Apr 9, 2021 04:56 AM
https://nautil.us/blog/do-we-have-free-w...snt-matter
EXCERPTS: . . . Most people grow up with the notion that they are, in some sense, responsible for their thoughts and actions because, unlike animals, humans can think about their choices. We can reflect on what we should do, and other people—be they our parents or Supreme Court justices—can rightly hold us accountable. [...] A Christian might say it goes back to Adam and Eve, who abused their God-given free will in defiantly eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. An atheist, on the other hand, may say we simply evolved free will along with other cognitive abilities that distinguish us from our mammalian cousins and ancestors.
You could also say that no such thing exists, a view which seems increasingly fashionable. “Cognitive neuroscience and popular media,” a new meta-analysis notes, “have been putting forward the idea that free will is an illusion, raising the question of what would happen if people stopped believing in free will altogether.” The paper, a preprint posted on PsyArXiv by University of Cologne social psychologist Oliver Genschow and his colleagues...
[...] This isn’t an idle theoretical or academic question—beliefs about free will, Genschow says, seem to affect many “societally relevant” behaviors, like cheating. They also lie at the foundation of our criminal justice system, helping to justify retributive forms of punishment ... as opposed to rehabilitative ones... Some philosophers, like Saul Smilansky, have argued that if we were to give up on free will, the consequences would be catastrophic.
Scientists have tried to manipulate free will beliefs in a number of ways. A common method is eroding the plausibility of the concept by appealing to the mechanistic nature of reality. You tell people that all of their behavior is determined by the laws of nature, be those physical, biological, or psychological laws. How could it be otherwise? If you rewound the universe, you’d end up making all of the same choices you did the first time around. You might question this deterministic outlook by bringing up the role of chance, but on closer inspection that, too, erodes free will’s plausibility—because how could we call a choice “free” if it arose out of randomness?
[...] This gist of the meta-analysis from Genschow and his colleagues suggests that free will’s proponents and detractors may be putting too much store in what people believe. The belief, or disbelief, doesn’t seem to affect individual behavior in any way we might care about. Manipulating people’s ideas about free will, at least in experimental conditions, has only a small and temporary effect.
In other words, a persuasive anti-free will essay (the most effective method found) doesn’t change people’s core beliefs about free will—it only puts them in a temporary, slight anti-free will mindset. [...] There is no evidence that this induced change in free will beliefs has any effect on morality, such as antisocial behavior, cheating, conformity, or willingness to punish. There is also no definitive evidence against such effects. So for now, it appears that people’s beliefs in free will don’t really matter.
That’s quite a bold conclusion given that the most popular positions seem to be either: “Free will exists and is central to ethics,” and “Free will doesn’t exist, and it’s ethically important for everyone to recognize this fact.”
A good example of this first view comes in the new book Just Deserts: Debating Free Will by philosophers Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso. They argue about whether free will makes people deserving of punishment or praise for their actions, independently of the good that might result from punishing or praising them. To take an extreme example, suppose there were 10 people left on Earth, and one killed the other nine. Assume there is no forward-looking reason to punish them: There are no more people they could possibly kill, no other people to learn by making an example of this person, and so on. Does this person still deserve to be punished for what they did?
Free will, for Dennett, is the thing that would make the answer “yes.” That person deserves to be punished because of what they chose to do with their own free will. The problem with this, though, is that the existence of free will now depends on your theory of ethics! For example, I’m a utilitarian. I don’t believe retribution is ever morally justified. So because of my ethical theory, I must not believe in free will. But shouldn’t free will have to do with the nature of a person acting, their psychological properties, and their relationship to the laws of the universe—not whether or not utilitarianism is true?
The neuroscientist Sam Harris said as much in a recent episode of his Making Sense podcast. “Free will is an enduring problem for philosophy and science,” he said, “for one reason: People think they experience it. They feel they have it.” For Harris, those people are wrong, not just about the existence of free will, but the character of their own experience... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Most people grow up with the notion that they are, in some sense, responsible for their thoughts and actions because, unlike animals, humans can think about their choices. We can reflect on what we should do, and other people—be they our parents or Supreme Court justices—can rightly hold us accountable. [...] A Christian might say it goes back to Adam and Eve, who abused their God-given free will in defiantly eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. An atheist, on the other hand, may say we simply evolved free will along with other cognitive abilities that distinguish us from our mammalian cousins and ancestors.
You could also say that no such thing exists, a view which seems increasingly fashionable. “Cognitive neuroscience and popular media,” a new meta-analysis notes, “have been putting forward the idea that free will is an illusion, raising the question of what would happen if people stopped believing in free will altogether.” The paper, a preprint posted on PsyArXiv by University of Cologne social psychologist Oliver Genschow and his colleagues...
[...] This isn’t an idle theoretical or academic question—beliefs about free will, Genschow says, seem to affect many “societally relevant” behaviors, like cheating. They also lie at the foundation of our criminal justice system, helping to justify retributive forms of punishment ... as opposed to rehabilitative ones... Some philosophers, like Saul Smilansky, have argued that if we were to give up on free will, the consequences would be catastrophic.
Scientists have tried to manipulate free will beliefs in a number of ways. A common method is eroding the plausibility of the concept by appealing to the mechanistic nature of reality. You tell people that all of their behavior is determined by the laws of nature, be those physical, biological, or psychological laws. How could it be otherwise? If you rewound the universe, you’d end up making all of the same choices you did the first time around. You might question this deterministic outlook by bringing up the role of chance, but on closer inspection that, too, erodes free will’s plausibility—because how could we call a choice “free” if it arose out of randomness?
[...] This gist of the meta-analysis from Genschow and his colleagues suggests that free will’s proponents and detractors may be putting too much store in what people believe. The belief, or disbelief, doesn’t seem to affect individual behavior in any way we might care about. Manipulating people’s ideas about free will, at least in experimental conditions, has only a small and temporary effect.
In other words, a persuasive anti-free will essay (the most effective method found) doesn’t change people’s core beliefs about free will—it only puts them in a temporary, slight anti-free will mindset. [...] There is no evidence that this induced change in free will beliefs has any effect on morality, such as antisocial behavior, cheating, conformity, or willingness to punish. There is also no definitive evidence against such effects. So for now, it appears that people’s beliefs in free will don’t really matter.
That’s quite a bold conclusion given that the most popular positions seem to be either: “Free will exists and is central to ethics,” and “Free will doesn’t exist, and it’s ethically important for everyone to recognize this fact.”
A good example of this first view comes in the new book Just Deserts: Debating Free Will by philosophers Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso. They argue about whether free will makes people deserving of punishment or praise for their actions, independently of the good that might result from punishing or praising them. To take an extreme example, suppose there were 10 people left on Earth, and one killed the other nine. Assume there is no forward-looking reason to punish them: There are no more people they could possibly kill, no other people to learn by making an example of this person, and so on. Does this person still deserve to be punished for what they did?
Free will, for Dennett, is the thing that would make the answer “yes.” That person deserves to be punished because of what they chose to do with their own free will. The problem with this, though, is that the existence of free will now depends on your theory of ethics! For example, I’m a utilitarian. I don’t believe retribution is ever morally justified. So because of my ethical theory, I must not believe in free will. But shouldn’t free will have to do with the nature of a person acting, their psychological properties, and their relationship to the laws of the universe—not whether or not utilitarianism is true?
The neuroscientist Sam Harris said as much in a recent episode of his Making Sense podcast. “Free will is an enduring problem for philosophy and science,” he said, “for one reason: People think they experience it. They feel they have it.” For Harris, those people are wrong, not just about the existence of free will, but the character of their own experience... (MORE - details)