The Four Million Dollar Philosopher

• The Four Million Dollar Philosopher

  • According to some people, free will is housed only in non-physical souls; it’s a supernatural power
  • According to others, whether or not souls exist, free will doesn’t depend on them. People in this second group divide into two subgroups. Some will tell you that the ability to make rational, informed, conscious decisions in the absence of undue force – no one holding a gun to your head – is enough for free will. Others say that something important must be added: If you have free will, then alternative decisions are open to you in a deep way
  • What is needed is that more than one option was open to you, given everything as it actually was at the time
  • I assessed some much-discussed scientific arguments for the thesis that free will does not exist. The general structure of these arguments is simple. In stage 1, data are offered in support of some featured empirical proposition or other – for example, the proposition that conscious intentions are never among the causes of corresponding actions. In stage 2, the featured empirical proposition is combined with a proposition that expresses some aspect of the author’s view about what “free will” means to yield the conclusion that free will does not exist.
  • The real threat, I am sometimes told, is bound up with what philosophers call substance dualism – a doctrine that includes a commitment to the idea that every human person is or has a non-physical soul or mind. (So we’re back to the analogue of premium gas.) This alleged threat is based on two claims: first, given what “free will” means, having free will requires being or having a non-physical soul or mind; and, second, the experiments at issue provide powerful evidence that such souls or minds don’t exist.
  • Anthony Cashmore, in a 2010 article (’The Lucretian Swerve: The Biological Basis of Human Behavior and the Criminal Justice System’), asserts that “if we no longer entertain the luxury of a belief in the ‘magic of the soul,’ then there is little else to offer in support of the concept of free will.”
  • Michael Gazzaniga says that free will involves a ghostly or nonphysical element and “some secret stuff that is YOU.” Obviously, this isn’t a report of a scientific discovery about what “free will” means; he is telling us how he understands that expression – that is, what “free will” means to him. Given what Gazzaniga means by “free will,” it’s no surprise that, in his view, “free will is a miscast concept, based on social and psychological beliefs . . . that have not been borne out and/or are at odds with modern scientific knowledge about the nature of our universe.”
  • Because there is no place in the experiment for conscious reflection about which button to press, there is no place for an explanation of the button pressing in terms of conscious reasons for pressing it.
  • Self-deception, as I think of it, is (roughly) motivationally or emotionally biased false belief.
  • Part of the answer would seem to lie in what they want to be true: that they are very good at their job or extremely easy to get along with. It is likely that their wanting something to be true of them biases their self-estimations.

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