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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ม.ค. 2025
- Helen Steward is a philosopher and author of 'A Metaphysics for Freedom' (Oxford University Press), which argues that agency itself-and not merely the special, distinctively human variety of it-is incompatible with determinism. Keith and Philip will Mind Chat with Helen about whether we have free will, and what that would entail about the ultimate nature of reality.
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For those interested in hearing about/supporting staff striking in UK universities: www.ucu.org.uk....
For what concerns downward causation, that might happen in the case where the lower-level elements are complex aggregates of matter (e.g. cells, tissues), but not in the case of fundamental particles (which is the level at which causal closure is expressed). The reason is because our current fundamental physics theories are based on locality of interactions, which means that the fields produced by an object are simply the net fields produced by each of the constituent particles individually. We certainly could imagine forces that depend non-locally on sources, so that whether or not a force is produced would depend on the specific arrangement of particles within the object (for example the configuration of a human brain instead of the configuration of a particle accelerator). But there is currently no evidence of any such case.
You say there's no evidence, but if you think we have reason to believe in free will, that might in itself be a reason for thinking there are such forces.
Dr Steward has raised a theory that is like panpsychism in philosophy of mind and can be called "panlibertarianism". This theory is so fascinating. But unfortunately I cant comprehend the book. I am trying to grasp the ideas with listening to these videos. Thank you for dealing with such an important issue.
The book is not easy! I explore 'pan-agentialism' in my paper 'Panpsychism and free will'
It looks like the only argument she has against causal closure is that particles embedded in biological systems might not behave according to known physical laws. But there is not a shred of evidence for that. On the contrary, we routinely use fundamental physics to construct many medical devices (e.g. MRI machines) and no fundamental law has ever been shown to fail in those contexts.
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Philip and Philip's microphone are both on strike
I had it connected to wrong mic...definitely get it right next time!
Keith is too nice.
It seems there is a misunderstanding of reductionism. We don't discuss political or economic events in terms of laws of physics, because that will be extremely inefficient and there is no need. Coarse graining works good enough. Remember center of gravity coarse-graining for studying projectiles. Remember 1 teaspoon of sugar instead of a number of sugar granules in your tea. But in principle it is possible. Even in thermodynamics, a branch of physics, we coarse grain, and talk in terms of laws related to temperature, pressure, volume, and density without discussing the motion of individual molecules. But those laws can be understood, if we are willing to do analysis at the collection of molecules level, perfectly well. And we do not find any inconsistencies. That is the most crucial point. The non-discussion about political events in terms of laws of physics is a matter of avoiding inefficiency and economy of concepts and not a matter of inconsistencies between those levels. This is why everything is not physics. That is why we have physics, chemistry, molecular biology, biology, animal behavior, psychology, political science, and economics. And this is even more so because of historic reasons. Humanity knew about higher-level systems in day-to-day life before we knew about the connection with underlying microscopic concepts like atoms, genes, DNA, and microbes.
For example, most of the time I can work in Java programing language, but there are cases when I have to drop down to assembly language and even microcode of CPU. And in the end, I cannot make the Java language do anything that the CPU can't do. But Java language is very economical in expressing solutions for real-world problems.
But in any case very stimulating discussion. Thanks.
Nice articulation of a certain view, but why think it's true and/or the opposing view false?
@@philipgoff7897 Thanks. I think that reductionism is true because of how I see science has progressed in terms of explaining higher-level concepts (not necessarily the terminology at the higher level) in terms of lower-level concepts. An example of terminology confusion is when people ask "show me in physics where love is?". On one hand, it seems silly that I am giving that example, but actually, it is a very serious point. People confuse concepts with terminology at each level. As we go down the conceptual levels, we also have to go down the terminology levels translating them along the way.
We now know some deceases are caused by bacteria and viruses, which in turn is because of bio-chemistry -> organic chemistry -> chemistry -> molecular physics -> atomic physics. The bayesian probably of reductionism being true has been constantly marching upwards and IMO has crossed into the zone of practically considered as true. Of course, there are some areas where it has to make inroads - and in my opinion, a lot of scientific effort is being put in. The breaking down of barriers between various sciences like - biology, chemistry, and physics - the interdisciplinary nature of the research - is only accelerating. The research is now aided by computer sciences (algorithms, AI, big data). With that, the nature of research in the 21st century is qualitatively different than the 20th century siloed research. Another thing all of this has done is to (correctly) weaken our strong sense of intuition (which serves us well in certain regimes of reality) in other micro and cosmo scales. It is freeing us from being limited by our intuitions about reality.
Another way to think about reductionism is in terms of weak emergence vs strong emergence. I have not seen an example of strong emergence.
How on earth can "political or economic events" be understood in terms of the laws of physics?
@@naughtypanda2538 Well there's a few layers you have to go through to get from physics to politics. But if you think political events are largely caused by the interaction of people's wants, mental states, intentions, etc., (which seems true to me) then politics is probably describable in terms of psychology. And neuroscientists would contend that psychological phenomena are explainable in terms of physical interactions in the brain-like synaptic transmission-and they can often show how neural activity is related to emotions and other psychological phenomena through functional MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, positron emission tomography, etc. We have to make the jump from knowing that many psychological events are caused by physical interactions to presuming that all psychological events are caused by physical interactions. I think this is a fine jump to make because our best theory so far of where psychological phenomena come from is that they can be explained physically (dopamine and happiness, cortisol and stress, oxytocin and love).
Btw this should not be interpreted as a defence of a physicalist explanation of consciousness lol.
Another angle that was not explored was the insistence on the role of indeterminacy in free will. If indeterminacy here means randomness then I hope we really do not want that. We should hope to make decisions based on due and moral considerations of the facts. Unless indeterminacy was meant to appeal to some supernatural spirituality, let us put it on the table and admit it and not beat around the bush.
Steward does say explicitly that libertarian free will is richer than indeterminism.
supernatural'ness wont help her because of the 'problem of luck' - causal explanation of one action rather than another.
The other important thing to note is how casually we seem to be using the word determinism. The determinism physicalists talk about is the one with 100% precision of knowledge about the system. This is the Laplace daemon kind of precision. The libertarian free will is the similar counterpart of this strict, 100% precise knowledge-based physicalist determinism. This is practically never possible. Therein lies the disconnect between free will and determinism. The "libertarian" part of the free-will hides in the gap between casual determinism and Laplace daemon determinism. We do not have the "libertarian" free will for a qualitatively similar reason as to why we cannot have Laplacian, 100% precise knowledge determinism.
The free will we practice every day is what I call "effective" or "practical" free will. We should start calling it "freeish" will and it will start making sense.
For example, the free will of a stock trader will be affected based on knowledge of vs insider knowledge of the company performance. The point being the degree of partial knowledge of the market affects the stock trader's decision.
Another interesting thing to think about is also when we have to make decisions we have to make the decisions. Humans' got to do what a Humans' got to do. We cannot know full knowledge at an instant let alone knowledge over an extended time.
Another point to consider is how much our memory, life experience, desires, and goals play in our free-will decisions. Baby's have free will, yet they have to go where the parents take them, feed them or make them wear clothes etc.
Philip's voice is a bit louder than everyone else and it's distracting, I would really appreciate it if you balance the audio before starting. The questions asked here were very interesting even if I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions.
I'm definitely gonna get my mic sorted next time
I second that. It's like that in a lot of their videos. I end up having to turn my earbuds up and down to adjust for it.
@@philipgoff7897 Oh yay! Didn't see that before. :)
I do what I can, but I'd need separate audio files for each participant to do a proper job.
Does Steward hold to phenomenal conservatism? That seems a good way to capture her intuitions about burden of proof. Either way, Mike Huemer would probably make an interesting guest, both on the hard problem front and the hooking-up-of-consciousness-to-the-world front. Anyway, I absolutely loved this episode - I think it's shifted my view from compatibilism to libertarianism!
wow, that's quite a result! And yeah, I think you're right something like that is going on
In my 2021 paper "A Rationalist Defense of Determinism" (Theoria), which builds upon my 2011 paper "Concerning the Resilience of Galen Strawson's Basic Argument" (Phil Studies), I too see agency as something broader than just the sort of agency apparent when a human is making a major moral decision (such as whether to pull the lever in the trolley example). It extends to what I am doing when buttering my toast and what a dolphin is doing when going after food. I also share with Helen the belief that incompatibilism is true and that determinism is a doctrine of metaphysics (rather than physics). The major difference, of course, is that I argue that determinism, in its most global form, is true (and thereby come down on the side of hard determinism). Check the paper out, anyone, if you get the time.
1:13 narrator: he got him a pineapple
Why did neither of you express the luck objection clearly? You were far easier on her than you were on Tim O'Connor. Why??? Helen Steward is a seasoned philosophy professor.
5 star review
The problem I see with all libertarian and compatibilist arguments is this reductionism to "I don't feel like determinism is true" or "I don't want determinism to be true" so I'm going to say it isn't. I'm not seeing any actual arguments about how we make choices in a truly free way if we didn't pick our brain/personality to begin with. If our brains/personality played no role, and we're just randomly making choices, that's not free will. That's randomness. Likewise if all our choice making is considered by and colored by our brains/personality (which we didn't choose) that's not free will either. We're just robots playing out scenarios based on how are brains/personalities are structured to play them out. Where is the actual agency in any of this? Sure it's us doing it, since we are the sum of those parts. But we didn't pick those parts or put them together in that way.
Free will seems to be a paradox where we would have needed to be us before we were us, to pick out the traits of our brain/personality that is going to result in X when Y happens. Yet there is no evidence that's the case.
But if all of this is true and it's completely determined (minus maybe some true randomness changing the course of this or that) what are any of us going to do about that? If that's true, that's always been the case, yet we can seem to live and not be bothered by it. On the macro level we still exist in our fog of uncertainty, where we don't know what is causing us to do X when Y happens. So even if the movie is already made (in a sense - I think it's being made and we're watching the dailies), we're watching it for the first time and have no idea what's going to happen, or why this guy is motivated to do this, or even why we are motivated to respond the way we do.
This seems like an open and shut case. What am I missing?
I'd love Mindchat have Sam Harris on here to bring some sense to these ridiculous ideas
Lmao. Sad that you don't realise that Sam Harris is a complete white belt in philosophy and critical thinking compared to those black belts.
Those are publishing university prof. Sam Harris is a nobody academically. He is just popular among clueless people like you.
I think Steward won on human agency and Frankish on the non-human physical. Combine and you are dualist!