S15, E2: Randomness, Strawmen and Piñatas
Series 15: How to Remain Blameless while Calling BS on 'No Free-Will'
In S15, E1: The Railroaded Children: ‘No Free Will’ I asked, if free-will doesn’t exist, why would we have evolved the capacity to simulate it? Or, put another way, how would it benefit the survival of our genes to evolve imaginary self-determination?
So let’s refresh our memories and get a flavour of the Robert Sapolsky-objection to free-will, because close up it looks like an ideological aversion to attribution, whether that be to attach credit or blame to someone. In his recent conversation on
’s Within Reason podcast, he said:… it’s not intuitively obvious yet, that people who are kind are not intrinsically more deserving humans that people who are not, because neither had anything to do with it, Okaaaay, that one’s gonna take some work …
There’s no Free Will. What Now? - Robert Sapolsky, Within Reason, Alex O’Connor
So this means no responsibility and no merit, so how does Sapolsky suppose we are going to get to the idyllic world of no judgement, where no one can be deemed either good or bad? Presumably by a naturally occurring process analogous to natural selection i.e. one that does not require deliberate input. But what would provide the evolutionary pressure to make this change? After all, wasn’t it for survival advantage that we developed the ability to make judgements about things in our environment, in the first place?
The rapid first-impressions we gather about others is something we evolved to distinguish between friends and foes. We might say that tribalism and family life are both kinds of survival collaborations. Civilisation arose from groups that developed their own rules and cultures, enabling humans to moderate animalistic judgement, prejudices and drives. Yet the key word is ‘moderate’ and not eliminate, because those instincts are the basis of threat-recognition and remain necessary to our survival.
Sapolsky cares about how we judge people and I think it’s because of the noble aim of reducing suffering. We need to be careful of what we dismantle because social pressure on the anti-social must have emerged to reduce overall suffering in the general population, a principle Jeremy Bentham formalised in his definition of right and wrong1 long before Charles Darwin went on his first voyage - although the connection being made here might not be obvious2.
I agree that we should seek to do better because free-will empowers us to make a difference. Why should Sapolsky care who we judge if our judgement determines nothing? He might say it is because he has no choice but where does any of this get us?
… that one … [O’Connor: ‘yeah’ ] we’re at that challenge at this point ... save the effort for the important ones …
ibid. (Sapolsky)
And how are we meant to direct our effort without free-will? If you notice that none of this makes any sense, dig in, because it doesn’t get any better.
Alex O’Connor responds with this:
I think of that intuition of free will … as well … this might help people too … one of the problems of free will and one of the ways to really get into discussing is ... to simply ask a person, well what do you mean by free will?
ibid. (O’Connor)
Most people’s response would surely be that it’s the sense of self-determination that is naturally felt. O’Connor pretends he doesn’t instinctively know what anyone else means by ‘free-will’, and perhaps we are expected to imagine he has transcended to a distance plane of intellectual existence, where he can no longer understand what it feels like to make a choice.
This thing that you intuitively have, describe it to me, because what we’re talking about here ….. is somebody who says I feel nihilistic because I’ve realised that all of my actions are determined. I say ok, well what’s the alternative to that?
ibid. (O’Connor)
The pretence of puzzlement is the set up for a strawman, but before discussing that, I have five words on the role of randomness in the internal mechanics of self-determination; it does not have one. Consciousness gives us awareness of our environment and self-determinism enables us to react and interact with it - if our decisions sometimes seem capricious it is because much of our environment is governed by chaotic elements. It makes sense that being sentient and responsive are survival mechanisms, but evidently, in the case of humans it continued to evolve to incorporate a far more sophisticated model for self-interest.
It is true that ‘randomness’ has been used to support the existence of free-will - in attempts to explain why the decisions we make can feel ungrounded, for example, when calling heads or tails in a coin toss. These are piñata-like defences because it’s easily busted open by no free-will proponents. In S15, 2B: The B-Side, “Navigating Uncertainty”, I provide examples of where Sapolsky takes a swing at these, plus offer an alternative explanation for why uncertainty can make us feel we are responding arbitrarily.
Back to O’Connor’s argument:
… suppose that this action that you commit is not determined by anything at all - that means its random. You wouldn’t be in control of that either. If I convinced you that you were just random events occurring all of the time, that’s what you were… that’s all you are as a person, wouldn’t that instil a similar nihilistic crisis? Okay, … [Sapolsky laughs mistaking it for a mic drop moment]
ibid. (O’Connor)
It’s a strawman because although we might say the opposite of determinism is randomness, ‘determinism’ is not the opposite of ‘free-will’. What could it possibly mean to suggest that free-will is anything other than a form of determinism too? The options are not, ‘determined versus non-determined’, but ‘environmentally-determined versus self-determined’. Hence I suggest that the matter of free-will should not be a debate over whether what we think, say or do is determined, but where the determination originates. Also as per the conjectures presented in S15, E1: The Railroaded Children: ‘No Free-Will’, is it unreasonable to posit that the mind is the environment that determines thought?
Okay then maybe free will is kind of being sort of partly determined, partly not, like … if you try to pin down the thing that you claim to believe in it actually becomes very difficult to do and I would say - and this would be my argument and probably yours too, that whatever you do land on is an idea of what free will could be usually ends up by being self-contradictory,
ibid. (O’Connor)
Given the logical and linguistic leeway that O’Connor et al allow themselves it is a bit rich to accuse advocates for free-will of being self-contradictory. My confession is that the meaning of these sentences escape me, but in fairness, I am willing to assume they mean something.
… it doesn’t make sense, impossible or it’s describing something that is not really free will - like something the compatibilists do for example, so I don’t even know what this ... intuition really looks like … what is it you want if this is troubling you ...?
ibid. (O’Connor)
He would presumably accept that our motor reflexes and instincts are determinants for certain reactive behaviours. Sapolsky argues that people can be neither good or bad because they did not create themselves and are not responsible for who they are. That is plausible, but he also opposes our natural tendency to assess people’s ‘goodness’ based on their actions, without recognising its utility as a component of threat-recognition.
These intuitive risk assessments can lead to false impressions but on average they maximise safety, i.e. they arise from our survival instinct. So how are we to overrule some determining factors we don’t happen to like, without the free-will to initiate any change on our environment or ourselves? Even if this ludicrous scenario were in some way possible, our ability to press the override button on survival mechanisms would outstrip our competence to do it safely.
O’Connor affects not to understand the intuition for free-will whilst Sapolsky sees progress as relinquishing our intuition for good and bad towards a general acceptance that there is no such thing as personal responsibility. Oddly enough, the scientific basis for denying free-will, is the relationship between cause and effect, so to attribute credit or blame is an attempt to determine causality that philosophers like Sapolsky reject.
What Sapolsky and O’Connor share in all this is twofold; an impression of being in agreement and a failure to notice they are talking about different things. O’Connor thinks that intuitions about self-determination are illusions that don’t affect him. Sapolsky thinks our intuitions about human causality must evolve into those for environmental determinism - but why would that be necessary if our intuitions are only illusions that have no impact on the world? In lieu of a word that fits, I describe them as being in ‘agruntment’, which I locally define as agreeing on the noises each other are making.
Yet equally we can ask what are the mechanisms for self-awareness including the awareness of self-interest? Whatever our concept of brain or mind what seems obvious to me is that the substrate for free-will is consciousness. Our difficulty in understanding this stems from the fact that we don’t fully understand the substrate for consciousness. This was discussed in S8, E3: The Emergence of Autonomy3 in June of 2023.
What would be the purpose of consciousness if not some kind of feedback loop on wellness? What would be the purpose of that feedback if it could not be acted upon? Even if you say that it feeds into a deterministic process, are we to suppose that our brains process information whilst remaining indifferent to our conscious experience? More likely, it seems to me, that it would seek to optimise that experience for us. If so wouldn’t that be a mechanism by which our conscious minds have an input into decision making?
You see, to discount free-will altogether, you have to believe that our decision making is impacted by absolutely everything except our conscious experience. As suggested in S15,E1: The Railroaded Children: ‘No Free-Will’, if our subconscious fools us into making decisions to keep our conscious minds happy, then the state of our conscious minds is also an input into decision making. It does my argument no harm to agree with those who say our decisions and emotions are created by the subconscious mind, only to be witnessed by the conscious mind, a passive observer. But what is our subconscious if not us and in whose interests is it acting if not ours? How could that be anything other than self-determinism?
Next - S15,E3: A Unit of Consciousness
The B-Side/ “Navigating Uncertainty”
This link is to a free sample of ‘The B-Side’.
From March 26, 2024 I will switch on the options for paid subscriptions and after that, on selected series, I will provide some paid companion ‘episodes’. These will generally complement the free episode without being essential to it. If you are curious but still unclear, please see ‘The B-Side Explainer’, thank you.
The B-Side Explainer
S15, E2B: The B-Side/"Navigating Uncertainty"
Jeremy Bentham (February 15, 1748 - June 6, 1832) set out his axiom "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." I suggest this is the fitness measure for the evolution of societies because it maximises welfare and therefore survival. This principle of Bentham is almost Darwinian, but if that was the case, would we have expected societies to make more steady progress towards maximising happiness in the population? Let’s look at this from another perspective.
When revolutions come and empires fall, it is invariably because the interests of the few have been put above those of the many, until that situation becomes intolerable. We can surmise that the transition rate between a society in a peaceful steady-state and revolution is regulated by the balance of power which is not evenly distributed in societies. Factors affecting the transition rate from stability to instability include the availability of modern weaponry and public support for the state’s ‘monopoly on legitimate violence’.
Charles Darwin (February 12 1809 - April 19, 1882) went on his five year voyage aboard the Beagle in 1831 and a year later Jeremy Bentham died aged 84. It might be interesting consider how Bentham’s work may have influenced Darwin.
This was one of several episodes that were left in drafts unpublished from nearly a year ago.