metonymy4u

The Critique of Free Reason

“…it’s normal and natural from a behavioral standpoint to experience free will and this has almost nothing to do with whether one is a philosophical determinist or not.”
–Kohlenberg and Tsai, c. 2012

In the world of human psychology students often have cause to wonder if the behavioral model does not devalue human dignity and strip us of our freedom. If it doesn’t in some way suggest that we are robots, computers or automatons without a sense of beauty, mystery, love or freedom? And I suspect that this may be why many reject the model. Certainly, rejection of method due to differences of ideology is nothing new, and the proponents of behaviorism have always faced an uphill battle against the habits of a Judeo-Christian community. Yet this question, the paradox of freedom, is much older than Skinner or Watson. We may therefore have further cause to wonder if older treatments of freedom might not shed some light on this dilemma. And perhaps help you reconsider behaviorism? The choice, of course, is yours!    🙂

To be sure, we are not the first ones in western history to question the wisdom of particular sciences. During the most recent European renaissance for example, Copernicus and Galileo questioned medieval cosmological models, Machiavelli and Hobbes questioned political idealism and hereditary rule, and Shakespeare put human nature itself on trial –making us all actors in our own particular cosmic farce (“all the world’s a stage”), and relativizing our will to the intolerable march of time (“tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…”). To question the worth of an intellectual paradigm based on a heartfelt conviction would therefore be time honored trade. And so I sincerely hope to commend the part of history that pays insufficient honor to a questioner’s deed, more in particular observances, than any mortal breach.

Meanwhile, 200 years ago the question was posed: do we have free will?

The answer was both no and yes.

The yes answer: We must say we are free because we know that all actions that we take could have been otherwise. Sitting in my favorite restaurant, I could have ordered salmon instead of steak, all things being equal. Our picture of the universe as composed of particles in field of force has no place for a salmon or steak “enforcement agency” that taps me on the shoulder and makes my answer fall one way or the other! And even if I pain-stakingly describe all of the antecedent events that certainly do influence my final decision, still there is an instant of choice. I could have chosen otherwise. There is a kind of unavoidable gap between all of the determinate events leading up to my choice, and the choice itself. Think about it: when the waiter takes your order, you don’t both just sit there waiting to see what’s going to happen, do you? So it seems impossible for us to talk about our lives without referring to the idea of free will, because to speak otherwise would simply not work. Without free will we would all just walk around “waiting to see what happens,” and nothing would get done. Since we don’t actually behave that way, we must believe the world is a place in which some beings make free choices. Therefore we must affirm that we have (at least something like) free will.

Another way to look at it is like this: It is not logically necessary that I order salmon, at least not in the same way that it is logically necessary for all bachelors to be unmarried, or that the sum of the angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees. And it is very hard for us to think away free will, because any choice (assuming free will) to give up free will would be canceled out as soon as it was made. Making a choice to not have free will is impossible because when I choose to give up my free will, I’m exercising free will and thus have not given it up yet! In trying to alter the universe such that my free will no longer exists, I used the very thing that I’m trying to give up. It’s like trying to hit a bat away using the bat you’re holding onto. You’d have to let go of the bat in order to hit it away, but then you’d have to pick it up again in order to hit, but then couldn’t hit it away because now you’re holding on to it. You can’t affirm free will in order to have the option to give it up, and then give it up because in order to have the option to give it up you have to continue to affirm it. And if you try giving it up first, in order to not have it, then you can’t choose to not have it later on (because you previously gave it up), and are consequently stuck with it! So it seems like the only way we can truly not have free will is if we were created that way (see the “no answer” below). If that were the case, then we would be living with this illusory sense of free will, but through no free choice of our own, so why worry?

Actually I do think there are good reasons to choose to not speak of free will in some contexts [1], but that’s different than trying to decisively give up free will.

Now some might object here and say we were just created having free will (by God) and that’s the way the universe is. However, that doesn’t work either because if we did truly have free will, we could choose to give up our free will, and I’ve already shown you how that’s impossible. Which leads us to the other side of the dialectic.

The no answer: We are not free because we know that all events have causes. So even the action of choosing salmon and not steak was caused by an event, and that event was caused by an event, and so on and so forth. Given enough information about any event, we can precisely describe how that event, and not some other event, must have occurred. And from a God’s eye perspective, everything in the universe has a definable cause. So even though we cannot ourselves know as much about the universe as God does, in principle we know that everything is determined by something else. Unless you’re going to talk about spontaneous miracles. But even those have a cause–i.e. God himself.

So in the end we seem to have no choice but to talk as if we have a choice. Which means, of course we have no choice. But we have to have choice, at least insofar as we talk about choice.[2]

WTF?

The preceding account of how reason can bounce back and forth endlessly and fruitlessly between the poles of a dialectic like freedom is something that caught the attention of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He observed that reason is often propelled by its own processes to a mutually contradictory set of conclusions, which he called “antinomies.” The question with freedom is how to reconcile our experience of freedom, without which we apparently cannot act, with our experience of empirical causality, without which no event makes sense. How can we account for a universe of intentional acts and un-intentional events? The dialectic (paradox) indicated to Kant not that we needed a more clever way to solve the puzzle, but that we needed a different way of thinking. He called it transcendental idealism. Transcendental idealism involves an understanding of the tendencies of reason, a diagnosis of common difficulties, and a prescription for recovery.[3]

It goes like this:

We affirm that in the course of thinking about experiences, the mind tends towards levels of abstraction that eventually take it beyond experience. For example, I might see two apples, then think about two as a number that could apply to any pair of objects, then consider all the natural numbers, then the integers, rational numbers, and finally the idea of number itself. I could abstract even further and think about “number” as an expression of my concept of position, or movement through space, …then “space itself”… “existence itself”….time… “eternity”….or even…. what? Ultimately, Kant proposed, we are led inevitably to some sense of the world being a manifestation of some idea of an “ultimate reality” which most people call “God.” The point is not to debate what to call the “ultimate idea” but to notice that that we seem, when pushed to higher and higher levels of abstraction, to get to a point beyond which we can go no further, and which does not correspond to any concrete experience in or of itself.

But long before we get there, Kant said, we have out-striped anything that can actually be experienced. Think it about it this way: you can experience 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 things with no problem. 100 things? A little more difficult, but probably doable, unless you’ve been drinking! So really, how high can you go? Can you experience all the natural numbers? No of course not. At a certain point you have to settle for just a definition of a “natural number” and “take it on faith” that they’re all out there…somewhere… Our ability to experience concrete examples of abstract ideas is, “in fact,” limited. And where exactly is the breaking point? With numbers, maybe somewhere between 100 and 10,000? Who knows? The point is that at some point our ability to abstract from experience out-runs our ability to actually experience. And that is when Kant says we start to make use of transcendental (abstract) reason. Of course, some subjects become more rapidly abstract than others, such as questions about freedom and ultimate causality (God). Interestingly, this tendency towards transcendental reason is not just mediated by subject matter, but also by neurological development, as demonstrated by Jean Piaget (1896-1980).

So how does this apply to the question of free will? Or any other subject in which our abstraction out-strips experience? For Kant these were questions about God, questions about the origin of the cosmos, questions about free will and questions about the basic composition of matter. What he said was both simple and brilliant! He said that our ability to abstract routinely out-runs our experience and the problem isn’t so much that this happens but that it happens without our awareness of it happening. The problems that arise (the apparent contradictions) result not from problems in the world that truly need solving, but unavoidable problems in reason that need accepting. He proposed we see reason as an imperfect heuristic, not as a the royal road to ultimate truth. For the first time in western intellectual history, he proposed to relativize reason to the paradigms of experienced, rather than idealized, existence.[4]

So with freedom what we say is this: We cannot live our lives without reference to the idea of freedom, and neither can we say that we are actually as free as we think we are. In respect to God, we say: our idea of doing things we believe are good and avoiding things we believe are evil (i.e. our idea of the morally correct as opposed to the pragmatically prudent) commits us to the notion of an ultimate being who also does the good and avoids the evil, but we cannot know for sure if that ultimate being exists, or indeed what its status vis-à-vis experiential space and time might be.[5]

In respect to the origin of the cosmos, we say: the idea of a cosmos without a specific beginning in space and time is non-sense, because then we’d have to disbelieve our own existence which is impossible for us to do. However, we cannot know just where this time and place are because to define that time and place precisely would imply that we could define another event, situated in another time and place, that might have caused it. But then that second “ultimate event” itself would have to have a cause, and that third event a cause, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

In sum: we cannot behave other than under the idea of freedom, but we cannot know if we are as free as we think we are. We cannot apply the precepts of morality (as opposed to prudence) without the notion of God, but we cannot know God itself. We must assume that the cosmos began somewhere and somewhen, but we can never fix that event in a specific where or when.

These are the dialectics of reason that Kant described in 1781.

What this teaches in the end is that reason will always come up with its own contradictions. And given that the question of free will always leads us to one of these insoluble dialectics, doesn’t it seem more pragmatic to test behaviorism for what benefits it can practically bring, rather than reject it a priori based on a contradiction such as the dialectic of freedom, that in any case seems pretty insoluble by any standard of reason? Or to put it in terms suggested by Pascal (1623-1662) : doesn’t it make more sense to simply assume that we are inevitably free, and that not even a behavioral model which suggests, for the sake of emotional growth, that we are determined merely for the purpose of helping us figure out the “determinants” of our actions and thereby making us more free in the end, can take away that dignity of freedom which is both by birth and by intention, truly ours?

In other words, why throw out a method like behaviorism? Simply because you think it might possibly, in some way not completely available to reason or experience, violate your sense of “free will,” about which we have such a hard time speaking at all?    😦

Besides which, have you ever seen a robot who needed behaviorism?






Notes

1.  For more on this topic, see B.F. Skinner’s “Beyond Freedom and Dignity,” Friedrich Nietzsche’s, “The Genealogy of Morals,” or Richard Rorty’s, “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.”

2. Interestingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) proposed a solution in which freedom just isn’t the kind of thing that can be spoke about at all.  In his opinion all sentences constructed with things like freedom as the subject are empty, without any content or referent whatsoever.  He said this category of things was such that they could only be demonstrated, not discussed, and that “Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence.”

3.  The word re-covery here is actually quite apt.  Kant and later Heidegger (1889-1976) suggest that what is needed is a re-acceptance of some of the mysteries of life, hence we re-cover them over and give up trying to “solve” them using traditional western philosophical methods.   When running up against these types of paradoxes, Plato (424 BCE – 328 BCE) also often had recourse to myth and legend.

4.  Actually, he may have been anticipated in important ways by Plato, Aristotle, William of Ockham, Berkeley and Hume, amongst others.  However Kant was likely the first to explore so systematically and exhaustively the implications of a relativized epistemology.

5.  I want to acknowledge that I have conflated many of Kant’s discussions of the ontological argument for God’s existence.  The ontological argument is an endlessly fascinating topic, and also unfortunately beyond the scope of this essay.