Roy Baumeister vs. John Bargh on Free Will

B & B duked it out on free will at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention in Tampa and the debate continues on their respective Psychology Today blogs here and here. To my way of thinking Baumeister has some rather inchoate libertarian leanings and fears demoralization by determinism, while Bargh bites the deterministic bullet, saying everything’s going to be all right.

Comments

[George Ortega]

Tom,

Thanks for the information. I Googled Bargh and Baumeister, and discovered that each of their roughly 30 minute presentations are uploaded.

Bargh's is here;
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5368923768346222856&ei=FbROSo-xNI-6qQK77vjsCw&q=john+bargh&hl=en

I was somewhat disappointed that in his quite political presentation, he neglected to mention that because of our belief in free will, we imprison. and sometimes execute, essentially innocent human beings, and that a global poverty that takes the lives of about 29,000 children every day persists in large part because of our free will-driven tendency to blame those victims for having too many babies, not working hard enough, having currupt leaders, etc.

Baumeister's, who went second, is here;

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8683264038263484145&ei=
8rxOSsCvFKXeqALWobDVAg&q=Roy+baumeister&hl=en

Baumeister doesn't seem to have much respect for Compatibilism. At roughly nine minutes into his presentation, he states;

"If you want to believe in determinism, you can still believe in free will. Compatibalism, the view that free will and determinism are both true.. ah, philosophers who are the expert thinkers,.. lots of them subscribe to that view. Also laypersons very cheerfully believe in human determinism and free will. So you can believe in both of them if you want to. I mean, the drawback of Compatibilism is that it is dreadfully namby-pamby. You have to water down the definitions of both to make them fit together."

[Fritz Warfield]

"Compatibalism, the view that free will and determinism are both true..."

For me the biggest temptation to endorsing compatibilism is so that I can then serve as a living reminder that compatibilism is not the view that "free will and determinism are both true". But I guess I can do a bit to provide such a reminder even without being one.

[George Ortega]

Fritz,

I use "universal determinism," as a simple synonym of determinism, to draw attention to the complete, or universal, nature of Laplace's 1814 statement regarding causality, which does not allow for any indeterminacy in nature;

"We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow."

Some physicists and philosophers continue to interpret the results of Heisenberg's and other uncertainties to mean that elementary particle behavior is essentially, or in some instances, indeterministic.

My proof does not simply empirically and directly demonstrate the deterministic behavior of elementary particles, as opposed to indirectly inferring this behavior from resulting accurate probabilistic predictions, but also suggests by such a direct and empirical demonstration that any and all quantum mechanical and philosophical interpretations that allow for some indeterminacy in nature lack merit.

Again, the value of the proof is not simply that it directly, rather than interpretively, demonstrates universal determinism, but that it does so in a way that empirically refutes any and all assertions regarding "anomalous instances" of indeterminacy in nature.

Compatibilist arguments for free will that require some manner of indeterminacy, or chance, are thereby shown to lack a physical, and therefore rational, foundation.

[George Ortega]

Attention Moderator;

I apparently misposted the above response here rather than in Kip's "Thermostat" post where it applies. I hope you can delete this version.