Ways to Look at Issues of Free Will and Determinism, Baed on Current Work in Game Theory

This is a summary for purposes of the Secular Humanist Society Book Club Meeting, April 17, 2008, at the Muhlenberg Public Library .

Freedom Evolves By Daniel C. Dennett

American philosopher Daniel Dennett discusses ways of looking at life which get us a better purchase on issues of free will and responsibility than traditional philosophy. He believes that “concern about free will is the driving force behind most of the resistence to materialism generally and neo-Darwinism in particular” and he discusses ways of analyzing the issues which he thinks should alleviate that concern.

His analysis is informed by modern science, including the social sciences, giving us insight into contemporary approaches in a very accessible book.

There is a conversation so conventional that everyone, from high school student to philosophy professor, has joined in at some time. There are two incompatible but widely-held premises: (1) If someone knew where every atom was at a single moment in time, and all the physical laws about their movements, he could know everything that was going to happen in advance, illustrating that free will is illusory. (2) We know that we have free will and that we exercise it at least some of the time.

And you’re still frustrated if you stop and think about it, right? And you’re still looking to quantum uncertainty (which you don’t really understand, either) as a way out, right? Dennett shows us ways of looking at the issues that are genuinely useful.

For example, it is generally assumed that determinism implies inevitability, but he illustrates that is not the case. Taking a generally accepted definition of a deterministic universe as one with precise regularities, he gives us a very elementary model showing how a universe with such regularities can permit meaningful self-design just one organizational level up.

Imagine a simple two-dimensional grid, each box in it either filled in/ empty, or on/off, as you like. These “pixels” live in a world strictly determined by rules that require them to turn on or off from moment to moment based on which, if any, of their sides are adjacent to others that are on. You can run through as many moments of time as you want under these physical rules, preferably on a computer so they could be truly vast numbers of changes. Eventually, you will see patterns emerge as the little boxes cluster in loose groups. (This is partly a result of having

1 rules based on the physical relationships of the boxes; i.e., which boxes share which sides with each other -- a good model for

2 systems of life activity.) Certain clusters appear to move around the grid over time without losing their identity. The clusters can appear to be eating each other, knocking each other apart or living happily together while supporting different presidential candidates (ok, that last one has been disputed). Computers have run through seemingly endless numbers of these in both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional systems.

Among the simpler results that can be seen in even 2-dimensional models is that certain clusters of boxes can persist, and can evolve to become safer from clusters that tend to knock them apart. For example, they get “behind” other clusters that function like walls. What they have done is develop in such a way as to avoid getting knocked apart under certain circumstances. (To put it in more conventional Darwinian language, they survive better than some because their characteristics make them more fit for their environment.) It’s very un mysterious. Dennett reports that this system has created stunningly more complex patterns, depending on initial conditions and rules.

In this simple system (which here includes diagrams making them even clearer), the “lucky” clusters developed what could be technically described as a kind of “avoidance behavior”. That is the unused root of the word inevitable, which means “unavoidable”. So, even in a world which is “determined” in the classic sense, many things at a higher level of design and organization are not inevitable or unavoidable. We avoid things every moment of our lives, and will continue to do so whether the ultimate nature of the world turns out to be deterministic or not.

We are off the hook we put ourselves on. We don’t have to establish whether the universe is ultimately deterministic or indeterministic to meaningfully assert free will.

Our complex natures aren’t fixed because we have evolved to be entities that change their natures in response to interactions with the rest of the world . The Darwinian algorithms of evolution are substrate-neutral; they are about the effects of differential replication with mutation wherever it occurs, in whatever medium. Those would include, for example, evolution of proteins, or DNA or different types of ethical systems which are like extended memes. The term “meme” refers to information that is transmitted horizontally from one mind to another, words, ideas, images, etc., as opposed to something inherited vertically through generations.

Unlike systems of morality which are supposed to originate from pure utilitarian calculation or the word of God, or some other traditional

3 source, evolutionary theorists recognize that culture itself must obey the constraints of evolution by natural selection. He makes a good case for the claim that an evolutionary analysis supports, rather than subverts, morality. Perhaps most importantly, it relies on realistic models of how people behave.

Analyzing the development of morality in a Darwinian way leads to many fruitful ideas. We read a lot nowadays about where you are in your head, an important issue since we began learning a little about brain anatomy and function. Dennett shows that many issues about free will and responsibility have stumbled on shrinking the “I” to an imaginary place where some ultimate central consciousness, the decider, watches everything in its brain as in a theater, or settles in some part of the brain that does not include every part that is active in our decision making, such as the unconscious and preconscious. We can deal better with free will and our own moral responsibility when we recognize that we are our entire minds.

He also discusses the insights of how different essential functions of human moral and ethical life develop in an evolutionary way answering Cui bono? (Who benefits?)

“The point of morality is manifestly not restricted to ‘the good of the species’ or ‘the survival of our genes’ or anything like that,” he writes. Darwin’s levels of genetic selection : natural selection, unconscious selection, methodical selection, all just special cases of natural selection, have now added genetic engineering. Perhaps the most important for us as humans is memetic selection . A word, an idea, a tune or image are often spread across the globe at electronic speed. But even before today, with genetic engineering a hot topic, memetic engineering has been a major human enterprise: “the attempt to design and spread (discuss consciously and attempt to persuade each other of) whole systems of human culture, ethical theories, political ideologies, systems of justice and government, a cornucopia of competing designs for living in social groups. Memetic engineering is a very recent sophistication in the history of evolution on this planet, but it is still several millennia older than genetic engineering; among its first well-known products are Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics.”

We now must secure the most fundamental concept of a responsible moral agent who chooses freely for considered reasons and may be held morally accountable for the acts chosen.

At the end of a very chatty book, he concludes, “Human culture supported the evolution of minds powerful enough to capture the reasons for things and make them our reasons. We are not perfectly rational

4 agents, but the social arena we live in sustains processes of dynamic interaction that both require and permit the renewal and endorsement of our reasons, making us into agents that can take responsibility for our acts. Our autonomy does not depend on anything like the miraculous suspension of causation but rather on the integrity of the processes of education and mutual sharing of knowledge.”