After Free Will

Paul Davies (not the physicist 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 will say 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 or not 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.

Comments

[Michael Drake]

Tom, this obviously won't do. Preserving 'free will' offers far too many opportunities for contentious disagreement. (Whereas everyone already *knows* we're reasons-responsive.)

Serious question, though. I'm wondering about the conditions under which theoretical terms are preserved across different theoretical frameworks. So, for instance, 'free will' and 'atom' survive rather remarkable semantic change, whereas 'luminiferous ether' and 'miasma' for some or other reason lack the requisite referential flexibility and are discarded. Is there a literature on this issue?

[Kip]

"Preserving 'free will' offers far too many opportunities for contentious disagreement. (Whereas everyone already *knows* we're reasons-responsive.)"

Hear, hear!

[Manuel Vargas]

Hi Q!

That's a good question, and I wish we had some philosophers of language in the house to provide a better reply than I'm going to offer.

For what it is worth, my own view is that as long as the bulk of practical, conceptual, and inferential roles are preserved then we've got good cause to hold on to the considered term. That said, I suspect that in the real world preservation of terms across frameworks is probably less disciplined than we philosophers would like, and sensitive to lots of issues in the pragmatics (in the phil language sense) of term usage.

Here are two books that I'd *like* to read on the subject matter, but since I haven't actually read them yet I can't speak about their virtues: Mark Wilson WANDERING SIGNIFICANCE and Joseph LaPorte NATURAL KINDS AND CONCEPTUAL CHANGE; the footnote trail from either of these books is bound to be pretty good, though. There are surely other things out there, so if anyone else has some thoughts about what to look at, please chip in.

[Michael Drake]

Thanks Manuel. And nice *research*. (The preservation of identity through name change is a less vexing philosophical problem. ;-)