[FRIAM] Free will, 7-3-20 meeting

[Eric Charles]

In the 7-3-20 FRIAM meeting the "Free will" discussion developed in some
interesting ways that I would like to capture.


   - We started with a question about whether we could coherently deal with
   "the feeling of free will" from an evolutionary perspective, independent of
   any question about whether free will is "real". As soon as evolution became
   involved we needed to parse the possibility that said feeling was an
   adaptation, an exaptation, a spandrel, or simply the result of genetic
   drift.
      - Nick started by developing the spandrel notion, which led to much
      confusion, especially when he ultimately stated that he was
doing all that
      just to set up an argument that it was, in fact, an *adaptation*.
      - He argued that we have agency-detection mechanisms because it was
      adaptive to do so, and a self-vs-other-discriminating mechanisms
because it
      was adaptive to do so, *and* that it was additionally adaptive for
      those mechanisms to work together. If all that is true, then there is no
      mystery about why we might distinguish events caused by our own
agency from
      those caused by the agency of others or by entities without agency.
   - I argued strenuously that we should stop doing arm-chair
   philosophizing and start to work towards sciencing the problem... because
   without that we are stuck think about this stuff backwards. Mirror my
   response to Frank's email about "inner life" in rabbits and dogs, I argued
   that we ought to identify a bunch of concrete situations in people wanted
   to invoke "free will", and a bunch where they don't, then compare and
   contrast those situations for as long as we have to do identify the crucial
   parameters that distinguish them. No one seemed to want to go that route.
   Throughout the conversation I tried to argue that we couldn't possibly be
   talking about anything sensible that couldn't be studied perfectly well
   with rats in mazes. Unclear if anyone agreed... even Nick.
   - There was a lot of discussion about how we would figure out if an
   individual situation involved free will, or the behaviors in question were
   caused by mechanisms at various levels of analysis (physics-level,
   biology-level, psychology-level).
      - Basically, whenever someone said "X has freewill" Bruce said,
      "Well, but there *are *causes of that behavior. For example, A, B,
      C." At some point it seemed as if we were on the verge of
defining freewill
      as "something that happens, and there are no reasons why it
happened." Nick
      thought we were risking diving into a discussion of quantum woo, which
      never seemed to get us anywhere. I pointed out that if "free will" was
      synonymous with "not caused in any fashion" then we were defining it as
      magic, which seemed like a bad way to go.
      - Bruce gave the solid example of his preferring chocolate to vanilla
      ice cream, as a situation in which many might say he can choose icecream
      freely, but he doesn't feel like there is anything free about it, because
      those preference as simply built into him. I asked if mattered
that we *could
      *do a bunch of things to alter what our preferences would be in the
      future. Bruce said he for sure didn't think that changed anything, but
      others thought maybe it did. (I didn't have a prefered answer, I just
      thought it would be a crucial differentiator of how people were thinking
      about the issue, and that seemed true.)
      - Steve suggested that there was an issue of what sort of causes we
      were talking about, there was a sidebar about what "mechanical causation"
      meant, and eventually the conversation shifted to talk about degrees of
      freedom and the ways those can be constrained.
   - When the degrees-of-freedom issue came up, Steve started trying to
   articulate a distinction between when degrees-of-freedom were constrained
   by membership in a higher-order structure (I'm probably not doing it full
   justice, but that's close).
      - We ended up trying hard to distinguish two differet issues that are
      at play in Steve's model, using several different metaphors, out of which
      "joining the clergy" metaphor ended up seeming the best.
      - Issue 1: Were you free to join the clergy? This seemed to be most
      of what were talking about before we got this point in the
discussion, and
      I introduced it mostly to try to get us to stop talking about
that, and to
      focus on the second issue.
      - Issue 2: Does joining the clergy entail a reduction of free will?
      This seemed (to me) to be the interesting new issue Steve had introduced.
      If I say that I have subsumed my own will to the will of The
Church (which
      is what joining the clergy entails), then either I have fewer
      degrees-of-freedom now than I did before, or I am lying about my current
      state (i.e., I have not come to embody my pledge).
      - At some point after that distinction became clear, Steve asked for
      a steelman of his position. I claimed that I *was *producing the
      steelman, under one additional condition: We need to acknowledge
that - for
      Steve's issue-2-focused model - "has less free will" is a *description
      *of the state of the individual who is now a clergy member; it is *not
      *an *explanation *for that state. Similarly, a person who leaves the
      clergy might "have more free will" as a result; and again that would be a
      description of his state, *not *an explanation. More work would still
      be needed to hammer out how transitions between those states could be
      explained, and what things being-in-a-given-state might, in turn, be able
      to explain... but simply agree that Steve's position was aimed
primarily at *describing
      *degrees-of-free-will would do a huge chunk of the work to steelman
      his position.

Alas... I couldn't develop that line further because my phone battery
died... which means I left the conversation by other than my own free
will... and I don't know what happened next.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>
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