Tag Archives: haecceity

Freedom – why worry?

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chainWhy does the question of determinism versus free will continue to trouble us? There’s nothing too strange, perhaps, about a philosophical problem remaining in play for a while – or even for a few hundred years: but why does this one have such legs and still provoke such strong and contrary feelings on either side?

For me the problem itself is solved – and the right solution, broadly speaking, has been known for centuries: determinism is true, but we also have free choice in a meaningful sense. St Augustine, to go no earlier, understood that free will and predestination are not contradictory, but people still find it confusing that he spoke up for both.

If this view – compatibilism – is right, why hasn’t it triumphed? I’m coming to think that the strongest opposition on the question might not in fact be between the hard-line determinists and the uncompromising libertarians but rather a matter of both ends against the middle. Compatibilists like me are happy to see the problem solved and determinism reconciled with common sense, whereas people from both the extremes insist that that misses something crucial. They believe the ‘loss’ of free will radically undercuts and changes our traditional sense of what we are as human beings. They think determinism, for better or worse, wipes away some sacred mark from our brows. Why do they think that?

Let’s start by quickly solving the old problem. Part one: determinism is true. It looks, with some small reservations about the interpretation of some esoteric matters, as if the laws of physics completely determine what happens. Actually even if contemporary physics did not seem to offer the theoretical possibility of full determination, we should be inclined to think that some set of rules did. A completely random or indeterminate world would seem scarcely distinguishable from a nullity; nothing definite could be said about it and no reliable predictions could be made because everything could be otherwise. That kind of scenario, of disastrous universal incoherence is extreme, and I admit I know of no absolute reason to rule out a more limited, demarcated indeterminacy. Still, the idea of delimited patches of randomness seems odd, inelegant and possibly problematic. God, said Einstein, does not play dice.

Beyond that, moreover, there’s a different kind of point. We came into this business in pursuit of truth and knowledge, so it’s fair to say that if there seemed to be patches of uncertainty we should want to do our level best to clarify them out of existence. In this sense it’s legitimate to regard determinism not just as a neutral belief, but as a proper aspiration. Even if we believe in free will, aren’t we going to want a theory that explains how it works, and isn’t that in the end going to give us rules that determine the process? Alright, I’m coming to the conclusion too soon: but in this light I see determinism as a thing that lovers of truth must strive towards (even if in vain) and we can note in passing that that might be some part of the reason why people champion it with zeal.

We’re not done with the defence, anyway. One more thing we can do against indeterminacy is to invoke the deep old principle which holds that nothing comes of nothing, and that nothing therefore happens unless it must; if something particular must happen, then the compulsion is surely encapsulated in some laws of nature.

Further still, even if none of that were reliable, we could fall back on a fatalistic argument. If it is true that on Tuesday you’ll turn right, then it was true on Monday that you would turn right on Tuesday; so your turning that way rather than left was already determined.

Finally, we must always remember that failure to establish determinism is not success in establishing liberty. Determinism looks to be true; we should try to establish its truth if by any means we can: but even if we fail, that failure in itself leaves us not with free will but with an abhorrent void of the unknowable.

Part two: we do actually make free decisions. Determinism is true, but it bites firmly only at a low level of description; not truly above the level of particles and forces. To look for decisions or choices at that level is simply a mistake, of the same general kind as looking for bicycles down there. Their absence from the micro level does not mean that cyclists are systematically deluded. Decisions are processes of large neural structures, and I suggest that when we describe them as free we simply mean the result was not constrained externally. If I had a gun to my head or my hands were tied, then turning left was not a free decision. If no-one could tell which way I should go without knowledge of what was going on in the large neural structures that realise my mind, then it was free. There are of course degrees of freedom and plenty of grey areas, but the essential idea is clear enough. Freedom is just the absence of external constraint on a level of description where people and decisions are salient, useful concepts.

For me, and I suppose other compatibilists, that’s a satisfying solution and matches well with what I think I’ve always meant when I talk about freedom. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see what else freedom could mean. What if God did play dice after all? Libertarians don’t want their free decisions to be random, they want them to belong to them personally and reflect consideration of the circumstances; the problem is that it’s challenging for them to explain in that case how the decisions can escape some kind of determination. What unites the libertarians and the determinists is the conviction that it’s that inexplicable, paradoxical factor we are concerned to affirm or deny, and that its presence or absence says something important about human nature. To quietly do without the magic, as compatibilists do, is on their view to shoot the fox and spoil the hunt. What are they both so worried about?

I speculate that the one factor here is a persistent background confusion. Determinism, we should remember, is an intellectual achievement, both historically and often personally. We live in a world where nothing much about human beings is certainly determined; only careful reflection reveals that in the end, at the lowest level of detail and at the very last knockings of things, there must be certainty. This must remain a theoretical conclusion, certainly so far as human beings are concerned; our behaviour may be determinate, but it is not determinable; certainly not in practice and very probably not even in theory, given the vast complexity, chaotic organisation and marvellously emergent properties of our brains. Some of those who deny determinism may be moved, not so much by explicit rejection of the true last-ditch thesis, but by the certainty that our minds are not determinable by us or by anyone. This muddying of the waters is perpetuated even now by arguments about how our minds may be strongly influenced by high-level factors: peer pressure, subliminal advertising, what we were given to read just before making a decision. These arguments may be presented in favour of determinism together with the water-tight last-ditch case, but they are quite different, and the high-level determinism they support is not certainly true but rather an eminently deniable hypothesis. In the end our behaviour is determined, but can we be programmed like robots by higher level influences? Maybe in some cases – generally, probably not.

The second, related factor is a certain convert enthusiasm. If determinism is a personal intellectual achievement it may well be that we become personally invested in it. When we come to appreciate its truth for the first time it may seem that we have grasped a new perspective and moved out of the confused herd to join the scientifically enlightened. I certainly felt this on my first acquaintance with the idea; I remember haranguing a friend about the truth of determinism in a way that must, with hindsight, have resembled religious conviction and been very tiresome.

“Yes, yes, OK, I get it,” he would say in a vain attempt to stop the flow.

Now no-one lives pure determinism; we all go behaving as if agency and freedom were meaningful. The fact that this involves an unresolved tension between your philosophy and the ideas about people you actually live by was not a deterrent to me then, however; in fact it may even have added a glamorous sheen of esoteric heterodoxy to the whole thing. I expect other enthusiasts may feel the same today. The gradual revelation, some years later, that determinism is true but actually not at all as important as you thought is less exciting: it has rather a dying fall to it and may be more difficult to assimilate. Consistency with common sense is perhaps a game for the middle aged.

“You know, I’ve been sort of nuancing my thinking about determinism lately…”

“Oh, what, Peter? You made me live through the conversion experience with you – now I have to work through your apostasy, too?”

On the libertarian side, it must be admitted that our power of decision really does look sort of strange, with a power far exceeding that of mere absence of constraint. There are at least two reasons for this. One is our ability to use intentionality to think about anything whatever, and base our decisions on those thoughts. I can think about things that are remote, non-existent, or even absurd, without any difficulty. Most notably, when I make decisions I am typically thinking about future events: will I turn left or right tomorrow? How can future events influence my behaviour now?

It’s a bit like the time machine case where I take the text of Hamlet back in time and give it to Shakespeare – who never actually produced it but now copies it down and has it performed. Who actually wrote it, in these circumstances? No-one, it just appeared at some point. Our ability to think about the future, and so use future goals as causes of actions now, seems in the same way to bring our decisions into being out of nowhere inside us. There was no prior cause, only later ones, so it really seems as if the process inverts and disrupts the usual order of causality.

We know this is indeed remarkable but it isn’t really magic. On my view it’s simply that our recognition of various entities that extend over time allows a kind of extrapolation. The actual causal processes, down at that lowest level, tick away in the right order, but our pattern-matching capacity provides processes at a higher level which can legitimately be said to address the future without actually being caused by it. Still, the appearance is powerful, and we may be impatient with the kind of materialist who prefers to live in a world with low ceilings, insists on everything being material and denies any independent validity to higher levels of description. Some who think that way even have difficulty accepting that we can think directly about mathematical abstractions – quite a difficult posture for anyone who accepts the physics that draws heavily on them.

The other thing is the apparent, direct reality of our decisions. We just know we exercise free will, because we experience the process immediately. We can feel ourselves deciding. We could be wrong about all sorts of things in the world, but how could I be wrong about what I think? I believe the feeling of something ineffable here comes from the fact that we are not used to dealing with reality. Most of what we know about the world is a matter of conscious or unconscious inference, and when we start thinking scientifically or philosophically it is heavily informed by theory. For many people it starts to look as if theory is the ultimate bedrock of things, rather than the thin layer of explanation we place on top. For such a mindset the direct experience of one’s own real thoughts looks spooky; its particularity, its haecceity, cannot be accounted for by theory and so looks anomalous. There are deep issues here, but really we ought not to be foxed by simple reality.

That’s it, I think, in brief at least. More could be said of course; more will be said. The issues above are like optical illusions: just knowing how they work doesn’t make them go away, and so minds will go on boggling. People will go on furiously debating free will: that much is both determined and determinable.

Reality

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knight 4This is the last of four posts about key ideas from my book The Shadow of Consciousness, and possibly the weirdest; this time the subject is reality.

Last time I suggested that qualia – the subjective aspect of experiences that gives them their what-it-is-like quality – are just the particularity, or haecceity, of real experiences. There is something it is like to see that red because you’re really seeing it; you’re not just understanding the theory, which is a cognitive state that doesn’t have any particular phenomenal nature. So we could say qualia are just the reality of experience. No mystery about it after all.

Except of course there is a mystery – what is reality? There’s something oddly arbitrary about reality; some things are real, others are not. That cake on the table in front of me; it could be real as far as you know; or it could indeed be that the cake is a lie. The number 47, though, is quite different; you don’t need to check the table or any location; you don’t need to look for an example, or count to fifty; it couldn’t have been the case that there was no number 47. Things that are real in the sense we need for haecceity seem to depend on events for their reality. I will borrow some terminology from Meinong and call that dependent or contingent kind of reality existence, while what the number 47 has got is subsistence.

What is existence, then? Things that exist depend on events, I suggested; if I made a cake and put it in the table, it exists; if no-one did that, it doesn’t. Real things are part of a matrix of cause and effect, a matrix we could call history. Everything real has to have causes and effects. We can prove that perhaps, by considering the cake’s continuing existence. It exists now because it existed a moment ago; if it had no causal effects, it wouldn’t be able to cause its own future reality, and it wouldn’t be here. If it wasn’t here, then it couldn’t have had preceding causes, so it didn’t exist in the past either. Ergo, things without causal effects don’t exist.

Now that’s interesting because of course, one of the difficult things about qualia is that they apparently can’t have causal effects. If so, I seem to have accidentally proved that they don’t exist! I think things get unavoidably complex here. What I think is going on is that qualia in general, the having of a subjective side, is bestowed on things by being real, and that reality means causal efficacy. However, particular qualia are determined by the objective physical aspects of things; and it’s those that give specific causal powers. It looks to us as if qualia have no causal effects because all the particular causal powers have been accounted for in the objective physical account. There seems to be no role for qualia. What we miss is that without reality nothing has causal powers at all.

Let’s digress slightly to consider yet again my zombie twin. He’s exactly like me, except that he has no qualia, and that is supposed to show that qualia are over and above the account given by physics. Now according to me that is actually not possible, because if my zombie twin is real, and physically just the same, he must end up with the same qualia. However, if we doubt this possibility, David Chalmers and others invite us at least to accept that he is conceivable. Now we might feel that whether we can or can’t conceive of a thing is a poor indicator of anything, but leaving that aside I think the invitation to consider the zombie twin’s conceivability draws us towards thinking of a conceptual twin rather than a real one. Conceptual twins – imaginary, counterfactual, or non-existent ones – merely subsist; they are not real and so the issue of qualia does not arise. The fact that imaginary twins lack qualia doesn’t prove what it was meant to; properly understood it just shows that qualia are an aspect of real experience.

Anyway, are we comfortable with the idea of reality? Not really, because the buzzing complexity and arbitrariness of real things seems to demand an explanation. If I’m right about all real things necessarily being part of a causal matrix, they are in the end all part of one vast entity whose curious firm should somehow be explicable.

Alas, it isn’t. We have two ways of explaining things. One is pure reason: we might be able to deduce the real world from first principles and show that it is logically necessary. Unfortunately pure reason alone is very bad at giving us details of reality; it deals only with Platonic, theoretical entities which subsist but do not exist. To tell us anything about reality it must at least be given a few real facts to work on; but when we’re trying to account for reality as a whole that’s just what we can’t provide.

The other kind of explanation we can give is empirical; we can research reality itself scientifically and draw conclusions. But empirical explanations operate only within the causal matrix; they explain one state of affairs in terms of another, usually earlier one. It’s not possible to account for reality itself this way.

It looks then, as if reality is doomed to remain at least somewhat mysterious, unless we somehow find a third way, neither empirical nor rational.

A rather downbeat note to end on, but sincere thanks to all those who have helped make the discussion so interesting so far…

Haecceity

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knight 3This is the third in a series of four posts about key ideas from my book The Shadow of Consciousness; this one is about haecceity, or to coin a plainer term, thisness. There are strong links with the subject of the final post, which will be that ultimate mystery, reality.

Haecceity is my explanation for the oddity of subjective experience. A whole set of strange stories are supposed to persuade us that there is something in subjective experience which is inexpressible, outside of physics, and yet utterly vivid and undeniable. It’s about my inward experience of blue, which I can never prove is the same as yours; about what it is like to see red.

One of the best known thought experiments on this topic is the story of Mary the Colour Scientist. She has never seen colour, but knows everything there is to know about colour vision; when she sees a red rose for the first time, does she come to know something new? The presumed answer is yes: she now knows what it is like to see red things.

Another celebrated case asks whether I could have a ‘zombie’ twin, identical to me in every physical respect, who did not have these purely subjective aspects of experience – which are known as ‘qualia’, by the way. We’re allowed to be unsure whether zombie twin is possible, but expected to agree that he is at least conceivable; and that that’s enough to establish that there really is something extra going on, over and above the physics.

Most people, I think, accept that qualia do exist and do raise a problem, though some sceptics denounce the entire topic as more or less irretrievable nonsense. Qualia are certainly very odd; they have no causal effects, so nothing we say about them was caused by them: and they cannot be directly described. What we invariably have to do is refer to them by an objective counterpart: so we speak of the quale of hearing middle C, though middle C is in itself an irreproachably physical, describable thing (identifying the precisely correct physical counterpart for colour vision is actually rather complex, though I don’t think anyone denies that you can give a full physical account of colour vision).

I suggest we can draw two tentative conclusions about qualia. First, knowledge of qualia is like knowledge of riding a bike: it cannot be transferred in words. I can talk until I’m blue in the face about bike riding, and it may help a little, but in the end to get that knowledge you have to get on a bike. That’s because for bike riding it’s your muscles and some non-talking parts of your brain that need to learn about it; it’s a skill. We can’t say the same about qualia because experiencing them is not a skill we need to learn; but there is perhaps a common factor; you have to have really done it, you have to have been there.

Second, we cannot say anything about qualia except through their objective counterparts. This leaves a mystery about how many qualia there are. Is there a quale of scarlet and a quale of crimson? An indefinite number of red qualia? We can’t say, and since all hypotheses about the number of qualia are equally good, we ought to choose the least expensive under the terms of Occam’s Razor; the one with the fewest entities. It would follow from that that there is really only one universal quale; it provides the vivid liveliness while the objective aspects of the experience provide all the content.

So we have two provisional conclusions: all qualia are really the same thing conditioned differently by the objective features of the experience; and to know qualia you have to have ‘been there’, to have had real experience. I think it follows naturally from these two premises that qualia simply represent the particularity of experience; its haecceity. The aspect of experience which is not accounted for by any theory, including the theories of physics, is simply the actuality of experience. This is no discredit to theory: it is by definition about the general and the abstract and cannot possibly include the particular reality of any specific experience.

Does this help us with those two famous thought experiments? In Mary’s case it suggests that what she knows after seeing the rose is simply what a particular experience is like. That could never have been conveyed by theoretical knowledge. In the case of my zombie twin, the real turning point is when we’re asked to think whether he is conceivable; that transfers discussion to a conceptual, theoretical plane on which it is natural to suppose nothing has particularity.

Finally, I think this view explains why qualia are ineffable, why we can’t say anything directly about them. All speech is, as it were, second order: it’s about experiences, not the described experience itself. When we think of any objective aspect, we summon up the appropriate concepts and put them over in words; but when we attempt to convey the haecceity of an experience it drops out as soon as we move to a conceptual level. Description, for once, cannot capture what we want to convey.

There’s nothing in all this that suggests anything wrong or incomplete about physics; no need for any dualism or magic realm. In a lot of ways this is simply the sceptical case approached more cautiously and from a different angle. It does leave us with some mystery though: what is it for something to be particular; what is the nature of particularity? We’ve already said we can’t describe it effectively or reduce it theoretically, but surely there must be something we can do to apprehend it better? This is the problem of reality…

[Many thanks to Sergio for the kind review here. Many thanks also to the generous people who have given me good reviews on amazon.com; much appreciated!]