Mon 26 Mar 2007
Will
Posted by David Banach under David Banach , Philosophy Department Blog , Weekly Word[6] Comments
The will acts. But what is an action?
An action is a type of change or process, but obviously not one that is produced by something else or acted upon. When I throw a ball, this is not an action the ball performs. To call something an action is to refer a change or process to an entity and not something else. Yet not all sets of changes which we can refer to some entity are actions. All of the things I have done in the last hour do not constitute an action. An action has a certain type of integrity or wholeness.
The kind of wholeness it requires can be seen by considering the mystery of follow through. Anyone who has thrown a ball, or played golf, tennis, or baseball knows the importance of follow through, the portion of the motion that occurs after the ball has left the hand, or bat, or racquet, or club. But it is something of a mystery how the motion after the contact point can have any effect upon the ball, since it has already left. The solution to this mystery lies in the fact that all of these things are actions and function as they do precisely because of the type of continuity specific to actions. In an action, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the parts are transformed within the whole. Because a good motion or stroke is a single continuous whole, in order to be doing the right thing at the point of contact, it must be part of a whole which contains, and is transformed by, the follow through. The will is the agency that produces events with this type of integrity or wholeness.
This type of wholeness requires a detachment that is able to resist distractions and external influences, but also a subjective engagement that ties the elements of a process together into one whole. This combination of engagement and detachment ties the moments of our lives together into unities, in which the contents of experience are transformed and take on meaning in relation to a larger whole. Sometimes this is in the service of some external harmony which we allow to organize our action, as when we dance or sing or tap along with a piece of music. Here the order inherent in some external action serves as a guiding principle for our coming to be in that moment. Sometimes we order our own coming to be according to a harmony that we make up as we go along. This type of will is the improvisation of the order that transforms and gives meaning to the moments of our lives.
Is the will free? Events in us that are the result of external influences, of us being acted upon are not free. Collections of events that never have the type of continuity or wholeness that allows their elements to be transformed in relation to the whole are not free. Philosophical theories of free will have tended to look for some part of us that is not connected to any causal influence and, hence, can act free of any causal determination. But a wholly undetermined event would be arbitrary. If every few moments a random, undetermined twitch took control of our bodies, it would be free, but it would not be an action. It would not be us that did it, and what resulted would not have meaning as a result of our creative agency. Freedom is not a condition that allows us to act as an unmoved mover, starting causal chains of events out of nothing. Freedom is something we achieve, that must be caused by our agency; it is something that we do.
Can we be free if we live in a world governed by causal laws and if no part of us exists outside of this world? If we act, it can. Freedom is the relationship that our agency has to the emergent wholes that it creates. Causal laws relate events to other events. The will creates new events by creating new continuous wholes in which the meanings of other events are transformed. Even in a world governed by physical law, nothing governs the action of the will but its own agency. Every element of a dancer’s motions is governed by the laws of gravity, but the unity of each gesture is not another element in this series. Freedom is not the lack of causality, but the creation of new levels of causality that exist within each new integral event. How something like the will could arise in such a world is, of course, another question. But in a world of entities governed by physical law, what will create new events that transform the meaning of these entities? What will create freedom? The will will.
Tags: action, freedom, wholeness, will
What would a neuroscientist say regarding the will and action? Have they localized a certain region of the brain where they believe action or the will orginates?
This is a very good question. It puts in stark contrast the distinction I want to make between relations between events and the relation between our agency and its actions.
There have been numerous investigations in neuroscience of the events in the brain leading up to our conscious awareness of intending to do something. (One of the most recent by P. Haggard in the July 2005 Trends in Cognitive Sciences suggest that we can detect the neurological antecedents leading up to a decision before we become conscious of making the decision. Some of the similar neurological findings are summarized in the Wikipedia entry for Free will. There are also some resources on Daniel Dennett’s treatment of Benjamin Libet’s experiments on my Philosophy of Mind page. )
Clearly, if we are bodily creatures, and our decisions take place in our heads, then they arise in some way from events that are governed by whatever laws govern the stuff in our heads. (The details of whether those laws are neuro-physiological, bio-chemical, genetic, or physical hardly matters here.)
The view that free will can still exist in these types of law governed systems is called compatibilism, because free will is seen as being compatible with causal determination. The whole point of this little essay on the will is to note how the will brings new metaphysically distinct types of entities into existence. There are different levels of being present in any situation. The pixels on your screen are causally related to the actions of my fingertips on this keyboard through a complex web of computers servers and wires. Yet they are also little dots of phosphorescent light released by beams of electrons. They are also photons having their origin in energy level changes of electrons in atoms. In each case there is a very distinct causal story to tell. Whether they can be woven into one single causal story that connects them together is unclear. Twelve geese cross the sky forming the characteristic V shape as they soar over the melting snow, heading north. Each goose follows the genetically programmed structures of its brain that guides its flight according to cues about the proximity and position of its neighbors. These, in each individual case cause the flight of each bird, but they do not cause the V. Perhaps, you might say, all of them together, in interaction cause the V, but this is a very different thing, and it is not even exactly clear what we are saying since there is no additional entity here, on the same level of being with the geese, which is all of them together, in interaction.
Events in my brain cause other events in my brain. My action is not in the same category of being as these events, hence it cannot be determined by them in any straight forward way. (Scientists, eager to exaggerate the significance of their findings, sometimes find it convenient to ignore this) It would be more appropriate to talk about how these events causally underlie me, the agent that creates my action. My action is created by the agency that depends upon the physical events studied by neurologists. It does nor surprise or disturb me that these physical events in the brain are part of the processes that make my decisions any more that it does that my body carries them out. My brain and my body, after all, are not my accessories; they are me, on one level of description. This is not the level of description, however, on which actions exist.
Recently I was surprised to find a news article on how scientists and neurologists are working on a type of machine that would actually read brain waves in an attempt to reveal peoples potential thoughts in regards to action. For example, it would be able to tell if I wanted to throw a ball I was holding. Whether the machine really divulges if you will certainly throw the ball or if you are just entertaining the thought, is another question. This type of future invention calls into question what our degree of free will is if someone or something can simply “read” what you will do. The article referred to the machine as very similar in concept to the movie Minority Report.
This new conceptual idea is both excting and frightening. What are the consequences of reading someone’s mind? Do criminals have a right to retaining their personal thoughts? Do all people have some kind of inalienable right to the privacy of their thoughts? Where do we draw the line? All these questions could be a possibilty for us to entertain as we enter into a new era of technology once again.
I found those reports very interesting as well. I remember when my daughter was a baby and she was treated for epilepsy, she had an EEG and I sat there watching the squiggly lines pour out of the machine as I watched her. She smiled as she looked at me, and I could watch the characteristic changes it caused on the EEG. I had seen her smile from within her brain. (I asked for the paper record, and I still have it along with our old photo albums.)
In my classes, I entertain the possibility that one day, as technology increases, we may all be able to carry around a wrist-watch or cell phone size MRI or PET scan of our brains in real time, and just as people today keep track of their blood sugar or blood pressure and interpret their emotions in those terms, so we might someday interpret our own emotions in terms of detailed knowledge of the events in our brain. What exactly would we know? Looking at the readout we would have to learn to interpret the images and project our sensations of our feelings onto them the same way we do when we learn to interpret expressions on people’s faces, their body language, and their actions as expressions of feelings. And we could also learn to interpret our feelings as giving us information about our brain, just in the same way we can now “feel” our blood sugar drop or our blood pressure rise.
If we believe that our bodies are us, on some level of description, and not some foreign entity we occupy as a captain rides upon a ship (to use Descartes’s metaphor), then these possibilities should not surprise or dismay us. Imagine a detailed infrared record of the variations in heat on a baseball field during a baseball game. Is that the game we see? Well, we could learn to interpret those signals as the game if we learned what each corresponded to, but we wouldn’t have discovered that baseball is really a complex set of temperature variations. Our brains are us, on some level, so there just will be changes in them that correspond to our other actions. The metaphysical and causal relationships between our brains and us is not decided by these correlations, any more that the ones we noticed in the baseball game example.
Notice that all the same correlations exist between our decisions and emotions and our other externally observable physical properties. We can see a flush in the face, a dilation of the pupils, the nervousness in the body posture, a motion of the lips and cheeks, and interpret it as feelings or incipient decisions. There is a famous cartoon of a dog waiting at its bowl and a magician next to him saying “I will now miraculously read this dog’s mind.” In many ways already our mind and decisions are an open book. We may think that there are no ways of hiding the readable contents of our brain, as we do our expressions and bodily reactions (“Why, yes Aunt Sallie! I just love the tie you gave me!”) As we learned that our brain states were accessible to others and learned to perceive and control them, we might learn to hide our intentions and emotions as expressed there as well. (I’ll think about a story of a great robbery, or I’ll imagine what it would be like to pull of a great heist, while I’m actually planning to rob a museum. That should fool the theft intention detection system!)
The next post on connection stresses how are form of consciousness requires a certain type of privacy, and philosophers such as Thomas Nagel have argued that a certain level of privacy is a requirement of liberal democracy, so this type of technology might present ethical problems, especially if it is not available and common to all, since then we couldn’t learn to hide our brain states. Popular reports like these, however, tend to sensationalize the results and hide just how crude our attempts to understand the connection between brain states and mental states still is. We are now just taking pictures of things in the brain that are correlated with actions or feelings without having any idea what their causal or metaphysical relations are. Just how many intentions are involved in my decision to punch you in the face? I might feel hate, decide to hurt you, decide to punch you, decide to use my left hand, decide to throw a left hook, decide to shift my weight in preparation, might imagine all this in detail in preparation for doing it, or without doing it. Which of these, if any, does the little portion of my brain that lights up correspond to? I can already guess pretty well when my children are going to get into mischief. The prospects of detailed brain scans increasing the accuracy of my predictions any time soon are pretty slim.
Who do you think has free will? You might say everyone; I would say no one. The Wikipedia Encylopedia describes free will …. The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. Addressing this question requires understanding the relation between freedom and cause, and determining whether or not the laws of nature are causally deterministic.
To the average person that is probably correct if a bit incomprehensible and vague. But that in reality barley touches the answer.
Free (Not in bondage to another) will (Faculty by which a person decides or conceives himself as deciding upon & initiating action).
In other words, the state of being able to think and act independently, that is with no external influences or misleading internal emotions. The first requirement to having free will is to be able to think and be aware of yourself as an entity (I think therefore I am). That would rule out all of the animal kingdom. The second requirement would be intelligence (that is understanding not cleverness) or the question is meaningless. The forth would be not to let emotions have any bearing on all actions and decisions. For example, a parent has an adult child that has carried out many horrendous evil acts and is obviously mad. The way the parent views her/his child is very much influenced by the emotional fact that he/she is the parent. The parent does not have free will; the parent is in bondage to the fact that they are a parent and that emotional bondage has removed free will. Only if you can think intelligently and independently as if you had just come into existence could you have free will. Another example would be that of a judge. The judge might think he is intelligent (having understanding), fair and with free will. He would have probably been raised and educated in a relatively well off family. He would have had a good academic education. His middle (or upper) class parents would have also played a large part in shaping him. He would have lived in a pleasant comfortable home. He would have read books and newspapers that tended to agree with his view of the world. The people who he chose to associate with would have played a large part in his personality. His view of the world would be very much slanted/influenced by this background. He might think that he has free will but he does not. He has been influenced by the preceding factors that now have a baring on his thoughts and actions. Just as much as the fanatical suicide bomber whose life has also been shaped, who has a hatred for all non muslins and who wants shira law for the whole world. His education (or lack of it), family, religion and circumstances has shaped his view of the world just as much as the well educated judge. It you have a mental problem you do not have free will, a mind that is not intelligent and clear will not be able think clearly and act on that. You cannot have free will for part of the time only. It is not subjective to be switched on when required. To have free will means that you have it continuously. It is logically correct to say that if you are not interested to know if you have free will, you do not have it by definition. At this point, I would guess that I have eliminated 100% of the world’s population as not having free will. If you react instantly with an emotional response to ANY situation without correction, you do not have free will.
At this point, consider the importance of free will. Without it all the ugliness and badness in the world is explained. Without it what is the difference between you and ALL the ugly driven predators that have inhabited the planet since life started here. You might say I am good and believe in God or I am a good atheist who wants the world to be better. But without free will, you are only a pawn/player in this world of lies ugliness and violence.
If you are an adult, you have in affect been severely brainwashed by everything that has taken place in your life. Your country of origin, culture, parents, friends, religion, education, books read, films, art, music, radio, TV, newspapers, mores etc have all played a major part in forming your identity and how you view the world and your existence. Imagine that you suddenly came into existence with no previous identity or memory but you could think intelligently, read write, talk and understand. You would have NO preconceptions at all. If in that theoretical situation and with free will what conclusions would you come to of the world and civilisation. What would your first impressions of the world be to your fresh uncluttered mind? Would it be a world of intelligence, harmony, love or the complete opposite? Would each individual be concerned and want the best for every other individual. Would all share lovingly? Would there be no anger, hatred, murder, torture. Would there be an absence of greed? Would there be an absence of nonsense puerile religions? The answer is obvious. You would find a world of chaos with an awesome history of violence, pain and suffering. THINK, in your theoretical uncontaminated position could you possibly say that any one of the world’s inhabitants had free will? Do you think that the person who designs and makes nuclear weapons has free will? Do you think that the men and women in Russia who make the hundreds of thousands of Kalashnikov rifles that are used to kill throughout the world have free will? Do the millions of men and women in the west who buy their pampered pets expense food to eat while people starve have free will? Does the leader of a country or the head of a religious organisation living in luxury while others have only poverty with no hope have free will? Does the suicide bomber who blows himself up and everyone in his vicinity and thinks that he is going to paradise to be served by servile virgins have free will? Do the millions who smoke, over indulge in alcohol or are addicted to drugs have free will? Do ALL the six billion plus people on this planet who go about their daily lives and cannot see and understand clearly have free will? The list could go on and on and I’m sure that you would be in there somewhere.
If a just one person said to me..this world is ugly and worthless and if I could not change it completely I would without pain to anyone remove it I would know two things. The first is that the person would be intelligent (have understanding). The second is that while he might not have complete free will he/she would be more than half way there.
If you reply that, the answer is a man called Jesus or Muhammad not only have you not understood any of the previous and have no free will but you also have no intelligence.
Why is the world as it is? Why do people cling on to the lie that there is more good than bad when it is obviously not so. Why do people think that they have free will when they do not? That is catch22. Only by having free will can you know and understand the answer to that question. If you do not want to know, you do not have free will and you are the same as the lion, tiger, monkey, dog, flea etc. If you are religious consider God and Satan (if you believe that they both exist). Both want you to admire, genuflect and worship them and for you to be in their control. Anyone, man, woman or whoever who wants another to worship them is mentally ill and most certainly does not have free will. What a paradox it is that so often free will is the answer given by religious leaders as to why there is so much badness and evil in the world when in reality it is the opposite. It is the total lack of free will that makes and shapes this ugly violent world.
Do I have free will? I am aware that my thoughts and actions are influenced by external factors at many times; therefore, I do not have free will. But the important thing is that I can see and intelligently correctly evaluate that.
If you have read this and reached this point, I would make an observation. If you do not have free will, the preceding will not make a jot of difference to you. For free will means that you are intelligent, sane, seeing and understanding in a world where you do not belong.
Robert robert77@fsmail.net
Robert77:
I have a question for you. You say in your second to the last paragraph that you do not have free will because your thoughts and actions are influenced by external factors. You claim you can intelligently correctly evaluate that influence before you think or act. My question is how you determine when a thought or action is evaluated “correctly?” Also, when you decide to think or act contrary to all the influences of your experience, how can you be sure you are thinking or acting “correctly?”
Donna