Financial Times on Free Will

Financial Times has a short review of three new books on free will: Freedom & Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power by John Searle; Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think About the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to be Human by Susan Blackmore; and Four Views on Free Will by John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas.  You can read the review here.

Comments

[Neal]

It doesn't seem that this reviewer even read the Four Views book by Kane, Pereboom, Vargas, and Fischer. Anyone who knows anything about their work knows that they aren't just "staring at their navels". It's too bad that many people think the only "real" work to be done on the problem of free will is going to come from neuroscience.

[Manuel Vargas]

Actually, I think the reviewer is wrong about at least one thing: I have not gone cross-eyed staring at my navel. On the contrary, I can see it just fine. I'll spare you any observations about its depth and its lint-ladeness, but trust me on the cross-eyed thing. I tell you, reporting these days is really shoddy.

Kip, thanks for pointing out the review, and Neal, for the kind words. Now if we can only get the New York Times to slag us as well, fame and fortune beyond philosophy are soon to follow!

[Kip Werking]

Some comments on that article:

1. I like that the article emphasized the possibility of a moral revolution here. This is part of what makes this subject so fascinating to me. When philosophers like Tamler Sommers and Derk Pereboom say that there will or should be a moral revolution, and others like Dennett say there won't be or shouldn't be, this is an issue of tremendous weight.

2. It was mildly disappointing to read the reviewer's comments on Searle's and the Four Views books, respectively, because (although I haven't read either), I expect the latter to be so much better.

[Joe]

Stephen Cave, the author of the review, writes: "But the book that really does justice to this question is yet to be written." I guess we're supposed to figure this out for ourselves but it would be nice if Mr. Cave could at least tell us the ending!

[Tamler Sommers]

I want to resist the natural in-group reaction to trash the reviewer and dismiss the review, but so much of that article is indefensible that I can't do it. Still, there is one paragraph that made me pause:

"Now more than ever we need our philosophers to help us make sense of what science is telling us. But the bulk of this book is dedicated to an inward-looking family row revolving around some very implausible thought experiments, all conducted in an arcane cant..."

Replace 'this book'(which I haven't read) with 'the contemporary literature on free will and moral responsibility' and he may have a bit of a point. I worried about this a lot before diving head-first into the business. After all, our goal is to make a difference outside the small circle of specialists in the field. Maybe this wouldn't be as true if we were debating object permanence, but as we all know, questions about free will and moral responsibility have implications for everything from criminal justice to the meaning of life. Lately, now that I've started to write more scholarly papers, I've watched with alarm as my prose becomes more technical and less accessible, and non-philosopher friends and family have less and less of a clue what I'm talking about. I'm sure scholars and specialists in every discipline have to face this problem, but I still wonder if it more incumbent on philosophers in this field to make sure that intelligent well-intentioned non-experts can appreciate and understand our arguments.

(By the way, I don't mean this comment to be IN ANY WAY a criticism of particular philosophers in our field... It's a broad question that affects all of us, I believe.)

[Joe]

Tamler,

That is a good point but I wonder if it is possible for people to write papers that are both accessible to the general public and publishable.

I contribute to a local political blog, I have a semi-regular column in the local newspaper (just a 2 year gig), and I write letters to the editor of that newspaper. And then I write essays for journals, which are very different.

[Tamler Sommers]

I agree, it's extremely difficult to do both. Maybe "Moral Luck" is a good example of walking that fine line, and I'm sure there are quite a few others. But maybe the difficulty says something about the criteria for what counts as publishable. (Not that I have a great sense of what those criteria are.) Again, I know this issue comes up in every area of philosophy as well as in other disciplines, but it seems especially unfortunate in our field.

Like you, I try to reach out to other venues too with the interviews for the Believer, the stuff for the TLS, and my work on Naturalism.org. But the bulk of any non-tenured (and tenured usually) faculty's time has to be spent on writing for journals or academic presses, no? Which means that the bulk of our time and energy is devoted to doing things that the general public cannot appreciate.

I should note that I left out the sentence in the review about how philosophers are oblivious to events outside the academy. As Neal said, that is obviously, painfully false. Say what you want about the free will group, we do keep up with the literature in other fields. But when Neal says: "It's too bad that many people think the only "real" work to be done on the problem of free will is going to come from neuroscience" he's right. It is too bad. Shouldn't we take some (compatibilist) responsibility for this perception?

[Joe]

Tamler,

I can promise that, from now on, I will try my best to write like Thomas Nagel!

Two more serious points on this issue. First, if Stephen Cave, the author of the above noted review, is unsatisfied with the writings of Fischer, Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas I can promise you that he won't be impressed with mine either. I feel pretty confident that all of these philosophers write so that "intelligent well-intentioned non-experts can appreciate and understand [their] arguments." Thus, I don't think that this is the problem, in this particular case.

Not that it isn't a problem in general and certainly we can all strive to do better. So your comments are well appreciated. I just wanted to point out that I'm fairly confident that these four philosophers are at least attempting to make contributions to society as a whole, not some narrow part of it occupied by professional philosophers. In my opinion, they are all doing an excellent job, too!

Cave is guilty of scientism pure and simple. He seems to think that the ONLY kind of philosophical theory worth offering must be tied down to experimental research of some kind. I appreciate this view point and I'm glad that some folks adopt it but I respectfully disagree with it. And it has little to do with trying to reach out to the folk.

Second, I think that most of us write so that "intelligent well-intentioned non-experts can appreciate and understand our arguments." I always try to acheive this goal yet, in the end, it comes off as if my first language was the predicate calculus. You can't always attribute a lack of success to a lack of effort.

[Tamler Sommers]

Joe,

Don't get me wrong--I agree that everyone is doing their best, and of course that Fischer, Pereboom, Kane, and Vargas are doing an excellent job--I don't deny that for a second. None of us is satisfied just reaching small circle of free will experts. However, the institutional features of our field make it tricky to go beyond this. I don't think you can blame the general lack of receptiveness to philosophical work on free will exclusively on 'scientism.' A book like 'The Illusion of the Conscious Will," for all its many faults, attempts to reach out to the public in a way that most of my favorite books on free will do not (and maybe cannot). Part of that is fear of oversimplifying tough issues--I grant that. But part of it is also due to the way things work in philosophy. We aren't judged by how well we can clarify issues to people outside our field. That makes little or no difference. We're judged by the advances, large or miniscule, we can make in an agenda that has been set by our peers--an agenda that many non-specialists might find a bit bewildering. A book like Kane's Introduction to Free Will steps back and eloquently brings people up to date--that's great but all too rare and maybe only possible for someone who's accomplished as much as Bob has. Maybe this is an inevitable feature of the institution we belong to. That wouldn't surprise me. But it's still worth lamenting even if it is. You write:

"Most of us write so that "intelligent well-intentioned non-experts can appreciate and understand our arguments." I always try to acheive this goal yet, in the end, it comes off as if my first language was the predicate calculus. You can't always attribute a lack of success to a lack of effort."

I agree, I didn't think I was attributing it to lack of effort. (I hope I didn't come across that way.) But you can't attribute it all to scientism either, or to a mean-spirited clueless reviewer. There's something about our field that makes us start out wanting to write for non-experts but too often results in something that seems like our first langauge is predicate calculus. Why does that happen? It's not a natural way to write. It's an occupational hazard-- maybe an inevitable one, but maybe not.

[Joe]

Tamler,

I didn't mean to suggest that you were unaware of the contributions of Fischer, et. al. I know that you are well aware of them.

In fact, I don't really disagree with anything that you said (on this particular topic, at least!). This is helpful advice that we should all try to follow. My comments were more directed toward Cave than toward you.

My guess is that even if Cave had read Thomas Nagel's "Moral Luck" or either of Dennett's two books on free will he would have still described them as "going cross-eyed staring at their navels." Yet Nagel is regarded by both you and I as a paradigm of the kind of philosophical writing that you are advocating. And say what you want about Dennett but no one has been more successful in conveying the issues surrounding free will to a wider audience than he has.

Note the full quote from Cave summarizing his thoughts on Four Views of Free Will: "But what this book makes most clear is that, while scientists are making real progress studying the brain in laboratories around the world, many philosophers are going cross-eyed staring at their navels."

Cave is not making the kind of helpful and important suggestion that you are making. His point is not that philosophers would be better off if they could articulate their views to non-experts as well as the academy. This is a comment about methodology, not style. This is scientism.

And if the scientific method were the only way to gain useful information about ourselves and the world, then Cave would be right. But it ain't, so he's wrong! In my humble opinion, that is.

[Yuventius Nurman]

"Cave is not making the kind of helpful and important suggestion that you are making. His point is not that philosophers would be better off if they could articulate their views to non-experts as well as the academy. This is a comment about methodology, not style."

When people ask me what I do, and I answer that I study philosophy, the general mockery is, 'Oh, do you know if you exist?'

Many of the criticisms directed towards philosophy from "non-experts" are that of the "arcane" nature of the field. But similar concern can be directed to any sciences. I was reading a journal report in Nanotechnology; it presents the technology as a potential "cure" to HIV. Now, as a non-expert I can say that the report was inundated with jargons. But that is simply quibbling.

The problem is not in the style of our writing. It's in the general preconception about Philosophy. When first-year students are introduced to Descartes and his meditation, the typical reaction would be that of refutation of the methodology: it doesn't work, it's gobbledygook, nonsensical, unreal etc. Few has the will to analyse what Descartes was attempting to do, i.e., abandoning beliefs via fantastical thought-experimentation which is philosophers' version of scientific experiments. To put it simply, Descartes was doing something different, and somehow it seems to be an affront to the very delicacy of their sound knowledge of existence.

By saying this I'm not disregarding the fact that (some) philosophy papers have the tendency to be verbose and superficially incomprehensible. It is common knowledge that philosophy papers (Derrida's, Heidegger's, etc.) can be esoteric, and thus time-consuming. But, to me, philosophy is a vocation. And I suppose yes, there are ways to improve the style of the delivery. But bottom-line, to say philosophers spend their time 'going cross-eyed staring at their navels' is fundamentally an attempt to question (and at worst makes a mockery of our) methodology. I'm not sympathetic to that.

[Dillon]

I'm not a regular here, I stumbled across the blog after reading the FT article. Though I see some familiar names, I'll have to check back more often.

I'm glad to see that I wasn't the only one dissapointed with the review. While I appreciate the point about making philosophical work accessable to the general public, I was particularly bothered by what appeared to be the assumption (in the review) that if one is going to do philosophy well, one has the obligation to also explain the relevance of the philosophical issue with recent scientific findings.

I might be mistaken (this is not my philosophical forte), but It strikes me that one never hears of a scientific book (say on consciousness or perception) that it doesn't explain to us the discoveries that philosophers are making. I suppose I write it off as an annoying double-standard of modernity.

This same double-standard is evidenced in the Economists' recent recap of the study published in Nature (about brain damage and the trolley problem). Here's their take on it: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8881470

The last line reads: "Time, perhaps, for philosophers to put away their copies of Kant and pull a dusty tome of Darwin off the bookshelf.

[John Fischer]

I agree with Dillon. As one of the authors of one of the books reviewed by the FT, I suppose I shouldn't comment on the specifics.

But I agree that it is arrogant and ridiculous to reject both the history of phillosophical discussions of these topics, and also contemporary work in philosophy, and simply defer to "science". I have always argued that we philosophers should be intellectually broad-minded, and therefore open to the important insights of science. But it is striking how asymmetric attitudes prevail in certain quarters; there are those who wish to throw away or ignore philosophy, as if science alone can answer these questions. It is just as ridiculous in discussoin of the Trolley Problem, and ethics more broadly, as it is in free will.

Don't get me wrong: I strongly believe in a pluralistic, interdisciplinary approach to issues pertaining to free will and moral responsibility. Experimental philosophy, and neuroscience, is yielding interesting and potentially important insights, with which we must be conversant. But it bothers me that some (certainly not all, and not the best) practioners or a more "empirically informed" approach are completely narrow in their own way, arrogantly dismissing the history of philsophy and/or current philosophical work.

Narrowness and provincialism is not likely to yield great intellectual fruit, no matter what specific form it takes. For a good example of quite problematic work on such matters, see Libet. Al Mele has shown with great force that Libet's work could have benefitted from more philosophical sophistication.

[Tamler Sommers]

I think a bunch of questions are getting conflated here. Let me try to separate them as best I can.

1. Was the FT review good or fair or valuable?

No. It was terrible, indefensible, on many different levels. It got the philosophers wrong, the philosophy wrong, and some of the science wrong too.

2. Should philosophy just be a handmaiden to science, waiting dutifully for the next set of results about the way people react to trolley problems or self-reported claims about where the second hand was when you had an intention.

Obviously not.

3. Do scientists often engage in matters more technical and obscure than philosophers, and can they be much worse at conveying the import of their research to the public than philosophers?

Yes.

4. Do people give predictable annoying responses when you tell them that you study philosophy?

99 times out of 100. God bless the 1.

5. Should scientists who work on issues relating to free will pay more attention to philosophical work on free will?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

6. Does Manuel stare at his navel all day?

Apparently not, but on the other hand who would admit to spending all day staring at their navel? I know if I spent even 45 minutes a day staring at my navel, I'd keep it to myself. Maybe navel gazing is a little like internet porn or drinking coffee while pregnant: many more people do it than admit that they do it. Still, if Manuel says he doesn't I believe him.

7. All that said, could we do a better job conveying serious important sophisticated PHILOSOPHICAL views about free will and moral responsibility--views which have immediate urgent ethical implications for everyone--to non-philosophers?

Maybe. And if not, what does that say about our discipline?

I'm more than happy to be talked out of this, but trashing the review, the reviewer, and everyone who strawmans philosophy and philosophers doesn't address what may be a genuine(institutional) problem. Raising the issue doesn't remotely take away from the important advances that have been made in the last fifty years on our topic. But it's hard to deny that a very small percentage of the population know what those advances are. Does it have to be that way?

[Kip Werking]

Tamler, would you care to elaborate on:

"It was terrible, indefensible, on many different levels. It got the philosophers wrong, the philosophy wrong, and some of the science wrong too."

As far as I can tell, it summarized the ideas in those three books pretty well. Sure, it sprinkled in some provocative statements. But overall, I think the reviewer did a pretty good job. I'm really surprised by the amount of hostility Gardeners are showing to him.

BTW, I really love this quote from Pat Churchland in this review:

”The interventions may not always be pretty, but of course going to prison is not pretty either.”

[Kip Werking]

I should add:

I acknowledge that the "review" of the "Four Views" book is pretty thin. But the hostility here seems to be responding to more than that. And the review does get two crucial points right:

"But the majority of philosophers, from Aristotle to Thomas Hobbes, have taken a middle way. They have argued that the truth of determinism is somehow compatible with a degree of freedom and responsibility for our actions.

In fact, none of the four philosophers in this volume suggests we should give up the blame game altogether."

So I'm still a little surprised.

[John Fischer]

Actually, I think I pretty much agreed with everything Tamler said. That is, I don't disagree with the idea that philosophers should work harder to write in ways that engage a broader audience. Often I do feel that philosophers are needlessly technical and obscure. I have no problem with attempting to write in a clear, uncluttered way.

By the way, I don't think the FT review is worth taking seriously at all. It is not a serious review. Period. My response is not so much to it as to a more general attitude among some people--even philosophers. (This is just a springboard for a discussion of the broader metholdological point.) One of the most egregious examples, in my view, is the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who basically says that in thinking about the free will problem, we should consign the history of philosophy and almost all contemporary philosophy to the flames. The one notable exception, according to Dennett, is himself. I don't think this is unfair to him, since he reiterated this view at the APA author-meets-critics session on his book in Pasadena a couple of years ago. Basically, his view is that we should read Dennett, and also some evolutionary theorists, mathematicians, and perhaps some other scientists. I do not doubt that we should read Dennett!! (And in this respect Dennett is much more pro-philosophy than some who would shun all philosophers!) But, as I said in Pasadena and in my Journal of PHilosophy review of Freedom Evolves, it is very disappointing when an opportunity--such as a Dennett book on free will--is lost to take a more broad-minded, and indeed eclectic and open-minded, approach to the subject matter.

Science is crucial--from forensic science to neuroscience to cognitive science to ... But so is philosophy. I reiterate: Libet's work on these issues is in great need of some philosophical sophistication, and my sense is that much (although certainly not all) work by neuroscientists on free will is similarly crude. I have recently read a manuscript of a collection of work by psychologists on free will/moral responsibility. Much of this is interesting, but, again, I often feel that the work is philosophically somewhat crude. I especially find the treatments of compatibilism (in its various forms) almost laughably inadequate.

As I said at the end of my essay in a recent Journal of Ethics about free will/moral responsibility issues, I think intellectual progress will be made not so much by dismissing the empirical work or the traditional philosophical work, but by taking a broad-minded, eclectic approach.

[Manuel Vargas]

I do think the profession and subfield would benefit from someone connected to the literature doing a nice job of writing up something for a more popular audience. The trick is to find someone who is a good enough writer. We all write, 'cause that is part of our professional work. But being a good writer of philosophy papers and books does not always translate into being a good writer for more popular audiences. So, that's part of the trouble. The other trouble is finding someone who is interested enough in reaching a popular audience. So, between needing a good degree of familiarity with the issues, having an interest reaching a popular audience, and being good enough at that to write in a semi-respectable way, I think we should count ourselves lucky if we get more than one or two in a generation. Dennett had a shot, but between Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves, I think he lost interest in the philosophical literature. So, I think we aren't going to get too many more shots over the next 30 years. Hopefully I'm wrong about this, because it is clear that there are some great potential benefits for all of us if this were to happen.

Tamler: to clarify, I do acknowledge gazing at my navel. What I adamantly deny is that I go "cross-eyed" while staring at it!

[Chris]

Hi Kip,

I think most of us find the excellent work exemplified in the Four Views book as a example of what all of us are engaged in and care very much about. So, to have someone assert that such work amounts to starring at our navels, nay what is more, going crossed-eye while doing this is a bit more than provocative. It is down right insulting.

Moreover, Cave's essay betrarys little familiarity with the literature. After all, it is hard to mention Libet without mentioning Mele's excellent critiques of his work, especially since Mele's work demonstrates that philosophy has important implications for science.

Lastly, consider Cave's statement that "But what this book makes most clear is that, while scientists are making real progress studying the brain in laboratories around the world, many philosophers are going cross-eyed staring at their navels. Now more than ever we need our philosophers to help us make sense of what science is telling us. But the bulk of this book is dedicated to an inward-looking family row revolving around some very implausible thought experiments, all conducted in an arcane cant, and oblivious to developments outside the academy."

This statement makes me wonder if Cave read the book very closely. After all Kane dedicates part of his essay to showing how we might interpret chaos theory and quantum indeterminancies in such a way that make his event-causal view empirically plausible. Fischer's work is explicitly devoted to making sense of moral responsibility in light of what physics *might* show and how we should understand the relation between our interpersonal practices and the hard sciences. Pereboom motivates his argument against the likelihood of agent-causation on the basis of physics. Lastly, Vargas argues against libertarianism on the basis of its implausibility vis-a-vis current theories in brain science. He uses this to motivate his type of revisionism. How is all this not at least an attempt to make sense of what science is "telling" us?

All in all I must agree with the sentiments of my fellow Gardeners that the review was below par and quite insulting.

[Kip Werking]

Chris,

Some points (and then I'll keep quiet about this):

1. I think it's just silly to expect the reviewer to be familiar with the literature (like Mele's critique). This is the Financial Times, not the Journal of Philosophy. Not only are the standards of review different but their intended readers are different too. This is a distinction I think some of the reviewer's harshest critics are not fully appreciating.

2. I don't think Pereboom, Kane, or Fischer much engage any scientific literature. For example, Fischer's engagement seems limited to defending a semicompatibilist view that is immune to physicists declaring that determinism is true (I doubt they could ever do that anyway). This is not "an attempt to make sense of what science is 'telling' us"---it is an attempt to preserve certain beliefs despite what science might tell us.

Similarly, Kane's engagement is limited to citing indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics to defend the possibility of an indeterministic world, and also citing chaos theory to defend the possibility of amplifying random or indeterministic phenomena in the brain. The treatment of both subjects is minimal at best.

I can agree that the navel gazing comment is insulting, albeit not in a personal or ad hominem way; I think it was *intended* to be insulting. Not all reviews should be positive. I have not read the Four Views book, but I am guessing it is full of terms like: libertarianism, source incompatibilism, leeway incompatibilism, hard incompatibilism, Ultimate Responsibility, revisionism, Frankfurt examples, and so on.

Personally, I have no trouble with these terms and I enjoy reading the relevant literature. But I also know that, whenever I mention these terms to someone unfamiliar with this area of philosophy, they roll their eyes. This is the "arcane cant" that the reviewer mentions.

Considering this "arcane cant", and the very small extent to which philosophers here do engage physics and neuroscience, I don't fault the reviewer so much for his comment about navel gazing. But the responses here have surprised me, and so, having heard them, I wonder if the reviewer was really as out-of-line as other Gardeners seem to think.

[John Fischer]

Well, I think Robert Kane's introductory book on free will in the OUP Series (of which I admit I am a co-editor), Fundamentals of Philosophy, is exellent and accesssible. I also think much of Harry Frankfurt's work is very nicely written. I've tried in a few places to present material in an accessible way--perhaps I haven't been entireloy successful. Susan Wolf writes quite beautifully, I think. So it is not as bad as it might seem.

Frankly, Kip, if a neuroscientist or a physicist or a biologist started throwing technical terms around, I'm sure I wouldn't have a clue as to what he or she was talking about! Whence the asymmetry? Is philosophy supposed to be accessible to everyone at a coctail party or Bar Mitzvah reception? How about neuroscience?

[Chris]

Hi Kip,

I am not sure about what a reviewer should or should not know. Libet's work is quite tangential to the content of each book (actually this might need to be qualfied since I have not read all of Blackmore's book) and hence Cave's mention of Libet seemed to be an attempt to show how out of touch philosophers are with the "real" work that is going on in neuroscience. If this is correct, then my point is germane. Cave should have checked his facts, but instead he misled his readers.

Second, Fischer's work is an attempt to answer the question of what science is telling us. Specifically he attempts to show that the possibility of physicists proving global determinism is, arguably, irrelevant to whether or not humans are sometimes morally responsible for what they do.

In regards to whether this is minimal at best, I am not interesting in arguing about what would have counted as "enough" engagement. However, Cave intimated that they had no idea what was going on in the scientific community. Again, I suggested that this was false since all of their work depended, in crucial ways, upon aspects of current work in science. They mounted arguments from data in science, provided interpretations of this data, and at some points, attempted to show the irrelevance of this data. Why didn't Cave mentions this? It seems uncharitable to say the least.

With respect to the comment about "arcane cant", it is hard for me to see why the introduction of technical terms for the purpose of clarifying the logical landscape of the debate is a bad thing. It is intended to make the subject matter more precise, not more difficult. All the authors introduce these terms in gentle ways and moreover define their terms.

I agree with Fischer that there seems to be an unfair asymmtery here.

[Eddy Nahmias]

I agree with those who have suggested that philosophers should try, when possible, to write in a way that is accessible to non-philosophers. This is especially important when writing about a topic such as free will, which connects up with important social, moral, and political issues. Someday, I'd like to write the book Manuel suggests needs to be written, engaging the relevant scientific research in a philosophically informed way in such a way that the educated public, including scientists, can understand the issues--and come to understand why science alone cannot just prove we have free will or not, simple as that. (I think I better write an academic book first, though.)

One of the reasons I'd like to write such a book is to try to stem the tide of scientists and science journalists who write things like: "In other words, your brain is doing the real work, making your hands turn the pages of this magazine or reach over for your cup of tea, and all the time your conscious mind is tagging along behind. It is as if, after years of driving around in your car, you discover that the steering-wheel is not attached to anything, and the car has been steering by itself."

Not only has Libet's work failed to show this misleading image is justified, but it suggests (requires?) a dualistic picture that invites the problematic interpretations of neuroscientific research. This research has simply not proven "Free will is an illusion" (which is not to say neuroscientific research *could* not show our sense of free will is largely mistaken).

Perhaps we philosophers stare at our navels (well, our minds) too much, but lots of us do engage with the relevant brain research too, and try to figure out what this research can tell us about how the mind and brain relate (and how much free will we have). I just feel bad I can't grow a beard so I can be part of the great philosophical tradition of "two and a half thousand years of beard-tugging."

[tnadelhoffer]

Eddy,

Setting aside for now the problems that you, Mele, and others have correctly identified with respect to Libet's experimental design (and his analysis of the data), I want to hear more about why the kind of view Libet favors either suggests or requires some form of dualism. Why couldn't the mental mechanism(s) responsible for our conscious selves be similar to the "confabulating" module identified by Gazzaniga and others. Put differently, why couldn't there be a purely physicalist version of epiphenomenalism?

[Joe]

Kip,

1/ To make insulting criticisms about an entire body of literature (in this case traditional writing on free will) that you know nothing about, like Cave has done, is irresponsible. Just because you happen to agree with him doesn't mean that he wasn't irresponsible. It just means, at the very most, that he got lucky.

2/ I don't get your next set of points at all. Sure someone needs to write a book about free will that is more accessible to a wider audience but to think that it won't use terms like "libertarianism, source incompatibilism, leeway incompatibilism, hard incompatibilism, Ultimate Responsibility, revisionism, Frankfurt examples, and so on" yet will still be a faithful portrayal of the history and contemporary state of the debate is a little naive.

Why aren't there good books on free will that are accessible to a wide audience? Because writing such a book is a fricken' hard thing to do. If you don't believe me, then write the book yourself and we'll see how far you get. My guess is that my own family will react about the same way toward it as they react toward my own writing and that, on the whole, they'd rather be looking at Manuel's navel.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Thomas, you know I believe there could be a physicalist epiphenomenalism (that's the "modular epiphenomenalism" I describe in my powerpoint posted here, listed as the 3rd argument, and that I also discuss in my reviews of Wegner). And I believe the evidence is that, *to some degree*, our conscious deliberations and rational thinking are either causally impotent or post-hoc confabulations or both. But I think the evidence is far from clear *to what degree* that is true (surely, it differs between individuals and can vary based on one's education, not to mention one's situation). That's part of the reason I think people possess free will to varying degrees and exercise it to varying degrees in different actions (the Abu Ghraib prison guards were probably able to exercise it to a lesser degree than we are when we have to decide whether to say something to a colleague acting inappropriately).

But in the Cave article and in Libet's writing (and many others', I think), the threat to free will is not presented this way. It's presented the way I suggest in the 2nd argument in my powerpoint: Neuroscience is showing that the brain is causing everything we do, so the conscious mind doesn't have any work left to do (or it comes in too late to do anything). That "argument" seems right, I think, only if one is thinking of the conscious mind as something different from (or emergent from) the brain. Otherwise, who would be worried by the "discovery" that the brain is the (proximal) cause of all our behavior? Once you are a physicalist, then you are only worried if all our behavior is being caused by the *parts* of (or processes in) the brain that bypass those parts or processes we want to make a difference, such as conscious deliberations, planning, and rational consideration of our options (or the "automatic" decisions we make on the basis of earlier conscious planning, etc.).

(If Adam didn't have a navel, does that mean he couldn't have been a philosopher?)

[John Fischer]

I agree with Manuel: I can see my navel, perhaps with the help of certain Yoga postures, without going cross-eyed at all. So, no problem with that. But perhaps Cave was saying that, if all the authors are in a row, or even a circle, and each of us tries to gaze at the others' navels, then at least some of us are in jeopardy of going cross-eyed.

That's the most sympathetic reading of any feature of the review I can come up with.

[Tamler Sommers]

One point just to procrastinate from grading papers.

I'm glad almost everyone seems to agree that philosophers should try to write more clearly, but I think the problem may run deeper than that. In fact, many philosophers on free will do write very well and the general public remains unaquainted with their ideas. I believe the issue is more a product of how things work in our field. I have floated the idea of writing a popular (or trade) book about free will for years, and I almost always get the same answer. "Publish an academic book and a bunch of articles first; otherwise people won't take you seriously as a philosopher." (The one exception is Alex Rosenberg, one of my supervisors, who encouraged me to write a trade book before even seeing a chapter of my dissertation.) See Eddy's first comment above for a similiar sentiment.

This advice, and the difficulty of writing that book, has made me postpone even embarking on what I agree would be a really tough project. Meanwhile, as I try to become more scholarly I find I have a much harder time summoning the enthusiastic energetic prose which marks a good trade book on any subject. Academic writing can be wonderful but you become paranoid about every sentence (did I cite the relevant literature? Am I being careful enough here? Am I running roughshod over a subtle distinction? etc.) I occasionally worry that academic expectations will beat the raw contagious excitement about philosophy out of me. The great thing about teaching in fact is that it brings me back to a more naive state of mind. I wonder: does anyone further along look back at some (published or unpublished) papers from the very beginning of their career and say: wow, that was ME? I was capable of writing with that much energy and passion? Where did that go?

By the way, the model of great trade book writing for me is Richard Dawkins before he became an anti-God crusader. Dawkins called "The Extended Phenotype" the pride and joy of his professional life. It's a tough book, but I got so much out of it having never taken a post-high-school biology class in my life. I can't think of a parallel to that in philosophy. (Dennett's obviously a great writer, but even before I knew anything about the philosophical literature he fails to address I wasn't buying his free will stuff.) Could a philosopher say that a trade book was the pride and joy of their professional life and still be taken seriously as a scholar?

[Joe]

Tamler,

No.

Everyone,

I mentioned that I write a column for the local newpaper -- not a huge responsibility, just 4 columns a year for only two years. It is part of a general series that comes out each week called the Town Crier but there are 12 town criers in all.

In any event, given time constraints I was pressed for an issue to write about for the upcoming week. And given the discussion here I thought that it would be interesting to try to write about my current research project for a wider audience. Here it is. Let me know what you think!

---------

This semester I’m on sabbatical. I thought it would be interesting to explain my book project to a wider audience. It compares two arguments. The first argues that no one knows anything. How might one reach such an absurd conclusion?

Consider a common sense belief, for example, that I’m sitting in a café writing this column. Now if I knew that I was sitting in a café, then I’d know that I was not a victim in the Matrix world. In the Matrix world people are bodies in vats with fake experiences generated by a large computer network. No one in the Matrix world is sitting in a café, although many of them falsely believe that they are. Thus, if I knew that I was sitting in a café I could deduce, and know, that I was not in the Matrix world.

Yet how could I know that? All of the evidence that I have for believing that I’m sitting in a café is consistent with the Matrix hypothesis. After all, the Matrix world is designed to fool its inhabitants. Hence, I don’t know that I’m not in the Matrix world and it follows that I don’t know that I’m sitting in a café. And if I don’t know that, I don’t know anything.

The other argument is one that concludes that the kind of control we think we have over the world is merely an illusion. Why might someone believe such a thing? Well, in order to have control over our actions, me must have control over their ultimate causes. All of our actions are a product of our beliefs and desires, and ultimately they are a result of two factors: nature and nurture. Yet I had no control over my genetic structure, nor could I choose who my parents were, nor select any of the environmental factors that played a role in my early development. All of my beliefs and desires are ultimately influenced by these subsequent factors, factors over which I had no control. Since my actions are the eventual result of these, I ultimately have no control over them either.

Many people find these arguments to be silly. I agree but I can promise you that explaining why they are so silly is not as easy as it might seem.

It is worth noting that the logical structures of the above arguments are similar. I won’t bore you with the details but it turns out that for any response that one might offer to the Matrix argument there is a formally analogous response that one might give to the no-control argument. For example, you might think that a lack of knowledge about the Matrix world does not transfer into a lack of knowledge about one’s current experiences. But then why think that a lack of control over the past transfers into a lack of control over the present? Thus, there is no principled reason to think that the Matrix argument is bad yet that the no-control argument is good. The key argument in my book attempts to show that, given this, there is no reason to doubt that we have control over our actions.

Suppose you think that the Matrix argument is sound and that no one knows anything. In that case, no one knows whether or not we have control over our actions. Hence, if you think that the Matrix argument is sound, you should reject the no-control argument.

Suppose you reject the Matrix argument. Then you are going to reject some premise or inference rule of the argument. As I noted, it turns out that there are analogous maneuvers that one might make toward the no-control argument and you should reject it, as well.

Clearly there is a lot more to say about these similarities – this is why I’m writing a book instead of just a short essay! But if I’m correct about the analogy between the two arguments, it follows that there is no reason to doubt that we lack the kind of control over our actions that is essential to free will and moral responsibility. And say what you want about speculative philosophy but that is no idle conclusion to reach!

[Eddy Nahmias]

Joe, I look forward to your book. The arguments sound really interesting. Unfortunately, I suspect not many readers will be able to follow your ably-explained summary; the arguments are just too complex for a column. But I bet you could write a short popular version of the book. Let's make a deal. Write your academic version first. I'll write my academic version of Free Will and the Sciences of the Mind. Then we can see if Tamler is right that we will then be unable to write for the common folk. We'll try to take our academic book and make the arguments and issues simpler and clearer, with short, direct, and witty sentences and some pictures. I'll call mine something like Free Will and Science or Free Will in the Age of Neuroscience. What can you call yours? (By the way, I've tried to get my paper here to pick up some columns I've sent them but they are not receptive. Any suggestions?)

[Tamler Sommers]

Fair warning: if you guys wait too long, your publishers are going to say 'but someone just published a runaway bestseller on free will! Weird first name, I forget what it is... "

[Kevin Timpe]

Joe,

I like the way that you describe your project in the article. Sure, I doubt the average newspaper reader will completely follow you. But so much the worse for those readers--I think that the reader willing to put in a few minutes of thought will see how philosophy does relate to our everyday lives. I don't know what your previous collums were like (or about), but I think you do a good job here.

[Tom Clark]

Speaking of non-academic books on free will, Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses (just out and available at Amazon) is a brief (101 page) introduction to naturalism and what it might concretely mean to accept the idea we don't have contra-causal freedom.

Floating this idea is of course completely crazy from where most people sit, since they believe in souls and being causal exceptions to nature (or so I suspect, I could be wrong), and they believe that lots of important things depend on it. Indeed, Saul would say it's irresponsible to publicly debunk ultimate responsibility, but I spend nearly half the book offering reassurances that everything's going to be ok, indeed better (especially if you're a liberal-progressive) without libertarian free will.

So maybe this modest effort will pave the way for more thorough treatments of what I think is crucially important stuff for people to hear about. Plus I forgot to put in any pictures, damn!

[Paul Torek]

Joe,

I think it could fly. Can't wait for the book.

You need to explain that the no-control argument is much more accepted and respected among philosophers than the skeptic's argument. The paragraph beginning "Many people find these arguments to be silly" would be the perfect place.

Eliminate "formally" from "formally analogous" - for the lay reader, it adds nothing but gratuitous complexity.

[Alan]

Okay, time for me to waste gazillions of photons on your retinas.

First, let me chime in on my two favorite books of accessible philosophy--Thomas Nagel's little gem _What Does it All Mean?_, which I use as supplementary reading in my introductory philosophy single-topic free will course. That little book--cleverly paginated to encompass 101 pages--is the archetype of clear philosophy written so high school students can read it. As fare from our own garden, however, I'd recommend Ted Honderich's _How Free Are You?_ as an example of a more polemical work that is nonetheless very nicely and plainly written.

I applaud Joe's efforts in his newspaper column. It's very important for us to reach out to everyman and everywoman if we are to be relevant beyond the academy. I try to write letters to the editor to Wisconsin papers as often as I can. I encourage my fellow gardeners to do so too, especially after they've garnered (gardened?) tenure. I'd go so far to say that we have a responsibility to engage the public at large, and especially I'd argue that's even more so for those among us who are employed by the state. We don't have to surrender our more provincial scholarly interests in doing that--for example, read Joe's wonderful little essay on van Inwagen's consequence argument in the current (April) issue of Analysis. He's cutting the mustard on both fronts.

We should do riskier writing if it gets us wider exposure. I've got a chapter coming out in a University of Kentucky Press anthology later this year _The Philosophy of The X-Files_ on freedom and worldviews. Is it groundbreaking philosophy? Nope. (Though I develop the fundaments of the FW problem there without one reference to moral responsibility--my main creative effort in the piece.) But someone might get interested in Fischer, or Pettit, or Honderich, et al by reading it (and reading the footnotes).

Fairer warning, especially to Tamler. I've got a 30k+ word mss "Free Will from the Ground Up" on my computer awaiting another sabbatical to complete it. And my first name is "Villard". . .

[Joe]

Sorry to take so long to get back to this but thanks for the comments!

Here are a couple of things worth noting.

First, unfortunately I posted this after I submitted the article since I had a deadline. I wish I had done it the other way around, given some of the helpful suggestions.

Second, I agree with Eddy that "the arguments are just too complex for a column." (And, yes, I'd like to turn my book into something more popular, tentatively entitled "Knowledge, Freedom, and Responsibility" (which will no longer work as a title for the academic book). I'm not sure that I'll be able to beat either you or Tamler to the finish line, though.) It was a bit of an experiment that I thought would be worth trying since the audience of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News is unusual. Both Moscow and Pullman are dominated by the surrounding universities. Moscow has 22 K people with 12 K students in the university; Pullman has 25 K people with 17 K students in the university, Thus, the readers are by and large academics, many of whom contribute regularly to the op-ed page.

This also explains why it is easier for me to get a newspaper gig than it might be for some of the rest of you. Usually, my columns are on local, political issues but this time I decided to branch out. (Really, I've been working so hard on my research that I didn't have time to write on anything else!) It helps, too, that I'm active with a local political group and that I've been submitting letters to the editor on local topics for the last few years.

Third, there is an on-line version of the Daily News that allows for comments on editorals and articles and it seems that most of the readers DID NOT understand the argument at all! (In order to have access, you need a subscription to the paper.) Some of the comments:

"Once you assume we're in the Matrix world, anything follows!"

"Your conclusion that no one has control or free will is absurd!"

Fourth, this brings up a problem about communicating difficult ideas to the general public, which I tried to bring up my previous reply to Kip but which came out poorly. There I challenged him to write a text for the general public and suggested that he would fail. But I didn't mean to say anything in particular about Kip, I meant to make a more general point that any of us would fail. (Sorry, Kip! As I reread it it doesn't come off that way.)

The point is that the general public has a difficult time with philosophy not because of the technical vocabulary but because of the difficult nature of the arguments. I have doubts that we can simplify the arguments and still get the philosophy across. I worry that if it is philosophical, then the general public won't understand it; if they do understand it, then it is not philosophy.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, of course! But I lack confidence that our attempts will be successful.