Memeing Naturalism

Leveraging Harris: making moral progress by denying free will

2010-11-28T17:26:00.002-05:00

In his latest book, The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris devotes 10 pages (pp. 102-112) to debunking contra-causal free will and drawing out the progressive implications for our beliefs, attitudes and social practices. This is a most welcome development since Harris commands a wide readership and considerable respect (although by no means universal agreement) among atheists, humanists, skeptics and freethinkers. Such readers are among those most likely to be receptive to the thesis – radical from the traditional dualistic religious perspective, but a scientific commonplace – that we aren’t causal exceptions to nature. The Center for Naturalism has long been promoting the challenge to the soul and its supernatural freedom as a science-based route to more effective and compassionate interpersonal relations and social policies, so we’re very pleased that Harris takes up this challenge so forcefully. Having dispatched the Big God of the major Abrahamic religions in The End of Faith, the little god of free will is a next logical target.

Continued at Naturalism.Org, comments welcome at this location.

Causation and Culpability

2009-11-14T15:28:00.007-05:00

At Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne, stout defender of science against anti-evolutionists and accomodationists, describes attending a conference with psychologist Philip Zimbardo, known for his situational analysis of why good people end up doing bad things. Coyne writes (my bolding in the second paragraph):

…Zimbardo said, “There are no bad apples, just bad barrels.” Do have a look at Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment webpage: that work, done in the ’70s, is still a sine qua non in psychology texts as it raised disturbing questions about how nice people can become evil very quickly.

I was not completely convinced by this extreme environmentalism. For one thing, it’s an easy way to exculpate people who commit antisocial or criminal acts; for another, there do seem to be some people who are of inherently good
character and prone to do heroic things in circumstances where others are
apathetic. On the other hand, I keep thinking of Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which showed how everyday Germans, most of whom we’d consider nice, well-meaning people, became avid supporters of the Holocaust.

I want to nit pick the bolded phrase since it encapsulates what I think is a widespread misunderstanding about causation and culpability. Coyne is of course right that there are dispositional (characterological) as well as environmental (situational) factors that determine behavior, but whatever the balance is between them, a full causal explanation of behavior is not exculpating. To suppose that we can hold people responsible only if they are uncaused in some respect sets an impossible standard for responsibility. After all, there’s no reason to think people are uncaused in some respect or ultimately self-caused, a logical impossibility. And even if Zimbardo were right that people’s dispositions and characters count for very little, we would still have to hold individuals accountable as a means to deter wrongful acts, such as the torture at Abu Ghraib (about which see Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect and his interview with philosopher Tamler Sommers in Sommer’s new book A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, highly recommended).

What Zimbardo’s analysis does, crucially, is to broaden the scope of accountability to include not just individuals and their traits, but the systemic, institutional and policy factors that bring out the worst in human nature. Understanding how those factors cause individuals to act badly gives us that much more potential power to prevent wrong-doing, so it’s important not to let a narrow, dispositionist and perhaps even contra-causal conception of culpability block our appreciation of situational influences. Hence my nit-picking of Coyne’s comment.

Curiously enough, however, I’m not sure that Zimbardo himself is completely consistent in the application of his thesis. At a talk he gave in Cambridge, I asked him if his analysis of the Abu Ghraib situation didn’t also apply to George W. Bush and then vice-president Dick Cheney. Weren’t they too the product of a situation, of political parties, ideologies and the lure of power, not self-created monsters? He hemmed and hawed, clearly unwilling to endorse such an apparently exculpating explanation of people he considered evil incarnate. But again, such an explanation wouldn’t be exculpating since we can, and must, still hold Bush and Cheney responsible despite the fact that they were fully caused, by their situation and innate endowments, to be who they are, and act as they did. In his interview with Tamler Sommers, Zimbardo agrees with Sommers that contra-causal free will is an illusion, but he also says the higher-ups like Bush and Cheney bear greater responsibility since they create the systems that corrupt the underlings. But of course neither Bush nor Cheney created the system that created them, a crucial point Zimbardo seems unwilling to acknowledge, or at least vacillates on (read the interview, see what you think). The buck stops nowhere, which means interventions are appropriate everywhere they will do some good, including the reform of systems that create and enable nefarious leaders.

If Zimbardo, one of the major proponents of situationism (and more broadly the causal explanation of behavior) can’t fully accept that causation applies to all of us, even presidents and vice-presidents, this just illustrates the power of contra-causal thinking. Indeed, Zimbardo says in the interview, "I don't really believe in free will, but I can't live without it" (p. 50). Nonsense! Please try harder. As long as we suppose the wrongs that people do are not the fully determined outcome of a host of social, environmental and biological factors, including an electorate that can put the likes of Bush and Cheney in power and an administrative system that allowed them to pursue a needless war in Iraq, then we’re at a serious disadvantage in our attempts to make the world a better place. By pinning blame on the bad apple alone, we’ll be blind to, and lose control over, the causes of bad apples.

Is Naturalism Nihilistic?

2009-11-14T11:43:00.002-05:00

This is an invited response to Alex Rosenberg’s essay at On the Human, The disenchanted naturalist's guide to reality, in which he suggests that naturalism leads to scientism and thence to nihilism. Nothing remotely like this is true, and seeing why not is a good opportunity to make some observations about naturalism and normativity – about where standards of right and wrong, and true and false come from if nature is all there is. I’m happy to report that most of the other commentators declined Rosenberg’s gambit, so they rightly remain un-disenchanted naturalists. The supposed relationship between naturalism and nihilism has been debunked previously at Memeing Naturalism, see here.

Scientism as Rosenberg describes it isn’t equivalent to or implied by naturalism, a worldview that takes science as its guide to reality. He says “Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.” But science alone isn’t in a position to be nihilistic. Science arguably provides the best answers to factual questions about what exists, but doesn’t itself have the resources or competence to answer (in the negative, as Rosenberg would have it) the “persistent questions” of human meaning, purpose and morality. To suppose science alone can answer such questions is indeed to be scientistic in the original and rightly pejorative sense. After all, when considering the big questions, we ordinarily avail ourselves of all the philosophical and practical resources outside science, such as ethical and political theory, religious and secular traditions, maxims, rules of thumb, and other sources of wisdom on how best to live and find meaning.

It isn’t surprising that Rosenberg’s hyper-reductive scientism ends up in nihilism, since of course we don’t find values or purpose or meaning at the level of what he thinks science shows to be the only reality: fermions and bosons. But such austere physicalism isn’t forced on the naturalist, who can countenance higher-level ontologies, including mental states, so long as they play useful roles in our best (most predictive, transparent and unifying) explanations and theories. So far as science can tell, human beings (physical organisms) and their projects (their behavior) are just as real as their sub-atomic constituents, which after all are not directly observed but theoretical posits par excellence. Naturalism still leaves plenty of room for purpose, meaning and morality so long as these are understood as what they actually are under naturalism: human, creaturely concerns that need no cosmic or sub-atomic backup. To see this is to naturalize purpose, meaning and morality, to relativize them to naturally occurring needs and interests; it isn’t to annihilate them.

Rosenberg underestimates the extent to which scientific explanations can be understood and found inspirational by non-scientists, for instance the grand stories of cosmic and biological evolution. To discover ourselves full participants in nature, historically and in the present moment, need not be demoralizing as Carl Sagan so wonderfully demonstrated. Crucially, scientific explanations don’t entail that human existential and ethical concerns are unreal or unfulfillable, only that they are situated in a natural world that, logically enough, has no capacity to validate them. Only the assumption that addressing such concerns requires an appeal to supernatural or extra-human standards would lead us to suppose that naturalized meaning and morality aren’t the real thing. But there’s no good reason to make that assumption.

Rosenberg says that “If the physical facts fix all the facts…then in doing so, it rules out purposes altogether, in biology, in human affairs, and in human thought-processes.” But the physical level of description doesn’t compete with, or supplant, higher level descriptions of human behavior involving purposes and other intentional states, conscious and unconscious. There’s no making sense of behavior at our level without them. True, science reveals no purpose in evolution or nature, but that doesn’t show that our purposes are illusions, that we don’t really believe, desire, plan, etc. Purposes and intentional states are real-ized in physical organisms such as ourselves.

He makes the same sort of claim about morality: “There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon.” Agreed: for the naturalist norms aren’t free floating, but are rooted in our evolved needs and desires for flourishing in community with others (hence ethical norms of fairness and reciprocity) and for making accurate predictions about the world (hence cognitive norms of rationality, evidence and inference). But even though we don’t find anything intrinsically normative in nature taken as a whole, or at the level of physical facts about fermions and bosons, these norms are just as real as the human beings that depend on them for getting by in the world. From a naturalistic standpoint, the normative force attached to our moral core – our judgment that it’s correct – can only be a function of the fact that it serves basic human needs as shaped by evolution: if you want to get along with others (and you likely do) then you should in general behave morally. That this explanation shows our moral core to be an adaptation, along with much else about us, doesn’t debunk normativity as unreal, only naturalizes it.

Rosenberg’s reductive stripping away of higher level human perspectives continues down the line, for meaning, history, consciousness, the self, free will, and even knowledge (a perilously self-undermining tack to take). But the mistake in all this is to suppose that physicalist, mechanistic, sub-personal and selectionist explanations leave no room in naturalism for the higher level ontologies and explanations that comprise the need-driven normative realms of cognition, meaning and morality. That the brain doesn’t traffic in propositions, and that consciousness isn’t a direct mirroring of the world, doesn’t mean that language-using persons don’t have propositional knowledge or entertain accurate beliefs. That semantic meaning isn’t a “fact about reality” considered at the sub-atomic level doesn’t render unreal our linguistic referential capacities, or our ability to tell truthful and instructive stories about historical events. No original intentionality is needed, only the constructed intentionality made possible by being creatures whose brains instantiate mental models that track the world. Seeing that the consciously experienced self is naturalistically not a soul, but a neurally realized pattern (a “real pattern” Dennett would say) is to explain selves and self-concern, not to explain them away. That we aren’t contra-causally free doesn’t mean we cease being moral agents responsive to the prospect of rewards and sanctions, although it might entail that we rethink some of our more punitive responsibility practices.

The processes of naturalization spurred by science may indeed upset some cherished supernatural and theistic conceptions of the self, freedom, consciousness, morality, meaning and knowledge, which may in turn prompt changes in mainstream concepts and practices. But naturalism does not entail the scientistic elimination and debunking of all that matters to human beings; it simply places this mattering within nature as a set of creaturely concerns that other sentient beings might conceivably share with us. That nature, taken as a whole, or understood sub-atomically, does not validate our naturally occurring concerns and capacities isn’t a reason to give up on them, and indeed we’re pretty much constitutionally unable to do so. So naturalists need not be, shouldn’t be, and in the end can’t be, scientistic eliminativists or nihilists.

The Mitigation Response: Getting Smart on Crime

2009-09-27T20:14:00.004-04:00

The French proverb has it that “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” – to understand all is to forgive all. Although it isn’t good interpersonal or social policy to forgive those who show no sincere signs of regret, or could continue to harm us, the saying nevertheless captures an important feature of human psychology. Understanding the causal antecedents of wrongful behavior, and more basically seeing that it had causal antecedents – it didn’t come out of the blue – often reduces blame focused on the offender. We see the role of the factors that created him and the opportunity for wrongdoing, and know that had those been different, he might well not have done wrong. This in effect distributes causal responsibility for the offense, so that the offender ceases to be an ultimate, point-like originator of action.

It’s appropriate that this change in our perception of causal responsibility mitigates perceived blameworthiness. To blame is to assign responsibility and seek redress, and as it becomes clear the offender is not self-made, but only the most proximate cause of harm, the smart course of action is to widen the scope of redress to include his causes – his formative environment and current situation. The tendency for blame focused on the offender to diminish in light of his causal story is an adaptive reallocation of emotional and attentional resources. It frees us up to consider a wider, more effective strategy in preventing future wrong-doings.

All this has implications for criminal justice, in that drawing attention to the causes of criminals, not just crime, might make us smarter in dealing with it. But just how real and robust is the psychological tendency described above, what we might call the mitigation response? Is there empirical evidence that understanding and appreciating causation actually reduces our desire to punish? Might it attenuate our desire for retribution, which aims only to inflict suffering on the offender, not produce good social consequences?

Some preliminary research supports these hypotheses. A series of studies conducted by psychologists Azim Shariff, Joshua Greene, and Jonathan Schooler indicates that heightening the salience of determinism reduces the attribution of moral blameworthiness, the perception of free will, and the desire for punishment (“Beyond Retribution?: Effects of Encouraging a Deterministic Worldview on Punishment,” in preparation). Individuals exposed to explicit arguments in favor of determinism and against free will, or (in another study) scientific articles merely suggestive of determinism, were less likely to impose long prison sentences on a hypothetical murderer. The results also indicated that imposing shorter sentences was mediated by reductions in perceived blameworthiness, arguably the main factor motivating retributive, as opposed to consequentialist, punishment (about the difference see here). It looks as though these experiments induced the mitigation response.

They also suggest that educating the public about causation, in particular that human beings and their acts are likely fully caused, might help shift our criminal justice priorities away from retributive punishment, the law’s current preoccupation, and toward prevention, rehabilitation and restitution, while maintaining deterrence and public safety. By widening the consideration of causes outside the perpetrator (but not forgetting him either!), the “deterministic worldview” can humanize criminal justice by motivating the idea that any suffering inflicted on him must have a solid consequentialist rationale: only inflict it if nothing non-punitive works to reduce the future harms coming from crime, and only if the suffering inflicted is less than the harm being reduced.

The mitigation response, generated by appreciating the offender’s causal history of being shaped by criminogenic influences, can thus play a role in changing attitudes about blame and punishment. We should take full advantage of it in crafting a humane and smart approach to crime reduction.

(About a smarter, less draconian approach to criminal justice, have a look at Mark Kleiman's appearance on Bloggingheads with Reihan Salam.)

Freedom From Free Will

2009-07-16T18:21:00.004-04:00

Back in February 2008, the New York Times and many other news outlets made mention of research conducted by Jonathan Schooler and Kathleen Vohs which suggested that people cheat more when induced to believe they don’t have free will (discussed at Memeing Naturalism here). This finding, they argued, raises concerns about disseminating the idea that we might be fully caused in our behavior: we might get demoralized by determinism. Perhaps we should maintain at least the fiction of free will even if we don’t actually have it. But perhaps not. That we need not be demoralized by determinism is argued here, and that determinism is in fact indispensable to us here.

These concerns resurfaced in a debate between psychologists Roy Baumeister and John Bargh at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention in Tampa. Their presentations are on YouTube here and here respectively, and the debate continues on their Psychology Today blogs here and here. Baumeister, worried about demoralization, is very concerned to spike the idea that human behavior is fully determined, so he floats the unlikely proposal that causation at the macro level isn’t deterministic (same causes, same effects) but more a matter of probabilities (same causes, a range of possible effects). The latter is likely true for micro-level quantum phenomena but there’s no evidence that it’s true at the level of human behavior. I try to steer him straight about determinism here, and try to persuade him that determinism isn’t demoralizing here, with help from philosopher Tamler Sommers. Further, Baumeister’s view of free will itself is somewhat confused, a mixture of naturalistic compatibilism and contra-causal libertarianism, so I try to clarify things for him here. Fortunately he’s a forgiving soul and seems completely unfazed by my meddling.

Bargh, on the other hand, is a model of clarity in his responses to Baumeister (here and here), so hasn’t needed any helpful hints. He’s properly skeptical about contra-causal free will and makes these two important points, among many other good observations:

1) Where’s the research, and publicity, about possible positive effects of disbelief in free will? All the focus so far has been on the downsides of determinism, at least what we’ve heard about. Interestingly, Bargh mentions that Jonathan Schooler, who brought us the study on cheating, also found that “telling experimental participants that free will did not exist caused those participants to be more forgiving towards the transgressions of others.” But there have been no press releases or news stories about this to my knowledge. With any luck, Bargh and others will research the benefits of free will skepticism, so stay tuned.

2) Bargh says it’s crucially important that if we don’t have free will, people should know about it. Why? In order to empower them. He says:

To my mind, one potential benefit to getting people to not believe so strongly in the power of their own personal agency or free will is that they might then be more concerned about external influences or even explicit attempts by advertisers, government, etc. to control what they do (eat, drink, buy, vote). Research by Tim Wilson and Nancy Brekke (Psychological Bulletin, 1994) has shown that people do not worry very much about these influence attempts because they believe they are the captains of their minds and in near-complete control over their judgments and behaviors. For example, people do not believe negative campaign advertising affects them, and so do not attempt to counteract or defend themselves from the effects of such ads, yet that variety of campaign advertising is in actuality so effective that it became nearly the exclusive form of campaign ads during the recent 2008 US presidential election. And Jennifer Harris and colleagues in our ACME lab have recently shown unconscious effects of television ads on snack food and cigarette consumption, such that these ads contribute to societal health problems of obesity and smoking (see www.yale.edu/acmelab/publications.html). Thus I can see significant positive benefits in informing people of their (at least relative) lack of free will in the behavioral impulses triggered by the ads, both in their own health outcomes and in their ability to counteract presumed unwanted influences on their
important decisions, such as who they want to lead their country. Indeed, given that Baumeister has expressed his belief that telling people that free will may not exist is 'irresponsible', I can make the case that not telling them is perhaps even more irresponsible, because it leaves them at the mercy of corporations and governments who are not quite so naive.

Here Bargh agrees with behaviorist B.F. Skinner: the myth of radically “autonomous man” is used to lull people into being more easily controlled. Moreover, it helps in blaming and punishing victims (they cause their own misfortunes), and draws attention away from the actual reasons people fail to flourish (don’t blame circumstances, just blame individuals). In helping to challenge conventional wisdom about free will, Bargh is bringing power to the people, if only they could be convinced. They are, paradoxically enough, made less free by their own beliefs about freedom, which is why we needn’t be shy about advertising the truth about human agency. Freedom from free will is a liberation movement waiting to happen, should naturalism take hold. If it does, we can thank John Bargh for his straight talk on a matter many suppose should be kept under wraps.

Putting epistemology first

2009-06-15T13:19:00.005-04:00

The debate over so-called accomodationism (notably between Chris Mooney and Jerry Coyne, with significant contributions by Russell Blackford, Jason Rosenhouse and P.Z.Meyers) has, fortunately, raised what I think is the fundamental issue between naturalism and supernaturalism: how we know what's real. The National Center for Science Education and the National Association of Science seem to grant religion a special domain of epistemic competence in being able to decide the question of whether the supernatural exists, a domain in which science, they say, has no competence. But this seems wrong, as argued here. Science can investigate supernatural hypotheses if they have testable content, and religion has no special reliable mode of knowing which shows that something beyond nature exists, although theologians such as John F. Haught try to make the case that it does.

Of course there are important questions we can ask about reality outside the direct purview of scientific theorizing. Supernaturalist Ken Miller suggests some: "Why does science work? Why is the world around us organized in a way that makes it accessible to our powers of logic and observation?" And he points to "the deeper questions of why we are here and whether existence has a purpose." To the extent these questions involve matters of fact, or that they imply a factual state of affairs within which we ask them, we'll want to use our most reliable mode of knowing to ascertain those facts, which is science. What is the nature of existence, that it might or might not have a purpose? What is it about the methods of science that explains why it works so well? Science, and more broadly intersubjective empiricism, obviously has a role in investigating the nature of existence and the nature of scientific practice itself since these are empirical questions. To the extent these questions aren’t directly factual, but involve conceptual analysis, they are ordinarily deemed philosophical. But the neat distinction between empirical and conceptual investigation has been blurred considerably by the naturalistic turn in philosophy over the last century, so that we might call Miller’s questions “philo-scientific” questions, ones which arguably require the collaboration of science and philosophy to address.

What Miller and other supernaturalists such as Francis Collins at Biologos seem to suggest, however, is that religion and religious faith have some additional expertise, knowledge or epistemic competence beyond what science and philosophy have to offer in answering such questions. They believe that there are specifically religious, non-scientific ways of reliably knowing reality that can help answer the questions of why the world is accessible to logic and observation, and of ultimate meaning and purpose. If so, how do these ways of knowing work, such that we can see that they’re trustworthy? Does theology, usually in the business of defending the existence of something beyond nature, have a special philosophical or epistemic competence such that it provides insights into reality not available to naturalistic philosophy? If so, what is this? In a must read essay on naturalism, Barbara Forrest quotes Sidney Hook asking the crucial question:

“Is there a different kind of knowledge that makes ... [the supernatural] an accessible object of knowledge in a manner inaccessible by the only reliable method we have so far successfully employed to establish truths about other facts? Are there other than empirical facts, say spiritual or transcendent facts? Show them to us...”

This is a reasonable demand that any cognitively responsible supernaturalist should be able, and feel obligated, to meet. Of course it isn’t as if naturalists claim to have all the answers to the big or even middle-sized questions, but the methods of inquiry we stick with have been proven pretty reliable. If there are any rival methods that establish the existence of something beyond nature that informs such answers, we want to know about them. If there aren’t, then supernaturalists are skating on thin epistemic ice.

Getting Along: Civil Disagreements with a Thinking Christian

2009-03-16T12:10:00.004-04:00

It’s always salutary to get evaluated by a strong critic of your position, someone who doesn’t share your preconceptions and assumptions and who therefore is able to detect weaknesses in your premises and arguments. Being an advocate of a worldview is to be biased in its favor, and it’s good to achieve some virtual distance from your commitments by looking at them through the eyes of an opponent.

Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian was kind enough to offer a critique of Reality and its rivals, an article that discusses the justifications for intersubjective empiricism (exemplified by science) as our most reliable way of knowing, how empiricism tends to support naturalism, and the ethical obligation we have to one another to be empiricists (and thus, perhaps, naturalists). He then invited me to a debate in three parts, which you can read here.

I won’t reprise the arguments since the disagreements are perhaps less important than the tone of the discourse, which was pretty amicable. Since it’s unlikely that unanimity on the fundamental questions that worldviews address will ever be achieved, it’s crucial that worldview adversaries share a belief in live-and-let-live tolerance, otherwise things can get very nasty, as the history of ideological conflict shows. They should agree that maintaining an irenic philosophical pluralism is more important than achieving world domination for their worldview, because that’s simply not achievable given human diversity. Better we disagree peacefully than try to enforce an untenable uniformity.

I wrapped up my contributions by noting all the common ground that had come to light during the debate. I’ll quote that and the end of Tom Gilson’s reply, just as an example of how focusing on commonalities helps to generate cross-ideological comity. To put it succinctly and imperatively: everybody play nice!

Clark writes:

…But what I’ve learned from this debate is that we agree about those [epistemic] commitments more than I expected. We agree that “first person data” – for instance the subjective experience of being embraced by God – aren’t alone adequate to prove the claim of God’s existence. We agree (I think) that intersubjective evidence using public objects is necessary to justify that claim to persons not having such experience. We agree that history and philosophy have intersubjective elements to them, and we agree (I think) that one can’t simply reason one’s way to God: philosophical arguments supporting God’s existence involve premises about how the world actually is in various respects (otherwise you wouldn’t be interested in history or science, which of course you are). We also agree that there are unsolved mysteries about how the world works, that dogmatism is to be avoided, and that argument, not force, is the best way to resolve worldview differences. And if they can’t be resolved, we agree that we can still live peacefully together in an open society (my cardinal value). So all told we agree on a lot, and for that and the very civil discourse I’ve encountered here, I’m most grateful.

Gilson responds:

...I continue to hold that God can communicate his reality to persons in a private manner, and that he does so, and that the shared reality of that experience among believers is as valid as persons’ shared experience of “red.” This is in addition to, not instead of, external inter-subjective validations.

I agree that there is epistemological value in your two requirements [the insulation and public object requirements], but I hold that to place complete reliance on them is self-defeating. I think you probably have agreed with that in the end, but I’m not entirely sure.

This has been an interesting discussion. There’s room for more response here, and (whether this is good news to you or not I don’t know!) I have two further topics to address from your epistemology article, relating to meaning and ethics, so I’ll take those up in blog posts before long. I appreciate your excellent interaction!

The Wisdom of Alice

2009-03-16T10:49:00.004-04:00

It would be nice if a worldview were not only true, but livable. As yet, there aren’t many thorough-going naturalists to provide data, but a hardy few have reported back on the livability of naturalism and it mostly seems to pass the test, see Living in light of naturalism. Below are some updates from Alice in Australia at the Naturalism Philosophy Forum (open membership), who describes some of the practical and psychological advantages of taking a consistently cause and effect view of ourselves, and the understandable suspicions many folks have about it. She also describes applying naturalism to child-rearing, as does Stephen, another member of the Forum. If a worldview can pass that test, then clearly it’s a winner! Enjoy…

Alice writes:

I’m really happy with my understanding of the world based on what I understand Naturalism to be telling me. In the past I’ve found that I was coming up with theories, then when I came across a theory that made sense I was applying it, but it never went smoothly, something always came up that didn’t fit in with my theory. So I jumped from theory to theory until finding Naturalism in July 2007. 18 months is probably the longest that I’ve had a theory that I’ve applied to my life where in 18 months I’ve not yet had a contradiction to the reality that I’ve experienced. I feel enlightened. I tell my friends this and they’re not sure what to think. When things go wrong in my marriage and I ‘attempt’ to speak with my mother about it – she tells me ‘well you’ve made your choices’, so then I tell her, I don’t have free will, she seems to think I’m trying to cop out of something and is very disapproving of me. In fact most people are disapproving of my belief in NFWism [no free will-ism: not having contra-causal free will]. I’m just really sorry they don’t ‘get it’. NFWism allows me complete acceptance of what is. It allows me to have compassion for all people. It allows me to make informed decisions and respond to everyone with the understanding that they ‘couldn’t have done otherwise’. This is an emancipating position. Yet still people look at me and think I’m some how being a smart-arsed shirker of responsibility, who hasn’t quite understood how life works yet – a dreamer who really doesn’t get it! Ironic that they have it so back to front – and yet my world view allows me to have total compassion for them and their attitude – whilst they look at me in judgment. It really throws the Christian door knockers - LOL!

On child-rearing:

…So the better I understand Naturalism, the better I can enact those principles in my life and use the rationality of naturalism in my thoughts and actions, the more likely that is going to permeate all my relationships and influence those around me. My eldest is currently 7 years old, and I find overt examples of my Naturalistic world perspective come out in my discussions with him regarding interactions between himself and his younger brother. Kids are very good at detecting false realities, so I have to be careful what I say if I want to maintain any authority or respect. I find that if I stick to Naturalistic parameters, my argument is quite based in reality and therefore acceptable.

I can’t see any problem with introducing all aspects of Naturalism including NFW [no contra-causal free will] to my children. Children integrate what they learn very easily and can also easily see when things don’t add up or make sense. If they feel safe they will talk about what is not adding up for them and allow you the opportunity to clarify concepts. One example of this for me was when my son’s friend told him that he would burn in hell because he didn’t believe in God. As my son approached me with his concerns, I was able to give my perspective, which was satisfactory and caused much relief.

If you hold Naturalistic beliefs and are able to concurrently have good self-esteem then there is no reason why your child wouldn’t follow you to do the same. If anything Naturalism has improved my self-esteem, as I’m more grounded in reality, feel more confident about my understanding of the world and have more compassion for everyone around me, which has lead to my feeling more valuable in society and therefore created higher self-esteem.

With my first child I had a go at punishment as a parenting technique. It caused us both lots of distress [and] it clearly didn’t work – it wasn’t effective in outcomes. Now I go for a more effective method – I change the circumstances so that I achieve the outcome I desire. The child may or may not understand what I’m doing, or why, but if I get the outcome I want and the child is not distressed it’s win-win. I have no concerns that this will create problems later on, as I explain everything I’m doing and allow the child to learn how to see other perspectives at their own rate – developing compassion (the ability to see another’s perspective) in the child is the key to socially functioning adults.

And Stephen writes:

…the other day I was talking to my daughter about what school she will be going to. She was worried in case she got "a rough one." I explained that she was an amazing biological machine able to adapt to the situation and do well if necessary, that this was the result of billions of years of natural selection going right back to the first self replicating molecule, that she couldn't take ultimate credit for the fact but still she has this amazing ability.Oh and I told her we'd get her Karate lessons too :-)

She is 10, didn't bat an eye lid but it gave her justified confidence (along with the offer of karate lessons), she stopped worrying and cheered up.

I think she's used to having one strange dude for a father :-)

[Relatedly, see this interview with Dale McGowan on raising kids without supernatural beliefs.]

Science Wars: Dualism vs. Materialism

2009-01-14T11:11:00.003-05:00

The prestige of science is such that everyone wants it on their side. Science is a trusted arbiter of facts for most of us, at least when it comes to empirical questions on which evidence can be brought to bear. So it’s little wonder that even those with patently faith-based convictions about the nature of things should try to conscript it to their advantage. The obvious examples are creationists and advocates of intelligent design who argue that were it properly conducted, science would provide support for their supernatural hypotheses (see here). The argument thus becomes about the nature of science itself: does it have canonical methods and assumptions? What are these, and are certain scientists guilty of letting their worldview warp good scientific practice? If science as it’s commonly conducted doesn’t support your metaphysics, then the temptation might be to claim that mainstream scientists are guilty of malfeasance.

The intelligent design controversy is perhaps the biggest front on the science wars, followed by disputes over the paranormal, but a new front is opening up around the issue of materialism or physicalism. Is science biased in favor of the materialist-physicalist assumption, the idea that nature fundamentally contains only material things? A small but vocal group of self-styled anti-materialist and dualist neuroscientists held a mind-body symposium at the UN last year, arguing that science has indeed been hijacked by dogmatic materialists, who wrongly discount evidence for categorically non-physical phenomena. New Scientist ran a good article about it, quoting some well-respected mainstream scientists and philosophers who, unsurprisingly, see the anti-materialists as the dogmatists, intent on warping science to serve their agenda.

These opposed positions are mirrored in two responses to the 2009 Edge question, What will change everything?. One is by biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who says materialism’s days are numbered: certain questions, for instance about the nature of consciousness, will never be answered unless science is liberated from its assumption that the physical world is all there is. He says “Confidence in materialism is draining away. Its leaders, like central bankers, keep printing promissory notes, but it has lost its credibility as the central dogma of science.” The other is by biologist P. Z. Myers, who says that materialism rules, and that eventually people will adjust to the idea they don’t have souls, widely believed to be the precious immaterial essence of our being: “Mind is clearly a product of the brain, and the old notions of souls and spirits are looking increasingly ludicrous…yet these are nearly universal ideas, all tangled up in people's rationalizations for an afterlife, for ultimate reward and punishment, and their concept of self.” Science writers John Horgan and George Johnson discuss Sheldrake, Myers and the materialism/anti-materialism conflict at Bloggingheads, and there’s been a protracted debate between materialist Steven Novella and dualist Michael Egnor, both neuroscientists, at their respective blogs here and here.

So who’s right and how do we decide? Sheldrake and Myers are both credentialed, published biologists, so they must share considerable common ground in how they practice science on a day-to-day basis. But obviously that isn’t enough to keep them on the same page when it comes to the prospects for materialism.

One way to moderate the argument, if not completely resolve it, is to see that science is primarily a method of inquiry, not a repository of metaphysical truths. Science has no particular commitment to materialism as a final conclusion about the world, it’s just that so far it hasn’t found evidence for, or explanatory justification for, categorically immaterial phenomena such as souls, spirits or disembodied minds and wills (whether agreement could be reached on the defining characteristics of such phenomena is an interesting and open question). If such evidence were to accrue, and were our best explanatory theories to incorporate non-physical entities, no good scientist would complain about it. It’s just the way things turned out. What scientists are after, qua scientists (and not worldview advocates), is explanatory transparency and reliable, maximally predictive models of reality (see here). No one can say in advance where these cognitive desiderata will take us. If Sheldrake and Myers could agree on this point, then their opposing opinions on materialism are not fundamentally about science, but bets on where science is likely to take us.

Sheldrake seems to think science might be limited in its current menu of options when he says “But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.” Fair enough - no honest scientist supposes that we can know in advance what the final scientific explanations for life and mind must involve. Perhaps totally new fields of inquiry will develop (but I’m not holding my breath). However, what is very unlikely to change is the basic methodological constraints of science and its criteria of explanatory adequacy, which require high levels of evidential support, explanatory transparency, and descriptive specificity for phenomena to be certified as real. It’s these requirements that have thus far ruled out creationism and intelligent design as tenable hypotheses, and they will apply equally to any hypothesis about categorically non-physical phenomena.

Sheldrake says “science will be freer - and more fun” once divested of its materialist bias. But science, properly conducted, has no such bias, and its judgments on anti-materialist hypotheses will be determined by the same rather demanding rules of evidence and explanation it applies to any hypothesis, materialist or otherwise.

No Problem With Determinism

2009-01-14T10:51:00.003-05:00

Psychology Today hosts a wide variety of blogs written by psychologists, therapists, philosophers and other assorted professionals concerned with mind, body and behavior. New on the block is One Among Many by Brown University social psychologist Joachim I. Krueger, who posted recently on "Troubles with determinism." As the title suggests, he worries that a consistently determinist view of ourselves might undercut our sense of agency and self-efficacy. As he puts it,

The problem of determinism is a deep one, and I think that neither scientific nor folk psychology have come to grips with it. In scientific psychology, there is constant friction between deterministic theories, such as behaviorism (or any other theory describing "mechanisms") and theories stressing human agency. What academic psychology seems to be telling us is that human behavior follows scientifically detectable laws and that at the same time we have the power to choose and change apart from these laws.

It's crucial to see that determinism doesn't conflict with genuine human agency, including the power to change ourselves. Human beings, though caused in each and every respect, are just as real as the causes that shaped them, and they still have real causal powers to pursue their goals, including those set by psychotherapy. We can't logically attribute causal power to the factors that create human agents and yet deny it for the agents themselves (see Avoiding demoralization by determinism).

Were there some part of a human being independent of determining influences, it would have no reason to choose one way or another, since it wouldn't be affected by, and thus responsive to, its own motives and reasons. Any exemption from determinism wouldn't give us a freedom (or responsibility) worth wanting, as philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, only a random factor introduced into behavior. So we don't need, and indeed shouldn't want, a power to choose that's independent of "scientifically detectable laws."

As it turns out, there are now psychiatrists and therapists who are coming to grips with a deterministic, and more broadly, naturalistic understanding of behavior. Dr. Ron Pies, clinical professor of psychiatry at Tufts University in Boston, is one - see his papers on what he calls "psychiatric naturalism" in Psychiatric Times: Hume's Fork and Psychiatry's Explanations: Determinism and the Dimensions of Freedom and Psychiatric Naturalism and the Dimensions of Freedom: Implications for Psychiatry and the Law. (Pies responds to Krueger at the blog.)
In a therapeutic setting, seeing that one's behavior and that of others is fully caused works to reduce shame, blame (of self and others), anger and other responses predicated on the idea that we could have done otherwise in a situation. Indeed, Krueger recognizes a thorough-going determinism might make us more compassionate and self-compassionate, since, as he puts it, "We acted the way we did because we did our best and really couldn't have acted differently."

The cause-and-effect understanding of ourselves not only generates compassion, but gives us control, since we won't suppose that any part of us escapes being shaped by our circumstances, internal and external. Instead, we'll look at the actual causes of behavior, and thus be in a much better position to design and target effective interventions. So the insight that we don’t have contra-causal free will can be a key tool in achieving therapeutic objectives. Far from causing trouble, determinism - the reliable patterning of events and actions - can serve us well in navigating the world.

Further reading: Worldview Cognitive Therapy

After Free Will

2008-11-09T13:49:00.005-05:00

Paul Davies (not the astrophysicist but the philosopher at William and Mary) gets interviewed here (and there’s an audio clip here) on the possibility that we might have to give up on free will and what that might mean for us. By free will he has in mind some sort of capacity to transcend the neural instantiation of personhood, and he rightly suggests that a science-based, naturalistic understanding of ourselves calls such a capacity into question.

Of course compatibilists (those who say free will is compatible with determinism) will argue that Davies is mistaken about what free will is, and that it has nothing to fear from science. But they will likely agree that what he means by free will might not survive a naturalistic understanding of ourselves. The obvious point being that we can avoid confusion on the free will issue by stating up front what capacity or characteristic of an agent we refer to when we say "X has free will." Or better yet, simply talk about the capacities and characteristics themselves, whether there’s reason to believe they exist, and what their existence or non-existence implies for how we think about ourselves and, for instance, our responsibility practices. Talk about free will, absent clear definitions, is simply a recipe for miscommunication.

Davies himself speculates that even as strictly material creatures, we have robust, neurally based capacities for extracting and creating meaning that will likely see us through the death of free will as he defines it (the death of the contra-causal soul, more or less). He says there’s no evidence yet for such optimism, but I think there’s at least some anecdotal evidence coming in, see here. And as Shaun Nichols pointed out at the end of his Scientific American article (discussed by yours truly here), there’s evidence that determinists don’t give up on moral responsibility. Life, meaning and ethics and will go on after the soul is gone. Not that it’s going quietly, see Creationists declare war over the brain and Steven Novella's good 3 part commentary starting here.

I also take some (friendly) issue with Davies' description of the poor beleaguered self: he says it gets pushed around by internal and external stimuli. But if we agree the self isn’t an immaterial soul, is there anything else we’d call the self that’s separate from neural activity or from the brain and body that could be pushed around? If not, then we might say there is no self, in which case the problem of being pushed around disappears. But we might instead say (and this is my preference) that the self or person is, for instance, an integrated, functionally coherent construction of physical and psychological parts (see here). This stable, identifiable agent is just as real as its causal antecedents and external environment, and therefore we can justifiably assign it causal powers, just as we assign causal powers to the antecedent factors that created it and the environment that impinges on it. So we shouldn’t feel demoralized, disempowered or in any sense disestablished when admitting our complete integration into the causal matrix (see here). After contra-causal free will is gone, we'll still be recognizable as people, moral agents, and the readily identifiable individuals we so reliably are. And again, life will go on with its usual ups and downs, but minus a major incitement to pride, contempt, resentment, shame, guilt, and other not-so-lovely reactive attitudes.

Worldview Naturalism in a Nutshell

2008-11-09T13:34:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

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

Originally written for and posted at Nirmukta - thanks to Ajita Kamal.

Not to Panic, Everything's Under Control

2008-09-10T13:49:00.005-04:00

In a Scientific American article on free will, philosopher Shaun Nichols defines free will as being incompatible with determinism:

Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that free will doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free.

He goes on to worry that “If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility?”

He then discusses a study by two psychologists, Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler, that bears on this question. Their study purports to show that if people cease believing they are exceptions to determinism, then they are more likely to act immorally, in this case, cheat. (See here for a detailed discussion.) Vohs and Schooler suggest that to maintain moral responsibility, it might be necessary to promulgate the belief that that we have a kind of ultimate control over ourselves that transcends cause and effect: a contra-causal free will. But this would require a systematic campaign of mass deception since there’s no good scientific evidence that we have such free will. Maintaining the fiction of ultimate control and contra-causal freedom would be a grand exercise in anti-science brainwashing, not exactly the hallmark of an open society. Of course the Bush administration tried something similar in its fight to discount the reality of global warming (see Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science), so there’s precedent for a deliberate disinformation campaign that would pit moral responsibility against determinism.

But such dire and undemocratic measures are unnecessary. What Nichols doesn’t mention in the article is that many naturalistic philosophers think that we don’t need to be free from determinism to be morally responsible. There are good, easily understandable reasons to hold fully caused persons morally responsible, for instance, to cause them to behave morally and responsibly. Even if people are formed by factors that are ultimately beyond their control, they still have local, proximate control (what philosopher John Martin Fischer calls “guidance control”) in the sense that their actions are usually controlled by their own desires and motives. Whether or not people act on their desires and motives can obviously be influenced by the prospect of being held responsible. After all, every sane adult’s normal complement of cognitive capacities includes the capacity to anticipate praise and blame, to take into account the likelihood of being held accountable for their actions. Anticipating this, they unsurprisingly often make the choice to conform to moral norms.

So we can see that acting morally and responsibly centrally involves the causal influence of moral norms on an individual’s choices and behavior. As a locus of proximate but not ultimate, contra-causal control, a person generally (but not always of course) acts in ways that reflect the moral consensus. Put concisely: morality leverages each person’s local self-control to achieve social stability. We don’t need to have ultimate control, that is, be exceptions to determinism, for this to work, and indeed any part of us free from causation would be for that reason impossible to influence. So it’s a good thing we likely aren’t exceptions to determinism. If we were, we’d be uncontrollable moral monads.

Now, I take it that this commonsensical rationale for moral responsibility is not rocket science. It can be easily communicated in plain language (plainer than what I’ve used above), and what’s more, it’s the case. It’s how our moral responsibility practices actually work. This is why it’s puzzling that Nichols, who presumably knows of such rationales, said nothing about them in his Scientific American article. Had he done so, it might have forestalled the predictable free will/moral responsibility panic that sometimes ensues when people discover they are fully caused (for an instance of such panic incited by his article, see here). That he didn’t can only help inflame the culture wars between naturalism and supernaturalism.

Nichols does, however, mention research indicating that most of those who believe people are determined in their behavior (a small minority of the total population, but which includes many philosophers and scientists) still believe people can be held responsible. This suggests that, as he puts it “if you come to believe in determinism, you won’t drop your moral attitudes.” This is comforting to know, but he says it raises puzzling questions:

People who explicitly deny free will often continue to hold themselves responsible for their actions and feel guilty for doing wrong. Have such people managed to accommodate the rest of their attitudes to their rejection of free will? Have they adjusted their notion of guilt and responsibility so that it really doesn’t depend on the existence of free will? Or is it that when they are in the thick of things, trying to decide what to do, trying to do the right thing, they just fall back into the belief that they do have free will after all?

These puzzles are resolved by seeing, as suggested above, that yes, we can easily adjust our notions of guilt and responsibility to function perfectly well in the absence of contra-causal free will. Moral attitudes find sufficient justification in the necessity for holding each other morally responsible, so we don’t need to “fall back into the belief that [we] do have free will after all.” Of course, some of our attitudes and responsibility practices should change in light of a science-based naturalism, which shows human persons to be the fully caused outcomes of biology and culture. For example, absent contra-causal free will, retributive punishment is very difficult to justify, which has direct implications for our criminal justice system. But there’s no deep puzzle about the survival of moral responsibility overall under naturalism. We remain moral agents since we are often prompted to act out of moral considerations, considerations that are upheld and enforced by holding each other responsible. So no need to panic, it’s going to be OK - better, actually.

Can Ray Tallis Be Reined In?

2008-09-01T16:05:00.020-04:00

Dear Ray,

I hope this finds you well. I wrote in Playing Catch With Dr. Tallis last March that

It isn’t clear that Tallis believes that persons have something supernatural or contra-causal at their core, since after all he’s a medical doctor and therefore most likely a physicalist. But his desire to wiggle free of determinism in defending free will necessarily introduces an obscurity into his account of human action. This is too bad, since otherwise his is a first class intelligence, one that naturalists would love to have on their team.

I see from your April Voltaire lecture for the British Humanist Association, "Is Human Freedom Possible?," that you do in fact think there’s something contra-causal about us. I’ve appended below some comments on your talk, the thrust of which is that we don’t evade determinism (put otherwise, we don’t have libertarian, contra-causal free will) and don’t need to in order to secure any human good. You will of course disagree, but at least my critique might stand as an example of a humanistic, progressive naturalism that’s perfectly at peace with the absence of libertarian freedom. We don't need to resort to what I see as your metaphysical extravagances and obscurities to defend Enlightenment values. Btw, I should say that I like many of your points about the complexity of the self and its actions and our embeddedness in the social context. I just don’t think that this makes us first causes.

all the best,

Tom Clark

Ray writes:

"If we do not have individual freedom, or the capacity to be genuine agents, then the notion of political freedom, so crucial to progressive thought becomes more than a little problematic; which is why the issue of human freedom lies at the heart of the debate between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment."

It seems to me we don’t need libertarian, contra-causal freedom of the sort you champion to have political freedom. Political freedom simply requires freedom from certain sorts of constraints and coercions, namely those imposed by despots and tyrannies. See here, for instance. Being uncaused in any respect wouldn't increase our freedom or power.

"Most philosophers think that determinism is incompatible with free will."

Actually the reverse is true: most philosophers these days are compatibilists of one sort or another.

"There are, however, philosophers who believe that free will is compatible with determinism: the so-called compatibilists. As you will see, they include your Voltaire lecturer, though I believe that determinism applies only to the material world understood in material terms."

By carving out an exception to determinism in some sort of transcendent, non-material intentionality, and by making that the necessary condition of human freedom, you define yourself as an incompatibilist. If determinism ruled everything, material and immaterial, you’d say we couldn’t be free, so for you freedom is incompatible with determinism.

"Intentionality is entirely mysterious and not, at any rate, to be explained in terms of the processes and laws that operate in the material world. Its relevance tonight is that it is the beginning of the process by which human beings transcend the material world, without losing contact with it…"

I’m not sure how you go from saying that intentionality is entirely mysterious to then saying that you know for sure it can’t be explained in material terms. As you know, philosophers are hot on the trail of naturalistic accounts of intentionality that don’t appeal to anything immaterial.

"Intentionality is so central to the arguments about freedom and to everything I have to say today, that I want to dwell on it for a few more moments. The light enters the eye from the object and causes neural activity in the visual pathways. That is standard cause-and-effect as seen throughout the material world, where determinism reigns. The gaze looking out back at the object is anything but standard. The relationship that is established in this gaze, this counter-causal bounce-back that is intentionality, is more complex and key to human freedom."

I’m wondering if you have any citations/references for the idea that there’s something contra (counter) -causal about intentionality, about how contra-causal processes could be reliable, and how they connect with standard causal mechanisms, e.g., neural processes.

"Let me just go over again some of the consequences of the intentionality that is in the reverse direction to the flow of causality."

Again, I’m wondering what “in reverse direction to the flow of causality” means and whether it has any established basis in the scientific literature. I’ve never encountered this claim before.

"As our experiences are increasingly mediated by signs, intentionality expands beyond the body. We relate increasingly to an invisible, indeed immaterial world: the world of generality or of general possibility… The human world, in short, is a greatly expanded Space of Possibility that is not part of the material world."

I take your point about the increasingly abstract and multifarious nature of relationships made possible by signs and language, but don’t see that they transcend their material instantiation. Human reasons, for instance, are one variety of causes that need a physical basis in the brain and body and other media to be causally effective, as Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown point out in Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?. There is no opposition or contradiction between being “reason-driven” and “cause-pushed” (your terms, see below). As far as science can tell, the human world, including all its abstractions and concepts, is entirely encompassed by the material world, which is what’s amazing (but not miraculous): the material world, properly organized, does it all!

"This is where the buck starts: in a self that is not a thing, but not insubstantial, either: it is an embodied subject. This is the person as ‘an independent point of departure’ that Lucien Goldmann spoke of as central to the Enlightenment vision of humanity, of human freedom and human hopes for a better future."

I’m not sure how the fact that persons are embodied subjects of many talents, reasons and capacities makes the buck start inside them. After all, every bit of who you are originated ultimately from circumstances you didn’t choose. This doesn’t mean you cease having your talents, for instance for self-improvement, only that you can’t take ultimate credit for them. Nor does the Enlightenment vision depend on persons being undetermined, self-caused little gods. As you properly note later on, any uncaused, undetermined element of ourselves would have no reason to act one way vs. another. As you put it: “that which has no given properties would have no basis for choosing one action rather than another.”

"The determinist case, which slims down our lives to a linear succession of causes and effects, ignores the self and its world; indeed ignores the Space of Possibility within which we operate."

Not at all. Determinism doesn’t ignore or diminish the self, it only explains it, see Don’t forget about me: avoiding demoralization by determinism. Nor does a cause and effect view of things ignore possibility, since possibilities are constantly being considered and analyzed in human deliberations carried out by physical, deterministic neural processes in our brains and their external manifestations, such as your Voltaire lecture and this response. And of course randomness and indeterminism wouldn’t add anything to make us more free or rational. We want our cognitive processes to be reliable, accurate reflections of the world, and our actions to be reliable outcomes of our desires and deliberations. Introducing indeterminism or randomness anywhere in the human behavior-guiding process would subvert effective cognition and action.

"To see actions as cause-pushed rather than reason-driven is, of course, to prepare them to be reinserted into a causal chain extending backwards from a present material event to the Big Bang; and this is wrong. If we fail to spot the error of this first step, we shall find it difficult to combat a determinist case against freedom."

There’s no problem with tracing our selves and actions back to the Big Bang, it only shows our natural heritage. But wanting to be miniature first causes is problematic, since as science progresses setting ourselves up as little gods requires increasingly obscure accounts of human agency and intention, such as yours here. Not that your analysis of the complexity of human action and intention isn’t correct and enlightening in many respects, but we need not, and indeed cannot, insulate ourselves from the causal web in any respect.

"Have I rescued my personal freedom from the jaws of material causation and determinism only to feed it to the equally slavering jaws of external psycho-social causation and cultural determinism?"

Despite all I’ve said here and elsewhere it’s likely you will carry on in what I see as a quite unnecessary rescue mission. People very much like to hear that they are immaterial causal exceptions to nature. But of course we are no such things, nor do we need to be to have political freedom, moral responsibility and be effective, dignified agents, as explained at Naturalism.Org and in Encountering Naturalism. A summary of some reassurances about human agency, morality, etc. in a universe without libertarian free will is here.

The Case for Naturalistic Spirituality

2008-07-14T13:09:00.005-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Identity Crisis and the Law

2008-07-12T10:50:00.003-04:00

Tom Wolfe, cultural knockabout, discovered the neuroscientific revolution and its apparently dire implications for our self-image some years ago, and wrote it up with typical flair in "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died." His recent conversation with neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga at Seed gets into the same territory, what Seed calls the new identity crisis: if there's no ghost in the machine (and it seems there isn't), what the bleep are we, anyway?! Worries about genetic and environmental determinism are now joined by neural angst in suggesting that you're basically a biological choice-making machine. But Gazzaniga says this way of being you might be OK:

But who is "you"? "You" is this person with this brain that has been interacting with this environment since you were born, learning about the good and the bad, the things that work and don't work. You've been making decisions all the way along, and now you have a new one and you want to be free to make it. So psychologically, the Interpreter is telling you you're making this decision. But the trick is understanding that your brain is basing the decision on past experience, on all the stuff it has learned. You want a reliable machine to make the actual act occur. You want to be responding rationally to any challenge that you get in the world, because you want that experience to be evaluated. That's all going on in your brain second by second, moment to moment. And as a result, you make a decision about it. And phenomenologically, when the decision finally comes out, you say, "Oh, that's me!"

Choices arrived at neuro-deterministically are what you rationally would want to make. You want to be a good anticipator of probabilities and contingencies based on past experience, and inserting something random, undetermined, or (a logical impossibility) ultimately self-caused, would simply add noise to the mostly reliable calculations your brain makes "second by second, moment to moment." So it's a good thing you don't have the free will to do something other than what your brain decides, even though it might feel like you do. And indeed, never did a choice-making machine feel so spontaneous!

Gazzaniga, director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project, also properly points up a difficulty for criminal justice on this picture of the self:

So these ideas — what I call the ooze of neuroscience — are going out everywhere, and people are willing to accept that: "My brain did it. Officer, it wasn't me." These defenses are popping up all over the judicial system. But if we adopt that, then it's hard to see why we have a retributive response to a wrongdoing. It would seem to me to be morally wrong to blame someone for something that was going to happen anyway because of forces beyond their control. So people get into this loop, and they get very concerned about the nature of our retributive response.

And well they should. Even though we can't and shouldn't let criminals go free just because they're fully caused to commit crimes, we should nevertheless rethink retribution, the idea that criminals deserve to suffer whether or not it produces any positive personal or social outcome. The idea of reforming our punishment practices, stemming from the sea-change in our self-concept driven by neuroscience, has been taken up by a few philosophers, psychologists and others, including Joshua Greene (Harvard), Jonathan Cohen (Princeton), Derk Pereboom (Cornell), and of course the Center For Naturalism (we've proposed a Council on Crime and Causality to make the case for such reform).

Curiously, and it isn't clear why, Gazzaniga is self-admittedly very hard-nosed about punishment, even to the point of wanting to toss the insanity defense, see here. That a neuroscientist, of all people, thinks we should retributively punish those with serious mental disorders seems indefensible. But being very smart in one domain is no bar to being dead wrong in another. Relatedly, it's worth noting that the legal coordinator for the Law and Neuroscience Project, UPenn professor Stephen Morse, is also a retributivist, although not as hard-nosed as Gazzaniga (see here). Those at the Project who think neuroscience has progressive implications for the law, such as UPenn's Martha Farah, might have some tough sledding ahead.

The Collective Rationality of Responsibility

2008-05-11T14:06:00.003-04:00

Everett Young writes:

A thought occurred to me regarding the ongoing discussions of morality and ethics and the lack of free will. There's actually a very neat point that is hidden in your take on "holding people responsible" which I don't think is explicitly made, but could be made explicit. I'm borrowing here from some of the basics of political economy and game theory.

It is certainly the case that by holding people responsible, their behavior is caused to be more pro-social. But there are two points I'd like to add here.

The first is that I not only want to hold others responsible for their actions, but it's actually advantageous to me to be held responsible for my own actions! Why is this? It's not because I want to harm others wantonly--evolution has mostly made it so that most animals don't want to do that to conspecifics, even without the benefits of conscious, deliberative thought. No, actually, the reason I want to be held responsible for my actions is that if I'm not, then in a competitive world, others may be forced to defensively assume that, not being held responsible, I will outcompete them. They are then forced to "defect" in game-theoretical terms, or behave anti-socially toward me. I, in turn, knowing that they know that I'm not held responsible for my actions, know that they will anticipate this and will try to outcompete me, so when I'm not held responsible, I'm not just "free" to behave anti-socially, I'm forced to. Indeed, since everyone knows that everyone else is not held responsible for their actions, even the presence of a few anti-social people forces everyone in the population to behave anti-socially, producing a Hobbesian state. Ultimately, then, the absence of laws holding me responsible could, in many if not most populations (in particular, populations that are seeded with even a tiny number of defectors), cause me to behave anti-socially. This would be rational behavior as well as fully caused, at the macro level (i.e., I'm not talking about the neuronal level).

The second point is that being held responsible not only benefits beings with no free will, it also benefits beings that aren't even conscious, entities that could not possibly experience any "want."

There is an example I can think of, of a non-conscious entity which is designed for a certain purpose, and so it's clear what is "good" and what is "not good" for this entity. I'm speaking of a corporation. A corporation has no thoughts or feelings, certainly no free will of its own. But it does have a purpose: to make money for its investors. Now, a corporation is subject to the same causes and forces as an individual in a political economy sense. A good example would be a logging company. A logging company does not benefit from clear-cutting the forest. That might lead to short-term profit, but it also leads directly to the death of the corporation, because there are no more trees.

However, the existence of a population of several logging companies logging the same forest leads almost certainly to the companies racing to clear-cut the forest as fast as possible, because each company "knows" that if it does not cut as many trees as possible, the competition will. How do they know the competition will? Because they know that the competition knows this same thing about them. Everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows, so every corporation must race to clear-cut the forest as fast as possible. This requires no free will and no consciousness. A non-conscious computer could run the corporation based on purely logical, rational principles, and would come up with the same strategy without a need for "evil" uncaused intent. There is only one solution, of course, to this tragedy of the commons: every corporation must be held responsible for over-cutting the forest--including disincentives, such as financial penalties. The corporations can only fulfill their chartered purpose if they are held responsible. This, without their even being conscious beings, let alone entertaining illusions of being free.

I think this conclusively illustrates that "holding responsible" members of a society, whether those members are conscious or not, is not only good, but necessary for the common good. And rational organisms, even non-conscious ones, would not only elect to have "others" held responsible, but themselves too, because if they themselves are not held responsible, others will be caused to defy the law and defect, lest they be outcompeted. That is, if you and I are in competition, holding you responsible for what you do doesn't help me unless you know that I am also held responsible for what I do.

Laws then are a rational solution to a collective action problem, not a moral concoction invented by beings who need to stop each other from making too much use of their freedom.

________________

About the contributor: Everett Young is a political science instructor and Ph.D. candidate specializing in political psychology at Stony Brook University. His research currently focuses on individual differences in cognitive process variables that may produce opinion formation along the left- right ideological dimension.

Do We Lack Character?

2008-05-11T13:43:00.003-04:00

Larry More writes:

Dear Tom,

I want to bring to your attention I book that I think you will find useful and interesting. It is entitled Lack of Character by John Doris, 2002. The author is a philosopher of ethics, and main theme of the book is that character (in what we speak of as "moral character") does not exist in the way that we tend to believe, and therefore character ethics is a rather different enterprise than we usually assume, which he goes on to discuss.

Doris thoroughly reviews and discusses the social psychology research which has repeatedly evidenced that there is little empirical justification for our assuming any internal, temporal, or cross-situational consistency to behavior (as is implied, if not required, by our usual notions of moral character).

As a psychologist, I remember well the furor that was created in 1968 when persistent findings of low trait-behavior correlations and negligible cross-situational consistency resulted in suggestions that there was no central personality structure. The urgency around this issue lasted over 10 years, and was never really resolved; the field just passed it by. It seems to me that this response was in some sense the same one that is now arising around naturalism, determinism, retribution, will-power, responsibility, and so on. Doris does no more than touch in passing on the philosophical issue of determinism vs. free will (a page on compatibilism) and talks about supernaturalism not at all. Nevertheless, I am thinking that his emphasis on situational influences on (determinants of) behavior mark this book as naturalistic in orientation.

Although he doesn't seem to realize the importance of this direction, Doris' text actually touches on where we get our assumptions of a powerful single, coherent central self determining our actions. He points to substantial research regarding how children develop their conceptions of persons through their life-span; and even contrasts conceptions developed in other (less individualistic) cultures. Surely our notions of contra-causal free-will, the primacy of person over situation and the focus on individual responsibility raised to the level of metaphysical principle, our readiness to justify reflexive emotional reactions with judgmental cognitive categorizations, and to unwittingly engage in punitive retributive practices, -- etc -- all of these have such a developmental history. It strikes me that this is a sort of Foucauldian genealogical project, but there is a good bit of child-development research that bears on it. Showing how these concepts are embedded in a culturally-local developmental history that we (around here) share in common, does not of course directly challenge the "objective truth" of these points, but it surely would undermine and soften our reflexive attachment to them by offering (like I think Foucault's work did in its field) another direction of understanding.

Anyway, Doris' book is written in a thoughtful and somewhat informal, personable style even though it is fairly heavily annotated and referenced. Although it doesn’t take sides in the freedom-determinism wars, it seems to me that it straddles both psychology and philosophy in a way similar to materials on Naturalism.Org, so I figured you would find it of interest.

_____________

About the contributor: Larry More is psychotherapist in the Philadelphia area with a masters in counseling from the University of Georgia. He has worked over 15 years in the substance abuse area with a family-therapy orientation, and has conducted a more generalized practice in the last 15. Since the 70's, his main intellectual interest has been in the topic of "the self," with a masters thesis focused on the notion that no such self exists. If so, what, then, is therapy ?

Naturalism and Nihilism

2008-03-06T11:10:00.004-05:00

In an article based on his recently published book God and the New Atheism, theologian John Haught argues that the new atheism is just as bad as “the politically and culturally insipid kind of theism it claims to be ousting.” He says the new atheism is essentially faith-based, replacing faith in god with faith in scientism. It’s “creedal,” dogmatic, without a stiff cognitive spine, a “life-numbing religiosity…religiosity in a new guise.” It’s therefore epistemically and morally inferior to the theism Haught champions, which has no truck with faith, at least not the insipid, life-numbing kind. Haught’s belief in god is instead based in what he calls a “richer empiricism” which goes beyond science, as explained in his book Is Nature Enough?, reviewed here.

But is Haught being fair to tar atheism, and therefore naturalism, with the brush of religiosity and faith? Are naturalists creedal about scientism, which Haught defines as the idea that “science alone is a reliable road to true understanding of anything”? No. Naturalists don’t (or shouldn’t) suppose that all truths are scientific truths, only that science is our best guide to understanding the ultimate constituents of reality and the things they compose – the “furniture of the universe.” (More on distinguishing science from scientism is here, here and here.) Naturalists’ commitment to science in this regard isn’t a matter of faith, it’s based on experience – the widely shared experience that beliefs about the world based in science are generally more reliable than those that aren’t. If we want reliable beliefs, then it’s rational to stick with science, not a matter of faith. So it isn’t, as Haught says, self-contradictory to assert we shouldn’t base beliefs about the world on faith, but rather on science, since this assertion isn’t based on faith.

Haught takes the new “soft-core” atheists to task for accepting mainstream values and modern lifestyles, saying that they aren’t being true to the real implications of atheism. The old hard-core atheists such as Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre saw that “a full acceptance of the death of God would require an asceticism completely missing in the new atheistic formulas.” They would advise, as Haught puts it, that

If you're going to be an atheist, the most rugged version of godlessness demands complete consistency. Go all the way and think the business of atheism through to the bitter end. This means that before you get too comfortable with the godless world you long for, you will be required by the logic of any consistent skepticism to pass through the disorienting wilderness of nihilism. Do you have the courage to do that?

For Haught, true atheism and naturalism necessarily end up in nihilism. Since the new atheists obviously aren’t nihilists, being good bourgeois and all, they aren’t real, rugged atheists. He asks

Has [Sam] Harris really thought about what would happen if people adopted the hard-core atheist's belief that there is no transcendent basis for our moral valuations? What if people have the sense to ask whether Darwinian naturalism can provide a solid and enduring foundation for our truth claims and value judgments? Will a good science education make everyone simply decide to be good if the universe is inherently valueless and purposeless? At least the hard-core atheists tried to prepare their readers for the pointless world they would encounter if the death of God were taken seriously.

The equation of naturalism with nihilism is a standard scare tactic, but it doesn’t bear on the truth or plausibility of naturalism or theism. Even if Darwinian naturalism can’t provide “a solid and enduring foundation for our truth claims and value judgments” this isn’t proof that it’s false, or that god exists. It’s only a reason to hope god exists, on the questionable assumption that his authority provides a secure basis for moral values (see here).

It turns out, however, that the hard-core atheists (at least as Haught describes them) were wrong: an atheistic naturalism doesn’t end up in nihilism, so we needn’t run scared into the arms of god. Without a transcendent, theistic basis for our moral valuations, there are still compelling reasons for naturalists to be moral: we are animals whose flourishing within a society critically depends on behaving morally toward others. Moreover, we are built by evolution to take moral rules as universally binding (see here). This explains why the new atheists are just normal folk, not nihilists, when it comes to values and lifestyles: they, like pretty much everyone else, are moral by nature.

Haught closes with a question:

Belief in God or the practice of religion is not necessary in order for people to be highly moral beings. We can agree with soft-core atheists on this point. But the real question, which comes not from me but from the hard-core atheists, is: Can you rationally justify your unconditional adherence to timeless values without implicitly invoking the existence of God?

The answer, as we’ve seen, is an unequivocal yes. Of course it isn’t that naturalism avoids value conflict and moral ambiguity, but patently neither does theism, whether it’s what Haught considers the insipid, faith-based varieties, or the more "empirical" theological varieties. Since he admits that belief in god isn’t necessary for being moral, this puts naturalists and theists on at least an equal moral footing. That naturalists are not nihilists doesn’t implicitly invoke the existence of god, it’s simply evidence that morality is a natural phenomenon. As Dan Dennett would say, thank goodness!

Playing Catch with Dr. Tallis

2008-03-04T16:35:00.007-05:00

Raymond Tallis, physician, philosopher, poet and novelist, is a very smart and amusing champion of free will against determinism. You can see him in action as a panelist in Fora TV’s Battle of Ideas, where he read a paper denying that neuroscience can help us decide about criminal culpability (comments here). He’s also defended free will at the Manifesto Club in London (comments here), and most recently in the pages of Philosophy Now, in an article titled Who caught that ball? (warning: sports metaphors ahead). Tallis is a one man whirlwind of well intentioned, well expressed, but ultimately misguided arguments to the effect that in order to be free and responsible, human beings must transcend causation in some respect. Here I’ll respond to his latest sally, returning the ball to his court.

Tallis considers a cricket player who’s just made an amazing catch, and asks whether he deserves the praise coming from his teammates. On a close analysis of the rapid fire physical processes underlying the catch, most of which were necessarily carried out automatically and unthinkingly, it might appear that the player himself didn’t do much. He’s just the “lucky possesor of bodily mechanisms” that did the real work. Tallis points out that much of our behavior is in fact automatic and mechanistic, it “does itself” without intention on our part. If so, that seems to leave the conscious agent without much of a role to play. Further, as neuroscience is telling us, consciousness itself seems to be a function of the physical brain. If so, Tallis says we might worry that

...our brain is calling the shots. We persons are merely the site of those events we call ‘actions’. It all looks pretty bleak for those who believe that we really do do the things we think we do.

In rebutting this point, he goes on to point out, quite properly, that it’s only by virtue of conscious, voluntary decisions (to practice hard, schedule his time, show up for games) that the cricket player is ultimately able to make the catch. Further, to understand all this requires not just consideration of his brain, but the whole person and the field of action in which he is engaged. We are active conscious agents, not merely a collection of passive, unconscious processes.

All this is certainly true, but Tallis seems to think that broadening our explanation to include the person and environment somehow escapes determinism:

…we are always positioning ourselves to acquire the experience, skills, knowledge and even the attitudes that will enable us to perform effectively. And this is how it is with much of our lives, which consist of acting on ourselves in order to change ourselves, from going to a pub to have a drink to cheer oneself up, to paying good money to cut a better figure in Paris by polishing up one ’s French. Stuffing all this back in the brain and denying the larger background to our actions, which are to a significant degree chosen and shaped by us, is the first step to handing actions over to the impersonal material world and making determinism seem almost plausible.

But the plausibility of determinism – the law-like cause and effect regularities exhibited by events in the world that science describes at many interlocking levels – isn’t abrogated by being a person, since after all we are fully embodied beings. Nor is it abrogated by being very complex, recursively self-modifying beings that have reasons and intentions. There’s no basis to suppose that our choices to self-modify, and the reasons for those choices, aren’t fully explicable as a function of the intricate causal interplay between us and our “larger background.” As Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown argue in their book, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? (pp. 191-237), reasons aren’t opposed to causes, they are a category of causes. Indeed, to understand ourselves rationally requires that we analyze our choices and reasons in a deterministic fashion, to see them as causal operators with their own antecedents in our desires and motives, which in turn have their causal antecedents in our life history and genetics. Absent this sort of understanding, our behavior ends up an inexplicable, indeterministic fluke. In short, there’s no antinomy between determinism and personhood, between determinism and full-blooded voluntary intentional agency, or between determinism and the ability to modify ourselves or the environment to our own advantage. To suppose otherwise, as Tallis does, is to think we must be something more than natural creatures to be properly dignified and self-shaping. But this something more can only be an inexplicable, a-causal mystery.

It’s ironic that by objecting to “stuffing all this back in the brain” Tallis actually distributes part of the responsibility for our choices to the wider context of action, including other people. This is not what a defender of a buck-stopping free will would want, one supposes. But the point (an own goal, perhaps) is nevertheless well-taken: seeing that choices arise within a larger background, that we are not “stand-alone brains” as he puts it, militates against the idea of an uninfluenced, self-caused chooser within the person that bears ultimate responsibility for action.

Tallis ends his paper on a tentative note, saying that his argument “does not entirely refute the notion that we are small mechanisms in the great mechanism of the universe, but it makes it more difficult to hold.” This concession gives away a great deal, since the difficulty of holding a properly nuanced idea of ourselves as mechanisms is not that great. Remember, Tallis thinks for us not to be mechanisms we must transcend cause and effect determinism in some important respect; if we don’t, then we are mechanisms. Now, since we don’t transcend determinism (and importantly even if we did, that wouldn’t help us be responsible agents, see here) we are mechanisms, by Tallis’ definition.

But notice what amazing mechanisms we are, namely the kind Tallis describes in his essay: capable of all sorts of self-modifying, intentional, conscious and voluntary actions. We are a far cry from simple, inflexible mechanisms, which is usually what people mean by the word. So perhaps we should use a word that better suits our capacities. How about person? So long as we don’t have something supernatural or contra-causal in mind when thinking about persons and their capacities, this is the way to go.

It isn’t clear that Tallis believes that persons have something supernatural or contra-causal at their core, since after all he’s a medical doctor and therefore most likely a physicalist. But his desire to wiggle free of determinism in defending free will necessarily introduces an obscurity into his account of human action. This is too bad, since otherwise his is a first class intelligence, one that naturalists would love to have on their team. Meanwhile, Dr. Tallis, the ball is approaching rapidly.

Living with Darwin

2008-02-13T11:06:00.003-05:00

In the culture wars, Charles Darwin is the icon of our conflicting attitudes toward science. His portrait is familiar: unsmiling, the troubled brow reflects the disturbing hypothesis generated by years of careful observation in the field and laboratory. We humans are, he conjectured, the outcome of an unsupervised process of natural selection. We are distant kin to the very earliest life forms, close cousins to chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas.

The study of biological evolution has amply confirmed what Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett calls Darwin’s dangerous idea, dangerous (to some) because the scientific explanation of human origins manifestly competes with the traditional religious belief that we are God’s intentional creations, made flesh in his image. Indeed, because he knew his hypothesis would be deeply controversial, Darwin delayed making his ideas known. Only when he learned that Alfred Russel Wallace was working along similar lines was he finally moved to publish.

On his 199th birthday, Darwin’s legacy still disturbs many of us. But the potential to upset our most cherished convictions is the hallmark of science, the cognitive discipline that places public and experimental evidence above intuition, tradition, ideology and received truths. If we want to know how the world works, we must necessarily submit to the truths of nature, not cling to conventional wisdom, whether religious or secular.

The drive to fully comprehend the human condition sometimes leads to disconcerting conclusions, so it’s little wonder we are of two minds about science. Cognitive neuroscience now joins evolutionary biology in the search for self-knowledge, and again the findings challenge our fondest hopes, in this case about the existence of the soul. The material brain, we are learning, accomplishes consciousness, perception, feeling, cognition, and the control of behavior quite nicely on its own. As Harvard neurophilosopher Joshua Greene suggests, this puts the immaterial, immortal soul out of a job.

Given such (literally) dispiriting conclusions, science is sometimes portrayed as the big reductionist bully, robbing us of necessary reassurances. But these insults to our certainties are self-inflicted, since after all science is a quintessentially human enterprise. It evolved in response to one of our highest aspirations: the desire to discover, to the limit of our abilities, what is real and true from a culturally and personally unbound perspective.

Precisely because it aims for universal knowledge, science can draw those of different cultures and backgrounds together. So it is, on the occasion of Darwin’s birthday, that the organizers of international Darwin Day invite us to a “global celebration of science and humanity.” Despite its discomforts, science has given us much to be thankful for, and celebrating Darwin’s contribution is an apt expression of our appreciation.

Still, as we probe deeper into the cosmos, and into the brain, it remains to be seen whether we can assimilate the scientific truth about ourselves. We are caught, it seems, between competing desires, for knowledge on the one hand and existential security on the other. Will we come of age as a species, daring to fulfill our potential as knowers, or will we retreat to empirically unwarranted consolations?

As this drama plays out, we might recognize the nobility of staying unbowed under the impersonal gaze of science, of refusing the comforts of the soul and the supernatural. Moreover, as Darwin himself put it, there is grandeur in the scientific view of life, the majestic sweep of nature that has now produced us, a creature mindful of its own contingency. We may not play a starring role in existence as science reveals it, but we are nevertheless privileged to be here in Darwin’s world, marveling at the scale, complexity and diversity of what might well be an unscripted universe.

Happy birthday, Charles!

Displacing the Immaterial Self

2008-01-10T13:58:00.000-05:00

The naturalistic worldview has gained ground, slowly and incompletely, by means of scientific explanations for phenomena that have displaced supernatural explanations. The process of explanatory displacement has relegated god, in the unlikely event he exists, to the role of remote controller: the guy who got the ball rolling, but whose day-to-day supervision isn’t necessary. Things seem to happen quite nicely on their own, in accordance with physical laws and higher-level regularities we discover in the domains of biology, psychology and maybe someday even sociology.

God hasn’t been the only victim of explanatory displacement. Our understanding of life no longer includes the rather elusive concepts of élan vital or protoplasm: we now see it’s all a matter of complex interlocking mechanisms that encode information and control reproduction and behavior.

Next up, and it’s a biggie, is consciousness and the self. It seems pre-theoretically that the mind and body are very different things, and the mind, what we think of as the essential immaterial self, still seems beyond what physicalist science can account for.

But they’re working on it. A team of scientists and philosophers, including neurophilosopher and Center for Naturalism advisor Thomas Metzinger, has published a fascinating paper on how the experience of being a self located in the body can be altered experimentally, thus mimicking, at least partially, so-called out of body experiences. As the abstract in Science has it:

…we designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality to disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. We found that during multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. Our results indicate that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and are based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.

So the quintessential me that I so confidently and continuously feel sitting behind my eyes will move in response to perceptual cues (see the video on the experiment here). This supports the idea that the felt sense of self is construction of the brain in response to sensory input, not the result of being an immaterial something or other. In short, it’s another instance of explanatory displacement, in which a materially based informational process explains what was previously thought to be a categorically mental phenomenon. Out of body experiences can now be understood as what the brain does, not a matter of the soul floating outside the body. As a New York Times article on the experiment put it:

“The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to otherworldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, who, like Dr. Botvinick, had no role in the experiments. In what is popularly referred to as near-death experience, people who have been in the throes of severe and sudden injury or illness often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said and then, just as suddenly, finding themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.”

The basic sense of self, according to the original paper, is attributable to the fact that we experience “the transparent content of a single, whole-body representation.” In effect, what we experience is a model of ourselves, interestingly enough. Further, in their conclusion the authors speculate that “humans’ daily experience of an embodied self and selfhood, as well as the illusion reported here, relies on brain mechanisms at the temporoparietal junction.” So it looks like the brain, astounding machine that it is, constructs the self, for the self. That’s quite a trick. In displacing the immaterial soul, the physicalist explanation of self doesn’t diminish us, rather it shows what amazing things the physical world can cook up, including, remarkably, our very selves.

Behavior Tech: Lose Weight and Save the Planet

2008-01-10T11:38:00.000-05:00

On the strength of his expertise in consumer behavior and diet, Cornell food psychologist Brian Wansink has been appointed director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, home of the food pyramid. His 2006 book, Mindless Eating, has been getting attention and he was recently named Person of the Week on ABC World News (the interview and other news stories are posted on Amazon). His work is all about behavioral technology (behavior tech): how to actually get behavior to change in the direction we want. His thesis is that if we become aware of the determinants of our eating habits, especially the cues surrounding the presentation of food, we can gain more control over them. Supposing we can simply will our way to losing weight doesn’t cut it, since it turns out the will itself is controlled by various factors, internal and external.

This of course isn’t a new idea, but it might seem that way since the myth of willpower perpetually overshadows the practical wisdom of understanding our determinants. We tend to be radical individualists, supposing that behavior is governed by a self that’s more or less immune to influences, but the science of behavior (remember BF Skinner?) calls that assumption into question. A smarter approach, which Wansink’s work exemplifies, is to admit we’re fully in the causal mix. Then we’re in a much better position to realize our ambitions, whether its weight loss or anything else, by means of manipulating our environment to elicit the behavior we want. Example: use smaller plates, keep serving platters and dishes of candy out of sight. The will is weak when temptation is nigh, so get smart and banish temptation.

The idea of becoming aware of our determinants fits in nicely with some spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, which emphasizes the importance of self-knowledge gained through practices such as mindfulness meditation. In fact, the deepest self-knowledge is that there isn’t a substantial self in there, controlling behavior and witnessing experience. We are physical, dynamic processes responsive to contingencies, not puppet masters of ourselves. This very un-American idea won’t catch on anytime soon, but it’s what both science and Buddhism tell us, and what Wansink is ultimately driving at (although he may not realize it).

Getting good at controlling food intake is, as the ABC news story says, behavior change on a small, personal scale. But Wansink understands it can be scaled up: "If you can see that just making certain small changes can have this ripple effect on your life -- man, that's doing people a tremendous service that goes way beyond nutrition and physical activity and health." Behavior tech on a large scale is exactly what’s necessary to address looming collective threats to the environment and global stability. If we can agree on goals (and even many conservatives now admit that action on climate change is necessary), then we we’re much more likely to attain them if we understand the factors that shape behavior. But this first requires admitting that behavior is indeed caused, not a matter of self-initiated will.

Unfortunately, the ideology of radical freedom – the idea that each of us can and should simply choose to make the right choice, independent of circumstances – prevents the smart application of behavior tech, for instance in building safe and healthy schools and communities which elicit good behavior by design. Likewise, the political will to respond to climate change can be mustered, if we come to terms with the fact that the will itself is a function of conditions. Understanding our determinants, we can lose weight and save the planet.

Worldview Cognitive Therapy

2008-01-09T21:04:00.000-05:00

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) works on the principle that by fixing faulty beliefs, people can learn to behave more effectively and be happier. As one CBT web site puts it, “clients change because they learn how to think differently and they act on that learning.” According to Wikipedia, “The objectives of CBT typically are to identify irrational or maladaptive thoughts, assumptions and beliefs that are related to debilitating negative emotions and to identify how they are dysfunctional, inaccurate, or simply not helpful. This is done in an effort to reject the distorted cognitions and to replace them with more realistic and self-helping alternatives.”

From a naturalistic standpoint, many people harbor distorted cognitions with respect to their true nature, since they suppose they possess souls, or some non-physical essence which has the power to transcend or contravene causality. They imagine that their choices arise in some respect independently of their body, brain and surroundings, the product of a libertarian, contra-causal free will that moves the body without itself being fully caused by anything else. If we were CBT therapists, concerned for the mental health and optimum functioning of our clients – people at large, let’s imagine – wouldn’t we want to fix this faulty belief? Wouldn’t knowing the naturalistic truth about themselves support healthier attitudes and more effective behavior?

Understanding that cause and effect applies universally (except perhaps in the quantum realm), people would see that they’re determined to act as they do instead of chalking up choices to a mysterious uncaused or self-created self. They’d stop beating themselves (and others) up so much over mistakes, accepting that these were fully determined, not the product of libertarian free will. Armed with the knowledge of the causes behind what they did, they’d be in a better position to change their behavior. (Remember, just because things are determined doesn’t mean they don’t change. They usually do, and often for the better when we put our minds to it in the light of reliable knowledge.) Indeed, some CBT-oriented psychotherapists now use explicit naturalism in their practice when it’s therapeutically appropriate, gently prompting clients to reexamine their belief in contra-causal free will. They’ve found this can help to relieve guilt and shame, lessen anger directed at others (parents, for instance), and open up possibilities for more effective action.

A good therapist uses techniques appropriate to the client, taking her particular problems, strengths and weaknesses into account. Challenging someone’s fundamental beliefs about themselves, however gently, can itself cause distress, which is why not all clients in treatment are candidates for what we might call worldview cognitive therapy. What about people at large? Would they be able to assimilate the naturalistic truth about themselves and put it to good use?

Since people come in all psychological shapes and sizes, responses to naturalism will be equally diverse. Many, perhaps most at least initially, will dismiss out of hand the idea that we don’t have contra-causal freedom. However preposterous from a scientific perspective, the meme of the causally transcendent self, like that of god, is a deeply embedded assumption in our culture, not easily uprooted. And after all, it’s what many (even therapists and counselors) suppose is the locus of responsibility and the necessary catalyst for change. Since determinism is widely equated with fatalism, from a commonsense perspective challenging the existence of the freely willing soul seems to challenge the very possibility of a life worth living. (That it does not is what the naturalist must reassure them about – a big part of memeing naturalism.) So it’s likely that the majority of those hearing about naturalism will remain happy, or not so happy, supernaturalists, psychologically insulated from the logical and empirical case against libertarian free will.

Others, perhaps a significant minority (i.e., those 15% in US polls who count themselves non-religious, up to 50% in Europe, see here), will be in a better position to re-evaluate their ideas about the self and its place in nature. Those receptive to worldview naturalism will likely have already questioned the existence of god and the supernatural “up there,” and so are primed to take the next step. Such individuals are usually independent-minded, open to having their beliefs challenged, and thus more psychologically resilient. Even so, for some the realization that they aren’t little gods will indeed prove stressful. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of several instances in which naturalism provoked an existential crisis of sorts, not a surprise given that one’s deepest assumptions and beliefs are in play. But to my knowledge, in each case the crisis was resolved by a healthy, even transformative, adaptation to the insight that we’re completely included in the causal web. For others, the transition will be easy, either because they have no particular psychological investment in having souls, or were skeptical about libertarian free will from an early age, or both.

For most of those ultimately convinced of naturalism, the change will likely involve a halting but not unduly stressful reconfiguring of the self-concept. The day-to-day subjective experience of being themselves will continue on much as before, but within a very different cognitive context. It’s that new context which, in the considered opinion of naturalists, offers so much. Having discarded the soul, the person is in a far better, reality-based position to think and act effectively, taking into account the cause and effect relations that link her in all respects to her physical and social environment. She’s also better able to take an accepting and compassionate, but not passive, stance towards herself and all other sentient beings caught up in the tumultuous project of life. Once we get past the initial worries about naturalism, the advantages accrue rapidly (as argued at Naturalism.Org and in Encountering Naturalism).

On the other hand, Israeli philosopher Saul Smilansky thinks that large-scale naturalistic worldview therapy is just what the doctor shouldn’t order, since the illusion of libertarian free will is, he thinks, is the irreplaceable basis for psychological and social stability (see his book Free Will and Illusion and a summary of his position here). Daniel Dennett, less dire in his imaginings, still worries about the “environmental impact” of naturalism, suggesting we be cautious in its dissemination (see his book Freedom Evolves). Dennett is right – we have to be responsible in memeing naturalism, making sure people realize that we remain effective agents, who make real choices, whose actions make a difference, who can be held (compassionately) accountable, who are capable of positive self-change, and whose values don’t disappear. All this is perfectly doable, and indeed communities of naturalists (mostly academics at the moment, but increasing numbers of lay folk) are getting along just fine without the myth of supernatural freedom. Progressive skeptics about free will such as Susan Blackmore, Joshua Greene, Derk Pereboom, Will Provine, Tamler Sommers, Bruce Waller and others are making the case that Smilansky is wrong: there are good naturalistic replacements for belief in the soul and free will. We don’t need to traffic in illusions about our fundamental nature to have lives worth living, or to stabilize society. (Smilansky is critiqued here, and free will illusionism is discussed on the Garden of Forking Paths, a blog about Agency Theory.)

Advocates of naturalism believe that by uprooting harmful myths about ultimate responsibility, and by shedding light on the actual causes of behavior, it can ground a stronger personal psychology and a more humane social compact. Imprisoned by the myth of free will, people aren’t as mentally healthy or behaviorally effective as they might otherwise be: they don’t have the power and control conferred by a clear grasp of their causal connections to the world, and they’re barred from the self-acceptance and compassion that flow from seeing that yes, we are the world in its unfolding.

In the first film of the Matrix trilogy, Morpheus offers Neo the choice of a red pill – the route to a rather disconcerting truth – or a blue pill, the way back to a pleasant, but illusory existence. Neo’s choice of the red pill represents the claim on us of truth, the desire to live free of illusion whatever the cost. Fortunately our choice isn’t that stark, since there’s good reason to think that being undeluded about human nature, although initially disconcerting for some, can be the basis for mental and social well-being. As worldview cognitive therapists, we can therefore confidently recommend naturalism to the world’s attention.

Joshua Greene Battles Dualism

2007-11-09T17:01:00.000-05:00

Among the more vigorous advocates of progressive naturalism, although he doesn’t call it that, is Harvard neurophilosopher Joshua Greene. His experimental work using MRI scans of subjects engaged in moral decision-making strongly suggests that even the very highest human cognitive and moral functions are carried out solely by the brain; there’s nothing else there to do it, and the brain is up to the job. The conclusion that we are not of two natures, body and soul, is the gateway, he argues, to a more enlightened, humane view of ourselves.

Linked at his website are many articles worth reading, including his wonderfully titled doctoral dissertation, destined for publication as a book by Penguin Press. His paper with Jonathan Cohen, “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing, and everything,” has been widely cited in the growing literature on how neuroscience might impact the criminal justice system. It sets the progressive standard for what criminal law might look like should we someday accept a fully science-based, naturalistic understanding of ourselves. Conservatives content with the retributive and highly punitive status quo must now contend with his arguments, and his data.

Among recent additions at Greene’s homepage is a forthcoming book chapter, “Social Neuroscience and the Soul’s Last Stand,” in which he briefly describes a good deal of his research. He writes

…the soul will officially expire when the mechanics of the moral mind become transparent. I believe that the death of the soul may prove to be one of psychology and neuroscience’s most lasting contributions.

It’s seeing the “clockwork” of the brain in vivid detail that might eventually cement the death of the soul, although committed dualists can always insist there’s something more science can’t see. But that aside, why is it so important to really know, in our gut, that we don’t have such a thing? Isn’t that the most dispiriting conclusion we could possibly reach, figuratively and literally?

There’s no question that for many the death of the soul is unthinkable, or if thought, rejected immediately. There’s simply too much at stake: life after death, the special dignity of not being “merely” material, the soul’s contra-causal, determinism-defying freedom, among other invaluables. As one concerned dualist said recently (personal correspondence) “No matter how you parse it, determinism requires that we regard ourselves as things rather than as subjects.” Without the soul, perhaps, we become mere things. Responding to such concerns is one responsibility of those advocating naturalism, for instance see here and Appendix A of Encountering Naturalism.

But as Greene points out, whatever our discomforts might be, belief in the soul does a lot of damage, so if it’s false we should give it up. It helps to motivate religious conflict, regressive anti-choice abortion policies, opposition to stem cell research, complacency about environmental problems (since the life to come is what really matters), moralistic attitudes about mental illness, and a needlessly punitive and inefficient criminal justice system. On this last point he says

In the United States, at least, our prison system is very good at making people suffer, but its merits as a system for preventing future crime are highly questionable (Tonry, 2004). If we were more interested in reducing crime, and less interested in making guilty minds [that is, souls] suffer, we might all be better off.

All told, giving up the soul, if we can reconcile ourselves to it, would be an important contribution in achieving a more humane, sustainable culture. And this is why the intellectual and scientific battle against dualism is so worth fighting. In his conclusion, Greene says

Officially, we scientists already know that the operations of the mind are the operations of the brain, and not those of an immaterial soul. This is, at the very least, our working assumption. In making this assumption, however, we part ways with the rest of humanity, the vast majority of whom explicitly believe that we are souls housed in bodies. Such dualist tendencies are, in my opinion, a major social problem, and may become increasingly destructive. If that is correct, then dispelling dualism is serious business, at least as serious as curing cancer, and probably more so. If anything can cure us of our dualist tendencies, it is social neuroscience, the physical science of human experience. By decomposing the social brain into its mechanical components we can do good science in the conventional sense, but that is, I think, the least of what we’re doing. Social neuroscience is, above all else, the construction of a metaphysical mirror that will allow us to see ourselves for what we are and, perhaps, change our ways for the better.

Progressive naturalists and humanists can only agree, and wish Greene all luck and power in his challenge to dualism.

Unfounded Worries about "Neuro-Determinism"

2007-11-07T14:23:00.000-05:00

Raymond Tallis, speaking for the Manifesto Club in London, presented a spirited sally against the threat of “neuro-determinism.” To his way of thinking, determinism robs us of the “Enlightenment faith that… a human being is ‘an independent point of departure’. Each person is a new beginning, able to contribute to shaping the future for good or ill. We are not fated to act out a pre-ordained script.” Tallis expresses a common worry that's surfacing more often as neuroscience reveals the material workings of even our highest capacities.

His arguments against neuro-determinism aren’t particularly compelling, but it’s interesting that he thinks that only by denying determinism can we remain optimistic and effective agents, genuinely committed to the improvement of mankind. He says “there has been a counter-Enlightenment denial of the centrality of individual consciousness in human affairs” coming out of recent humanities and sciences. It seems he confuses the likely true claim that human conscious processes are fully caused with the idea that such processes don’t really have effects of the sort which make us effective agents. That is, he conflates determinism with fatalism, a common error.

This is unfortunate since he must deny the findings of the sciences or downplay their significance in order to secure what he thinks is essential to have real power: having contra-causal free will. The irony is that the Center for Naturalism takes the position that we're far better served by seeing that we don’t and couldn’t have such power. After all, its attribution is often used to assign ultimate credit and blame in ways that justify punitive attitudes and practices, demonize enemies, and marginalize the unlucky in life. Further, positing the existence of contra-causal freedom necessarily leads to ineffective policies, since we ignore the actual causes of human behavior. So we don’t need to suppose we're free in this quasi-supernatural sense to have power and use it humanely, quite the opposite.

Curiously, as he goes along Tallis seems to accept the fact we are not causal exceptions to what he calls Laplacean, that is, deterministic nature. He says our freedom comes from having higher order capacities, personal and social, that distinguish us from simple mechanisms, plus the fact that we are proximately self-creating once we get past childhood. But all of this is consistent with the fact that higher-order capacities and proximate self-causation involve complex, recursive mechanisms, which don’t need to transcend Laplacean determinism to be causally effective. In any case, this just goes to show that the presumption that we have and must have contra-causal free will exists even among smart, critical thinkers, who only want the best for humankind. Another instance of smart (and very progressive) folks running off the cognitive rails is described in The Specter of Scientism.

Finding Free Will in the Brain

2007-09-07T18:07:00.000-04:00

Every now and then incautious neuroscientists (or more likely science journalists) claim to have found the site in the brain responsible for some universally shared bit of behavior or psychology. It's much like the tendency to tout discoveries of a "gene" for obesity, addiction or extroversion: often it turns out on closer inspection that there's no single gene, or site in the brain, responsible for the trait in question. Rather it's a more complex story of how genes and environment and multiple brain systems interact. But the fascination with such findings, oversimplified or not, reflects the attractiveness of physicalism as an explanatory story. Once we've identified the physical embodiment or correlate of something - the mechanism constituting it or causing it - it becomes categorically real. This is probably because mechanistic explanations are the most transparent we've got. Everything's out in the open, observable and pinned down, even if it's fiendishly complex, such as the neural reward system that regulates our cravings for sex, drugs and Monteverdi. Everyone now agrees the placebo effect is real since it's been shown that believing a sugar pill is a drug actually changes the brain!

So when neuroscientists announce they've found the place in the brain where free will resides, it might generate some puzzlement. Isn't free will supposed to be that which escapes mechanism, such that we choose freely, independently of deterministic causation? If it's the brain that gives us free will, then it must boil down to the physical goings-on of neurons and neurotransmitters, in which case how does that make us truly free and responsible? Finding free will in the brain doesn't make it real, it destroys it.

This question points up the fact that there are different meanings of free will floating around. Looking at the various articles about this research (here and here for instance), it's clear that what these scientists mean by free will is a specific capacity, namely to consciously reconsider an intended action. Why call that free will? Well, the ability to control impulses by means of higher level cognitive processes arguably gives us an important kind of freedom, namely freedom from being simple slaves to our appetites. We gain tremendously in flexibility by virtue of all the brain-instantiated firmware that decides what actions are appropriate given one's situation, long-term goals, and present urges.

This is clearly quite different from the folk-metaphysical concept of free will: a conscious capacity that transcends the mechanistic workings of the brain. The folk concur that free will is about self-control, but real self-control comes from a self beyond mechanism; if not, it's obvious that people are just the working out of mindless physical parts, and what's free about that? Doesn't that make us mere robots? If not having an immaterial soul makes us robots, then yes. Some, such as Keith Stanovich, have argued that being a sufficiently complex organic robot is all we need to be. But of course many balk at this prospect.

Many scientists (and most philosophers) know full well that the physicalist/functionalist downsizing of free will doesn't cut it for laypeople, so they tend to soft-pedal the implications for our self-image. But a few, such as neurophilosophers Patricia Churchland and Joshua Greene, are pretty forthright in laying out the implications. If free will isn't a magical quality that people can just choose to exercise, but rather a physically-based capacity for self-control, then we can't blame someone who lacks this capacity, such as an addict, for not having exercised their free will. This is one aspect of the moral significance of moving from dualism to physicalism: we'll be more likely to cure or rehabilitate, rather than punish, those who, for one reason or another, lack normal capacities for self-control. Another aspect is that we'll see that those who do have normal capacities but misuse them in anti-social, damaging ways are products of specific conditions that shaped their values; they are not self-made. This suggests that originative responsibility for behavior doesn't inhere in the person alone, but also in the culture, community and family that produced him. So our responsibility practices should take this into account, which again means not merely punishing, but preventing and rehabilitating.

Some will say we'll never find free will in the brain since free will by definition is that which transcends mechanism. Others will say that free will, mechanistic or not, is just that which makes us morally responsible. Or (my preference), we can clarify the debate by dropping talk about free will, which will always be ambiguous since it has multiple meanings, and argue about what sorts of freedom and responsibility we plausibly have on a naturalistic understanding of ourselves. Getting a fix on these will then inform our responsibility practices, making them more effective, and more humane.

Science and the Supernatural

2007-09-07T17:41:00.000-04:00

Creationists often argue that science, by refusing to consider supernatural explanations such as intelligent design (ID), presumes naturalism and thus illegitimately promotes a sectarian worldview. An unbiased scientific approach to explaining phenomena would consider all hypotheses, not exclude some simply because they invoke a creator. In an excellent article for Science and Education (available here) Yonatan Fishman of the Department of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine gives the lie to this charge, showing that science can and does consider supernatural hypotheses.

Fishman first points out that some very reputable science organizations, such as the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, seek to defuse the science-religion conflict by saying that science establishes nothing about god since it only considers explanations involving natural processes. But this plays right into the creationist argument. Likewise, Judge John E. Jones gave creationists ammunition in his recent Kitzmiller vs. Dover decision against teaching ID by saying "rigorous attachment to ‘natural’ explanations is an essential attribute to science by definition and by convention." Again, this seems to confirm the suspicion that by ruling out supernatural explanations in advance, science enshrines naturalism as its worldview.

But Fishman mounts a detailed, persuasive argument that science can indeed evaluate supernatural hypotheses, assuming they have a shred of content. Using a Bayesian framework as a model for scientific inference, he shows that the probability of supernatural claims can be estimated by comparing them to what we already know about the world, by looking for evidence for and against the claim, and by seeing if there are plausible naturalistic alternatives. The probability of the existence of god can be evaluated according to these methods, and Fishman proceeds to do just that with many examples. For instance, if a benevolent, concerned god were at work in the world, we'd expect intercessory prayer to have positive effects on the health of those prayed for. But experimental studies of prayer, including the largest and most carefully controlled study recently conducted by Herbert Benson at Harvard, have turned up no such effects. So, as Fishman puts it

The essential point is that methodologically sound studies published in reputable scientific journals have been conducted to directly test the consequences of a supernatural hypothesis....In general, as reflected by the likelihoods in Bayes’ theorem, whenever a supernatural claim predicts with a specified degree of probability some state of the world, that claim can be tested simply by inspecting the world to see whether or not the world displays that state.

Science's verdict on god as Fishman presents it is unsurprising: the probability that a benevolent, concerned, intelligent designer exists, given background knowledge, current evidence, and alternative hypotheses, is very, very low. We can't of course disprove god's existence, but as Fishman points out, that's not a good reason to believe in god; instead, the very low probability of god's existence is good reason to believe in naturalism.

Of course it's only reason to believe in naturalism on the assumption that it's best to go with the probabilities as established by scientific investigation when deciding what's real. If you're not an empiricist, then never mind about science, just believe on faith, tradition, authority, revelation or intuition. But if you want to play the science game, be prepared to have your supernatural hypotheses tested, and very likely rejected. Science rules out intelligent design and other supernatural hypotheses not because it assumes naturalism, but because these hypotheses have failed all the scientific tests put to them thus far.

If Fishman is right, and I think he is (I've sketched similar arguments here, here and here), it makes things more difficult for those wanting to reconcile science and religion. But there is a fallback position for science organizations not wanting to offend religious sensibilities. This is simply to say that nobody's forced to take science as their way of deciding what's real. It's a free country, after all, so having faith in god is permitted. Indeed, a recent Pew Research poll shows that's exactly what people continue to do when apprised of scientific findings that contradict their beliefs. But what science organizations can't do, of course, is to say faith is equal to science as an epistemology, since that would betray their very mission. If that counts as a bias, it's one that creationists and IDers will have to live with. In an open society, not only are we free to believe on the basis of faith, we're free to disbelieve on the basis of evidence.

Hodgson's choice

2007-07-10T09:14:00.000-04:00

David Hodgson, an Australian (New South Wales) Supreme Court justice, has published an article on free will and responsibility in the July 5th 2007 Times Literary Supplement (TLS) titled "Partly Free." Although he concedes the explanatory force of current physicalist accounts of human behavior, he opts for a kind of non-naturalistic mentalism:

I believe there are stronger reasons for holding that, while our conscious experiences do correspond with physical processes, these experiences can themselves have effects beyond those explicable in terms of physical processes and laws of nature, and that this enables us to have free will and to be responsible for our actions.

He takes this line because he believes that determinism destroys moral and criminal responsibility, a belief that UPenn law professor Stephen Morse calls the “fundamental psycholegal error.” Hodgson also thinks we need retributive justice as a way of limiting punishment to only what people deserve, otherwise we risk over-punishing. Further, retributive justice can only rest on a sort of agent causation in which a deterministic, physicalist story cannot be traced from antecedent conditions, thence into and including the agent, and thence to the act. Fortunately such agent causation exists, he argues, so all is well. We are causal exceptions to natural laws and thus can take a full measure of what he sees as a metaphysically real responsibility, that which justifies retribution.

But we needn't resort to human causal exceptionalism to remain responsible agents, nor do we need retribution. First, we don't need the concept of retributive desert to limit punishment. A central value in the West is personal liberty and autonomy, and it is this that limits punishment so that it doesn't become draconian. The criminal justice goals of deterrence and public safety are counterbalanced by our commitment to individual freedom such that legal sanctions remain proportionate to the crime.

Second, if we are naturalists there's no basis for retribution in Hodgson's agent causation since the requisite sort of undetermined, self-caused agents don't exist, which is to say we don't have contra-causal free will. Nor are there any convincing compatibilist grounds (that is, grounds compatible with not having contra-causal free will) for retribution; see for instance my critiques of Morse, Moore, Bailey, Hoffman and Goldsmith, and Hill. But since we don't need retribution to limit punishment, this isn't a problem.

Third, as natural agents, those fully subject to cause and effect, we remain moral agents in that we are responsive to the prospect of moral evaluation, rewards and sanctions. We don't need to be causal exceptions to the natural order to be held responsible. Indeed, if we were such exceptions, our responsibility practices, such as the threat of sanctions, wouldn't work. Our freely willing core wouldn't be responsive to moral evaluation - it would just do what it darn well pleased. So morality, minus its retributive component, survives without contra-causal agency. This has considerable implications for criminal justice.

Most of Hodgson's ideas in "Partly Free" appear in an earlier article, "A plain person's free will," which he wrote for the Journal of Consciousness Studies, critiqued here. He can only maintain his non-naturalistic notion of free will by dint of some very tenuous and contentious claims having to do with quantum mechanics, consciousness, rationality, evolution and human agency. Such implausibilities (by my lights) wouldn't be necessary but for his antecedent supposition that we need to somehow evade cause and effect to be moral agents and to keep punishment humanely proportionate. But there are far simpler conceptions of moral agency and humane criminal justice to be had within science-based naturalism, a worldview that accepts that human beings are fully included in the natural, physical order of things.

Will the soul survive?

2007-07-06T10:05:00.000-04:00

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom (author of Descartes' Baby) said in a New York Times editorial back in 2004 that "The great conflict between science and religion in the last century was over evolutionary biology [natural selection vs. intelligent design]. In this century, it will be over psychology, and the stakes are nothing less than our souls." The Times science section on evolution a few weeks ago included a piece on the science of the soul which suggested he might be right:

For many scientists, the evidence that moral reasoning is a result of physical traits that evolve along with everything else is just more evidence against the existence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with souls. For many believers, particularly in the United States, the findings show the error, even wickedness, of viewing the world in strictly material terms. And they provide for theologians a growing impetus to reconcile the existence of the soul with the growing evidence that humans are not, physically or even mentally, in a class by themselves.

Consciousness and our mental life, including reasoning and imagining, seems the last redoubt of dualism, and therefore, possibly, of supernaturalism. If we can come up with a transparent explanation of how the operations of the brain entail subjective experience, then we'll have pretty much closed the case on the soul and rehabilitated the reputation of "mere" matter. We'll see how the brain does everything the soul was supposed to do, short of surviving death. But clear and testable definitions of mental phenomena are so elusive, and theories of consciousness so arcane (thus far), it's unlikely that the soul will be put out of a job anytime soon. It just isn't at all obvious how one gets pain, for instance, out of neurons, even though a naturalist would insist there's nothing "spooky" going on. Absent a clear physicalist-functionalist account of our mental lives that a layperson can grasp, the concept of the soul will live happily on, no doubt, giving aid and comfort to those who want to be more than just physical.

In the article, theologians Nancey Murphy and John Haught try to reconcile the soul with science, but don't give much comfort to dualists since they admit we're basically material creatures. The soul, as they describe it, becomes pretty much a metaphor or vague untestable concept, very much like god in liberal theology. But it's a way to soften the blow of naturalism, permitting the use of a word that inevitably retains supernatural and immaterial connotations.

Despite best efforts of hard-nosed scientists and philosophers, the transition to naturalism will likely be by very slow and halting degrees since the required change in our self-concept is so radical. Part of that transition will involve the gradual redefinition of words and phrases with dualistic implications (self, soul, spirituality, religion, free will, responsibility) in a more naturalistic, non-dualistic direction. If the soul survives under naturalism, it will mean something quite different from what it does now.

The virtuous circle of causation and compassion

2007-05-11T21:27:00.000-04:00

In a New York Times op-ed piece, Why Darwinism Isn't Depressing, Robert Wright puts a nice new spin on the connection between naturalism and empathy – at least it’s new to me. First, as many naturalists have suggested, when we understand the causal story behind say, brattiness, we stop blaming a bratty child in the way we did before. We see the factors (lack of a nap, bad upbringing, genetic predispositions, etc.) that contributed to character and behavior. We see that brattiness isn’t self-caused, but the result of various factors, and seeing this might lead to some forbearance in our own attitudes and behavior towards the child. There isn’t a self independent of these factors that could have overcome them during the kid’s development. In contrast, as Wright puts it: “the ‘brat’ reaction [calling the kid a brat] — isn't even an explanation.” This non-explanation might suggest that the “brat” could have helped becoming who he became (if indeed he’s predisposed to brattiness), reducing our forbearance.

What Wright does, which is cool, is to flip the relationship between seeing causation and feeling empathy around: once we start empathizing with people, we are better able to see and accept that there is a causal story behind their behavior (“Thus does love lead to truth”). We’re less likely to cut short our explanations by blaming the supposedly self-caused agent. And, he says, once we see the genetic contingency of our special love for our immediate family, we might be able to expand our circle of empathy, and therefore of causal understanding. This in turn (I extrapolate here) will lead to more empathy as explained above. A nice virtuous circle.

Of course as he points out, some people tend to get depressed by the Darwinian "selfish gene" explanation for familial love, thinking such love isn't real. But to explain isn’t to destroy, only explain. Unless, that is, you’re wedded to dualism and think it’s the case that the soul or something immaterial is essential for anything valuable. Which would be too bad, since the physical world has cooked up some pretty amazing and sometimes even loveable phenomena.

Can the Self Be Saved?

2007-04-27T10:04:00.000-04:00

In his New York Times op-ed on the Virginia Tech massacre, David Brooks raises a central question about the acceptability of naturalism. He says free will might be an illusion, but he also wants a "self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center" (“self-confident”: pun intended?). Can we save the self and moral responsibility if we don't have contra-causal freedom? An important project for naturalists is to show in what respects it still makes sense to talk about selves, choice, and responsibility in a determined, cause and effect world (at the macro-level of brains and behavior). This is vital, since otherwise people will reject naturalism on the grounds that it destroys the core of our moral universe.

Clearly Cho was struggling with mental illness, so right away he's not responsible in the way a sane individual would be, whatever your worldview is. But from a naturalistic perspective, sane individuals have coherent personalities and behavioral repertoires which determine their choices, even if these in turn are (likely) fully determined phenomena (and even if they weren’t determined that wouldn’t give us more responsibility, as David Hume saw long ago). We have a strong, internal, emergent experience of being a self, and strong hard-wired emotional responses that track moral rights and wrongs. And we must as a practical matter continue to hold each other responsible (as compassionately and non-punitively as possible) in order to make each other into good citizens. So Brooks can be reassured that yes, we can still legitimately explain actions as the outcome of choosing selves (as a practical matter we’re forced to explain behavior at the personal level of conscious intentions, not the sub-personal level of neurons, etc.) and we can and must continue to talk of moral responsibility. The upshot is that human agents and morality don’t disappear when naturalized. This is the burden of chapters 3 and 5 of Encountering Naturalism.

But there’s one huge difference under naturalism: the self is not a "moral levitator" as philosopher Daniel Dennett so nicely put it. On a naturalistic understanding, we see that the self is fully a function of bio-social processes, and that therefore we can't demonize wrong-doers the way we could on the old, soul-based, self-caused view. Plus we'll pay more attention to the actual causes of horrific acts, both in mental health and gun-control policy. If people see that we can have viable notions of personhood and moral responsibility under naturalism, and that these lead us to act more compassionately and effectively, they’ll be far more likely to accept it.

David Brooks, Naturalist

2007-04-15T22:12:00.000-04:00

In case you missed it, have a look at David Brooks Times op-ed, The Age of Darwin. It’s straight naturalism, except that he allows god might exist as an uninvolved initiator.

Some highlights:

~ Non-optimal natural “design” driven by selfish genes
~ No separate immaterial soul
~ No central controller-I – the self is emergent
~ No higher purpose or intention

Great stuff, and he caps it by admitting that, as Darwin put it, there's grandeur in this naturalistic view of life: “We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history. We have a central cosmology to embrace, argue with or unconsciously submit to.”

Not bad for a button-downed conservative. But not a complete surprise since his naturalism showed in earlier columns that discussed the causal antecedents of self-control and good citizenship. How much further will naturalism push Brooks to the left, one wonders?

Are We Rich Yet?

2007-03-10T11:06:00.000-05:00

Everybody wants to get ahead, have things work out, find security, and live happily ever after. Anyone who can convince others to pay good money for the supposed key to all this will get ahead, find security, and live happily ever after. One secret of success is to sell a purported secret for success.

As you may know, Oprah has been promoting a group of authors and speakers selling The Secret, a not exactly new New Age formula for achieving success by visualizing it. According to the “Law of Attraction,” if you think the right thoughts, about prosperity for instance, prosperity will be yours. The universe obeys your every wish, if your wish is sufficiently strong and single-minded. And of course, you’re in charge of your wishing, so it all comes down to you. Not rich yet? You’re the problem, buddy. For a thorough debunking of The Secret, see Ingrid Hansen Smythe’s report for the Skeptic Society. The New York Times style section covered the creation of The Secret in Shaking Riches Out of the Cosmos, also reprinted here - most entertaining.

To naturalists, this sort of magical thinking about thinking is a sad example of supposing the self is causally privileged over the world, of attributing to ourselves a supernatural ability. Playing to the universal desire for control and power, sellers of The Secret purvey the manifest falsehood that one’s thoughts somehow directly influence things outside the head. To state the obvious (from a naturalist perspective): thoughts, physically instantiated in the brain, are part of a causal chain that sometimes has effects on behavior, that then has effects on the world. Thoughts themselves have their own causal antecedents as well, of course. Oprah is doing her audience a vast disservice in promulgating the idea - that is, causing her audience to think - that they can merely think and grow rich, that behavior isn’t necessary to get the universe to give them what they need. It’s sad because it gives people false hopes, sets them up for self-blame, and blocks exploration of realistic means for achieving success.

But how could anyone believe such nonsense? Part of the answer is that Western society routinely sets up the self as a first cause, a mental controller that can bootstrap itself into anything it wants to be. We’re taught from day one that it’s all up to us, that we can rise above our circumstances, that if we want something badly enough, it can be ours. So, let’s all work on wanting things, really badly, and the culture is happy to help with that. In short, we’re predisposed by the mythology of the American dream to accept the premise of The Secret, that success is mostly a matter of your attitude, the force of your will and desire, which you can manifest if you just choose to. Work on your mind, the rest will follow.

Another part of the answer is our long love affair with mentalistic paranormal powers that transcend what the mere body can accomplish. The Secret plays this to the hilt, suggesting that the self-motivated mind or spirit somehow controls reality directly, without needing a bodily interface. Exactly how this works is necessarily left obscure, but the promise of such power is pretty seductive. We become like gods, self-created and practically omnipotent.

To suggest instead that our powers are merely material, and that the self and its will are a function of physical circumstances, might not fly as the core concept of a best-selling self-help program. It doesn’t have quite the all-American, individualist ring to it. Still, it’s arguably a better bet than magical thinking about the power of thoughts, since we can learn about how our circumstances affect us, our motivations, and opportunities for action, then change the circumstances in ways that generate effective behavior. It might be replied that the myth of thought-power is empowering since it gives hope, spurring motivation. Perhaps in the short run for some people it is. But the smart money is on staying in touch with reality, in which it’s always necessary to act to make things happen. The sellers of The Secret act effectively on their own behalf by promoting the myth that we need not act, merely think. Nice work if you can get it.

Intuitions, Please

2007-03-08T09:43:00.000-05:00

Naturalism, some have argued, should be suppressed since it calls into question some indispensable, although false, notions of human agency. Perhaps we can’t live with the truth about ourselves and so must buffer reality with some functionally necessary fictions. As blues singer Mose Allison once asked, “How much truth can a man stand?” Not all that much, maybe.

So here’s the question: Is there something most people believe about freedom and responsibility that’s false? And here’s another: If they do, is that belief necessary for us to get along in life, and with each other?

Regarding the first question, a new discipline called experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) is engaged in actually finding out what the “folk” believe about such things as free will and moral responsibility, using interviews and surveys. I’ll discuss a few findings below, but before continuing, take a minute to check out your own intuitions. In a sentence, how would you define free will? And what do you think most other people mean by free will?

Ok, now let’s look at some data. In a paper, Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?, a group of experimental philosophers describe research on beliefs about free will, moral responsibility and determinism in which they posed questions about hypothetical scenarios, what philosophers call thought experiments. In one study, participants were asked to imagine a universe in which the laws of nature always guarantee that, given an initial set of conditions, the same outcomes always occur. If conditions at time T are such that Z steals a necklace later on, then if the same conditions are recreated, Z again steals the necklace. Participants were asked: does Z act of her own free will and is it fair to hold her morally responsible and blame her? Before reading on, what do you think? And what do you think the results were? Well, 66% said Z acted of her own free will and 77% said she was morally responsible and blameworthy.

These findings suggest that a majority of these respondents, when prompted by this scenario, seem to think that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. Whether these results get replicated and validated by more research is of course an open question, but let’s take them as a preliminary indication that many people are what philosophers call compatibilists. Are you a compatibilist in this sense, in that you think we’d have free will and moral responsibility in a fully deterministic universe? Did you suspect that perhaps a majority of people are compatibilists?

In another study conducted by different philosophers, respondents were asked to say which universe, A or B, is most like our universe. In universe A, everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it. In universe B, almost everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it, the one exception being human decision making. What’s your intuition about which universe is most like the one we actually live in? And what’s your guess about the results? Well, in this study an overwhelming 95% thought that universe B was most like our universe. In other words, they thought human decision making is likely not fully caused by preceding events; it’s an exception to determinism such that we could have chosen otherwise in the exact same situation in which we made our choice.

If we take these very preliminary findings as an indication of what people (of a certain socio-economic status in the US) might believe about free will, moral responsibility and determinism, what’s it all mean? Well, even though a vast majority of people believe human choices are not fully determined, a substantial majority believe that even if our choices were fully determined, we’d still have free will and moral responsibility.

Now, the supposed threat of a hard-boiled naturalism is the claim, increasingly supported by science, that human choices aren't exceptions to (macro-level) determinism – we likely live in universe A, not B. Some think that to make this known would substantially undermine people’s beliefs that we are moral agents who can be held responsible. But this research suggests that even if people started believing their choices are fully determined, a majority wouldn’t stop believing in moral agency. Thus the advent of a deterministic naturalism in public consciousness may not pose a fatal threat to moral intuitions. Maybe we can stand the truth about ourselves.

But there’s a substantial minority, perhaps, who’d find the news that we live in universe A literally demoralizing, since they tie the idea of moral responsibility to our being exceptions to causation. These folks can perhaps be reassured that since we’re fully caused creatures, we have to be held responsible so that we’re caused to become morally competent, ethical individuals. Our moral standards don’t disappear or become ineffective if determinism is true.

A further question, though, is about what people believe is actually involved in holding people responsible. Once we accept our place in nature as fully caused outcomes of circumstances that we didn’t choose, what happens to our intuitions about credit, blame, reward and punishment? Does retribution – the idea that we deserve to suffer for our crimes, whether or not it produces any good consequences – still make sense once we see that we were fully determined to commit them? Do the super-rich deserve all their astronomical wealth, once we see that they’ve simply been lucky in their talents, upbringing, and opportunities? Naturalism leaves moral agency intact, but will it leave our intuitions about what people deserve, and therefore how we should treat them, unchanged? Stay tuned.

The Pitfalls of Mind-Brain Dualism

2007-01-26T12:26:00.000-05:00

Wall Street Journal science writer Sharon Begley has written Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, on the practical implications of the mind-body connection. In particular it’s about how the power of thought can, as she puts it in a recent article based on the book, “sculpt our grey matter.” Cool! But why would we want to sculpt our grey matter? Presumably because the brain controls behavior, mood, personality, etc. So if you can control your brain using your thoughts, you’ve got ultimate control over yourself.

But hold the phone. Who or what controls thought? Where does thought come from? Mind-brain research of course shows that thought comes from the brain. Without the brain, there are no thoughts, as far as neuroscience can tell. So what Begley describes in the article (I haven’t yet read the book) as a causal path from thinking to brain-sculpting is really the brain sculpting itself, with thought simply being the subjective experience of what the brain is doing.

Begley – a very smart, perceptive reporter on cutting-edge science – here seems somewhat in thrall to the last vestiges of mind-brain dualism, and it isn’t hard to see why. Supposing that we can just think our way to a better brain offers a kind of control we otherwise wouldn’t have. Since I can think whatever I want, I can bootstrap myself into better brain-based mental health, and who wouldn’t want that kind of power?

In the article, Begley states the dualistic metaphysics behind this scenario that none other than the Dalai Lama suggested might be the case:

[I]n addition to the brain giving rise to thoughts and hopes and beliefs and emotions that add up to this thing we call the mind, maybe the mind also acts back on the brain to cause physical changes in the very matter that created it. If so, then pure thought would change the brain's activity, its circuits or even its structure. (emphasis added)

And the payoff is described by scientist Michael Merzenich at the University of California, San Francisco:

We choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work, we choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves. (emphasis added)

So: the pure thoughts that we as immaterial selves choose to think sculpt our brain, to make it function better. But again this just raises the question about the source of the immaterial self and its thoughts. As Begley herself recognizes in the first passage quoted above, it’s “the brain giving rise to thoughts and hopes and beliefs and emotions that add up to this thing we call mind.” If this is true, then our mental selves arise from grey matter, so we can’t in any sense stand apart from our brains and manipulate them. The brain, embedded in a body embedded in an environment, is an entirely physical cybernetic control system that changes in response to the demands put on it as the organism makes its way in the world. Conscious thought, along with sensations and emotions, is what it feels like to be such a system; thought isn’t a magic lever over the system itself. There isn’t an immaterial soul in charge of the brain.

To see this is crucial, since otherwise the failure to just choose our way out of our difficulties is unexplainable except as the fault of the soul, in which case we’re susceptible to massive self-blame, guilt and shame. And the myth of pure mental power might lead us to ignore the fact that our psychological states stem a great deal from the physical and social circumstances we’re in; we actually lose control by supposing we can (and should) just rise above our circumstances, instead of seeking to change them.

Dualism, therefore, has little going for it, either as an accurate picture of the mind-brain connection or as a practical approach to mental health. A science-based, fully naturalistic understanding of ourselves suggests that the conscious mind – sensations, thoughts, emotions, etc. – is what it feels like to be a brain-body system acting in the world. Knowing this, we’ll be less susceptible to soul-guilt and better situated to sculpt our physically-instantiated selves to our liking.

Do We Really Need Another "Ism"?

2006-12-21T17:34:00.000-05:00

Some of those skeptical about faith-based religions and other non-empirical belief systems seem equally skeptical about whole-heartedly endorsing any worldview. They don’t particularly want to sign on to another “ism,” something which might be, or turn into, a fixed creed or ideology. Or perhaps as staunchly independent thinkers they don’t want to be pinned down or pigeonholed – no labels on me, thank you very much. Although they might endorse a rational, empirical approach to justifying beliefs and not have any truck with the supernatural, they balk at describing themselves as naturalists.

Fair enough. The skeptical, independent habit of mind underlying this refusal is exactly the cognitive virtue naturalism encourages. And indeed, those suspicious of naturalism as an ism – a potentially restrictive ideology – are welcome to expose it as such. If naturalism can be shown defective, for instance because it imposes cognitive blinders, limits the range of human experience, or blunts our engagement with the world and each other, then it must yield to whatever worldview does better in these respects. (How’s that for being non-defensive?)

Absent this critique, however, those who are naturalists in all but name might consider coming out as such (although the countersuggestible among them likely won’t). Atheists, secular humanists, skeptics and freethinkers are basically naturalistic in their worldview; a science-based, rational, empirical naturalism is their philosophical lodestone, even if it isn’t always explicit. Naturalism simply names the worldview that holds the world is of a piece, not divided into the natural vs. the supernatural, and naturalists are simply those that subscribe to naturalism.

To count yourself a thorough-going naturalist is, however, to go beyond what many atheists, humanists and skeptics currently are willing to accept. Denying god is fine, but denying contra-causal free will? That’s a real problem for many. Nor will the progressive implications of a thorough-going naturalism be particularly palatable to secular conservatives. If they consider themselves true-blue naturalists, they must either formulate a naturalized notion of contra-causal agency (very difficult!), or deny there are progressive, humanistic implications of seeing that we’re fully caused creatures. Such critiques are welcome since naturalism is by definition based on open inquiry.

But again, do we really need another ism, in this case naturalism? Well, if it’s an accurate, convenient label for what you believe on careful consideration to be the case, make use of it. Not to name your worldview, after all, leaves it at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace of belief, what Susan Blackmore would call the “meme-o-sphere.”

Big Tobacco and the Free Will Defense

2006-12-15T11:19:00.000-05:00

In a recent paper in the journal Tobacco Control, researchers report that tobacco companies use a “free will” defense in law suits, to wit:

“The defendant’s cigarettes may have been a factor [in causing cancer], but the plaintiff knew of the health risks and exercised free will in choosing to smoke and declining to quit.”

The data presented in this paper show that, as evidence mounted that smoking causes cancer, tobacco companies stopped using the “no causality” defense (that there’s no causal connection between smoking and cancer) and shifted to the “free will” defense:

“We found a decrease in the use of the ‘no causality’ argument over time. As can be seen in table 7, this argument was used in 89% of the cases before 1997, 65% of cases during the period 1997–2002, and 25% in 2003. Correspondingly, there was an increase over time in the use of the ‘‘other risk factors’’ argument (from 11% during the first period, to 33% and 50% in the next two periods, respectively) and the ‘‘free will’’ argument (56%, 71%, and 100% in the first, second, and third periods, respectively).”

It’s interesting that as the causal story got filled in about the connection between smoking and cancer, tobacco companies increasingly relied upon juries’ intuitions about free will to defend against liability claims. There are two sets of intuitions that might come to bear, related to two different understandings of what’s meant by free will.

On a compatibilist understanding of free will (compatible with determinism), tobacco companies would say that no one was forcing smokers to smoke; they were smoking voluntarily on their own recognizance. Their will was free in that their behavior was unconstrained by any external compulsion. They knew the health risks of smoking, but their desire to smoke won out, perhaps against their better judgment. So smokers alone are responsible for continuing to smoke.

But this last claim about being solely responsible is a non-sequitur. On a deterministic, causal understanding of the desire to smoke, the addictive qualities of nicotine obviously play a big role, and tobacco companies knew full well they were marketing a very addictive product. So the causal story clearly shows that tobacco companies share responsibility for the inability of smokers to quit, and therefore for the high rates of cancer among smokers. So a compatibilist free will defense doesn’t get tobacco companies off the hook.

On an incompatibilist, contra-causal understanding of free will, tobacco companies might be appealing to people’s intuitions that no matter how addictive or pleasurable cigarettes are, a smoker could quit, if only he chose to. Everyone, ultimately, has a power of choice that transcends causal influences, that decides which influences to give in to, and which to rise above. If jurors have this picture of human agency in mind, then indeed they might conclude that tobacco companies bear no responsibility for the health costs of smoking.

This points to the importance of debunking the idea of contra-causal freedom, since left intact, it effectively insulates the purveyors of addictive products from taking any responsibility for the harmful consequences of addiction. If you’re a tobacco company executive, you’re probably smiling and saying: ain’t supernatural free will a wonderful thing? But as naturalism about human agency takes hold, it will become more difficult to hide behind the free will defense.

Naturalism and Forgiveness

2006-11-01T15:23:00.000-05:00

It’s always interesting to see those on opposite ends of the political spectrum agree with one another. In this case, Boston Globe columnists Jeff Jacoby (conservative) and James Carroll (liberal) agree that the Amish were out of line – weird, misguided, perhaps morally defective – to forgive the killer that so cruelly took the lives of five girls, along with his own. That Jacoby in Undeserved Forgiveness takes this position is what we’d expect; after all, conservatives, as a matter of temperament and ideology, tend on balance to be less forgiving than liberals when it comes to crime and punishment. But to be fair, Jacoby raises an important question about forgiveness that I’ll return to at the end of these remarks: is it appropriate to automatically absolve an offender, absent a clear indication of remorse? In this case, the killer’s suicide prevented such considerations from arising, and Jacoby assumes that the Amish would have forgiven him whether or not he showed contrition. But of course we can’t be sure about that.

Carroll (Monsters in Our Schools) notes that this killer, as well as others involved in school massacres, “escaped retribution” by suicide, and asks “how are we to think of them?” Carroll (much like David Brooks here) strongly suggests the killers are, in some sense, self made:

One hears it said that every monster is someone to whom, at some point in the past, something monstrous was done. Because it affirms a principle of order, however perverse, the idea has appeal, and may be discernibly true in some instances.
The Colorado shooter, Duane Morrison, left behind a letter making an explicit connection to his sufferings as a child. But it is wrong to draw a causal link between a person's former experience of victimhood and his subsequent role as a victimizer.
This is most obviously so because the majority of victims, across a range of horrors, do not go on to inflict like suffering on others. Those who have encountered life's vicissitudes, even when inflicted out of cruelty or malice, are at least as likely to be marked by special magnanimity as by callous self-centeredness.

Carroll casts doubt on the sufficiency of a killer’s past, including abuse inflicted on him, to account for his becoming a killer. After all, he says, others have suffered as much, and not become killers. So, one wonders, what does account for the fact that some become callous and self-centered, and others magnanimous? If, as Carroll claims, we can’t draw a causal link from past life experience to one’s character, the clear implication is that character is ultimately self-originated. In which case, of course, the killer has willfully made himself a monster, deserving of retribution, not forgiveness, at least by us. Thus:

[S]ometimes forgiveness can seem properly left to the Almighty, while we humans yield to a visceral burst, an imagined clenching of the fist in the faces of our newest enemies: You don't storm a school, fellows! You don't line up children for grievous exploitation! You don't execute them!
Thinking of those children, how is it possible not to hate their executioners?

It’s true of course that our initial response to such atrocities is likely to be visceral hatred, which all too often results in retributive excesses. But should we give in to our punitive instincts? To his credit, Carroll says we shouldn’t, that “Defense of the moral order from the deeds of monsters requires a refusal to become monsters in return.” Nevertheless, he ends up refusing the possibility of forgiveness:

[B]efore empathy [for the killer], there must be truth. The slaying of innocent girls in the sacred precinct of a school is a self-excluding act. However the crime is adjudicated, the man who commits it has banished himself from the human family.

Banishment – being beyond forgiveness – is, according to Carroll’s truth, a self-excluding act. As Carroll implied earlier, the killer banished himself by choices that were not a function of his past, but of his own free will. But on a naturalistic understanding of ourselves, this can’t be the case, since there is no ultimately self-constructing freedom that operates independently of the various factors - genetic, familial, and social - that shaped the killer. (I take Alan Dershowitz to task for making the same incoherent appeal to self-origination in Explaining Moussaoui.) Carroll’s case against forgiveness, his common cause with Jacoby, thus depends on an implicit notion of a contra-causal and therefore supernatural free will. Withholding forgiveness leads him, finally, to accept the killer’s suicide as an appropriate response to his self-inflicted banishment. When liberals and progressives start condoning suicide, we see the moral hazards of supernaturalism.

Now, as both Jacoby and Carroll rightly point out, forgiveness shouldn’t be automatic, and nothing in a naturalistic, deterministic understanding of human behavior requires that we instantly forgive those who trespass against us, even if that’s what the Amish did. As Jacoby says “I cannot see how the world is made a better place by assuring someone who would do terrible things to others that he will be readily forgiven afterward, even if he shows no remorse.” Indeed, authentic forgiveness must be contingent on authentic remorse: the acknowledgement that what one did was terribly wrong, accompanied by deep regret, contrition, and a determination never to repeat the offense.

Many, of course, will be unable to forgive even if such remorse is tendered. It will be beyond their psychological capacities, especially if they believe people just choose to become evil-doers. But if they do forgive, this isn’t a mark of weakness, or an inability to appreciate the gravity of the offense, or a refusal to make moral judgments. Nor is forgiveness, as Minette Marrin recently argued, an inhuman quality. From a naturalistic perspective, it’s the profound, and for the victim, liberating acknowledgement that even the very worst among us, those badly used by the vagaries of their genetic endowment and their life experience, are still part of the human family, and there but for circumstances go you or I. With forgiveness, the victim might let go of her hatred; the offender might, possibly, be reclaimed in some meaningful sense, even if he never walks free. If we count forgiveness, properly bestowed, as a virtue, then naturalism can help us be more virtuous.

Choice and free will: beyond the disease model of addiction

2006-09-09T13:04:00.000-04:00

The causal story behind addiction, backed up by neuroscience, is playing an increasing role in how addicts are portrayed. According to a recent ad campaign designed to build support for treatment, addiction is a disease process that corrupts the brain, so addicts shouldn't be stigmatized as having a character flaw or moral deficiency. It features a man saying: "It'd be better if I had cancer; then you wouldn't tell me what I'm going through is just a phase. You wouldn't see my condition as a lack of willpower, but the disease that it truly is."

But as reported by Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the New York Times Magazine, people remain skeptical about the disease model of addiction:

A series of recent surveys sponsored by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence and by Faces and Voices of Recovery, a recovery advocacy group, found that half the public called addiction a personal weakness. Among those who did see addiction as a disease, most put it in a special category of diseases that people get by making poor choices.

These findings aren’t surprising. Poor choices (taking that first, second or third hit of cocaine) certainly figure in the onset of addiction, and choices aren’t ordinarily considered part of a disease process. Moreover, poor choices can indeed result from what might be called “personal weaknesses,” for instance a genetic susceptibility to addiction related to a particular type of dopamine receptor, or a penchant for risk-taking, whether learned, inherited, or both.

But of course what’s meant by personal weakness and bad choices, when stigmatizing addicts, is that the addict should have risen above his weakness; he could have chosen otherwise at the time addiction took hold. There’s an implicit assumption of contra-causal agency: no matter what influences and factors came to bear, the addict could have done otherwise, but simply chose not to. It’s that supernaturalist assumption which the disease model of addiction is meant to counter, which it does, but only to a limited extent. To combat stigmatization effectively, we must go further and show that there’s deterministic story behind sane, voluntary choices, as well as the drug-damaged brain. Otherwise, stigmatizers will always have a ready target: the supposedly non-physical moral core of a person, his freely willing soul-essence which rises above natural causality when making decisions.

On the other hand, just because this core doesn’t exist (on a naturalistic view of ourselves) doesn’t mean that there isn’t a moral component to addiction. Whenever voluntary choices are involved, as they are to some extent even in highly addictive behavior, moral concepts potentially apply. We want to minimize behavior that’s harmful, either to the addict or others, and the social judgment that such behavior is wrong is among the first lines of defense. To the extent that someone has a functioning “normative operating system,” the anticipation of censure or other social sanctions helps to keep bad choices in check. Most addicts retain some capacity to be influenced by social norms, and thus they remain moral agents.

The key point, though, on an enlightened understanding of the moral dimension of addiction, is that it’s specific behavior that’s the potential target of sanctions, not the mythical moral core. Once bad choices are seen as outcomes of causes and conditions, not free will, then we won’t imagine that there’s any virtue in the blanket condemnation of the addict as a bad person, even though we must still judge some behavior as wrong. We replace the moral essentialism of the soul with the moral consequentialism of making sanctions contingent on particular choices.

Of course, the threat of sanctions is just the punitive side of behavior control, and there’s much that can be done on the positive side to cure addiction, for instance to consistently and strongly reward productive, non-addictive behavior (as for instance in what’s called contingency management therapy). Punitive policies on addiction are often premised on the underlying notion that, as a moral failure, the addict deserves opprobrium, whether or not it does any good. Seeing that there is no freely willing agent to blame therefore makes it difficult to justify mere stigmatization, and easier to undertake programs that, on the moralistic view, might seem to coddle bad actors.

Conservatives about addiction such as Stanton Peele (quoted here) and Sally Satel (and many moderates too, no doubt) often worry that addicts will “escape responsibility” for their choices should the disease model carry the day. To go beyond the disease model, and portray addiction as a fully determined behavioral disorder might seem to obliterate the basis for responsibility altogether, but we’ve seen this isn’t the case.

What is the case, however, is that accountability is just part of the cure for addiction, and we shouldn’t be any tougher on addicts than necessary: accountability should be tempered with compassion. Understanding that addicts, like the rest of humanity, are fully caused phenomena shifts the focus from punishing the blameworthy soul to creating conditions under which they can learn new, successful behavior. And holding out rewards, not just threats, plays an essential role in that process.

Who counts as a naturalist?

2006-09-04T21:39:00.000-04:00

The death of god, it seems, is always deferred. He’s been kept alive - robust, in fact - despite what might be called explanatory displacement: the tendency of science to displace supernatural explanations with natural explanations. What god used to get credit for (lightning bolts, creating humans) can now be chalked up to unintentional, non-purposive, and more or less mechanical processes. The more we can explain in this fashion, the less there is for god to do and the less reason to believe he exists, one would suppose. After all, what rationally motivates belief in things, to a large extent, is the role they play in good explanations, those that permit prediction and control. Things that cease to play a role (e.g., phlogiston, the ether, élan vital, protoplasm, cold fusion) usually get dropped from our ontology - our catalog of what exists.

Unless, that is, they have independent means of ontological support. For god, this support comes from historically entrenched religious traditions that vigorously meme supernaturalism. These traditions, of course, take advantage of evolved human psychology: our disposition to read intention into the world, our distaste for death, and our tribal tendency to form in-groups built around shared ideology. All of these supply fertile ground for belief in a supervisory creator who has special concern for our tribe (not the other guy’s), and in an immaterial soul that survives to join him in the hereafter. So explanatory displacement notwithstanding, supernaturalism lives on.

Still, as science advances, believers feel the heat of god’s explanatory irrelevance. Writing in the New York Times about Pope Benedict’s seminar on evolution, Ian Fisher reports that

…Father Fessio and others say the pope, based on his statements and writings, remains deeply concerned specifically about the contention among some supporters of modern evolution that the theory refutes any role of God in creation.

‘Given this ideology, the temptation or danger is real to say that you don’t have any need of God, that the spirit doesn’t exist,’ said Msgr. Fiorenzo Facchini, an Italian priest and paleoanthropologist. ‘And the church should keep guard against this and denounce it.’

So how do we keep god in the picture? Well, by claiming he’s needed to get the ball rolling. After that, material, mechanical processes, such as natural selection, take over. We won’t find god’s intention written directly in the fossil record or in our DNA, but he still gets the credit. Not bad for a day’s work.

This move, of course, begs the question of where god came from. For those seriously interested in explanations, this question spikes god, since positing a further mystery (a creator) to explain a more proximate mystery (the origins of life and the universe) simply multiplies mysteries. But for those wanting a fig leaf of explanatory relevance for god, his role as Very Remote Controller is just the ticket. It gives him at least a bit part to play, and thus (if we don’t ask too many questions) a quasi-rational reason to believe in him, apart from wanting to be reassured about death and our privileged place in the universe.

The same sort of dynamic, curiously enough, is being played out in a discussion among a group of religious naturalists (RNs) associated with the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science (I'm a member and a participant in the discussion). The issue, essentially, is about the scope of religious naturalism itself. All parties to the debate count themselves as naturalists insofar as they all claim that nature is all there is – there’s no additional supernatural realm. But the question that divides them is: What is nature? What is its ontology? This question has bite, since if we can’t agree about the nature of nature, then the designation “religious naturalist” may not be particularly informative.

Some RNs think that nature is, in some sense, benevolent or purposive. It has a direction - a teleology - that we participate in, for example in having evolved to become intelligent creatures. Among the most florid expressions of natural teleology is the belief in “evolutionary enlightenment” and “conscious evolution” as championed by New Age gurus Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilbur. But there are less specific, milder versions as well, in which nature includes a force for good, such that things are working out for the best. We live, perhaps, in a Panglossian universe.

What’s happened here, of course, is that god’s role as intentional creator, supervisor, and protector has been transmuted into an aspect of nature. Nature has us and our interests in mind, so to speak. But just as there is no good scientific explanatory justification for god, there’s no good scientific justification, at least not yet, for imputing to nature either benevolence or purpose. Such notions play no role in currently accepted scientific theories; they have no explanatory relevance. Instead, the same human psychology that drives belief in god is driving belief in a cosmos that has a purpose we can latch onto. People very much want there to be something more beyond chance and necessity, and even those who’ve abjured traditional theistic consolations will sometimes read into nature what they’re so strongly motivated to find.

All sorts of comforting beliefs about nature are consistent with science, since science can’t prove that nature has no purpose, just as it can’t prove the non-existence of god. Just as Francis Collins in his new book The Language of God can confidently assert that his belief in a Remote Controller is consistent with his belief in natural selection, so too can self-described religious naturalists assert that their belief in cosmic benevolence is consistent with science. There may not yet be hard evidence for benevolence, but it can’t be categorically ruled out.

The defense against what’s very likely wishful thinking is to stick to the ontology science positively supports. Without the constraint of having positive evidence for an existence claim, then there’s almost no limit to what we can claim about nature, in which case the concept of the natural becomes too loose to distinguish it from the supernatural. To count yourself meaningfully as a naturalist, as opposed to supernaturalist, therefore requires you to cite good evidence for your conception of nature. Empiricism and naturalism go hand in hand.

Science and the insanity defense

2006-07-30T21:30:00.000-04:00

Writing in the Times on July 30, 2006, judge Morris Hoffman and law professor Stephen Morse defend the insanity defense. They rightly point out that the very notion of moral responsibility requires us to excuse those who don’t have sufficient capacity for what they call moral cognition. But in reaching what should be an uncontroversial conclusion, they argue that science and the law are at odds, when in fact they collaborate. They say

The rise of various materialistic and deterministic explanations of human behavior, including psychiatry, psychology, sociology and, more recently, neuroscience, has posed a particular challenge to the criminal law’s relatively simple central assumption that with few exceptions we act intentionally and can be held responsible. These schools of thought attribute people’s actions not to their own intentions, but rather to powerful and predictable forces over which they have no control. People aren’t responsible for their crimes: it’s their poverty, their addictions or, ultimately, their neurons.

This levels a false charge against science and is misleading about control. First, although materialistic and deterministic psychiatry, psychology, sociology and neuroscience deny contra-causal free will, they don’t deny human intentions or responsible agency. Rather, science shows their causes in biology and culture, and eventually might describe their neural correlates in some detail. Second, in point of fact, we aren’t in control of the powerful and predictable forces that, early in life, shape our brains, and therefore our personalities and proclivities – we aren’t self-made. Nevertheless, we form intentions, and can be held responsible for acting on those intentions, if we have normal capacities for rationality and self-control, all of which are entirely material and determined (as Morse freely admits elsewhere).

So why do Hoffman and Morse set up this straw man of science's supposed threat to responsibility, one wonders? Perhaps to carve out a special domain for the law barred from scientific inquiry - an unfortunate bit of territoriality, if true. Scientific materialism and determinism do, of course, undermine widely held supernaturalist notions of moral agency, those that ground ultimate metaphysical responsibility in contra-causal free will. So maybe Hoffman and Morse distance themselves from science in order not to offend those who suppose such ultimate responsibility is necessary for the law (which of course it isn't).

They go on to claim that “we should recognize that the criteria for responsibility — intentionality and moral capacity — are social and legal concepts, not scientific, medical or psychiatric ones.” But they immediately point out that in ascribing responsibility we recognize that “some people suffer from a mental disorder, and some do not” and of course we don’t hold responsible those with serious mental disorders. So, if psychiatric illness is real (and few would dispute this, except notoriously Thomas Szasz or, curiously, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga), then at least some of the criteria for responsibility are indeed medical, psychiatric and scientific.

Finally, Hoffman and Morse say that “Convicting and punishing a defendant who genuinely believed that God commanded him to kill is not unscientific, it is immoral and unjust.” But the immorality and injustice of such punishment stems directly from the fact that the defendant (Andrea Yates, for instance) suffered from a morally impairing psychosis, the diagnosis of which is a matter of science, not law. The point again is that, contrary to their op-ed thesis, the law’s definition of responsibility isn’t conceptually independent of science. Rather, neural and functional deficits in rationality and impulse control, undermining the capacity for responsibility, are precisely what medicine, psychiatry and neuroscience can help us discern. The legal test for insanity can’t be divorced from these.

Much of the injustice in the recent rollbacks of the insanity defense is due to the failure to take the science of human behavior seriously, and substitute instead the narrow, stern and retributive judgment that wrongful behavior must be punished, what ever the mental state of the accused. If they were less concerned with defending the law from science, Hoffman and Morse would discover in a materialist understanding of the mind an ally in clarifying our judgments of when a person has, or has not, the neurally instantiated cognitive capacities to be justly held responsible. We need not keep science at a distance to retain moral agency, even if we are fully material, and fully determined.

Supernatural Dignity or Domestic Bliss?

2006-07-10T13:21:00.000-04:00

In case you missed it, there’s a must read on modern love from the New York Times style section : What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage (June 25, 06). It could just as easily have appeared in the science section, given that it’s about behavior modification techniques. Amy Sutherland, researching a school for exotic animal trainers, discovered that their techniques worked equally well on her husband. Generally, reward good behavior and studiously ignore bad behavior. More specifically, reinforce actions that are the building blocks of desirable behavioral repertoires, as well as those that displace unwanted behavior. Her husband became less annoying and more loveable as his behavior improved, and it happened without nagging and sarcasm, which meant fewer hurt feelings and arguments – all told a better marriage.

Sutherland's approach is standard behavior mod, with (please note) no use of punishment, except the mild but effective disappointment of being ignored occasionally. So there’s nothing particularly new here, except of course that Sutherland is TRAINING HER HUSBAND! What is he, after all, an animal? Yes indeed, and that’s the crucial lesson here, with considerable ramifications. Sutherland says:

I used to take his faults personally; his dirty clothes on the floor were an affront, a symbol of how he didn't care enough about me. But thinking of my husband as an exotic species gave me the distance I needed to consider our differences more objectively.

I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys.

Sutherland understands, wisely, that behavior is a fully caused matter of contingencies of reinforcement and hard-wired biology. This objective, rather tough-minded view of ourselves as physical animals leads to acceptance and control. She can’t any longer suppose that her husband can just choose to behave better, and is therefore blameworthy in that sense. Rather, the causal origins of his faults lie partially in his environment, which includes, of course, herself. She can’t any longer point to hubby as the freely willing, self-caused source of his behavior, and this blocks the contempt often heaped on those we suppose are willfully misbehaving. Rather, seeing his causal story motivates a compassionate acceptance, and forces an acknowledgment of her own role in marital disharmony. She can’t as easily get on her high horse.

Further, she (and her husband too, as you’ll see if you read the piece) gain non-punitive control by virtue of understanding why they behave they way they do, and what actually works in learning new tricks. The acceptance mentioned above makes it less likely that they’ll want to use insults and sarcasm to punish annoying behavior, instead of the more effective strategy of simply ignoring it. Compassion and control, what’s not to like?

Well, maybe seeing ourselves as “mere” animals is to lose dignity, in particular the dignity of having a higher, soul-based nature that isn’t susceptible to training and other influences. OK, but if you insist on such dignity, you also let slip the dogs of blame, contempt and moral superiority, which feed on the idea that people really could have done otherwise, whatever their circumstances, or that they’re literally self-made in some respect. So what do you most want: the improbable supernatural dignity of being a causal exception to nature, or domestic bliss?

Catching up to naturalism

2006-06-15T13:38:00.000-04:00

Eventually, it will be a commonplace that most things, including human behavior, can be understood as resulting from a sufficient set of causes, that is, most things are determined. Although people commonsensically invoke causation in all sorts of ways, they generally don't go all the way in admitting they and their actions can be understood as consequences of antecedent conditions that ultimately they didn't have control over. Indeed, understanding things at the macro level above quantum phenomena requires citing causes and being deterministic, there's just no way around it. (Gary Drescher in his new book Good and Real says determinism goes right down into the quantum level.)

The New York Times published an article today by Amy Harmon, That Wild Streak? Maybe It Runs in the Family, which gets well into one half of the causal story behind human behavior - genetics (lots of links to actual studies in the online version). What's striking is the extent to which she covers the implications of genetic causation for our notions of praise and blame, stigma, responsibility, control, willpower and excuses. She cites many instances in which individuals feel relief that what might otherwise be considered a self-chosen character flaw, or failure to exert willpower, is now properly seen as at least partially a matter of genetic vulnerability, for instance to obesity, addiction, risk-taking and attention deficit disorder. Of course, others are upset that telling the genetic side of the story of their good behavior robs them of credit. Bottom line: the realm of responsibility for which the agent takes credit and blame shrinks as we learn of the genetic contribution to their vices and virtues. As Harmon suggests, the "power of the human spirit" (that is, willpower) is under siege.

But of course genetics is only half the story. The other 50% (more or less, depending on what traits or behavior we're talking about) is environmental, and as BF Skinner demonstrated years ago, the environment is just as determining, just as causal, as genetics. Harmon could do the same story over again, but simply look at the environmental contributions to the same behaviors: the role of food advertising and availability in obesity, the effect of peer groups in promoting or reducing criminality, the rise of video games in lowering the threshold for real violence, the marketing of extreme sports in encouraging risk-taking, etc., etc.

Once we get both the genetic and environmental stories told, what's happened to the person who takes credit and blame? The person is still there, of course, but now she's pretty much explained (never fully of course, given the practical gaps in our understanding). Explanations reveal the self-caused, bootstrapping, radically individualist self for the Western myth that it is, which leads to a more compassionate and effective stance in dealing with human faults and frailties, and less uncritical awe of the successful. The winners in the game of life we understand as ultimately just lucky in their endowments, genetic and environmental.

Even though explanations explain where people's virtues come from, what they don't do is "trivialize their skills and accomplishments" as Harmon suggests they might near the end of her piece. Getting good at something like ballet still requires hard work and effort, for which we can justly praise someone: we mightily appreciate such skill, after all, and we want to encourage it. But exerting effort doesn't involve anything magical that transcends causality. The desire to work hard comes from some place after all, for instance genetically acquired gumption or luckily encountered role models, not out of the blue or from self-chosen willpower.

So, once Harmon writes the story about environmental determinism, and draws the implications of causal explanations for our notions of self, free will, credit and blame, the Times will be fully caught up to naturalism, and it will seem dead obvious. Then there's the rest of the country, but all in due course...

Unmasking retribution

2006-06-03T16:44:00.000-04:00

Michael Shermer's 6/1/06 E-Skeptic published a review by Kenneth Krause of Laurence R. Tancredi’s book, Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals About Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0521860016). Below are some comments on a passage from the review and a related New York Times article on insanity and the death penalty:

“This would suggest,” Tancredi argues, “that murderers are strongly affected by prefrontal deficits even without the ‘social push’ from environment” (153). The author stops short, however, of professing that criminals are never morally responsible for their actions. Rather, he writes, “those who have full control are likely to represent a very small percentage of those we now label as bad,” and “the relationship between ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ is growing ever closer” (143, 160).

Thus, Tancredi alleges, the M’Naughten standard and other modern legal insanity tests are deficient, at least insofar as they consider only a defendant’s ability to distinguish or appreciate the difference between society’s definitions of right and wrong but not a defendant’s ability to control his or her behavior, or, in other words, to exercise free will. The same reasoning should apply, the author reasons, when individuals judge other individuals’ “badness.”

This is interesting since it demarcates two classes of murderers: those who have full control capacities and thus are morally responsible (a small minority, according to Tancredi), and those who don’t (the majority). If so, then we’re punishing lots of people who aren’t morally responsible, instead of treating them or at least keeping them safely and humanely segregated from society.

This fits with a recent New York Times article, “Judging whether a killer is sane enough to die” which shows that people are far more interested in exacting punishment, even of the demonstrably insane, than in providing treatment or humane segregation. Why, one wonders? The Mr. Panetti mentioned below is a convicted killer facing execution who has a long history of mental illness:

Robert Blecker, a law professor at the New York Law School and a cautious supporter of the death penalty, said Mr. Panetti's execution could serve the goal of retribution. "He knows what he did," Professor Blecker said. "He knows what the state is about to do to him, and why. For the retributivist, the past counts. It counts for us, and for us to be retributively satisfied, it must also count for him."

We see here the stark disconnect between achieving backwards-looking retributive satisfaction (“the past counts”) and any forward-looking social good that might be served by killing Panetti. All that’s necessary to justify retribution, says Blecker, is the offender’s bare understanding that what he did was wrong, however impaired he might be in his ability to control behavior. Because the goal of punishment here is retribution, not reform, rehabilitation, public safety or deterrence, the person’s mental health (beyond possessing a rudimentary moral sense) is not a consideration. This shows just how much the demand for retribution has, over the last 30 years or so, come to trump the functional role of punishment in facilitating rehabilitation and public safety. Even if Mr. Panetti had full control capacities and thus on Tancredi’s compatibilist account had free will and was morally responsible, we could ask the question: why is it morally better to kill him as opposed to humanely segregating him? Why does he just deserve to die? The answer isn’t at all obvious, as explored at http://www.naturalism.org/criminal.htm.

What’s ironic is that our retaliatory, punitive impulses were originally functional (deterring aggressors, keeping free riders in check, etc.) but now, thanks to Kant and other deontologists, they’ve been given a justification that floats free of any consequentialist rationale: we’re obligated to inflict suffering or (in this case) death, whether or not any benefit results; it’s our duty if the offender has the capacity to know right from wrong. It’s the past that counts, not the future. But as neurophilosopher and psychologist Joshua Greene points out, what’s really going on is that the hard-wired emotional disposition to retaliate bequeathed us by evolution has been enshrined as an abstract deontological moral principle. This allows its expression even in cases where no enlightened social good is achieved, but only the emotional satisfaction of inflicting suffering or death, dressed up as retributive justice. Seeing this, we can pose the question of whether retribution should really have such a claim on us. When retributive justice is unmasked for what it is, do we any longer want to be part of it? Here’s an example of how a naturalistic understanding of ethics and our moral intuitions might have far-reaching policy implications for criminal justice.

David Brooks tending toward a humanistic naturalism

2006-05-30T20:17:00.000-04:00

In the latest edition of the CFN newsletter, I congratulated NewYork Times columnist David Brooks for taking a causal view of children's capacity for self-control, compared with his anti-naturalistic take on the Columbine massacre (see "Brooks, Reconfigured"). Now Brooks has written "Of Love and Money" in which he looks at the big picture of human capital and social inequality, again from a causal perspective. That he feels concern about inequality and fairness is progress for a conservative, and that he's so interested in causes and admits that human capital is fully physical (based in brain capacities) is of course laudable from a naturalist's perspective.

Since his avowed goal is greater equality, and since he's basically a naturalist (at least in this piece), then the question becomes: what works best to address the causes of inequality? He recognizes that healthy brain development is one key factor, and that this requires stable relationships early in life. He thus asks: "How do we inculcate good brain functions across a wider swath of the 3-year-old population?" and "How does government provide millions of kids with the stable, loving structures they are not getting sufficiently at home?" Not surprisingly for a conservative, he plays down the role of government, and ends up with the rather banal observation that "Kids learn from people they love. If we want young people to develop the social and self-regulating skills they need to thrive, we need to establish stable long-term relationships between love-hungry children and love-providing adults."

But having said this, the next question Brooks needs to address is what can help establish these relationships. Since loving relationships are primarily a matter of healthy, non-punitive families, schools and communities, the question then becomes how best to encourage the development of such families, schools and communities. Are strictly market-based solutions the best, or intentional, targeted, science-based policies (see "Causes of violence" below), or perhaps a mix of both? Once you start taking human welfare as a primary good, and then accept a fully causal, physical view of the person, then there's at least a chance that laissez-faire ideology might be questioned. This is to say that being a humanistic naturalist militates against thoughtlessly buying into unchecked free-marketeerism. I detect in Brooks signs of both humanism and naturalism, although he probably won't ever come out and say so, since that would alienate his conservative constituency.

Causes of violence

2006-05-30T20:10:00.000-04:00

"Violent developments: disruptive kids grow into their behavior" at Science News is about the complex causation of violent behavior, including gene/environment interaction. No mention of free will, as one would expect from a science magazine. This quote was interesting, connecting forgiveness with understanding causality: "Henry's feelings of rage abated as he grasped that his father struggled with his own deep-seated problems."

And "Home remedy" in the New York Times magazine is about helping violent kids using something called multi-systemic therapy (MST), an evidence-based intervention which operates on the assumption that "all of the causes of anti-social behavior should be attacked at once" and that "behavior is shaped by multiple aspects of the environment." So the emphasis is on changing the environment the kids are exposed to, especially in improving parental and peer influences.

If we put resources into such interventions the way we do into Iraq...

Doubting naturalism

2006-05-25T16:38:00.000-04:00

There’s an interesting piece by Anthony Matteo at Science and Spirit, “Reasonable Doubt”, which raises objections to naturalism on grounds which will be familiar to those who know Alvin Plantinga’s work. Among them are 1) an evolutionary-adaptive account of human reasoning is insufficient to ground the reliability of our theorizing about the world, and 2) naturalistic explanations can’t secure the causal efficacy of consciousness (mental causation) upon which having true beliefs supposedly depends. These considerations suggest that on a naturalistic account of ourselves we can’t trust our own reasoning. Since naturalism fails us, we have to assume some sort of supernatural basis to account for our capacities for reliable knowledge: “deeper ordering principles in nature that have to be added to the explanatory mix to account for their emergence” and those ordering principles might be conferred on nature by a “Cosmic Mind.” In less a theistic but equally dualist vein, Matteo concludes that “the emergence of consciousness and rationality require a more expansive metaphysical vision in which the mental dimension is in some way a fundamental feature of the nature of things, not simply an epiphenomenal derivative of the physical.”

A few comments, for those with the time and inclination:

Matteo worries that a strictly physical, causal story of the brain as being sufficient for rationality somehow undercuts the idea that we can have true conscious beliefs. But I don’t think this necessarily follows. Why can’t true beliefs, occurently experienced as the conclusion of conscious deliberative processes, supervene on deterministic physical processes going on in the brain? Seeing exactly how the correspondence is established is of course a fascinating problem, but there’s no a priori reason to suppose this can’t be solved. That there is such correspondence means we can see how the capacity to form true conscious beliefs was subject to selection pressure: selection operated on their neural correlates. Our beliefs “hook on to external reality” because our brains were selected to reliably track our environments. Whether a purely physicalist account (no spooky stuff, but taking advantage of all explanatory levels) renders consciousness causally epiphenomenal, as Matteo worries it might, is a separate question, ultimately to be decided by arriving at the best explanation of our cognitive capacities.

Matteo also conflates the “hard problem” of explaining conscious phenomenal qualities (qualia) with the problem of being rational, which again is quite a separate matter. After all, we’ve built at least the beginnings of a proto-rationality (having goals, following logical rules, and sensitivity to contingencies) into our computers, which we assume don’t have qualia (yet). And regarding the hard problem, Matteo’s far too pessimistic, quoting Jerry Fodor that “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be [phenomenally] conscious” and Ned Block: “In the case of [phenomenal] consciousness we have nothing—zilch—worthy of being called a research program, nor are there any substantive proposals about how to go about starting one.” Fodor was writing in 1992, and since then there’ve been significant advances both in clarifying what we mean by phenomenal consciousness as an explanatory target, and in adducing full blown, empirically grounded theories (e.g., Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One). So I think Block is simply wrong about research programs.

Regarding our cognitive capacities, Matteo writes:

“If they are of a nonpurposeful origin, have we good grounds for assuming their reliability? If we could provide a nonpurposeful explanation of a contrivance such as William Paley’s famous watch, would we then go on to contend that it was nonetheless a reliable time-telling device?”

Well, how do we determine reliability in the first place? In this example, it gets determined independently of the watch’s origins, namely by how well it tells time. Do criteria for reliability require anything more than the consistent corroboration of predictions? If so, what are these? And if we want to invoke teleology we can always think of our cognitive capacities as having a purpose from evolution’s “point of view,” namely winning the game of survival. Reliable cognition at higher and higher levels of abstraction quite obviously results from the “arms race” generated by natural selection.

Near the end of his piece, Matteo writes:

“The theistic argument of Lewis and Plantinga does not seek to overcome some self-induced Cartesian brand of global skepticism, but to provide a more adequate basis for our inevitable reliance on the fundamental validity of our cognitive capacities. It seeks via “inference to the best explanation” to move beyond mere pragmatism.”

The difficulty, of course, is that there is no explanation forthcoming of how the god of the theistic argument sees to it that our cognitive capacities are reliable and that our beliefs are true. Any purported gaps in naturalistic explanations have to be filled explicitly by supernaturalistic explanations if they are to have any appeal to inquiring minds. Generally, supernatural accounts can’t meet the basic requirements of explanatory transparency since they leave god and his workings a mystery. Naturalists are happy to admit gaps in our understanding, but don’t paper them over with possibly comforting pseudo-explanations.