Flickers of Freedom

Thanks!

It's been really wonderful serving as featured author these past few weeks, and I wanted to conclude just by thanking all of the people who made this possible. First, a huge thank you to Thomas Nadelhoffer for creating this whole amazing series. Then, many thanks to all the people who pitched in with comments or questions. I really learned a huge amount from discussing these issues with you, and I'm sure my subsequent work will be shaped in all sorts of ways by your input. 

Finally, I am incredibly grateful to all of the extraordinary coauthors who worked with me on the papers discussed here. They really drove this research and provided most of the important ideas at the hearts of the papers. I thought it might be helpful to wrap up just by listing them all. 

 

George Newman

What Explains the Abstract/Concrete Effect?

One of the most salient and noteworthy facts about the question of free will is that people find it confusing. Just try teaching a course on the topic, and you will immediately notice that there is something drawing students toward incompatibilism but that there is also something drawing them toward compatibilism. This is part of what gives the question its enduring appeal and makes it so difficult to resolve. 

Research on the cognitive science of people's free will intuitions should give us some insight into this confusion. Such research should not simply say that people are incompatibilists, or that they are compatibilists; it should give us a better sense of what is drawing people in these conflicting directions. 

 

In our early work on this topic, Shaun Nichols and I made an initial attempt to address this puzzle. We provided evidence that people are drawn in different directions depending on whether they are thinking about the issue abstractly or concretely. When people are thinking in the abstract about a deterministic universe, they tend to be more drawn to incompatibilism. However, when people are thinking concretely about specific individual agents within such a universe, they tend to be more drawn to compatibilism.

 

But of course, this just leaves us with a new question. Why do people's intuitions differ depending on whether they think about the issue in the abstract or in the concrete? 

 

As some of you may know, this deeper question has been the site of some recent tumult. Our original paper proposed an explanation that involved the impact of concreteness on people's affective reactions, but unfortunately for us, this explanation was later refuted in two very impressive papers by Florian Cova and colleagues and by Florian Cova and Adam Feltz. 

 

But that just leaves us back where we started. We still need some kind of explanation for the abstract/concrete effect. I thought it might be helpful to propose a new explanation here. 

Causal Determinism and Going with the Flow

I have been suggesting that people don't think that mental states can just straightforwardly cause human action, but surely people do recognize that mental states play some role in our actions. So how exactly do people understand the relationship between our beliefs, desires, emotions, etc. and the actions we choose to perform?

To begin with, let's imagine an agent whose beliefs, desires and emotions are drawing her to perform some specific action. I want to suggest that people think it would be possible for this agent to proceed in either of two ways. 

 

One option would be just to passively allow herself to be controlled by her mental states. Drawing on previous work by Queens of the Stone Age (2003), we might refer to this first option as going with the flow. 

 

Another option would be to respond more actively. Instead of just allowing herself to be controlled by her mental states, she could resist the pull of these mental states and freely decide to do something else instead. 

 

Now, you might be thinking: "I can certainly imagine cases in which it feels like an agent is choosing that second option, but in such cases, the agent's actions are still caused by mental states. Basically, what is happening is that certain mental states are causing the agent to act in a way that seems to go against other mental states." Fair enough. But what I want to suggest is that this is not the way people ordinarily make sense of such cases. On the contrary, people's ordinary conception is that such cases involve an element that is fundamentally different on a metaphysical level. The agent, people believe, has a contracausal power to reject the direction her mental states are proposing and simply do something else instead. 

Causal Determinism and the Self

Let's turn now to a topic that is near and dear to many readers around here. We have been discussing some findings from recent research on the way people ordinarily conceptualize the self. So then, what can this research teach us about the relationship between ordinary conception of self and causal determinism?

We can begin by stating the obvious. Human beings have mental states, and these states cause certain outcomes. For example, you might have a particular emotion, and this emotion might cause you (perhaps involuntarily) to have a facial expression. 

 

A question now arises about how to make sense of free action. One possible view would be that free action should be understood in more or less this same way. One might think: 'Basically, the self is just a collection of mental states. When you perform a free action, what happens is that your beliefs, desires, values, etc. interact in some way that causes a particular outcome. Of course, the causal process that generate such actions will be enormously more complex than the process at work in going from emotions to facial expressions, but at a metaphysical level, it is still fundamentally the same sort of thing.'

 

In my view, existing experimental research suggests that people do not hold this sort of view. Indeed, I will argue that people are drawn to a deeply different conception. On this conception, the self is not just a collection of mental states. Hence, free decisions are not best understood as being caused by mental states. In fact, free decisions are not caused by any prior state or event at all. 

Personal Identity and the True Self

Alas, my reign as official featured author came to an end on Sunday, but I thought I'd put up a couple of further posts just to round out the discussion of these issues. (Other people should definitely feel free to put up their own posts as well.) This one is on personal identity.  

To begin with, imagine that tomorrow you get into an accident that results in some changes to your body and to your brain. The next day, there is a person lying in a hospital bed who has some of the properties you have now but lacks others. So then, is that person actually you?

 

The 'psychological' approach to personal identity says that the answer depends on something about your mind. Specifically, it depends on whether certain aspects of the mind  of the person after accident shows the right kind of continuity with the mind you have right now. 

 

But now we immediately face a further question. Which aspect of the mind does personal identity depend on? Putting aside for the moment the question as to what it means for there to be continuity, we can simply ask which thing it is that has to be continuous.

 

If we assume that the mind is best understood as a collection of mental states, the answer to this question might seem pretty obvious. Right now, you have a bunch of different mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, memories, etc.). Then, if we want to know whether some person who will exist in the future is psychologically continuous with you, what we need to ask is whether or not there is a continuity in these various mental states. 

 

If you have been following along with this series of posts so far, you can probably guess what is coming next. I want to suggest that people do not ordinarily think of the mind in this way. People don't simply think of your mind as a collection of mental states. Instead, they think of you as having an essence, your true self. Thus, your personal identity is not just a matter of continuity in mental states; it is a matter of continuity in your true self.

Asymmetric Freedom, or True Self?

Ok everyone, third substantive post, coming right at ya! This one is about moral responsibility. 

Consider two cases: 

 

(1) Fred says something mean to Jane. He was feeling so upset that he couldn't have done otherwise. 

 

(2) Fred says something nice to Jane. He was feeling so overcome by compassion that he couldn't have done otherwise. 

 

When it comes to moral responsibility, these two cases seem different. In case (1), Fred's emotion is mitigating. That is, we give him less blame in this case than we would have if he had just calmly and deliberately decided to say something mean. But in case (2), nothing parallel occurs. Even though Fred completely couldn't help but say something nice, we still give him full praise for what he has done. 

True Self and Essentialism

Ok, here comes my second substantive post. In the last one, I suggested that philosophers have often tried to understand the notion of a true self using a framework derived from philosophy of mind. This framework says that people have various mental states and that these states can be characterized in terms of their type and their content. The idea, then, is that we can somehow spell out the notion of an agent having a true self in terms of the type and content of that agent's mental states. 

In my view, this strategy is a mistaken one. We should not try to do a better job of working out the details of a theory along these lines. Rather, we should stop looking to that sort of framework and turn to a different one entirely. What sort of framework might do the job? The suggestion I want to make now is that we might do well to look to theories of essentialism. 

The True Self and Reflective Endorsement

Hello again! Here comes my first substantive post, starting in with the concept of a 'true self.' It's possible that some of you will already be familiar with the ideas discussed in this one, but if you get bored with this first post, I hope I can rekindle on your interest with the next one. Anyway, here goes...

A lot of important work on the notion of a true self has been shaped in various ways by Harry Frankfurt's very intriguing example of the unwilling addict. Here is the basic idea:

Suppose that Mark is a heroin addict and has a very strong desire to get another hit of heroin. Now suppose that Mark also has the belief that doing heroin is deeply wrong. As a result, he wishes that he did not have this desire. He hates this aspect of himself and wants nothing more than to get clean and start a very different kind of life. 

Mark is experiencing an inner conflict, but many people have the intuition that the two sides of this conflict are not simply on a par. Instead, it seems that Mark's true self is the part calling him to get clean and that if he continues using heroin, he will be betraying his own true self. 

 

This strikes me as a very important fact, which reveals something fundamental about our understanding of the self. But what exactly does it reveal? If we start out with the assumption that the self is basically a collection of mental states, we will be immediately drawn to explain this intuition in terms of facts about the type and content of these states (desires, beliefs, second-order desires, emotions, etc.). 

 

Philosophers who take this approach may then be tempted to spell out the intuition that Mark's true self is calling him to get clean in terms of the fact that his second-order desires go in that direction, or that his beliefs do, or in some other way in terms of the type of mental state that is drawing him in this direction as opposed to the other. 

 

This whole approach seems to me to be mistaken. The thing that makes us regard this aspect of his self as the true self is, I think, completely unrelated to facts about which type of mental state is pulling him in which direction. To see this, consider a different case:

Suppose that Mark is gay and has a very strong desire to be with another man. Now suppose that Mark also has the belief that homosexuality is deeply wrong. As a result, he wishes that he did not have this desire. He hates this aspect of himself and wants nothing more than to fall in love with a woman and start a very different kind of life. 

In this latter case, our experimental studies show that most liberals have exactly the opposite sort of intuition. They conclude that Mark's true self lies in precisely the aspect of him that he reflectively rejects. Then they think that if he acts on the aspect of his self that he reflectively endorses, he will be betraying his own true self. 

 

In light of this result and others like it, we are coming to think that the notions of reflective endorsement, second-order desire, etc. just don't have anything to do with people's conception of the true self. Instead, this conception seems to be deeply tied to issues of value. On this hypothesis, the difference between the two cases comes down to something extraordinarily simple. It is that Mark's desire for heroin is bad whereas Mark's desire to be with another man is good.

 

To really spell out this idea in a broader philosophical framework, we are going to need to switch away from this emphasis on thinking of the agent's various mental states and instead adopt an approach that allows us to see why issues of value might be absolutely central here. But for that, we will have to wait till the next post!

Agency and the Self

Hello Flickerers! I am really grateful to Thomas for putting together this wonderful series and for inviting me to be one of the participants. In my actual posts, I'll be trying to lay out a particular view about people's ordinary understanding of agency and its relationship to philosophical theories, but I thought it might be a good idea to start out just by giving a few brief hints about the puzzle I'll be taking on and the strategy I'll pursue for resolving it.

Reigniting the Torch

Dear Flickerers, 

It has been a while since we last had a Featured Author. After a bit of a hiatus, I am happy to say that it is now time to relaunch the program (see the upcoming schedule below)! First up, is our own Joshua Knobe--Professor of Cognitive Science and Philosophy at Yale University. Here is what he has to say about himself over on his homepage:

I am an experimental philosopher, appointed in both the Program in Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy. Most of my work involves using the kinds of experimental methods associated with cognitive science to address the kinds of questions associated with philosophy. 

A lot of my recent research has been concerned with the impact of people’s moral judgments on their intuitions about questions that might initially appear to be entirely independent of morality (questions about intention, causation, etc.). It has often been suggested that people’s basic approach to thinking about such questions is best understood as being something like a scientific theory. My co-authors and I have offered a somewhat different view, according to which people’s ordinary way of understanding the world is actually infused through and through with moral considerations.

For an overview of this research program as a whole, the best place to look is probably the paper Person as Scientist, Person as Moralist. (Or, if you are looking for something quicker and more entertaining, you could try this funny video.)

Josh has worked on a wide range of issues ranging from free will and intentional action to consciousness and the self, to name a few.  He has also edited several important volumes on experimental philosophy (see the books to the left) and he runs The Experimental Philosophy Page (see here). If you want to watch an interesting recent discussion with Josh you can find him talking shop about psychology and experimental philosophy with Daniel Kahneman (see here). He also did a great interview recently with Shelley Lynn Tremain for Discrimination and Disadvantage as part of the Dialogues on Disability Series (see here). 

Unlike most of the upcoming Featured Authors--who will likely only be doing week-long stints as part of the new format--Josh will likely be posting throughout the month. As someone whose own research program was shaped and changed by Josh's early work on intentional action, it's my honor to welcome him to be this month's Featured Author at Flickers of Freedom. Please join me in welcoming him to program!

 

The rest of the upcoming schedule is below the fold: