Chapter Two: Free Will
© David Weissman, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0197.02
Are we the vehicles of energies and trajectories past, or agents who redirect the causal tide for reasons of our own? Hard determinists suppose that efficacy expresses nature’s original stock of motion and energy, nothing added. Volition’s power to divert the tide is an illusion, if this is so. Autonomy is a conceit: humans, no less than windstorms, are ephemeral moments in causal histories established long ago. What part of this is true?
1. Introduction
Vision has eyes, sound has ears; will seems disembodied. Referring volition to mind was once a way of grounding it, though nowadays, when consciousness is suspect, that ascription is inconclusive. We redeem it by construing will as an expression of hierarchically organized brains. Dewey’s description of the reflex arc, in 1896, is our point of reference: will is inhibition or release in agents poised to satisfy interests or desires.1
Thinkers who contest free will embed us in causal chains that invoke the universal determinism of Laplace’s demon. They agree that we seem to choose among alternatives, but, they say, the experience of choice is illusory: everything happening today was predictable from the beginning of time, given original conditions and the laws of nature. This is contestable: Jack and Jill were mutually unknown until friendship and marriage superseded their indifference. Marriage inhibited choices that each was accustomed to making, though it promoted some that neither had considered before. Their relationship was emergent; duties created by its reciprocities blocked those parts of causal history enabled by their separate lives. Was their bond predictable? There was no sign of it in their separate causal histories; marriage was unforeseen until they discovered one another. Yet eclipses of the sun are fully determined; why assume that this coupling was not? Because its inception was a blind date arranged by a randomized lottery. Compatibility evolved by fits and starts when each partner adapted to the other’s hopes and expectations. Marriage was an intrusion that redirected causal histories for reasons current and situational, not historic. Responses to novel or surprising situations often redirect the causal tide from within it.
2. Background
Autonomy is self-regulation. Much that we do is habitual, though many actions—rising for work, walking faster to get there—are willed. Choice is a hallmark of autonomy, so it matters that will’s freedom is challenged. Are we free when responding voluntarily to circumstances? Or is will never free because our mechanical nature makes us subordinate to a history of sufficient causes?
There is, so far, no explanation for the emergence of mind’s conscious qualities and actions—color, pain, thought, and choice—but life, too, was once a mystery; perhaps inquiry will also expose the exhaustively material conditions for conscious phenomena. Other aspects of our materiality are already understood. Like machines, we’re programmed by society or DNA. Autonomy enables us to satisfy rules at a pace of our own; it doesn’t establish that we do anything freely. The law-governed processes moving through us started eons ago; hard determinists say that we carry their messages while unable to initiate our own. The more we understand, the less free we seem to be.
An opposed tradition supposes that will, like all mental activity, falls to Descartes’ remark that nothing is better known to mind than mind itself.2 Mental structure and activity are, he thought, comprehensively inspectable, no part hidden or obscure. Philosophy canonized this perspective; self-knowledge required finding oneself in the mind’s eye. Or so it seemed. Skepticism about self-awareness and self–control is unrelenting when both are regarded as evolutionary afterthoughts. Freedom, virtue, and responsibility are conceits if all we do is fixed by our bodies and causal histories. Imagine a future conversation between householders and their robots: “This isn’t a dispute between humans and machines but, rather, plain speaking from one machine to another. You do a few things well; but, for the most part, not so well as us.” Which side is speaking? Do we think better of ourselves if neither side comes away fearing that the other has won the argument?
Our knowledge of will and autonomy is grounded in conscious reflection, because this is our first source of information about everything. Yet volition is problematic; is it directly perceived or merely inferred from action and its effects? We lack Descartes’ conviction: there may be no mental activity that is accurately and exhaustively known to introspection. Consciousness is the filter through which mental activities are discerned, not the theater in which they are directly perceived. Nor do we safely infer that their character when conscious accurately represents them when preconscious: there may be little or no isomorphism between the two. Integrating our points of access—inspection and inference—will be problematic, until we have a detailed account of the neural conditions for conscious experience.
I understand autonomy on analogy to a horse and rider moving at speed across a plain. The horse—our bodies—does most of the work; mind adds purpose and direction. The rider whispers in the horse’s ear; he doesn’t know why this works, but often it does. Like the rider, we credit ourselves with voluntary self-control; we deliberate before acting, then choose the option that seems best suited to our interests and circumstances. Human will is an internal power for affecting nerves and muscles when provoked by desire or deliberation. Will is explained by the altered levels of dopamine that affect brain sites where neural or muscular activity is initiated or suppressed.3 Animals display purpose when moving as appetite or safety requires; their self-control is variable to a degree, though largely instinctual. Will in them may be an elaboration of tropisms familiar in plants responding to light or water. People lacking will would resemble anemones in ocean currents, though we humans, more like sharks, are always moving or ready to move: memory and imagination are active when muscles are loose.
Skeptics concede that we seem to have free will, and that moral and intellectual autonomy require it. But there are two kinds of autonomy: one is inflexible, the other adaptive. Light bulbs have the first: being mechanically self-sufficient, each works—given energy—because of its design. Living things are autonomous in the other way: we anticipate and adjust our behavior to altered circumstances. This difference would once have seemed rigid; it isn’t anymore. Mechanical control mimics human self-control when feedback is self-correcting (self-driving cars that learn to observe lane markings; machines that improve their skill at chess or Go by surveying games they’ve played and lost). Feedback is deterministic if free will has no opportunity to interrupt a causal loop. Hence the reduced stature implied when hard determinism supposes that human self-control is only a version of the control embodied in sophisticated machines. Are we responsible for our judgments, intentions, and behavior; are we self-reproving? Could we resist a fad or oppose a mob? The rhetoric of self-regulation implies this authority. Do we have it?
Our margin of freedom is uncertain because of two ambiguities. One obscures the difference between freedom to and freedom from, the power to act or will in pursuit of one’s aims versus exemption from control. The other is universal determinism, the idea that no act or choice is free because each has sufficient causal conditions that stretch forever backwards. Is there no relief from history; was everything decided at nature’s inception?
3. Freedom To and Freedom From
Freedom from signifies that one isn’t controlled by forces or agents that include impulses, attitudes, other people, or things. Freedom to is the opportunity, power, and right to choose and pursue one’s aims. These phrases express the Enlightenment’s political nerve. Its aim was physical, intellectual, and moral autonomy; discover yourself by eliminating arbitrary controls on your actions and identity. Liberation required doing or believing as good judgment prescribes; reason would be its discipline. Yet this opposition—freedom or restraint—is misconstrued if we assume that freedom to will and act presupposes exemption from the materiality of one’s body and context. That idea implies Kantian spontaneity: choice or action initiated from a position outside space and time. The alternative is categorical: one is never free to do something when free from everything else. Here are six illustrations:
3i. “You’re free to choose,” we say, though choices or plans are limited by aims, values, needs, resources, or likely effects. Circumstances are confining: there is no way to do as one chooses irrespective of them.
3ii. “Having the skill and resources required, I’ll do it (bake a cake, fly the plane).” This is situated freedom, the autonomy that comes with having appropriate means when choosing to act. “You’re free to go if you like” is cruel when addressed to people having no way to go because disabled or imprisoned.
3iii. “You’re free to disappoint us (your family, friends, or partners).” This formula, intimating a neglected duty or broken law, invokes a limit one may be unwilling or unable to breach. Statutes (traffic laws) protect us or facilitate practices that would be chaotic without them. Duties locate us within core systems we’ve formed or inherited. Freedom to abandon those roles lapses at the point where families or friendships are sabotaged.
3iv. “You’ve considered all the reasons for and against acting. Now do one or the other.” Good reasons are causes or permissions; having a lawful desire and resources, one acts. This, too, is situated autonomy, though now the tipping point has shifted. Before, it was resources; do it if you have them. Now, when resources are assumed, preferences are established by deliberation. We’re not free to do what good sense tells us not to do, though passion sometimes overrides good sense with effects we approve.
3v. “Stop what you’re doing.” This implies an inhibiting power, will as circuit-breaker. We don’t always see the costs of our choices; better stop before they accumulate. This, too, is evidence that we are not free from circumstances, reasons, or likely effects.
3vi. “You’re free to blink or remember.” It may be alleged that these are actions of the only sorts unconstrained by anything but the power to do them, though here, too, an ability (a capacity justifying the use of can) is their material condition. Freedom from every condition—in the way of Sartre4 or Descartes in the early Meditations—would entail our inability to do anything.
Will’s freedom is situated, never exempt from material, prudential, moral, or legal constraints. Is it free within those limits, and, if so, to what degree?5
4. Ontology
Some determinists say that every effect has ancient causes, all lawfully determined to produce it. This is event causation; it works mechanically by transferring energy or averting its transfer. Agent causation (not considered here) is ascribed to human agency by writers who doubt that human intentions can be understood in the terms of mechanical relations.6 Event causation is the power and process responsible for the global drift of material change. Is human autonomy the temporary shield that delays our subjection to the causal tide, or is talk of freedom a conceit?
Hard determinism emphasizes that every event has causes sufficient to produce it, and that every process and event is constrained by natural laws. It demoralizes libertarians of every stripe. Though its conclusion is only dogmatic when no inventory of laws, lineages, processes, and current conditions supports its claim that every effect was incubated in nature’s original conditions. Where, for example, were the myriad emergent systems—living things, families, friendships, and cities—stabilized by the causal reciprocities of their parts? Determinists explain that these effects were predictable, given the natural laws controlling their generation. Yet contemporary philosophic opinion is distinguished by a difference that makes no difference. Humeans aver that causality is constant conjunction and that laws are regularities.7 Or laws are described as the higher-order sentences of axiomatized theories,8 though data confirming their validity—the regularities reported—are said to supply the whole meaning of their content. Nature is a grab bag of possibilities without essential internal constraints, if laws responsible for generating regularities reduce to the phenomena observed.
We require a different ontology, one sensitive to natural order and normativity, if what we say of causality is correct to nature while tolerant of autonomy and free will. Aristotle is a useful guide. He argued that natural normativity is secured by laws existing in rebus.9 Those are laws of motion, and (an idea foreign to Aristotle) rules of assembly implicit in the geometry and topology of spacetime. Laws of this kind are exhibited in the regularities of the periodic table and patterns for the assembly of natural kinds. Is universal determinism viable when modified to acknowledge that nature’s constraints are located within it? Here are some reasons for believing that we should distinguish two of its versions.
5. Universal Determinism
Determinism comes in two versions: hard and soft. The soft affirms that we humans live within the natural world as self-stabilizing modules. Having innate powers or those acquired by engaging other people or things—learning to walk and talk—we’ve become agents of change, causa sui, affecting other things and ourselves. Much that we are was caused by conditions we didn’t control; yet now we choose what to do, decline it, or stop doing it. Causa sui has theological sources, though it applies in our time to machines engineered to manage themselves. Discipline has that effect in us,10 but with this difference: having learned to read, we choose our books.
Soft determinism agrees that every event has causes sufficient to produce it. So, choice, too, is fully determined, with the qualification that principal causes decisive for volition are internal to the chooser. Every event satisfies natural laws (laws of motion and laws controlling the assembly of atoms, molecules, and neurons), though nature tolerates alternate choices without interposing a specific law for each. Or should we suppose that people entering a supermarket engage a tangle of laws—a different one for every product sold—until each shopper is entrapped by a law obliging him or her to buy the item it favors?
The efficient causation and holism of this formulation would offend Hume. He reduced reality to the force and vivacity of percepts before identifying causality with the constant contiguities of “impressions.”11 But why suppose that practical life is the artful manipulation of percepts when that makes no sense of productive activity: dentistry or dance, for example? Hume’s theory ignores this implication because he believed that esse est percipi expresses a truth that bars penetration into the ambient world. I assume that causality is energy exchange or inhibition, and that energy’s transmission is inferred, though we have no percepts of energy itself. The successes of practical life are a paradox, physics has a kinetic but no dynamic interest, if energy is only an “inference ticket.”12
Assume that causal efficacy—efficient causation—is congenial to soft determinism, then consider that hard determinism resists the autonomy enabled by this other version. Hard determinism avers that nothing can deviate from trajectories fixed at the beginning of time; every change is the current moment in a lineage having a lengthy past and perhaps an infinite future, however diverse or complex its origins. We believe that attitudes (values) and reasons fix choices calculated to satisfy interests or needs, that autonomous bodies and neural complexity enable the speed, flexibility, and efficiency of our responses. But this is naïve: personal development and idiosyncrasy are the effects of causes we didn’t and couldn’t control. Peter Van Inwagen put it simply:
If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born; and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore the consequences of these things (including our own acts) are not up to us.13
Notice how much of human agency is diminished if this remark is true. Everything thought, willed, felt, or done was caused long ago; all of it satisfies natural laws, and none of it is “up to us.”
Comprehensive determinism is unarguable if one agrees that nothing comes from nothing. For if something exists, if only oneself, then there must have been a cause or set of causes sufficient to create it, and so on to infinity for every previous state of affairs. Soft determinism concedes this point; it, too, locates us within comprehensive causal networks. Why prefer it to hard determinism? Because it identifies breaches and barriers in the causal tide, and because the softer version emphasizes autonomy’s role in the emergence of selfhood, hence the implication that each of us is the cause of his or her responses to other people and things. Hard determinism has no regard for habits and ideas formed in the interplay of memory, talent, and imagination. It ignores ingenuity: having to innovate in situations that are nowhere anticipated in one’s causal history. Some constraints are historical, but others—tight shoes—are current. Hard determinism wants to be comprehensive: sets of conditions, from history to the present, are sufficient to produce effects that are foreseeable in a lawful world. Soft determinists emphasize contingency, risk, and the asymmetry of explanation and prediction. Where agents are the critical variable, freedom is shorthand for their shifting priorities in circumstances that are, themselves, unstable. Hard determinism is lopsided: there is too much emphasis on history; no recognition of opportunities unanticipated by the causal stream, or those enabled when emergent properties or functions block old histories. Though situations are often baffling in some respect, so initiative and experiment are required before we can respond effectively to them.
6. Explanation/Prediction
What is explanation’s relation to prediction: are the causes specified by an explanation sufficient to predict all the properties of their effects? This collateral issue clarifies the difference between these two versions of determinism.
Both determinisms, hard and soft, agree that every effect is explained if we can cite causes sufficient to determine its existence and character, given natural laws. They disagree about prediction. Hard determinists suppose that everything was decided, hence predictable, at the beginning of time; our inability to make accurate prediction is the effect of having imperfect information about nature’s laws and original conditions. Having that information would enable us to predict, in principle, what an agent will do. Though these determinists identify only a few of the conditions for any event; most are buried or disguised in its history. Soft determinism is equally confounded by the density of historical antecedents, but it has the advantage of emphasizing the current choices and actions of existing agents. It can’t predict what they will do, because volition is often an event’s determining condition, and because the variability of an agent’s responses to evolving circumstances makes choice uncertain.
Here is an example favorable to hard determinists. Adopt construction rules for assembling triangles: attach the endpoints of three line-segments of any length to one another so that the three angles formed are equal to one hundred eighty degrees in a flat space. Suppose that this rule, with original conditions, is sufficient to explain the generation of every geometrical property or relation in the domain of flat-space triangles. Now generalize to spacetime, and ask this question: do geometry’s construction rules (construed as natural laws determining the assembly of phenomena in spacetime) decide the character of all reality, as general relativity implies? It would be true, if so, that motion and a geometrized spacetime (as originally configured) have determined the existence and character of everything existing since the beginning of time. Hard determinism would be vindicated. A geometrizing god would know all that is, has been, or will be. But consider: Neptune moves as the sun determines, but could the god have predicted Beethoven or Stravinsky? Would its failure be evidence that complexity obscured its view, or an effect of the style each composer developed when responding to the musical culture of his time? Why say that such things are unpredictable? Because altered circumstances may provoke an agent whose aim or understanding is disrupted: “Sorry. I thought you were the mailman.” These are reactions caused in the moment, not those prepared over eons of time.
Hard determinists suppose that having perfect information would enable them to make predictions that are certain to be correct. Why? Because inferences less rigorous would have conclusions that are only probable because contingent. But do we have evidence that antecedent conditions and construction rules—natural laws—were necessary and sufficient to determine the existence and character of all that is? No: many phenomena—some determined at the last moment, others better established—are unexplained. We’re puzzled by a sudden power failure, but also by transitions that created life and mind from carbon and proteins. Could it have happened that their organization or processes were altered by an event or condition independent of anything in their history, hence a situation—an electrical storm, heat, or pressure—to which life or mind was the unpredicted response?
Predictions’ failures can be reformulated as a question about laws, rather than causes: can we predict values for dependent variables signifying effects, if there are values for their conditions? That seems unproblematic because of correlations that facilitate prediction by linking causes to perceived effects: genes to red hair. Yet correlations are not the generative laws required to warrant inferences from effects to their determining causes. (Those are inferences available to an omniscient god; it knows what color hair will be by seeing how genes control metabolic processes.) We know very few such laws as things rise through the trajectory from molecules to cells, bodies, and beyond. Hard determinists aren’t deterred because their postulate is an ambitious philosophic idea. They gamble that science will confirm the symmetry of explanation and prediction by discovering conditions sufficient to determine the existence and character of all phenomena from the beginning of time: there will be reliable inferences from carefully specified effects to the lineage of their sufficient causes. Deliberation and choice are conceits if this proves true, though confirming evidence is scarce because complexity obscures the intermediate processes responsible for those effects.
7. Cause or Capacity
Hard determinism might claim an easy success with an argument no one known to me has proposed. Consider that the material possibility for every current property or state of affairs was anticipated in the capacities of nature’s original conditions: they could combine or transform in ways that would eventuate in life and mind. Incapacity at our origins would have entailed the non-existence in our time of properties and powers everywhere apparent. Does this entail that current states of affairs trace a straight and determined though obscure and complex trajectory from those original conditions?
That inference exploits an ambiguity in the relation of cause and capacity: namely, the mistaken idea that capacities are self-actuating energies that impel the changes perceived as causal. But that is a non sequitur. Knives have sharp edges enabling them to cut, dig, or spread paint. Capacities for all these effects are static until an agent supplies energy and motion while using the knife to do one or another. For capacities enable effects without themselves being their efficient causes. Specific changes in nature’s original conditions—probably capacitated for alternate evolutions—likely occurred when contingencies of assembly, pressure, or flow produced stirrings—causes—that eventuated as nature evolved. Hard determinism bets on the combination of causes and capacities, not on the idea that nature is the evolutionary effect of an original set of self-actuating capacities. The capacities anticipated various outcomes; causes explain the subset we have.
8. Leibniz or Laplace
No reference to ancient times is required if the whole resembles a jigsaw puzzle, every piece shaped to mesh directly with neighbors and mediately with the rest. Autonomy would be altogether suppressed were it true, as Leibniz claimed, that nature is pervaded by internal relations: everything calibrated to everything else.14 This could be construed in either of two ways. Things were, at one time, so packed together that all were marked in ways that abide since their separation as distinct causal lines. How many of nature’s features are marked in this way—all, many, or a few—if this is so? Or nature remains a dynamic whole: everything is perpetually affected, directly or mediately, by every other. This second alternative is a version of universal internal relations. It, too, allows of alternate readings. One closer to Leibniz would short-circuit the emphasis on origins, causes, and laws because time and converging causal streams would be incidental to the global—holistic—entanglement of a complex idea. God sees its simplicity, as we do not. The other would explain entanglement as the effect of global causal relations such that every thing is both cause and effect of every other, whether directly or indirectly. (We are affected indirectly by galaxies that expired before the formation of our galaxy.) Things considered discrete should be reconstrued, were this true, as phases or portions of the complex whole. So, things and their perceivers would be reconceived as complexes of mutually determining qualities: the hand as seen. Much would be unknown to people having a limited view of the whole, though situations yet to occur would resonate already in those current: the future, as much as the past or present, would be settled by universal reciprocal determination.
Is either of these ontologies—the colliding streams of hard determinism or a global system of internal relations—likely to be true? Credit both ideas with the assumption that nature experienced explosive inflation after beginning as a small, dense, and dynamic plenum where every point was affected directly or indirectly by every other. But they diverge: hard determinism supposes that nature evolved, differentiating itself into separate causal streams that cross or collide. Every current entity or state of affairs has, on this telling, a dense history of converging causal lineages: parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. It may be true that all humans share a single great-grandmother, yet we have different grandparents, and blood lines that separated eons ago. The Leibnizian story reads this history differently: we assume naively that the relation of a percept to its cause is unproblematically causal, though the Leibnizian account avers that causal and convergent are the wrong words for describing it. Attention and perspective falsely project separations, then things, causes, and causal streams into the weave of qualitative differences. These ideas play out in different ways when used to interpret simple examples: is it Laplacian or Leibnizian when Jack and Jill meet? Laplace would construe their meeting as the converging of mutually independent causal lines. Leibniz would have said that the lines were never independent: Jack and Jill needn’t discover one another (though mutual awareness dawns), because they are already linked.
Now consider what difference these views make in the context of disputes about free will. Imagine an able but distracted driver as he moves safely through traffic, until a moose bounds onto the road in front of him. Too late to brake, he swerves and misses it. Spinning the wheel required the volition commanded by nerves and muscles; its proximate condition was the flexible response acquired by years of driving. Was there also a longer causal history, perhaps one originating before the Punic Wars? Maybe, but why speculate unverifiably when nothing in history is relevant to the details of his situation? The sufficient cause was a current perception that disrupted the driver’s evolving gestalt. His response, a complex of will and action too fast for deliberation, was provoked by the disruption. His causal history prepared him for driving and even for responding to emergencies, but that experience wasn’t sufficient in itself to cause the saving swerve. Its cause is well-described as existential: the driver didn’t swerve because impelled by his history, he swerved to avoid the moose.
There are two other ways to interpret this situation, both inimical to free will. One is congenial to Leibniz; another favors hard determinism. The interpretation is Leibnizian when the relation of the driver’s percept to the moose is wrongly construed as causal. We mistakenly speak of a causal relationship—the moose percept caused by seeing the moose—when there is only the eternal but contingent coupling of a percept and its referent. Ideas cohere in God’s mind, though none is a free-standing thing, and no correlate is cause of another. God is the only substance; he thinks all his ideas at once, and he is their only cause. This persuasion is raffish but odd. Holism and entanglement seem entailed by the idea that the cosmos began as a superheated plasma before fracturing into myriad shards, each having a character somewhat independent of others. Yet every number in most telephone directories is independent of the rest: each could be changed without altering others. This degree of independence is characteristic throughout nature: causal lines often cross or join to create autonomous strands, but many strands never cross. God may know the essential coherence of the Leibnizian world, no detail falsely abstracted from the whole, but we do not.
Is hard determinism more compelling? It isn’t, because of a strangely Leibnizian impulse within it. Does the look of a bounding moose appear to the driver because he is linked to the moose within the holist weave? Does each confront the other at the moment when their entanglement has ripened, or because their independent causal lines have converged? There is urgency to the dialectic because the Leibnizian solution entails a tighter determinism: there is no margin for indeterminism if every qualification is perpetually determined by its place within a plenum where the existence and character of everything is a function of all the rest. For suppose that the moose runs in front of his car while the driver’s independent causal lineage generates the impression of a moth, not a moose. The causal streams don’t converge, with this effect: the driver discounts the perceptual evidence and doesn’t swerve. Does he hit the moose? He does not, because swerving is the contemporary effect of seeing the moose, a situation in which histories converge, not an effect immanent in either causal line.
Why is hard determinism a closet version of Leibnizian internal relations? Because hard determinism needs the Leibnizian thesis to avert having to concede that swerving has only this encounter, not history, to explain it. Seeing the moose is incidental if seeming to see a moth or mouse would have had the same effect: he swerves in each of these situations. See these determinists as they exploit Leibniz’s internal relations without endorsing his theism: let every choice and action be explained by the global holism, the global determinism created by nature’s cohesive (holistic) evolution from its original conditions.
These implications are closer to home if we imagine a conversation between two strangers, one asking directions, the other imagining simple answers. Hard determinists hear the first question—”Where am I”?—as an effect generated by the speaker’s causal lineage. But what of the second speaker’s response: “Corner of State and Madison, Chicago.” Is that an effect of his causal history, or is it the effect of that history coupled to this alien because unanticipated request coming from an unrelated lineage? We have these three interpretations: i. The Leibnizian isn’t surprised by the query or its response because, he believes, everything is implicated in everything else. ii. The hard determinist is embarrassed: he can’t explain why independent causal histories are aligned such that the response to every question is an appropriate answer. You ask for salt, and I pass it. Is there a pre-established harmony, so that independent causal lines never formed: everything was and is connected to everything else? iii. Or is it true that the two speakers do stand within lineages that were independent until this moment, when a speaker freely responds to another’s surprising question with an appropriate answer? He speaks from within his lineage (he knows where he is), though his response is provoked by a question having no precedent within his history.
Is everything decided, as Leibniz and Laplace tell us, by internal relations or long ago by natural laws and original conditions? We often devote considerable time and energy to making things happen, but we could trouble less if reality is designed to harmonize questions with answers, needs with resources. But aren’t there disappointments, and worse? Yes, but they can be ignored at moments when reality has been organized, from its inception, to reward us. No wonder people speculate that a benign Leibnizian deity oversees us. But look away: efficacy also has this other explanation. The bread I buy is the one I ordered. The driver swerves because his vision is reliable: seeing the moose, he averts an accident.
9. “Things Are Not Up to Us.”
What are the implications of Van Inwagen’s skeptical précis? What is autonomy—self-regulation, self-direction—when everything has causes affecting all it is and does? Is there freedom to choose one’s direction when choice seems foreclosed by the myriad causes shaping antecedents, hence oneself? Autonomy is never more than notional, if this is so. Nor is the experience of volition more than a conscious tic if choices and actions are determined by ancestral causal conditions. Hard determinism is nevertheless faulty because its version of history—cosmic or human—is simplistic. Consider its principal claims: i. Locating humans within long causal chains entails that personal choices are predetermined. For every current affair is the most recent in a possibly infinite succession of events. This is the causal tide, the array of histories generated, sustained, or amended by successive efficient causes. ii. There is nothing arbitrary or speculative in this thesis because causal trajectories satisfy or embody deterministic natural laws. Nothing happens by chance; every outcome is foreshadowed. All would be foreseen by an omniscient god. Here are some responses:
9i. The causal tide: Hard determinism avers that every current change is the last in a history that extends from time immemorial (the time of the Big Bang or before) to the present: a garrulous crow is the current event in a lineage that may have no beginning or end. There are myriad histories, each integrated within the tapestry of cosmic time. But nature’s content has two principal constituents. One is implied by energy’s conservation: none is lost or created. The other, its complement, is the sequence of forms—the qualitative effects—produced when matters are altered or transformed by their interaction. You bake cakes, I brew coffee: two fractions of the total energy cache. Energy isn’t exchanged without interacting causes, but the qualities of causes and effects are contingencies relative to the stable pool of energy.
Imagine that energy is stripped of qualities, exposing energy raw: no longer apples or pears, just the energy they embody. This distinction is consequential, though it implies an ambiguity: how loosely are these two—energy and its expressions—connected? Should we affirm that energy is the material reality while its expressions are dreamlike phenomena, perhaps fantasies of a kind projected onto the ambient world as we think about or imagine it? That would be a retelling of Plato’s cave allegory: people imagining stable entities or processes as they strain to make sense of shadows on the cave walls.15 Only the presumed reality—energy, rather than Forms—would be different. This implication is unintended because it reduces nature to a disembodied surd or, as in Plato’s metaphor, a story confirmed merely by repeating it. The alternative avers that energy’s relation to its expressions is that of identity. The expressions are protean, their measures are diverse, though energy retains its essential character as nature’s way of creating stability or effecting change. Accordingly, every energy exchange—every causal relationship—bundles and transfers energy in a specific qualitative form: knives cut as spoons do not.
Distinguishing the finite energy pool from qualitative effects is tantalizing because it suggests a possible response to hard determinists. The energy pool remains intact—it courses through every change—though qualities have no effect on subsequent events if they are extinguished before later effects have occurred, or if emergent phenomena have powers and effects that displace their antecedents. This distinction—energy versus its contingent expressions—is ignored when determinism supposes that nature is a continuous surge from its origin. Is the tide sometimes interrupted—its effects superseded—by jumps in the qualitative record? Are there barriers that shield later events from the qualities or dispositions of some antecedents?
There are four points to consider: ia. the alleged weave of quality-preserving causes versus qualitative breaks in the causal chain; ib. ambiguities in the idea of a causal tide; ic. the relative independence of causal strands; and id. causal history versus the priority of current situations. A fifth point—emergence—requires a separate, subsequent entry.
9ia. Is nature a continuous weave of quality-preserving causes? Every qualitative change is energized by our world’s stable pool of energy: energy is often conserved as a specific quality or complex: dinosaurs reproduced their kind for eons. This result satisfies hard determinism, though it doesn’t follow that every qualitative change is conserved to affect its successors or that there is qualitative continuity in lines of natural succession. Punctuated equilibrium is the thesis that evolution makes jumps. Genetic sports enable new functions and behavior because of altered bodily structures: flight or speech, for example.
There are sufficient conditions (molecular and environmental) for the altered structures, hence sufficient conditions for the altered behavior, though the grunts of a preceding generation are not a sufficient condition for whatever is articulate in the speech of its successors.
9ib. Ambiguities in the idea of a causal tide: There is ambiguity when the alleged flow of causes and effects is thought to imply that every change presupposes the collaboration of all its antecedents, though antecedents are partitioned: an effect is caused by some but not by most others. The metaphor is also ambiguous in these other ways. It obscures the different weights of causes that are proximate or remote, necessary or sufficient. It ignores discontinuities, causes that perish because they are unsustainable in themselves or unsustainable because of inimical circumstances (depleted resources or competitors). Some events can’t have a direct effect on successors because exterminations, wars, or depressions preclude later effects by annulling them, or because they are too remote to affect the light cones of others. Most things, events, or forces come and go with no permanent grip on reality, though some (gravity and DNA) are enduring causes of subsequent effects. Birds are less secure: they derive from dinosaurs, though dodos have no heirs.
Nature’s historian resembles a knitter reconstructing a garment chewed by moths: find and tie the severed strands. Nature, too, is more ragged than we imply when invoking the idea of its continuous weave. We acknowledge the half-truth but defend against its exaggeration: yes, to energy flow and conservation; no, to the steady continuity of qualitative change.
9ic. Mutually independent causal strands: It is essential to my argument for free will that causal strands are, for the most part, mutually independent. The unfamiliarity of people meeting for the first time exemplifies situations in which previous history leaves both parties unprepared for their encounter, hence unable to make informed choices about what to say or do. The possibility of having no information about one’s prospective circumstances may be challenged on the slender basis that the independence—hence unfamiliarity—of situations-to-come is implausible when every causal lineage embodies myriad cross-stitches. Could we know (remember or anticipate) more than we think we do? Or does history create a weave so dense that trying to recover buried strands would defeat the most scrupulous search for evidence, much of it indecipherable or destroyed? Every human is a remote cousin, yet one often meets people with whom one shares no identifiable ancestor.
9id. Causal history versus the priority of current situations: Where muscle control activates or inhibits movement, raising and turning a hand seems an unproblematic example of free will. Hard determinists prefer this other surmise: every event is the successor to ancient causes. But is that so? Consider my gesture: I’m imitating someone who’s teaching me the hand signals used as insults by members of his tribe. I’ve learned the gesture because of a chance meeting at a local bar, not because this effect has sufficient conditions in my causal history. Here, as often, a new or surprising situation provokes a response enabled by emergent powers: thought, perception, memory, or imagination is challenged in a way having no antecedent in one’s experience.
Hard determinism implies that history is the unspooling of original causes as they shape subsequent history. Unforeseen complexities create surprises, but their essential ingredients and conditions (energy and the laws of motion) were there from the start. This part of their surmise is plausible and likely true, though it misses two things: idi. the difference between efficient and formal cause; and idii, responses to situations that are unanticipated by the agents’ causal histories (Jack and Jill).
9idi. Efficient and formal causes: Suppose history is the transformation of primordial factors—energy and spacetime—present at the hypothesized start when geometry and topology prescribed limits to nature’s evolution. Efficient causes exhibit the energy driving qualitative change and changes of motion. Particles were formed by imbalances—a formal cause—in the original energic broth. Later, stabilized particles emerged as organized ensembles within regions of greater size: molecules and weather, for example. Every formal cause frames its circumstances; each is a complex, a configuration that establishes limits on actions or changes appropriate or possible within it.
History preserves the record of efficient causes in the respect that their portion of energy is conserved. Formal causes are less secure because they include configurations or assemblies that are often ephemeral: people standing in line or waiting for a bus. A presiding god would see both factors: energy and its configurations. Energy’s flow would seem lawful, perhaps necessary in a parochial sense because native to this possible world (not necessary universally, because energy may behave differently in other possible worlds). The god would also observe formal causes: some are inconsequential; others constrain the formation of atoms or molecules, or the behavior of people working together. Much else would be less assured: there might be no discernible design, for example, in the evolution of public enthusiasms or city clutter.
Formal cause is critical to situations where choice flourishes (for reasons considered below) because situations having the same constituents are distinguished by the formal causes that organize them. So, teams use the same players in different configurations; they organize a defense for one opponent using a different configuration to defend against another. Now consider an opposing offense: imagine it’s surprised by the other’s defense, until it sees and acts on opportunities neither had anticipated. This is the reality of teams testing one another in the early stages of a game, if each lines up in ways the other hadn’t anticipated.
9idii. Unanticipated situations: Situations are structured ensembles: formal causes organize their quantitative and qualitative features. Most come and go while leaving no trace, because of having no efficacy or stability as wholes: a basket of laundry, dishes in the sink. Solutions are familiar; habits, rules, or practices direct our responses. But some occasions are baffling; with no useful memory or habit to prepare us, we improvise or react. Imagine walking on a remote mountain trail during a storm. Rain intensifies; I run for cover as lightning crackles above. Yes, I’ve been caught in the rain before, though never out here where birds cower and light flashes all around. There will be habits on which to rely if something like this happens again, but now—and for every novel situation—history is suggestive but not determining.
Hard determinists might speculate that situations are disguised by their apparent novelty, though recognized all the while: we don’t recall having encountered them before, though we know what to do because they’re familiar. Or the agent is truly unprepared, though his or her preparation is irrelevant because fate (converging causal streams) have determined the outcome. Placid as a Venus’s flytrap, situations seem inert until we excite predetermined effects by engaging them. But is it plausible that circumstances, so blandly passive to inspection, impel responses we can’t inhibit? Imagine entering a building where buzzers are the point of entry for the many apartments. How do I decide which to press? The buzzers are indifferent; ring any one, the choice is mine. Having no information appropriate to an informed choice, I close my eyes, reach forward, and press the buzzer closest to hand. What happens next: whom do I meet; what shall I do? Could an omniscient god advise me?
Hard determinists tell a reassuring story: a car moving at reasonable speed in a straight line—a time slice in one lineage—is struck by a meteorite from another. The convergence of these histories seems accidental, though their intersection was prefigured. Does it follow that every situation develops as trajectories collide? All choices have conditions sufficient to determine them, but choice’s determinants include values, aims, and information about a situation’s qualitative features, more rarely information about the lineage of its conditioning antecedents. Jack and Jill’s marriage has emergent effects that neither anticipates. Often befuddled, they navigate current situations because of converging values and aims, not because of ancient solutions.
9ii. Natural laws: Hard determinism appeals to “natural laws,” though law’s status is moot. Very little in modern or contemporary philosophy challenges the belief that natural normativity is a myth exposed and dispatched by Hume’s phenomenalist analysis of causation, 16 and his remark that is doesn’t entail ought.17 Theorists who reduce causality to regularity deplore the naiveté of thinkers still provoked by observing that the offspring of mice are mice, not rabbits. Humeans suppose that the regularity of this sequence is the whole content of the law explaining it, though regularity is the fact needing explanation, not the norm explaining it. That reason is DNA, a cause both formal and efficient.
Sympathetic to the Aristotelian idea that natural laws exist in things they control and to Descartes’ surmise that the normativity of kinds (qualitative differences Aristotle described as substantial forms18) is founded in the geometry of space,19 I suggest that there are natural laws of two sorts. Those controlling the evolution of causal processes are generative laws that limit energy exchange: fires caused by striking matches. Laws of the other sort establish the geometrical configurations available to causal processes; principles of least energy (shortest paths) are presumably founded in their trajectories. Spacetime is the elemental substance transformed when laws of the two sorts converge as geometrized laws of motion. So, one construction rule creates circles by bending lines; another produces triangles by joining line segments. Materiality complicates these recipes as genes direct the assembly of proteins.
This is a strongly necessitarian view of natural laws. Does it justify the hard determinist claim that all causes pertinent to today’s choices have ancestries going back to the beginning of time? Does it validate Laplace’s formula?
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.20
No natural change could stray from the specific determinations permitted by law; everything that is was predictable from the start, given the lawful evolution of original conditions. Where each of a tree’s limbs bend or twist in particular ways, there is a law that can, in principle, explain its formation.
Put aside doubts about the strict determinism of natural laws. Notice instead that this formulation ignores an apparent qualification: the configuration of this tree’s limbs differs from that of trees nearby, though all are subject to the same laws. This is true of nature more generally: small sets of laws—whether generative or formal—apply across all of nature’s myriad domains and differences; any variation that satisfies them is tolerated. Explicating universal determinism by citing natural laws is, therefore, less decisive than it seems. Supplement them by citing the original conditions (Laplace’s “all positions of all items”) whose evolution was and is controlled by laws.
Yet determinism, however well founded, is itself the enabler of deviations in nature’s evolution. They occur because of capacities that first evolved with the emergence of living things. Those were organisms whose cell walls created protected interior spaces. Filtering nutrients and information while defending them from intruders, these spaces enabled simple organisms to inhibit responses while surveying their circumstances. Prioritizing their interests, they evolved mechanisms for satisfying their interests in safety, food, or sex. Hard determinism was breached, because those primitive choices expressed an agent’s appraisal of its situation: which needs were more likely to be satisfied, given its circumstances? That appraisals and choices were primitive is assumed; yet they evolved as defenses were fortified and flexible responses were refined. This was practical freedom in its earliest expressions. Why believe that this inference is correct? Because such creatures survived to reproduce and evolve; because fossils confirm their evolution; and because the brains in our bony skulls are principal evidence that the surmise is true. This is determinism as it generated inhibition, deliberation, and choice.
Hard determinism presents itself as impregnable: every event is powered by energies embodied by its antecedents. Each is a moment in a continuous swathe, a tapestry of histories multiply cross-stitched, all constrained in every detail by natural laws. Yet we hesitate, because an observing god would acknowledge ruptured stabilities, expired causal strands, and this evolutionary sport.
10. Emergent Wholes, Their Properties and Powers
Hard determinism ignores emergents and their causal roles. A triangle’s properties emerge when its line segments are connected. Systems emerge—molecules from atoms, teams from their players—when reciprocal causal relations bind their parts. This is a representation of emergence as it starts with elementary particles and rises to complex systems:
Suppose each number of this series signifies phenomena of increasing complexity: 1=particles; 2=atoms; 3=molecules; 4=cells; 5=tissues; 6=organs; 7=animal (human) bodies; 8=families; 9=villages or tribes; 10=cities or states. The trajectory stabilizes at points 4, 7, and 10 because they signify entities able to obtain and stock energy sufficient to maintain themselves. Everything short of these points falls back to the next lower stable order for want of that capacity.
Laws having application at the early orders may be strongly deterministic because spacetime geometry constrains bonding and the formation of atoms and molecules. This may still be true at level 4, though regularities at levels 7 and 10 are disrupted by the diversity and complexity of things whose formation they regulate: social development is variable; communities have distinct histories, forms, and resources. They evolve in different ways. But variable doesn’t mean indeterminate: triangles formed by joining three line segments, like tunes created by joining five notes, are determinate. Every such structure has a decided character because the properties and relations of its constituents are determinate. Subsequent changes or elaborations may evolve in various ways, but each of them will also be determinate. An orchestra joins many musicians in an ensemble capable of playing many sorts of music, though all produce music of determinate tones and rhythms by playing in determinate ways. Every brain is a system of many neurons, each having a specific character and function while linked in specific ways to others. Brains are adaptable and responsive to evolving circumstances; they are sometimes underdetermined because uneducated or unmotivated, but they are never undetermined. What they will do is nevertheless determinable because reasons and collateral—mutually independent—causes decide what their subsequent determinations (the modifications of previous determinations) shall be. Free will is enabled by the structural features of some living things, as argued below; it doesn’t supervene as a bloom lacking conditions sufficient to produce or explain it.
Emergence is critical to free will in two respects: i. Living things are monadic; their walled interiors are spaces that buffer intrusions; ii. Abilities that evolve within these spaces are strategies for successful responses to internal and external challenges. These are powers for deliberation, judgment, and choice, hence for reasons that function as causes. They vindicate the idea that free will is a biological adaptation, not a mysterious power that alters the causal tide from a position external to it.
10i. Living things are monadic: Living things are complex systems having an inside devoted to life-sustaining processes, and an outside that buffers relations to other things. The outside is a barrier to intrusions and an entrée to information about the entity’s circumstances. The inside is a protected space where agents deliberate and choose when they’ve acquired faculties and strategies for coping with external challenges and opportunities: what to do, when to flee.
10ii. Reasons as causes: We often deviate from a lineage of antecedent causes when deliberation affords reasons for choice and action. These are two things: the emergent power for interrupting—redirecting—the stream of causes, and one’s reasons for intervening. Reasons are justifiers: given circumstances and values, they warrant choice and action appropriate to an aim. Justifiers are odd because they needn’t cite actual states of affairs. I may keep my closets tidy because the ghosts living there don’t like disorder. Though too casual a regard for truth isn’t sustainable: sympathy and imagination embellish the margins, but truth—reality testing—is the control that makes choice viable. Justification requires it; we align ourselves with things as they are, or as we imagine they are. Reasons may be commanding because meaningful (my god requires it); because they express interests or needs (we’re cold); or because they require that one inhibit choice and action out of concern for others. Many reasons are traditional, but some are contemporary and situational: take an umbrella, it’s raining.
10iii. Free will reconstrued: Will is a biological adaptation to external circumstances, a power acquired under the protection of the internal spaces created when monadic living things emerged. The will to live is an impelling drive rooted in life itself, a steady backdrop to the choice of particular aims: coffee or tea, walk or ride. Why call willing free, falsely implying that it’s unconditioned? Because will is exempt, to a degree, within these spaces from determination by other things, considerations, or processes in or outside them. This doesn’t imply a shortage of conditions—including reasons—sufficient to provoke it.
Kant supposed that free will sets action’s trajectory from outside the tide of material conditions,21 but there is an alternative: choice and action redirect the tide without escaping it. We deliberate within the tide, hesitating but never leaving it. Preventing a rout saves lives or careers: we don’t step out of history when changing its direction.
11. Character/Sensibility
Character, sensibility, and personality name different aspects of the structure giving autonomy its force and coherence. Character is a set of stabilizing habits and attitudes. Sensibility is resonance. Personality, style and mien, is the shallower term of this triad; I ignore it.
Character is agency’s keel: it comprises instincts, inclinations, and aims. All are educated in the style of one’s society, while embodied as reciprocally regulating habits; liking noise, I don’t exceed the tolerance of neighbors who don’t like it as much. Sensibility begins as innate irritability before acquiring form as a responsive weave of information, tastes, and sentiments. It looks two ways: we learn from others; but incorporate their effects as an array of distinguishing tastes, desires, and vulnerabilities. Hard determinists evoke the energic tide as if every next change has no resources for ignoring or opposing its antecedents. But sensibility blocks inputs opposed by one’s aims or tastes: fashionistas sometimes resist new styles.
Add situations and consider this obstacle to hard determinism. Sensibilities address situations by way of gestalts. These are a sensibility’s windows into the ambient world; like eyeglasses that enable sight, gestalts direct our search for features pertinent to our intentions and attitudes. All are holistic; each has a fore- and background that projects the thinker’s aims or anxieties onto the map of his or her circumstances. Each is a formal cause: an interpretation, hypothesis, or plan. Configuration dominates the thinking of architects, painters, and photographers; scientists and novelists hypothesize or interpret. Plans prepare us for practical life; framing a situation, they direct our interventions by sequencing actions and expected responses in ways relevant to our aims. Frustration measures the discrepancy between the values or objectives expressed by a gestalt and the effects accruing as it provokes an action; equilibrium is established when action’s effects satisfy the interests prefigured, or when a new gestalt, better adapted to circumstances, displaces the one before.
Orientation is usually steady; gestalts are conserved when aims and circumstances are stable. But mind would be regularly disoriented if action were forever encumbered by gestalts superseded by altered circumstances, understandings, or desires. That doesn’t happen, because gestalts are regularly revised or replaced. This is consequential for the determinist argument because it implies that evidence for bits of one’s past is lost. Why? Because the gestalt is an orientation, a form; one may remember some or all its constituent details, but not the way they’re integrated: not the gestalt. Its effect on choice and action, however significant, may terminate without intrapsychic evidence of its role: I don’t recall how I saw things, or why. Hard determinists may reply that every gestalt has effects on psychic memory that abide, buried but real. But this is a surmise: sometimes true and verifiable, it is often unverified and unverifiable. Something comparable happens on large scales when stars or debris sucked into black holes escape as radiation: information about the material ingested is not (it seems) recoverable from escaping energy. The cycle from birth to death has an equivalent effect: dust to dust when most of the middle is lost.
Does the brain refresh itself during sleep, purging the previous day’s business? Not always: people are often dominated by the same concerns for days or more. Effective accommodation to changing conditions is, however, essential to well-being: we may edit or replace outdated gestalts every few moments when action requires that we clear outdated information or expectations from thought or perception. For we’re often surprised by evolving situations. Needing to adapt, wanting to secure ourselves while controlling them, we adjust our ways of perceiving the near-world. That purge rebukes hard determinism: the past cannot determine all we do because we eliminate some part of our information about it when confronting altered circumstances.22
Imagine causal strands linked by partners newly acquainted. Is their convergence anchored in the remote past, rather than a recent chance encounter? Hard determinism fails this test for three reasons pertinent to sensibility:
11i. Hard determinism alleges that everything current is the latter-day effect of natural laws as they regulate the transformation of original conditions. But is that so? Jack and Jill met at a boxing match where she was one of the fighters, and he was an usher. They stayed in touch after learning that both raise bats. This is too many accidents for any of nature’s laws. What explains their affinity? Sensibility, not law. Relationships are situational; they’re sustained by reciprocity, passion, and the negative feedback that quashes arguments, not by laws and original conditions.
11ii. Sensibility is often a barrier to the effects of its antecedent formations. Consider the athlete traded from one team to another. His old team values ingenuity—players take chances—the new one emphasizes teamwork. He navigates the difference by suppressing what he learned from his former team while acquiring the discipline of the new one. Teams, jobs, or marriages: sensibilities respond to altered circumstances.
11iii. Novel situations provoke ingenuity. A news story, several years ago, described a man who saved his life when pinned under a rock by cutting off his arm. No historical narrative explains his courage; what law determined it?
Hard determinism founders when a novel situation is coupled to a sensibility of moderate complexity: there will be effects, relevant laws will be satisfied, but four contingencies make the character of those effects uncertain: i. The occasional instability of a sensibility’s values makes decision unstable: am I sure that I like this? ii. The shifting pressures of competing inclinations (chocolate or a diet pill) makes aims inconsistent and planning ineffective: I thought I wanted this result though having it, I regret wanting it. iii. Situations evolve, often unpredictably, because of the material conditions engaged (credit markets, weather), not because of apposite laws or the agents addressing them. iv. Planning is frustrated when we lack information about a situation’s evolution under the force of our actions.
There is often a prevailing direction to a situation’s evolution, though drift is fixed by material conditions, not only by natural laws. Laplace might propose that we identify the laws controlling a situation’s development as we engage it, but generational and formal laws tolerate innumerable variations. Memory and imagination are alternate determinants: they collaborate as mind tracks material changes by reformulating its gestalts. This sometimes works, though the novelty or complexity provoked by crossing causal strands is often bewildering.
12. Initiative
Choice is usually contextualized; it expresses an agent’s history, perspective, and interests when focused by a current situation. Focus is unproblematic when circumstances are accurately represented by the gestalts directing choice and action: wanting a shirt, I go to the closet where they hang. We improvise when gestalts falter because of frustration triggered by error, or because of confused expectations provoked by conflicted aims. There are three plausible strategies: an inquiry that gathers better information about one’s situation; clarified aims; or an interpretation that makes conflict seem coherent. The following is a sample test of hard determinism.
Earth is generous when the first spaceship to Mars discovers a thriving musical culture. The best of Martian composers is puzzled when these visitors give him a piano. He tinkers for weeks before beginning to write duets for piano and local frogs. The music is odd to human ears, but all call it beautiful. Martian history doesn’t explain this result; Earth’s history all the less. Imagination is the more likely cause: something productive happens in the space where it reconciles the gap between old and new. Starting with available information, rules, and techniques, one analogizes, extrapolates, or generalizes until understanding affords a solution. Whether the context is practical or artistic, this is the power that fills the space.
Hard determinists will respond that originality isn’t less determined for our failure to understand it. That is true, but incidental because the question is different: how to understand solutions generated when there is no technique or well of information appropriate to solving them. Determinists may surmise that there were instruments like pianos in Martian culture, though we postulate that there were no useful analogues to our keyboards in its history. They weren’t required in the current situation because there as here, inquiry and experiment are sometimes the cure for incomprehension. Contributing the piano exemplifies Mill’s method of difference: add something new, then get an original effect by exploiting the freedom to innovate.23
Now limit attention to Earth and consider the freedom of people responding to local circumstances. Consider the man deliberating when caught in the rain: is it heavy or light; how far is he going; is his coat water repellent? Experience helps when deciding what to do, but judgment and his gestalt are sensitive to circumstances. Having decided to continue without an umbrella, suddenly hearing wind and the crack of thunder, feeling a deluge as the skies open, he changes his mind. His decision is altered by shock, fear, and heavy rain, not by daydreams or the history of his ancestors. Could he have decided otherwise? Given the prospect of a life-changing reward, a treasure just ahead, he would have pursued it. But that wasn’t a live option in his perception of the moment; when all his choices were dim or worse, he ran for shelter. Hard determinists are unconvinced: here on Earth, where all the energies of the past and all their effects are inventoried, nothing happens that isn’t foreshadowed. But is that so? Our stroller is often caught in storms he ignores when told of bullion free for the taking behind the tree ahead. Why not infer that he would have ignored this threat, too, but for the intimation that this storm might be deadly? Why be surprised, given his fear, that his response was different? This is smart autonomy: the agent who responds appropriately when registering his circumstances.
Hard determinists regard “autonomy” as a temporary cul de sac formed by antecedent causes, then reabsorbed by the tide. But this is faulty in several ways: i. It ignores the modular character of systems that are effectively self-sustaining, given supportive circumstances. ii. It ignores the relative independence of causal strands. iii. It assumes that circumstances always impose themselves upon us, though conditions often tolerate alternate responses: chocolate, strawberry, or vanilla. iv. It ignores ingenuity, and the interface where established skills meet unfamiliar situations. This is the dialectic that prevents human history from perpetually recycling the same routines. Having estimated where we are, we improvise, test the result, revise, then test again.
Were Google and Facebook written in Tarot cards those many eons ago? Not quite: they were imaginative extrapolations from an established base, including telephones and the internet. Other issues—consciousness and dark matter—require innovations of a different sort. Solutions will come when imagination structures understanding in ways that are currently unforeseen and maybe unanticipated.
13. Productive Imagination
Gestalts make practical situations intelligible: one isn’t surprised when served with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant. Their role in art is different: there, gestalts are ideas directing the organization of an art’s figures or words. History is respected, but innovation is prized. Materials are an art’s substance; like bricks or notes, they precede it. But there is no organizational principle, no formal cause until the artist imagines it. Listen to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” then consider that George Martin, its producer, was the principal source of its format. Its raffish qualities had precursors in English music halls but there was no line of ancient conditions responsible for Martin’s design; the whole he created exceeded its parts and antecedents. Laugier’s forest hut24 prefigures the rule exemplified in every house, but is there a rule discernible in every novel, sonata, or painting? Understanding is a faculty of rules, but imagination is a faculty that creates unexpected results when it plays with old rules or invents new ones. Where every artist or thinker has access to the same materials, imagination creates wholes that stand apart from their antecedents. Originality has antecedents but no history: Haydn preceded Mozart, but Mozart was different from Haydn.
Finished work inspires others to formulate rules for creating similar wholes, be it music or design, by organizing an art’s materials. The rules are a style adaptable by artists less sure of themselves, however subtle. Each vogue has a history: an original master and adherents, then a diminished old age when acclaim has drained a style’s vitality. What distinguishes great artists from stylists? Principally, ideas, judgment, initiative, and wit. Do artists of either sort work freely? Most are slow to answer: imagination (rules and materials) direct him or her; the artist is its instrument. But these aren’t the artists of Plato’s Apology, poets inspired by the gods though unable to explain the meaning of their poems. Great artists discriminate: every brush stroke is a choice, one has said. What justifies the inference that imagination can never do more than regurgitate its causes?
14. Consciousness
How much do we know of will by way of consciousness; what part is unconscious? Four distinctions are fundamental. We may be: i. unconscious after a blow to the head, processing no perceptual information, performing no cognitive activity; ii. unconscious in the respect that we perform effectively without conscious attention to the activity, or to obstacles to which we respond effectively (driving successfully while preoccupied); iii. conscious of attending to relevant features of a situation: traffic or a child, for example; iv. self-aware because a task requires careful attention. (ii is preconscious relative to iii; iii is preconscious relative to iv.)
Will is active in the last three of the four postures above: ii. One is distracted though effective through successive traffic lights, without awareness or memory. iii. Newly attentive, one scans the road for obstacles. iv. A new driver, fearing the judgment of an on-board instructor, does nothing to the steering wheel or pedals without anticipating their effects. Why concede will’s operation when its conscious markers are absent? Because perception or cognition has activated the voluntary control center in the associative cortex, hence nerves that control muscles and acts pertinent to circumstances. Will is inferred in the cause of the second and third mode; choice and action are perceived (with a slight delay) when consciousness is self-awareness.
Is there more to will than consciousness reveals? Would there be reason to claim having a will if we weren’t aware of choosing among alternatives or acting as we’ve chosen? Self-awareness is an extended window into our circumstances, hence the assumption that will is best seen for what it is when present to self-inspection. But is that so: is it odd that the evidence of will is usually less decisive than an array of flashing lights? Walking in a strange city, arriving at a fork in the road, I decide arbitrarily to go left. I’m aware of making the choice, though it and the act of stepping left are almost simultaneous. Does it matter if an fMRI shows that choosing to go left occurred fractionally before my awareness? It matters, though the implication is benign: electrochemical signals are transmitted in finite velocities. (Consciousness is not a froth where messages pass simultaneously.) Will is opaque, even to self-awareness, but that is true to some degree of every mental state inferred or perceived. None will be fully understood until physiology explains all the expressions and gradations of phenomenal life. In the meantime, details elude us.
15. Choosing Freely
This is our anomaly: we are formed by materiality and our causal history, though free will is essential to the texture, purpose, and moral quality of personal and social life. We could elude the implications of materiality by assuming that will stands outside the stream of causes sufficient to produce its effects. That was Kant’s idea: will is free when exempt from the influence of material conditions; choices are made spontaneously from outside space and time. But this is magical thinking, one evoking a time when human bodies were said to be endowed with immaterial souls. What is “free will,” if we suppress the inclination to mythologize? Construe it as a metaphor for resources exploited in different ways. Earthquakes and firestorms interrupt the causal tide; mind does it too when inhibiting impulses frees mind for deliberations and decisions that reorient the causal flow.
Hard determinism ascribes the sufficient conditions for every current action and effect to matter’s ancient configuration and the laws determining energy’s evolving forms. Circumstances are primed; history determines one’s every decision; what looks like choice is actually a narrowed focus, one whose only possible outcome is the action taken. Soft determinism demurs: there are sufficient conditions for every event, but one or more of an event’s conditions may have no history: those are conditions that arise when the converging causal lineages are those of human agents. Jack and Jill meet as strangers; each affecting the other from the distance entailed by their independence. Each makes space for deliberation and judgment by inhibiting impulses; values and strategies evolve as they test one another. Time will pass before each can expect securely predictable responses from the other; or their coupling will terminate because of mutual disappointment.
Hard determinists would explain the result by inferring that determining seeds were planted eons before; but this would ignore the evidence of current interactions. Why search an indecipherable past for proof of incipient conflict or compatibility when all the evidence is generated by the convergence of independent causal streams? These two don’t share a past or parallel preparation for this encounter. Do they fight? One might predict that they won’t get along, but that’s a guess informed by previous observations. Better to wait and see if they coalesce. That would be the effect of testing one another, not one having necessary and sufficient conditions in ancient times.
Circumstances are elastic; they can be altered, though not by everyone. Rabbits are stuck with habits that make them vulnerable to hawks; we revise practices having effects we dislike. We’re liberated when confronting novel or surprising situations because we’re free to experiment when having no established response. Addressing a situation with an inappropriate gestalt, we fumble for a time before revising it. Regretting an action, we resist doing it again. Why? Because of a current frustration, not for reasons ascribable to an ancient cause.
Discussion below is focused by rubrics that organize the array of mind’s interventions. i. First are domains where inhibition is an emergent power. It creates spaces where deliberation, judgment, and choice emerge and stabilize, because they adapt us more effectively to our circumstances. ii. Next are novel or surprising situations where self-control is exigent because the effects of choice and action are uncertain or unknown. iii. Third are choices whose principal or only effects are personal. iv. Initiative and invention are fourth. Their agents are artists, engineers, and all the theoretical or practical thinkers who remake a domain by reconceiving its materials or forms. v. Last is a summary of reasons for saying that hard determinism is defeated.
15i. Emergence. Emergence is the effect of complexity: an emergent has properties and powers—stability, life, or mind—that are absent in its proper parts. Emergence is critical to volition because it generates modes of animal response—inhibition, deliberation, and choice, for example—that were previously unavailable. These powers weren’t up to us: they emerged in response to circumstances that favored their evolution.
We reasonably infer that the relational capacities of matter’s precursors enabled or precluded nature’s subsequent evolution. Yet (as above) their dispositions prefigured possibilities for alternate evolutions; they were not sufficient conditions for human properties that evolved with the accretion of later developments: the present was not pre-formed in the past. Hard determinists would agree that successive events of many kinds were required before deliberation and choice could emerge within animals able to inhibit or choose their responses to external stimuli. But all of this is explained, they would say, by successive advances in the causal tide. No steps were jumped; transformations were linear; every change had its sufficient conditions. One may accept this generic account while taking exception to its conclusion; emergence may itself have hard determinist conditions, though it explains the inception of free will and is, thereby, a countervailing step in the determinist evolution of cosmic history.
That is so because living things achieved a degree of freedom from their circumstances when their internal organization created the external barriers, the cell walls of unicellular animals. Those spaces were the protected sites where organisms developed capacities and strategies for sustaining themselves. This was primitive autonomy: needing food, they withstood deprivation by storing energy; stabilizing themselves, they resisted predators and one another. The spaces evolved; faculties that developed within humans—deliberation, judgment, and choice—made autonomy flexible, subtle, and effective. The internal spaces were always natural; their evolution was conditioned by capacities and causes traceable to the origins of the universe. Their consequences in us—deliberation and free will—enable imagination, initiative, control of ourselves, and our circumstances. Will as a faculty has had a lengthy incubation; choices enacted in current situations are often habitual. But sometimes, they express reasons, judgments, or tastes provoked by circumstances rather than history. Histories deviate to some degree because of our choices.
Was the evolution of living things—entities with protected internal spaces—a contingency dependent on the drift of circumstances, or a necessity, given laws controlling the evolution of nature’s original conditions? Each of these variables may be construed in either of two ways: ia. causal laws are deterministic or probabilistic; ib. nature’s dispositions, the capacities inhering in its original conditions, were determinable or generically specific (hair that was red, rather than hair that could be variously colored). There are also these additional considerations, and a response: ic. self-control; id. moral identity; and ie. riposte.
15ia. Causal history, and the force of causal laws: Circumstances are tightly predictable, given causal laws; or they embody inexplicable accidents, because the laws are probabilistic. Probabilistic laws violate the principle of sufficient reason: there is no assurance that a set of conditions is sufficient to produce a specific effect. Hard determinism is fatally compromised if this is true, because all or most causal streams are laced with events that seem to have violated deterministic causal laws.
There may have been qualitative jumps in causal history, effects that could not be traced to the determinist evolution of nature’s original conditions.
15ib. The character of the dispositions inherent in nature’s original conditions: This point is critical, but obscure. The capacities inhering in nature’s original conditions might have been determinable, hence susceptible to alternate evolutions, or specific, as seeds (apple or pear) prefigure specific evolutions. We don’t have to know which refinement is accurate because buffered animal bodies with interior spaces and evolved interior functions could have emerged on either telling.
Either way—laws that are deterministic or probabilistic, capacities that were determinable or specific—we vindicate the material possibility that free will could emerge in creatures having an external buffer and the elaborate internal functions that emerged when taking advantage of its protection. For having an external buffer gives us time to inhibit responses while gathering information; there was time to deliberate, judge, and choose. This was the likely inception of free will, and, on causal assumptions—whether determinist or probabilistic—the condition for its emergence.
Emergent free will was, I hypothesize, an evolutionary effect; its affirmation isn’t the conclusion to a conceptual argument. Laplace might have agreed that monadic creatures having buffered interiors could harbor the development of faculties and strategies appropriate to their well-being. Free will would not be unconditioned, if this were true: attitudes, aims, and information would bias an agent’s judgments about personal aims or choices and the conduct appropriate to encounters with people or things in separate causal streams. But that leverage would be as much autonomy, as much free will as fallible creatures could hope or want.
15ic. Self-control: Self-regulation is one of our principal evolutionary achievements. This is temperance made habitual, control made conscious and voluntary. Regulation has numerous expressions. Some are holistic: we stabilize bodily integrity and social relations within sustainable parameters. Other expressions engage particular functions: we discipline thought and passion, oversee the choice of aims, enable planning, direct action, and correct error. Each requires the oversight provided by feedback. Negative feedback prevents organs or modular systems from working at rates too fast or slow for the effective operation of systems to which they’re coupled; positive feedback promotes activities supplying motivation or energy for activities of high priority. Mechanisms of both sorts are hard-wired neural circuits that inhibit action or provoke it when target thresholds are attained. Voluntary control makes some thresholds adjustable when set points vary with values and aims. The neural architecture enabling feedback has two levels: the level responsible for muscular activity is surveyed from a higher order where it’s twice appraised: actions and effects are measured for efficacy, and for consonance with values, hence conscience.
Regulation is conspicuous when we choose aims, make plans, or formulate reasons for attitudes, choices, or actions (ici); and as we practice self-control (icii):
15ici. Aims, plans, and reasons: Why do you hold her hand when crossing streets? To keep her from bolting into traffic if the light turns red. Determinists counsel perspective: why emphasize current experience when circumstances would have neither character nor existence without its antecedents? Because the contested issue is the force of history versus current interests and reasons. Our outlook is prospective, not past; the task is urgent, and often without precedent. What’s to be done? We reflect and decide. Innovations are usually small, but real. Does it matter to these choices that some of our ancestors were salamanders?
15icii. Regulation, character, and judgment: Regulation implies that one is self-directing and -correcting. Much of our control is evidence of habits and inclinations—character—as they stabilize choice and activity. Judgment is the vital faculty when we’re confounded by contrary interests or surprising situations. Considering our options, choosing what seems best, we appraise our choices when seeing or imagining their effects. These are consequences for oneself or others, be they partners or bystanders. Who has priority; how do we decide? Personal values make some of these determinations; social and cultural values make others. We accede to a “decent” standard for making decisions, though it varies among cultures and societies. Is there a mean to which all should defer? Live and let live is the fail-safe answer when duties, costs, and advantages are weighed.
15id. Moral identity: Choices, their effects and self-control, are the measure of moral identity: what do we choose; how well do we control actions that affect others or ourselves? More than recognition that we are causes having effects, responsibility is the moral posture of agents who hold themselves blame- or praiseworthy for their actions and effects. Responsibility is both a reason for ascribing free will (no one is culpable for effects he or she didn’t will or couldn’t avert) and evidence of it (soldiers who risk themselves to save comrades). Altruism and self-sacrifice may be explained as instincts acquired without choice, but that leaves much unexplained. Imagine a young man, normally feckless and out of work, who refuses a reward after finding and returning a wallet stuffed with cash. His family and friends are surprised; nothing in his history predicts it. He shrugs when asked to explain: “It wasn’t mine.”
Responsibility may be construed from the third-person vantage of those who declare what should be done, given a role, rule or law; or the stance of the person engaged. Is his or her moral sense determined, because learned and habitual; or is it sometimes evinced as an expression of choice? One may choose to satisfy a rule newly learned, or to do the same thing without knowing the rule because of fellow feeling. Tightly packed on a subway or bus, we make room for others out of regard for their comfort or ours. Inertia forces some changes; others are voluntary. Are these accommodations generous or merely prudential? Many are both: nothing good happens without cooperation; much we fear happens when it breaks down. This is the moral dimension to self-control. Many actions are routine, yet each is an opportunity to express one’s moral perspective. Cab drivers are often aggressive. Time is money; many are determined not to waste it. But sometimes, one rides with drivers who give way to pedestrians and other cars. One driver explained to me that each person has a personal trajectory and often a narrow beam of attention; he makes way, knowing that his passengers will arrive, little delayed, at their destinations.
These are two moral postures, usually assumed at once: how I satisfy my roles and pertinent rules; how I declare myself. The two often cohere. But there are distinct levels of concern: everything done in a routinized way can be informed by regard for its effects. Both perspectives have social utility, though the first is too often a disguise for thoughtlessness. For what’s to be done, who is culpable if established tasks or positions are used as shields to obscure their consequences? That happens when roles having pernicious effects are exercised in legally sanctioned ways: judges who impose gratuitously harsh sentences for minor crimes, politicians who argue procedural scruples while ignoring public interests. Moral identity of the professional kind is sometimes perfunctory; the other sort—choice and behavior regulated out of regard for their effects—is the better expression of one’s conscience and aims. Consciousness is the private moral space where choices are considered. But are the choices freely made? Only sometimes.
15ie. Riposte: Hard determinists believe that conditions required by these expressions of free will are never satisfied: every current state of affairs disguises the sediments from which they arise. Acting now, we’re anchored in the past, though situations evolve, causal history is redirected when circumstances are engaged in ways, large or small, that have no antecedents. Raised in the desert, new to cities, rain, and puddles, I avoid stepping in this puddle when seeing what others do. For if every act has causes sufficient to produce it, the causes for some responses are newly learned.
15ii. Situations that engage individuals with other people or things: Why don’t we explain every human initiative and response by citing ancient events? Because the same evolutionary effect that explains free will, also explains history’s frequent irrelevance to contemporary problem-solving. Free will is provoked and tested when agents are engaged in situations that are new, surprising, or problematic in any way. That effect is more typical than rare when aims or fears give prominence to states of affairs that seemed innocuous moments before. The situations concerning us locate individuals in relation to other people or things, or they are individual and intrapsychic. Both are complexes of interests, values, contingent states of affairs, and choices.
Consider situations joining two independent lineages: agents who are mutually unknown address one another. Their interaction reorients one or both causal streams when one or more of three considerations affect choice and action: i. information about the situation disorients the gestalts of one or both agents because it is new or surprising; ii. one or both perceive that their interests are threatened or enhanced in these altered circumstances; iii. one or both agents are motivated to act in a way or ways appropriate to his or her interests. Each factor is disruptive in this respect: it provokes thought and choice; do something or nothing.
How does one respond to situations having no antecedents in one’s experience? History and habit are a backdrop: they’re often inclining, but not compelling. For we have resources that enlarge the array of testable choices: namely, emergent powers—deliberation and foresight—that enable other responses. There are principally three options: leave decisions to random impulses; deliberate on the basis of imperfect information and personal or social interests; or gamble. Each is a strategy sufficient to determine the issue, but none is a cause fully determined by ancient history.
Consider Jack and Jill. Both need freedom to experiment, because neither has sufficient information about the other. Who is he, who is she; what difference does that make to what he or she might do? Hard determinists believe that every current state of affairs obscures its causes without preventing them from determining a current effect. That’s partly true. A friend who spoke no Japanese went to Japan with the Navy. He returned with a wife who spoke no English. Incomprehension defeated them. But this isn’t an issue for Jack and Jill. They share enough history to clarify misunderstandings, enough confidence to engage one another when neither is sure of the outcome.
Hard determinists emphasize the integrity of causal histories without distinguishing enduring conditions from reacting, adapting agents: DNA is heritable—it has history—as many situations are not. Circumstances established without regard for their human occupants—the Manhattan street grid, for example—are often stable, yet most situations alter perpetually to some degree because of changes in material conditions or those agents. Change is confusing, but also liberating: we can’t respond effectively to altered situations if we’re preoccupied with those superseded. Adaptability, more than opposable thumbs, is our saving power in situations having no viable precedents. Hard determinism does us no favors by to tethering us to the past. Stifle free will, and you suppress initiative and accommodation.
Unfamiliarity or surprise makes choice risky. Responses are unpredictable when we face bewildering situations; one can’t tell what people will do or what their effects may be. Hard determinists invoke causes and causal laws to explain the trajectory and fine grain of these responses, but minds (with information, aims, and values expressed as attitudes) are one of two variables when agents encounter novel or surprising circumstances. The other is the provoking situation: what is it, how is it construed; which demands is it making? Choice and its effects are unpredictable if nothing in one’s past anticipates this encounter. Think of Mormons pushing wheelbarrows from upstate New York to Utah when the stock of horses, mules, and carriages was exhausted. What passion enabled them to make a choice for which no ancient history could have prepared them?
Here, in sequence, are graded situations that test choice or ingenuity. Responses are ever more problematic as we’re challenged to understand the circumstances we address:
15iia. Social conditioning: Is free will precluded because people everywhere are creatures of their circumstances? As children and adults, the British favor Marmite; Americans like peanut butter. (Children born in one place, but quickly transferred to the other, learn the bias of their new home.) Every day millions of people in either place express a desire for one or the other. Our question—is your choice freely made—is situational and current, not obscurely historical (peanut butter was invented in 1895, Marmite in 1902). Wanting answers, we ask the people choosing: do you have other choices; is anything obliging you to choose as you do? What could we mean by denying that choices are freely made when almost everyone polled says, Yes, there are alternatives, but I want this one? Some respondents can be discounted as addicts. The rest make choices that are conditioned but free: they have choices, there is a context of learned preference but no coercion. Context is ineliminable: there is no way to strip away material conditions that educate us for choice while limiting available choices, and no way to shuck every learned expectation when addressing our circumstances. But there is free choice within these limits: freedom enjoyed when choosing among available alternatives for reasons or tastes of one’s own.
15iib. Reciprocity: Reciprocity is situational: it emerges with opportunities for engaging people whose interests are similar or complementary to one’s own. Given several options (if only yes or no), we choose among them. Are choices free? Not always: people often seize a desired object when it’s available. But imagine an opportunity unavailable until there is access to someone like-minded. Wanting the pleasure of a tennis match, tired of hitting balls against a wall, I agree to play this new acquaintance. Why call my choice free when this is an opportunity I’ve sought? I wouldn’t agree had she played at Wimbledon: I do because this is a match I could win. Free will doesn’t preclude causation; it implies exemption from conditions that may have once prevented it. Having the opportunity, I choose it.
15iic. Impulse: Specific impulses—for chocolate or vanilla—are distinguished from the steady purpose or intention that drives living things to engage others while securing and satisfying themselves.
Impulses are often habitual: we act again as we have before. Imagine being asked to choose coffee or tea. One often decides between them, but usually with no pattern to one’s choices. Ancient causes may sometimes explain us, but do they also explain this week’s random profile: coffee on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, tea the other days (a different order next week)? How would one go about specifying remote causes for this difference? Choosing among alternatives is familiar to everyone who dresses in the morning or shops for groceries. Why is it fraught when the explanation for trivial choices is will’s determination by a transient interest or need? I’m drinking tea today because of a recent choice: I’m curious about the taste of leaves purchased yesterday. The relevant history is short.
Impulsive signifies a range of actions, from the automatic to the voluntary, with entries in the middle that are uncertain. Consider the voluntary: I raise my hand as evidence of free will. Why call it willful, implying freedom to choose? Two considerations are pertinent when mind has the power to submit or resist: i. Calling an act impulsive implies that brain’s causal role is involuntary though brains that evolved by way of our causal history—systems having a complex, hierarchically organized structure—have some degree of self-control. ii. Higher-order control sometimes supervenes on behavior that is lower order and involuntary. That control may have greater effect when consciousness augments the brain’s power to open or close its hierarchically organized neural gates. What provokes this self-regulating response? There may be reasons of several kinds: belief that the impulse is dangerous, or fear that it subverts an aim.
15iid. Contrarians: Imagine someone who rejects a current standard for reasons of his own. Others tolerate situations that annoy them; he expresses dissent by acting in ways these situations discourage. Which is the better explanation for his response: ancient causes percolating through him, or a sensibility that expresses his distress with socially sanctioned behavior? Is his conduct reactive, implying that choices aren’t free when conditioned by sensibility? Or is it reactive but voluntary and controlled: he has reasons—practical, moral, or aesthetic—for resisting conditions he deplores. Is this second response question-begging: why deny that our subject is merely reactive if his reasons are aesthetic (practical or moral), given that sensibility is acquired, during childhood and beyond, without control? Because acquired sensibilities are often revised and refined by people who have their reasons for resisting socially approved beliefs or tastes. Their judgments and self-control put them at odds with people more comfortably socialized.
15iie. Surprised, but steady: We’re often surprised, but accustomed to finding useful responses. That’s partly because solutions proved viable in other circumstances can be adapted to a present situation, partly because we innovate when necessary or ask the help of someone more adept. We’re rarely confused to the point of having to admit defeat, though natural or social disasters sometimes defeat us. This is a plausible example: My room fills with smoke; the door is locked from outside. Surveying my options, I go through the open window, with only a short drop to the grass below. Smoke was the motivator, the reason; the drop to the grass was remembered and imagined; deliberation and choice were quick. Why be sure that my choice had no precedent in my lifetime and lineage? I can’t speak for lives previous to mine; what to do in situations like this may be stored in tribal memories. But the sufficient condition for this choice—curling smoke—was singular and current. There were other conditions—some long standing and familiar—but they aren’t pertinent to the issue at hand because choices and actions always have multiple conditions. The contested point is specific: are choices made for reasons that are contemporary, rather than ancient.
Each of these provocations provoke several responses:
15iif. Inhibition: This is a first response, however momentary: we’re surprised, something isn’t recognized or right; it needs to be identified and appraised. Inhibition is an early expression of agent autonomy: stopping an activity, with or without deliberation, is something we do when realizing that it threatens unacceptable effects. We might explain this response in historical terms: an external cause provokes us before another, internal, shuts us down. But inhibition has evolved in autonomous agents—buffered monads—capable of deliberation, judgment, and choice. I wanted to go but changed my mind; I thought I could do it, but I can’t. Acknowledge that situations often provoke these tensions, then ask if ambivalence is reduced or cured by tracing it, without confirmation, to remote origins. Free will doesn’t entail the absence of determination; it sometimes expresses itself as the inhibition of impulses and the self-control enabling one to consider pertinent alternatives.
15iig. Deliberation, judgment, choice, and their context: Deliberation is disciplined reflection. Its hypotheses signify possible states of affairs; its aims and plans are directives. Each acquires meaning by way of signs having sense and reference; all are organized using learned rules that promote consistency, coherence, and cogency. Wanting a resolution appropriate to our situation and interests, we test choice and action by considering their imagined effects: what are their likely costs and benefits? Decisions are poor if analysis is shallow; directives are tentative if intentions are ambivalent. Assessments are fallible for reasons that are recent or current, not ancient. But now, when reflection is past, we choose and act or decide that doing nothing is the better way.
Situations with properties that are novel, surprising, or puzzling are the vulnerable chink in the determinist argument that everything current was anticipated in nature’s laws and original conditions. Laplace might have said that novel situations resemble traffic jams, cars stymied when none can move because each blocks the others. The jam is unforeseen but it would have been predictable had one known the earlier distribution of cars and the roads on which they move. But this reply is incomplete: original conditions, natural laws, and efficient causes are not the only relevant variables. It ignores complexity—organization—hence the formal causes, the perceived complexity of situations that change repeatedly as circumstances evolve. Determinists likely respond that complexity is merely the assembly of a situation’s elements. A traffic jam is a jumble of cars; provide for their configuration by plotting each car’s trajectory and nothing remains unexplained.
This analytic perception may seem deep and powerful, but it strips experience and its circumstances of the emphases and forms—the contingencies that give it texture, detail, and significance. For complexities—in health, beauty, and rhythm—are often corporate (holistic) rather than aggregative. Each is a configuration having a distinctive form. Each form is the formal cause that renders the complexity intelligible. An orchestra’s musicians play their separate parts in ways that create the complex but unitary effects prefigured in their music’s score, though many corporate effects are not foreseeable by plotting converging causal streams because we don’t know all the relevant variables or the effects of their interactions. Choreography reduces the variables; we see the evolving shape of a dance; personal health and economies are more obscure.
Situations are complex to some degree; they evolve in ways that are consequential for disputes about free will. Jack and Jill are uncertain about one another’s responses; their interactions are tentative, experimental. Hard determinists affirm that their god knows every situation and its resolution; it knows the outcome to every writer’s frustration, the evolution of every complexity. Opacity isn’t a problem when predicting planetary motions; why does it complicate the relations of situations in which people address unknown or unrecognized others? Because planets and their moons don’t misconstrue one another or the sun. People often misidentify a situation’s other constituents without clarifying their personal aims or values. Choices and actions are often tentative; responses are often surprising. Uncertainty is chronic. Hence the evolution and emergence of inhibition, deliberation, and initiatives that are tentative. Why suppose that every step was decided long ago, when so many of our cognitive abilities address the need to resolve uncertainties that are problematic and current?
Let’s make the argument congenial to hard determinists by rendering two factors in ways they would approve. It’s agreed that energy is conserved, so sufficient causal conditions for every current state of affairs embody energy from the ancient cache. And we say that emergent properties—those of a circle, for example—are foreseeable given their generating conditions. Emergent properties are often surprising, but nothing about them is unpredictable if this is true. These concessions entail that current states of affairs are determined by the ancient stock of energy, and that emergent properties are the causal or configurational effects of properties originating in a simpler domain (that of cells or molecules, for example).
Now consider: Jack and Jill are mutually attracted, but mutually puzzling. Why call their future determined when their calculations—tentative, fallible, revisable—are one of its principal determinants? A rigidly determined future looks plausible if energy is conserved and if there are sufficient conditions for all emergent properties, but two considerations are ignored. One is the random factor introduced when agents engage circumstances that are novel or surprising. Neptune isn’t surprised by the sun, but Jack and Jill often surprise one another. Why aren’t their responses predictable in principle since the beginning of time? Imagine their conversations as each responds to the other in ways appropriate to the other’s previous words, not because of ancient antecedents: “Pass the butter,” she asks; he does it. The hard determinist intrudes with his principal weapon: everything is predictable; an omniscient god knew what she would say and what he would do. We should understand that a contemporary cause—her request—embodies the ancient lineage while clothed in its current guise.
This is faulty in three respects:
15iigi. All was allegedly decided eons ago, precluding the possibility that a current effect is the result of a cause contemporaneous with or immediately preceding it, though Jack has always waffled unpredictably. Having never met anyone like Jill, he’s all the more erratic. His response to Jill has no traceable antecedents in her history, but also none in his.
15iigii. How should we construe the hard determinist reading of this situation: Jill makes a request, and she hears the response of something in her causal lineage (an anticipation of Jack); Jack hears and responds to a request from something in his past (an anticipation of Jill)? Or should we suppose that Jack and Jill are linked in a Leibnizian universe, so her request eternally entails his response? The Laplacian model of hard determinism postulates that independent causal streams perpetually evolve in ways determined by the evolution of their original conditions. Yet little or nothing is said about the convergence of previously independent streams, hence Jack’s relation to Jill when nothing in either lineage anticipates their responses to one another. Does hard determinism insinuate a Leibnizian solution: Jack and Jill are already bonded by eternally established internal relations? That would be inappropriate to a problem founded in a Laplacian assumption: that nature is an assembly of lineages, many that evolve and cross while others are mutually independent.
15iigiii. Add that the “omniscient” god invoked to locate sufficient causes for their exchange in ancient history is a deus ex machina, a philosophic conceit for which there is no confirming evidence. It seems plausible that our universe may be entirely closed, every next change a predictable (in principle) consequence of some or all that has gone before. But it is also plausible that nature is perpetually reoriented for reasons that are situational and contingent. Emergence may be a principal reason for its indeterminacy. For if each emergent property has sufficient causal conditions, it may happen that effects are imperfectly foreseeable when two emergents, both tentative and disoriented, engage one another.
Is everything exactly determined, given the precise specification of values for relevant variables and laws controlling their evolution? Or do we merely opine that determination is exact because we fear the irregularity of a world where interaction’s effects are probable only?
15iii. Situations that are principally individual and intrapsychic: There are three points of reference: iiia. initiative and invention in art; iiib. resistance; and iiic. ordinary decisions. Deliberation is often their context, though impulse is commonplace when making everyday decisions.
15iiia. Initiative and invention in art: Responses to surprise are defensive if we’re uneasy, but provocative if we’re artists or entrepreneurs seeing opportunities rather than threats. Initiatives express their control of a medium: metal or clay. But could Bach, Cole Porter, or Henry Ford rightly say that his initiatives were his own? Current expressions take contemporary forms, but is that more than a disguise for ancient origins?
Some years ago, a gallery in New York exhibited nineteen (or so) Picasso portraits. All or most featured the head and shoulders of a single male subject painted in shades of black, white, and red. Most differed little from one another; they were, collectively, the record of an experiment in composition. The show might have been described as an historical record: portraiture as paleontology, Picasso’s renditions of an ancient form. But that appraisal would have missed the gallery’s aim: his ways of construing the form were the only reason for the exhibition. Can we save the gist of the determinist reading by making the same point with a different emphasis: was the aggressive style of the paintings prefigured by a different artist painting or dreaming eons ago? Who would that have been? Consider again the autonomous spaces—the conscious minds—that evolution and emergence have supplied. Most of us fill them with everyday tasks, sentiments, and memory. That jumble provides content for material reworked and refined by productive imaginations: body parts are familiar; artists see them differently.
Nietzsche, writing of eternal recurrence, affirmed that artistic styles are invented, forgotten, and recalled.25 But something elemental is implied by the distinction of productive and reproductive imagination.26 For we are, as he also said, creators of values and ideas. Artists innovate unpredictably while embellishing or augmenting familiar melodies, materials, or designs. Anton Diabelli supplied a waltz; Beethoven wrote an hour’s worth of variations.
15iiib. Resistance: Imagine someone challenged by an idea or design—a paragraph or drawing—of her creation. Exploratory steps were predictable, but now she’s thwarted by thought’s alien product: she doesn’t know how to develop or correct it. This is the impasse of writers or artists stymied by obstacles of their own making. They analyze, probe, or free associate, wanting insights that would leverage a useful change. Not having assured solutions, they experiment or surrender. Is the difficulty exaggerated when the struggle is intrapsychic, both sides occurring in one mind? These situations are remarkable only for pitting minds against themselves; they resemble every situation that confronts a thinker with data exceeding his or her ability to construe it. Resistant content is mastered when we discover an inkling of its motivating idea. Or the idea is obscure in itself, so we try alternate ways of refining it. Success is partial; many first efforts can’t be saved.
Finding myself provoked by something of my own making assimilates this example to those considered above: we address other people or things in puzzling situations. But examples of this sort are easily modified without losing their point: we shrink the situation to the scale of reflecting mind by supposing, as often happens, that the ideas to be clarified are conceived but uninscribed. Resolution evades us until initiative succeeds on the back of imagination: solutions dawn as we analogize, extrapolate, generalize, or free associate. Or we leverage a choice by citing a reason: the idea was too complicated; we’ve simplified it.
15iiic. Personal choices that are ordinary or arcane: Puzzling situations were the point of reference in the section above: how to respond to other people or things when they challenge one’s inventory of habitual or prepared responses. There are also the free choices made when circumstances are insufficient to decide an issue. Chocolate or vanilla, coffee or tea? Reality doesn’t care which choice it is, when eons haven’t been sufficient to fix these outcomes. They occur when history receives a supplement: a determinable (a property or situation having two or more possible expressions) receives a determinate expression because of a decision based on new information pertinent to a reason, interest, or value. Here are two examples: one cerebral, the other anecdotal.
Tycho Brahe made observations from which Kepler inferred that planetary orbits are elliptical rather than circular. The data in Brahe’s diaries were previously unknown; his inference was a startling departure from the assumption that planetary orbits are circular. Thought leapfrogged from Copernicus to Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo to Newton: understanding achieved determination (a specific hypothesis with confirming data) when a value (inquiry) provoked an extrapolation that was unprepared by centuries of reflection. Why was that possible? Because the interests, ideas, and values directing inquiry were applied innovatively, rather than mechanically: what could the data imply if not circularity, when each of its variations was long construed as less worth of Plato and God because of being a distortion? Thank Kepler’s imagination for exceeding all that previous history had conceived.
Choice intervenes when circumstances allow either of two or more determinations. Decision wouldn’t be required if every interest had only one possible satisfier, but reality is determinable in respect to many interests and values, hence to many reasons for acting. Walk or ride, coffee or tea: why choose one or the other? The answer may be habit, but it could be that there is new information pertinent to the reasons, interests, or values shaping one’s choices. Wanting something to do, I can’t decide between taking a walk or riding a bicycle. Choice decides: I mount the bike, only to realize that both tires are flat. Resolve is quick because desire is flexible; I’ll walk.
But isn’t choice conditioned by motives that are themselves historically conditioned? That is so but qualified because interests and values are responsive to new information. Kepler was looking for eccentric orbits or willing to consider them; Brahe’s records supplied confirming data. The ankle that kept me from walking is better now; I’ll test it. Hard determinists resist the distinction between antecedent conditions and our responsiveness to new evidence; they intone a message like that of Plato’s Meno,27 though orientations change when information is acquired, not merely repackaged. Could one argue that deviations consequent on new information are never more than responses to antecedent conditions? That would be an inference with a name: post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Choice is always a risk, but less so when agents anticipate opportunities once unknown because information has revised our estimates of action’s likely effects. Assume that dark matter hides civilizations we shall eventually discover. Their ways will likely be strange to us, though we may decipher them well enough to respond to their messages in ways their agents comprehend. That won’t require innate ideas or determinist histories because imagination and inference will have bootstrapped us beyond every current limit. Physicists swooned, then adjusted, when Newton reflected after seeing an apple fall. Something comparable will happen again, probably many times.
15iiid. Disputed variables: We invite confusion when these five variables have contested implications for free will:
15iiidi. Information: Any information that extends understanding of one’s self or circumstances is a basis for initiatives that may have no precedent in one’s history. The inciting information may concern one’s lineage or matters having no precedent within it. Either origin may be decisive in fixing a response to a problematic situation or for determining a determinable’s expressions. I hadn’t known that my grandmother was a gambler: should I caution my daughter?
Information is a baseline for discussions of free will because this is the least contentious way of escaping the determination of one’s lineage. Genes determine many things without being known to the agents affected, but many aspects of one’s lineage have no effects unless they‘re known. Do other variables have an equivalent force, and if so do they have it principally or only because they too are fueled by information that exceeds whatever is or was known of an agent’s history? A principal example is the interplay of information and values. Suppose that values are (at least) inclinations to favor or resist a thought or practice, and that new information prompts one to alter an established habit out of regard for value: valuing health, open to the news that speed, sugar, and inactivity are unhealthy, I change. Add that this functional relationship is sometimes reversed: information alters values. Naïve about climate change before learning of global warming, I trade my car for a bicycle.
15iiidii. Reasons: Reasons are justifiers. They are second-order causes: exercise is a cause of health; but citing health is a cause of exercise. Aristotle’s notion of final cause is often criticized for its implication that finality is a process directing change, but that understanding is correct when the cause of an outcome is the intention directing it. The condition provoking an intention may have had a succession of antecedents, but many reasons driving it are current: one drinks because thirsty. Could one choose otherwise? That often happens: I’m thirsty, but I’ll wait. What makes the choice possible? Muscular—functional—control.
Here too information is decisive. Tomorrow’s game has everyone excited, but heavy snow has fractured the roof of the stadium; the game is cancelled, I won’t go. My decision is responsive to reasons because my reasons are sensitive to news. The information need only be news to me, not new in itself: I’m surprised by a sequence of red-haired babies, though my wife had chosen baby clothes of a matching shade because she knew the likely outcome. But she’s an in-law and not herself affected by the determining blood line; it was information, not inspiration or antecedents, that enabled her choice.
15iiidiii. Values: Values are the set points of the body/brain’s positive and negative feedback systems, but also the sensitive leading edge of thought, choice, and action. They impel some actions (call a friend), while inhibiting others (ignore insults). Those rooted in metabolic processes are stable if one is healthy, though they change with illness or age. Others are labile because determined by socialization or information: much of current technology was unforeseeable; wanting it was nowhere in our history.
15iiidiv. Imagination: How could we establish that imagination—invention, analogy, or extrapolation—is more than the quasi-grammatical operation of reconfiguring available colors, shapes, ideas, or words? Suppose that many new musical compositions are prefigured in the eighty-eight keys of a standard piano: for why, if so, aren’t they apparent? Because each sequence of notes needs discovery and exposure. A note-sequencing machine will generate occasional phrases of musical interest, but hear the difference when its software program is exposed to bird song or ululating voices. Would it have been musically productive without that information? Only in a random—accidental—way. Why this difference? Because imagination is the power for bringing the brain/machine’s innate heuristics to bear on this new information. More than a combinatorial faculty, it is musically sensitive; its innate or acquired aesthetic values make it musically selective.
15iiidv. Functions: Consider the facility apparent in actors, dancers, and athletes: they move supplely; they’re self-controlled. Each of their neurological-muscular capacities has operational integrity that exceeds its causal lineage in the respect that each is lodged altogether within agents who control their expressions. Is this the mechanical evolution of complex systems? No: choice and action exceed a causal lineage when impelled by information: one learns Wolof or French, not American English, because that is the content of sounds children hear. Hard determinists emphasize lineages of sufficient causes; they pass over the difference between causes and the determinable capacities activated by information, values, or initiative. There is always history in the beginning, but history is penetrated by accidents, information, and opportunities: one learns baseball, not cricket, because that is the game locals play. The god who sees us at the beginning of life only discerns all we can do given our innate capacities and antecedents; it doesn’t see all our opportunities or all we shall choose to do or be.
15iv. Hard determinism is defeated: We have four reasons for discounting the hard determinist claim that there are no expressions of free will:
15iva. Living beings have an inside protected from things outside by a membrane that resists intrusions while filtering information and nutrients. That structure enabled the emergence of faculties for deliberation, judgment, choice, and will. Other animals have these powers to some degree, though not to their pitch in humans.
15ivb. The gestalts with which we address situations express personal orientations, hence histories, but also responses to current situations. They orient us in two ways: creating coherence by integrating the disparate matters thought or perceived and by creating frames in which the difference of figure and ground expresses an agent’s dominant values or concerns. A new or troubling situation disrupts a previously established gestalt; starting again, so to speak, a thinker finds his or her way to a different orientation, often one having no exact precedent. A bit of history—information in the previous gestalt—is suppressed. Is the information forgotten? Details may be remembered; the orientation is often lost. This is creative destruction: previous assumptions are a drag on current perceptions, though a radical change in situations alters old persuasions. Yesterday’s stranger is today’s good friend.
Hard determinism is defeated at the first moment of addressing troubling situations. For superseding gestalts—however fragmentary and confused—disrupt the causal tide. We’re challenged to construe our circumstances in terms relevant to our values and interests when they seem unprecedented in our history. What are we to do? Responses may be cautious, or unpredictable and daring to some degree. We deviate from established patterns: forgetting or ignoring standards that were once obligatory.
15ivc. Sheltering within barriers that defend our vital interiors, we are causes that respond to other things or plan our engagements with them. Novelty provokes us. Addressing problematic situations, choosing among a determinable’s possible expressions, we rely on information that justifies our reasons, interests, or values. We err sometimes, but the choice is ours.
15ivd. Is there, nevertheless, a way to vindicate hard determinism? Yes: argue, with evidence, that the causal version of Leibnizian holism is valid. (The whole is a differentiated, dynamic entity in spacetime, rather than a complex, static idea in the mind of God.) There are, this implies, no independent causal streams; no encounters such that agents address situations for which they are unprepared. It implies that surprise or apparent novelty are mistaken impressions, and that personal experiments (Jack and Jill) are conceits. For all is entangled; everything is cause and effect of everything else and has been since the beginning of time. But this is a dream, an idea distinct from the more plausible surmise that nature is still marked by the effects of its early history when, prior to its expansion, all was tightly packed. Is it still wholly compressed; or is it true that there are no precedents for many agent encounters because independent causal streams did form and often converge?
16. Last Thoughts
This book has a simple aim: establish within the context of soft determinism that humans have autonomy and free will. Autonomy isn’t controversial, every animal has a degree of it; self-maintenance and sociality are common to all. Yet autonomy may be automatic because programmed, hence insufficient to secure free will and all it implies: inhibition, initiative, invention, responsibility, credit or blame. Many choices are routine; habit explains them. But what decides the issue if assembled causes are indifferent while inclinations are mutually opposed? That leaves deliberation as the source of viable alternatives; choice expresses its judgments, values, and priorities.
Mind was formed by causes; aren’t its decisions also caused? Yes, though there may have been little or no germ of current determinants in their antecedents. Composers trained in classical harmonies were disoriented by Schoenberg’s twelve-tone scale. History was no guide; their choices were experiments. This point generalizes: anyone facing a situation for which he or she is unprepared responds reactively—without thought—or the response is delayed while interests and values are calibrated. Judicious responses are distinctive and personal because the sensibility that emerged with experience is a dense, self-organizing formation, a barrier to history that generates priorities of its own. Do situations of this sort often arise? They occur whenever speakers await a reply after saying something for which interlocutors have no answers: “Will you marry me”?, “Do you like quantum gravity”?
Freedom is the power to address other people and things in ways appropriate to oneself. This is a creative force, one determining mind’s powers in the margin that remains when material obstacles, natural laws, and social rules or roles are acknowledged. Why credit volition with responsibility for one’s psychic and behavioral identity? Because this is the fulcrum for initiative, invention, cooperation, or dissent. Is will always free in ways congenial to soft determinism, free because the conditions for choice are internal to autonomous agents? That isn’t sure: it’s not a contradiction that events in the early universe initiated a lineage still vital in our time, something that infiltrates the internal spaces of some, all, or most people. This concession won’t pacify hard determinists because their thesis—nothing is “up to us”—needs more than this possibility to justify it.
1 John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” Psychological Review 3 (1896), 357–70.
2 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in: Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 70.
3 Jay Schulkin, Effort: A Behavioral Neuroscience Perspective on the Will (Mahwah: Psychology Press, 2006), pp. 56–61.
4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Citadel, 1956), pp. 409–534.
5 See Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), for a review of most contemporary views.
6 See, for example, Christian List, Why Free Will is Real (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019); and David Weissman, “Christian List, Why Free Will is Real,” Metaphilosophy 50 (2019), 743–47.
7 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), pp. 155–58.
8 Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), pp. 33–37.
9 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1001b-1002a14, p. 729.
10 C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes I–VI, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934–35), V, paras. 5.440–5.442, pp. 294–96.
11 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 1.
12 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), pp. 121–27.
13 Peter Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 16.
14 G. W. V. Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), para. 39, p. 154.
15 Plato, Republic, Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 514a-517e, pp. 747–50.
16 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 12–13.
17 Ibid., p. 469.
18 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1041a7–1041b32, pp. 810–11.
19 See René Descartes, The Geometry of René Descartes, trans. David Eugene Smith and Marcia L. Latham (New York: Dover, 1954).
20 Pierre Simon Laplace, An Essay on Probabilities, trans. F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory (New York: Dover, 1951), p. 4.
21 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 52.
22 Shuntaro Izawa et al., “REM sleep–active MCH neurons are involved in forgetting hippocampus-dependent memories,” Science 365:6459 (2019), 1308–13, https://www.doi.org/10.1126/science.aax9238
23 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Volume 1 (London: HardPress, 2016), pp. 450–63.
24 See Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essay on Architecture (London: HardPress, 2013).
25 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 322.
26 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), p. 165.
27 Plato, Meno, pp. 353–85.