Author: Philosophics

Philosopher of language and author of speculative fiction

Illusionism and the Illusion of Determinism

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One reason I prefer to look at agency is to avoid the claims and counterclaims of proponents of free will and of determinism, each having factions causing the other side of clinging to an illusion. As I’ve noted previously, at present I am a self-described soft-determinist insomuch as I declare myself to be agnostic.

My hypothesis is that humans have little or negligible agency. Under hard determinism, this would collapse from nil to zero. In either case, it is criminal to presume to be able to assign moral responsibility to any person.

Illusionism

Determinists charge free will advocates of being fooled.

Illusionism is the position that free will does not exist and is merely an illusion.

Many ancient and modern thinkers have made this claim. They have usually been strong determinists, from Hobbes to Einstein.

Classical compatibilists, from Hobbes and Hume on, have held that free will exists but that it is compatible with determinism (actually many determinisms).

Since the discovery of irreducible quantum mechanical indeterminism, most scientists and some philosophers have come to understand that determinism is a dogmatic belief unsustainable from the evidence.

It is determinism that is the illusion.

Nevertheless, most philosophers remain compatibilists, even as the evidence of indeterminism has caused them to declare themselves agnostic on the truth of determinism or indeterminism.

Illusionism <https://www.informationphilosopher.com/articles/illusion_of_determinism/>

The Illusion of Determinism

Adequate determinism is an emergent property in a universe that was initially chaotic and which remains chaotic at atomic and molecular levels. Consequently all physical processes are statistical and all knowledge is only probabilistic. Strict determinism is an illusion, a consequence of idealization.

Statistical knowledge always contains errors that are normally distributed according to a universal law that ultimately derives from the discrete quantum nature of matter.

The existence of this universal distribution law of errors convinced many scientists and philosophers that the randomness of errors was not real, that strict deterministic laws would be found to explain all phenomena, including human beings.

To the extent that randomness is needed to break the causal chain of strict physical determinism, many philosophers continue to think that free will is the illusion.

The Illusion of Determinism <https://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/illusionism.html>

Peter F Strawson

Peter Strawson said he could make no sense of ideas like free will and determinism. In this regard he was one with those English-speaking philosophers who, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, thought such questions were pseudo-problems to be dissolved by careful attention to actual language use.

Strawson made a contribution to the free will versus determinism discussions by pointing out that whatever the deep metaphysical truth on these issues, people would not give up talking about and feeling moral responsibility, praise and blame, guilt and pride, crime and punishment, gratitude, resentment, and forgiveness.

Peter F Strawson

To be fair, I feel that Peter Strawson and I agree on the insufficiency of language to settle the matter of whether the universe offers free will or is deterministic, that questions such as this are pseudo-problems.

Buridan’s Ass

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On my Agency adventure, I’ll be collecting and assembling thinking and discussion points.

Jean Buridan’s principle of Equipoise

Buridan’s ass is a fourteenth-century paradox to illustrate why reason or rationality has challenges. I’ve seen this illustrated with hay bails. In deference to Shrek’s donkey, I’m having waffles.

Buridan’s ass is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will. It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the donkey will always go to whichever is closer, it dies of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision between the hay and water. A common variant of the paradox substitutes two identical piles of hay for the hay and water; the ass, unable to choose between the two, dies of hunger.

The paradox is named after the 14th-century French philosopher Jean Buridan, whose philosophy of moral determinism it satirizes. Although the illustration is named after Buridan, philosophers have discussed the concept before him, notably Aristotle, who put forward the example of a man equally hungry and thirsty, and Al-Ghazali, who used a man faced with the choice of equally good dates.

A version of this situation appears as metastability in digital electronics, when a circuit must decide between two states based on an input that is in itself undefined (neither zero nor one). Metastability becomes a problem if the circuit spends more time than it should in this “undecided” state, which is usually set by the speed of the clock the system is using.

Wikipedia

On Agency and Structure

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Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Karl Marx – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

DISCLAIMER: This page is an idea dumping ground acting as a scratchpad for me to coalesce ideas related to my agency endevour.

As I consider the relationship between agency and determinism, it will be necessary to define my terms. To this end, I’ll rely on historical citations and definitions. Marx’s quote echoes that of Schopenhauer

We may act as we will, but we cannot will as we will.

Arthur Schopenhauer – On The Freedom Of The Will (1839)

Ostensibly speaking Agency is a sense of freedom in concert with will and volition.

Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. It is independent of the moral dimension, which is called moral agency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)

Agency may either be classified as unconscious, involuntary behavior, or purposeful, goal directed activity (intentional action). An agent typically has some sort of immediate awareness of their physical activity and the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing. In ‘goal directed action’ an agent implements a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)

Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices. It is normally contrasted to natural forces, which are causes involving only unthinking deterministic processes. In this respect, agency is subtly distinct from the concept of free will, the philosophical doctrine that our choices are not the product of causal chains, but are significantly free or undetermined. Human agency entails the claim that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world. Howhumanscometomakedecisions, by free choice or other processes, is another issue.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Agency page is as good of a start as any other credible place.

In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity. The philosophy of action provides us with a standard conception and a standard theory of action. The former construes action in terms of intentionality, the latter explains the intentionality of action in terms of causation by the agent’s mental states and events. From this, we obtain a standard conception and a standard theory of agency. There are alternative conceptions of agency, and it has been argued that the standard theory fails to capture agency (or distinctively human agency). Further, it seems that genuine agency can be exhibited by beings that are not capable of intentional action, and it has been argued that agency can and should be explained without reference to causally efficacious mental states and events.

Debates about the nature of agency have flourished over the past few decades in philosophy and in other areas of research (including psychology, cognitive neuroscience, social science, and anthropology). In philosophy, the nature of agency is an important issue in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, the debates on free will and moral responsibility, in ethics, meta-ethics, and in the debates on the nature of reasons and practical rationality. For the most part, this entry focuses on conceptual and metaphysical questions concerning the nature of agency. In the final sections, it provides an overview of empirically informed accounts of the sense of agency and of various empirical challenges to the commonsense assumption that our reasons and our conscious intentions make a real difference to how we act.

Schlosser, Markus, “Agency”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/agency/>.

Hume and Kant both believe that freedom is essential to morality. Moreover, both believe that a philosophical theory and vindication of human morality requires reconciling freedom with universal causal necessity (determinism). However, they offer different conceptions of freedom, different ways of reconciling it with necessity, and different ways of understanding why this reconciliation matters for morality. Scholars agree that Hume is a “compatibilist”, but there is no consensus on the correct label for Kant’s position.

Wilson, Eric Entrican and Lara Denis, “Kant and Hume on Morality”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/kant-hume-morality/>.

Human agency

See also: Action (philosophy)

Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. It is normally contrasted to natural forces, which are causes involving only unthinking deterministic processes. In this respect, agency is subtly distinct from the concept of libertarian  free will, the philosophical doctrine that our choices are not the product of causal chains, but are significantly free or undetermined, but is perfectly in accord with some compatibilist philosophical views. Of course many philosophers have sophisticated deterministic accounts, such as Stawson’s theory of reactive attitudes . Human agency – in its naive psychological interpretation – entails the claim that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world. How humans come to make decisions, by free choice or other processes, is another big issue.

The capacity of a human to act as an agent is personal to that human, though considerations of the outcomes flowing from particular acts of human agency for us and others can then be thought to invest a moral component into a given situation wherein an agent has acted, and thus to involve moral agency. If a situation is the consequence of human decision making, persons may be under a duty to apply value judgments to the consequences of their decisions, and held to be responsible for those decisions. Human agency entitles the observer to ask should this have occurred? in a way that would be nonsensical in circumstances lacking human decisions-makers, for example, the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter.

In philosophy

In certain philosophical traditions (particularly those established by Hegel and Marx), human agency is a collective, historical dynamic, rather than a function arising out of individual behavior. Hegel’s Geist and Marx’s universal class are idealist and materialist expressions of this idea of humans treated as social beings, organized to act in concert. Also look at the debate, philosophically derived in part from the works of Hume, between determinism and indeterminacy.

In sociology

See also: Structure and agency and Agency (sociology)

Structure and agency forms an enduring core debate in sociology. Essentially the same as in the Marxist conception, “agency” refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices, whereas “structure” refers to those factors (such as social class, but also religion, gender, ethnicity, subculture, etc.) that seem to limit or influence the opportunities that individuals have.

Basic Knowledge 101 Agency

a proposal titled “Should the Criminal Justice System Be Abolished?” I argued that the answer was yes, that neuroscience shows the system makes no sense and they should fund an initiative to accomplish that.

Behave (Sapolsky), Chapter 16: Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and (Oh, Why Not?) Free Will

Interestingly, Sapolsky’s reasons for asking if the criminal justice system should be abolished don’t directly consider human agency.

Theories of Agency (Uncerimoniously lifted from Swarthmore College)

Key concepts present within “agency”: the individual, action, will, intentionality, choice, freedom

Key concepts against which “agency” is commonly situated: structure, determinism, society, environment, inevitability

Philosophy

What is the individual, self or person? (e.g., what is the unit of ‘agency’?) What, in contrast, is not-agent (environment, structure, inanimate)?

Postmodernist and poststructuralist skepticism about the individual or “the human subject”.

How does the agent know about the difference between itself and the environment?

Cartesianism: the self is that which knows itself; existence is best understood by radical categorical divisions between mind-body, self-other, etcetera, for heuristic and ontological reasons.

  • What is an action?
  • Does the agent choose or will its action in the world?
  • Does agency exist even if the act changes nothing in the environment? Is there more agency if there is more change?
  • Does agency exist if the intentionality of the action and the change bear little or no resemblance to each other?

Social and Behavioral Science

Agency determines everything

Libertarianism and objectivism

Certain forms of Christian theology, both evangelical Protestantism and Deism (with the frequent proviso that God is the “uncaused cause” or prior determination of the individual struggle against sin)

Certain forms of 19th Century liberalism

Structure determines everything (macrostructures or microstructures)

  • Calvinist predetermination
  • Strong forms of structuralist anthropology, folklore and psychoanalysis (Levi-Strauss, Jung)
  • Strong forms of genetic determinism
  • Strong forms of developmental or evolutionary psychology (Skinner, Buss)

Functionalism

All practices and behaviors of agents are determined by logics which precede those practices, and which always make rational sense in objective terms outside the perception of human actors (which human actors may or may not be aware of) (Marvin Harris on human diet; Talcott Parsons on human institutions)

Certain forms of teleological Marxism, Hegelianism and other 19th Century social thought.

Structure-Agency feedback loop

Can be strongly determinist or indeterminist, depending on how closed the loop is represented as being. Malthusian thought, for example, is a structure-agency feedback loop, but it is intensely determinist.

Social contract theory

Individuals consent in some initial pre-social state to a foundational understanding of their social rules and institutions; those rules have binding force on individuals and exist outside of their agency until such time as sufficient numbers of individuals choose to withdraw their understood consent to the legitimacy of social structures.

Can have a “negative spin”, as in Hobbes: social institutions as the only constraint which keeps individual agency from producing horrible suffering.

Anthony Giddens and structuration theory

Modernity not as “iron cage” (Weber) or “prelude to utopia” (Marx) but as a condition collectively chosen through the deliberate actions of many people; agency determines structure which determines the possibilities for the expression of agency and so on ad infinitum.

Neoclassical economic thought

Agents act out of self-interest, individually and differentially perceived and measured and achieved; the sum total of individual action is (or ought to be) a well-ordered political economy that maximizes the aggregate opportunities for self-interest even though the results for every individual will not be equally optimal (equal opportunity, non-equal results).

Historicist anti-functionalism and some forms of evolutionary theory

Practices, behaviors and institutions are ‘structure’, but explained largely by the fact of precedent and inertia, not by deeper ‘preset’ functionalism that precedes and trumps change over time; no teleological end to change. “One damn thing after another”.

The “bounded circle” of agency

Agency exists within tight constraints, but is free within those constraints. this is a common way ever since the Enlightenment to describe the agency of individuals: absolutely constrained beyond a certain boundary, absolutely free or devolving upon the individual within it. Sometimes this is only an axiomatic assumption governing social institutions and sometimes it is an ontological assertion about agency. (e.g., you could argue that modern American criminal law assumes absolute individual responsibility for actions once constraints of circumstance and environment are considered, but does not require an ontological assertion about the reality of agency).

“Men make history, but they do not make it just as they please” —Karl Marx

Marx needs this in order to believe in the possibility of revolution, but it has long been debated among Marxists since Marx’s time whether the “humanist” Marx who seems to believe in a limited but critical role for will and agency in choosing a revolutionary moment or the “scientific” Marx who believes in the structural inevitability of revolution.

“Methodological individualism”

Structure exists, and has determinant force, but a conscious heuristic decision that what individuals choose to do, or perceive themselves as choosing, is interesting as an object of study–not the individual as a “case study” of a larger whole, but the individual as exceptional or particular.

Before I was a Nihilist

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For years—decades even—I identified as an Existentialist, and I still have an affinity for some of the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus. I had read some Richard Wright. I never read Kierkegaard directly, and I may never. And of course, there’s proto-Existentialist Nietzsche. I’ve encountered to various degrees Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Jaspers but not deeply.

The draw for me is that we create our own existences, but I came to feel this was at odds with Structuralism. Per my previous post, I don’t have much faith in the Agency seemingly required by Existentialism.

In Statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA), there is a notion known as degrees of freedom. This is how I view Agency. Per my Testudineous Agency post, after we account for genetics and environment, how much agency effectively remains? This is the degree of freedom. Under hard determinism, degrees of freedom are zero.

What else can we strip away after genetics, epigenetics, indoctrination, environment, and other mimetic and learned behaviours? And what remains after we do?

Agency Be Damned

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I don’t believe that humans have the agency presumed they have, so I’d like to set out to prove it—at least rhetorically. In the ages-old battle between free will and determinism, I’ve tended to lean toward the determinism camp, but there is something keeping me from gaining full membership. I feel that proving hard determinism may be too hard a nut to crack, so I am aiming at just the agency aspect.

There are two major themes in my thinking.

  1. Humans have no material agency
  2. Power structures require the presumption of agency

Although this concept has been rattling around my brain cage for a while and I still have a ways to go, I feel it will be helpful to sketch out my ideas. I feel inspired by people like Robert Sapolsky and Daniel Dennett. And I feel I can draw insights into counter-arguments from people like Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and even Steven Pinker. I feel that my experience in behavioural economics may be useful for additional context—people like Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, and Dan Ariely. But I feel disheartened when it appears that Galen Strawson and his father before him, Peter Strawson, people much more connected and elevated in the field have been treading the same territory for decades — over half a century — ahead of me, thankfully beating a path but not necessarily making much headway. Perhaps I can build upon that foundation if not substantially at least perceptibly. Of course, the seminal work by Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty.

We may act as we will, but we cannot will as we will.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Besides the aforementioned, a correspondent has suggested other source references. He shares: Physics, including quantum mechanics, is fully Lagrangian. According to Stanford’s Leonard Susskind, Lagrange derived his formalism from the principle of ‘Least Action’. Jean Buridan’s principle of ‘Equipoise’ renders a Lagrangian model of the world perfectly deterministic. So, the physical domain is not probabilistic; and all indeterminacy is actually epistemic indeterminability. He also suggets Thomas Hobbes’ “De Corpore”.

About my second point, my corresponent agrees:

I think your “meta” is right. We feel that we are “free agents”, and we don’t know to what to attribute our feeling that we freely choose; so we imagine that we have “free will”. In my view it also doesn’t exist – we really are, as Sapolsky describes, zombie robots – we just don’t (and cannot) know it. Free will is thus a mere (but compelling) illusion on both individual and emergent scales. And yes again: all of morality, jurisprudence, etc., depends on it.

Unattributed Correspondant

My correspondent is a professional philosopher who shall remain anonymous until such time as he agrees, if ever, to make his identity known. I am quiet aware that some of my ideas are contentious and polemic. Not everyone wishes to be mired in controversy.

Humans Have No Material Agency

Humans have little to no agency. This is the point I am making in my Testudineous Agency post. From what I know until now, this likely qualifies as soft determinism, but this might shift as I acquire new nomenclature and taxonomic distinction. I’ve discovered this taxonomy of free will positions, though I am not well enough versed to comment on its accuracy or completeness. For now, it seems like a decent working model to serve as a starting point, but I am fully cognizant of possible Dunning-Kruger factors.

A Taxonomy of Free Will Positions

In essence, hard determinism says that the world is not probabilistic. Some event triggered the universe as we know it, and it will unfold according to the laws of physics whether or not we understand them. A weaker form, soft determinism, allows for some probability and trivial ‘agency’. I feel that Dennett supports soft determinism. I feel that because we, as ‘individuals’, are a confluence of multitudinous factors, we have little agency (interpreted as responsibility). More on this later.

Power structures require the presumption of agency

To be honest, the free will debate is only interesting to me in context. To me the context is power. The ‘meta’ of this is that society (and human ‘nature’) seem to need this accountability and culpability, but it doesn’t actually exist, so it is created as a social construct and enforced in a Foucauldian power relationship through government through jurisprudence mechanisms.

This is the part of the debate I haven’t heard much about. Sapolsky did write in Behave, chapter 20X, that criminal justice systems need to be reformed to account for diminished agency, and I’ll need to return to that to better comprehend his position and assertion.

The rest of the story

As a handy reference, these are the authors and books I’ve encountered to date and in no particular order:

Then there I those I have yet to read:

I’ve got a lot of essays and lecture notes not referenced plus general content from Reddit, Medium and other blogs sources, YouTube, podcasts, and so on. I probably should have documented some Classical philosophers, but I don’t generally find their argumentation compelling, though I might add them later.

The aim of this post is just to capture my intent—if it is indeed my intent. Oh, the questions and implications of a lack of agency. Please stand by.

Pizza Tracker Reality

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Three years late, but a mate of mine shared this with me and it got me to thinking — sort of. No synapses were harmed (or likely even engaged) in the construction of this post.

No synapses were harmed in the construction of this post.

Domino’s has a pizza tracker app, where a person can track their order from intake to delivery. Only the tracker does not reflect what’s actually occurring. It’s merely a facade built on historical timing. The pizza-making process is very well regimented, so at a macro-level, it may appear to work. If on average, a pizza takes 30 minutes from order to the time it shows up at your door, and your delivery conforms to this average, you’ll be none the wiser that the details didn’t otherwise happen to comport.

Pizza Tracker Concept

I feel that it’s almost fair to consider this app analogous to our cognitive processes. The details don’t really matter, so long as the stimulus-response corresponds to our expectations. Unlike the actual process underlying the manufacture and delivery process, we don’t have direct access to reveal the ‘reality’.

Around the same time as Domino’s fakery was being revealed, they did make progress by at least relaying GPS details via the app. Given that this probably accounts for most of the variability in their process, it would make sense to address this earlier than later.

My point is not to take a deep dive into the technology or remark on the integrity of this approach. I only wanted to point out that most customers might not have even questioned the progress meter. Others may have their own questions.

Meme Blowback

In the end, the state of the process could be transmitted, but it could actually slow the process by introducing additional steps, so the cost of conveying reality may outweigh the benefits. I’m not the one to make that call. Meantime, pizza’s up.

Intuition and Reason

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I’ve been cycling through The Righteous Mind and Moral Tribes, respectively by Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene. These blokes are social psychologists and moral philosophers. I started each of these books with the conception that I would neither like nor agree with the content. As for like, I suppose that’s a silly preconception better captured by whether or not I agree; that with which I don’t agree, I don’t like.

This said, I like the style of both of the authors, and I am finding the material to be less contentious than I first thought. I can already envisage myself agreeing with much of the substance but waiting to disagree with the conclusions.

Although I committed myself to document The Righteous Mind in situ, I am finding that I am listening to the audiobook whilst driving and so getting ahead of myself, so I’ll have to rewind and retread in order to do this. In fact, the reason I switched back to Greene’s Moral Tribes is so I wouldn’t progress even further in Haidt’s work.

I am writing this post to acknowledge this. I’d also like to document that I don’t believe that humans are good reasoners, a situation both Haidt and Greene cite to be generally true. Humans are post hoc rationalisers, which is to say that they make up their minds and then create a narrative to justify that position. Haidt uses an analogy of an elephant and a rider, and he asserts that humans might more accurately be described as groupish than selfish. Certainly not shellfish. Greene notes that people have been shown to concede self-interest to political party interest, which helps to explain how people continually and predictably vote against their own self-interests. This also supports my position that democracy is a horrible form of government. Of course, Haidt would argue that this proves his point that people tend to adopt facts that support their perspective and diminish or disregard those that don’t.

it doesn’t follow that intuition is (1) better, (2) significantly better, or (3) good enough for (a) long term viability or (b) grasping complexity.

Haidt suggests that reason is overvalued, but then he proposes intuition as a better alternative. I agree with him that reason is overvalued and for the same reasons (no pun intended) that he does. But it doesn’t follow that intuition is (1) better, (2) significantly better, or (3) good enough for (a) long term viability or (b) grasping complexity.

Whilst I am not immune to this any more than someone else. I recall Kahneman writing in Thinking Fast and Slow that even though he is well aware of cognitive biases and fallacies, he himself can’t escape them either. When I used to teach undergraduate economics, I’d give some sort of policy assignment. As a preamble, I’d instruct the students that without exception, all policy decisions have pros and cons. In their submissions, they’d need to gather both supporting and detracting arguments and then articulate why one should be adopted over another. Minimally, I’d expect at least three pros and cons.

The students would almost invariably complain about how difficult it was to imagine a counter-position. Even when they’d include some, they were usually weak tea fodder. Oftentimes, the students already shared the same perspective, so they couldn’t usually even get the opposing side until we debriefed after the assignments had been graded. Although I do recall instances where students would admit that they hadn’t considered this or that opposing view, I can’t recall a case where a position was flipped after hearing new evidence—not that this was my intention. People do engage in escalating commitment, doubling down on existing beliefs and generating defensive—sometimes tortuous—arguments to support their positions.

Myselves

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Disappointed from the start, I was hoping to have coined a neologism in myselves, but I’ve been beaten to the punch. Although my spell-check doesn’t appear to agree, myselves is a legitimate albeit nonstandard term.

Followers of my content will recognise that I don’t fully subscribe to notions of self or identity, so being a philosopher and linguaphile I am constantly on the search for another way to describe my reality.

Galen Strawson — What Are Selves?

I became aware of Galen Strawson through Daniel Dennett and who I share perspective on in a recent post, Testudineous Agency. In an attempt to better understand his position, I resorted to a Google search and unearthed some first-person narratives. I find I share a certain affinity with him.

Ostensibly, Strawson feels that free will and moral responsibility don’t exist. But he goes deeper. He acknowledges that not only do the concepts of free will and moral responsibility not have shared meaning for unequivocal communication, but even if we parse the terms more fully into free, will, moral, and responsibility, we still don’t come to accordance. More on this later.

In the case of myselves, one of my first reactions was to consider the anti-plural-pronoun application-as-singular-object-reference cohort: It’s not proper to refer to he or she as they and him or her as them—or for that matter, his or hers for their.

As for me—the me interacting with this keyboard in this moment—, the idea of thin-slicing my differentiated selves, nanosecond by nanosecond, picosecond by picosecond—or by femtoseconds or attoseconds. Or why not Planck time slices?  

Just a short post for now. I’ll see where is ends up.

Testudineous Agency

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In chapter 71, Ultimate Responsibility, in Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, author and philosopher, Daniel Dennett presents a counterargument to the notion that an agent, a person, is not absolutely responsible for their actions. He questions some premises in the ‘the way you are’ line of argumentation, but I question some of his questions.

Here is a nice clear version of what some thinkers take to be the decisive argument. It is due in this form to the philosopher Galen Strawson (2010):
1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are.
2. So in order to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain crucial mental respects.
3. But you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
4. So you cannot be ultimately responsible for what you do.

Dennett, Daniel C.. Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking (p. 395). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Dennett continues.

The first premise is undeniable: “the way you are” is meant to include your total state at the time, however you got into it. Whatever state it is, your action flows from it non-miraculously.

Dennett and I are in agreement with Strawson. There is not much to see here. It’s akin to saying the now is the result of all past events until now. This is “the way you are”.

The second premise observes that you couldn’t be “ultimately” responsible for what you do unless you were “ultimately” responsible for getting yourself into that state—at least in some regards.

This second premise asserts that one cannot be responsible for any action that one had no part in performing. Two scenarios come immediately to mind.

First, you are not responsible for being born. As Heidegger notes, we are all thrown into this world. We have no say in when or where—what country or family—or what circumstances.

Second, if one is hypnotised or otherwise incapacitated, and then involved in a crime, one is merely a cog and not an agent, so not responsible in any material sense.

But according to step (3) this is impossible.

Whilst Dennett fixates on the absolute aspect of the assertion, I’d like to be more charitable and suggest that we still end up with a sorites paradox. Dennett will return to this one, and so shall I.

So step (4), the conclusion, does seem to follow logically. Several thinkers have found this argument decisive and important. But is it really?

As Dennett invalidates step (3), he insists that the conclusion is also invalid. He asserts that the notion of absolute responsibility is a red herring, and I argue that Dennett doesn’t get us much further, perhaps redirecting us with a pink herring.

I’ve created an image with tortoises to make my point. There are actually two points I wish to make. The first point is to determine where the responsibility is inherited. This point is meant to articulate that the world can not be strictly deterministic and yet one can still not have significant agency. The second point is that culpability is asserted as a need, and acceptance of this assertion is the problem.

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Testuditude

The image depicts an evolution of an agent, with time progressing from left to right. The tortoise on the right is a product of each of the recursive tortoises to its left. The image means to convey that each subsequent tortoise is a genetic and social and social product of each tortoise prior. Of course, this is obviously simplified, because tortoises require pairs, so feel free to imagine each precedent tortoise to represent a pair or feel free to add that level of diagrammatic complexity.

This is not meant to distinguish between nature and nurture. Instead, the claim is that one is a product of both of these. Moreover, as genetic, epigenetic, and mimetic influences are transmitted in family units, they also occur through social interaction and the environment, as represented by the orange and green tortoises.

…if one is a product of genetic and mimetic forces, how much agency remains for culpability?

The point here is that if one is a product of genetic and mimetic forces, how much agency remains for culpability? Each person is an emergent unit—autonomous, yes, and yet highly programmed.

If I programme a boobytrap to kill or maim any intruder, the boobytrap has no agency. I assert further, that the maker of that boobytrap has no more responsibility than the killing device.

The old hand grenade wired to a doorknob boobytrap trick

But who do we blame? you ask, and that’s precisely the problem. Asking questions doesn’t presume answers. This is a logical fallacy and cognitive bias. This heuristic leaves us with faulty jurisprudence systems. Humans seem hardwired, as it were, to blame. Humans need to believe in the notion of free will because they need to blame because they need to punish because vengeance is part of human nature to the extent there is human nature. There seems to be a propensity to frame everything as a causal relationship. Dennett calls this the Intentional stance. To borrow a from Dennett…

This instinctual response is the source in evolution of the invention of all the invisible elves, goblins, leprechauns, fairies, ogres, and gods that eventually evolve into God, the ultimate invisible intentional system.

Dennett, Daniel C.. Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking (p. 374). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Fire Trap in Home Alone

Sins of the Fathers (and Mothers)

Let’s wrap this up with a sorites paradox. As I’ve already said, I agree with Dennett that the absolute aspect is unnecessary and undesired. The question remains how much agency™ does a person have once we account for the other factors? Is it closer to 90 per cent or 10 per cent? Apart from this, what is the threshold for culpability? Legal systems already have arbitrary (if not capricious) thresholds for this, whether mental capacity or age, which basically distils back to the realm of capacity.

I have no basis to even venture a guess, but that’s never stopped me before. I’d argue that the agency is closer to zero than to one hundred per cent of the total, and I’d propose that 70 per cent feels like a reasonable threshold.

I could have sworn I’d posted a position on this after I read Robert Sapolsky’s Behave. Perhaps it’s never made it out of drafts.

In closing, I don’t think we need to settle the question of determinism versus free will to recognise that even without strict determinism, personal agency is still severely limited, and yet as our political systems presume a level of rationality that is not apparent, so do legal systems presume a level of agency not present.

Instead Laugh

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I promise not to make this blog about child development anecdotes. The house toddler exhibits an interesting adaptation.

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I’ve raised a few toddlers in my day, and this one is different in the most delightful way. All other toddlers I’ve encountered—especially the pre-verbal variety—cry to solicit attention. Particularly, if they are napping in another room and awaken, eventually they beckon for attention. Where all others I’ve known—mine or those of strangers—have cried or fussed, this one laughs.

I can explain it in cognitive terms. She somehow connected laughter with attention, which was further reinforced by attention to her laughter. Having seen Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, I am hoping she doesn’t go there. (Joking). It’s interesting. I wonder how common this is. I’d be interested in knowing if any readers have experienced this.

She still cries and fusses at frustration or discomfort—hair washing or brushing, falling, or wet diapers—, but not when it comes to attention.

OneSide Zero, Instead Laugh

I leave with an old favourite tune…