Re: Determinism and Free Will (and Quantum Mechanics)

Delurking because this is a topic of great interest to me right now...

I have been very absorbed in the work of Daniel Dennett as of late. A
strict materialist through and through, Dennett nevertheless believes
we have free will. He would fall under Loren's "option 3". His book
"Freedom Evolves" is especially useful in this regard. In many ways
it is a continuation of his discussions in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"
about strong AI and the ability to "design in" free will using
evolutionary considerations.

Dennett argues that the usual discussion of "free will" is trapped in
predictable ruts due to determinism/indeterminism debates (he thinks
them irrelevant to the question) or monism/dualism debates (he finds
no merit in dualism). His argument follows a different form: there
are several ways we could define free will, and only some of them are
"varieties of free will worth wanting." Say you were lining up for a
golf putt, and you missed. If determinism is true, there really
wasn't a way you COULD have made the putt. But from Dennett's
perspective, because we have the ability to, say, choose to practice
our golf game, there exists a set of circumstances in which we can
make future putts. Indeed, evolutionary forces have brought us to
this level of sophistication -- and morality (consider the ant, thou
sluggard) -- by allowing our brains to communicate with our "future
selves" in such a way that we can plan out such remedial golf work in
order to improve our "fitness" for golf. That we can improve our
fitness for something so mundane is a happy by-product of evolution.
Incidentally, his definition of consciousness falls neatly out of that
picture.

Some would rightly say that this is not what we usually mean when we
say we have free will. Dennett rather brazenly sidesteps thousands of
years of philosophy by taking this course. But this notion of having
free-will-from-our-perspective doesn't seem that different from
Calvinist theology to me. Moreover, because it doesn't require
determinism to be true or false, this view allows for miracles without
changing the central thrust of the theory. There are the etchings of
an "option 2" defense in there, but don't expect the athiest Dennett
to make them!

Chris
Received on Wed Mar 23 09:49:27 2005