Blogging Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality, Chapter 6

1. Whatever experiments such as Libet’s imply about free will or its lack is indirect. At face value, what they support is some kind of epiphenomenalism, i.e., that conscious states, at least the introspected experience of making a choice, don’t have the causal powers we are apt to ascribe to them. Thoroughgoing epiphenomenalism is, I assume, incoherent: if these states of what we call consciousness exist, then they do have effects, at least our reports of them. But it is surprising if, as the evidence suggests, one’s conscious choice to perform an action is not its cause, but also an effect of whatever unconscious brain event causes it. Libet’s results undermine a particular conception of free will, one on which a choice is free only if (a) it is the effect of a conscious act of will, and (b) that conscious act of will is not the effect of some antecedent event. Which is to say it subverts a robust libertarian idea of freedom. (Maybe it is an effect of the person that chooses, in contrast to some event in her, but no one has any idea how we could manifest such “agent causation.” And we really have no idea how a material being could be an agent cause, even if we believe that God is free in this radical sense.) Materialists either accept this libertarian idea of free choice but say that we do not have it, or reject libertarianism in favor of a compatibilist conception of freedom: choices are free so long as they have the right kind of causal history, i.e., they deny condition (a). However, compatibilists have traditionally accepted condition (b), assuming that the proximate cause of a free act is a conscious choice to do it, one which is a free choice in virtue of having causes of the right kind. This is typically spelled out in terms of practical rationality: a choice is free just if it is caused by the chooser’s very own, reflectively examined reasons, i.e., her desires and beliefs. Can compatibilism survive the demotion of conscious acts of choice to a semi-epiphenomenal status?

2. I don’t find this a threat to compatibilism. First, we all know that the standard account on which something or other causes one to have various desires and beliefs, these cause a conscious act of choice, and that in turn causes the bodily motion that constitutes the action, is an idealization. Most of our free and responsible behavior proceeds without conscious deliberation and choice. Libet’s experiments bring into focus what we are already introspectively aware of: Conscious deliberation is relatively rare; mostly, we just do things, without consciously examining reasons. The essential compatibilist claim is that our free choices are caused by our reasons, and compatibilism has no interest in denying the obvious fact that we are only episodically conscious of them. At this moment you have a great many beliefs and desires but almost all of these mental states are dispositional, not occurrent.

3. There is a familiar worry that our conscious awareness of the reasons for which we act need not be entirely accurate, and we act for reasons other than the ones we think we act for. This is plausible enough to have kept psychoanalysis in business for years. Compatibilism is not committed to any given free choice being an effect of conscious deliberation, but it is in general committed to the idea that a high degree of freedom and responsibility does depend on a disposition to conscious deliberation under certain conditions, e.g., when the best course of action is not obvious but getting it right matters. This is, I assume, arises from the connection of self-consciousness to personhood, and of personhood to moral responsibility.

4. It might be that our concept of freedom is incoherent, that it combines the idea of free choice as uncaused and as having causes of the right sort. (There are empirical studies that support this.) If so, we may ask just what science leaves us and whether what’s left is worth having. Is it a sufficiently robust idea of freedom and responsibility to sustain the practices where we put it to use? As I noted earlier, when we discover that something lacks a feature we’ve long regarded as essential to it, we must either continue to regard it as essential and conclude that there is nothing to which the concept applies, or revise it, acknowledging that it was a mistake to take that feature of essential. Science sometimes shows us that things do not exist, e.g., witches, caloric, phlogiston, and sometimes that what exists is radically different than we thought, e.g., atoms, gravity, the mind. Rosenberg, for reasons not fully clear to me, seems strongly inclined to elimination over revision.

5. With many philosophical naturalists, I think a good case can be made for compatibilism, but difficulties lie ahead. One worry, which I suspect figures in Rosenberg’s rejection of it, is due to the fact that at face value it depends on the idea that human behavior generally can be explained as the effect of reasons, of beliefs and desires. Explaining, and predicting, and making sense of what human beings−others and ourselves−do by appeal to these mental states manifests our innate folk psychology, a presumed product of natural selection. Suppose, as may well be true, that folk psychological concepts cannot be smoothly mapped onto the physical, or even information-theoretic, structures of the human brain. These mental things can be identified with nothing in the domain of neuroscience. In what sense can beliefs, desires, and other intentional states be said really to exist? (“Intentional” here in the sense of having semantic properties, being about something.) When kinds of thing that we want to invoke in causal explanations cannot be reduced to the things physics refers to, the status of those explanations can be problematic. Is there are place for these mental states in the objective, physical universe, and if there is, is it a place that affords them a role in causal explanation? (It’s worth recalling that it’s not reduction, but reduction’s failure, that raises doubts about the reality of things. It’s the irreducibility of mind to matter that challenges the materialist.)

6. The other worry arises only for theists. Even if compatibilism is in general true−there’s no insurmountable conceptual difficulty in human action being at once caused and free−free choice might still be impossible if God is the First Cause. After all, if God created the universe, i.e., he brought about its initial conditions ex nihilo, and authored its causal laws, then his free creative act is the remote cause of every human action. Even if our actions could be free and responsible despite being the effects of natural causes, if what one does is caused by, foreknown by, and intended by someone else, then we are not free and responsible. If you choose and act as you do as result of the microchip a clever neuroscientist surreptitiously implanted in your brain last year, then you are not free and responsible. It will seem to you that you satisfy the compatibilist conditions for freedom, but this will be an illusion. Whatever investment a theist has in free will and moral responsibility as such−maybe not all that much−a Christian theist has a profound investment in human beings being capable of relating to God interpersonally and this requires that vis-à-vis him we be free, that what we do is distinct from what he does, and that we can do other than what he wants us to do. We might be free even if everything we do is causally determined, but not if it is causally determined by God. For this reason, the Christian hopes that nature’s fundamental laws are indeterministic. If they are, then God remains the most remote cause of all our actions, but he does not specifically foreknow or intend them. So long as the creation is indeterministic God and creatures can share responsibility for what creatures do, a view that lies at the heart of the Christian faith, which confesses the crucified God who takes responsibility for his wayward and ruined creatures. Whether nature’s laws are deterministic or indeterministic makes no difference so far as the issue of compatibilism goes, but it matters a great deal when our aim is to integrate a naturalistic account of the human condition into the Christian faith.