Cognitivism Ends The Great Free Will Debate

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In the age of cognitive neuroscience, we have better ways of discussing why we do what we do than ‘free’ or ‘unfree.’ This article initially appeared in Serious Philosophy.

I’ve been out of academic philosophy since I quit teaching in 2016, but even standing outside and gazing in I can’t help but notice that people still think there’s some benefit to be had by indulging in the Great Free Will Debate. So much amazing work is going on in the neurosciences, and sadly philosophers find themselves inclined to resist the incursion into their territory instead of embracing the new knowledge and terminology that could elucidate some of the biggest problems surrounding this discussion.

Many philosophers do choose to participate in this new discipline, which has been ascendant in recent years as a direct heir of the cognitivist framework that found itself growing rapidly as early as the 1960s. But mainstream or pure philosophy still features a prominent behaviorist institution: the great free will debate.

When I was in grad school, I took classes in the psychology and anthropology departments to complement my knowledge of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, as well as ethics. What I found, there, was on the one hand, lacking in the philosophical rigor I’d grown to really appreciate. On the other hand, however, it was clear that these concepts were in many ways more developed and more helpful than what my philosophy professors tended to offer.

My undergraduate courses provided me an opportunity to explore different things with the assistance of young and unbiased minds, but overwhelmingly they supported cognitivism after our two-week unit on the great free will debate.

Why?

Because cognitivism has explanatory power that the “free will” positions universally lack.

Free Will And Behaviorism

Many of my fellow philosophers still somehow mistakenly believe that we have something to learn by asking ourselves whether or not we have free will. There are three primary schools of thought they hold to: free will, determinism, and compatibilism. These three roughly represent the answers we’ve come up with to the question of whether or not we have free will. Views like indeterminism and libertarianism are developments of these main branches of the theory, but fail to provide real value for the reasons that will be discussed in this essay.

Most people will recognize that the universe at least appears to be deterministic at first glance: that’s why we’re able to play pool, for example. The laws of physics operate on most objects in predictable and seemingly deterministic ways. The most popular view among my undergraduates used to be compatibilism, the idea that free will and determinism go hand in hand and each play some sort of role or at least give us the impression that they play some sort of role in our decisionmaking.

Despite what common sense would seemingly have to say to us here, we can reasonably wonder whether these laws of physics operate upon us the same way that they operate upon billiard balls. Living things respond to their environments in complex and fascinating ways, so we can appreciate the apparently obvious involvement of our choices with the actions we take whilst acknowledging the deterministic nature of most aspects of our environment. But we need to look deeper than that, if we want to understand the true nature of the problem here, mainstream philosophy tells us.

What if we’re determined in such a way that we each contain an illusion of free will? A self, as explored by Antonio Damasio, seems to carry with it some amount of baggage — could part of the issue here be that we only believe ourselves free, when in fact we are anything but?

Some experiments into behavior tell us that we are “programmed” to behave certain ways in certain situations. Addiction is one example; social situations are another. And when do we ever behave without any influence from our environment? We do not exist in a vacuum — could it therefore be possible that we are merely components of our environment, doing what we must in response to it?

Each of these lines of thinking sheds a bit of light into what modern free will theorists believe they’re getting to the core of: the character of the will. And yet, the fundamental assumption that founded cognitivism lurks at the core of this entire line of questioning: what are we?

Behaviorism refused, famously, to answer this question, positing a “black box” into which inputs went in and outputs or responses emerged. In his landmark 1957 critical review of B.F. Skinner’s book, Behaviorism, Noam Chomsky lambasted almost every aspect of behaviorist thinking and became an early member of the school of thought which said cognitive processes must be investigated empirically. The critique stood the test of time, yet philosophers have not yet begun to compellingly integrate its main ideas into the free will debate, which seems to drudge on over time irrespective of any new development or insight from the cognitivist school with little or no meaningful development taking place otherwise.

Cognitivism And Microwills

In the philosophy of Nietzsche, we discover a curious concept which predates the cognitivist revolution of the 1950s by over half a century. In my personal favorite Nietzsche passage, from Beyond Good & Evil, we find a hint of microwills in aphorism 296, the final one: “We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer — only weary and mellow things!” Nietzsche does not view himself as a thing, or at least not as what Deleuze and Guattari termed a “body without organs” — Nietzsche is aware of his parts. The passing of his thoughts allowed their novelty to fade; writing them involved difficult work and, no doubt, painstaking clarity and revision.

However, Nietzsche was a philosopher of the will. His interests in that ancient concept stemmed from his fascination with morality, particularly the peculiar and misshapen morality of Christian leaders, but he was not unwilling to turn his skeptical eye toward anyone who drew his interest. What he noticed, in this study of morality, he later applied toward individuals. Here some of his most striking observations took place. Concepts such as nihilism and the will to power are the hallmarks of Nietzsche’s philosophy, and in both we see individualist as well as social readings throughout his work. A nihilist is a preacher who speaks of the Lord God to his congregation and then indulges in sinful behavior because he does not believe what he preaches. The will to power is the animating force behind our actions; it speaks to us of good and change and our ability to accomplish things by our effort. These two concepts are opposed, of course; the will to power causes the preacher to give a sermon he does not believe just as nihilism in an individual signifies damage sustained to their will to power. Thus, the priest who lies to his congregation is said to have a damaged will to power and suffer from nihilism. One wonders if these two concepts are ever to be found separately.

This desire to see competing drives — and there are many — in an individual, for Nietzsche, predates and predicts the cognitivist revolution. The desire to peer, even without sophisticated machinery, into the machinery at work within a given human mind (let alone within a group of human minds!) is what links Nietzsche’s philosophy to modern disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience.

Why Free Will Is A Behaviorist Term

Free will, in the sense of the popular modern philosophical debate, is the notion that human beings are able to choose their actions for themselves. We see evidence of this in that people are different. We have different preferences, different tastes, different views on various issues. Clearly these differences must be a result of our choices! This would seem to suggest that each individual has the capacity to make different choices in the same or a similar situation, and thus people must have free will to one extent or another, or else we would never see such diversity in the world. Or, perhaps the subtle variations in our genes also create our subtly different personalities.

And yet, having reached this point, the modern free will debate will turn its guns upon the concept of a choice, rather than the concept of an individual mind to attempt to make a determination. The indeterminist position, that things are more or less random, maintains that we have no ability to predict what will happen next at all. Clearly, this is false, but it is instructive nonetheless: the reason the indeterminist position fails is that it fails to produce a new model for us, not that it fails to adequately describe reality. The question, “if you choose to do something, could you choose to do a different thing than you chose?” is intended to highlight the notion that a choice takes place at a point in time, in hopes of turning our attention to the Zeno Paradox event of the choice itself — which never seems to actually take place.

Unfortunately, cognitivist tools are seldom used (outside the Libet experiments, which ultimately show us nothing particularly interesting) to investigate free will empirically because results in such investigations are generally not favorable to the debate. Seeing when neurons in given brain regions fire and measuring the time difference between these events and particular actions provide fascinating conversation material, but little in terms of real frame-shifting substance. The reason for this is simple: the free will debate is a behaviorist undertaking. The language surrounding the whole enterprise is oriented to prevent us from asking what people are and what real facts about people can lead them to make different choices than they otherwise might have made.

The fact of our personalities, the limitations in our understanding of what a choice is and when and where it occurs, and the seemingly impossible task of adapting free will debates to a laboratory setting all point to one core fact: the great free will debate is dead.

the great free will debate is dead.

I’ll say it again: The great free will debate is dead. It is no longer providing new material for discussion, and while it may continue to be entertaining to discuss with undergraduate students, no serious philosopher attempting to leave a real mark should waste time on this backwater conversation that, at this point, only serves to prevent them from discovering cognitivism and all of the remarkable things that follow from its pursuit.

 

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