Flickers of Freedom

Darwall on Second-Personal Attitudes of the Heart...

...as well as a story about reactive attitudes generally, over at PEA Soup.

Moral Luck and Football Greatness

Really interesting article--"Lucky and Good: How Tom Brady Became the Greatest" over at Grantland on the role of luck in making Tom Brady the greatest QB of all time (unless you prefer guys who put up huge stats in September and October and then fold when the temperature dips below 45 degrees. Or guys who played with 10 hall of famers in a pre-salary cap era.)   Some key quotes:

"Anyone who’s ever been the greatest at anything has gotten outrageously lucky...Luck is supposed to matter. A charmed existence is part of the myth behind any regular person who gets turned into a folk hero."

"This is how sports work, and it’s actually how life works. We worship greatness and all the qualities that give birth to it, but we forget how arbitrary this can be."

It reminds me a lot of Paul Russell's criminally under-discussed article (seriously, it should be a federal crime not to talk about this paper) "Free Will, Art, and Morality."

 

 

 

The Latest Work on the Psychology of Free Will Beliefs

Experimental philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have all become increasingly interested in the psychology of believing in free will and moral responsibility. Because there has been a ton of exciting work being done on this front, I thought I would post a list of just some of the papers that are piling up on my reading list.  See below the fold for details.  If you have other readings to suggest, please post them in the comment threads!

Billboards Now Promoting Moral Responsibility Skepticism

Caruso, Pereboom, Galen Strawson, and Waller have won.  I shouldn't have left the team.  (h/t @delskorcho on twitter)

Nahmias on Free Will at Scientific American

Our own Eddy Nahmias has a piece on free will at Scientific American boldly entitled, "Why We Have Free Will." And while I think, "Whether We Have Free Will Depends on What We Take It to Be" would be more apt, I understand it's a bit long for a title! Either way, congrats to Eddy. Hopefully, philosophers will continue trying to reach the masses when it comes to this and other important issues! If only Eddy's piece wasn't behind a paywall--that is, if only it were free!

p.s. There is a survey you can take about free will here (priming be damned)!

Causation via criterial resetting

Interventionist/Manipulationist models of causation (e.g. Pearl, 2000; Woodward, 2003) are rooted in the intuition that if some event A causes some event B, then one should be able to manipulate A in some way and see corresponding changes in B after changing A. If A is modeled as causing B, then there should be an intervention on A (in at least some state of the model) that results in B changing its value. These kinds of models of causation basically describe what scientists already do to determine causal relationships among variables. Scientists have for centuries tried to control for all independent variables (Woodward calls this “screening off” the other variables besides A that likely partially cause B, by holding their values constant) save one, A, which they vary, in order to see the consequences or changes expressed by some outcome or dependent variable B. If B changes with an intervention on A, it is concluded that A causes B.

A counterfactual formulation of interventionism would be: "If A had not occurred, with all screened off variables that may cause B held constant, then B would not have occurred." A core point of criterial causation is that we need to enhance the interventionist account by saying : "If A had not occurred, with all screened off variables that may cause B held constant, **and with the parameters by which B evaluates its inputs also held constant**, then B would not have occurred."  

To sum up, standard interventionist models of causation carry out some intervention on A to determine what effects, if any, there might be on B (and other variables). If instead of manipulating A, or A’s output to B, however, we instead manipulate the criteria, parameters or conditions that B places its input (including on input from A), which must be satisfied before B changes or acts, then changes in B do not follow passively from changes in A as they would if A and B were, say, billiard balls. Inputs from A can be identical, but in one case B changes in response to A, and in another case it does not, depending on B's criteria for responding. This reparameterization of B is what neurons do when they change each other's synaptic weights, such that a neuron now responds optimally to different inputs than prior to the act of reparameterization or criterial resetting. Criterial causation emphasizes that what can vary is either outputs from A to other nodes (the traditional and I would say incomplete view of causation), or how inputs are decoded by receiving nodes B, B’, B’’ and so on. On this view, standard interventionist (hearkening all the way back to ‘Newtonian’ models of causation that emphasize energy transfer and conservation; e.g. P. Dowe’s views (1992)) are a special case where B places no particular conditions on input from A that have to be met before B changes state. But the brain, if anything, emphasizes causation via reparameterization of B, by, for example, rapidly changing synaptic weights on post-synaptic neurons. Let me emphasize that I do not think that Woodward or Pearl are wrong. But they also make no mention, as far as I can tell, that causation might partly depend on reparameterizations of B.

Changing the code or parameters or criteria that B uses to decode, interpret or respond to input is a manipulation that might make no apparent changes to A or any other variable in the system for long and uncertain spans of time, until just the right pattern of inputs comes along. For example, the Mossad might program a cellphone to explode only when a particular phone number, known 'only' to their target, is dialed. Manipulating ‘A’ here appears to have no effect on any dependent variable ‘B’ and might not, in principle, for as long as you like (think of a booby trap in a king's tomb set by the pharaoh’s builders that only kills archaeologists millennia later). It might take years to get this phone into the hands of their targeted Hamas leader. But when the bombmaker dials his ‘secret’ number to call his uncle in Paris, his head is blown off. This kind of reparameterization of B need not have immediate noticeable or measurable effects within the system, so seems to violate the assumption on the traditional view that causation is transferred at some fast speed (say the speed of light). But reparameterization of B is a causal intervention nonetheless, even though this subclass of causation has been relatively ignored so far.

I believe, however, that it was the ‘discovery’ of this class of causation by evolution that really led to the explosion of physical systems that we now call biological systems. Once causation by reparameterization came not only to involve conditions placed on physical parameters (e.g. molecular shape of a neurotransmitter before an ion channel would open in a cell membrane), but also conditions placed on informational parameters (fire iff the criteria for a face are met in the input) that were realized in physical parameters (fire iff the criteria on the simultaneity of spike inputs are met), we witnessed a further revolution in natural causation. This was the revolutionary emergence of mind and informational causation in the universe, as far as we know, uniquely on Earth, and perhaps for the first time in the history of the universe.

Sinnott-Armstrong on Brain Blaming

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has an interesting piece over at The Conversation entitled, "My Brain Made Me Do It, But Does It Matter?"  Given the attention this issue has received lately, it's nice to see another voice being added to the mix!

Caruso at TED

Our own Gregg Caruso recently gave a nice talk at TED called "The Darkside of Free Will." He does a nice job defending skepticism from a consequentialist standpoint (in very short time). So, if you have ten "free" minutes, you should check it out!

Audio Free (for Free)

There's now an audio version of my new book, Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will.  I have access codes for several free copies. I'm planning to give some to family and make some available to FSU grad students and readers of this blog.  If you'd like a free copy of the audio book (*Free* for free), send me an e-mail and I'll send you a code and instructions.  I'll do this for the first 3 e-mailed requests I receive.

Here's a link to the "Audible" page on the book. 

Things to Come

Dear Flickers community, it nice to be back. Let me begin by thanking Thomas for allowing me to post again on this wonderful forum. It is approaching a year since I last posted here. I enjoyed interacting with you all very much and found the interchanges both valuable and challenging. I enjoyed it so much in fact that I asked if I might have another go at it, and Thomas kindly obliged.

In the spirit of having an open conversation between philosophers and neuroscientists, let me ask that you be quite straight with me, if you think I write anything in error this month. I am working on another book on philosophy and neuroscience, and would appreciate the feedback. In return, let me offer to answer anyone’s questions about Neuroscience on this first thread. If there was ever something you wanted to ask a brain scientist but were afraid to ask, or did not have a chance to ask, I will try my best to answer you. Certainly I have my own biases and likely misconceptions about how the brain works, but I probably share a core understanding about the basic models of brain function with most other neuroscientists, and can at least, I hope, give you the standard views. So in this first thread, please ask me anything about neuroscience or psychology, and I will try my best to answer it. That said, I won’t be able to answer any questions till the 7th of the month, because I am on the road.