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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Recently eight leading thinkers were asked to identify the world's most dangerous idea. Somewhat predictably, the majority of responses were political; Nussbaum suggested religious intolerance, Francis Fukuyama suggested transhumanism and Eric Hobshawm suggested spreading democracy. However, the one that most struck me was the suggestion of Paul Davies: Undermining Free Will.
Davies observes that free will has been an uncertain concept since Newton when the universe was reconceived as a form of mechanism, with quantum uncertainty failing to address the matter since it leaves unable to determine our own actions. However, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience are the particular problems at present. In this case, the traditional notion of a self founding ideas of agency and responsibility (i.e. the legal distinction between a crime carried out by someone under hypnosis or sleepwalking and other conditions), is viewed as incompatible with evolutionary explanations for behaviour and the genetic encoding of those evolutionary processes. Naturalistic explanations displace metaphysical ones. To some extent this critique is not especially novel either, going back to Ryle's critique of the idea of the Ghost in the Machine through to the localisation of conscious activity through PET scans. As Daniel Dennett put it in his critique of the Cartesian theatre where we are conscious of whatever it is we're conscious of quot;if there is a theatre in the mind, there has to be someone in the theatre, watching it all; and if there is someone watching it, they must in turn have a little theatre inside them where the watching goes on, and that must have another watcher, and so on, smaller and smaller, in an infinite regress towards absurdity. "
The more recent development is the replacement of those figures on stage with a set of evolutionary processes. I've written before that such explanations tend to be rather suspect (if nothing else because they are no more subject to conscious investigation than Freudian notions of the unconscious), on the grounds that they require a rather awkward apparatus to explain behaviour. On the whole though, the erosion of free will as a concept is largely to compatibilist accounts such as that offered by Dennett. As Jerry Fodor suggests:"Dennett's particular contribution to this line of thought - is that if, by instrumentalist assumption, the evolution of agency is just the evolution of sufficiently agent-like behaviour, then whether or not you are an agent is independent of how your behaviour is caused... Because creatures that appear to be agents (actors, perceivers, thinkers) are such good 'solutions' to her 'problems', Mother Nature increases their relative frequency in their breeding group. So here we are... (One wonders, in passing, why Mother Nature bothers with this elaborate charade. Wouldn't the best way for her to make a creature that acts just like an agent be for her to make a creature that is an agent? Such are the puzzles instrumentalists are prone to.)"
The figure on the stage is replaced instead with a puppetmaster bent on having his creations behave as if the strings were not present. At this point attempts to produce a compatibilist explanation of free will begin to seem little more coherent than the notion of a self independent from material factors. Much the same can be said for pragmatic accounts of free will where the superstructure of existing cultural assumptions is allowed to remain largely intact embodied in laws and ethical codes in the absence of the religious and philosophical ideas (based on notions of free will) that originally defined those legal and ethical codes. A naturalistic account of these matters could certainly permit much of them to remain, but it seems difficult to conclude that this would be a seamless process. This was something I had written about elsewhere, comparing the philosophical basis of Locke's liberalism with Hobbesian conservatism:"Hobbes viewed mankind as being naturally governed by his passions and incapable of forming a social bond without some element of coercion to ward off universal war... John Locke, by contrast, dismissed notions of passions governing mankind, with the notion of the tabula rasa, or blank slate.
One of the grounds for citing these two conceptions, lies with the degree to which modern conceptions of rationality are increasingly spurning the idea of the blank slate and moving towards a conception that bears a marked resemblance to that of Hobbes, if we substitute the term ‘genes’ for ‘passions.’ As Edward O Wilson observed, every human brain is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as 'an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid. "Labels: Philosophy, Science
posted by Richard 5:33 pm
