An Exchange with Galen Strawson on Free Will

In the comments to Randy Clarke's Libertarianism and the Laws post, Eddy Nahmias asked if standard arguments could be reformulated with my "adequate determinism."

I recently exchanged emails with Galen Strawson asking him whether quantum indeterminism could be limited to the generation of alternative possibilities (and not affect the decision and action directly) without making the ultimate choice random.

Here is that exchange.

For more on why chance should not be the direct cause of responsible action, please see:
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/chance_direct_cause.html

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Dear Professor Strawson,

I would love the chance to discuss with you the view that quantum mechanical indeterminism is negligible in large macroscopic objects like neurons, so all our actions and movements are adequately (though not strictly or necessarily) determined.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/adequate_determinism.html.

(GS) Well, it doesn’t matter to my view even if there are larger scale indeterminisms. It’s not going to help to make you free.

(BD) But since the brain is an information storage and retrieval system, it must contain noise, both quantal and thermal, which is enough to generate alternative possibilities for thoughts.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/possibilities.html

These thoughts would then be the start of new causal chains - a minimal kind of causa sui. http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/causa_sui.html

(GS) The trouble with this is that it can’t help with free will at all. It can’t make you free at all, let alone more free, on my view, if some of your thoughts and subsequent actions are randomly generated.

(BD) I completely agree with you that we are not free if random thoughts subsequently generate random actions.

I think event-causal libertarians - Kane, van Inwagen, Ekstrom, for example - are quite wrong when they say that we need some randomness in our decision.

The question is: could you feel responsible if your adequately determined will chose from among thoughts of alternative possibilities that included some thoughts that had been randomly generated by free associations in your mind?

What if random thoughts were considered and de-liberated by your adequately determined will?

Could a person with such a will feel responsible for subsequently actions also adequately determined?

(GS) Their random generation would definitely do no harm to your claim to freedom/responsibility.

If you mean ‘could you legitimately feel responsible if ...’ again, yes, given that your will being ‘adequately determined’ was compatible with your being truly free/responsible [which I’m sceptical about as you know]

(BD) Or would randomness anywhere (a causa sui) contaminate any actions further along the new causal chain?

(GS) No. to take a more mundane kind of case that does not involve any sort of objective randomness, you wd not be less free or responsible if it was only ‘by chance’ that you came across a crucial piece of information that enabled you to perform some action successfully.

(BD) There is a debate going on at the Garden of Forking Paths blog on this subject. May I quote your response to the Gardeners? Or do you occasionally participate there?

(GS) I just don’t have time to do these www things, unfortunately. Sure you can quote me — though I don’t know if I was clear. I think that what you want in the way of freedom is available, and is as much as we can get

Galen

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Dear Gardeners,

I am happy with Galen's opinion that this much freedom is available.

It may not be the metaphysical freedom some Libertarians want, but I am hopeful that my free will model might satisfy what we might call "adequate" compatibilists. Following the work of Martin Heisenberg in Nature this week, we might call it biophysical freedom. It is a capability that has evolved and sees humans as continuous with other animals, not an exception.

This modest libertarian free will is not a metaphysical view, for example that freedom is a special gift of God to humanity.

It might be called event-causal, but this is misleading. The random alternative possibilities are generated probabilistically and as such are not events that are caused deterministically. They do have prior events leading to them, but these are "the dreaded" causa sui.

For more details on my model, please see:
www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/cogito/

For my draft history of the free will problem, look at:
informationphilosopher.com/freedom/history/

For problems as I see them with various standard arguments against free will, please see:
informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html

This page includes quotes and analyses of versions of the standard argument from the writings of nineteen leading philosophers – A.J.Ayer, J.J.C.Smart, Peter Strawson, Roderick Chisholm, Richard Taylor, Robert Nozick, John Searle, Galen Strawson, Colin McGinn, Paul Russell, Steven Pinker, Ishtiyaque Haji, Randolph Clarke, Thomas Pink, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, Kadri Vihvelin, Peter van Inwagen's Consequence and Mind Arguments, and Robert Kane’s Ascent and Descent metaphor.