John Searle - Philosophy of Free Will

john about seven years ago you told me free will was one of the biggest scandals in philosophy is scandal getting any better no it's getting more scandalous i think uh and the scandal is after all these centuries of worrying about it and all these very intelligent people writing and thinking and debating about it it doesn't seem to me we've made any progress on other subjects like consciousness and morality and political rights that seems to me we have made some progress but where free will is concerned we're pretty much back where we was when i started doing philosophy a long time ago and i have to say maybe even generations before that okay well let's discern why i mean if we've made progress in some other areas and not in free will i mean one uh conclusion may be that we're it's it's not a real problem it's it's a problem of definitions or people are screwing things up in a linguistic sense and it's unsolvable yeah let me tell you why it is a such a problem we can give pretty good arguments for saying we don't have free will we're just part of nature like anything else we no more have free will than a plant has free will the problem is that we all have experiences conscious experiences of making up our minds of deciding something where we experience a kind of causal gap i have reasons for voting for a particular candidate in an election reasons to vote against voting for that candidate but all the same at the end of the day i have to make up my mind now here's the amazing fact about that experience that experience only makes sense to me if i assume that i really have a choice that is the experience what i this i call the gap there's a causal gap between the reasons and the decision and the experience of the gap is what gives us the conviction that we have uh free will and we can't now what is peculiar about this you cannot evade that conviction uh you see if i come and think that free will is an illusion all the same i still have to make up my mind i if other things if i think colors are an illusion i can live my life on the assumption that colors are an illusion but if i come to think that free will is an illusion it's no good i still have to exercise my free will see if i go on a restaurant and i order something and the waiter says well what are you going to have it's no good saying waiter i'm a determinist everything is determined i'll just wait and see what happens quesara sarat's an italian restaurant but that won't do because the refusal to exercise free will only makes sense to me if i construe it as an exercise of free will so here's the puzzle we have good arguments thinking we don't have free will yet we have to live our lives on the assumption that we do and we don't see any way to reconcile uh these two but living your life the as if you do is not saying the same thing as as that you really do maybe it is an illusion it could be an illusion you're using very careful words you the experience of it the sense of it the feeling of it that could be an illusion the fact that i experience the gap does not prove the reality yes of free will right no question right but it does make free will different from other problems in other problems if you become convinced that something is an illusion rainbows are an illusion okay it's an illusion i i there isn't really an arch in the sky but if i become convinced that that free will is an illusion then i'm still stuck with the fact that i have to act on the presupposition of free will i give a lecture on this in london i guess i in the audience said well suppose free will was refuted suppose determinism was proved to be true would you accept that result and i said what you're asking me is suppose there was it was proved there's no such thing as free rational decision making would you freely and rationally decide to accept that result that's the paradox i can give you arguments for saying that we have no free will and yet we have to proceed on the assumption as if we had free will all of our rationality all of it presupposes free will by the way console it's a long time ago another example of no progress in the subject kant made this very point that you can't get out of the conviction of free will i want to take you to uh both extremes um because i like exploring extremes to understand so on the one extreme let's assume there is absolute real free will yeah how in principle could that be caused okay yes now that that is the the next step suppose let's examine each thing exactly what would the world be like if determinism were true what would it be like if free will were true right okay if that were the case then there will be events in the universe namely free decisions which i sometimes do not have antecedentally sufficient causes they don't have causes sufficient to fix that particular how is that possible well let's look around in the universe and figure out are there any parts of the universe that are like that where you do not have antecedentally sufficient causes for events and of course there is such a part it's the quantum part quantum mechanics is not deterministic and it's odd to describe that as a part because of course everything is quantum mechanical all the way up from the quarks and the muons up to the larger bodies but here is here's the puzzle then if free will is a reality and the only parts of the universe we know for a fact uh will it lack causally sufficient conditions for the sequence of events that occurs then there must be some connection between free will and quantum mechanics how could that be well uh one of the more at least less likely explanations of consciousness is the quantum mechanical explanation is that consciousness is essentially a quantum mechanical phenomenon let's look at the free will part of it if quantum mechanics is is non-predictable and so if if are things that are random are those free will i mean what which is worse determinism or randomness okay this is a standard objection it's one i used to accept against the quantum mechanical explanation of free will and that is quantum indeterminacy is randomness and free decision-making is not random right okay now formally speaking that commits a fallacy that argument of the fallacy of composition of supposing uh features the little things must be features of the big things that the consciousness is made of but to avoid that you'd have to say something that doesn't sound very plausible you'd have to say the quantum indeterminacy which is random at the submolecular level gives rise to through causal processes in producing consciousness gives rise to a consciousness that inherits the indeterminacy of the quantum level without inheriting the randomness now if that isn't enough to keep a philosopher awake at nights i don't know what it is but that's the best i can come up with it is formally impossible at least in principle i i like that yeah i don't i'm sure i don't agree with it but i like the the idea that they're at least in principle there is something that that can achieve that the other problem with quantum mechanics is that you have it all over and you have to have this problem of composition yeah that that you're adding all these little bits together and somehow that's how you get it you get a big one okay so now here's what you'd have to have i mean if we're going to prove given what we know about physics today if you're going to prove the existence of free will you'd have to have the following there has to be a quantum mechanical explanation of consciousness uh the quantum mechanical explanation of consciousness has to show how consciousness uh inherits the absence of determinacy of the quantum level without inheriting the randomness of the quantum level and you'd have to show how all of the quantum phenomena add up to a single integrated unified sense of consciousness including the consciousness of free will right so you asked me a question about the mystery of free will i gave you three mysteries right right an answer all right now i got to take you to the other extreme and this these are the the hard determinus the world is fully determined there's no indeterminacy and is there free will and there's a big dispute in that group they fully believe in determinism some people say therefore logically there's no free will you got to accept no free will or whatever the moral implications of that so be it there's no free will others come up with so-called compatibilism that we can say the world is fully determined but define free will in a way that that that enables you to survive free will within a determined world okay i'll be brief about compatible it seems to me a cop-out it got the compatibilist says well sure everything's determined it's just let's continue to use the vocabulary of free will we'll continue to uh to make it because nobody's constraining me i'm not in the strategy there are some kinds of determined actions where they're determined by causes inside my brain right and we'll call those free right and that as far as ordinary language usage is concerned that's probably okay that is uh we say i did it of my own free will where of course it may be completely determined so as far as ordinary language is concerned compatibilism is right about ordinary use of these words but if we're talking about with heavy duty philosophy and you want to know what the philosophical conclusion are compatibilism doesn't answer the question because the question is not is there a use of the words where freedom and determinism are compatible the question is are there human actions which are such that the causes of the action were not sufficient to fix that action and that's the hard question so that's that's compatibilism is just an evasion but the but the i i i think i mean we could go on about this but i i they're still around and it doesn't appeal to a lot of people to think well we can still talk the vocabulary of free will even if we have to grant that really it's a form of determinism that com free will is compatible with determinism on this use of the words but the more interesting is what is the world like if determinism is true and there it seems to me it's pretty much what we were brought up to believe it's like before quantum mechanics everything is completely predictable on the basis of causally determinate conditions it's all predictable according to the laws of nature and indeed it would be easy enough to build a a robot i mean technically i i'm easy now it's got source of all sorts of mechanical problems involved but it would be easy to build a robot that had no free will it might say i have free will and it might i argue that it has free will but we know that it has no free will because we programmed it to behave according to a computer program so the world describable without free will is easier to describe than the world with free will the problem is we can't believe it

Channel: Closer To Truth

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Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, John Searle, Philosophy of Free Will, freedom of will, free will, analytic philosophy, determinism, is the future decided, what is free will, do we have free will, problem of free will

Id: 973akk1q5Ws

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020