INR5: Jerry Coyne "You Don't Have Free Will"

my new book by the way is called faith versus fact and if it's not in the lobby its is hit used to say it's available in fine bookstores everywhere I said I want to do something or start with a trope that was mentioned by Lawrence and Richard last night in their conversation when they talked about how resting the blanket of faith from people is often makes them very angry or distressed because their safety blanket their Lynas like blanket of security has been taken away from them and it disturbs them in a way that refusing their politics or their sports affiliation doesn't to do none of us are probably most of us don't need a blanket of faith but what I want to do today is try to rest away from you another blanket of faith that you sort of have but one that's not based on divinity and that is to challenge and that's what I try to do I'm going to try to doing the secretary challenge one of your most deepest held assumption is that a section is so deeply interwoven with your psyche that it's part of your identity and that is the view that you are conscious agents who can make decisions that is that you have free will when you go into the restaurant you can freely choose the chicken lipstick that you can make any decision that is not constrained by the laws of physics now many of you probably don't accept that you don't believe that your robots made out of meat which is what I'm going to try to convince you of today but I'm not going I just want you to think about it okay this view is so instilled in people because we have this either genetically inborn or culturally acquired view that we're at autonomous agents that it's hard to think otherwise but the laws of physics mandate that it is otherwise and so I'll try to convince you of that and at the end and the reason I'm doing this is first of all to try to show you that science actually tells you something different about yourself from what you feel deeply but second of all because there are certain salutary consequences of rejecting the notion of free will for both personal and social reasons that I'll talk about at the end of this talk Samuel Johnson was one of the first people that argue against free will but a lot of famous people including Einstein at the end also rejected free will and I'll talk about that later what I'll do in this talk is first mention what do I mean by free will because the definition when you make an argument like this is crucial second of all I want to prove to you or show you the evidence that belief and the kind of free will I'm going to talk about is pervasive throughout the world then I'll go to the scientific argument that our behavior is absolutely determined by the laws of physics I'll go over some misconceptions about determinism and then I'll talk about this nefarious movement called compatibilism which is if you that even though science dispels the common conception of free will philosophers have rushed into the breach and said well yeah okay we know that's wrong but we have another kind of free will and let me tell you about that and then I'll tell you what's wrong with compatibilism and why it resembles in many ways theology especially of the sophisticated sort and finally the important part the sort of punchline why what the implications are for believing in determinism and rejecting free will for both your own personal behavior and for society in general so it behooves me to start first of all with what I mean by free will and it's pretty much what everybody in their gut feels is free will I use the definition by the biochemist Anthony cash Moore here and Proceedings of the National Academy freewill is defined as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature that is there is something you can do that violates naturalism and the laws of physics and what he means is making decisions so what you're free of in this conception of free will is you're free from naturalism you're free from the laws of physics both deterministic and purely in deterministic and that's what people think of is free well that they can sort of obviate these laws of nature there's an alternative definition which I'm going to reject just on physics grounds but this is another common conception of the view if you could replay the tape of life and put yourself in a situation in which every molecule in the universe was aligned exactly as it was before and you had a decision to make you would make exactly the same decision over and over and over again because it's dependent on the molecules that make you up now the reason I don't like this definition as much as the other one is because there is a fundamental in determinism in physics that is the quantum indeterminism as Lawrence was talking about last night so it is possible at a human behavior is based on the sort of the indeterminate Mullett movement of molecules in your of electrons in your brain and we don't know that it is that maybe if you're putting the same situation again you would make a different decision because then electron would jump the wrong way now that does not mean that you have freewill because your consciousness does not enable you to move the electrons in your brain according to quantum mechanics but so you could think of this as an alternative definition of freewill if quantum indeterminacy does not play a role in your decision that is you would always do the same thing if everything in the universe was considered configured in the same way let me briefly give you a taxonomy of freewill because there's two versions of it those sort of religious spiritual and very common definition the dualistic version which is that free will is independent of determinism over laws of physics it is maybe most stuff like balls rolling down inclines or space shots are indeed available as of physics but there's one thing it doesn't and that's your decisions the way you choose to behave and this is dualism the classic dualism of religion that is that there's a ghost in the machine that the mind and the brain are separate from rather and the mind can actually control what the brain does this of course is the classical notion of free will this is called libertarian or contra causal because it goes against the causes of the laws of physics there's a star by it because it's the most common conception of freewill that people really have when when serve a second of all and we have the view which is the scientifically true wide that determinism and all including the term as a quantum indeterminacy so I want them both together is determinism you could call it naturalism that our behaviors and choices are completely governed by the laws of physics that's all because we are made of molecules and molecules obey the laws of physics and there are some maybe some quantum and determine see there but nobody's ever yet shown that the quantum indeterminacy has an effect on human behavior now once you accept determinism and the vast majority of philosophers do although religionists don't then you can divide yourself into another two classes in the in compatibilist class which means that if you accept the Turman ism of your behavior that you have no choice that what you chose for breakfast today was determined probably yesterday it wasn't something you consciously decided to have then you don't have free will at least not in the sense that I mentioned before but there's this other school of people who are also determinists people like dan Denham yes the vast majority of philosophers say that freewill there's another counter for you well it's not contra Costa freewill we're going to redefine frugal in another way that makes it compatible with determinism and I'll talk about the various forms of gunpowder ballistic freewill which I regard as symmetric tricks basically to try to convince people that you know we're still ok even though we are meat robots ok I'm an incompatible list that doesn't mean I don't feel like I have a choice when I go to the breakfast buffet ok this feeling of agency is so strong I believe it was probably instilled in our genes by natural selection that we cannot overcome it but once we recognize it then there are certain things we can do to improve Society okay well libertarian or dualistic free will is is the mainstay of many religions and if you're religionist or know anything about religion you know that it's true for example one of the Christian one of the explanations that Christians apologists give for the fact that humans do more elite horrible things to each other despite the fact that God is benevolent it shouldn't happen is that God gave us free will and that's where important than all this bad stuff that happens because their free will so we have this sort of explanation for you know human Eve based on freewill absolutely predicates that we have a choice about whether to behave good or ill it's also so that's the second point the first point of course is that you have a choice about whether to accept your Savior if you're a Christian whether or not you Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior if you make that choice you go to heaven if you don't you go to hell no matter how good you've been that again presupposes that you can make a choice free choice between Jesus and not Jesus and finally of course there's a other invidious effects of freewill their view that homosexuality is a choice rather than something that's biological compelled most of us probably accept the latter thing because the evidence is coming in on that front but the view that homosexuality is something a behavior that you can exercise by choice or not do it by choice is at the bottom of the view of Christians can condemnation of homosexuality okay so libertarian free will as I say is a mainstay of not only Christianity but also many religions if religions promulgate a moral code it presupposes that you have the choice whether or not to obey that moral code okay now what's the evidence that most people believe in this kind of libertarian free will and this was a survey that was done by sarkeesian in 2010 he gave students in four countries a choice of thinking about two different kinds of universities you don't really have to read this but in universe a it's a deterministic universe everything you do has been decided beforehand by your genes the environmental influences that impinge upon you and this has been if the word about quantum indeterminacy you could say your choice at breakfast this morning was determined at the Big Bang but that's probably not true because quantum effects intervened in between but if there were not then yeah everything was the result of the Big Bang so if you decide to have french fries at lunch like John does then everything in the universe worked up to that very moment that John decided french fries and he could not have done otherwise then choose those french fries okay that is pure determinism or naturalism as I call it okay and then he presents an alternative universe the students in which everything still goes ticks along in a deterministic way but you have a choice there's one thing that's free from determinism freewill and you have your choice about what to do so Mary I think this is an example of sexism because Mary doesn't like french fries she likes a salad so anyway the Mary goes to luncheon in this universe she doesn't have to choose the French fries she actually has a free choice about whether to choose the french fries of the salad even if the circumstances were exactly the same leading right up to that moment of choice she could have chosen either one then they have two seasons okay what universe do we live in what kind of universe you think we have is it the deterministic one or is it the freewill one and the proportion of people that answer that we live in the freewill universe the universe where Mary could choose a salad instead of french fries in four countries the survey was it's anywhere between 65 and 85 percent okay so for people to say well nobody really believes that you can make a free choice that's for people who are scientists and really recognize that fact but for the average person even many scientists whom I encounter day to day accept the fact that yes we live in a universe where our decisions if nothing else are things that we can really choose between then I ask in universe a which is the purely deterministic one where people have no choice about what they do are people morally responsible for their actions maybe you could raise your hand if you think they are now what do you think sir okay 1 2 3 for free ok well that's interesting because you're going against the grain of much contemporary philosophical thought and any rate the most people agree with those who didn't raise their hands that 63 75 percent said that there is no sorry that the number of people that think that we have no moral responsibility in a deterministic universe is very high okay so that almost all of you here don't believe in more responsibility I can see that because you didn't raise your hands think about that most people think that in a deterministic universe and this is the universe we live in people are not morally responsible for their actions reason being of course because they can't make a choice about how they behave and this is my view and people always ask miss what do you mean you're not morally responsible for actions how could you not be and my answer is well we're responsible for our actions because it if I do something like steal it is the entity known as Jerry Coyne that does the stealing it is the entity notice Jerry Coyne it has to be punished or treated with disapprobation because of that so in that sense you're responsible but I don't consider myself morally responsible because I don't have a choice the very concept at least to me of being morally responsible for doing something means that you could choose to be moral or immoral okay again this is my view I don't expect you accept that I'm just trying to get you to think about it because it's really a very interesting problem okay why do I believe that the universe is deterministic if you're a physicist or naturalist you have to right from the very outset first principles were made of molecules molecules have a the laws of physics therefore everything in ice including the brains that make our decisions have to obey the laws of physics and the laws of physics are by and large deterministic except with maybe a little quantum and determinism thrown in but neither of those may say you can affect the workings of your brain by somehow thinking about so even my first principles alone this should settle the argument about whether what we do is determine at least to me but then there are experiments showing that when we think we made a choice that choice is actually made in your brain well before you think you've made it and it is predictable I'll give you an example of one of those experiments and finally there's this whole there's a book I can't remember who called the illusion of free will in which psychologists that I think at Harvard shows that you can manipulate people's idea of agency very easily through psychological experiments Ouija boards are one where people think that they don't have any agency about how they move the thing around but sure enough it spells out a sentence like you know you're going to die next year or something like that clearly you don't think you have a gence e what you do there's there's brain stimulation experiments where you put an electrode in the guy's brain in the emergency room not in the emergency room in the lab he's conscious and then you stimulate it and the guy goes like this which is an automatic result of stimulating their brain but electricity and then you ask the guy why did you wait for hand oh my god we'll say I was trying to say hi to that nurse over there you know it's confabulation he makes up a reason he cannot conceive of what he did except as a result of a conscious decision you made so the feeling of agency has been bypassed thereby stimulating the brain okay but really the first point here the the first principles of physics should be dispositive in this case we're nothing other as Anthony Cashmore said we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar and I firmly believe that because we are bowls of sugar just very complicated ones and we have nucleotides and proteins as well okay but if you don't believe that here's some I'll give you an example of one of the experiments that was done a couple of years ago but soon at all it's a little bit complicated but I'll just run you through it to show that people's decisions are made before they make them before the conscious of having made them and you can actually predict to a large extent what those decisions are by doing functional magnetic resonance imaging so what you do is you have somebody strapped into an fMRI machine and you show them a series of slides of these pictures and each slide has four numbers in the corners and then a number in the middle and a letter in the middle and those two are the ones you have to pay attention to these slides go by at a rate of one per second so somebody's just sitting there chugging along and they've trained these people and they tell them okay at some point you're going to decide whether you're going to perform an active addition or subtraction on the next two slides you see so you have a decision to make add or subtract it turns out that people do each one or about half the time so here's the slides going by and at this point the person decides he's going to do an act or qi is going to do an act of subtraction when you make that decision you record in your mind the letter on the slide where you at the time that you made that decision in this case it's Z okay so now you know you're going to subtract the next two numbers in the middle that come by one per second so the first one is six sorry can't we do it yeah and two and so you do the subtraction of your mind and it's four in the next slide one of the correct answers is in the corner and now you press a button corresponding to the correct answer which will tell the experiment or what decision you actually made because this is a decision of subtraction so here you press a button and then in the next slide it goes by one second later you put down the letter that was on the screen when you made the decision to add or subtract okay so you made this decision back here three four seconds before to add or subtract and then you record that moment where you made the decision now your brain is wired up so you could actually test well what's going on in the brain up to and after that person made the decision and it turns out the point at which the decision is made is zero seconds on this graph it's the vertical red line brain recording shows the percentage of scanning various parts of the brain shows the percentage of correct answers you could predict before that decision is made based on how because the blood flow to the brain differs on whether you decide to add or subtract and you can see in these cases in the pronucleus and sorry I don't not an expert on brain chemistry the posterior cingulate in the media fronts are poorer you can predict with sixty percent accuracy six seconds before that person is conscious of having made the decision that they were going to subtract rather than add now this one one hundred percent right fMRI is not a really good way to measure what's going on in your brain but this is a highly statistically significant result which means that you can predict whether a person's going to add or subtract six seconds before the conscious of having made that decision so something was going on in their brain that had not yet bubbled up into consciousness and experiment after experiment shows this kind of result sometimes used depending on the experiment you can predict up to seven to ten seconds before somebody is conscious of having made a decision what the decision will be or if you want greater accuracy one second before they're conscious made a decision you can predict with up to 80% accuracy I'm absolutely convinced that if we have better ways of scanning brains and measuring neurons that we could predict stuff like this with nearly 100% accuracy what this means of course is that your conscious will has no effect on what your decision was it was made in your brain beforehand it had not come to consciousness this just substantiates what we already know that what's deterministically bubbling around in our brain is what conditions our behavior okay so if determinism is true and I will maintain that it is our sensitive agency is an illusion it's a very powerful one it's so powerful that I could not even persuade Steven Weinberg a Nobel laureate physicist who's also an atheist that he did not have libertarian free will he said are you trying to tell me I could have I couldn't have done something else I said yeah and he said don't believe it okay if Steven Weinberg can be seduced by the illusion of agency then anybody can so so I don't hope to change people's minds instantly on this but I hope with some cogitation about this and reflection on the nature of your brain and your physical substance that you might be come around to this view and as I'll say there are very definite consequences of this few misconceptions about determinism when I write about this on my website I always get a lot of readers saying this can't be right from reason XY and Z and they misunderstand what determinism entails first of all people think that determinism makes you apathetic or nihilistic if you really think that everything you do is determine by the laws of physics why bother to get out of bed in the morning everything's already been mapped out well for you well first of all your sense of agency is too strong for that look at me I'm a determinist and incompatible listen I'm up here making a lot of effort to give a talk you know why did I get out about this one I you know I thought I hope for persuading people and that was determined by the laws of physics eeeh Wilson has made this step sentence without belief in free will the mind imprisoned by fatalism would slow and deteriorate okay well that's just not borne out by the evidence because there's a lot of philosophers who determinist and also incompatible is to go about their daily lives perfectly fine belief in determinism makes you cheat and act badly you're free from the moral constraints that normally bind other people that believe in free will dan Dennett is one of the exponents of this view and he's going to hear this talk on YouTube and he's going to rip my surface into hamburger but I've got him by his own words here this is his Erasmus lecture where in which he says if neuroscientists say we're already puppets controlled by the environment they're making a big mistake if the idea that free will is an illusion is likely to have profoundly unfortunate social consequences if not rebutted forcefully well I'm sorry but you know free will is an illusion in the sense that I mentioned the unfortunate social consequences I don't believe in I'll talk about that in a minute then it sees it as his brief to rebut these consequences forcefully the way he does it is make up another definition of free will so that we can tell ourselves yeah we do have some kind of free will and so we're not going to be thieves and rapists and killers and cheaters and things like that Paul Davies many may know him he's a physicist who has definite sympathies for theism has even said that even if we know that free will of the nature I said is is fiction it's a fiction worth maintaining if free will really is an illusion let's keep it okay now this does this remind you something like religion or God and all this I'll try to show you there's a lot of parallels between the people that keep trying to tell you you have free will despite determinism and theists like Paul Davies another misconception determinism gives anybody excuse to do anything and nobody is culpable and be punished because we don't have a choice about what we do here's legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen since all behavior is caused by our brains wouldn't this mean that all behavior could potentially be excused no that's not the way it is you don't have a choice about what you do but if you do something wrong there are very good reasons why society should punish you if you do something right there very good reasons why society should blog you because we are susceptible to that kind of social or program or just program determinism means that everything is predictable but it doesn't seem like that in our lives right I mean we seem to be buffeted by a series of psychological environmental accidents well aside from quantum indeterminacy that's just the way it is everything is predictable except that we don't have the kind of knowledge we need to predict what we're going to do 20 years from now that we're required knowing basically the position of every molecule and every person we're going to interact with all the nature of the weather and all kinds of stuff and we don't have that kind of information so on a practical level things are unpredictable on a conceptual level with the exception of quantum mechanics which is fundamentally in particularly yeah everything we do for the rest of our lives could be predicted if you had perfect knowledge and we would all our decisions could be read out the sermon is Amin's it's useless to try to change people's minds this is the biggest misconception we have about free well if we're determined and what good is it to try to persuade people to change their minds what good is it for me to stand up here and try to get you to accept my view of free will well this is a misconception because part of what builds your brain is what comes in from the environment the example like these is you have a nice friendly dog that you're given and then every time it comes up to you kick it right what's going to happen the dog is going to learn through rewiring of its neurons that you are a person to be avoided okay it's the same with other human beings we are susceptible to the influences of other people punishment reward love etc that does not mean that we're not determined what it means is that part of the influences that physically impinge on our neurons and make us behave is our environment okay and so yes it is useful to try to change people's minds now our even our very desire to change people's minds the fact that I'm up here trying to do this it's determined by hit my own you know physical Constitution and environment that is the infinite regress and this sort of annoying thing about determinism it's Turtles all the way down and here's a you know is there any point trying to this is a common room or website is there any point in trying to improve society when things are simply fated to happen and how can you deter people if you punishing others if there's no free will well this is again a fundamental misconception of what determinism says you can change people's minds and you can change other people's minds by what you do to other people if you know that if you run a stop sign you're going to be executed you better believe that people would stop running stop signs okay okay now we get to the doctrine of compatibilism which is the view that all your behaviors really are determined by your genes and environments because compatible lists are determinists like the rest of us naturalist and at the time and they'll admit including my friend Dan Dennett that you could not have chosen otherwise than what you did at any given moment you still have a form of free will okay and then there are various Verizon compatibilism which are incompatible with each other and I'll give you some examples of how they manage to rescue the concept their free will I don't find any of these attempts to rescue it very convincing first of all you have free will if you don't make your decision under a completely coercive circumstances in other words if someone puts a gun to your head and says give me your wallet you're not acting under free will but if you give some of your wallet and you don't have a gun to your head then you're acting under free will okay so that's so that's the definite of free will that your coerce the problem with it people don't realize when they Adam berate this version of free will is that your brain is exactly as coercive as if somebody with a gun because it tells you exactly what you're going to do and remember when you have a gun to your head and say your money or your life you have a choice okay you can either die or you can give him your money remember they'll Jack Benny skit when they said your money or your life and he he just sat there cogitating for all on the bandits said well hurry up but you said I'm thinking I'm thinking he was a notorious cheapskate of course I believe Sam Hara said this there isn't anything materially more coercive about giving money at gunpoint than drinking milk when you're thirsty and if you think about it he's absolutely right your brain is making you drink milk and when you're thirsty and you don't have a choice about that you don't have any more choice about that then you do about giving you a wallet so the thief is holding a gun to your head that's compatible as in version 1 version 2 this is Dan dents version of what free will is yeah we're all determined but the human brain is very complicated and we take in all these inputs before we cogitate which is his word for run the computer program in our neurons it's deterministic to come out with an output which is a decision so we're basically very complicated animals much more complicated than something like a planarian and that fact that all these things have to be weighed by neurological programs constitutes freewill I don't understand you know what's free about this or why it's any different from what acro does or squirrel or any other animal that's able to weigh factors the fact is that a brain is a complicated computer I mean that's a simplification but it has evolved to run programs and weigh various factors even without our knowing about it so I don't consider this I mean what's free about this it's no more free it just means that a computer program is more complicated than that a Paramecium just playing computer does exactly this you put in the moves it considers all the possible ramifications of what could happen like you do when you're worried about your future behavior and then it makes move okay this is a computer a chess-playing computer have free will most people would say no where's the freedom the output is still deterministic it's absolutely predictable okay it's compatibilism three free will is the view that if circumstances have been slightly different you could have made a different decision and acted on it I don't really understand this one at all because everybody agrees of this including libertarians if things weren't the same you're not going to act the same so what does that mean but you know free will free will has to do with being an identical circumstances and then seeing if you could have decided differently from what you did and another view of compatibilism which is also very common and exposed lead and generative freeware represents the decisions people make when they are not mentally it is if you were one of the people one of those nice people who is persuaded by moral suasion if people tell you shouldn't steal you believe them and then you don't steal then that's free will whereas the miscreants the pathological people who don't aren't persuaded by that way they don't have free will I find this unconvincing as well because even whether you're persuaded by moral suasion or not is determined whether you're not the other kind of person who accepts other people's notions of morality is something that you have no control over more of and if you don't that's something you don't have any control over either so what's free about this there's nothing free and that's the word you got to keep concentrating on when you say that this is a form of free will what really is the freedom here Sam here okay anyway I'll get on the Sam in a minute but what I'm trying to say is first of all the debate between compatible lists the fact that we have some other kind of free will and incompatible lists like myself that say that the real important version of free will is the libertarian one is a semantic arguing it's an argument about what free will means we're all in agreement that we're determinists that were naturalist that there is no ghost in the machine that at any moment except for quantum indeterminacy we can only do what we are programmed to do by our environment our genes so we're all agreement on scientific facts but we're in this agreement with is what we call freewill and it's a semantic argument why is it important to deal with this semantic argument is because the condition the traditional and ubiquitous notion of free will is the libertarian one not these compatibilist ones if you went to somebody on the street or to a religionist and said you know is your notion of free will that you know you're you're a complex organism and and even though you can only give one output your inputs are complicated they say hell no yeah it's that I could have chosen two this crisis when I say or not Sam Harris I think is you know he's very eloquent much more eloquent than I is that the real problem is people feel that they are the authors of their cuts and actions and then this is the reason why there is a problem of free will worth talking about we feel we are free and so that's the notion of free will that we need to deal with because it's the notion that is refuted by the scientific facts Sam also dismissed compatibilism I love this statement as he characterizes as a puppet is free as long as he loves his strings okay in other words we're not free to move anywhere we want but we just have to say that those strings constitute some kind of free will for us okay why do people ask why do people even espouse compatibilism why isn't it more important to recognize that our behaviors are determined by laws and physics and then to play these semantics word games with philosophies that that are and you just use the it'sh pill poll on uselessly corporations about trivial things why do they do this it's because most people feel and then it is certainly made this very clear as well as others I don't mean to be it on Dan although he has beaten our making any time so I'm exercising which I shouldn't with free will which is retribution we certainly don't want people disabling them with bad disabling themselves with bad science so I think this is a very serious issue in other words we don't want people to know that their behaviors are all determined because they're going to go wild on the streets and many many people have said this this is very similar to religion we don't want people to know there's no god I call it the little people argument you know we know better because we're smart and we're scientific and stuff but you know you got to let the people have their religion because if they don't believe in God they're going to becoming world same thing with free will if you don't think you have free will of a sort then God knows what's going to happen to the fabric of society this I believe of compatibilist will deny is the root cause for philosophers trying to tell us that we have other kinds of free will and in fact this is a quote from Dan which says it explicitly this reminds me of the anecdote I think Richard has probably told this about the wife of the Bishop of Worcester back in the 19th century when she was told that mr. Darwin had shown that evolution was true and that we were humans were descended from apes and this is maybe apocryphal but the Bishop of Worcester wife is supposed to say my dear descended from the apes let us hope it is not true but if it is let us pray it will not become generally known this is what I think people think about determinism and free well what the compatible is do yeah we're all determined but listen let's sweep that under the rug okay because here's a shiny new version of free will that you really have and let's just forget about this nasty determinism the problem is that determinism has very serious consequences for our view of how we punish and reward people I'll get to that very shortly now some more retributive bashing of compatible lists because I think it really is a unproductive useless detour in philosophy and psychology to try to infect some version of free will that is not really free but makes us feel good about ourselves it resembles theology in many ways first of all it really earns and compatibles redefine notions that have been long-held sophisticated theologians tell us God isn't really what we thought it's not an old man in the sky that listen to your purse it's a ground of being or you know it's everything I mean the definitions go on forever same thing with free will it's not the libertarian version that everybody believed in or religious believe in is something new and here's the one I'm going to offer you in both areas I believe definitions are concocted post facto to comport with an emotional commitment or a belief about social consequences so you know do sophisticated ones like David Bentley Hart will say well God is not what you think he's something else and here's the definition that I've come up with it comports with what you your emotional commitment same thing with compatibilism people think well you know we still got to have free will this is my take on it okay and philosophers are really going to get mad at this but I'm going to do some psychologizing they think we still have to have freewill because it's important for the social fabric so therefore let me think of a definition of free will that cannot be refuted scientifically same thing with God in both cases it's dangerous for the public to know the truth as Paul Davis said if we knew that free will wasn't true there'd be bad things that happen so we got to let them maintain this fiction the little-people argument that also goes for God some of the most sophisticated theologians who barely believe in God will still claim that we should not tell people that you know even about my notion of God or that there is no God because they're going to go well both theologians and compatibilist set slight humans as special many compatible to say it's only homeless sapiens that has free will no other animal does it's hard to make that argument but they do do that it's the same thing with theologians only humans are made in God's image and only humans are capable of apprehending and worshipping God there are as many versions of compatibilism as there are conceptions of God and finally both cases on both theologians and philosophers who are compatible it's dismissed science in favor of philosophy they privilege philosophy and say that the notion of our behavior and being determined or not it's not something that scientists should mess with there's another statement with by Dan are we free neuroscience gives the wrong answer this is if we have nothing to say about human behavior it's up to the philosophers to tell us whether we have free will or not I finally disagree with that okay so my view is let's forget about these semantic arguments let's emphasize not you know let's emphasize the determinism that's behind all our actions why is that good to do that let's forget about all the semantics let's forget about you know sweeping determiners onto the rug determinism should be flowing like a banner because it is true that's the one thing that we need to know I doubt that there's anybody in this room that would claim that there is anything more to human behavior than the motions of the molecules that constitute our bodies because most of us are not naturalist second of all if you believe in determinism or naturalism it gets rid of this kind of envy is infectious free well that theists believe in you don't have a choice whether you really accept Jesus as a savior there's no free will that makes excuses immoral actions of humans because God vouchsafed is this and you can't blame gays for making a choice because they have no choice to make I mean if you talk to gay people almost all of them will tell you I didn't make a choice I've always felt this way which comports precisely with you know the fact that it is determined and finally on what I'll finish with is determinism has serious implications for the criminal justice system as well as for our notions of moral responsibility and personal behavior and I think that the implications are good wins it is I don't think that we're going to become lay in bed all day or go wild in the streets if we accept this notion of naturalism because our feeling of agency is so strong we cannot overcome it we can accept determinism on intellectual level and just by doing that we can wreak useful useful results in both our personal lives and for society and large personal advantages determinism and I realized this about a month ago when I was thinking about one of my old girlfriends and she was the one that got away you know it would have been nice if it worked out you know we'd be married blah blah and then I realized well you know there was no way I couldn't have worked it could have worked out because the laws of physics determined that so why am i beating myself up about this when it could not have happened otherwise now granted it's hard to realize that right it's hard to avoid the self-recrimination but if you in really internalize that you can realize that it it gets away it takes away a certain amount of guilt feelings from you you don't have to beat yourself up over it I should have done this instead of that and it would have been different because you could not have done this instead of that I mean you can feel sorry about what happened you can feel you know upset like I did about the one that got away but at least it eliminates a certain amount of you know personal recrimination and self beating up it enables you to forgive yourself a little bit more the most important implications for this are its effect on crime and punishment because once we realize that criminals are do not have a choice about their act or that somebody does something good does not have a choice about their act I mean I like Bill Gates he does good stuff but he didn't Bill Gates didn't like a choice about whether he gave 50 million dollars to help bring fresh water Africa that was in his genes in his environment that's not to say that he shouldn't be praised for that of course because when you praise somebody they tend to do more they like that and they can do more of the good stuff that's deterministic by the way that's one of the fallacies that were overcome so crime and punishment and the criminal justice system already recognizes that there is a kind of criminality which should be excused that based on whether you're in sound mind when you did the crime or whether you're insane so they are people already recognize that there was a degree of culpability for criminals and they do something but not always here's Cecil Clayton it was executed recently in Missouri if ever there was a case for not killing somebody for committing a crime and Cecil Clayton who had a sawmill I fist think of as a son little accident he lost one-fifth of his temporal lobe you can see the scan of his brain there's a big hole and when this happened he became socially irresponsible he became somewhat of a sociopath and he committed a murder okay normally you'd say well he had no choice about this because his brain made him do otherwise now when you think about that remember this is true of every criminal i just sees a Clayton they executed him why did they execute him even though they recognized that he was formerly mentally retarded and that he was a sociopath they said he understood why he did wrong people told them you did wrong he said yeah I guess I did so they killed him for that okay that is the exculpatory circumstances but we have to realize that every criminal has note that no criminal has a choice about what they do when they do the crime it is just the result of their genes in their environment now this does not mean that we shouldn't punish people for doing bad things even under the rule determinism first of all we need to keep people that do bad things out of society either by putting you in jails or hospitals because people that do bad things tend to do bad things again so we need to get them out of society before they do further harm so this is okay undetermined ISM and another thing is deterrence the pterence is a very real thing we know it works except in the case of capital punishment and so by punishing people you're setting a lesson for other people which will affect their brains deterministically saying I better not do this because this could happen to me people and what if there's anything built into us by natural selection it's the instinct for self-preservation which is a proxy for reproduction so yeah deterrence is okay for punish and you can punish people for rehabilitation purposes I mean if you consider punishment this is ultimately what we really should do if we could treat criminals properly is to treat them so that they wouldn't go ahead and do what they do again now the advantage of all this is that each of these can be scientifically tested in principle we could say how much jail time is really good to keep to deter other people how do you rehabilitate people all these are subject to experiments and tests grant they're hard to do we don't have a lot of money but at least punishing people on these three bases is something that is warranted by determinism and is justified by the belief that criminals had no choice in what they did you still have to put them away for various reasons what is not justified by determinism is punishment based on retribution because retribution killing somebody for what they did I for an eye a tooth for tooth implicitly assumes that people had a choice about what they did the way you have attributed punishment you're paying them back from making the wrong choice one of the retribution is capital punishment it is not justifiable under a deterministic view unless it acted as a deterrent and even and it doesn't so you know killing somebody for retribution is not justifiable and there's something else which is pointed out by the philosopher Greg Caruso it's Stoneybrook that the view of determinism gets rid of this invidious Republican spurred view called the just world belief which is that people deserve what they get if you're poor you deserve it we're not going to help you up with your bootstraps because you know you made the choice to be poor you know and the just world belief is that people rise or fall to a little society because they've made choices that are really good or bad we know that that is not true so once you accept the terminus and then you know that you have to have more empathy for people because they are purely molecular products of their background somebody this poor is not poor by choice they're poor by their environment of their genes so I'll finish off with two modest proposals about free will and then a few excuse about experiments that could be done to help answer this question first of all get rid of the notion of free will okay if your naturalist say my decision was caused by internal forces that I did not understand okay sometimes you cannot understand right like if you decide to avoid if your dog you decide to avoid being kicked the dog can't understand that but we could if we were the ones main kick second of all get rid of the notion of moral responsibility because that comes along with the baggage of being able to have chosen to behave morally or and morally call people responsible if you will do not call them morally responsible unless you're very careful about what you mean by moral responsibility and I'll finish with very interesting questions that remain these questions fall in the realm of both philosophy because there is a role for philosophy in this endeavor it's just that they don't have the hegemony over the whole field first of all you know what are the effects of a deterministic view upon punishment of reward how should we take on board the view that criminals cannot choose to behave good or ill in terms of our philosophy of how we reward and punish people second of all what about this moral responsibility thing what does it mean if it means something beyond you had a choice about to behave good or ill what what is the notion of that more responsibility and then the scientific questions how far ahead can we predict decisions before they're made consciously this will involve brain scanning maybe of individual neurons and of course a greater the last question the greater understanding of the our mental and genetic factors that impinge on our behavior and I'm absolutely sure that in the coming decades we'll be able to predict what people do a lot longer and with more accuracy than we did before and since I'm an evolutionary biologist the last question I want to bring up is this we have this feeling of agency when you go to lunch and you decide what you're going to pick out of those silver trays there's nothing stronger than you're feeling like I'm going to pass on these tiny noodles because I want the chicken or you know I should have a salad you know but but that's not true and whether or not you guys are going to have a salad at lunch has already been determined before you get up walk out of this store you don't know it but it's down there in your brains now it could be influence on your way to the lunch buffet like somebody could say hey Joe you know look at that great salad over there that's it that's determinism okay and I could have picked your choice but by the time you get to that soluble whether or not you take it it's already in your brain you just don't know it yet why do we have this feeling of agency is it learning Moran and Larry you're here we yeah there is okay he's a friend of mine he would call it an Epiphone on because he doesn't really believe in that natural selection is powerful and he has some good things to say about that is as powerful as you think of this but I think there's a case to be made at least that our feeling that we can make choices is a result of natural selection and I'll just throw out at the end three theories on why natural selection could have given us this illusory feeling that we could make choices the first of all is it could have been a result of selection or a brain to live harmoniously with others if we feel that we are agents and can make choices then we can also feel that other people are agents that can make choices and that Nexus could enable people to live more harmoniously in small groups these are all purely speculative I don't even know how to test them second of all it tells our brains whether we're doing something to ourselves or whether somebody else is doing it to others so if you also you feel your hand shaking like that you want to know whether somebody has your hand and is shaking it or whether you've got palsy or a twitch or something I mean that is drastically important for your survival to know if something that is some feeling you have isn't being done by somebody else or is actually originating with you and so maybe the feeling of agency evolved to promote this and then my favorite theory is this you try harder to achieve things if you have agency because those people who try hard to achieve things left more offspring and if the feeling of agency promoted that because we think wow you know if I do that I'm making a choice here and well of other than the natural selection could build into us the feeling that we really do are the harbingers of our fate and I don't know the answer to these questions I doubt that we ever will I don't even know if we'll know that agency is a result of natural selection unless we somehow find agency genes are able to sequence them and look for the natural selection and I'll finish with the quote from Albert Einstein since he was the smartest man in the world whatever he says has got to be correct at least this is what religious people believe they're always quoting Einstein saying you know he believed that God and since he was the smartest man in the world there must be a God well here's Einsteins belief in free will if the moon in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth were gifted with self-consciousness it would be fully convinced that it was travelling in its way and its own accord so at a being endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence watching that doesn't mean he believed in that being watching man is doing smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will thank you

Channel: BillJ Castleman

Views: 72,021

Rating: 4.6533866 out of 5

Keywords: Jerry Coyne, Determinism, Free Will, INR5, Imagine No Religion 5, Skeptiism

Id: Ca7i-D4ddaw

Length: 51min 53sec (3113 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/TrottingTortoise]

I've found that Harris' position was far, far stronger. In fact, reading that exchange completely undermined my opinion of Dennett.'

/r/philosophy everyone

[u/somanyopinions]

He ends by telling us we "shouldn't beat ourselves up about something that is predetermined" implying we could decide to feel otherwise and voiding any value we might have drawn from the lecture.

It's like that test you do in grade school where the first instruction is "read all the instructions before starting" and the last is "don't follow any of the preceding instructions but the first".

[u/completely-ineffable]

The r/phil thread

[u/-jute-]

I will use my free will to contest that statement.

[u/TrottingTortoise]

Lord this comment merits my posting again in here:

Oh, no, please don't understate my position -- compatibilism itself is the derail. As in, it completely derails a simple discussion that would otherwise end in, "no, of course free will doesn't exist".

[u/rundmcescher]

The only thing worse than the video is the comment section

[u/Obi_Kwiet]

Oh boy. Free will. Anytime that subject gets raised, people immediately start talking about randomness and determinism with out stopping think about what exactly the will is and what it would mean for it to be free. No need to make sure we are talking about meaningful, well developed concepts before we argue about whether they exist or not.

Being a Calvinist is a riot.

[u/Son_of_Sophroniscus]

Okay, so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins_Award

Is Dawk trying to upstage the Dekes? Also,

Jerry Coyne

Who?

[u/mrsamsa]

One of the major proponents for giving up the concept of free will was B.F. Skinner (read any of his books, but primarily Beyond Freedom and Dignity). The explanation of behavior from the behaviorist perspective (similar to Coyne) is that behavior is determined by the genes and the environment (specifically one's history of reinforcement), and for their to be a science of behavior, it must be compatible with natural laws. Skinner was a scientist, and developed his theories based upon strong empirical evidence (not philosophical arguments). The inductive nature of his science (a natural science of behavior) led to the dismissal of free will for determinism. There are now almost 80 years of research supporting this notion from a purely scientific perspective, all pointing to the absence of free will and a deterministic view of behavior.

Skinner would not be happy at all to be compared to Coyne, or for it to be suggested that he wasn't doing philosophy. "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" was an entirely philosophical work, as he was laying the foundations for radical behaviorism and the philosophical principles he thought a science of behavior needed to rest upon. He probably wouldn't be happy with his work being used to reject free will either.