[FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will

[Eric Charles]

Skinner had the book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" (1971) that made a
similar argument. Basically, he argued that while we didn't have full
explanations of behavior yet, we had made enough progress to be confident
that behavior could be explained in various ways - development, immediate
causation, etc. - in all situations. If we can agree on that, or even
mostly-agree on that, what happens to concepts like "freedom", which seem
to be applied primarily in situations where we can't obviously explain
someone's behavior?

When I train a rat to press a lever when the light in the cage illuminates,
is the rat free? If your life has trained you to put on your right sock
first, then the left, are you free? Etc., etc. And certainly sometimes
people feel as if their choices are more "free" or less "free", but what do
we do with that? Presumably we can also train people to generally feel free
or not, under ostensibly identical current circumstances? (Note how many
conversations about White Privilege, or Wealth Inequality, focus on how
people who were given great benefits early in life often feel as if they
were independently successful based on initiative and merit.)

The issue of variation in feeling "free" under ostensibly similar
circumstances, is a huge dilemma for me, as I don't feel social pressures
in many situations where others do. "I wasn't free to talk in the meeting",
someone says. And I look confused, because so far as I could tell they were
clearly *free *to talk in the meeting, but *chose *not to for
various reasons.

"You don't understand how hard it is to X, under circumstances Y!" Well...
I *do *understand why it might *feel *hard... but that sounds like an
explanation for why you *chose *not to. We aren't talking about how hard it
is to run a sub-6-minute mile, or sing an Opera, we are talking about how
it can feel hard to call someone out for a racist comment in the middle of
a meeting (or something like that). In fact, I often have people come to me
before key meetings and ask me to bring up points they don't feel free to
bring up. Am I "free" because I find that relatively easy? Are they "not
free" because they find it hard? Does it matter that, as Jochen points out,
one could certainly look into my and the other person's past, or into my
and the other person's physiology, and construct an explanation for why
each of us behave-in-meetings the way we do now? Or is it, as Skinner
suggested, time to just move "beyond" such questions?



<echarles at american.edu>


On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 4:29 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> I am reading a book about Leibniz and started to wonder if the hard
> problem of consciousness could be the reason why we have the illusion of
> free will and can not predict how others will act.
>
> From the outside a person seems to have free will in principle. From the
> inside everybody feels something different and is controlled by emotions
> based on subjective experience, which is unknown to others, because the
> individual is not transparent and the history is not known.
>
> Once we investigate the life of a person, for example by a detective as
> part of a criminal investigation, or as movie viewers in a cinema, we start
> to understand why a person acts they way it does. The more we step into the
> footsteps of a person, the better we understand the feelings, goals and
> motives.
>
> Could it be that the same thing which  prevents us from understanding the
> subjective experiences of others also creates the illusion of free will?
>
> -J.
>
>
>
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