How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?There is a lot to unwrap in that question. We might start with the fact that this book (or essay) seems aimed at the philosophically inclined laymen, as apposed to an academic philosopher. So at this early stage I don't think we need to delve into just what it is to "make sense" of a life (I would say a life is not the sort of thing one makes sense of), or the more interesting question of what it means to hold someone accountable for their choices. I think this is the topic Harris probably devotes most of the essay to, and what I'm most interested in exploring later. The last point, as to what counts as conscious or unconscious, he gets into in the next section.
It's nice to see my main contention addressed at loc 122:
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent.I would argue for less. What is an illusion? Something that appears to be there but isn't. Does free will even appear to be there? One might say one "feels" like they are free to make choices, but this is not the sort of feeling that comes from the limbic system. It's more an unawareness of where one's acts of volition arise, which the conscious confabulator fills with a self of the gaps.
There's something that strikes me wrong about this that I'm probably going to have trouble articulating, but I'll make a go of it anyway.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I don't like the "time" argument of free will he starts in on page (Loc.146).
On fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you
are aware of what you will do next - a time in which you subjectively
appear to have comlpete freedom to behave however you please -
your brain has already determined what you will do.
This presupposes that there are only two possible states here, the state of "unconscious" thought, in which we appear to have no real control over the consequences of the choices our unconscious mind makes, and "conscious" thought, where we do appear to have control. The observable impulses (via MRI or similar technologies) of the initiation of actions and the actions themselves (some period of time later) need not be coincident with our conscious observation of those thoughts/actions. I would posit (in an admittedly 'devils advocate sort of way') that there may in fact be other layers of "conscious" thought that have already done all the pre-processing for us, and the only things that actual surface as thoughts of that are the topmost layers yielded up for more active perception and observation. Who's to say? There is so much that is *not* understood about the brain and how it processes, stores and decides things that just about *anything* is possible.
I think he gets to this point at the very end of this section:
Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would
need to be aware of all the factors that determine...
And this gets to the root of the fallacy, I think. If by "aware", he means that you would need to be able to *consciously* have to process all the factors involved in the decision-making... I'd agree. But I don't think that is true. The underlying sub-conscious states and processing may have quiet a large variety of cognitive capability (for decision making) that he seems to think is only possible at the conscious level, and I'm not sure I agree to that. Well... I guess this gets back to what "control" implies (insofar as free will implies control). Just because we're not "aware" of those layers of consciousness in our fore-brain thinking... doesn't mean we don't have any ability to control them.
There are some other discussions to be had about the philosophical materialism that I'd like to get into, but I'll wait until they come up again later. I have some ideas around that that might bear fruit by the time those topics get touched on again.
Certainly the ideas there hinge on the nature of consciousness, which I think I'll start a new post to discuss. I just wanted to briefly comment on the statement:
ReplyDelete..."conscious" thought, where we do appear to have control.
A word in that statement deserving attention even more than "conscious" is "we." Trying to nail down the concept of free will almost always forces one to draw some distinction in the mind between volitional and autonomic functions, ending up with some absurd homonucleus at the helm. Which is the principal reason it is not a coherent concept to begin with. I think we (ha) should be careful with pronouns, and make sure they only refer to the totality of one's mental processes. Once you're careful in this way, you can dismiss mountains of meaningless bullshit written about consciousness.