Chapter 5 notes
Kristen Ely
Jason
On Oct 29, 3:44 pm, Kristen Ely <kristene...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Good explanations can describe phenomena at any level of emergence. They do not have to be at the lowest level in order to be fundamental.
>
> Emergence is a beginning of infinity -- we need emergent phenomena to explain the world; our knowledge consists of explanations of emergent phenomena
explanations.
Someone posed the matter of free will, and asserted that free will
conflicts with the lowest level explanations and therefore cannot
itself be a good explanation.
I don't recall Deutsch addressing free will specifically.
Is free will a good explanation for human activity and if so, how is
the apparent conflict with a deterministic universe resolved?
--Jason
Elliot Temple
I think it's a good explanation.
Can you suggest any way to vary the idea of free will, so that it will still solve the same problems?
I think people have a problem with it because it's not reductionist and there's no known complete explanation to tie it into fundamental physics. Also it has to do with moral philosophy and a bunch of atheist intellectuals want to reject anything that smells like religion. And also they commonly don't understand what problems free will solves and what it's for.
There's also the determinism issue. To begin to address that, consider: what other than determinism would be more compatible with free will?
If nothing would be any better (or worse), then determinism can't be relevant. In that case, there must be some other issue that is the real source of the problem, some common theme of determinism *and alternatives* that may conflict with free will. I think identifying and asking about that underlying concept, instead of determinism which is a red herring, is a good step towards a solution.
-- Elliot Temple
http://curi.us/
Jason
On Oct 31, 4:18 pm, Elliot Temple <c...@curi.us> wrote:
> > On Oct 29, 3:44 pm, Kristen Ely <kristene...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> Good explanations can describe phenomena at any level of emergence. They do not have to be at the lowest level in order to be fundamental.
>
> >> Emergence is a beginning of infinity -- we need emergent phenomena to explain the world; our knowledge consists of explanations of emergent phenomena
>
> > Also, emergent explanations cannot conflict with the lowest level
> > explanations.
>
> > Someone posed the matter of free will, and asserted that free will
> > conflicts with the lowest level explanations and therefore cannot
> > itself be a good explanation.
>
> > I don't recall Deutsch addressing free will specifically.
>
> > Is free will a good explanation for human activity and if so, how is
> > the apparent conflict with a deterministic universe resolved?
>
> I think it's a good explanation.
>
> Can you suggest any way to vary the idea of free will, so that it will still solve the same problems?
to explain the fact that I (or any other person) performs one
particular action among all of the possible actions we apparently
could have done. When I was discussing this, I used the example of
standing on one leg and whistling dixie.
There are variations of the kind of "free will" as an emergent
property of the mind, which purport to solve that immediate problem:
the supernatural and "souls" being one, random noise coupled to what
amounts to neural amplification with post facto story telling being
another. My interlocutor was of the atheist intellectual variety, and
in so many words he advocated for the latter explanation. He claimed
as evidence, experiments showing that people decide to do something a
few milliseconds before they are aware they've made a decision.
I don't believe in the supernatural, and I think the latter ("random
noise") variation does not solve the problem of coherent actions that
are undertaken in many steps over a long period of time (such as
building a house, starting a business, or putting a man on the moon).
> I think people have a problem with it because it's not reductionist and there's no known complete explanation to tie it into fundamental physics. Also it has to do with moral philosophy and a bunch of atheist intellectuals want to reject anything that smells like religion. And also they commonly don't understand what problems free will solves and what it's for.
ones I mentioned above?
> There's also the determinism issue. To begin to address that, consider: what other than determinism would be more compatible with free will?
aren't bound by deterministic physical laws. The person I was
discussing with asserted that believing in free will requires
believing in the supernatural, and conversely rejecting the
supernatural requires rejecting free will.
> If nothing would be any better (or worse), then determinism can't be relevant. In that case, there must be some other issue that is the real source of the problem, some common theme of determinism *and alternatives* that may conflict with free will. I think identifying and asking about that underlying concept, instead of determinism which is a red herring, is a good step towards a solution.
liberal political positions that I have advocated. Nevertheless, he
characterized the use of emergence as I was using it to address the
apparent conflict between a deterministic universe and free will as a
"magic wand."
That criticism does have a certain resonance in the following way:
couldn't emergence as we are applying it to free will, be varied to
explain virtually anything? Couldn't someone, for example, assert that
God is an emergent property of the universe that we simply don't know
a complete explanation for how to tie into fundamental physics? This
wouldn't exactly be the Christian God, but something more resembling
the Gaia beliefs underlying some envornmentalists' thinking.
--Jason
Elliot Temple
On Oct 29, 2011, at 3:44 PM, Kristen Ely wrote:
> Guiding principle -- reject bad explanations in favor of good ones
>
> Which, in regard to what is real or not, leads to:
> If our best explanations refer to the existence of something, then we should regard it as really existing, whether or not we can observe/sense it
> If our best explanations deny that something exists, then we should regard it as not existing, even if we formerly thought it did (such as the force of gravity)
I like this.
> Emergence:
> Lower-level complexity (such as at the level of atoms) resolves itself into higher-level simplicity, and can be understood/explained at the higher level without direct reference to the lower level.
It doesn't exactly resolve itself. Atoms aren't active and don't know about levels of abstraction. BoI says it does:
> Fortunately, some of that complexity **resolves itself** into a higher-level simplicity. For example, we can predict with some accuracy how long the water will take to boil. To do so, we need know only a few physical quantities that are quite easy to measure, such as its mass, the power of the heating element, and so on. For greater accuracy we may also need information about subtler properties, such as the number and type of nucleation sites for bubbles. But those are still relatively ‘high-level’ phenomena, composed of intractably large numbers of interacting atomic-level phenomena. Thus there is a class of high-level phenomena – including the liquidity of water and the relationship between containers, heating elements, boiling and bubbles – that can be well explained in terms of each other alone, with no direct reference to anything at the atomic level or below. In other words, the behaviour of that whole class of high-level phenomena is quasi-autonomous – almost self-contained. This resolution into explicability at a higher, quasi-autonomous level is known as emergence.
But I don't see how it makes sense to treat complexity as an active agent.
I see two possibilities here. One is that a better explanation is needed which deals with complexity not being an active agent. The other is that the following explanation is sufficient:
Any complex thing can be described in a variety of selective or lossy ways; that's no mystery but inevitable. We pick the ones that are useful to us, and find they help us solve some of our problems. The reason that works is that most of our problems don't have to do with various complex details; lots of the detail is irrelevant so we come up with concepts like "hot water" to refer to lots of motion of water atoms without specifying more detail.
Similarly we come up with concepts like "planet" and impose them on atoms to selectively focus on aspects of those atoms we care about. If physics were different and instead of planets we had something else, we'd come up with different abstractions for that. The emergence is not some special attribute of that particular structure of atoms but something we'd find in almost anything.
This covers the simple sort of emergence: emergence imposed by our knowledge on materials lacking knowledge. Then there is a second type is caused by knowledge in a different way: e.g. a cow's eye is caused to have the high level property of seeing by the knowledge in the cow's genes. The reason emergence works there is that one is explaining at the same level as the knowledge, not the tools the knowledge uses to get its job done. (This may clash with BoI's distinction about the limits of biological evolution and how it can't create explanatory/abstract(?) knowledge.)
> The behavior of high-level phenomena consists of the behavior of the low-level parts it is made of. Sometimes the low-level details will be important for our understanding of the high-level phenomena, but not always. For example, the second law of thermodynamics describes the behavior of high-level physical processes without referring to the behavior of the molecules those processes consist of.
>
> Ideas that reject explanations:
> -Instrumentalism -- rejects all explanations
> -Reductionism -- rejects high-level explanations
> -Principle of Mediocrity -- rejects high-level explanations that involve people
> -Holism -- rejects reductionist explanations; the only significant explanations are of parts in terms of wholes
There's no way to judge what is simple or complex, whole or a piece of a whole, without already having explanations that address the question. So approaches like holism assume without critical thought some initial explanations, with no discussion of whether they are "wholes", and also no way to discuss them well since there'd be no way to judge if they were wholes or not except circularly.
> They all reject explanations without considering whether those explanations are good or bad -- they are not following the guiding principle of rejecting bad explanations in favor of good ones.
>
> Good explanations can describe phenomena at any level of emergence. They do not have to be at the lowest level in order to be fundamental.
>
> Emergence is a beginning of infinity -- we need emergent phenomena to explain the world; our knowledge consists of explanations of emergent phenomena
>
> Emergence also explains why we can create successive scientific theories, each explaining more than the last, even if they are very different from each other -- each theory explains another "layer" that the previous theory had not addressed, although it explained its own "layer" well.
>
> Knowledge "uses" physical entities (organisms, brains) to get itself copied
> Knowledge is abstract
> Something abstract is affecting something physical
>
> Abstractions exist, because some explanations must refer to them ("if our best explanations refer to the existence of something, then we should regard it as really existing, whether or not we can observe/sense it")
>
> Causation is an abstract idea -- we can't see it, it's not a part of the laws of motion of elementary particles. It's an emergent property of that motion.
>
> We don't learn from experience, we learn from conjecture and criticism. Believing that we learn from experience makes it seem like we can't know anything outside of science (an empiricist mistake).
>
> Experience in science -- used for experimental testing
> Experience in philosophy -- provides problems by bringing our ideas into conflict
>
> You can't get an *ought* from an *is* (you can't derive a factual theory from an *is*, either), but we can use factual evidence (what *is*) to criticize moral theories (what *ought* to be).
For example one can ask, "If being a Mormon is best, why aren't more people doing it? It's accessible to many people. I could convert if I wanted. The only thing stopping me is that I haven't been persuaded. Why aren't Mormons more persuasive if they are so awesome?" And this gives Mormon moral philosophy something to explain. If it can't offer an explanation then that's a flaw in it.
> Our best explanations refer to the existence of causation and the laws of physics, therefore we should regard them as actually, objectively existing, even though they are abstractions.
A circle is an abstraction. That doesn't make it a useless idea, and it'd be pretty strange and pointless to go around saying how circles "don't exist". What problem would such a claim solve? The idea of circles, by contrast, does help us solve some problems.
Elliot Temple
On Nov 1, 2011, at 9:44 AM, Jason wrote:
>
> On Oct 31, 4:18 pm, Elliot Temple <c...@curi.us> wrote:
>>> On Oct 29, 3:44 pm, Kristen Ely <kristene...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>> Good explanations can describe phenomena at any level of emergence. They do not have to be at the lowest level in order to be fundamental.
>>
>>>> Emergence is a beginning of infinity -- we need emergent phenomena to explain the world; our knowledge consists of explanations of emergent phenomena
>>
>>> Also, emergent explanations cannot conflict with the lowest level
>>> explanations.
>>
>>> Someone posed the matter of free will, and asserted that free will
>>> conflicts with the lowest level explanations and therefore cannot
>>> itself be a good explanation.
>>
>>> I don't recall Deutsch addressing free will specifically.
>>
>>> Is free will a good explanation for human activity and if so, how is
>>> the apparent conflict with a deterministic universe resolved?
>>
>> I think it's a good explanation.
>>
>> Can you suggest any way to vary the idea of free will, so that it will still solve the same problems?
>
> I think the immediate or superficial problem free will solves is, how
> to explain the fact that I (or any other person) performs one
> particular action among all of the possible actions we apparently
> could have done. When I was discussing this, I used the example of
> standing on one leg and whistling dixie.
I don't think that's a problem.
A cat has a lot of actions it could do.
Even a bacteria may have some. Or an game AI that plays Starcraft. Or an automated machine tool capable of carving many different shapes.
In each case the possibility of various things is controlled in some way. The cat has a brain which runs an algorithm which chooses actions.
A robot could be built to stand on one leg and whistle, without any element of free will, and with the physical capability of walking around and doing other stuff instead.
The mere fact that humans can stand on one leg and whistle is compatible with them not having free will and with simple and well understood (at least in concept) methods of control of actions.
> There are variations of the kind of "free will" as an emergent
> property of the mind, which purport to solve that immediate problem:
> the supernatural and "souls" being one, random noise coupled to what
> amounts to neural amplification with post facto story telling being
> another. My interlocutor was of the atheist intellectual variety, and
> in so many words he advocated for the latter explanation. He claimed
> as evidence, experiments showing that people decide to do something a
> few milliseconds before they are aware they've made a decision.
I'm skeptical that experiments actually showed that, and won't believe it without either reading the a scientific paper and not finding any mistakes, or being presented with an explanation meeting the same quality standards.
Regardless, I don't actually think it'd be very important, or make decisions unfree, if they were made by the subconscious mind.
Also the experiment as described is compatible with the conscious mind doing most of the deciding and a subconscious part of the mind doing some minor finalizing step.
> I don't believe in the supernatural, and I think the latter ("random
> noise") variation does not solve the problem of coherent actions that
> are undertaken in many steps over a long period of time (such as
> building a house, starting a business, or putting a man on the moon).
Cats and game AIs take coherent actions in many steps over long periods of time. Well maybe not normally as long as you mean, but pretty long, and if you wanted to have a chess program spend 5 years on each move (it's not hard to make it actively do computations the whole time and actually make progress, not just go in circles), then it could play a single game over the course of more than a current human life span.
So what is the issue here? Explaining how humans can do what non-humans can do in relatively simple ways?
>
>> I think people have a problem with it because it's not reductionist and there's no known complete explanation to tie it into fundamental physics. Also it has to do with moral philosophy and a bunch of atheist intellectuals want to reject anything that smells like religion. And also they commonly don't understand what problems free will solves and what it's for.
>
> Perhaps I don't either. Does free will solve any problems beyond the
> ones I mentioned above?
The most important issue that free will addresses is that it plays a role in moral theory.
For morality to exist it needs free will, or a similar concept.
Since free will figures into one of our good explanations, helping solve some problems, it therefore exists.
The issue is that morality is about which decisions people *should* make, and why. This relies on their ability to make decisions. If they had no choice in the matter, no "free will", then there'd be no purpose to moral ideas since they couldn't help people with anything -- people would never have the option to choose to listen to some moral advice or not, choose to adopt a particular lifestyle or not, etc...
Our understanding of morality and moral explanations rely on the existence of choices like this -- sinners can choose to reform or choose not to reform, people can choose to give into temptation or not, and so on. And this also underlies concepts like moral responsibility.
Take away free will and you make a mess of these important ideas. It's solving the problem of providing a component they need.
>> There's also the determinism issue. To begin to address that, consider: what other than determinism would be more compatible with free will?
>
> The supernatural in general and "souls" in particular - entities that
> aren't bound by deterministic physical laws. The person I was
> discussing with asserted that believing in free will requires
> believing in the supernatural, and conversely rejecting the
> supernatural requires rejecting free will.
Yes, there's that.
So, if the issue is determinism vs magical thinking, then I want to reframe it:
It's really non-magical thinking generally (all types including determinism and anything else) vs magical thinking. And the claim in question is whether non-magical thinking inherently contradicts free will.
Thus, determinism in particular is irrelevant.
Agreed so far?
Also irrelevant is the commonly mentioned indeterminism which, contra Popper, is also irrelevant. (Popper mistakenly thought indeterminism would help rehabilitate free will. But how can introducing the use of a random number generator in some physics formulas help free will? It can't.)
Also, btw, the thinking that spawned the idea of free will, while associated with some magical thinking (God, souls, etc) was not itself magical thinking, at least a good portion of it wasn't. It was effective, useful thinking. It spawned a variety of good ideas which have helped make our civilization work. E.g. the ten commandments have some good ideas (not all of them), and there's been more nuanced thinking since making incremental improvements over past ideas.
The main part of the free will idea that, prima facie, looks like magical thinking to me is the *justification* for it. That's not a huge surprise: since justification is impossible, it'd be hard to come up with a rational justification!
The rest tells us things like people don't have to be murders, they can choose not to be, they have the option to be priests or farmers or whatever instead, and if they hear the 10 commandments and say "I have no choice but to disobey, I can't help it" they are mistaken. If people get angry, they can still restrain themselves, and are responsible for doing so. And more. I don't see the magic to this.
>> If nothing would be any better (or worse), then determinism can't be relevant. In that case, there must be some other issue that is the real source of the problem, some common theme of determinism *and alternatives* that may conflict with free will. I think identifying and asking about that underlying concept, instead of determinism which is a red herring, is a good step towards a solution.
>
> I speculate that the underlying concept is opposition to (classical)
> liberal political positions that I have advocated.
That happens, but I think liberals too can get confused about this, so it's not the only issue.
> Nevertheless, he
> characterized the use of emergence as I was using it to address the
> apparent conflict between a deterministic universe and free will as a
> "magic wand."
>
> That criticism does have a certain resonance in the following way:
> couldn't emergence as we are applying it to free will, be varied to
> explain virtually anything? Couldn't someone, for example, assert that
> God is an emergent property of the universe that we simply don't know
> a complete explanation for how to tie into fundamental physics? This
> wouldn't exactly be the Christian God, but something more resembling
> the Gaia beliefs underlying some envornmentalists' thinking.
The difference is the concept of God doesn't solve any problems but free will does.
-- Elliot Temple
http://beginningofinfinity.com/
Westm...@aol.com
> ... (Popper mistakenly thought indeterminism would help rehabilitate free will. But how can introducing the use of a random number generator in some physics formulas help free will? It can't.)
I thought it was a violation of list guidelines to disagree with Popper. In this case, I think he's right. In the BOI schema, there is apparently no such thing as a *random* number generator: all numbers happen in one or another universe, so all we have to do is check the infinity of other universes to confirm that all possible outcomes occur and are determined by prior conditions. Likewise, just check all non-fungible instances of the synapse firings in my brain to confirm that all of the "mes" in combination have no free will.
>The main part of the free will idea that, prima facie, looks like magical thinking to me is the *justification* for it. That's not a huge surprise: since justification is impossible, it'd be hard to come up with a rational justification!
My position is "mitigated determinism", observing that abstract mental concepts are not subject to the Laws of Nature: you can imagine anything you please and it will affect your actions.
Bill
Jason
On Nov 4, 11:04 am, Elliot Temple <c...@curi.us> wrote:
> On Nov 1, 2011, at 9:44 AM, Jason wrote:
> > Does free will solve any problems beyond the
> > ones I mentioned above?
>
> The most important issue that free will addresses is that it plays a role in moral theory.
>
> For morality to exist it needs free will, or a similar concept.
>
> Since free will figures into one of our good explanations, helping solve some problems, it therefore exists.
>
> The issue is that morality is about which decisions people *should* make, and why. This relies on their ability to make decisions. If they had no choice in the matter, no "free will", then there'd be no purpose to moral ideas since they couldn't help people with anything -- people would never have the option to choose to listen to some moral advice or not, choose to adopt a particular lifestyle or not, etc...
>
> Our understanding of morality and moral explanations rely on the existence of choices like this -- sinners can choose to reform or choose not to reform, people can choose to give into temptation or not, and so on. And this also underlies concepts like moral responsibility.
>
> Take away free will and you make a mess of these important ideas. It's solving the problem of providing a component they need.
explains some of morality:
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin.html
At first blush this seems like a good explanation. Zak *seems* to be
demonstrating that significant, morally relevant behaviors are driven
by a chemical rather than by ideas. He *seems* to be aware of and
controlling for the correlation-causation fallacy.
I don't think oxytocin explains all of morality. And despite some
rather grandiose posturing at the beginning of his talk, I don't think
Zak is actually claiming that either, at least not in this TED talk.
The question that comes to mind in context of BoI and Paul Zak, is
free will a better or worse explanation for trustworthy behaviors than
Zak's oxytocin explanation? It seems to me that oxytocin is more
specific and harder to vary. It has reach - it explains some
evolutionary history, some of the differences between animal species,
as well as human moral behavior.
The oxytocin explanation is not completely incompatible with free
will, just as biological evolution is not completely incompatible with
the existence of a "God of the gaps" that explains other things we
haven't yet otherwise explained. But like Darwin's explanation does
regarding God, the oxytocin explanation (and similar deterministic
explanations for moral behavior) leads me to wonder if free will might
be a similar (and similarly dangerous?) euphamism for "whatever we
haven't explained yet"?
> The main part of the free will idea that, prima facie, looks like magical thinking to me is the *justification* for it. That's not a huge surprise: since justification is impossible, it'd be hard to come up with a rational justification!
>
> The rest tells us things like people don't have to be murders, they can choose not to be, they have the option to be priests or farmers or whatever instead, and if they hear the 10 commandments and say "I have no choice but to disobey, I can't help it" they are mistaken. If people get angry, they can still restrain themselves, and are responsible for doing so. And more. I don't see the magic to this.
Zak does at explaining how oxytocin gets produced or not produced in
an individual. But it's not clear to me that any such explanations
would necessarily involve choice, though they would seem to involve
memes in at least some cases. Borrowing from the idea of memes:
perhaps people will be murderers or not depending on whether the meme
"I can choose" or the meme "I can't help it" has successfully
propagated to their brain. In that sense, wouldn't free will be a
beneficial, though false, meme?
--Jason
Alan Forrester
Oxytocin has nothing to do with morality. Morality is about the best way to live your life. Oxytocin is a chemical secreted in your brain when you feel certain feelings. No particular feeling is moral nor immoral. Lots of people hurt those they love, others are willing to act in a reasonable manner toward people they hate. If a mother has a child and doesn't want to look after him her feelings don't determine whether she makes good choices, nor do they dictate what is a good choice. She might be right to change her preferences, or she might be right to give the child up for adoption, and either way the right course of action isn't determined by her feelings.
Free will is about our capacity to choose - in particular our capacity to create new explanatory knowledge that can lead us to live better lives. If a person has had a sucky life up to now the laws of physics do not require him to keep living that way. There are universes in which he starts taking steps to make his life less sucky.
>> The main part of the free will idea that, prima facie, looks like magical thinking to me is the *justification* for it. That's not a huge surprise: since justification is impossible, it'd be hard to come up with a rational justification!
>>
>> The rest tells us things like people don't have to be murders, they can choose not to be, they have the option to be priests or farmers or whatever instead, and if they hear the 10 commandments and say "I have no choice but to disobey, I can't help it" they are mistaken. If people get angry, they can still restrain themselves, and are responsible for doing so. And more. I don't see the magic to this.
>
> To get at these using oxytocin we would have to do a better job than
> Zak does at explaining how oxytocin gets produced or not produced in
> an individual. But it's not clear to me that any such explanations
> would necessarily involve choice, though they would seem to involve
> memes in at least some cases. Borrowing from the idea of memes:
> perhaps people will be murderers or not depending on whether the meme
> "I can choose" or the meme "I can't help it" has successfully
> propagated to their brain. In that sense, wouldn't free will be a
> beneficial, though false, meme?
You say it's false, but have provided no explanation of why it's false.
Alan
Elliot Temple
On Nov 7, 2011, at 2:54 PM, Jason wrote:
>
>
> On Nov 4, 11:04 am, Elliot Temple <c...@curi.us> wrote:
>> On Nov 1, 2011, at 9:44 AM, Jason wrote:
>>> Does free will solve any problems beyond the
>>> ones I mentioned above?
>>
>> The most important issue that free will addresses is that it plays a role in moral theory.
>>
>> For morality to exist it needs free will, or a similar concept.
>>
>> Since free will figures into one of our good explanations, helping solve some problems, it therefore exists.
>>
>> The issue is that morality is about which decisions people *should* make, and why. This relies on their ability to make decisions. If they had no choice in the matter, no "free will", then there'd be no purpose to moral ideas since they couldn't help people with anything -- people would never have the option to choose to listen to some moral advice or not, choose to adopt a particular lifestyle or not, etc...
>>
>> Our understanding of morality and moral explanations rely on the existence of choices like this -- sinners can choose to reform or choose not to reform, people can choose to give into temptation or not, and so on. And this also underlies concepts like moral responsibility.
>>
>> Take away free will and you make a mess of these important ideas. It's solving the problem of providing a component they need.
>
> I wonder what your take is on Paul Zak and his claim that oxytocin
> explains some of morality:
> http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin.html
I don't want to watch something like that.
I'm guessing this makes me and Paul even, since he doesn't want to read and discuss something like Szasz's _Ceremonial Chemistry_. (If you're skeptical, invite him here to discuss it and see what he says. If he joins I will watch the video to discuss it too.)
> At first blush this seems like a good explanation. Zak *seems* to be
> demonstrating that significant, morally relevant behaviors are driven
> by a chemical rather than by ideas. He *seems* to be aware of and
> controlling for the correlation-causation fallacy.
How can it be controlled for? I think it has to be avoided outright, not mitigated.
> I don't think oxytocin explains all of morality.
It explains none of morality. It does not tell us what is a good or bad life. It doesn't address the moral question of *how to live*.
Even if it somehow controlled people, that would not tell us what is a good or bad life. And by implication that's not telling us, for example, whether we should strive to make technology to get rid of oxytocin or not.
"Oxytocin drives behavior" type ideas are attempts to explain *what people do*, not what people *should* do. Rather than addressing moral philosophy they are avoiding it.
What these people usually say is something like, "This explains people's behaviors which we may regard as moral, but actually they are caused by this chemical so morality is a myth and people shouldn't get moral credit for their chemical-driven actions". But with decreasing clarity as one gets towards the end of that statement. They may regard this as addressing and explaining the issue of morality, but it does not engage with, let alone solve, the problems in moral philosophy (e.g. what is a good life?).
> And despite some
> rather grandiose posturing at the beginning of his talk, I don't think
> Zak is actually claiming that either, at least not in this TED talk.
>
> The question that comes to mind in context of BoI and Paul Zak, is
> free will a better or worse explanation for trustworthy behaviors than
> Zak's oxytocin explanation?
Free will is not our explanation of trustworthy behaviors. Our explanation of that, in many cases, would be knowledge: people have knowledge of why to behave that way instead of another way.
Knowledge (ideas) is the dominant factor in people's decision making in general, not chemicals.
But how can ideas be relevant to decisions? That requires:
1) decisions aren't controlled by God, fate, etc... (this is the "free" part)
2) decisions exist at all (this is "choice", a prerequisite for morality to exist at all)
3) decisions can be made by my ideas (my "will")
Do decisions exist? Yes, as in the example of I could eat chili or soup for lunch today.
No amount of reductionism, determinism or oxytocin prevents this idea from making sense and needing to be addressed not ignored.
> It seems to me that oxytocin is more
> specific and harder to vary. It has reach - it explains some
> evolutionary history, some of the differences between animal species,
> as well as human moral behavior.
explaining "human moral behavior" -- behavior to which humans attribute a moral purpose -- is completely different from addressing moral problems like what is a good life.
and explaining human behavior as due to things other than ideas/knowledge is, in general, false. BoI takes on this issue in regard to Jared Diamond. the same sort of ideas and approach apply to oxytocin too.
>
> The oxytocin explanation is not completely incompatible with free
> will, just as biological evolution is not completely incompatible with
> the existence of a "God of the gaps" that explains other things we
> haven't yet otherwise explained. But like Darwin's explanation does
> regarding God, the oxytocin explanation (and similar deterministic
> explanations for moral behavior) leads me to wonder if free will might
> be a similar (and similarly dangerous?) euphamism for "whatever we
> haven't explained yet"?
>
>> The main part of the free will idea that, prima facie, looks like magical thinking to me is the *justification* for it. That's not a huge surprise: since justification is impossible, it'd be hard to come up with a rational justification!
>>
>> The rest tells us things like people don't have to be murders, they can choose not to be, they have the option to be priests or farmers or whatever instead, and if they hear the 10 commandments and say "I have no choice but to disobey, I can't help it" they are mistaken. If people get angry, they can still restrain themselves, and are responsible for doing so. And more. I don't see the magic to this.
>
> To get at these using oxytocin we would have to do a better job than
> Zak does at explaining how oxytocin gets produced or not produced in
> an individual. But it's not clear to me that any such explanations
> would necessarily involve choice, though they would seem to involve
> memes in at least some cases. Borrowing from the idea of memes:
> perhaps people will be murderers or not depending on whether the meme
> "I can choose" or the meme "I can't help it" has successfully
> propagated to their brain. In that sense, wouldn't free will be a
> beneficial, though false, meme?
Once upon a time, William Godwin pointed out that people having sex, in the heat of passion, will stop if something they regard as more important comes up.
This is as true today as it was then. But many of today's thinkers ignore it and ignore Godwin.
It's hard to imagine it was an original idea, though he might have been the first *philosopher* to explain it well. It borders on common sense. Many people have experienced having sex then stopping because something came up, and they must know that they can and do stop (not always for all interruptions, just for the ones they regard as important enough.)
Some people will get confused because they *say* they regard something as more important than sex but don't stop for it. But there have to have been many people without such confusion, who are more in tune with their own values, who have known this.
A lot of modern intellectuals have lost touch with common sense (as well as with most of the history of good philosophy). And they seem to often manage to overlook events that have happened thousands of times, and are well known.
This refutes the notion that drugs like oxytocin or whatever is involved in sex actually *control* people. We control ourselves by our preferences. When we prefer sex or oxytocin-producing-behaviors we do those. When we don't, we don't. It's all a matter of our values.
And which values are good to have? Well, that's where moral philosophy comes in.
Changing one's values is not trivial but is possible. And this is, again, very well known: sometimes people change religions, change political parties, or otherwise change their values substantially. This, again, is well known. (Not all converts change their values. Sometimes a political party changes while they stay the same, or they discover disagreements that existed all along. But sometimes, often, the convert does change his values.)
-- Elliot Temple
http://fallibleideas.com/