During a recent group discussion, Stephanie West Allen described some of the work of Jeffrey Schwartz, a neuroscientist, and complimented him for what she called his “non-materialist” approach to neuroscience — the view that “the mind is not (just) the brain.” Jeff receives a lot of criticism for this view in the scientific community, Stephanie explained, because materialism is the dominant view in the neuroscience community. This is unfortunate, she added, because materialism excludes the possibility of free will.
I actually don’t remember the next several minutes of discussion because I was too busy digging back through 13 years of memory to the college philosophy course in which we spent weeks studying questions of free will. After a bit of web research, I decided to sketch out the rough explanation below of what materialism has to do with free will. What follows is oversimplified, probably in ways that matter. But one has to start somewhere.
Materialism and the Mind
Stephanie described materialism, in the context of neuroscience, as the view that the mind and the brain (or perhaps the mind and the nervous system) are the same thing. That may be overstating the point, though not by much. So let’s start by reducing that to:
P: The mind does not exist apart from the nervous system.
That allows for the possibility that there are aspects of the nervous system that don’t count as “mind” (though the more I learn about my own mind, the more I doubt that there is much of the nervous system it doesn’t relate to.)
Why would one believe P? Well, one might believe P if one also believes:
Every real, concrete[4] phenomenon[5] in the universe is physical.
[4] By ‘concrete’ I simply mean ‘not abstract’. It is natural to think that any really existing thing is ipso facto concrete, non-abstract, in which case ‘concrete’ is redundant. But some philosophers like to say that numbers (for example) are real things—objects that really exist, but are abstract.
[5] I use ‘phenomenon’as a completely general word for any sort of existent that carries no implication as to ontological category (the trouble with the perfectly general word ‘entity’ is that it is now standardly understood to refer specifically to things or substances); and suppress its meaning of appearance.
Note that someone who agrees that physical phenomena are all there are but finds no logical incoherence in the idea that physical things could be put together in such a way as to give rise to non-physical things can define materialism as the view that every real, concrete phenomenon that there is or could be in the universe is physical.
Strawson, G. Real Materialism, in Chomsky and his Critics, ed. L. Antony & N. Hornstein (Blackwell 2003) pp 49-88; available at http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/gjs/rmchomsky.htm (last viewed June 7, 2009).
But that only entails P if one also assumes that the nervous system contains all the physical “stuff” that we experience as the mind. That may or may not be true, but for now let’s just observe that such an assumption would be a convenient one among neuroscientists, and would appear to be consistent with the external observations they make of neurological activity and reported experiences. As Galen Strawson, the author of the quote above, wrote in the same article:
A real (realistic) materialist cannot think that there is something still left to say about Experiential phenomena, once everything that there is to say about the physical brain has been said.
Id. Of course, the notion of being able to say everything that there is to say about the physical brain is hugely problematic, not least because our physics (and our neuroscience) does not have terms with which to characterize our experiences in the way that we experience them. The neuroscience of, say, sleep, does not have words with which to express the what-it’s-like-ness of sleep. As Strawson remarks later in the same article, “[C]urrent physics, considered as a general account of the general nature of the physical, is like Othello without Desdemona: it contains only predicates for non-Experiential being, so it cannot characterize Experiential being at all … . It cannot characterize a fundamental feature of reality at all.” Id. But Strawson does not think that the inability to describe the what-it’s-like-ness of experience from a scientific perspective necessarily means that consciousness is not a form of matter.
Materialism and Free Will
Free will is generally understood as a special capacity of humans to make reasoned choices from among alternative courses of action — that is, the ability to meaningfully choose one’s own actions. The idea of free will is not only an important element of one’s sense of self; it also underpins our ideas of moral responsibility. We would be loath to blame people for bad decisions if they did not have the capacity to choose differently.
What makes materialism apparently hostile to free will is the fact that everything in the physical world appears to behave according to causal relationships. Upon close examination, what will happen next appears to depend entirely on what is happening now. Because materialism holds that all real, concrete phenomena are physical, it does not admit of any other “stuff” that is not subject to causation by physical “stuff.” The general view that the state of affairs at time t determines what the state of affairs will be at time t+1 (where by “state of affairs” I mean all facts about the universe) is called determinism. Here is one account of determinism:
Determinism requires a world that (a) has a well-defined state or description, at any given time, and (b) laws of nature that are true at all places and times. If we have all these, then if (a) and (b) together logically entail the state of the world at all other times (or, at least, all times later than that given in (b)), the world is deterministic. Logical entailment, in a sense broad enough to encompass mathematical consequence, is the modality behind the determination in “determinism.”
Hoefer, C. Causal Determinism, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008)
There appears to be some question among scientists whether determinism breaks down at certain margins — see the article just cited for a discussion of some of those. Do those breakdowns in theories that otherwise appear to be deterministic make a difference when it comes to arguments about free will? A few people seem to think so (like this fellow). I haven’t surveyed what’s been written on that point. However, it is worth noting that a universe where our choices depend upon chance may be as unfriendly to free will as a universe in which our choices are illusory, at least depending on how that chance is introduced.
Given determinism, the main argument against free will unfolds something like this (with a lots of nuance omitted): If every physical thing is subject to causation and the mind is a physical thing, then my mind — including both its inner workings and its outward expressions — is just as subject to the laws of causation as the chair I am sitting on. But if my mind and the choices it makes are caused (entirely) by other things, then I do not have any meaningful capacity to choose my actions, because when presented with different possible actions now, I will make a choice determined entirely by events that have already happened.
Another more nuanced way of expressing this kind of argument can be found here.
A plethora of arguments try to address various features of this problem. They fall into two main categories:
Compatibilism: Free will and determinism are compatible in meaningful ways (and, in fact, some kind of determinism is necessary to free will). See also.
Incompatibilism: Free will and determinism are not compatible. One major subcategory of arguments, “free will pessimist” arguments, contend that determinism rules out the existence of free will. Another, “libertarian” arguments, contend that free will exists, so determinism is false. See also.
If you made it this far, you might enjoy exploring some of those links.
What believing the universe is (just) matter has to do with free will