Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds | Prospect Magazine March 2009 issue 156

Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds

Situations have a bigger influence on how we behave than we think they do. Perhaps, then, rather than worrying so much about character building in an Aristotelian vein we should be making people more aware of how easily apparently irrelevant factors can shape what we do. As Appiah asks: “Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”

Is this all a storm in a common room? The repercussions of the experiments cannot be so easily dismissed. Think of the impact on political liberalism. At the heart of liberalism is the idea that an educated adult is and should be capable of choosing how he or she lives. But if, for example, situations affect us more than the reasons we give for our actions, and we use those reasons to rationalise them retrospectively, this assumption may need revision. This branch of x-phi might be nudging us towards Nietzsche’s view that what we take to be the inexorable conclusions of clear rational thought are nothing but reformulations of our innermost desires—disguised as the products of logic. We are not as in control of our thoughts as we thought. Nietzsche fully grasped how profoundly unsettling this notion was.

Free will! Can I have one? | Psychology Today Blogs

Free will! Can I have one? | Psychology Today Blogs

The Free Will debate is something that I have pondered from a very early age. I truly believe that the Free Will question answers a lot of confusions on the part of people regarding political questions.

The more we learn about what really causes us to tick, the better we can structure our society, laws, and political systems--with the goal being to allow individuals to freely flourish.

I personally believe free-will is an illusion, which survived as a useful mechanism for our ancestors to flourish, those having such a processing tool were better able to reproduce and multiply over those who lacked it.

I think that more effort to look into why this illusions and/or brain processing function was useful to our ancestors will help us better understand our biological system.

I think free-will is popular because it allows us to justify our own actions and condemn those whom we disagree with. Even saying free will is popular will send your mind in two different directions 1) if we lack free will to say it is popular would be a mistake 2)does someone stop justifying their own actions and condemning others whom they disagree with when they "say" they don't have free will anymore?

My thoughts on 1...
This is a great example of the crux of most philosophical problems i.e. confusions of language. I can count 5 problems that are created by carelessness and/or double meanings of some of the words in

if we lack free will to say it is popular would be a mistake

So one big problem is simply that we run so haphazardly with words.
To the questions of 2...
No... justification and condemnation don't stop. Or at least the things that what we perceive those words to mean do not. But to quickly argue that this disproves those who argue against free will would be sloppy, and miss the point completely. The question at hand is what exists and why. We have to differentiate between the words we use to describe things and the things in themselves.

So the question of free will is split into two:
1. What biological processes exist (either we do or don't... or somewhere in between)
2. What words/descriptions are best used to resolve question 1

Finally I think most of the "debates" I end up having with people aren't about 1... and I hardly ever get people to dealing with the gravity of question 2; most of the debate which ends up happening is on questions of ethics. People sound terrified by the idea that they lack the "freedom" to choose of their own volition and want to dig into ethical questions to prove how outlandish it would be to lack free-will. Ethics are are different issue from whether free will exists, though ethics is the core of what drives me to want to apply our findings on the question of free will to politics.

Another asymmetry is that determinism excludes the possibility of free will, whereas free will does not fully negate determinism. There is supposed to be a privileged domain in which the will is free. But how did this precious free zone open up? How did it emerge from an otherwise deterministic universe? And what are its boundaries? The self-congratulatory answer is that free will is uniquely human. Upon reflection, however, we are "determined" to realize that the boundaries are fuzzy. The behaviors of infants, senile or autistic humans show clear evidence of will, but that will does not appear to be free in the folk psychological sense. There is little reasoning, deliberation, or rationality.

I think that Baumeister's approach to the boundary problem lies in the role he accords perceptions of responsibility. This is his argument number three. The proposition is that if people have free will, then they are personally responsible for their actions. I do not argue with this proposition, but with its inverse. The fact that people hold humans (mostly others) to be responsible does not mean that there is free will; it does not even mean that they think there is free will. In fact, people hold others responsible even if they agree that the behaviors in question (e.g., heinous crimes) are determined by causes outside the person (Nichols & Knobe, 2007). If the allocation of rewards and punishments is an indication of perceived responsibility, people treat many animals as if they think these animals have free will. A similar argument can be made for power. Finding that many people pursue "the right to make decisions that may affect others" (Baumeister, p. 16) says nothing about the presumed freedom of those decisions. Many non-human animals are concerned about power, rank, and status, and they struggle to get it. Yet, they are widely regarded as automatons.

update:
Here is the post from Garden of Forking Paths that sent me to this piece. Go read the comments thread. That dialogue is exactly one thing that blogs and the Internet are great for... I love fruitful debate. And this thread digs a lot more in-depth into the free-will debate, hitting far more than my own post does...

On attention spans and Jim's hard determinism

So I was a test subject (think mouse running on that wheel thing) in a research study looking at cognitive skill deficiencies (or something to that effect) in those with bipolar disorder.

It was fun.

One of the questions she asked me was about my attention span problems. I replied bio-chemical. To which she looked at me funny, paused, looked down and then tried to follow up. I replied that since I have been tested to have adhd, and that my Psychiatrist hoped that the antidepressant I started taking would reduce anxiety levels reducing problems with attention span (and it has), that it must be neurotransmitters. She wrote it down and moved on.

Something tells me most people don't blame things on their neurotransmitters. Go figure.