We've talked first about free will, and then about rules as a perceived impediment to free will. Now we need to take a look at the new cognitive science as it pertains to free will as usually conceived: the ability to make unconstrained choices.
What does science, specifically, cognitive psychology, but also anthropology, neuroscience, and even experimental philosophy, have to do with that ability to make unconstrained choices?
At first blush science seems to pose a challenge to free will in the ordinary sense, since it has shown we are profoundly but subtly influenced on an ongoing basis by our surroundings. The source of that influence is said to be evolutionary, that is, our minds are programmed to respond interactively to our environments so that we might process oncoming floods of data rapidly enough to make judgments that enhance our survival. One example of a scientist working in that vein is Daniel Kahneman, who, in his 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, breaks down how it works.
Kahneman designates fast and intuitive mental responses as "System 1," while calling slow and deliberative mental processing "System 2." System 1 includes both automatic responses and overlearned responses. For example, an illusion in which one line looks longer than another depending on the angle at which fin-like lines are attached (the Müller-Lyer illusion) is an example of a relatively automatic response, while the seemingly instantaneous decisions of an emergency room physician or a chess master are examples of the effect of expert learning. Kahneman makes the point that expert decisions are rapid because they are based on overlearning and practice, even though we may call them "intuitive" decisions.
Many of our rapid-fire habitual responses started out as slow. Take reading. Think back to what reading was like at age five or six. If that's difficult to remember, picture a child learning to read. Now that we have practiced and honed the skill of literacy over the years, just think what our brains and minds do for us in the area of reading! Perhaps you've seen those examples of how easily we can read despite multiple errors and omissions. For another example, think of learning to drive, juxtaposed against your current level of skill. Through discipline and practice, what began as System 2 is now largely in the realm of System 1. Reading and driving are two examples of areas in which, once beginners but now experts, we make rapid-fire, "intuitive" responses.
While Systems 1 and 2 have no objective existence, they are useful descriptive devices. Here is some of what Kahneman has to say about them:
When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book (Thinking, Fast and Slow). I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of system 2....
...We are born prepared to perceive the world around us, recognize objects, orient attention, avoid losses, and fear spiders. Other mental activities have become fast and automatic through prolonged practice....
Our actions run the gamut from completely involuntary to those subject to apparent voluntary control; System 2 behaviors are characterized by their need for our attention and are disrupted without it. As for attention, we have a limited amount of it and have to allocate it. When we're spending it somewhere we do not have it for somewhere else; to demonstrate that phenomenon Kahneman uses this apt example.
Next, we need to look at Kahneman's discussion of priming, to show how it's a problem for what we consider to be free will. An example of priming that we are all familiar with is the notion of going to the grocery store when hungry, then purchasing more and other than we intended.
But priming goes much further than that. It affects word association. For example, if you see the word SO_P when hungry, you will read it as "soup," but if you see the same word when feeling dirty, you'll read it as "soap." Subsequently, those primed words will retain a weaker ability to prime still other words, in a ripple effect.
The impact of priming goes further yet. For example, subjects who saw words associated with being elderly, such as "gray" or "wrinkle," literally walked more slowly after the ostensible end of an experiment than did people who had seen only words neutral as to age. All of that happened outside of conscious awareness, that is, outside of their attention.
Similarly, if you hold a pencil in your mouth with the eraser pointing right and the point left, you will have different emotional responses to stimuli than if you hold the pencil in your mouth by pursing your lips around the eraser end. The first way of holding the pencil forces your face into the shape of a smile, and the second way, into a frown; simply holding our faces in one of those alternate ways primes our emotional responses.
Those are only a few examples, but the impact of priming is pervasive.
You cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware....
There is research showing how priming by money affects us: it makes us more independent and persistent. It makes us more self-reliant. It also makes us more selfish. It makes us less oriented to helping others. In experiments designed to test the impact of priming by money, primed subjects spontaneously sat further apart. When the experimenter contrived to clumsily drop a bunch of pencils, money-primed subjects were less likely to help pick them up. And so forth.
And what constitutes being primed by money? Priming could consist of putting money-related words in order, as opposed to the control group's money-neutral words. Priming could consist of seeing toy monopoly money on a nearby table, or it could be a randomly glimpsed screen saver of dollar bills floating in water. Or simply hearing the word "money."
We could extrapolate from the results that in our society, based as it is on self-interest (that is, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), we are very often money-primed. Kahneman asks the reader to consider the cumulative impact of a society imbued with reminders of money, in contradistinction to that of a society imbued, for example, with reminders of the "Dear Leader," or of respect, or of God.
Kahneman says people react with disbelief when told the results of studies of priming. Our sense of awareness gives us the impression that we are in charge. He says it is not the case that we are completely at the mercy of primes that happen to be in our environment at any one time. On the other hand, for example, if only some people vote differently on a school-related issue because the polling place just happens to be a school rather than a church (or vice versa), it could tip an election. In Kahneman's words:
The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusion of these studies are true. More important, you must accept that they are true about you. If you had been exposed to a screen saver of floating dollar bills, you too would likely have picked up fewer pencils to help a clumsy stranger. You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience. But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.
In a similar vein, this June 21, 2013 PBS Newshour story reported on psychological research that showed wealthy people reacting less generously than poorer individuals. Moreover, people who merely felt richer, after being set up to win at Monopoly, reacted similarly to the rich. Notably, the experimental effects were mitigated when subjects who were rich or felt rich were then re-primed by being shown pictures of people in need.
The news story also told about how, when the research report appeared in a scientific journal, readers reacted with disbelief. Many accused the experimenters of "liberal bias" since they were based at the University of California, Berkeley.
Moving on from priming, Kahneman proceeds to explain that, in their beliefs, people confuse familiarity with truth. People are biased toward their own current beliefs, in that they select evidence that will confirm those beliefs over evidence providing the opportunity to explore and learn. People will believe a story that fits together coherently over one that is complete, and the less they know, the easier they find it to fit what they do know into a story. And we routinely confuse plausibility, a characteristic of a good story, with probability, that is, actual likelihood.
And there is much, much more in Kahneman's book showing how events and predispositions rather than rational choice affect what we do.
Another psychological researcher, Michael Grazziano, concludes that even consciousness itself is not some God-given domain from which determinism is excluded and in which free will in our traditional sense reigns (consciousness being the foundation from which Descartes famously proclaimed "I think, therefore I am"). According to Grazziano's interview recounted in the June, 2013 issue of Monitor on Psychology, and in his Huffington Post blog, and apparently in his books, too (which I have yet to read), consciousness is a matter of attention. In his view, awareness reduces to a sort of evolutionary bookmarking system.
These scientists whom I've mentioned are only a few examples of so many--for example, Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis, 2006, and The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, 2012) and Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002, and The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011).
Just what the findings of cognitive psychology, as well as other scientific findings of the day, say about the ultimate nature of reality is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. For instance, I've struggled with philosopher Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. He protests against present-day scientific orthodoxy to the extent it claims all of reality can be understood in mechanistic physical terms. Not all scientists make such claims, though, and, anyway, Nagel argues that scientific findings don't depend upon the correctness of such claims.
I agree that the validity and the impact of the scientific findings are not affected by whether or not the scientists are making so-called reductionist claims (that is, reducing all of human experience to materialistic, evolutionary terms). As my quote from Daniel Kahneman indicates, the findings are true about us, even if we don't "believe in them" or "agree with them." Unless we want to be like those people who "don't believe in evolution" or the like, we must consider those results.
The aim of my section on science has been to give the uninitiated a taste of the new findings and to show why they present a problem for free will. As I think is clear, if what we call "consciousness" is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves that strings together what we have paid attention to, while in the meantime most of our functioning proceeds full-steam ahead without even breaking into awareness, then the realm of free will as we traditionally conceive of it is greatly shrunken.
In fact, we could say science plays havoc with our notion of free will.
It remains to be explored how we might adjust our vision of what free will is, in light of the findings of science, and how rules might figure into that picture. That's the task of the next (and final) section.
(The reader may click here to view Parts I - IV in one continuous post, or here to go to Part IV.)
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