Friday, September 23, 2011

I could have been wild and I could have been free, but nature played this trick on me

This is part III of an irregular series of posts in which I take a famous passage from a work of philosophy and talk about it without taking its context much into account or doing more than glance at a tiny fraction of the secondary literature on it. That's pretty inexcusable, but I enjoy it and the results have been OK so far. (This is the kind of thing people say before a terrible crash.)

Today my victim is Hume. He is famously a compatibilist, believing that free will is compatible with determinism. But is this really what he believes? It isn't clear to me that he believes in either free will or determinism, and 'neither...nor' is not 'both...and.' If we define determinism, as I believe Tommi Uschanov once did, as the theory that every event has a cause, then Hume would not be a determinist if he did not believe that any event has a cause. And surely some people read him this way. Certainly some people read him as denying that we have free will, since he talks about the liberty of not being in chains rather than freedom of the will, and this (our not being in chains) is not what defenders of free will typically have in mind.

So, what does he actually say? This sounds pretty deterministic:
Everyone agrees that matter in all its operations is driven by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so exactly settled by the energy of its cause that in those particular circumstances no other effect could possibly have resulted from that cause.
But he also says this:
The necessity of any physical or mental action is not, strictly speaking, a quality in the agent; rather, it resides in the thinking or intelligent onlooker, and consists chiefly in the determination of the onlooker's thoughts to infer the occurrence of that action from some preceding events
Which sounds as though he is denying that there is any necessary force in any matter that drives its operations. The necessity is in the mind of the beholder, much as the badness of murder lies not in the act, according to Hume, but is a kind of function of the heart of those who contemplate the act. Because we all have much the same minds we all agree that murder is bad and that determinism is true. But it isn't really. (Kant then tries to solve this problem by claiming that the matter in question also exists only in the mind.)

And what of liberty or free will? Everyone knows that Hume says this:
By ‘liberty’, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will; i.e. if we choose to stay still we may do so, and if we choose to move we may do that. This hypothetical liberty—·‘hypothetical’ because it concerns what we may do if we so choose·—is universally agreed to belong to everyone who isn’t a prisoner and in chains. There’s nothing to disagree about here.
I think less attention is paid to this passage:
liberty, when opposed to necessity, is nothing but the absence of that determination ·in the onlooker’s thought· and a certain looseness or indifference which the onlooker feels in passing or not passing from the idea of one event to the idea of a following event. 
Liberty, too, is in the mind of the beholder, according to this. Hume seems to think it is rather illusory, but that is what he says it is. If this is right then liberty is not compatible with necessity at all. The onlooker's thoughts either have the determination in question or they don't. If they do, the agent's actions are necessary. If they don't, they are free.

I'm sure this has all been said before unless it is just badly wrong. But I wonder whether it relates to why (as I recall) Wittgenstein, in writing about free will, focuses so much on predictability.  


8 comments:

  1. I quite agree with your reading of Hume. What I had in mind when I used that definition of determinism you attribute to me was, in a certain sense, nothing more than the same thing you're reading Hume as saying.

    I was kind of converted to determinism thus defined by Richard Taylor's Metaphysics, my intro metaphysics textbook as an undergraduate. Determinism isn't a topic to which I've devoted much thought - except in my short old paper "The Standard Misinterpretation of Determinism", which was about determinism and moral responsibility. But this Humean-Taylorian determinism is still what I'm inclined to defend if someone (say) raises the matter in everyday conversation. Somehow I've just never even had the feeling of freedom of the will which many critics of determinism claim is either obvious or is least supposed to be detected relatively easily through a kind of introspection. What I do in situations of choice is rather... wait to see which way I choose. Explaining the said feeling away has thus never been a problem for me.

    I don't remember whether we've discussed this before, perhaps on the old mailing list. But I've never really been able to make head or tail of Wittgenstein's lectures on the freedom of the will - just about the only extended stretch of text published under his name for which this holds. He justly mocks the scientistic idea that there could be a kind of a posteriori demonstration of the lack of freedom of the will. But that's none of my concern. To me, determinism itself is an explanatory hypothesis, and to be favoured because it is the simplest workable one, the most elegant one formally. Freedom of the will is an extra presupposition which Occam's razor just slices away. I don't see what discussions of predictability, which indeed take up a large portion of the lectures, have to do with determinism at all. I readily agree that humans' actions are often unpredictable even by themselves, but that is an epistemological limitation of humans, not anything metaphysical.

    It's very obvious that this is quite far from Wittgenstein's way of seeing the matter. And so his discussion of freedom of the will is just not peace-bringing (befriedigend) for me in anything like the way his average discussion of a comparable subject is. The problem is crystallised for me by the final words of the lectures: "You can call it a different game or not call it a different game." (Already earlier, he says: "And as for feelings, you can choose whatever you consider most interesting.") If determinism is true, then that's precisely what I can't do. If I'm determined to call it a different game, then that's the only thing I can do, and if I'm determined not to call it a different game, then that's the only thing I can do.

    Liberty is indeed in the mind of the beholder, as you say. This is one of Wittgenstein's main points in the lectures, and one where he agrees with Hume. But whether the liberty is in the mind of the beholder or not is itself yet another thing he cannot choose.

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  2. I like that definition because it's so simple but still seems to do what it is meant to do. I've become so used to using it, in fact, that I can hardly think what could be added to it. But I remember being struck by its simplicity when I first came across it.

    Wittgenstein's lectures on this perhaps seem better to me than they do to you, although it's been some time since I looked at them. I remember liking Bill Brenner's presentation of Wittgenstein's views, and actually being helped by this presentation in a way that felt liberating. The focus on predictability, though, has always struck me as seemingly beside the point. So it might be helpful to read those remarks as a response to Hume. More generally, I'm tempted to think that Wittgenstein would have immersed himself in the readings that Russell recommends at the end of The Problems of Philosophy. I don't remember what these are, but I'm sure Hume features prominently in them.

    Whether determinism is true of course depends on what it is, but it would be hard to argue with the claim that "every event has a cause." We could argue about the meaning of 'event' and 'cause' though. Neither of those concepts seems easy to sum up. (And someone might reject "every event has a cause" without argument, but I'm not inclined to do so.)

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  3. "Drury: I was recently at a lecture by A. E. Taylor in which he said he could never make up his mind whether Hume was a great philosopher or only a very clever man...
    Wittgenstein: As to Hume I can't say, never having read him."

    From p.106 of Rush Rhee's "Recollections of Wittgenstein". I notice on the facing page (107) Wittgenstein mentions reading Hamann, which surprises me. I should read the rest of this now that I've bothered to get it off the shelf to check that quote....

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  4. Well there goes that theory! Thanks, though, for putting me right.

    Wittgenstein sometimes seems to have meant "read thoroughly" or "read with a sense of full understanding" when he claimed not to have read someone at all. But I think this pretty much puts paid to my immersion idea.

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  5. In the spirit of the spirit of your post, here's me responding without having thought very carefully about Hume either (though having talked at length with someone recently about his views on miracles and necessary connections): if we never perceive necessary connections, then we can't perceive, as it were, either the freedom of the will or its determination by outside forces. True, we assume (out of habit or custom) that every effect has a cause. But I wonder if this gives us as much reason to be skeptical about determinism as it does to be skeptical about free will, at least the view that some acts are free. Or maybe Hume's skepticism gives us reason to render, as he does, freedom in a more practical sense, and to leave off worrying about more "metaphysical" ideas about freedom. (If we want to retain talk of causes, then maybe we just have to distinguish between what R. Taylor and others called agent-causation and other kinds of causation...)

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  6. I like that definition because it's so simple but still seems to do what it is meant to do. I've become so used to using it, in fact, that I can hardly think what could be added to it. But I remember being struck by its simplicity when I first came across it.

    I looked up the wording of Taylor's original definition, which I vividly remembered, even after more than 15 years, as having struck me similarly by its simplicity. It turns out that he had several definitions:

    [I]n the case of everything that exists, there are antecedent conditions, known or unknown, which, because they are given, mean that things could not be other than they are. That is an exact statement of the metaphysical thesis of determinism. More loosely, it says that everything, including every cause, is the effect of some cause or causes; or that everything is not only determinate but causally determined. The statement, moreover, makes no allowance for time, for past, or for future. Hence, if true, it holds not only for all things that have existed but for all things that do or ever will exist. (Metaphysics, 4th edn., p. 36)

    What I was precisely struck by is "everything, including every cause, is the effect of some cause or causes", which is probably also closest to my own wording of the same definition. I can say with certainty that this is the historical source of "my" definition of determinism, so I can take credit for the exact wording at most, not the idea.

    I remember liking Bill Brenner's presentation of Wittgenstein's views, and actually being helped by this presentation in a way that felt liberating.

    I like that presentation too (in his "Natural Law, Motives, and Freedom of the Will"). But I haven't felt helped or liberated by it at all. The point that determinism can be seen as a kind of attitude to human action and human life, or perhaps as emergent in some way from certain attitudes to them, is genuinely Wittgensteinian. But it doesn't take away the self-referentiality which I talked about and which makes discussions of our attitudes to determinism different from discussions of our attitudes to other philosophical views.

    If I adopt a determinism that can unproblematically be redescribed as an attitude, it still follows from my believing in the truth of determinism that, just like every other phenomenon in the world, I cannot view my own attitudes toward this determinism as having come about otherwise than... deterministically. And viewing the attitudes as themselves having come about deterministically and not indeterministically is something that determines their content at least partly.

    This is precisely the thing that mystifies me about Wittgenstein's lectures. Both Wittgenstein and Brenner speak a lot about adopting one attitude or another towards the whole determinism debate - the attitude that is most helpful for whoever adopts it. But the problem is that the determinism debate itself is a debate about such things as whether we can choose what our own attitude will be towards anything, including the determinism debate itself.

    Wittgenstein sometimes seems to have meant "read thoroughly" or "read with a sense of full understanding" when he claimed not to have read someone at all. But I think this pretty much puts paid to my immersion idea.

    Yes. If I had to suggest an identifiable historical source Wittgenstein would have known, it would be Schopenhauer's Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will (1839), the source of that wonderful soundbite: "Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills."

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  7. True, we assume (out of habit or custom) that every effect has a cause. But I wonder if this gives us as much reason to be skeptical about determinism as it does to be skeptical about free will, at least the view that some acts are free.

    Well, the interesting thing here is that in everyday life there simply doesn't seem to be any such thing as "being equally skeptical about determinism and free will". On the contrary, determinism thus defined seems to be a basic On Certainty-type certainty for every psychologically normal human being. Taylor goes on:

    Of course people rarely think of such a principle, and hardly one in a thousand will ever formulate it to himself in words. Yet all do seem to assume it in their daily affairs, so much so that some philosophers have declared it an a priori principle of the understanding, that is, something that is known independently of experience, while others have deemed it to be at least a part of the common sense of mankind. Thus, when I hear a noise I look up to see where it came from. I never suppose that it was just a noise that came from nowhere and had no cause. Everyone does the same - even animals, though they have never once thought about metaphysics or the principle of universal determinism. People believe, or at least act as though they believed, that things have causes, without exception. When a child or animal touches a hot stove for the first time, it unhesitatingly believes that the pain then felt was caused by that stove, and so firm and immediate is that belief that hot stoves are avoided ever after. We all use our metaphysical principles, whether we think of them or not, or are even capable of thinking of them. If I have a bodily or other disorder - a rash, for instance, or a fever or a phobia - I consult a physician for a diagnosis and explanation in the hope that the cause of it might be found and removed or moderated. I am never tempted to suppose that such things just have no causes, arising from nowhere, else I would take no steps to remove the causes. The principle of determinism is here, as in everything else, simply assumed, without being thought about. (p. 36)

    This is in fact an important part of what enabled me to adopt Taylor's determinism when I read his book as an undergraduate. I was already a firm Wittgensteinian at that point. But the fact that Taylor was able to put the matter in such On Certainty-like terms made me think that this, and not for instance the position of Wittgenstein's own lectures on the freedom of the will, is the truly Wittgensteinian, and not just the Humean or Taylorian, view of the matter - if there can be said to be a Wittgensteinian view of it at all.

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  8. Matt: yes, determinism in the sense of necessary connections 'out there' doesn't seem to be something Hume really believes in, any more than free will. And his skepticism does lead in a rather Wittgensteinian direction, I think. Wittgenstein might have liked this, for instance: "The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer, as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it."

    Tommi: the problem is that the determinism debate itself is a debate about such things as whether we can choose what our own attitude will be towards anything, including the determinism debate itself.

    Right. I don't think we can choose our attitudes like that. Strawson says something like this, doesn't he? (But not in a pro-determinism way.) We can, though, (perhaps) realize our ignorance and thus suspend any unwelcome judgements.

    When a child or animal touches a hot stove for the first time, it unhesitatingly believes that the pain then felt was caused by that stove, and so firm and immediate is that belief that hot stoves are avoided ever after.

    This is very Wittgensteinian, yes. It's like the remark that a man who resists being burned alive is motivated by "not induction [but] terror." And there is also something Schopenhauerian about this

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