are generally benign and not fundamentally divisive.
Now, given the context in which the original analogy was used, this is just an extension of that. Here’s the analogy:
A causes an amount of suffering.
B causes an amount of suffering.
Here A is rape, and B is religion. And on his assessment religion causes more harm than rape.
So, if he could wish away one of them he thinks the best option would be religion, as removing it would reduce harm the most.
Note that this is a simple thought experiment, wishful thinking, and as such has no specific bad consequences.
For example, if it clearly was a magic wish that did the trick he’d no doubt want all the currently religious people to be simply non-religious – so it’s not as if he would be causing more suffering by removing religion, the newly non-religious wouldn’t feel they were deprived of religion.
And, since rape sometimes occurs during religiously inspired genocides, and since some religious leaders use their status as a cover for sexual abuse and rape, then removing religion would remove some rape.
And we could still carry on trying to stop rape, so it’s not as if Harris is condoning rape. It just happens to be an unwanted human behaviour that he uses in an analogy.
There really isn’t that much to this statement after all, given the context. It’s ridiculous how many religious people have tried to get mileage out of it since he made it.
A More Literal Comparison
But what if he was to have meant it to be taken seriously. Is religion worse than rape? You’ll have to ask Harris yourself, if you still think he’s the son of Satan for uttering the words ‘rape’ and ‘religion’ in the same breath. But here’s my understanding of what he said and how to interpret it, should you want to take it as a literal intention by Harris.
1) Individual rape can ‘harm’ one victim at a time. I’m not aware of any person being able to rape more than one person at once. This is basically a one-on-one act. Annually (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics) it might be 500,000 a year, accounting for unreported rape.
2) Nuclear weapons or biological weapons can ‘kill and harm’ hundreds of thousands or millions at a time. It might take more than one person to achieve this, but the ratios are still pretty high: one-to-hundreds-of-thousands, or one-to-millions.
3) Extreme religion probably has the highest potential for (2) currently.
4) All religions, by setting faith above reason, are self affirming systems that can, under some circumstances, provide the right framework for (3), and hence (2). That framework of extreme religions exists now, and this has been a self-evident fact since 9/11. Some small number of people with religious motivations killed thousands of people, directly and in the aftermath. And 9/11 was the catalyst for a war that kill even more. 9/11 is still invoking religious hatred now at ground zero. That’s before we get to the many conflicts around the world that are going on now that have a religious element, if not done in the name of religion. Harris covers plenty in his book.
Note to liberals: the extensive use of reason on top of faith is not a get out of jail card. Faith plus speculation is a poor move. It just happens to be a really bad move in the hands of terrorist fanatics.
5) The same applies to all dogmas that affirm their beliefs and aren’t subjected to sufficient scepticism. So, it’s not just religion Harris is objecting to. But currently religion is the most dangerous in his view.
Again, a note to easily offended moderates and liberals: just because you’re pretty harmless doesn’t change the fact that religion in the wrong hands is dangerous.
6) Bonus point: without religion there’s no RC church, which reduces the number of rapes and abuses a little. And since many of the genocidal wars around the world also include rape, then if removing religion could reduce the number of such wars then there’d be less rape anyway.
7) Harris isn’t calling for or expecting the abolition of religion – some people have mistaken his statements here for that. Harris believes in freedom of religious belief. His statement was hypothetical wishful thinking. His point being that if it were possible for religion to suddenly vanish, that would be a better outcome than if all men suddenly stopped raping.
Now I know some people don’t like it when we try to evaluate relative harms, when we try to be objective about them. They find something distasteful and taboo about even considering it.
Here’s a response to Harris,
I would like to ask Sam Harris what personal experience he has of rape.
Why is this relevant? What is my experience of rape or being the victim of a suicide bomber? None.
Another question to Harris,
And I wonder how it would feel to have been subjected to rape and then to hear a statement such as Harris’s?
– Or how it would feel to have your family taken by a suicide bomber or abducted and beheaded by terrorists, or killed leaving his place of work, or blown up in an Irish pub.
These are very one sided questions. Do we have to experience every suffering to have any regard for the sufferer? What do you think human empathy is all about? what do you think it is that has been driving your own morals all this time? God?
Conclusion
Having read Letter To A Christian Nation, and the interview with Saltman, I don’t think Harris has said anything particularly controversial. Dispite that being my opinion, of course Harris may well have made the statements specifically to be controversial. Maybe his remark about being inflammatory was calculated. You’ll have to ask Harris. But on first reading it I hadn’t noticed anything particularly bad about it – just a rhetorical flourish. I’m often surprised how the religious, who survive on emotive language, don’t particularly like it when their religion is the target.
We can take any version of his rape statements: analogy of natural evolved benefit no longer being beneficial; a thought experiment, a wish, that religion wasn’t present; or a more literal calculation of least harm. Each interpretation of Harris’s words are really not that controversial – except to the extent that the religious like to find fault with Harris.
Harris, throughout his book and interview is quite gracious about the people of religion. He sees their particular problem as being that they have been misguided by religion. He simply dislikes the principle of religion and faith that can provide a framework for fundamental atrocities.
So, here are the words again:
I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.
Out of context I guess they could be misconstrued. And the problem is they usually are taken out of context – when seen in a blog, referencing another blog, taken from an article, that short changes the original source. And comments are made on the basis of the sentences here, or the fuller paragraph given earlier. But I see them as quite harmless in context, particularly the wider context of the book and the interview.
Some theists seem to get the wrong impression about atheism and atheists, with regard to the extent and type of opposition to theism and religion. I think this occurs because several issues become conflated in discussions between theists and atheists. Some theists seem to think that atheists want to abolish religion or censor it; but they are confusing the following: genuine desire to stop some religious practices and privileges; the desire for a secular state; and intellectual disagreement on the validity of religious belief.
They are all issues that should be considered separately.
Opposition To Faith Schools
The objection to faith schools is because of their indoctrination of young minds and the fact that one faith view is projected. Most humanist atheists want schools to be secular, which only means no religious or other world view bias (not even atheism), not the censorship of religion. We actually want education to include information about all religions and other world views and basic philosophy in a non-biased here-it-is make what you want of it sort of way. There’s no requirement to impose the atheist or humanist world view above others.
My children attended a Roman Catholic school, which preached RC Christianity. Both my children said that when they compared notes with friends at a state school the coverage of other faiths was quite different. The Roman Catholic school had given feint acknowledgement to other faiths whereas the state school was more open about discussing the variations of the details of the different faiths. I don’t know to what extent a difference in teachers played a part, and I’ve no detailed experience of other faith schools. But in principle I’m opposed to the promotion of a particular faith.
Faith schools breed division. This I know from my personal school experiences, where a predominantly CoE state school backed on to a Roman Catholic school – pupils were always at war, and though most pupils probably weren’t particularly religious, the religious difference was a focus of difference. This inevitable divisiveness has also been commented on with regard to Northern Ireland many times. In Oldham there is currently a plan to form a mixed academy to replace the current Christian dominated school and Muslim dominated school in areas that resulted in race/faith/culture riots ten years ago.
Abolishing Religion
The wish by atheists that religions did not exist is just that, a wish. Not necessarily that religions never existed – there is no requirement to change history. The wish is that religions would begin to fade away – starting with the most obnoxious elements of each religion, because we think in the long term society will be better when religion has gone. Note, that isn’t saying atheist humanism is the cure for all ills.
And this wish isn’t expressed in any political sense. There is no way in which humanist atheists want to censor or ban religion or religious thought. The very nature of atheist humanism, or in this context secular humanism, is that the state should not be involved at all in personal world views, and that everyone should be free to choose their own world view. There are many unknowns about the universe, regarding its origins and its makeup. The God hypothesis is a reasonable one, so given the free-thought imperative of secular humanists there is no requirement to stop people believing in God.
Secular State
The political desire for a secular state is not a request for censorship, it’s the request for the removal of a religious bias and privilege that is already present. What’s the alternative to removing bishops from the House of Lords as religious political posts? Add more bishops representing every faith in proportion to the faith adherents? Add atheists specifically because they are atheists? What about Wiccans and followers of other belief systems? A Lord of New Age? No, the most equitable route is to remove all posts relating to religion and have people there on merit or by election – depending on the desired make-up. This then does not prevent religious leaders being members; they would simply be members for some other reason: hopefully, merit.
The wider issue of a state church is slightly less significant to me, though many British Muslims might disagree. We have a lot invested in our culture associated with our churches, armed services, state events, etc., that currently have a close association with religion. I’m in no hurry to see these go since they are quite benign, colourful and culturally of historic interest, in terms of the state. I don’t, for example, have an issue with traditions that date back to more feudal times, such as the monarchy and knighthoods and so on. They just need disassociating from the executive branch of the state.
Intellectual Opposition
The intellectual objection to theism, as opposed to particular religious organisations that implement the varieties of theism, is purely that, an intellectual one of the understanding of the philosophy and science of it all. Again the free-thought nature of secular humanism supports the unrestricted examination of all philosophical views and wants to engage freely in debates about these issues. Historically it has been religion that has wanted to censor views and interfere in the free thinking, free expression and free action of others that don’t agree with the religion.
It’s a bit rich for anyone associated with these ancient religions to accuse atheists of censorship – it couldn’t be further from the truth for atheism, while at the same time most religions don’t have a good record on censorship.
Anti-Religion
Anti-religion is the opposition to some or all religions. Personally I am strongly anti-religious when it comes to the more dogmatic religions.
There are many aspects of Islam, such as it’s political desire to dominate that is such an important and freely expressed part of that religion, and the discrimination inherent in Islam against non-Muslims in Islamic state governance. These are inherent parts of Islam, given that they are stated in the Koran or Hadith. Islam would have to go through a radical change for me not to be anti-Islam. But there are probably many Muslims who would like to see such change, and I’d support them in that without wishing to have them give up non-political or otherwise humane aspects of their faith. If some Muslims think atheists have an unfair view of Islam then they need to start making their more moderate voices heard, not only by atheists, but by the more radical Muslims.
There are many aspects of fundamentalist Christianity that make me anti-those sects too, such as the intense indoctrination of children into psychologically damaging beliefs about being sinners and being damned to hell. I am less anti-liberal-Christianity, though I do disagree with its ideas on intellectual grounds. Other atheists may have a more blanket anti-religious stance.
Summary
Atheists generally do want to stop faith schools, political privilege, any particularly unfair practices, and to work towards a secular state.
Atheists generally are willing to debate theism and atheism on intellectual philosophical grounds.
Atheists may also be happy to see the back of religion. But one of the main principles of free-thought humanist atheism is the right to practice ones own belief system, and so we would want to defend anyone’s right to belief, as long as the practice of that belief is not contrary to the freedoms of other people.
My personal feeling is that I have no problem with self-funded religions and places of worship. I quite like some aspects of the CoE; I like to visit old churches; I enjoy some religious music, though I have no interest in the content of any songs or hymns; I like to visit grand cathedrals and mosques. I suppose my interest is atmospheric and historic. I have fond memories of some vicars from when I was young in the Boys Brigade – even our local tyrant vicar was fair. So, other than the issues above I’m not that anti-religious.
And I enjoy a good argument.
So, in general atheists don’t want to burn theists at the stake, stone them or decapitate them, or condemn them to hell or whatever the atheist equivalent might be (which according to some theists would be for them to become atheists). Live and let live – if only the religious would.
In the debate about Sam Harris on science and morality (links in this post) I want to side-step some of the philosophy, because much of it is influenced by the armchair philosophy of the past when science had nothing to offer at all, a time when philosophers plumbed the depths of their minds searching for something solid that indicated dry land in sight.
I see all moral codes as arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. They mean nothing outside a biological and social evolution. Prior to the evolution of consciousness, self-awareness and language what we think of as morals would have been biological imperatives. It’s our self-awareness, empathy, language and the classification of ideas that has caused us to label behaviour as good, bad, evil, right, wrong, moral, immoral. It’s our deep remaining biological imperatives that dictate which of these labels, and hence which behaviours, we prefer.
Within the contexts of separately developing cultures of the past there was still scope for moral codes to emerge as quite different from one culture to another. It may even have been possible to live by the maxim, “When in Rome do as the Romans do”, particularly for travellers who relished variety. Minority congregations that have travelled to a different culture still live by their own rules, and this can cause serious conflict of cultures – occasional ‘honour killings’ occur in the UK within cultures that value family honour greater than personal freedom and life of loved ones; and you can still get a good whisky in The United Arab Emirates, which restricts the purchase of alcohol from a liquor store to non-Muslim foreigners. We can see the social development of morals on top of biologically evolved imperatives.
Pre-TV we relied on news media that were much more susceptible of political and cultural influence. It was still possible for news reports to be so heavily censored, either for political reasons, or in acknowledgement of the sensitivity of the readers (i.e. the newspapers had a great concern for the dear ladies, and a fear of the indignant religious opinion). We were spared the blood and guts of foreign affairs. Only genuine travellers, and often soldiers, really knew the reality of events taking place elsewhere that didn’t fit our coy world view.
Innocent ignorance was real. During WWII my mother, 14 at the time, live near an aircraft factory in Manchester. During one attack a German plane strafed them in the street as she was walking to school, but it was soon shot down. She and her friends went to see the monster that had parachuted into a nearby field – they were expecting a real monster, a dreadful beast of a man, and were utterly shocked so see a very handsome blond haired terrified young man who looked not much older than them. The propaganda about the evil ‘Hun’ had been only words on a crackly radio, but those words had evoked vivid nightmarish images that had attributed evil to every member of another nation – every German was immoral.
The growth of TV was primed nicely for the Vietnam war. Horror came right into our homes. The Sixties and Seventies saw the dawning of a questioning of the morality of our own governments like never before. The threat of nuclear annihilation was real, and we questioned the immoral madness of it.
The subsequent rise of postmodernism awoke in us an appreciation of the arbitrariness of our own standards. Moral relativism seemed a logical necessity if we were to apply the Golden Rule to whole cultures – what right did we have to dictate to others how they should behave.
But as we’ve witnessed more of what goes on in other cultures, particularly with the rise of the internet, we’ve begun to question the soundness of the moral relativist argument. Do the Johnny come lately cultural customs of acceptable behaviour overrule our deeper stronger biological imperatives?
It’s difficult to pin down where the fault lies when we intuitively know there’s a fault. Many atheists have been quick to condemn Islam for it’s barbaric practices, only to learn that the cultural influence of the religion of Islam has itself been influenced by cultural values – some of the practices performed in the name of Islam are specific to one culture.
We know instinctively that female genital mutilation is ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘immoral’. Our empathy tells us this. But note even here, when I’m trying to be rational, the judgemental term ‘mutilation’ rather than ‘female circumcision’, or ‘female genital cutting’.
Is the Jewish practice of circumcision also ‘mutilation’? Some adult ‘victims’ think it is. But some non-Jews don’t want to interfere with this ancient tradition, and yet are outspoken about female genital mutilation because, to us in the West, it’s news; most of us weren’t really aware it happened. Cutting was OK for Jesus, but not for some young girl? Yes, there are differences in what is cut – perhaps there might be greater outcry against circumcision if the male glans were cut off, as the clitoris is cut off in girls. What are the moral implications? Should we address this imbalance? Cut the skin but not the clitoris/glans; cut the clitoris and glans; or stop the practice altogether. Would it be immoral to interfere in both cultural practices, or just one, or to not interfere at all? Our gut feelings are in conflict with our own Western postmodern cultural relativism, resulting in a moral relativist angst.
How arbitrary is all that!
We have many instincts trying to get the attention of our conscious minds. Our empathy tells us killing is wrong. But our empathy for the killed is in conflict with our empathy for the killer, depending on the circumstances. If it’s self-defense against an aggressive assault we side with the killer. Some found it difficult to side with the killed when Tony Martin shot dead a fleeing burglar. Even within our Western culture we can’t always decide. Why? If morals are God given or absolutes, why is it so difficult to be consistent?
Morality doesn’t come from some holy book, and it isn’t written in the foundations of the cosmos. We evolved with it and invent it’s varieties. And my moral instincts tell me that we need to figure out where we stand with our morals before we pass judgment. We need to understand the moral implications of our moral behaviour. We need to stop being so parochial and arbitrary, because otherwise we are betraying our own commitment to one of our most empathetically driven moral codes – fairness.
I know what I think morality is, but others have different views. We need to figure out what morality really is. We need to decide which culturally derived morals, or customs, are acceptable to our evolved instincts. Various international human rights organisations make fair attempts, but are often thwarted by member nations with cultures where the cultural customs have a more powerful base than science and reason.
Using philosophy alone we’ve raised questions but provided no answers. So if Sam Harris wants to try going down the route of using science, then I’m all for it. And in defense of Sam Harris, I really don’t think he means that the abstract process that is ‘science’ make decisions for us, or that it (science) will dictate how we should behave. That decision is ours, using our reason, along with the science that we perform.
The behavioural act of performing science on issues relating to how we make moral decisions and how we attribute value, and how we measure value, and what we do with the data we uncover, is a complete and entirely human process that can only improve our moral behaviour. I really think this is what Sam Harris means.
In this post I plan to criticise some views, giving my opinion on where they go wrong, then ask some questions to which I have no answer, and then describe my particular view on the matter, without having the slightest confidence that I’m right. And, for good measure, I’ve every chance of contradicting myself on the way. It’s not going to be short. This sounds about par for the course.
The Harris Problem…
It’s all about what Sam Harris appears to be claiming in his TED Video. I blame Lesley for getting us into this mess, here, here and here. And now Gurder has turned this into a wider debate.
Sam Harris TED Talk…
I want to address the talk itself first,…
“It’s thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value.”
I think that’s right, but with the caveat that it can give us data that can influence what we think we ought to value. I’m with the general agreement on Lesley’s and Gurder’s blogs and comments that science provides the data and that it’s for us to form opinions about that data. At least I think I am.
There’s a formulaic sense in which science can give us an ‘ought’, but it’s the wrong sense of ‘ought’. If I include in my ethics the ‘least harm’ principle, and then concoct some scenarios where there’s a choice between harms – e.g. the Trolley Problem – then science could say I ‘ought’ to do such and such in a particular scenario to achieve least harm, then this isn’t the moral ‘ought’.
But for me this does then raise the questions, what is a moral ‘ought’? Do morals exist, and if they do what are they?
Back to Harris,
“And, consequently, most people … think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, “What is worth living for?” “What is worth dying for?” “What constitutes a good life?” “
I think science can answer these questions, if we give science the goals that we want to achieve in the first place. Further more, I don’t think these particular questions are moral questions. They may be personal judgements – a Royalist might think Prince Charles is worth dying for, a Republican might not. We need to be clear about what constitutes a moral question.
“So, I’m going to argue that this is an illusion — that the separation between science and human values is an illusion…”
Let’s see if he does.
“Now, it’s often said that science can not give us a foundation for morality and human values,”
Now that depends on what is meant by ‘foundation’. (‘That depends’ is a theme of this post) If it’s a foundation of data upon which we can build our morality, our ethics, then yes, as long as we have the other elements of morality to go with this foundation. The stronger the foundation of facts the more informed we can be in building our morality. But the foundation of facts is not the full extent of our ethics – maybe. Don’t we need our moral goals in place to use these facts?
I think this is where Harris goes wrong.
“Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the wellbeing of conscious creatures.”
Yes, they become facts in their own right, once we decide what they are – it is a fact that most humans believe murder is wrong. It may be a fact of biological and cultural evolution that has caused most humans to hold that view, and so on. But what is fact about why we should think that we should hold this view? – What makes this a moral question?
“Why is it that we don’t have ethical obligations toward rocks?…And if we’re more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it’s because we think they’re exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. Now, the crucial thing to notice here is this is a factual claim: This is something that we could be right or wrong about.”
Yes, it is a factual claim, that we do hold this view, and we might be wrong about it (as Gurder points out). Again, evolution can explain why we do – where ‘why’ here means ‘how it came about’. It says nothing about why we should hold this view (or not).
“And we know — we know — that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space.”
Do we? Really? Just because we agree with Harris on most of his scenarios doesn’t mean they are moral questions, or questions that are only to do with morals.
“Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea? Probably not.” – Probably not? Why not just ‘no’? Why not ‘yes’? What is that turns this into a moral question?
“There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish, whether or not we understand these truths. And morality relates to these truths.” – First sentence, OK. Second? How and why? It relates in the sense that the more we know the more it can help us to construct morals – given we know what our moral goals are. Again, if least harm is a goal then the ‘Probably not’ answer is probably right – depending on other facts – but we do need to know our moral goals.
So, we must know our morals first, in order to decide what to do with the facts that we uncover. But is it that simple? How do we get to our moral codes in the first place? We observe them in ourselves? We feel them? But sometimes we feel we want to kill, so why do we choose non-murder as a moral code? Our morals often seem to be intended to overcome some of our feelings – our base instincts, or animal instincts. Why is love a moral good and murder a moral bad? Because of the Golden Rule? But what determines the Golden Rule is worth following? Our moral sense? But …. where do we go from here?
More from Harris. He gives some explanations, and then comes to this, “So, what I’m arguing is that value is reducible to facts — to facts about the conscious experience — of conscious beings.”
This sounds sort of right – we can reduce some values to facts. But which values? All of them? The fact that this organism (me) puts a greater value on raspberry to strawberry can be reducible to the details of science – raspberry releases more pleasure signals (simplification) than strawberry does – I like raspberry more than strawberry. But what’s happening in my nervous system when I attribute greater value to love than hate? I mean, it clearly is my nervous system that’s driving that valuation (at least as a materialist I think it is). And that nervous system is as it is because of scientific facts – biological and cultural evolution and personal experience – whether we have all pertinent facts or not. What is the difference between these values that makes one a matter of preference and the other a matter of morals or ethics?
I’ll leave that for now and get back to Harris.
“Now, let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space, or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question. …” – See. Caveats – for those who take this talk too literally, or who didn’t hear this bit clearly enough. This is a common notion to materialists: just because we can’t answer questions yet, or maybe can never answer them (at least in our currently evolved human form), doesn’t mean we have the final answer on the matter.
“…But if questions affect human wellbeing then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. And just admitting this — just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish — will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future.”
And there it is! There’s his moral goal. He’s already stated this, but it’s easy to let it slip by; and so from there he thinks that science can provide answers. This is the respect in which Harris thinks science can answer moral questions.
The fact that science can’t do that for every ‘human wellbeing achievement’ question, by using current science, is not to say it can’t, ever. But even if it were the case that science can never answer every such question, then so what; maybe it can answer more than by not using science.
The remainder of the talk fills in the details. We can argue about some of the examples, and question some of his reasoning, as Chris Anderson does. But the general idea that if we can establish that human wellbeing is in fact a moral goal we value, and if we can establish what constitutes human wellbeing, then science can accumulate the data needed to make the judgement call – maybe.
But for me Harris isn’t clear (maybe in his own mind, I don’t know) about what we use to judge the value of the science he is talking about, because he doesn’t say how science gets us to evaluating our values. He seems to assume one moral value, human wellbeing, as a given. Where’s his science that gets us to this and other moral values? Maybe he gets to that in the future. Maybe all we can draw from this is that science can help more than we are accustomed to thinking since Hume gave us is/ought. Can we dispose of is/ought as we dispose of non-overlapping magisteria?
I don’t think Harris convinces that it’s all an illusion – unless he can tell us elsewhere how he’s figured out all the problems of metaethics – see later. It’s not illusory that science can’t help us with all aspects of morals – as his own caveats attest.
Sean Carroll On Harris…
Sean Carroll criticises Harris here.
Well, I don’t think this is quite right with regard to Hume’s is/ought. See this post by Alonzo Fyfe. “Prove it.”, challenges Alonzo. Of course Alonzo knows that can’t be done, and isn’t really expecting you to. It’s a rhetorical flourish to explain his claim that Hume’s argument is one from ignorance. The difficulty, the seeming impossibility, of getting and ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
Carroll says, “Morality and science operate in very different ways.” – Well, maybe. Maybe morals and psychology are as different as psychology and physics. Maybe we just don’t understand morals too well – we may know them when we see them, but that doesn’t mean we understand them. Surely Carroll isn’t doing a Stephen Jay Gould on us – do science and morals operate in so different ways?
I’ll come back to Carroll where I think he’s right.
Where Does That Leave Me?…
Is the problem perhaps that morality itself isn’t quite what we think it is – that it is some specific set of facts that determine what we do? This has a similar flavour to questions of what consciousness is, what free-will is – whether they exist at all, or whether they do exist but not as we know it; Jim. Could Harris be right that morals can be reduced to facts?
Maybe morality is, in fact, just another, fact, another data point, an emotional response that we experience. What is it, in fact, to say we have morals? After all, as I conclude that I have no evidence of God (I therefore become an atheist), at all, and so can’t derive morals, whatever they are, from him, then God isn’t a source – as far as I can tell. Further, as I have no evidence that there are moral absolutes in the universe, but also no evidence that I can know I have access to absolutes in order to judge that, then I can’t claim that that’s a source, or not.
So if my morals come out of what’s left, the only evidence available to me, my biological and cultural evolution, then in the great scheme of things they are quite arbitrary facts, aren’t they? They could have been otherwise different facts. If we had inherited a propensity for infanticide of existing children of new mates, say from a common ancestor with some big cats, then any female divorcee might be reluctant to take on a new man – but the infanticide under those circumstances might then not be a moral problem. Maybe we would have come up with a ‘moral’ means of achieving this – like the debate over the method of death on death row in some US states, the death isn’t the moral issue, but the method is. Our morals are only meaningful in our own human contexts.
Maybe, below our feeling that they are not facts, they in fact are – and being this type of fact are open to discovery, and statistical analysis (i.e. democratic voting), the result of which determines what we do. This doesn’t mean we have to, as some fear, scan each other constantly to determine our moral values. The human genome project hasn’t been quite the horror for insurance access that we worried it might be, because we took some more general principle fact (empathy), constructed a moral code out of it (fairness) and prevented the wholesale use of genetics as a means to insurance discrimination and persecution.
So, before we’re too critical of Harris, maybe we need to think what our morals are first – I don’t mean what our moral values happen to be. Earlier I distinguished between two possible meanings of ‘ought’. But do we fully understand what the moral ‘ought’ is?
1) Is it (morally)right/wrong to murder?
2) Is it (morally or otherwise)right/wrong to make murder a moral matter?
What do I mean by ‘otherwise’? I mean as in ‘makes sense’, or as in ‘category error’, or as in ‘appropriate’…
If it’s wrong to make murder a moral matter, then the first question loses its significance.
3) Is it (morally)right/wrong to like oranges?
4) Is it (morally or otherwise)right/wrong to make the liking of oranges a moral matter?
Q4 is easier to answer than Q2, so Q3 is obviously not a moral issue. Why is Q1 a moral issue? Have we clearly answered Q2?
Exactly why is murder a moral question and the liking of oranges not? You might think to answer ‘The Golden Rule’, or ‘Least Harm’ or whatever is your moral code. But why is that a moral code in the first place?
As Gurder says, “Ethics are not easy“. Quite right. The whole subject of metaethics is testament to that. Try wading through this, through all the descriptive/normative stuff, and see if you can find a conclusion – you’ll certainly come out of it with more questions than you took in.
So, where do I stand?
Yes, ethics is real complex. we’re not even sure what it is we’re talking about – yet we all sort of know what we’re talking about, as if by magic (e.g. as if by God), when really it’s just some complex opinion we have that comes about because of our biological and cultural evolution and personal experience and reason – or at least as my biological and cultural evolution and personal experience and reason informs me. All very flaky, tentative, contingent, arbitrary? Too true it is.
Should I be a moral relativist? Well, what an awkward question that is – I’m asking an ‘ought’ question about my ‘oughts’. I can certainly observe a moral relativism – it’s plain to see that everyone has a relative opinion about morality, even if there are more common features than differences. There are probably as many nuanced moral views as there are variations in the human genome – and why shouldn’t that be so.
But we don’t generally implement moral relativism (some post modernists excepted). We do make moral stands – i.e. we do make moral claims – and Harris points out some of these. Even if we can’t justify how we come by them or why we hold them. We can’t give a moral justification for all our moral views.
That means conflict. I think genital mutilation of baby boys and young girls is morally wrong. I can justify why – Golden rule, least Harm, Freedom to Choose, Self-Determination, etc. – but I can’t justify those in turn on moral grounds. I am at odds with people who think those practices are acceptable. I could have, had I lived at the time of the Crusades, gone to war over an issue like this. Now I have to content myself with changing opinions through reason and law – if I, with others, can through reason persuade enough others that these practices should be proscribed through law, then I win that conflict; otherwise I continue to lose. This is what it boils down to.
So, I think Sean Carroll is on firmer ground with this:
“A big part of the temptation to insist that moral judgments are objectively true is that we would like to have justification for arguing against what we see as moral outrages when they occur. But there’s no reason why we can’t be judgmental and firm in our personal convictions, even if we are honest that those convictions don’t have the same status as objective laws of nature. In the real world, when we disagree with someone else’s moral judgments, we try to persuade them to see things our way; if that fails, we may (as a society) resort to more dramatic measures like throwing them in jail. But our ability to persuade others that they are being immoral is completely unaffected — and indeed, may even be hindered — by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true. In the end, we will always be appealing to their own moral senses, which may or may not coincide with ours.”
I’ve emphasised the bit where I’d add something: by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true, whether they turn out to be objectively true or not, whether Harris is right or not. I’m back to my contingency of knowledge again. Epistemology is a bitch, even for a deity. But that’s okay. When it gets very vague – at the limits of ability to figure things out, we just have to make the best of it we can – we do science.
The religious seem to dump this whole problem in God’s lap. That doesn’t seem good enough to me (do I find that an immoral failure of responsibility?). If I can’t figure something out I’d rather admit it, and if I must, I make a choice, based on whatever I’ve got available. And that consists of my senses and reason. And the best we can do with our senses and reason is to use them as rigorously as possible – science.
So, to some extent I’m with Harris in his project. I don’t think he’s got it right yet. But give the guy a break, we’re still trying to figure out lots of stuff, and philosophers and scientists are bound to make lots of mistakes. But how do we know what are the limits of knowledge; how do we know what we can’t know, when it comes to complex issues like this, that are processed in our very peculiar brains, which we don’t yet fully understand.
Let’s give Harris some rope – see if he ties it all up nicely or hangs himself.
Ramblings 