>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

Responsibility, but not Blame

I was reading this article this morning, and the following passage caught my attention:

"When Mr. Obama presents his first State of the Union address on Wednesday evening, aides said he would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame, for failing to deliver swiftly on some of the changes he promised a year ago."

What is the distinction between "accepting responsibility" and "accepting blame" that White House aides are relying on here? Is this just political wordplay or can we make something substantive out of it?

Al Mele awarded Templeton Grant

Please join me in congratulating Al on receiving a very impressive grant from the John Templeton Foundation for the project: "Free Will: Human and Divine--Empirical and Philosophical Explorations."  For more information on the project please see this website.  This is very exciting for Al, as well as for future research on free will.

FlashForward: Can the Future Be Changed?

The ABC prime time sci-fi series FlashForward deals entertainingly with free will, fatalism, time and the future, even if the starting premise is a tad implausible: the whole world blacks out for 2 minutes 17 seconds, during which people see glimpses of their lives 6 months in the future. Question: will these “flashforwards” (some pleasant, some horrific) necessarily come to pass? Can we change the future? You can see the first 10 episodes online at ABC or Hulu, the second season starts up again March 18 according to ABC.

The producer David Goyer says, not too ambitiously: "That is sort of the bulk of what we'll be dealing with philosophically over the second half of the season. It's not determinism, and it's not free will. We never intended it was either/or. There is a philosophical model of the universe that combines them, and we do deal with that head-on in the second half of the season."

From the first season:

 

Newspaper headline following the suicide of someone who saw himself *alive* in his flashforward: “The Future Can Be Changed”.

 

Two physicists haggle over their responsibility for an experiment that might have caused the blackout:

 

Simon: Fate is fate, we’re not responsible, Lloyd.

Lloyd: What about free will?

Simon: No such thing.

Lloyd: Oh since when did you become such a hard determinist?

Simon: Simple quantum suicide theory. I will win this hand and every subsequent hand we play, ad infinitum, QED.…

Lloyd: You’ve upended the whole world and you hide behind determinist rhetoric.

 

Newscasters discussing the blackout: “Let’s get back to the big question: do we have free will… that’s the big question, possibly the central question of human existence for millennia” (fades out)

 

My take on the FlashForward problem set is here. I predict that because it must cater to folk libertarianism on free will and the metaphysical openness of the future, the show will give short shrift to the “block universe” view of things (accepted by many physicists as a consequence of special relativity), in which all events, past, present and future, are immutably fixed in spacetime. But of course the producers might falsify my prediction. Stay tuned!

Physics is now complete.

No mention in the article about determinism, but the details are here. 

Formulating PAP

I’ve recently become puzzled about the best way to formulate the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). Almost everyone follows Frankfurt (1969) who puts it like this: “a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise”.  This is often sharpened like this: “for all persons S and actions A, S is morally responsible for doing A only if S could have done something other than A.”

But there seems to be an obvious problem with this formulation. Frankfurt, as everyone knows, claims that PAP is false; that is, he asserts the negation of PAP. But the negation of PAP (as formulated above) comes out as: “there is a person S and an action A, such that S is morally responsible for doing A and it is not the case that S could have done something other than A.” But this clearly isn’t what Frankfurt (or any contemporary ‘Frankfurtian’) has in mind. This is both too weak and too strong. Too strong: because Frankfurt isn’t claiming that any actual person is responsible. (Despite being a compatibilist about responsibility and determinism, he might think there are other actual considerations that universally rule out responsibility.) Too weak: because Frankfurt isn’t trying to say anything about the actual facts of responsibility; rather, he’s saying something about the conditions for responsibility.

Rather, in denying PAP, Frankfurt means to say that moral responsibility doesn’t require the ability to do otherwise; in other words: it is possible to be responsible despite lacking alternative possibilities. This suggests that PAP is best formulated as follows: “necessarily, for all persons S and actions A, S is morally responsible for doing A only if S could have done something other than A.”  The negation of this is: “possibly, there is a person S and an action A, such that S is morally responsible for doing A and it is not the case that S could have done something other than A”, which seems closer to the mark.

Has anyone else noticed this?

 

Balaguer Again

Back in June, I promised I would respond to Mark Balaguer’s claim that the free will question reduces to an entirely empirical question, about how human decision-making is actually implemented. Mark claimed that if we discovered that some of our decisions are undetermined (in the right way), we would discover we have libertarian free will. Briefly, I argued that we could know that human decision-making was indeterministic in the way envisaged by Balaguer without knowing whether we have libertarian free will because without some heavy duty philosophical argument we wouldn’t know whether we appropriately authored and controlled the decision. Mark promised that my worries would (or should) be allayed by his recent book (which Bob Doyle recently reviewed here). I have now had a chance to read the book.

Free Will and Autism

Only a handful of prominent historical figures denied the existence of free will (at least for non-religious reasons).  Yet a disproportionately large number of them had many symptoms associated with the autism spectrum.

Einstein, Russell, and Spinoza (ERS) each denied the existence of free will, and each has been repeatedly “diagnosed” with Asperger’s Syndrome.  Einstein and Russell are two of only 20 historical figures diagnosed in the book Asperger’s Syndrome and High Achievement.  Spinoza is one of only 21 historical figures diagnosed in the book The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome And The Arts.  Here is a great video explaining the link between Einstein and autism.

If you’re willing to entertain that idea, then we reach the following conclusion: (1) ERS didn’t believe in free will and (2) ERS had many characteristics associated with the autism spectrum.  My thesis is this: the combination of (1) and (2) was not a coincidence.

Mark Balaguer - Free WIll as an Open Scientific Problem

In June, Neil Levy posted to the Garden a draft chapter of Mark Balaguer's new book "Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem," MIT Press (December 2009).

I bought a copy of Mark's book and read it closely. It has a new introductory chapter, but chapters 2 through 4 are expanded, and in many places altered, versions of papers that Mark previously published in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Noûs, and Synthese.

Gardeners had a chance to read and comment on chapter 2 - "Why the Compatibilism Issue and the Conceptual Analysis Issue Are Metaphysically Irrelevant." Balaguer maintained that the question whether free will exists  - or of what kinds of free will exixt - was independent of the question of what free will is, i.e., whether it's Humean freedom, Frankfurtian freedom, or Libertarian freedom, for example.

$12,000 - $15,000 Fellowships and Scholarships to M.A. program at Georgia State

Please let your students know about these opportunities and/or post this flier.

The Master's program of the Philosophy Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia is accepting applications from qualified students for two Neurophilosophy Fellowships, a Legal/Political Philosophy Scholarship, and a German Philosophy Scholarship, and up to 20 funded Assistantships.  All funding packages cover two years of full tuition.  Fellowships provide $15,000/year, Scholarships provide $12,000/year, and Assistantships provide $4,000-$10,000/year.

Initial application deadline: February 15, 2010. 

Further information is available at the department's website: www.gsu.edu/philosophy.

Thanks.  And Happy New Year everyone, Eddy