>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

Gazzaniga and the Gifford Lectures

Michael Gazzaniga was recently honored with the opportunity to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures.  Fortunately for those of us who were not there to see his exciting series of talks, the good folks at the University of Edinburgh were kind enough to make them available on-line.  I have posted the lectures over at the Law and Neuroscience Blog (see here) where you can now watch all five talks.  Having watched through them in the past few days, I strongly encourage you to check them out--especially if you happen to be unfamiliar with his groundbreaking work on split brains and the interpreter module.  If you don't have time to watch them all, Gazzaniga talks about the relevance of his work to the free will problem in the fourth talk.

The Secret Politics of the Compatibilist Criminal Law

I am curious to hear what Gardeners think about a recent paper by Anders Kaye entitled, "The Secret Politics of the Compatibilist Criminal Law."  Here is the abstract:

Many criminal theorists say that we have a 'compatibilist' criminal law, by which they mean that in our criminal law a person can deserve punishment for her acts even if she does not have 'genuinely' free will. This conception of the criminal law harbors and is driven by a secret politics, one that resists social change and idealizes the existing social order. In this Article, I map this secret politics. In so doing, I call into question the descriptive accuracy of the compatibilist account of the criminal law, and set the stage for a franker discussion of criminal punishment - one that recognizes that the perpetual struggle to say just who 'deserves' punishment is driven as much by brute politics and the competition to allocate power and resources in society as by any independent moral logic.

I am particularly keen to hear what the compatibilists who frequent the Garden have to say about Kaye's provocative line of argumentation.

The Folk and Limited Free Will

I suspect Manuel, Eddy, and other like-minded revisionists and compatibilists will be comfortable with this folk "degrees of freedom" description of the contemporary problem of free will (especially as it relates to science) despite some of the confusions contained therein .  For instance, even if we didn't have free will and hence weren't morally responsible in the robust sense, it wouldn't follow that criminals shouldn't be accountable at all.  How and why we treat criminals would of course change, but that we do something rather than nothing would not change.  Setting that aside, I nevertheless find the post illustrative.  I am curious to see what the Gardeners think...

Here are two BBC articles that lend support to the "circumscribed yet free in the face of science" line of reasoning.  The first is about child abuse and suicide, the second is about child abuse and alcoholism.  In both cases, the evitability of the outcome is stressed in the end despite the genetic and neuro-cognitive changes that are said to occur as the result of abuse.  I take it the skeptics in the crowd will focus on the stark changes that abuse can cause whereas the free willers (and likely the folk--such as the author of the aforementioned post) will focus on the openness of the end result.  But that is a story for another day... 

Free Will in Psychology Today

Yet another piece on free will by a psychologist can be found here.  This time, the author is Joachim Krueger--a social psychologist from Brown University.  In light of the gathering number of popular science pieces on free will, I thought this might be a good opportunity to get everyone to list the ones they know of in this thread.  I actually had someone contact me the other day when I posted the the link to the "free choice" study asking me if there was a rough and ready list for getting one's feet wet with respect to what psychologists are saying about free will (or lack thereof).  Since this is something that comes up here at the Garden, I figured this would be a perfect place to get the ball rolling.  Once the comment thread is flowering, I will compile it into a bibliography and post it here for others to use.  It might aslo be helpful if you state in your comments whether the psychologists take a pro, anti, or neutral stance on the existence of free will--which would make it easier for me to clasify the bibliography.  Since I know at least two Gardeners are already working on a paper about the contemporary interest amongst psychologists in free will, I assume they will take the lead here! :)

UPDATE:

The piece by Krueger is a response to an earlier post by Baumeister which can be found here.  Another response to Baumeister can be found here. 

The Neural Mechanisms of "Free Choice"

There is a recent article in Cerebral Cortex that explores the neural mechanisms of what the researchers take to be "free choice" (see here).  It's certainly the kind of thing Gardeners ought to find of interest.  The abstract is as follows:

The neural mechanisms underlying the selection and initiation of voluntary actions in the absence of external instructions are poorly understood. These mechanisms are usually investigated using a paradigm where different movement choices are self-generated by a participant on each trial. These "free choices" are compared with "instructed choices," in which a stimulus informs subjects which action to make on each trial. Here, we introduce a novel paradigm to investigate these modes of action selection, by measuring brain processes evoked by an instruction to either reverse or maintain free and instructed choices in the period before a "go" signal. An unpredictable instruction to change a response plan had different effects on free and instructed choices. In instructed trials, change cues evoked a larger P300 than no-change cues, leading to a significant interaction of choice and change condition. Free-choice trials displayed a trend toward the opposite pattern. These results suggest a difference between updating of free and instructed action choices. We propose a theoretical framework for internally generated action in which representations of alternative actions remain available until a late stage in motor preparation. This framework emphasizes the high modifiability of voluntary action.

Let the grumbling begin!

Terminological Differences

Given the interest generated by Tamler's recent post on free will skepticism, I thought I would try to keep the discussion going by posting something about a related issue that I have often found puzzling.  On the surface, it is obvious enough what distinguishes libertarians, on the one hand, from compatibilists, semi-compatibilists, and revisionists, on the other hand.  The later, unlike the former, believe that we could be free and/or morally responsible even if determinism were true.  Similarly, it is obvious enough what distinguishes libertarians from free will skeptics.  The former, unlike the later, believe that we are both free and desert-based responsible. 

However, it is not always as clear to me what distinguishes compatibilists, semi-compatibilists, and revisionists from free will skeptics.  As far as I can tell, proponents of each of these views generally believe the following:

1. Humans do not have the kind of robust free will that libertarians think we have. 
2. Humans are nevertheless typically reasons responsive creatures with the ability to consciously regulate their own behavior, form second-order desires, etc.
3. Given the social nature of humans, the creation and enforcement of social norms is necessary and justified.
4. Given the importance of social norms, punishment may be necessary for encouraging compliance--especially when the wrong-doers have the capacities mentioned in 2.

So, wherein lies the disagreement?  It appears the two main disagreements are as follows:

• Should we call the kind of reasons responsiveness and conscious control that are emphasized by compatibilists, semi-compatibilists, and revisionists "free will" rather than something else?
• Regardless of what we call compatibilist control, is it enough for full blown desert-based moral responsibility (rather than the merely forward-looking stuff that presumably everyone agrees is compatible with determinism)?

The first of these two disagreements is entirely terminological.  Settling this dispute requires the parties to the debate to spell out why they believe using the term "free will" is beneficial or harmful.  For instance, Manuel thinks we should keep the term even if we have to (radically?) change the meaning, whereas I think we should jetison it entirely if we now realize we don't have the kind of causal powers we once thought we did.

The second disagreement does not appear to be merely terminological.  But it is nevertheless important for compatibilists, semi-compatibilists, and revisions to spell out very carefully how and why the kind of circumscribed free will we purportedly have is enough to ground desert-based responsibility.  Keep in mind that the issue is not whether humans ought to be held responsible for their actions.  As 4 above makes clear, this is something about which all parties to the debate agree.  The issue is whether the kind of free will compatibilists allege we have is enough for moral desert. 

Temperament and Philosophy: Two New Papers

I have just posted two new papers over at the experimental philosophy blog (see here) that readers of GFP might find of interest.  The first is by Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely and the second is a commentary on their paper by me, Trevor Kvaran, and Eddy Nahmias.  Both papers explore the relationship between personality type and folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility.

Philosophers Welcomed!

Dear Gardeners,

I am posting this in the hopes that you will be able to help Trevor Kvaran, Eddy Nahmias, and I in our efforts to run a new study.  Rather than limiting our attention to the intuitions of the folk, we are actively trying to collect data on the intuitions of philosophy majors, grad students, and professors as well!  Moreover, we are also casting a much larger net than normal by collecting both demographic data and information on participant's background beliefs, judgments, habits, etc.  As a result, the study takes longer than usual to complete, but since we think we could get a really rich and important data set, we hope you will not only set aside some time to take the survey yourself, but that you will also encourage your friends, students, and colleagues to play along.  I even suggest you have your family participate.  I, for one, have had some interesting conversations with mine about philosophy since they took the survey! 

The link to the survey can be found in this post over at the experimental philosophy blog.  Thanks in advance for your time and consideration.

Cheers,
Thomas

Positive Illusions and the Free Will Debate

I am quite confident that all of the Gardeners are busy readying themselves to spend some quality time with their friends and family over the holidays (and rightly so!).  So, I have no illusions (pun intended) concerning the likelihood that people will have time left in 2007 to take a glance at the paper I wrote with one of my undergrads here at Dickinson (Tatyana Matveeva).  But since I thought some of you might nevertheless have time to read it after the new year and before the beginning of spring semester, I figured now might be a better time to post it than once we're all back to work in mid to late January.  For now, have a delightful break! 

Download positive_illusions.pdf

The Trolley Problem and Self-Defense

I realize that the main focus here at the Garden is usually on issues pertaining to free will and moral responsibility, but since there is a special category for The Trolley Problem, I figured I would post a draft of a short piece I am working on about the trolley problem and self-defense.  Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.  Just be gentle--it's still a little rough around the edges.  But before I do any more work on it, I thought I would see what the gardeners think about the general strategy I adopt first.  Thanks in advance!

Download trolley_problem_revisited.pdf