Elbow Room — The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

„The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”

„Ideas about causation were at the focus of attention in the early days of Greek philosophy, and it occurred to some to wonder whether all physical events are caused or determined by the sum total of all prior events. If they are—if, as we say, determinism is true—then our actions, as physical events, must themselves be determined. If determinism is true, then our every deed and decision is the inexorable outcome, it seems, of the sum of physical forces acting at the moment, which in turn is the inexorable outcome of the forces acting an instant before, and so on, to the beginning of time.”

„The trouble with philosophy, I think, is that it is much harder than it looks to either Scientists or Artists, for it shares—and must share—the aspirations and methods of both.”

„Notice for instance that one of my initial premises—that people care deeply about free will—has already undergone a familiar exaggeration in my hands. It is not as if everybody cares about having free will in the same way that everybody cares about avoiding pain or finding love, for instance. We might remind ourselves of the luxury of our own participation in this exploration. Most people —99 percent and more, no doubt—have always been too busy staying alive and fending for themselves in difficult circumstances to have any time or taste for the question of free will. Political freedom, for many of them, has been a major concern, but metaphysical freedom has just not been worth worrying about.”

„If having free will matters, it must be because not having free will would be awful, and there must be some grounds for doubting that we have it.”

„That is (as Mother used to say), if we look them straight in the eye (and don’t avert our eyes ever so slightly and make ourselves ever so busy devising theories) we may see that some of them are only figments of our imaginations.”

„Prisons are dreadful. Prisons are to be shunned. Anyone who fails to understand this is not one of us.”

„A jail without a jailer is not a jail. Whether or not it is an undesirable abode depends on other features; it depends on just how (if at all) it cramps the style of its inhabitants.”

„A tumor might cause this or that in someone’s brain, and it would be terrible indeed to have a debilitating brain tumor, but it would take an awfully smart tumor to control someone’s brain.”

„In real life one often comes into competition with other people, and even with other organisms (outwitting the rat or mosquito, for instance), but in the cosmic game of Life against whom is one wagering?”

„We are looking at a world that appears to have been cleverly designed but then deserted by its designer.”

„Our own rationality will undo us, because once we’ve seen the truth, we will be unable to deceive ourselves any longer.”

„As Tolstoy says in the last line of War and Peace, “It is necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist and to recognize a dependence of which we are not personally conscious.”

„After all, if determinism is true now, it always has been true.”

„And is a man any wiser, when he runs to one place for a benefice, to another for a bargain, and troubles the world with writing errors and requiring answers, because he thinks he doth it without other cause than his own will, and seeth not what are the lashings that cause his will? (Hobbes, Molesworth, ed., 1841, Vol. V, p. 55)”

„Sometimes the only way to get what you really want is to try to do something else.”

„Even great intuition pumps can mislead as much as they instruct. When we teach Descartes, for instance, we typically do not teach his thought experiment as revealing the truth—or even as leading to the truth—about knowledge. In fact, we typically blame Descartes and his seductive intuition pump for leading philosophers on a three-century wild goose chase. At best we are grateful to him in the same way we might be grateful to someone who gave us the wrong directions, but whose directions led us on a fascinating misadventure from which we happened to learn a great deal. The central role of intuition pumps in philosophy shows that philosophy is not, and could not reasonably aspire to be, science.”

„“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”

„We do have free will. We can have free will and science too.”

„we all are liable to reinvent what we admire”

„Reason is the root, the fountain, the original of true liberty, which judgeth and representeth to the will, whether this or that be convenient, whether this or that be more convenient. (Hobbes, Works, Vol. V, p. 40)”

„If to break loose from the conduct of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worse, be liberty, true liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen: but yet, I think, nobody would choose to be mad for the sake of such liberty, but he that is mad already. (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, XXI, sec. 51)”

„In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing had so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.”

„Put more anthropomorphically, if these simple replicators want to continue to replicate, they should hope and strive for various things: they should avoid the “bad”

„the replicators began to turn into crude guardians of their own interests.”

„Were we to act as her guardian, we could advise much better courses of action to her—if only she could take our advice!3 She is a very imperfect guardian of her own interests, it seems.4 Moreover, we can say why she is so imperfect: she apparently has no inkling of her interests, or even that she has interests. One is even inclined to wonder if she has any inkling of her own existence!”

„As the creature thus comes to have interests, the world and its events begin creating reasons for it—whether or not the creature can fully recognize them.”

„The subtlety and deviousness of this thinking-without-a-thinker is often more than a match for the thinking we thinkers do.”

„’Tis impossible reason cou’d have the latter effect of preventing volition, but by giving an impulse in a contrary direction to our passion; and that impulse, had it operated alone, wou’d have been able to produce volition. Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion, but a contrary impulse; and if this contrary impulse ever arises from reason, that latter faculty must have an original influence on the will, and must be able to cause, as well as hinder any act of volition. (Treatise of Human Nature, II, III)”

„Optimal solutions to this set of problems can be calculated by an elaborate dynamic programming algorithm. In other words, reason dictates a certain course of action (on plausible assumptions about the birds’ interests and circumstances). “ “Events can be physically discriminated according to their duration or location—or, say, by the presence or absence of light of some particular wavelength, or tone of some particular pitch and volume. But events cannot be physically discriminated according to their meaningfulness or lack thereof. We, however, can discriminate meanings; we can respond directly to the import, sense, or relevance of things that we encounter. Therefore we are not (merely) physical discriminator-mechanisms. Here is a somewhat different underground argument to the same conclusion. To do something because reason dictates it is to be caused by (the appreciation of) a reason so to act. But reasons are not physical conditions in the world. Therefore, if any act of mine is caused by physical conditions in the world, it is ipso facto not caused by (the appreciation of) a reason. Thus the only hope of having a rational will involves the exemption from physical causality of one’s mind.”

„In short, brains are meaning manipulators, information processors, or, as I shall say, semantic engines (Dennett 1981a).”

„The creature who is not only sensitive to patterns in its environment, but also sensitive to patterns in its own reactions to patterns in its environment, has taken a major step. Unlike Sphex, it can notice that it is caught in a futile loop or rut, and leap out of it.”

„Thus (1) the blind trial and error of Darwinian selection creates (2) organisms whose blind trial and error behavior is subjected to selection by reinforcement, creating (3) “learned”

„consideration,”

„based on”

„illusion”

„for perhaps several dozen cycles—until something clicked and turned off the behavior. Much higher on the spectrum of modes of reflexivity is the representation of some of one’s reactions, whether via expressions in a public language or other public system of representations, or via internal states that themselves have enough of the functional properties of vehicles of public representation to be worthy of the name. A system that can reflect on its own activities in this way cannot reflect on all its activities at once. It may be able to reflect on its reflections on its reflections, but sooner or later it must run out of moves or room or time.”

„No doubt the sort of causation that might arise from someone’s glands would be a crude blast of some sort, a shove in one direction, a “blind”

„psychological”

„It’s part of your responsibility to be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it. That’s really your only chance to exercise some amount of free will, to be able to make a real choice instead of being pushed by psychological determinants [emphasis added]. (Doan and Macnamara unpublished ms., p. 7)”

„Thus Nagel notes that one can hope that even if one’s actions are determined by causes, they are “not determined by causes in a way which implies that they are not justified by reasons”

„One reason might be that people reflect on it by imagining themselves to have complete understanding of the etiology of some act, and find themselves imagining something (sketchily) with a causal ancestry far too simple and direct to be a plausible candidate for a responsible act. Since the only causal processes we can completely understand at a glance (the sort of glance one gives to such matters in imaginary cases) are quite simple causal processes, we arrive at the intuition that causal understanding excludes rational evaluation and assignment of responsibility. This is a clear case of a misused intuition pump, where simplicity is doing all the work.”

„We know that on closer examination we would find every corner of our world teeming with complicated, indecipherable, tangled webs of causation, but we tend to ignore that fact. Thus when we think of someone caused to believe this or that, we tend to imagine them being shoved willy-nilly into that state. The person thus caused to believe is analogized to the billiard ball caused to roll north, or the liquid caused to boil in the test tube. But in relying on these analogies we tend to ignore a major difference: test tubes and billiard balls are deaf and blind. You don’t have to whisper in front of the test tube, or make sure the billiard ball doesn’t see you watching it. People and higher animals, on the other hand, are designed to be highly sensitive to virtually everything that happens around them. It is, in fact, utterly impossible to get an awake, normal human being into exactly the same “cognitive state”

„People often have reasons represented to them. And it often moves them, fortunately for them.”

„For, the mind having in most cases, as is evident in experience, a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires; and so all, one after another; is at liberty to consider the objects of them, examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others. In this lies the liberty man has; and from the not using of it right comes all that variety of mistakes, errors, and faults which we run into in the conduct of our lives, and our endeavours after happiness; whilst we precipitate the determination of our wills, and engage too soon, before due examination. To prevent this, we have a power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire; as every one daily may experiment in himself. This seems to me the source of all liberty; in this seems to consist that which is (as I think improperly) called freewill. For, during this suspension of any desire … we have opportunity to examine, view, and judge of the good or evil of what we are going to do; and when, upon due examination, we have judged, we have done our duty, all that we can, or ought to do, in pursuit of our happiness; and it is not a fault, but a perfection of our nature, to desire, will, and act according to the last result of a fair examination.”

„As Locke sees, some of the most important thinking we do is not directly about the objects of our desires, but about our desiring those objects.”

„We also have the important capacity to think about our beliefs, and wonder about whether they are as they should be.”

„A lot would seem to hang on the answer, for some of our strongest intuitions about freedom hinge on consciousness. When we become conscious of our reasons, we recognize them (unlike Sphex who merely behaves as if she recognizes her reasons). So the capacity for conscious recognition of motivation is apparently a necessary condition of real freedom.”

„Even if we can make sense of some varieties of unconscious thinking, can we make sense of the idea of unconscious thinking about beliefs and desires? Could one be self-conscious, but only unconsciously self-conscious, or has the gulf between unconscious and conscious processes already been crossed once we have arrived at systems that are capable of treating some of their own internal “belief”

„recognition”

„genuine consciousness”

„It is always essential in these thought experiments that the victim be kept in the dark about the very existence of the manipulator. For once a suitably adroit self-monitor becomes informed of abnormalities in the causation of its cognitive states (and particularly of the source and intent of the abnormalities), it can immediately undo the well-laid plans of its deceiver. The process of undoing a deception comes in two forms: the illusion persists but one learns to discount or discredit it (so-called “stable”

„Then one fine day an “unintended”

„naive perfectionism”

„Why do people draw pictures and diagrams for their own eyes to look at? Why do composers bother humming or playing their music to themselves for their own benefit (Goodman 1982)? We can suppose that the creatures in our Just So Story would also be able to engage (profitably) in internal diagramming and humming.”

„The techniques of autostimulation are extremely various. Just as one can notice that stroking oneself in a certain way can produce certain only partially and indirectly controllable but definitely desirable effects (and one can then devote some time and ingenuity to developing and exploring the techniques for producing those desirable effects in oneself), so one can also come to recognize that talking to oneself, making pictures for oneself, singing to oneself, and so forth, are practices that often have desirable effects. Some people are better at these activities than others. Cognitive autostimulation is an acquired and intimately personal technique, with many different styles.”

„Rather do our ideas, our values, our yeas and nays, our ifs and buts, grow out of us with the necessity with which a tree bears fruit.”

„Darwinian motif: in the beginning there was some relatively unstructured and unsophisticated raw material; mutations of one sort or another occurred; and out of this emerged something novel, bringing with it not only new sorts of concrete phenomena, but new abstracta. Out of an inorganic world came not only replicators (living things) but also the reasons their striving after replication created. Out of tropistic and unlearning creatures, who only imperfectly “recognized”

„As Hobbes says, we represent reasons to other people “because thereby we think to make them have the will they have not.”

„transcend our biology”

„contra-causal,”

„We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth. … We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism— something that has no place in nature [that is, in a Hobbesian state of nature—DCD], something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. … We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. (Dawkins 1976, p. 215)”

„It is our communal activity of mutual persuasion, reflection, and evaluation that creates the values that then take precedence over the cruder interests of our ancestors.”

„Intellectual vertigo does set in on occasion, and people begin to balk. Nietzsche, for instance, has an unsurpassed capacity to make one reel with his search for higher vantage points: “This problem of the value of pity and of the morality of pity … seems at first sight to be merely something detached, an isolated question mark; but whoever sticks with it and learns how to ask questions here will experience what I experienced—a tremendous new prospect opens up for him, a new possibility comes over him … we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must just be called in question.”

„Is this the top of the pinnacle then? Or is it just the top of our pinnacle, the point at which we reveal our sphexish streak and flounder about foolishly in the face of higher thought?”

„Even if there were higher vantage points of rationality, would they matter to us?”

„We may well be designed to be oblivious to certain truths, or to be obsessive inventors of comforting falsehoods, protecting ourselves from the irritating truth with pearly layers of persuasive myth. Do the scars of our genetic and cultural evolution show? We should not be surprised if they do. But do these scars cripple us?”

„The rationality Nature has endowed us with is practical; it makes a difference by moving us, for the most part, in appropriate directions. But we must not suppose that it is only practical, that it is an endowment tied directly and rigidly to serving the biological ends that gave birth to it. As we have seen, a particularly powerful part of that endowment derives from our capacity for language, which itself could only emerge under the pressure of no doubt very specific (if still dimly understood) environmental demands and constraints. Without having an important biological function to serve, something as complex as language could never evolve. But once it has arrived on the evolutionary scene, the endowment for language makes room for all manner of biologically trivial or irrelevant or baroque (nonfunctional) endeavors: gossip, riddles, poetry, philosophy. In seeing how evolution has made reason practical, we have also seen how evolution can give birth to impractical reason. Let me summarize the results of this chapter. I have not offered a proof that rationality is possible for physical entities. What would be the point of such a proof? I take it that we already have an abundance of reasons for believing both that we are physical entities and that we are rational. So we need to understand how it might be so, and how it might have come about. The biological speculations, by helping us imagine in more detail how our capacity to be moved by reasons is ensconced in the universe, removes at least some of the temptation to retreat into absolutist dogmas about our status as agents. The perfect Kantian will, which would be able to respond with perfect fidelity to all good reasons, is a physical impossibility; neither determinism nor indeterminism could accommodate it. But that does not leave us in Sphex’s predicament. We are not infinitely but only extraordinarily sensitive and versatile considerers of reasons. If that is not enough, if free will and responsibility requires absolute freedom from sphexishness, if no modicum of responsibility can survive in anything but a perfectly sterile environment, then we must either overthrow the scientific vision of ourselves altogether or admit defeat. But these dire alternatives are not yet pressed upon us. We have hardly begun to see how much of what we want to be true about ourselves can be illuminated—not threatened—by an application of the scientific, naturalistic vision.”

„We want to be in control, and to control both ourselves and our destinies. But what is control, and what is its relation to causation and determinism?”

„One can control only those states or activities of a thing that fall within the range of its degrees of freedom, or in other words, within the range of what it can do.”

„When you control your plane perfectly, you don’t do it by controlling all the causes that influence it.”

„Foreknowledge is what permits control. Circumstances that are clearly beyond our control may nevertheless not disrupt or prevent our control of the events we wish to control—if we know about those circumstances in time. For if we know about them in time, we can plan in the light of our expectations, and take steps to prevent, avoid, preempt, avert, harness, exploit, or accommodate ourselves to those circumstances. We are at the mercy of only those causal chains that either creep up on us without warning (“blind-siding”

„Moreover, even if it is true that for some reason and in some regards people would be importantly less subject to control in such circumstances, there is still no denying that the imagined exercises in controlling the controllers are precisely the sort of activities we human beings dislike, resent, and seek to avoid.”

„We can see one reason (there are surely more) why it is chilling: it hints subliminally at the dark idea that the environment wants us to do this and that, and acting on the desire, makes us do what it wants.”

„What is the right way? What could it be except just the way we would want, if we knew everything about our interests and the way the world really is?”

„A truly benevolent world would keep us well informed about itself—but also, of course, the news it would tell us would be good news! If that bed of roses is too much to hope for, at least we might expect a benevolent world to “tell us what to do,”

„go out of its way”

„The environment is not designed to tell us what to do; we are designed to figure out from the indifferent environment what to do. So it is unwise, even in the light of this indirect but systematically helpful tendency over the long run, to speak of the environment controlling us.”

„We know perfectly well that causation can be entirely inscrutable—utterly lost in a tangled web of coincidence—and still be causation. What caused this grain of sand to be right where it is on the beach? Something did—or rather some billions of things over billions of years did. “ “we speak of “the”

„good, clear cases”

„randomizing”

„“The environment, not being an agent, does not control us. And yet the environment, over evolutionary time, has done a brilliant job of designing us.”

„The standard antidote recommended for abuse of the Mother Nature vision is to remind oneself constantly that evolutionary processes operate with no foresight and no goals.”

„Sometimes things do happen to be against us. The environment may be indifferent to us, but we much prefer some ways the world might be to others— and for good reason: some arrangements of the world’s objects better suit the pursuit of our interests than others. Nature does occasionally “conspire”

„intelligence”

„If my opponent gets the edge, it may be able to find some way of treating me the way the biologist treated poor Sphex, some way of controlling my activity in the wrong sort of way, a way that is contrary to my interests.”

„A guiding principle cannot be formulated by the requirement of maximizing two (or more) functions at once. … One would be mistaken to believe that it can be obviated … by a mere recourse to the devices of the theory of probability. Every participant can determine the variables which describe his own actions but not those of the others. Nevertheless those “alien”

„Consider the delightful case of the well-informed, truthful oracle who indirectly manipulates a person’s brain by bombarding his ears with lucid and accurate warnings, made all the more irresistible by the citation of all the evidence in their favor and a frank account of the entire evidence-gathering operation.”

„Of course we might want to eliminate the middleman altogether; we might prefer “first-hand”

„radical freedom”

„controlled”

„radical freedom,”

„read my mind.”

„The only way of assuring that there is no readable pattern in those activities is to make them random.”

„The traditional wisdom of statisticians says that you should draw your five percent sample randomly from the domain. Why? To minimize the danger of using a pattern of sampling that coincides with the very pattern in the world you are looking for.”

„The way to give oneself the best chance of seeing what is out there to be seen is to disorder one’s search.”

„We flip a coin to settle things that could often presumably be settled in a more rational, if laborious, process of consideration. Instead of trying to decide which team “should”

„the chief advantage of the dice over the gourmetoscope—aside from price—is that they require no maintenance. They give you an answer every time you ask, and who cares if it’s “right”

„For instance, a certain amount of arbitrariness, of informational insensitivity (which from the wrong vantage point would look like sphexishness) is an essential feature of time-pressured rationality; otherwise there is no breaking out of the vicious regress of deciding to decide to decide (on various incomplete grounds) … to terminate deliberation and act. We never choose a course of action as the best course all things considered; it would be insane to try to consider all things.”

„“If I let my acts be dictated by reason alone, I would be bereft of personality, a mere conduit for Truth and Doing the Right Thing, not a unique and idiosyncratic actor on the world’s stage.”

„If I let my moves in chess be dictated by reason alone, I would always play exactly the same game, for there is one Best Game of chess to play.”

„heuristic”

„shuffling”

„genetic variation,”

„More interesting, from our present point of view, are the forced moves on those occasions when there is more than one legal move, but only one nonidiotic, non-“suicidal”

„More generally, we prefer more options to less—up to the point where we become so swamped with options that we do not have time to consider them all. We prefer to find ourselves in circumstances where we can indulge in a modicum of spontaneous exploration, and while this preference for spontaneity is perhaps a genetically encouraged or even strongly hard-wired part of our characters, it is also dictated by reason. So the apparent conflict (expressed by Rilke) between the ideal of spontaneity and the ideal of rational deliberation is an illusion. While no one of sound mind would choose a totally chaotic policy of decision and deliberation, it is equally true that the purest devotee of reason will be led, by that very devotion, to a policy that includes a fair measure of “letting yourself go.”

„Moreover, the past does not control us. It no more controls us than the people at NASA can control the spaceships that have wandered out of reach in space. It is not that there are no causal links between the Earth and those craft. There are; reflected sunlight from Earth still reaches them, for instance. But causal links are not enough for control. There must also be feedback to inform the controller. There are no feedback signals from the present to the past for the past to exploit. Moreover there is nothing in the past to foresee and plan for our particular acts, even if it is true that Mother Nature—gambling on our general needs and predicaments—did, in effect, design us to fend quite well for ourselves. Far from it being the case that we are completely under the control of our ancestors or our evolutionary past, it is rather the case that that heritage has tended to set us up as self-controllers—lucky us. What begins to emerge from this exploration of the concept of control is a sketch of an ideal: how we would like to be. We would like to be as immune as possible from manipulation and dirty tricks and as sensitive as possible to harbingers of future vicissitudes that might cause us to alter course in the right ways—so that we can face the world with as much elbow room (as large a margin for error and as little relevant uncertainty) as we can get. This implies that we would also like the world to be a certain way: full of variety, certainly, and with lots of sustenance and delight—but more important in this context: not so savagely demanding (given our needs and abilities) as to constrain our options to a bare minimum. “ “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”

„Some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first.”

„The first day I was ever in London, I found myself looking for the nearest Underground station. I noticed a stairway in the sidewalk labeled “subway,”

„If one cannot be responsible for consequences of one’s acts due to factors beyond one’s control, or for antecedents of one’s acts that are properties of temperament not subject to one’s will, or for the circumstances that pose one’s moral choices, then how can one be responsible even for the stripped-down acts of the will itself, if they are the product of antecedent circumstances outside of the will’s control? The area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point.”

„But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen. … “(Spoken by a character in Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973, p. 34) “we have the image of the physical human being as no more salient, really, than domino number 743 in a chain of a million dominoes. If we are mere conduits of causation, it seems, we cannot also be agents.”

„First, there is something like an illusion of scale caused by magnification of effects by the nervous system. Whatever else we are, we are informationprocessing systems, and all information-processing systems rely on amplifiers of a sort. Relatively small causes are made to yield relatively large effects. In particular, the expenditure of large amounts of stored energy is controlled by modulation of lower-energy events. An information- processing system is essentially an organization of switches or triggers. The switches that control the output effectors—the arms, legs, mouths, wheels, projectiles, rockets—use very little input energy to initiate, modulate, and terminate processes or activities that expend dramatic amounts of energy in clearly observable ways. Moreover, such a system’s input switches—the transducers that form the perceptual organs—are also amplifiers. The “firing”

„triggered”

„introspective”

„How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?”

„Why must there be a center at all? The illusion of such an ultimate center arises, I think, from our taking a good idea, the idea of the self as a unitary and cohering point of view on the world (Dennett 1992), and pushing it too far under the pressure of preoccupations with our responsibility (moral, but also artistic and intellectual, as in the case of Mozart). We ask ourselves “Did I do that?”

„Events near the input and output “peripheries”

„in my control,”

„And on the other side of center, when we look more closely at action, is my voluntary act really moving my finger, or is it more properly trying to move my finger? A familiar intuition pump about someone willing actions while totally paralyzed attests that I am not in control of all the conditions in the world (or in my body) that are necessary for my finger actually to move. Moving in still further, is it so obvious after all that either accepting or trying is voluntary? Is it not perhaps an illusion that I can grant or withhold acceptance of some proposition “at will”

„will power.”

„I have decided to take the job,”

„A self is, above all, a locus of self-control. How do you know, when you look in a mirror, that the person whose reflection you see is you? Not just by noting the resemblance, for how do you know what you look like right now?10 You determine that you are looking at yourself by using the same tests you use to determine that you are controlling the model airplane. You see if you control the motions of the person you see. Can you wave that hand? If you can, it’s yours. The epistemological problem of such selfidentification is normally trivial, but in contrived cases it can be difficult. In a suitably disguised and complicated tangle of arms and legs—say, a group wrestling match in identical costumes and gloves—the question “Which of these hands are mine?”

„An individual human being starts life with a problem: learning how to control himself or herself. As in all problems, one starts in a certain position with certain limited resources, and must then bootstrap those resources somehow into a solution.”

„Not only do we know, empirically, that a newborn child is very far from being a blank slate, but we also know, by a priori reasoning as compelling as any, that we have to start that way if we are to be capable of learning or developing at all.”

„This is a subtler challenge than our earlier worry about being controlled by the past. I may not be controlled by the past, but my current capacity to make decisions and control myself is not, it seems, something I can take credit for.”

„No matter how many steps of character formation one has engaged in, Edwards says, there has to have been a first step, and if it was a decision over which the agent had no control, its product cannot be anything the agent is responsible for. “ “But by parity of reasoning, there couldn’t really be any mammals, since every mammal must have a mammal for a mother, and if you go back far enough in the family tree of any apparent mammal, you must find a manifestly nonmammalian ancestor, whose offspring just couldn’t themselves be mammals, and so forth.”

„Perhaps the error is this: it presupposes that one could not take full responsibility for something unless it was entirely of one’s making. But of course nothing is ever entirely of one’s making, unless one is God, so this is an extravagantly strong premise with which to begin an argument. Can the artist not claim full credit for a creation that incorporates, as a proper part, an objet trouvé? Does a resourceful exploitation of serendipity count against the authorship of the exploiter? I take responsibility for any thing I make and then inflict upon the general public; if my soup causes food poisoning, or my automobile causes air pollution, or my robot runs amok and kills someone, I, the manufacturer, am to blame. And although I may manage to get my suppliers and subcontractors to share the liability somewhat, I am held responsible for releasing the product to the public with whatever flaws it has. Common wisdom has it that much the same rationale grounds personal responsibility; I have created and unleashed an agent who is myself; if its acts produce harm, the manufacturer is held responsible.”

„Among the questions facing a sophisticated self-controlling agent are: could I revise my basic projects and goals in such a way as to improve my chances of satisfaction? Are there grand strategies or policies that are better than my current ones? Is there a style of operation that would suit my goals better than my current style? Will my current policies tend to lead me into tight quarters with little room to maneuver and great risk of disaster? What should my general policy regarding risk be? What kind of an agent do I want to be or become? (Some of these questions may strike one as objectionably amoral, but I am deliberately keeping explicitly moral questions at bay here, for I want to show how much of the structure of “free will”

„a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires”

„weighing”

„What a man will think of trying to do is narrowly circumscribed and may sometimes be predictable with almost perfect accuracy”

„character”

„The reason for this unreliability at the highest levels is clear enough; finite agents must use heuristic methods when faced with large problems and limited time (and other resources). The larger the search space of a problem, the larger and messier the haystack in which the needle must be found, the more risky any heuristic method (with its inevitably blind leaps) must be.”

„There is a real question of what one ought to do, a question that may well have an objective, “definitive”

„decision procedure”

„“The further ground of responsibility, Taylor suggests, comes from the particular nature of the way in which we accomplish radical re-evaluation.”

„But it is obvious that “I”

„But the position, for all its persuasiveness, seems just as vulnerable as ever to a version of Edwards’ skeptical challenge: if I happen to have defined myself so as to be able to listen to the voice of reason (on occasion) that is just my good luck, and if another person is unlucky enough to start life with a character tainted by ancestral shortcomings, his misdeeds are similarly only a product of his bad luck. Neither of us was responsible for being who we were the day we were born, and neither of us is, or could be, responsible for anything we subsequently do, so long as our characters today are deterministic outgrowths, however constructive or creative, of our characters yesterday and the day before. Is it “just luck”

„And how many there are who may have led a long blameless life, who are only fortunate in having escaped so many temptations.”

„Suppose the United States and Russia were to agree that henceforth they would settle all disagreements and conflicts by tossing a coin in Geneva. Each country was to designate a contestant for the great international toss-up. Who should represent us? I expect someone would hit upon the idea, both democratic and grandiose, of a national coin-tossing tournament, engaging every man, woman and child in a systematic elimination. The winner, of course, would be the ideal representative to send to Geneva: America’s luckiest citizen, someone who had just won twenty-eight consecutive coin tosses without a single loss! Surely that person would stand a much better chance of winning in Geneva than some citizen just chosen at random? If there were such a thing as luck—that is, if luck were a projectible property of people or things—then this imagined tournament would be a fine luck distiller or amplifier. But of course (unless we are very much mistaken) luck isn’t like that; luck is mere luck, not a genuine, projectible endowment.”

„For there is really no such thing (we think) as being lucky in general, being reliably lucky; there is only being lucky on particular occasions. But the winner would probably find it very difficult not to feel chosen or special or in some other way magically singled out for favor. The lucky survivors of disasters —shipwrecks and mining accidents—typically cannot forgo drawing extravagant conclusions from the fact that they survived while others perished. The winner of our tournament, then, would be strongly tempted to believe that luck was something real, a force in nature that was running his way.”

„Now is there an illusion of personal responsibility in those of us who take ourselves to be the captains of our destiny analogous to the illusion of responsibility or prowess engendered in our tournament winner? Surely anyone who, winning such a tournament, takes credit for it, or anticipates future success on the basis of past experience, is simply making a mistake. Might we similarly be just wrong in thinking we—some of us, in any case—are genuinely responsible for our acts? There is a sense in which we are all, like the winner of the coin-tossing tournament, extraordinarily lucky to be here in the winner’s circle. Not a single one of our ancestors suffered the misfortune of dying childless! When one thinks of all the millions of generations of predecessors knocked out in the early rounds of the natural selection tournament, it must seem that the odds against our existing are astronomical. (And speaking of astronomy, think how fortunate we are that our planet just happened to get formed out of heavy elements (which are a great rarity in the universe)—so we have something solid and comfortable to stand on! Whether or not we are lucky to be here, from the fact that we are here we may be able to deduce surprising facts about the “laws of nature.”

„But we do expect a lot from the rest of us, and for good reason. We are not just lucky; we are skilled.”

„After all, if you are not even capable of throwing a basketball seventy feet, you cannot ever avail yourself of the occasional desperate opportunities to heave a lucky, game-winning toss. Moreover, the better you are, the less luck you need, and the less your successes count as merely lucky. Why? Because the better you are, the more control you have over your performance.”

„Similarly then, if someone is skilled at self-improvement, such success in this line as he may achieve is not attributable to his luck on each occasion, but to his skill. We expect more of him. Noblesse oblige, as the saying goes.”

„sn’t this manifestly unfair? Yes, if the race is a hundred yard dash. No, if it’s a marathon. In a marathon such a relatively small initial advantage would count for nothing, since one can reliably expect other fortuitous breaks to have even greater effects.”

„no one actually has more luck than anyone else, even though some have been lucky enough to start off with more talent.”

„When the talented succeed, it is not because they are lucky, but because they are talented. Ah, but they are lucky to be talented in the first place! Not always. Some talented performers are made, not bore; some have diligently trained for hours every day for years on end to achieve their prowess, and in the process have denied themselves many delights and opportunities that we less skilled performers have enjoyed. Ah, but they were lucky to be born with the gumption and drive required to develop their skill in training themselves. Not always. Some aren’t born with that temperament, but learn it from a wise teacher or coach. Ah, but then they are lucky to have the intelligence required to comprehend the lesson of that good coach. (After all, not all the players are capable of being inspired by him.) And, of course, they are lucky to have been born in the town where that fine coach works his miracles. Moreover, they are lucky not to have been born blind, and lucky not to have been struck by lightning on their way to school. In fact, as already remarked, they are astronomically lucky to have ever been born at all! As this petulant little dialogue exhibits, there is a tendency to treat “lucky”

„when we say “we have every reason to expect”

„We are all the “gifted”

„There but for the grace of God go I”

„implicit pruning.”

„Only some of the portions of the physical universe have the property of being designed to resist their own dissolution, to wage a local campaign against the inexorable trend of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And only some of these portions have the further property of being caused to have reliable expectations about what will happen next, and hence to have the capacity to control things, including themselves. And only some of these have the further capacity of significant self-improvement (through learning). And fewer still have the open-ended capacity (requiring a language of selfdescription) for “radical self-evaluation.”

„Human beings can identify their own limitations, as one feature of the world among others to be self-consciously accepted, or, if possible, deliberately changed, rather than simply responded to.”

„Time does not really exist without unrest; it does not exist for dumb animals who are absolutely without anxiety.”

„And one of the deepest, one of the most general functions of living organisms is to look ahead, to produce future as Paul Valéry put it.”

„We all take deliberation seriously, and would hate to learn that we are deluded to do so. We plan for the future; we lie awake nights gnawing at the bones of indecision, worrying about what to do and why; we promise ourselves that we will be more circumspect in the future. If we find ourselves on a jury, we try especially hard to pay close attention to the evidence presented, so we can render a responsible verdict. Is all this worry and work wasted? Is it somehow a sham or delusion? Many people are afraid that it is, if determinism is true.”

„It seems that we can conclude that if determinism is true, then any belief we ever have about there being more than one possible future for us is false. If determinism is true, then only the actual is possible; whatever did happen was the only thing that could have happened, and whatever will happen will be the sole possibility the future ever held in store for us. But then, since deliberation surely presupposes that there are multiple possibilities to be decided among, determinism and deliberation are incompatible. But what could this supposed incompatibility come to? If we are to do justice to this suspicion we must first clear away some of the jostling crowd of bad ideas that are easily confused with the best version. Then we will be able to see that even the best version is mistaken; there is no incompatibility at all between determinism and deliberation.”

„The prisoner who spends his days and nights concocting vengeful schemes but dies in his chains has engaged in deliberations whose only effects are, let us say, to deepen the furrows in his brow and to exacerbate his high blood pressure. His cellmate engages in similar deliberations, and acting on them, escapes his cell and puts all his plans into tumultuous effect. If this is what “making a difference”

„in real deliberation, there is a genuine opportunity for the agent, with both branches “open to the agent.”

„all along”

„I can never decide whether this is a tragic or comic vision: the deterministic world unfolds over the eons, eventually producing creatures who gradually grow in rationality and curiosity to the fatal point where they can be caused, inexorably, thanks to their very rationality, to see the futility of their frantic, scheming ways.”

„Fatalism is the rather mystical and superstitious view that at certain checkpoints in our lives, we will necessarily find ourselves in particular circumstances (the circumstances “fate”

„Consider the man who has thrown himself off the Golden Gate Bridge and who thinks to himself, as he plummets, “I wonder if this is really such a good idea.”

„The man who is locked in a room and who does not know it. He may certainly make a choice about staying, despite the fact that he has no choice about staying.”

„Our lover will arrive at a positive verdict no matter what evidence is placed before him.”

„The lover’s capacity for self-deluded deliberation is an extreme case, of course, and we all succumb to his temptation on occasion—to varying degrees and with varying frequency. This universal pathology, mild or severe, presents itself in a variety of guises that array themselves between the two poles of selfdeception and weakness of will (what Aristotle called akrasia).”

„Deliberation is (in general) effective in a deterministic but nonfatalistic world.”

„But still there is a feeling that there must be something absurd about soldiering on with one’s deliberating after reaching the opinion that that very deliberating is determined, both in its process and in its ultimate product, There is a feeling that anyone who happened to continue deliberating under such circumstances would have to be deluded about something. Hence, once the nature of the case was presented to him, he would either have to reveal a sphexish blind spot—an inability or refusal to accept the appalling truth— or have to do the honorable and rational thing: commit intellectual harakiri. But suppose the person went blithely on deliberating, and shrugged off the charge of irrationality with the familiar retort: “If I’m so stupid, how come I’m so successful?”

„Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

„Yet while it is part of our nature to produce a future, the system is geared in such a way that our predictions have to remain dubious. We cannot think of ourselves without a following instant, but we cannot know what this instant will be like.”

„If one were to design the perfect deterministic deliberator, then, what features would it have? As we saw in the previous chapter, it must have the capacity to be caused by current features of its environment to foresee the causal milieu into which it will soon pass. And it must foresee this reliably, swiftly, and accurately. There is a trade-off, however, among these desiderata. If this is to be genuine foresight, and not hindsight, a price must be paid: the device must simplify its information-handling tasks. It must throw away or ignore data it could in principle obtain, for the costs (in time and effort) of carrying along too much information will frustrate real-time prediction. And it cannot jettison just any data; if it is to maintain some modicum of reliability of prediction, it must make the “right”

„As Simon (1969, p. 110) notes, in his philosophically rich discussion of these issues: “for a tolerable description of reality only a tiny fraction of all possible interactions needs to be taken into account.”

„To predict the future of a curve is to carry out a certain operation on its past. The true prediction operator cannot be realized by any constructible apparatus; but there are certain operations which bear it a certain resemblance, and are in fact realizable by apparatus we can build”

„Whatever particular trade-off of these factors is dictated by the circumstances of a species, it will involve making certain distinctions. In each deliberator some line or other will be drawn, marking off those features of its environment that it “considers”

„unpredictable”

„possible”

„impossible”

„In the context of such models, even an omniscient and omnipotent organism would not be a Laplacean demon. It would neither require nor seek total knowledge of the universe, but only knowledge of those factors affecting fitness”

„As Ryle (1949, pp. 125–135) puts it, what it means to say a dog can bark is that one may not rely on its silence.”

„So a particular type of deliberator-agent—a species, for instance—will always be equipped with a somewhat idiosyncratic way of gathering and partitioning information about its world; it will have its way of “conceiving”

„The point of all this prudent information management is to enable the deliberator to make good (reliable, useful) control decisions before it is too late. And these decisions must be based not only on the deliberator’s goals (or desires), but also on reliable expectations of several sorts: (1) what will happen soon no matter what the deliberator does; (2) what will happen soon if the deliberator does A or unless the deliberator does B. If the deliberator has as a particular goal the preservation or protection of x, then x’s likely future states and circumstances under various circumstances will figure importantly in its calculations, especially if x is the deliberator itself. So as we saw already for other reasons in the previous chapter, self-prediction is an essential component in the competence of a self- controlling deliberator. A self-controlling deliberator has to have a good idea of what it is getting itself in for. But self-prediction itself breaks down into a variety of categories, and has its limits. There are expectations about: (1) what will happen soon to the deliberator no matter what the deliberator does; (2) what will happen to the deliberator if the deliberator does A or unless the deliberator does B; and (3) what the deliberator will decide to do soon.”

„The deliberator can foresee that, barring unforeseen interference, it will decide to follow one of, say, two or five or twelve courses (roughly individuated— ignoring microvariations within courses). Which of these courses will actually emerge as the adopted course remains practically unforeseeable by the deliberator, to whom they must all count as “possibilities.”

„expenditure”

„keep your head down”

„may not care.”

„And what if some other tries to tell me his prediction before I have decided? He must either confound his prediction of me with his own selfunpredictability (what will I tell him, and just when and how?), or (if he attempts to circumvent this problem by “leading his target”

„Getting the best scope for the range of what is up to me, getting neither too broad nor too narrow a class of “possibilities”

„a being who can realize a nihilating rupture with the world and with himself”

„middle-sized”

„We have found some reasons supporting our parochial hunch that the way we think about our place in the universe is not only the only way we can think of it (on a day-to-day basis), but the only way to think of it—the only way for a finite, rational deliberator to think, whether or not determinism is true. If you want to deliberate, and deliberate well, it is rational for you to act as if the world really does have an open future, with real opportunities. But isn’t that to say that it is rational to keep yourself under the illusion that the future is open and contains real opportunities? Not necessarily. I have assumed for the sake of argument that we have been discussing deterministic deliberators in a deterministic world, but I did not assume for the sake of argument that these were deliberators operating in a world with no real opportunities. It may seem as if determinism rules out opportunity, but a closer look at the concept of opportunity may convince us otherwise.”

„What is an opportunity? Are the opportunities we seem to have merely apparent opportunities if determinism is true? Would real opportunities be possible if determinism were false? What would a real opportunity be? An opportunity is supposed to be a “chance”

„make a difference.”

„The robot has a robot-opportunity whenever it is caused by such specialinterest events to “consider,”

„Bare opportunities are in great abundance, but they are not enough; when we say we want opportunities, or chances to improve our lots, we don’t want just bare opportunities. We want to detect our opportunities, or be informed of them, in time to act.”

„What is important about these cases is precisely that they are cases of one agent controlling some facet of the world of another agent to deny him an opportunity by systematically linking conditions so that all the conditions that are necessary for the opportunity to be acted upon (or, one might say, risen to) are never jointly satisfied. But in the absence of devious counteragents of this sort, the environment, in its indifferent way, does not systematically hide opportunities from agents. Nature does not play hide-and-seek; it is, as Einstein said of God, subtle, but not malicious. So a real opportunity is an occasion where a self-controller “faces”

„deliberation”

„The robot is finite (like us) so it cannot follow a policy of considering everything that might be relevant to its interests all the time. And it is deterministic. But as a well-designed, real-time self-controller it makes use of heuristic procedures, and hence is designed to “take chances”

„If we look microscopically at the robot’s program on the occasion of its failure to arrive at the correct solution, we see that if the pseudo-random number generating program had spewed up a 5 or a 6, the program would then have taken one more round of deliberation-generation and would have found the item in its memory that would have altered its decision in just the right way. But on the actual occasion a 3 was delivered by the pseudo-random number generator—and of course it was determined (alas) that the number generated would be that 3. So the robot never really had a chance!”

„No sneaky agent with inside knowledge has manipulated the distribution of tickets, because the knowledge of the winning ticket did not (and could not) exist in any agent until after the tickets were sold.”

„Would many people buy a ticket in a lottery in which the winning stub, sealed in a special envelope, was known to be deposited in a bank vault from the outset? I suspect that most ordinary people would be untroubled by such an arrangement, and would consider themselves to have a real opportunity to win.”

„If our world is determined, then we have pseudo-random number generators in us, not Geiger counter randomizers. That is to say, if our world is determined, all our lottery tickets were drawn at once, eons ago, put in an envelope for us, and doled out as we needed them through life.”

„Remember, even in a perfectly fair, perfectly random, coin-tossing tournament, it is determined that someone (or other) will win. The winner cannot properly claim it was his “destiny”

„Opportunity is a notable example of a concept closely related to possibility, but that can have nothing but a wildly metaphorical application outside a personal sphere.”

„The distinction that I wish to emphasize is that between germ-line cell division (reproduction) and somatic or “dead-end”

„Opportunities play a role, as we shall see in chapter six, not only in our conception of the biological world but also in our conception of the lifeless world of physics and chemistry. “The idea that the opportunities we see for ourselves might be only apparent, might not be real (if determinism is true) is not only metaphysically ill-founded; it is politically retrograde and morally dubious in a way we should acknowledge. If there were no real opportunities, then there might be no real, important difference between the person who is agonizing over whether to accept admission at Harvard, Stanford, or Swarthmore, and the person who is not agonizing over whether or not to go to work today in the factory”

„The opportunities that matter to people hinge on everyday-sized features of their manifest images, and some people have more opportunities than others.”

„Consider the bank president, to whom the idea of quitting his job (which is killing him with ulcers and hypertension) and becoming a gardener (which he would love) is all but unthinkable: his wife would go gray (or mad) overnight, his children would have to drop out of college, his friends would be appalled and uncomprehending. We who are not tied by a thousand strings of affection and commitment to those acquaintances of his may scoff at his quandary, but which of us could carry off a similarly radical break? There is more than a kernel of truth in Kris Kristofferson’s lyric: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”

„keep their options open.”

„Almost all philosophers agree that a necessary condition for holding an agent responsible for an act is believing that the agent could have refrained from performing that act.”

„Those who hold dear the principle of “could have done otherwise”

„Seeing both sides of the question does not require that one not be overwhelmingly persuaded, in the end, by one side.”

„Doesn’t a considerable part of being a responsible person consist in making oneself unable to do the things one would be blamed for doing if one did them?”

„For today’s orthodoxy is that indeterminism reigns at the subatomic level of quantum mechanics, so in the absence of any general and accepted argument for universal determinism, it is possible for all we know that our decisions and actions are truly the magnified, macroscopic effects of quantum-level indeterminacies occurring in our brains. But it is also possible, for all we know, that even though indeterminism reigns in our brains at the subatomic quantum mechanical level, our macroscopic decisions and acts are all themselves determined; the quantum effects could just as well be selfcanceling, not amplified (as if by organic Geiger counters in the neurons). And it is extremely unlikely, given the complexity of the brain at even the molecular level (a complexity for which the word “astronomical”

„those who claim to know that they have performed acts such that they could have done otherwise in exactly those circumstances must admit that they proclaim this presumably empirical fact without benefit of the slightest shred of evidence, and without the faintest hope of ever obtaining any such evidence.”

„it is usually empirically answerable, and its answer matters. For not only is the traditional metaphysical question unanswerable; its answer, even if you knew it, would be useless.”

„Although people are physical objects which, like atoms or ball bearings or bridges, obey the laws of physics, they are not only more complicated than anything else we know in the universe, they are also designed to be so sensitive to the passing show that they never can be in the same microstate twice.”

„There is some point in determining how a bridge is caused to react to some very accurately specified circumstances, since those may be circumstances it will actually encounter in its present state on a future occasion. But there would be no payoff in understanding to be gained by determining the micro-causation of the behavior of a human being in some particular circumstance, since he will certainly never confront that microcircumstance again, and even if he did, he would certainly be in a significantly different reactive state at the time.”

„So if anyone is interested at all in the question of whether or not one could have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances (and internal state), this will have to be a particularly pure metaphysical curiosity—that is to say, a curiosity so pure as to be utterly lacking in any ulterior motive, since the answer could not conceivably make any noticeable difference to the way the world went. ((Nozick (1981, p. 313) claims that we all want “originative value,”

„could have done otherwise”

„sub specie aeternitatis,”

„space-time worm,”

„the cement of the universe”

„open future.”

„There is a difference between being optimally designed and being infallible.”

„What concerns the engineers when they encounter misperformance in their robot is whether or not the misperformance is a telling one: does it reveal something about a pattern of systematic weakness, likely to recur, or an inappropriate and inauspicious linking between sorts of circumstances and sorts of reactions? Is this sort of thing apt to happen again, or was it due to the coincidental convergence of fundamentally independent factors, highly unlikely to recur?”

„Why do we ask “could he have done otherwise?”

„He’s not so stalwart,”

„he could well have done otherwise.”

„“Can I help it what occurs to me and what doesn’t?”

„accident,”

„accident”

„As van Inwagen (1975, pp. 49–50) says, “To deny that men have free will is to assert that what a man does do and what he can do coincide.”

„Biologists assure us that unicorns are not only not actual; they are impossible —as impossible as mermaids. (It has something to do with the violation of bilaterality required for a single, centered horn, I gather.) But the biologists also assure us that there are many possible species that haven’t yet existed, and probably never will—short-legged, fat horses good only for eating, say, or blotchless giraffes. Only a small portion of the possible variations ever appear.”

„Accidents must happen if evolution is to take place, Monod says, and accidents can happen”

„for what evolution requires is an unpatterned generator of raw material, not an uncaused generator of raw material. Quantum-level effects may indeed play a role in the generation of mutations, but such a role is not required by theory.”

„chaotic systems are the source of the “practical”

„There is no higher perspective (unless we count the perspective of an infinite being) from which the “accidental”

„no accident”

„It was in this sphere then, the sphere of legal obligations, that the moral conceptual world of “guilt,”

„The varieties of free will we deem worth wanting are those—if there are any— that will secure for us our dignity and responsibility. (…) If it turns out that there is no such sort of free will, the very idea of responsibility will lose its foundation.”

„But strangely enough, it seems that we want to be held responsible. Why? Perhaps because our dignity is threatened by the prospect that we ourselves might not be responsible agents. But could we be wrong to feel this way? What is this dignity that is so special? And why should we care about it?”

„If so, then those who have written books and articles denying the reality of free will are in an even more embarrassing position: they are left advising (pretending to advise? seeming to advise?) the reader that advising is pointless.”

„Some suspect that if determinism is true, so is nihilism.”

„This theme first surfaced in Socrates’ “paradoxical”

„So long as the risk was taken in full knowledge of the consequences of the loss, the agent can hardly complain that the sanctions now imposed are unfairly applied to him.”

„The (entirely unconscious) organization of memory guarantees that only some approximately appropriate subset of relevant points will occur to one in the time available (Cherniak 1983).”

„Particular instances of conscious problem solving or decision making must include a somewhat arbitrary decision (conscious or not) to terminate deliberation about the main decision while knowing full well that there still are uncanvassed relevant considerations. “ “Any finite control system (such as a human brain) will always be prone to making mistakes or arriving at decisions that a more leisurely analysis would condemn; it is an inevitable feature of human character, even perfected to its limit.”

„The conscience that manifests itself only retrospectively in agonies of remorse, and never prospectively in overcoming some base urge, is a singularly unattractive trait of character, and one that any moral world could well do without. The sort of remorse that (on the other hand) is a manifestation of some significant, projectible, nonmomentary shift in priorities for decision is precisely the sort of attitude the institution of holding people responsible exists to achieve.”

„Instead of thinking ahead, planning and hoping and trying to anticipate the world, we spiral down into a regress of self-preoccupation that squanders our time, virtually guaranteeing that our self-image of futility and indecision will come true.”

„Having good reasons for wanting free will is not, of course, having good reasons for believing one has free will. It seems to be, however, that having good reasons for wanting free will is having good reasons for trying to get oneself to believe one has it.”

„If the agnostic instead sinks into doubt, or worse, into the conviction that he lacks free will, he is certain to be right: his attitude toward his own opportunities for choice and action will be such that he is essentially disabled as a chooser. He ceases to act under the idea of freedom. We seem constitutionally unable to maintain that conviction for more than a few bad moments; hunger or boredom or curiosity soon sets in and lures us back into action—a bit of sphexishness for which we can be grateful, perhaps.”

„Still, what one hopes very much to be true may be true. And there is nothing better to do, given our irrepressible curiosity and skepticism, and our aspirations to rationality, than to conduct a patient examination of the issues to see if our hoped-for conclusion can be sustained. This I have attempted to do, and my conclusion is optimistic: free will is not an illusion, not even an irrepressible and life-enhancing illusion.”

„What we want when we want free will is the power to decide our courses of action, and to decide them wisely, in the light of our expectations and desires. We want to be in control of ourselves, and not under the control of others. We want to be agents, capable of initiating, and taking responsibility for, projects and deeds.”

„There are real threats to human freedom, but they are not metaphysical. There is political bondage, coercion, the manipulation inducible by the dissemination of misinformation, and the “forced move”

„One of my tactics has been to respond to traditional philosophical claims about what is unimaginable by urging: try harder. My own intuition pumps are designed to help. Yes, if we try hard, we can imagine a being that listens to the voice of reason and yet is not exempted from the causal milieu. Yes, we can imagine a being whose every decision is caused by the interaction of features of its current state and features of its environment over which it has no control—and yet which is itself in control, and not being controlled by that omnipresent and omnicausal environment. Yes, we can imagine a process of self-creation that starts with a non-responsible agent and builds, gradually, to an agent responsible for its own character. Yes, we can imagine a rational and deterministic being who is not deluded when it views its future as open and “up to”

„When we see how robust a naturalized vision of ourselves can be, we are less apt to be attracted to absolutist and perfectionist doctrines that defy assimilation into science, or its offspring, common sense. We see that a more realistic view of human rationality—one that takes our finitary predicament seriously—is actually more versatile and powerful than the preposterously idealized “theories”

„the rediscovery in 1417 of the ancient but astonishingly modern protoscientific poem, “On the Nature of Things”

„Science has proven to be a more commanding authority than scripture ever could be!”

„“There are certain kinds of truth which, even though they could be known, would nonetheless be unwisely offered for indiscriminate consideration.”

„Scientific and philosophical disputes behind closed doors are next to impossible these days, so we had better be very careful how we couch our claims. My second observation is that this openness today is actually a blessing, not a curse, no matter how inconvenient it can be at times.”

„how can one honestly—and credibly—mount a campaign to demonstrate that free will is real when “everybody knows”

„don’t just gratefully accept their conclusion because it doesn’t contain any obvious errors and appeals to you! But also never forget that it is possible that they are right.”

„God could not just foresee your every choice, but was also its ultimate author; nevertheless you still had a kind of freedom of choice, a kind worth wanting, a kind that made sense of your striving.”

„Perhaps without recognizing it, John Horgan, Steven Pinker, Daniel Wegner, Marvin Minsky (and Paul Davies, Jerry Coyne, Paul Bloom, Chris Frith, and yes, Stephen Hawking and even Albert Einstein) actually do believe in a kind of free will that gets them through the day without lapsing into despair.12 Perhaps they are unwitting compatibilists after all, and just don’t accept that what they believe in has just as much warrant to be called free will as the variety they dismiss as illusory. Some others do not belong in this camp, since they, like Luther, claim to have disproven the very idea that anybody deserves praise or blame for their deeds: Wolf Singer, Sam Harris, and Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, for instance, but on closer examination, they too turn out to have nuanced views.”

„When the “control”

„This folklore is part of the defense we pass on to our children, so that they will become adept at guarding against it. We don’t want our children to become puppets! If neuroscientists are saying that it is no use—we are all already puppets, controlled by the environment, they are making a big, and potentially harmful, mistake.”

„Is the world then just one all- encompassing magician, psychologically forcing all our decisions? That is what the illusionist scientists seem to be saying, but it’s nonsense. It takes real skill to execute psychological forces, and clumsy attempts are easily identified and disarmed. When you pick a card from a magician’s deck you ought to know about the prospects that your choice is being forced, but when you pick a seashell off the beach, you don’t (except in bizarre but imaginable scenarios) have to worry about whether an agent is manipulating you. Of course there must be something about the shell you pick up that causes you to pick that one rather than another one, but so what? Either there is a reason (you are looking for bluish shells that look just like that, or it is particularly beautiful, or it would make an excellent ashtray for your cigar) or there is no reason at all, and you’ve allowed a “random”

„in principle”

„If Luther said that God controlled your will, there was simply no way of investigating the claim empirically, a fact that protected Luther’s claim from falsification but also made it easy for his followers to grant him his conclusion and then go right on believing that in fact they controlled their own will. Who could tell? In sharp contrast, if our neurosurgeon tells you she controls your will, you can easily enough refute her claim decisively—if you are not overwhelmed by the authority of her white lab coat and fancy apparatus—and, of course, if she did prove to be right, you’d better hope some friends of yours can remove you from her clutches. But until that imaginable, logically possible but extraordinarily unlikely state of neurotechnology is achieved, you can be quite sure that your free will is not an illusion at all.”

„cognitive state”

„This problem of the value of pity and of the morality of pity … seems at first sight to be merely something detached, an isolated question mark; but whoever sticks with it and learns how to ask questions here will experience what I experienced—a tremendous new prospect opens up for him, a new possibility comes over him … we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must just be called in question.”

„we speak of “the”

„“The standard antidote recommended for abuse of the Mother Nature vision is to remind oneself constantly that evolutionary processes operate with no foresight and no goals.”

„we have the image of the physical human being as no more salient, really, than domino number 743 in a chain of a million dominoes. If we are mere conduits of causation, it seems, we cannot also be agents.”

„The idea that the opportunities we see for ourselves might be only apparent, might not be real (if determinism is true) is not only metaphysically ill-founded; it is politically retrograde and morally dubious in a way we should acknowledge. If there were no real opportunities, then there might be no real, important difference between the person who is agonizing over whether to accept admission at Harvard, Stanford, or Swarthmore, and the person who is not agonizing over whether or not to go to work today in the factory”