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[RyanS]

Hello once again:

The question I asked nearly three months ago was a question that was a one-off debate over the course of 15 minutes with someone over the phone. However, I just now got the opportunity to bring up that debate again with him in person, and his stance evolved. The idea is, from what I am aware, is fairly common, and is the typical answer that one drums up upon considering how one would argue against free will. Dr. Sam Harris wrote a book on it, and the CosmicSkeptic made a video restating the point. The idea is roughly so:

We either act from desire or coercion. If we are operating from coercion, then clearly we do not have free will in that decision by nature of the label we are attaching to the category. Any desire from which we can act, however, is simply thrust upon us (coming from causal factors that brings us back to the affirmative hard deterministic argument). This assertion is evidenced by our inability to manipulate our desires in any way, to increase or decrease their grip over ourselves, and that we cannot turn them on or off by our own volition. If it were the case that we do something else contrary to that desire, it then must be the case (and, indeed, always will be the case) that another desire has been thrust upon us that would lead to such an outcome. That second desire, too, cannot be changed, only replaced by another desire of greater intensity. Of course, it is clear that we cannot act out on a weaker desire, otherwise its resultant effect would be a stronger desire. For a shared example, CS Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity (Chapter 2 of Book 1, and I believe he references it further on, but I am not sure) that if one were to hear a man crying for help, we would have a desire for both self-preservation and a desire to help the man, the latter being far weaker than the other. However, the "third thing", as he put it, is a desire to follow the latter desire, even if it is the weaker one. Now, it cannot be the case that we made that choice, since it is simply the case that the "moral law" (and this argument purported by others lays no claim to discounting the idea of objective morality, but it seems better to call it by what it is than keep it as the "third thing") was a greater desire than the desire to stay away from danger; the desire to be moral was greater than to preserve oneself. One can see the opposite clearly in acts of unlawfulness, wherein the desire to be moral is lesser than to indulge in such an act, and so it is that the person goes forth with his/her greater desire of committing him/herself to immorality. Free will then, the idea that we pick our desires and manipulate them at our leisure, seems to fall apart.

I would like to know your thoughts on that argument. Or, if I misrepresented it, the actual argument that Dr. Sam Harris put forth in his work. I thank you very much for your assistance.

-Ryan

[jimwalton]

Great to hear from you again.

I think the argument falls apart with the second assertion that we cannot turn our desires on and off by our own volition. To me this is clearly not the case. Any dieter will tell you that it's a constant battle, and we do turn off primal desires to eat by our conscientious desire to lose weight. This is also the case in many instances, where I may desire to say something sarcastic to a person but my desire to act like a Christian overrules it.

But you have mentioned in the argument as well. Some key words show the weakness:

"...it is clear we cannot act out of the weaker desire." And yet I can. I've broken my diet many times. In which case these skeptics would say, "Then indulging was the stronger desire," but this doesn't follow logic. They say if I override it with the stronger desire, I prove the point, but if I indulge the weaker desire and make it the stronger desire, then I prove the point. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. In this way they purport to claim victory in every situation, even contradictory ones, and this cannot be the case.

Somewhere along the road they are both missing and denying the key component, that there is a will in me that makes the decision between competing desires. They claim, "Now, it cannot be the case that we made that choice..." but why cannot that be the case? Again, they try to skew the game by closing off all goalposts before the opening whistle is blown.

I think the "other side" makes the mistake of attributing all thoughts to biology, which is ultimately absurd. Richard Swinburne writes,

“I do not believe that in any of its forms this reduction works. The difficulty is just what are these states or events which are supposed to replace agents and what they mean to do by their actions. If these states or events are to function in scientific explanation, they must be occurrent states or events. From the 17th c. to the 20th c. many writers supposed that they were mental acts of willing, to which they gave the name ‘volitions’. On this view, actions are movements caused by volitions; my moving my hand is a volition to move my hand causing a subsequent motion of my hand. One difficulty of this view is that volitions, being themselves actions, ought to be analyzable in a similar way. But if each volition involves another one, we would have an infinite series of volitions involved in every action—which is absurd. ... Here’s where it truly fails: The basic idea of all the theories is that an agent’s bringing about an effect intentionally, i.e., meaning to do so, is indubitably to be analyzed as the causing of that effect by some state of the agent or some event involving him. But all such analyses fail because an intention (or wish or desire) of P (a personal agent) to bring about an effect E, if it is some occurrent state or event, could bring about E without P’s having intentionally brought about E. Causation by an intention does not guarantee intentional action.”

I think these scholars, like Harris, are claiming science tells them far more than it does, but that's what their arguments are based in. At what point do waves become sound? At what point does sound become music? At what point does music become art? At what point does art become beauty? At what point does data become sequences? Sequences become information? Information becomes useful, and then becomes science? At what point do letters become language? Language is interpretable and becomes meaningful? At what point does meaningful language become literature? There is more here than biology, even complex biology, can define and describe.

At what point do chemicals reactions turn into consciousness? At what point does consciousness yield thinking? At what point does thinking yield reasoning? At what point does reasoning yield free will? We reach the point where self-awareness necessarily includes self-direction, which necessarily means free will. The Bible is clear that our desires do not rule us.

The problem in their argument is that science doesn't back it up. They are extrapolating conclusions (I am a slave to my desires) based on unscientific assumptions (desires cannot be changed). Let's start off with their assumption: "We either act from desire or coercion." That is not a scientific statement, but a philosophical one. It is not based in science, nor is it provable by science. It's a presuppositional ground (sand) on which they build their argument, but there's nothing solid, scientific, or provable about it. When it comes right down to it, it has no more merit than arguments about free will.

If all desires are merely uncontrollable stronger or weaker brain states, then we are claiming that we can define the world fully by speaking only in physical properties, which we all know (art, science, music, literature, beauty, language, meaning) is false.

[RyanS]

As always, thank you very much for the answer (especially on the Sabbath day!). Further, as always, I need a little more help to understand fully what is going on.

Regarding the Swinburne quote, I am confused on how he is attributing "action" to "volition", as a "volition" does not appear to me to be an action. Also, everything after "Here's where it truly fails" seems to me to be a "all x is y, but not all y is x" type of idea. While not all E requires a volition from P, if P gives volition, then E should result. In fact, that section almost strikes me as him moving from a defense of free will to an attack against it. However, I could be misunderstanding what he said, so please help me to understand if that is the case.

Speaking about misunderstanding, I missed the analogy you used in asking when a becomes b. I understand that a would be the desire, but I cannot tell what the b would be. Or, I misunderstood completely what it is you intended to say with those questions.

Finally, I did notice in the argument that it really does just boil down to assertion. My pastor (a brilliant apologist, as well) explained to me that, if hard determinism were true, the skeptic bears the burden of validating that assertion with what set off the domino chain that they say everything is physically subject to. In this case, it would be the person who asserts that we do not have free will to validate that idea by explaining where those desires come from, which would only be answered by the same ideas that you have already explained as rubbish in the other thread. It is difficult to explain, though, that the argument is simply philosophical assertion. It is no different to say that one's desires are inflicted than it would be to say that one can choose them, since both are assertions being made without evidence. However, that point tends to not register in conversation. How, then, can you posit the opposite with any evidence: that volition is not simply inflicted onto us without our input, but is malleable by a separate entity that one calls free will? It reminds me, to return to Mere Christianity, of Lewis's explanation that the Moral Law is what decides between instincts, but is itself not an instinct. Free will, analogously, would be what brings about volitions, but is not a volition itself. Is that accurate? If so, how would it be defended? Or, better yet, how would you make the case for free will in view of the aforementioned argument against it?

[jimwalton]

> Regarding the Swinburne quote...

I chopped up the quote to save space and time, and possibly in doing so I did an injustice to his line of thought. Since you asked for clarification, here is the "full" quote (at least, the amount of quote I've put in my notes). Possibly it will be more beneficial for you to see the "whole" thing.

“I do not believe that in any of its forms this reduction works. The difficulty is just what are these states or events which are supposed to replace agents and what they mean to do by their actions. If these states or events are to function in scientific explanation, they must be occurrent states or events. From the 17th c. to the 20th c. many writers supposed that they were mental acts of willing, to which they gave the name ‘volitions’. On this view, actions are movements caused by volitions; my moving my hand is a volition to move my hand causing a subsequent motion of my hand. One difficulty of this view is that volitions, being themselves actions, ought to be analyzable in a similar way. But if each volition involves another one, we would have an infinite series of volitions involved in every action—which is absurd.”
An alternative is to suppose that the causal factors involved our conscious mental events are but happenings rather than actions. On this view an action is a movement caused by an occurrent want or desire. My moving my hand is an occurrent want to move my hand causing the movement of my hand. … a crucial difficulty however, for both volitional theory and occurrent mental pause theory is that they vastly over populate our mental life. People perform vast numbers of intentional actions all the time without there being all these conscious ‘findings-attractive’ going on. Within a few seconds I tip my chair, move my head, type some lines, and correct my mistakes. These just are not all these ‘findings-attractive’ going on. The crucial causal factors are clearly not conscious occurrent mental events, whether actions or mere happenings.
Others assume that the crucial causal factors are brain states—a series of neural states. … Human actions are just a series of neural events terminating in bodily movements.
… Now even if intentions are always brain-states—it is coherent to suppose that they are not—it is coherent to suppose that a man may have some intention without as a result of his brain’s being in a certain specific state. It is not a logical consequence of a man’s having an intention to have a drink that his brain is in a certain specific state (although these things may always go together). Nor is it a logical consequence of agent P (a person) bring about an effect E, meaning so to do, that a certain specific series of neural states caused E. So the identity between intentions and brain-states, intentional actions and series of neural states is at most a logically contingent one. … Even if intentions are brain states, an explanation in terms of an intention is not analyzable in terms of an explanation by brain-states.
Pg. 40: Here’s where it truly fails: The basic idea of all the theories is that an agent’s bringing about an effect intentionally, i.e., meaning to do so, is indubitably to be analyzed as the causing of that effect by some state of the agent or some event involving him. But all such analyses fail because an intention (or wish or desire) of P (a personal agent) to bring about an effect E, if it is some occurrent state or event, could bring about E without P’s having intentionally brought about E. Causation by an intention does not guarantee intentional action.
Pp. 44-46: There can be two explanations of phenomena.
Pg. 47: There may be scientific/biological/chemical explanations, and there might be other explanations on top of that: personal/intentional/spiritual.

You just might be interested in this whole book. I found it not only fascinating, but so helpful. The Existence of God by Richard Swinburne. It's grossly overpriced at Amazon. I wonder if it's out of print. Hmm.

> I missed the analogy you used in asking when a becomes b.

My point was simply that physical properties are inadequate to explain all realities and experiences. Our desires are part of identity, conscience, values, fear, primal drives, peer pressure, and probably a dozen more things. To reduce them to physical properties has no scientific basis, nor does it conform to logic. Physical processes simply do not lead us to meaning, judgments, values, non-survival-oriented desires, or even reason.

Have you seen "The Matrix"? A question was asked there that I think has merit: "Is reality just electrical signals interpreted by your brain? If reality is more than that, then the truth is not dependent just on physical processes." I think the core of skepticism is that we are warranted in doubting all knowledge, and yet Descartes argued against that by positing that the identity of self (I think, therefore I am) gave a ground of knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt.

> It is no different to say that one's desires are inflicted than it would be to say that one can choose them, since both are assertions being made without evidence. However, that point tends to not register in conversation.

Let me try this to see if this analogy works or helps. This comes from William Rowe and pertains to the problem of evil. (I'm using this as an analogy for our discussion.)

The theist’s best argument against the claim that “there exist instances of suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse” is an indirect procedure, as shown by G.E. Moore.

David Hume, for one, argued (quite successfully) that if the skeptic’s premise is correct, we cannot know of the existence of any material object. Moore responded, If the skeptic’s premise is incorrect, we can possibly know the existence of material objects. Moore noted that his argument is just as valid as Hume’s. The only way to choose between the two, claimed Moore, is by deciding which of the first premises it is more rational to believe.

In this case of the existence of evil, we are giving an argument: p, q, therefore not-p.

1. p
q
____
r

2. not-r
q
____
not-p

It is a truth of logic that if I is valid II must be valid as well.

Originally, p was “There are instances of suffering God could have prevented.” Q was “God would prevent the occurrence of any suffering he could.” R was “Therefore God does not exist.”

So not-r would be “There exists an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.” Q is the same. Therefore, not-p proves that it is not the case that there exist instances of intense suffering that an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

We now have 2 arguments. The theist’s argument is just as valid as the atheist’s.