I never stopped learning from Daniel Dennett
nautil.us
nautil.us
( And hi Anil, in case you stumble in here :)
If folks haven't heard Sam Harris' take on the topic, I encourage you to read his book or listen to one of his many podcast episodes on the topic.
I really don't understand people's objections to it. Free will never had a denotational definition that everyone agreed on, it had a set of vague, imprecise connotational meanings, and the free will debate has always been about determining whether we can devise a clear denotational definition that makes of agency and how we reason about moral responsibility. We can, and that's Compatibilism.
Moreover, studies I empirical philosophy have validated that most lay people experimental on moral reasoning questions largely agree with Compatibilist reasoning:
https://philarchive.org/rec/ANDWCI-3
So I think Dennett has been vindicated.
Agreed in that there is not a coherent definition of free will, but what most people think it means is that if time were wound back and replaced, a person could have made a different choice than they previously made.
> the free will debate has always been about determining whether we can devise a clear denotational definition that makes of agency and how we reason about moral responsibility
Clearly people make voluntary actions and we can influence the voluntary actions people take (through teaching, punishment, reward, etc). This can all be explained through a chain of cause and effect, by which we are all constrained and lack freedom from.
Let me ask you to think of a movie. Now think of a 2nd movie. Now a 3rd.
Did you think of the movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York? Why not? Why did you think of the movies you thought of and in what sense did you choose which movies to think of?
Of all the things humans consider free will, choosing a movie in your head as among the most uncontroversial personal choices. In what way were you free to choose one and not another? I contend that you are not free to choose what thoughts pop into your head. Where is free will then?
I disagree and I think the paper I linked literally proves that people do not think this way. Per the paper, most people agreed with "source Compatibilism", where people considered an agent responsible if they were the ultimate source of the choice. I recommend reading the paper, it's well done and very accessible.
> In what way were you free to choose one and not another? I contend that you are not free to choose what thoughts pop into your head. Where is free will then?
The freedom to choose according to your desires. The fact that you don't have a choice in your desires doesn't seem relevant.
Think about it mechanistically: suppose you have a machine learning model that can act as an intelligent agent, and this model responds to moral feedback, eg. you tell it when it did something morally wrong or right, and it updates its internal state to reflect what it's learned and makes better choices in the future. It's capable of abstraction and generalization in order to learn general moral principles rather than merely memorizing specific rules.
After some period of training, doesn't it seem reasonable that you could trust such an agent to make ethical choices, no matter what its initial state was? Even if you initialized it with maximal hostile intentions, but it still operated basically the same as one initialized with maximal altruistic intentions, they would both converge roughly to similar points on important moral questions.
Maybe the hostile one might be a little more selfish in circumstances of moral ambiguity where the other will still err on the altruistic side, but I would argue you can still mostly trust it to make ethical decisions.
Such agents still probably won't be perfect, and where they mess up we would require more ethical feedback to update its internal state that drives its decision procedures.
What is this feedback loop if not holding the agent morally responsible for its choices? How are humans any different from such mechanistic agents? As children we know little but have certain proclivities towards selfishness or charity, and adults teach us when we've done something right or wrong, and we internalize and generalize that kind of logic as we mature. We don't have a perfect system for determining when someone is fully mature and ready to make ethical choices, but the heuristic of 18-21 years old seems to generally work.
The initialization state doesn't seem particularly relevant. Maybe the hostile agent prefers ice cream where the altruistic agent prefers chocolate bars, but this isn't really relevant to whether they are free to make choices according to their internal reasons, and whether they respond to being held morally responsible for poor choices.
The only freedom worth having is the type that lets you choose according to what you value, and that turns out to be the kind of freedom we do have.
The confusion about free will comes from a confusion about what "free" means. The everyday use of the word free has little to do with determinism etc.
"By clearly defining what freedom is, regardless of whether or not determinism holds, our conceptualization of value freedom allows for a compatibilist view on free will. We are not disagreeing with the classic incompatibilist argument (McKenna & Coates, 2021) that determinism does not allow for free will; rather, what we propose is that the kind of freedom lay people actually refer to in everyday language is not the same kind of freedom incompatibilists reject. This distinction between what we here call physical freedom vs. value freedom allows for several potentially interesting perspectives."
In my early mid-life, facing a chaotic world of gross conservative christian religious dogma, his posture felt agreeable to me because it seemed to offer a prospect for intellectual adaptation: don't assume magic for what you don't understand.
But it also never felt welcome to me because he comes off as an authoritarian.
As I've become more sensitive to the limits of explanation I've become more interested in how the philosopher encounters the limits of his own language and in this area Dennett is notable for his awareness of limits, but shows no special traits of adaptation to these limits.
Like all philosophers he can't escape the bounds of his own undefined terms, e.g., "free will", and shuffles around the problem of scope by changing the subject to some other area to which he can speak with authority.
As he aged out he became a shaman for his own point of view.
He once appealed to the part of me that takes comfort in the reasoning of a strong father, but I lost the need for this.
It's clear to me that the mysteries not only aren't going away with more thought, but thought expands the mysteries to fill all available space.
In my limited exposure to his philosophy, he appeared to take no obvious joy in the mysterious, nor have any regard for it. He rarely said anything to the effect of the marvelous, i.e, "it's really strange things work this way"
Contrast with Feynman.
Dan Dennett has now crossed over into the fullness of mystery, and I'm skeptical that his philosophy was much solace to him during the trial of that passing. I doubt he took Pascal's wager.
In the film, Dennett’s brain is transplanted to a vat so it (he?) can control his body remotely using a radio transmitter (to retrieve a subterranean ICBM).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_of_the_Brain
A (very low quality) copy of the film is available on YouTube: