Compatibilism: Reconcilin...
Compatibilism: Reconciling Will and Determinism
(34:37) [Music] Theory but it's not dualist in any strong [Music] sense I think the most important feature about Free Will is it's something that should matter so the idea of free will that I think is most important is the one that grounds moral responsibility some of us have it most
(35:10) of us have it some don't small children don't have it the scile the brain damaged other people may lack basic moral competence and that's completely compatible with determinism and with everything we know about the brain the compatible position is tricky although it is in fact the most
(35:34) frequently adopted position among modern philosophers and that's the idea that yes we do live in a deterministic universe as far as we know because there's some debate actually about that but in fact uh that doesn't deny the notion that we have free will in the
(35:52) specific sense of non-c Contra causal Free Will in the specific sense of volition that we do make decisions and those decisions are ours in an interesting sense of being our decisions just because they're influenced and maybe even determined by causal factors it doesn't mean that they're not our
(36:10) decisions If part of those causal factors come from the internal Machinery of the human mind then that's my decision if I I am the one who is making that decision one of the interesting things about Free Will as I Define it is that you can lose it and you can have it
(36:25) taken away from you by other agents who manipulate you and so it's important that Free Will is something you have to protect and you should want to so here you have determinism on one side and here you have libertarian free will on the other and most philosophers by many
(36:43) studies that have been done fall in the middle they would be called compatibilists they think yes confronted with the reality that we live in a completely deterministic Universe uh everything is basically pre-ordained and we can't violate Free Will and yet we tend to live our lives as if we do have
(37:02) free will and we base our social expectations we base our laws we base many policies we base moral judgments on the assumption that we have free will so most of the people who do that who juggle both sides at once would be called compatibilist I think that the essence
(37:22) of compatibilism is some kind of causal structure to to uh the universe in general of course and in particular to the human organism right so how that particular structure causal structure is cached out it's not really particularly relevant it could be in a variet of ways
(37:37) that's why talk about determinism versus random events is actually red herring you have compatibilism anytime you assume that there is a a causal structure a causal web to how the world works and in particular to how human beings work and and to do without that
(37:53) would seem to mean that you were essentially to do without science in a sense science is precisely the job of figuring out the the structure of the cause of the web of cause and effect and separated from things that are actually not causally [Music] connected I'm a compatibilist I think
(38:18) Free Will is compatible with determinism when I talk about free will I'm a practical real life philosopher so I think everything has to relate to the real world that that affects people in the real world not not the Ivory Tower debates and stuff they're disconnected
(38:32) from real issues so for example when when I'm talking about free will I'm looking at like what does it mean in courts of law what does it mean in medical ethics decisions what does it mean in when we're asking about people's consent to things we're talking about
(38:44) their autonomy like did did they were they able to consent to something or were they acting of their free will or were they not what do we mean by that in Practical life what we mean is people don't want someone else making decisions for them people don't want their decisions being
(38:59) blocked by someone else they want to be able to make the decisions they're making and not be interfered with and so that's actually more of a human rights issue right and so you look at that it's it's not something that that people want to be free of all causation is that they
(39:12) want to be free of certain causes that would interfere with their will it would allow them to make their own decision and so people are acting with free will as long as they get to deliberate and think about and analyze and evaluate what decision they're making and get to
(39:25) make the decision they want to make and it's not a question of being free of all those causes it's a question of actually being caused by you like so you are the one causing the action and not someone else or something else that's interfering and intervening and who are
(39:38) you like what you mean when you say you are the cause of a thing you are a collection of knowledge memories skills reasoning skills you know virtues values um preferences and all stuff that all of that stuff is you and if you subtract all that stuff you take it away there's
(39:54) nothing left that is you [Music] compatibl ISS are trying to have their Free Will and eat it too the most common version is you're free to act on your desires okay then where do your desires come from oops I'm not sure about that that must be determined by something
(40:16) else you can't suddenly say act on your desires but your desires control you uh except for the fact that you can resist them or act on them where do the desires come from another version of compatibilism is it's um responsiveness to reason well okay but what makes you
(40:31) responsive to reason something else outside you whereas my view for M Ren is reason is a choice that you make up that's up to you so I think compatibilism which is trying to have your cake and eat it too can't work there are other definitions of Free Will such as that when you make a choice
(40:58) it was completely uncaused by the physical events occurring going back to the Big Bang that's a Preposterous idea and it the reason that people make that mistake I think is they're confusing two very important Notions causation and control control and causation are two
(41:20) different things some things are self-controlled and autonomous car is to some degree self-controlled other things are remote controlled like that drone that I control by running the little Gadget and some things are out of control nothing is controlling them that doesn't mean they're not being caused to
(41:41) move it means that the causes are as good as random a leaf falling out of a tree is not being controlled by the wind it's not being controlled it's just out of control the important idea of free will is that we are fairly autonomous beings and we're capable of self-control
(41:59) and that is a not so much a philosophical idea in a way it's an engineering idea it's a clearly defined idea what is in control of this entity with these degrees of freedom and if we understand Free Will in those terms then I think we can make sense of why moral responsibility
(42:23) depends upon freedom and why freedom in this important sense has nothing to do with the physics of causation in the brain it might have but in fact the physics of causation in the brain is just what you would hope it to be for a brain to have free [Music] will For Me free Will is the illusion
(42:50) that we have the ability to do otherwise we don't actually have that ability but we have this illusion and I think the illusion is not only very useful but I think it's a beautiful illusion and it's a part of who we are as social human beings and I realize after thinking about it a lot
(43:15) that you can only be a compatibilist if you think the two sides are at the same playing level like playing a game of tug-of warar there would be one side and another but thinking about it more I realized they can't be compatible or incompatible so be like asking is Melody compatible
(43:33) with Harmony well maybe yes maybe no who cares that's that's not important I would say it's acompatible you have two different axes you have Melody going this way across time here's a note here's a note here's a note kind of like cause and effect in science but if you
(43:47) flip it this way you have Harmony Harmony is not an individual note it's a stack of notes it means the dma is artificial the dichotomy is artificial there's there's no fight there at all and yet traditionally historically we've been treating it like there's this fight
(44:04) between determinism and free will I do think that determinism versus Free Will is a false dichotomy it's it's a red herring even if in fact we did not live in a deterministic universe even if there was a sort of a element of fundamental Randomness uh in our actions
(44:18) then that wouldn't make our actions free of causal uh influences we just making random when I get up and go to the refrigerator to get some beer because I'm thirsty I don't think of that as a random action at all now it's possible that there are some Quantum random
(44:34) effects at the level of the brain nobody's ever measured them and I think it would be really difficult to measure them but I supposed that they are because after all the brain is in fact a physical system okay so that all only means that occasionally I will do
(44:47) something random that I don't I can't explain that I'm not going to be able to give a causal account of and it's like I just roll the dice my my brain just rolled the dice but that's not uh what we mean by free will we mean the ability of actually making deliberate choices or
(45:01) reflecting on things and then making a choice about certain [Music] [Music] things thing about free will is that if you ask people if they have it they'll say they do and that's because we experience free will we know what it feels like even though we don't have it
(45:29) there's this illusion of Free Will and I think the reason for that is because although we don't get to choose what we want we get to do what we want and so we still have this experience of free will because you are choosing to do what you want you are making that choice that's
(45:47) something you're doing it's just that you couldn't have gone any other way it's like uh John locks analogy of a man in a locked bedroom he's carried and sleeping he wakes up and he wakes up and there's a person next to him who he likes to talk to is a good
(46:05) conversational partner so he decides to stay in the room he doesn't know the door is locked now the point of the analogy is that although he chose this this man he chose to stay in the room clearly that was his choice but what he didn't know was that he couldn't have
(46:19) done any other way the door was locked he just didn't know it in the same way that the man is ignorant of the locked door and so felt like he had the choice we're ignorant of causality and the philosophy surrounding Free Will and so we feel like we have free
(46:33) will if you realize that your behaviors come from your brain and your brain is made of matter and matter OBS the laws of physics then everything that emanates from your brain which includes your choices and decisions and everything else that you do is the result of the laws of physics
(46:54) and hasate the laws of physics since those laws are by and large deterministic then your behaviors and choices are deterministic every event has a cause and the link between the cause and the event is a function of the laws of physics whatever they turn out to be now in so far as they're not
(47:15) purely deterministic that is they to some extent quantum mechanical indeterminacy then that still doesn't give you a Libertarian free will because the movement of an electron in your brain is not something you have control over so whatever happens in your brain it's not something that you have any
(47:33) control over it our minds are what our brains are doing we know this because every time the brain gets influence in some way the Mind changes whether it's by drugs or surgery that's not up for debate anymore so if we accept that we're a part of the universe and the
(47:51) universe is deterministic in the way it evolves then our behavior is determined in the same way that everything else in the natural universe is determined that's what made me become a hard determinist that's all you need to know if you believe in the laws of physics