In this dialogue, Socrates and Diotima discuss the conflict between freedom and determinism.
Personae: Socrates, Diotima
S: Oh, hi there, Diotima. What are you up to?
D: Hey Socrates, not much. Just been to the agora and now I’m headed to Aristocles’, gonna grab a couple of cold ones and watch the game with ma boi.
S: What’s on?
D: A pygmachia match between Dynamis Thebes and Corinth ’96.
S: Ah, you’re into boxing?
D: Yeah, Aristocles is a huge fan and I’ve kinda acquired a taste for it by hanging out with him so much. Platonically, that is.
S: I see. And what were you doing on the agora?
D: I fed some owls and then watched a group of climate activists protest the new regulations on stock farming. Something to do with cows farting out of their mouths or whatever.
S: I presume the methane they emit…
D: I know, I know, that was clearly a joke, Socrates. Anyway, they had this interesting idea of conceiving of nature as a legal entity, with judicial rights and everything.
S: Do you find that plausible?
D: Yeah, why now?
S: Well because nature clearly isn’t a single monolithic entity you could attribute personhood to, right? Sounds like an anthropomorphism to me.
D: No, sure but of course it would suffice to grant rights to the individual organisms that make up nature.
S: Right, and you mean to all of them?
D: Sure, why not?
S: Well, where do you draw the line? If you grant rights to organisms as simple as bacteria then you could barely soap your hands without breaking the law or at least violating your moral duties.
D: But that’s no valid counter argument. It will simply mean that your right to germ-free hands and decreased risk of falling sick trumps their right to live. It’s a moral trade-off.
S: I see, but my right to a tasty steak doesn’t trump a cow’s right not to endure the horrendous living conditions of an industrial farm?
D: Precisely. Your rights carry more weight than those of bacteria because they are not capable of having the same deep experience of life as you. How you spell out the preconditions of moral worthiness in detail would require further discussion, but I find the idea intuitively plausible. Don’t you?
S: By all means. But you haven’t answered my question yet. Where do you draw the line? Presumably you wouldn’t attribute judicial rights to stones.
D: True, though I’m pretty liberal with this criterion. I would say, for example, that not only bacteria, but also plants should be treated as legal entities. Anything that has some degree of freedom.
S: What do you mean by that?
D: Well, anything that isn’t entirely determined by the laws of nature.
S: Wait, so you think the growth and life of a plant isn’t entirely determined by the causal forces of nature?
D: No, do you?
S: Yes, of course I do, it would strike me as absurd to attribute freedom to plants. Or bacteria, for that matter. But wait, before we move on, am I right in presuming that you are not taking a compatibilist stance whereby freedom and determinism are just two different ways to look at the same thing, right?
D: Oh, you mean as in the Kantian framework?
S: Yes, exactly. In the sense that you can look at a particular instance of human behaviour as a physical event that was caused by the physical events preceding it in time, but at the same time you can look at it as an act that resulted from rationally aligning yourself with the categorical imperative or some other normative standard. At least that’s the contemporary way of putting it.
D: Yeah, no that’s not what I mean. And to be honest, I think the main appeal of the Kantian conception rests on the idea that our faculty of reason exists in a sphere beyond time and space. Which in and of itself is a pretty wild assumption, some would say. But that’s a discussion for another time, I suspect.
S: So, you think there is an irreconcilable conflict between the laws of nature and freedom? And that freedom wins? How do you explain our ability to resist the causal influence of nature then?
D: What do you mean?
S: I mean, in order to act freely our will or the locus of our freedom or whatever you want to call it would have to be able to exert its influence on our body given that this body is the medium of all of our behaviour, including our supposedly free actions. Presuming that you don’t believe in telekinesis.
D: I can put your worries to rest on that front at least.
S: Great. So, freedom means the will influences the body so as to make it execute free actions. But given that the body is a physical object determined by physical forces it would seem that there is simply no leeway for the will to exert any kind of influence on it whatsoever. In order to do so, we would have to possess the ability to quench or delete at least some of the physical forces imposing themselves on our body so as to create a space for the will within which to operate.
D: I’m afraid you’ve got it all wrong, Socrates. For starters, I don’t think our body is physically determined in the way you claim. Causality isn’t this all-pervading force you make it out to be, it’s the kind of thing that exists under the highly artificial experimental conditions of a laboratory.
S: You’ve got to be exaggerating.
D: No, I’m not. Look, determinists like you pretend that the position that everything can be reduced to physical forces in the final analysis is not a substantial metaphysical claim and that to say anything else would be to indulge in the wildest speculation. But this is simply not the case. Your determinist stance has serious metaphysical implications you might not be aware of, and it begs a number of questions you might not be able to answer.
S: Couple of things. First, I haven’t claimed thus far that everything can be reduced to physical forces in any strong eliminativist sense. For instance, when I say that behaviour can be reduced to physical processes in the body and its immediate environment, I’m not saying that behaviour actually doesn’t exist and that we had better refrain from talking about behaviour altogether. Let me put it in slightly more technical terms.
D: Yay, can’t wait…
S: …Said the champion of subtle irony. Anyway, for convenience’s sake let’s call the set of behavioural facts in our example B and the set of physical facts about the body and its immediate environment P. As I said, my claim that B can be reduced to P doesn’t imply that B doesn’t exist. It simply means that B strongly depends on P or that B supervenes on P…
D: What’s supervenience again?
S: In this case, supervenience means that the facts of P determine the facts of B. Thus, there cannot be a change in B without a prior change of P.
D: So, you can’t manifest a change in behaviour without also manifesting a change in your physical properties?
S: Exactly, though the reverse is possible. For instance, you could slightly alter the temperature of your toes, but this wouldn’t register as a behavioural change to even the most careful observer.
D: Yeah, I don’t find this way of looking at it very intuitive, I must say.
S: You could also say that if B is reducible to P, then someone who knows P and possesses the necessary higher-level vocabulary to formulate the truths of B, then they also know the whole of B.
D: To be honest, I think this whole B-P-talk is simply BS.
S: How so?
D: I mean, thus far you’ve only argued that reducibility doesn’t imply elimination. But what I wish to argue is that there is no deterministic dependence between the physical sphere and our actions in the first place. That’s what I meant earlier when I said that your physicalist reductionism is a strong metaphysical claim.
S: Still not very happy with that label but do go on.
D: I simply do not see any reason whatsoever to suppose that the world is structured according to the laws of physics, which is itself an incomplete and flawed human construction. If there are so many things physics can’t explain then it would seem to me an irrational leap of faith to suppose that it can explain human actions. It cannot even explain the growth of cells. From this alone it would follow logically that it cannot explain the actions of organisms made up of cells. Though I think that your position can also be refuted on independent grounds.
S: Why wouldn’t it be able to explain the growth of cells?
D: Well, I suppose it would if it could, but it doesn’t ‘cos it can’t. We don’t have a good model of cellular growth as of yet, and this clearly illustrates that physics isn’t all-knowing in the way your position presupposes.
S: But this is merely a problem of complexity, wouldn’t you say?
D: What’s that supposed to mean?
S: By that I mean that there are no reasons to suppose that physics couldn’t explain the growth of a cell in principle. It just so happens that cells are very complex physical objects constituted by an immense number of particles which interact with each other in intricate ways so that any purely physical model would be simply too vast, too big, the processing power its predictions would necessitate too complex to be executed by the computers we in fact have. But this doesn’t imply that such a model is per se impossible, neither does it imply that the predictions of this model would be anything other than deterministic. And this is all I need for my argument.
D: But that’s mere science fiction.
S: How so?
D: I think it’s a cheap and easy way out to pass the buck to an entirely hypothetical physics that might or might not come about at some future point in time. Sure, maybe we’ll one day have this fancy super-theory that will explain all phenomena in terms of underlying physical states, but that’s wishful thinking at best.
S: By characterising my position as science fiction you already imply that it is purely fictional, which is to say, wrong.
D: Quite the careful observer, aren’t you?
S: Well, am I really making a claim about a future state of science? Or am I not rather making a claim about the possibilities today’s science has in principle?
D: I’m not sure I’m following you. What do you mean?
S: Okay, let’s say you have a giant sandbox, I’m talking millions of kilometres in width, length, and depth with determinate limits such that you can tell with certainty for any grain whether it is within or outside the bounds of our box. Now, if you took a pinch of sand, put it under a microscope and looked at it carefully, you’d surely be able to count the grains. Thus, you could in principle count the contents of the whole box, though in practice you’d die of old age or boredom before you ever got to the end. That’s what I mean by complexity in this context. If you possessed the necessary technological knowledge to devise a clever contraption to count the grains automatically and if you built enough of these then you’d even be able to actually count them. Now, is this a science fictional claim about some future state of your counting abilities? Or is it not much rather a claim about the possibilities of your abilities as they are today?
D: I don’t see how this distinction refutes my argument.
S: Well, the only thing you need to count all of the grains is just more of what you already have: the ability to count grains of sand. In the same vein, we already know how to measure the position and state of physical particles well enough in order to predict their future position and state according to the laws of nature, at least on a certain level of description. There would be no additional kind of knowledge required to explain the growth of a cell, just more of what we already have.
D: But aren’t you begging the question here? You are already presupposing that complex phenomena such as cell growth can be explained in terms of the supposedly underlying physical phenomena and the ways they interact. But that is precisely what I wish to deny.
S: I understand that, but the sandbox example was meant to demonstrate that the fact that we don’t have a functioning model of cell growth in physical terms is no counter argument to my claim. Indeed, if you accept the fact that many interesting phenomena are complex in the way I just illustrated, meaning that while they could in principle be explained in terms of underlying simpler phenomena, the sheer number of these underlying phenomena and their many intricate ways of interaction is simply too vast to allow for a reductive explanation in practice, this doesn’t contradict the possibility of an explanation in principle.
D: Still not quite sure what you’ve actually gained by this demonstration.
S: Well, your point was that human behaviour isn’t determined or explained by physics because there is an awful lot of things physics can’t explain such as cell growth. My counter argument was that this claim is true only if by “explain” you mean “explain in practice”. In principle, however, many of the alleged counterexamples are actually only examples of complex phenomena that pose no threat to the possibility of physical analysis.
D: We just don’t know how to conduct the analysis, right?
S: No, that’s the point. We do know how to. Just like in the sandbox example, it’s our own contingent limitations such as the scarce processing power at our disposal that is the problem.
D: Okay, but would it actually follow from you position that human behaviour is determined? What I mean is, even if we presume that physics is the super-theory of everything, hasn’t quantum physics done away with the naïve billiard ball conception of causality?
S: To be honest with you, I don’t really understand a whole lot about quantum physics.
D: Yeah, me neither.
S: Great, sounds like all preconditions for a fruitful investigation are met. But you know as well as I do that our a priori faculty to reason is the only wellspring of truth and knowledge whose clarity and pureness can only be muddled by such pesky nuisances as empirical facts and theories, so our ignorance should not hold us back.
D: So, what I was getting at is that our state-of-the-art physical theories actually don’t presume that physical particles are determined in the way determinism presupposes. There are quantum states which are ontologically indeterminate such that…
S: Well, whether their indeterminacy is ontological is still subject to debate, I hear.
D: Whatever, they are indetermined such that all we can ever say about them is that there is a certain probability distribution for the possible observations of them. As soon as we try and measure the state, this wave function collapses to one of the possible observations.
S: Okay, that matches my own poor understanding. I’m not too sure this helps your position, though. What you’d need for freedom in the strong sense of the word you’re advocating is not the pure chance of quantum effects, but control.
D: What do you mean, “pure chance”?
S: Well, the frequency of the actual observations of the quantum state must of course conform to the predicted probability distribution over time, but apart from that, the outcome of your measurements is utterly random. Spinning the wheel of the quantum lottery again and again over the course of a behavioural sequence doesn’t amount to freedom in my book. Indeed, your position even presupposes that there are at least some dependency relations in this universe which are absolutely deterministic, that is, the relations between your will and your behaviour. If you couldn’t deterministically cause your body to move in a certain way, we would hardly interpret this as acting freely.
D: Okay, but what about the hard problem?
S: What about it?
D: Well, physics certainly can’t explain how physical states relate to, let alone give rise to, phenomenally conscious states, right? There is nothing in the whole of physics to predict which physical systems are endowed with conscious experience and which aren’t. Indeed, the currently known laws of physics are perfectly consistent with the idea that there could be an exact physical replica of you that is not conscious.
S: I grant that, but what do you think follows from this for the purpose of our discussion?
D: It follows that there are some phenomena physics is unable to explain.
S: So, what? I’ll gladly concede this point. As I said, I’m not a physical eliminitavist who thinks that physical entities are the only entities in town.
D: But here you make a mistake because your argument presupposes that there are no ontological gaps in your worldview.
S: And by ontological gap you mean…
D: Well, the hard problem is an example of an ontological gap. The fact that we don’t have a satisfying theory that relates the physical to the phenomenal is not due to our epistemic limits, but rather due to a gap in nature between both spheres.
S: Not sure the hard problem really qualifies, but for the sake of the argument let’s suppose it does. Then why would my deterministic stance presuppose that there are no such gaps?
D: Isn’t it obvious? You think that everything is ultimately tied back to or caused by some physical event. If there is an ontological gap between two phenomena, then one obviously couldn’t have caused the other. If it had, there wouldn’t be an ontological gap in the first place.
S: Because causation is a relation of dependence and dependence is exactly the kind of thing to bridge ontological gaps.
D: Exactly.
S: Okay, I don’t see why the hard problem should refute my position. Indeed, I don’t even think that I’m committed to saying that everything is caused by physical states. For me, it would already suffice to demonstrate that human behaviour is physically caused. Determinism in this sense is neutral on the question of how consciousness relates to physics. Sure, you might have the strong intuition that your self is both the locus of your will and the metaphysical substrate of your consciousness and that, as physics can’t explain the latter, it surely can’t determine the first. But I rest my case. Determining behaviour is all I require. And you’ve already granted that behaviour is the medium in which your supposedly free will would necessarily need to manifest.
D: Even so, I still think that the many ontological gaps are a problem for your position.
S: And why would that be?
D: Well, as I said before, you’re obliged to satisfyingly explain the various relations of dependence your theory posits. But we’ve already discussed that it can’t.
S: Have we? For the overwhelming number of seemingly inexplicable phenomena, I’ve argued that the lack of a satisfying explanation is due to the complexity of the explanandum. And as to the hard problem, determinism is indifferent as to how it pans out. I suspect you’re confusing epistemological gaps with ontological ones. Determinism doesn’t have to provide a complete and perfectly detailed account of how everything relates to physics in order for it to be plausible that human behaviour is determined.
D: But if it can’t provide this kind of account, why would anybody accept such a crazy position?
S: Because it sits well with the best empirical theories we have at the moment.
D: Again, why should we expect physical theories to tell us anything of interest about the human condition? Physical entities simply exist in a distinct sense field from human experience and human actions.
S: In a different sense field? Wait, this is Maggus’ ontology of sense fields, isn’t it?
D: Yes.
S: Yeah, I dimly remember, Kriton told me about it a couple of weeks ago when he and I strolled down to the Port of Piraeus. Bring me up to speed again.
D: So, the basic idea is that you redefine what it means for something to exist. If something can be meaningfully spoken about, then it’s part of a sense field and, thus, it exists. This is true both of your beloved physical particles, of macroscopic objects such as chairs and cats on mats, of abstract objects such as the number 69, of sets such as the set of all unconvincing arguments you’ve made over the course of our conversation, of fictional objects such as Othello and unicorns and, finally, of moral notions such as freedom and responsibility.
S: Seems like this rather liberal criterion bestows the status of existence on an awful lot of things.
D: Yes, and the framework doesn’t compel you to specify how these different sense fields or the different things within the sense fields depend on each other. It’s an entirely flat hierarchy of being. Indeed, this is one of the interesting features of Maggus’ theory; he doesn’t require that some sense field be the fundamental level of analysis to which all others must be reducible. In this sense, physical objects, and the realm of the physical more generally, don’t bear a privileged position over the other realms. They are merely one kind among the many kinds of things that can be meaningfully talked about. Also, he claims that the world doesn’t exist.
S: Oh yeah, I do remember that one. There is nothing like a pithy and seemingly paradoxical slogan if you want to popularise your ontology.
D: Well, it doesn’t exist in the sense that there is no supercontainer to encompass all of the things there are. Suppose you could make a list of all things that can be meaningfully talked about, then this list itself wouldn’t be on it. The logic of the ontology of sense fields is such that the totality of all existing things is fundamentally elusive.
S: Spoken like a true philosopher.
D: I can also dumb it down for you. You cannot formulate a fundamental level of analysis for all existing things. In order to do so, you’d first need to represent the existing things. Then, however, this representation itself wouldn’t be contained in the fundamental analysis. And note that this problem is regressive. As soon as you create a second-order fundamental level that contains the first-order now-not-so-fundamental-anymore level plus the vocabulary needed to formulate its truths, you’re again faced with the problem of how to include the vocabulary necessary to formulate the second level.
S: Sounds like Wittgenstein’s observation that any explicit semantics is regressive.
D: In what sense?
S: Well, if you’ve got a given language and some objects it’s supposed to relate to semantically, you cannot fix this relation by using some meta-language because an analogous problem arises on the second level. In other words, now you’d be faced with the problem of specifying how your meta-language relates to the object-language and its objects. It seems to be regressive in just the same way.
D: I see the parallel. Anyway, you can formulate at least two rebuttals of your physicalist position based on Maggus’ considerations. First, you presume that physics is the fundamental level of analysis, but you need to concede that you need meaningful language in order to formulate the truths of physics. So, physical truths presuppose the existence of meaningful expressions. These, however, are not themselves physical entities. If you were to try and reduce them to physical entities, this reduction would itself again presuppose that the expressions that make it up are meaningful and so forth ad infinitum.
S: True. But before I answer your first concern, let’s hear the second one.
D: Secondly, if you suppose that two elementary particles A and B exist, you’d be rationally committed to saying that the set of A and B exists as well. However, the set itself is not a physical entity.
S: The second objection sounds like a weaker version of the first, to be honest.
D: To what extent?
S: Well, any good physicalist would of course claim that the set of A and B is reducible to A and B and then the same problems would apply as above. What it really boils down to is how to account for the semantic content of our meaningful expressions within the physicalist framework.
D: And how would you answer this objection?
S: By pointing out that it rests on a misunderstanding of my position. As I will gladly repeat, I’m not a physicalist in the strong sense your criticism purports. Do you know Dennett’s paper on real patterns?
D: Nope, fill me in.
S: His main point is that even though some patterns may be reducible to others such as the patterns of chemistry to those of physics, it doesn’t follow from this that the reduced patterns don’t really exist. After all, it might turn out the patterns described by nowadays’ physics are themselves further reducible to an even more fundamental set of patterns yet to be found, but this possibility doesn’t make us call into question whether physical states are real. Or, to complicate matters further, it is even logically conceivable that we live in a world without a metaphysical bedrock, so to say, such that for any pattern there is an even more fundamental one so that you’d end up with an infinite chain of patterns, each more fundamental than the next, but none to ground them all. In that case, nothing would exist, which is patently absurd.
D: Doesn’t Dennett also negate that consciousness exists at all?
S: So, what? I can buy some of his positions and not others, without loosing any sleep over it.
D: Okay, but how does this help you refute my objections?
S: Well, my position doesn’t compel me to claim that sets of physical objects don’t exist or that I can give a reductive account of meaning or of intentionality more broadly. I don’t even need to claim that there is a metaphysical supercontainer to encompass the totality of being. All I need to say is that the objects or patterns in one sense field are perfectly determined by those patterns or things in another, to use Maggus’ own terminology. Which is to say, if someone were to know all the facts in the sense field of physics and if they were competent speakers of the language necessary to formulate the facts of the sense field of human behaviour, then they’d be able to deduce all those behavioural facts.
D: But isn’t this wishful thinking again? That there is a determinate and law-like mapping from physical facts to behavioural facts such that all you need is the necessary vocabulary and enough time?
S: Obviously I don’t think so. But my goal right then was just to point out that Maggus doesn’t have compelling arguments against my position. You can still coherently formulate my viewpoint within his ontology of sense fields.
D: But the point of his conception is precisely that you don’t need to specify relations of dependency between sense fields.
S: Yes, you don’t need to, but you still could if it seemed appropriate. Look, I don’t know Maggus’ theory all that well. Maybe I’m getting him all wrong and it’s entirely impossible to say that one sense field depends on another. But even then, this wouldn’t be a valid argument against my position. For the sake of argument suppose that we conceive of a framework which doesn’t allow to formulate relations of logical implication. Would it follow from this that no proposition is ever implied by any other? Obviously not. It would only show that my framework isn’t powerful enough to express all the things we might reasonably want to express. If you think, on the other hand, that it is unreasonable to formulate a dependence of behaviour on physics in the first place because no such dependence exists, you’d have to motivate this view on independent grounds. The fact that some framework couldn’t express this dependence will hardly count as an argument.
D: You too, Brutus, would have to argue for your position on independent grounds, because if Maggus’ framework were flawed, this wouldn’t support your thesis either.
S: True. Let me try and put it as succinctly as possible. Physics describes the law-like regularities of particles in time and space. Human bodies are objects in time and space, too. Ergo et cetera. Moreover, the fact that our physical theories allow for accurate predictions is amply illustrated by the many technological devices we continue to come up with. Thus, the accuracy of our physical predictions is unlikely to be a social construct or some other sort of theoretical artefact, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to fly to Mars. This also illustrates that our theories don’t just predict isolated processes under the highly artificial conditions of a laboratory setting, as you claimed in the beginning. If this were so, we wouldn’t be able to control nature as well as we in fact can. Now, why would organisms be the exception?
D: Yeah, but that’s a leap of faith.
S: That human bodies are subject to the same laws as other spatio-temporal objects?
D: Your formulation is itself highly tendentious. Obviously, the human body is much more than a mere spatio-temporal object.
S: Okay well, then let’s hear your side of the story. Why do you believe we are free?
D: To even ask the question seems so absurd to me. First, I believe we have the immutable intuition of being free whenever we act. Secondly, almost all of our moral and epistemic notions presuppose that we are free.
S: Even our epistemic notions?
D: Sure, for instance, if you can be reasonably said to believe that p, your very belief implies that you could have believed something else. That is, you might also have believed q, but chose p over q in virtue of your freedom.
S: I’m not sure I find that convincing.
D: Why not?
S: Well, it kind of depends on your definition of belief whether it implies freedom or not, doesn’t it? For example, if I define a belief in p as a disposition to behave as if p were true, then believing something wouldn’t presuppose freedom at all. Just because you can artificially bake freedom into the definition of a bunch of epistemic terms doesn’t demonstrate that these terms depend on freedom in any essential way.
D: Yeah, but the baking in of freedom isn’t artificial. At least I have yet to hear of a plausible alternative.
S: What about the definition I just proposed? I could even flesh it out a little further. Maybe my belief in p isn’t just the disposition to behave as if p, but also a disposition to update my other beliefs as if p were true, to commit to all propositions that follow from p in public discourse and so on. We could easily imagine a soulless automaton who displays all the behaviour that make up a belief in p according to my definition. Ex hypothesi, this automaton wouldn’t be free, but he’d still believe that p. That rhymes so it must be true.
D: I wouldn’t say so. In a soulless automaton, there would be nobody to even hold the belief in question.
S: Ah, so you’d say that a belief necessarily requires a believer?
D: What kind of question is that? Of course, I do. Or have you ever heard of a free-floating belief with nobody to hold it?
S: That’s not what I meant. Of course, in order for a belief to exist, it would have to be embedded in some sort of cognitive system, possibly even a system that is capable of generating behavioural output that is at least in part dependent upon the belief in question. However, I don’t think it is required that this system be free in the sense you intend, neither that it enjoys personhood in any other than a conventional social regard.
D: Wow, just wow, Socrates. How to describe humans so as to achieve maximal alienation? Is that what you were going for?
S: It was meant to be sufficiently abstract so as to include dogs, too, you’ll be happy to know.
D: Indeed, I’m very happy to know that.
S: But back to the topic of discussion. I don’t think our epistemic notions become meaningless as soon as we take freedom out of the picture.
D: Yeah, but our moral notions for sure do.
S: I do admit that this is probably the sharpest arrow in your quiver. But I might just dodge it.
D: I’m curious to see you try and fail.
S: Watch me. So, if I were to steelman your position, it would go a little something like this: all of our moral notions rely on the concept of responsibility, which in turns relies on the fact that we could have acted differently. You think that being able to act differently means having the freedom to choose between your behavioural options. If we take freedom out of the picture, the attribution of responsibility becomes meaningless and our social order which relies on this attribution would break down. A guy who murdered twelve people would be no more responsible for his actions than an avalanche, his incarceration would become unjustifiable and so on and so forth.
D: Sounds about right.
S: Where I would beg to differ is that the possibility to act differently doesn’t imply freedom.
D: Wow, that’s gonna be a tough sell.
S: Let me elaborate. I’ll need to qualify this statement before it’ll makes any kind of sense.
D: You don’t say.
S: I think the central point of my explanation is that even if you don’t believe in freedom, you can still reasonably draw a distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions. According to common parlance, you are responsible for your voluntary, but not for your involuntary actions.
D: And how would you draw this distinction then? Aren’t you committed to saying that a premeditated action is just as determined as a mindless kneejerk reaction?
S: I am indeed. However, even though both are determined to the same degree, the premeditated action takes more of your actual beliefs and intentions into account. It is much more embedded into your cognitive system and thus much more reflective of who you are as a person than any reflex reaction could ever be.
D: And why would this matter?
S: Well, I claim that this representativeness is what actually interests us in the attribution of responsibility. If some special circumstance could assure us that your acting out of line is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, it wouldn’t be predictive of your future behaviour and it wouldn’t make sense to punish you.
D: So, you think that the function of punishment is to correct a person’s behavioural disposition in order to achieve more favourable outcomes in the future?
S: At least I think this should be its function. The only other alternative would be retribution, and this has always seemed kind of barbaric to me, if I may say so.
D: So, hold up. If you don’t think that freedom is baked into epistemic notions, that’s fine, whatever. But both the vast majority of philosophers as well as Joe Blow on the street have the pretty strong intuition that it is baked into the notion of responsibility. If your analysis is correct, this would mean that they are all mistaken.
S: Sure, the attribution of responsibility wouldn’t mean what it appears to mean at first glance, but this should not worry us too much, I think. All speech acts that contain normative vocabulary would still exert the same regulatory influence on our behaviour and, thus, they would still serve the same function of perpetuating the predictability of our social practices and customs.
D: Okay, let me go to the heart of our disagreement.
S: Please do.
D: I think, and almost everybody else agrees, that if you ought to do something, you must first be able to do it. And the logical contraposition would be, if you’re not able to do something, you cannot have the duty to do it.
S: Seems about right.
D: But you can apply this straightforwardly to the point of our contention, don’t you see? If you can’t ever make a choice because you are not free, how could you every be dutybound to choose the moral option?
S: But this is where I disagree. You can choose, your choice just isn’t free.
D: Sometimes I wonder if you’re just trolling me.
S: No, but I mean it. The part in your brain that makes voluntary choices is precisely the addressee of moral communications. It is the thing we try to influence with our moral speech acts. Never mind that this whole process is deterministic.
D: Oh boy. Well, it doesn’t get more plausible the more you talk about it, I must say.
S: Yeah, I do admit that I’m not a big fan of the type of philosophy of language that corrects and alters natural language. But I wouldn’t be the first one to propose such a semantic revision and it’s a small bullet to bite. Let me ask you a question, though.
D: Shoot.
S: Why are you not bothered by the ontological gaps posited by your own theory?
D: Like which ones?
S: Like the emergence of freedom from determined nature. Even a hardliner as yourself admits that dead matter isn’t free and, consequently, that for the longest time our universe was entirely governed by the laws of physics. But as soon as the first organism appears which satisfies your conditions of freedom a completely different kind of force comes online. But how is this possible? Where does this new kind of force come from? Would you go so far as to say that it was caused by the physical states preceding it in time?
D: You see, I don’t have to provide an account of how this might have happened. Indeed, the fact that there are ontological gaps in my view is exactly what you’d expect if you take the idea of freedom seriously.
S: Any why would that be?
D: Well, as we’ve said before, an ontological gap occurs in the absence of a relation of dependence. To claim that our will is free is tantamount to saying that it doesn’t depend on anything else. Thus, any theory that posits freedom also predicts ontological gaps.
S: Quite a clever move. You frame the fact that your theory cannot account for the possibility of freedom as a confirmation of your theory’s predictions.
D: True. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. And note that this move isn’t arbitrary. Not any theory could plausibly interpret its own supposed weaknesses as confirming its predictions. This move only makes sense in the context of freedom.
S: Okay, let’s see. Suppose you accept both my proposal that epistemic notions don’t essentially depend on freedom, and you accept, or at least you don’t outright reject, my analysis of the functional roles of normative speech acts in the upholding of our social practices, then it all comes down to a clash of intuitions, right? I was able to answer all the objections you have raised thus far but couldn’t provide an argument that would convince you to adapt my position.
D: So it seems. But surely, you’ll have to admit that I have the dialectical high ground in this regard. My position is the default position and if you wish to diverge from it, it is you who carries the burden of proof.
S: Because you suppose that the intuition that we are the undetermined authors of our actions is obvious and incontrovertible?
D: Yes, or would you go so far as to doubt even that?
S: You guessed it.
D: Are you just trying to be edgy here?
S: Not at all.
D: Look, literally everyone perhaps apart from a minority of mentally ill people experience themselves as free actors in every conscious instant of their lives. And you can argue all you want, this intuition isn’t going to budge, buddy.
S: I don’t think this intuition is quite as immutable as you make it out to be. I do agree that this is how it seems on first sight and if you don’t introspect closely enough.
D: You mean to say, if only we were able to introspect more carefully, we’d finally realise that we aren’t free?
S: Yes, although it might take some years of practice. Indeed, all spiritual and religious traditions of Eastern Asia are centred around the basic tenet that your ego is an illusion. There is no single kernel of being that functions as the addressee of all sensory input and as the source of all deliberate action. That which you take to be this centre of your being is itself a sensory event and this is a fact of your phenomenology you can discover by careful observation in meditation. To some people this insight even occurs spontaneously without them ever practicing in a spiritual tradition. To others it occurs under the influence of psychedelics. We even know which brain regions host the correlate activity of ego, the default mode network.
D: Okay, hold up. You’re saying that my ego, which is essentially my sense of being somebody, is an illusion? And that people work towards not feeling like they are somebody anymore?
S: Essentially.
D: Why would anyone want to do this?
S: Because it is a neurosis and a source of tremendous suffering.
D: Feeling like you are somebody causes you suffering?
S: Yes.
D: Oh, boy… And the solution is to just become a passive blop?
S: Well, you wouldn’t be passive, I guarantee you. The whole repertoire of the human situation would still be present: intentions, voluntary actions, thoughts, plans, feelings, you name it. The only difference being that it all just arises and passes away on its own. There may even be a sense of self to help you navigate social encounters, but you don’t identify with it anymore. Indeed, it is part of the illusion that your ego is the one thing that keeps the show up, like a metaphysical plate spinner of sorts. You may think that without it, your whole being would just collapse, but this is not so. Actually, the ego has never exerted this function in the first place and almost all is as before.
D: Why would this be desirable?
S: Look, you’d have to start meditating and see for yourself. Or take the shortcut and drop some acid. Either way, all I can do in this conversation is appeal to your intuitions. Usually, situations in which I have a particularly strong sense of self are those were something goes wrong, usually in moments of social awkwardness or when you’re ashamed of yourself or particularly proud. The sense of self manifests as the struggle to make things different from what they are, to cover up some undesired feelings or to manage your social impression. I don’t know about you, but I find these situations inherently stressful. Moments of egolessness, on the other hand, are moments of flow, moments when I’m so completely engrossed by an interesting book or a beautiful sight that I forget myself. Love is another prime conductor of selflessness. What I’m getting at is that selflessness correlates with a set of experience we usually find inherently valuable. For some people, this state is permanent. But even before you achieve liberation, you can still get a taste of what it feels like.
D: Okay, I get that you dig Buddhism and all, but, honestly, I think I’m more with the existentialist types. In other words, I think that the freedom to act and the responsibility we inherit from it form the fundamental starting point for all other philosophical and ethical considerations. In this regard, you’d be giving up the thing that is at the very centre of the human struggle.
S: So be it. It’s your God-given right to subscribe to whatever philosophical view you deem fit. On the topic of existentialism, though, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there is such a strong emphasis on personal freedom and, consequently, on the self on one hand, and a feeling of metaphysical disgust and alienation on the other.
D: And why would there be a link between the two?
S: Well, because to identify with your ego means to distinguish yourself from the world. Maggus doesn’t have this problem, of course, because for him, there is no world.
D: Witty, aren’t you?
S: Anyway, my point is that the more you identify with your freedom and with yourself, the less you feel at home in this universe. It’s neatly illustrated by the term “thrownness”. You’re thrown into this world like an entity that is fundamentally alien to it. In my picture, however, it would make much more sense to say that you organically grow out of the world, to use a phrase by Alan Watts, that is a little hackneyed by this point, I’ll be the first one to admit.
D: Look, all I’m gonna say is this. If I have to drop acid or spend a decade meditating in a remote mountain monastery before your metaphysics starts to seem plausible to me, then maybe, just maybe, it’s just objectively implausible. I’ve got a cousin who tripped a little too hard in his twenties and now believes in alien obductions. It’s quite possible that if I were to take the same amount of LSD, his views would start to seem less implausible. But does this really speak in favour of his views?
S: Probably not.
D: There you have it.
S: I’m under the impression that you’ll remain unconvinced.
D: Who is under this impression? I thought you didn’t identify with your self.
S: Firstly, yes, I still do identify with my self in most situations, but maybe less so over time. And secondly, you will hardly count the fact that English grammar requires personal pronouns as a sufficient condition for any metaphysical claims, will you?
D: I was joking, relax.
S: Alright.
D: I get the feeling like this dialogue is about to be concluded. Usually, the Buddhist sermon comes right at the end. It’s your little cetero censeo, I’ve noticed.
S: Yeah, you might be right. I actually also wanted to talk about the apparent contradiction of determinism and self-efficacy in therapy and about whether there could ever be a causal model of psychoanalysis, but that might have to wait for another time.
D: Sounds like a good idea. My brain juices are used up.
S: Let’s call it a day then. Have fun with the game.
D: Oh crap, I bet I’ve missed the match already.
S: Wasted your time doing philosophy, I’m afraid.
D: Don’t we all?
S: Yeah yeah, anyway. Take care and see you around!
D: See you, Socrates!
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