In this episode of Life, the Universe & Everything Else, the LUEE hosts take the day off to enjoy a wonderful Canada Day, which allows hosts Robert Shindler, Richelle McCullough, and Gem Newman a chance to look back at the past year to share with you a couple of presentations from our vault.
This is a talk that I gave at TEDxManitoba on 9 February 2012. Below the video you can find the full text of the talk, with annotations and sources provided.
As a kid, I loved playing Monopoly. I was great at it, too! I was very nearly unbeatable.
I remember one game, looking down at the board and wondering how I was ever going to win. My mother had just pulled a $500 bill out from where she'd hid it between the couch cushions, my stepfather's hotels were crowding two sides of the board, and my houses on Mediterranean and Baltic just weren't paying off. How could this be? I thought to myself. I'm a smart kid. I'm great at Monopoly! But the odds were stacked against me, and the situation seemed impossible.
But that's what made me such a great Monopoly player, I guess. Somehow, I'd always pull out a win in the end. Thinking back, I don't remember losing a single game!
At some point, we all need to come to terms with the fact that maybe things didn't happen quite the way we remember them. As humans, we're just not that great at telling what's true from what we want to be true. Let's be frank: I was ten. I probably sucked at Monopoly. But I remember being awesome.
As Yale neurologist Dr. Steven Novella notes, "Our memories are not an accurate recording of the past. They are constructed from imperfect perception filtered through our beliefs and biases... Our memories serve more to support our beliefs rather than inform them."[Source]
We're not great observers, we humans, and we tend to pay much more attention to data that confirm our preconceived notions than to details that don't fit our theories. We have a marked tendency to remember the hits and forget the misses; presumably why people like Sylvia Browne and John Edward remain so popular.
It's for this reason that independent confirmation is one of the cornerstones of science.
I'm not a scientist, but I do think of myself as a "science cheerleader". And science needs cheerleaders, for a couple of reasons.
First, because it's important for everyone to have a basic scientific understanding. Professor Art Hobson put it this way: "the most crucial decisions [in industrialized nations] concern science and technology, and in democracies, citizens decide."[Source]
The second reason that science needs cheerleaders is that it is so oft maligned. Scientific skepticism is often portrayed as cold, unfeeling; antithetical to compassion or human emotion. Those with a penchant for whimsical nostalgia stubbornly insist that life was better and that times were simpler before science got all muddled up in society.[Note]
Could it be that they're right?
Science is the quest to understand ourselves, our universe, and our place in it. Science is curious by nature, for its goal is to figure out what's really true—but for that reason, science must also be skeptical. It insists that we shouldn't simply take claims at face value, but instead we should proportion our belief in a proposition to the evidence supporting it.
A series of studies conducted in the 1980s found that roughly 80% of people consider themselves above average drivers.[Source][Source] A 1987 study of Australian workers found that only 1% of them rated their workplace performance as below average.[Source] Unless I badly misremember how numbers are meant to work, it seems to me that something very near to half of them are mistaken.
The way that we see the world is coloured by many things, our own egos foremost among them. Perhaps when it comes to Monopoly games we can be forgiven if we see ourselves through rose-coloured glasses. Concern may become warranted when our callous assumption that we outperform our contemporaries affects the quality of our work or the safety of our driving.
But what about when it really counts? What if your child is sick? There are clearly many cases where we simply cannot afford to let our petty biases influence the way we see the world. And that's where science comes in.
While it's true that public support for science has remained generally high over the last several decades, and scientific literacy has been increasing more-or-less steadily, there have been some troubling developments in the popular media and in culture at large.[Note]
The image of the "mad scientist" is deeply ingrained in our culture, and probably dates to Mary Shelley's celebrated Frankenstein, in which the relentless pursuit of knowledge leads inexorably to unspeakable horrors. This idea is not a new one. Anti-science messages have been with us for hundreds of years.
Here's the problem: science is seen by many as unnatural, inaccessible, or even sinister. Scientists are widely regarded as arrogant, superior, or closed-minded.
What's the common thread here? Aside from being totally awesome, that is. Any guesses?
As unbelievable as it might seem, all of these stories are riddled with anti-science or anti-reason messages. Even in science fiction, the genre that inspired so many of the technologies and conveniences that we take for granted today, it is common to see science portrayed as sinister and destructive.
In Star Trek, a series that celebrates human ingenuity, Spock is set up as a straw man, his much lauded Vulcan logic inevitably knocked down by Kirk's emotionally driven human pluck. When it comes time to choose between thinking with your head and thinking with your heart, the message is clear: human emotion wins every time.[Note]
In Jurassic Park, the audience is shown the consequence of scientists "playing God". As in Frankenstein, disaster is the inevitable result of scientific excess.
In Lost, John Locke constantly admonishes the other characters to have faith, that they are all on the island for some mysterious purpose. And, because it's a fictional story, it turns out that he's right.
Oh, and then there was that episode of The X-Files that showed faith in the supernatural triumphing over the skeptic... Which one was that again...? Oh, right: all of them. Don't get me wrong: I loved The X-Files, but seriously—it was always a monster? Every time?
And even Scooby-Doo, a longtime favourite among skeptics of the paranormal, isn't blameless. Recent adaptations are much more likely to feature real monsters than grumpy old groundskeepers who would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!
But perhaps the most egregious example of anti-science rhetoric in popular fiction is found in Ronald Moore's 2003 reimagining of Battlestar Galactica.
While dramatically enjoyable, the emphasis of faith over reason was a thread that wound its way through the entire series. What's worse, the final episodes first hinted then proclaimed that in a society that embraces science and technology, a technologically driven holocaust is inevitable. This has all happened before, we are told, and it will all happen again.
The series culminates (spoiler alert) with the entire human race abandoning all technology in favour of founding a nomadic hunter-gatherer society. Science fiction becomes luddite fantasy—famine, disease, and the concomitant contraction of the human lifespan be damned.
This message is getting through to the public, loud and clear. A 2001 NSF survey found that 50 percent of Americans believe "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith".[Source] I find this distressing.
From The Terminator to The Matrix to 28 Days Later, the idea that science will lead to some sort of technopocalypse is ubiquitous these days. And after all, why not? Isn't there a grain of truth to the idea?
Perhaps you might rightly scoff at Ben Stein's contention in the pseudo-documentary Expelled that the science of evolution led to the Nazi holocaust...[Note]
...but what say you when the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are laid at scientists' feet? Who can help but shiver upon hearing Oppenheimer's words? "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." How can we answer such a charge?
In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were forbidden the knowledge of good and evil, but their curiosity got the better of them. According to this story, it was our thirst for knowledge that led to the fall.
Curiosity, we're told, is what killed the cat.
Knowledge can, of course, be used for good or for ill. Scientists invented the bomb—but it was politicians who called for it, taxpayers who funded it, and the military who saw it deployed. If you want to lay death and destruction solely at the feet of scientists, I don't think that you're playing fair.[Note]
"Curiosity killed the cat." How unjust!
That we should be incurious is perhaps the single most damaging message that our children receive from popular culture. Curiosity is one of the greatest assets that we as a species possess. It fuels free inquiry! It fuels innovation! Without nurturing our curiosity we risk retarding our progress as a civilisation.
Knowledge is not evil, nor is the pursuit of it. Knowledge of the way this wondrous world really works equips us to better our own situation and that of every other living being with whom we share this planet.
"Curiosity killed the cat." You would be hard pressed to find an idiom that irritates me more.
You want to know what probably didn't kill the cat? Diabetes, hyperthyroidism, intestinal parasites! For every cat killed by curiosity, I would wager that there are hundreds who have been saved by veterinary practices unknown a century ago.
Curiosity cured the cat!
Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, is credited with saving one billion people from starvation. We have indoor plumbing and flush toilets, and hand-washing, and the germ theory of disease, all of which save countless lives every day. These victories aren't just victories for science; they are victories for humanity. Science wins this fight.
As for the arrogance and closed-mindedness of scientists: I find this charge frankly startling, for in the process of skeptical inquiry I see the most amazing intellectual humility. The success of the scientific endeavour requires us to admit to our human foibles and failings, our petty biases and conceits. It is only in accounting for these human weaknesses that we make progress. Science is rooted in curiosity, and one cannot be curious without being humble. To wonder how something works, first you must admit that you don't know.
So if science is so successful in improving our lives, why does science still have such an image problem? Why do people fail to understand that science isn't the enemy of nature, but merely the study of it?
It probably isn't news to you that the media has a huge effect on how we think and behave. That's what advertising is all about, after all, and study after study shows that it works, even when we think that it doesn't.
In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan laments that "Scepticism does not sell well. A bright and curious person who relies entirely on popular culture to be informed about something like Atlantis is hundreds or thousands of times more likely to come upon a fable treated uncritically than a sober and balanced assessment."[Source]
In a culture so steeped in irrationality, a culture that prizes faith over evidence, it can be difficult to make progress in promoting science. Right now, the greatest obstacle to the public understanding of science is the way it's presented in the media.
So what if our stories had skeptical, pro-science messages? What if they encouraged the audience to think critically, rather than just nodding along? What if the heroes of our stories weren't those who simply fought for what they believed in, but those who had the courage to ask themselves why it was that they believed it?
We have the power to reignite the public passion for learning new things. We need to teach everyone (everyone) what science is, at its core. That may sound daunting, but it's really a very simple idea: Beliefs should be supported by good evidence.
None of us are perfect, and so if we're serious about figuring out what's really true we need to understand our own biases and apply a basic skepticism to all claims to knowledge. We need to avoid the temptation to look only for the evidence that confirms what we already believe. Or, as Randall Munroe put it, "You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right."[Source]
And we already have allies in the popular media.
On the front lines, I see novelists like the excellent Robert Sawyer (from whom you heard only a moment ago) and the unbelievably popular J.K. Rowling.
Sawyer is famous for stories that show rationalism triumphing over superstition. In the Harry Potter series, Rowling provides an excellent role-model in Hermione Granger, whose success is due not to some innate talent, but to hard work and a willingness to question popular wisdom.
There are musicians like George Hrab and the inimitable Tim Minchin who encourage us to be skeptical of extraordinary claims. Sara Mayhew infuses her manga with a love of science. Randall Munroe and Zach Weiner pen comics that make us laugh and make us think. We have Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson working to communicate science to people of all ages. Adam Savage, Jaimie Hyneman, and rest of the gang at MythBusters remind us how exciting it can be to figure out what's really true.
At this point, you might be wondering what you can do to help.
Be curious. Question everything. Prize learning over simply knowing, because even things that we think we know can turn out to be wrong. As Carl Sagan said, "it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."[Source]
With everything that science has done for us, it deserves our support. So when you hear someone complain that science is arrogant, closed-minded, or dangerous: speak up. Because you know better.
[9] Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, page 16
Notes
[1] They set science and rationalism here and they set mystery and compassion there and demand that you choose between them, even though such a choice makes no sense. Science is no more a cold, unfeeling monstrosity than is a screwdriver or a pair of spectacles. Science is a tool that helps us overcome some of our inherent limitations. And yet, the idea that life was somehow better, humbler, and more existentially satisfying in some misty, bygone age is pervasive in our society.
[2] In our culture, the scientifically illiterate can get on by saying that they're just not "science people". Basic scientific literacy is very important, but ScienceDaily reports that in North America it sits around 30%. It's perfectly acceptable in our culture for a person to be scientifically illiterate, but just imagine what it would be like to have a similar attitude toward those who can't read or write.
[3] To learn more about the Straw Vulcan, I refer you to the TVTropes page that coined the term. I also highly recommend Julia Galef's talk from Skepticon 4, The Straw Vulcan.
[4] For more about the absurdity that is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, I refer you to Expelled Exposed, a site created and maintained by the National Center for Science Education. This site cheerfully exposes the anti-science propaganda behind this so-called documentary, while managing at the same time to be an enjoyable read! I doff my proverbial hat to Eugenie Scott and the rest of the folks at the NCSE for their tireless work in combating creationism masquerading as science.
[5] Neil deGrasse Tyson expressed this sentiment well. "Scientists don't lead marching armies!" he said. "Scientists don't invade other nations! Yes, we had scientists who invented the bomb, but somebody had to pay for the bomb, and that was taxpayers, that was war bonds. There was a political action that called for it. But everyone blames the scientists! ... At the end of the day, a discovery itself is not 'moral', it's the application of it that has to pass that test." (This quotation is taken from an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson at Montclair Kimberley Academy. The interivew was conducted by a rare out-of-character Stephen Colbert, and is fantastic. You can watch it here.)
What follows is a transcript of my presentation from the Winnipeg Skeptics' second annual SkeptiCamp Winnipeg, an open conference celebrating science and critical thinking.
Free Will: What is it?
So what is free will? Well, it depends who you ask.
Free Will: Three Views
I'll briefly sketch outlines of three views of free will in this presentation.
The first is that of "Libertarian Agency". While many off-the-cuff definitions of free will seem to quickly descend into tautology, by far the most cogent definition of free will that I've come across was offered by Apologist J.P. Moreland.
The second position that I'll discuss (the dissenting view) is the determinist position. In brief: we do not have free will.
Finally, I'll take a moment to introduce the compatibilist position, which states that determinism can be reconciled with free will. This is the position taken by many modern naturalist philosophers, such as Daniel C. Dennett.
Libertarianism
[Insert Ron Paul joke here.]
In his essay "Naturalism and Libertarian Agency", Moreland describes his "libertarian" view of free will. He insisted that our actions do not have prior causes: you are the ultimate cause of your own actions. You can initiate and/or stop yourself from initiating any action. We are all "little gods", "unmoved movers".
Now, you may ask why I'm citing an apologist to define free will. Well, theologians tend to spend a lot of time thinking about free will, as it is central to theodicy and many other works of apologetics. I'll be dealing primarily with libertarianism for the purposes of this talk, but I'll briefly discuss a different, compatibilist view of free will later on.
Libertarian agency is also called contra-causal free will, because it holds that our decisions are not bound (or "determined") by a causal chain of events. However, if our minds (and therefore our decision-making processes) are entirely the product of our brains (which are made of matter), it is difficult to imagine how our thoughts could be completely free, or causally unbound. For this reason, free will is often linked with dualism. Within this framework, the "soul" or "spirit" (which is not composed of matter, and is therefore freed from causation) is the "free agent" in decision making.
Free Will: Do we have it?
"Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."
—Arthur Schopenhauer?
Einstein attributed this to Schopenhauer but, as often happens, it seems that the original source is slightly less pithy.1 Regardless, it certainly captures the sentiment.
Do we have free will? I don't think so. Not the libertarian kind, anyway.
Laplace's Demon
"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 any moment knew all forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were 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."
—Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
Determinism
Determinism holds that we live in a causal universe, and that we are not somehow exempt from that web of causality. Our thoughts and deeds are fully caused. Our decisions are the effects of prior causes, and the causes of future effects.
Put simply, determinism is the position that your choices, like all other aspects of the macroscopic universe, have causal antecedents; that is to say, given the same options and the same set of preconditions, you will always make the same choice.
But we still make choices. If you're at the café for lunch, and you decide to get a regular Pepsi instead of your usual Diet Pepsi, there was a reason for that: probably many reasons, that all came together in that one decision. In fact, the question, "Why did you do that?" really only makes sense within a deterministic framework.
Remember: determinism doesn't say that you're some sort of mindless automaton with no mental life. You still deliberate over choices, your past experiences still play a role, you'll still sometimes make snap judgements based on your emotions instead of thinking things through—but all of these factors are fully caused, and causally affect your decision-making process in turn.
Determinism does constrain you, but it only constrains you to act within your own character—which, upon reflection, doesn't seem so bad.
The Process of Deliberation
Within the deterministic framework, your decision may be influenced by a multitude of factors. Some of these factors may be consciously recognized, while you may be completely unaware of others. Regardless, from the determinist perspective, your decisions are the result of a calculus. A whole bunch of variables go in, and a decision comes out.
Let's contrast this with contra-causal free will: you are waiting to cross the street, and the light says "Don't Walk". Perhaps you're running late for a meeting, perhaps you've been standing in line all day and you're feeling impatient, and perhaps you were recently issued a citation by a police officer for jaywalking. Does any of this factor in to your decision to cross against the light? If you're a "libertarian agent", the answer must be "no" (or at the very least, "not necessarily"). If you are an unmoved mover, you simply choose.
In many ways, a free choice is a meaningless choice.
When you're weighing your options, this is a deterministic process. In fact, "weighing" one's options is an excellent analogy for the way decision-making works within a deterministic framework.
Even though it might seem like a close call, 30 grams of lead and 15 grams of gold will always weigh more than 5 grams of silver and 35 grams of copper. If you weighed them a second time, could things come out differently?
I'll expand a little on the example that I used earlier (which I stole from the guys at Reasonable Doubts, by the way). Let's say you're ordering lunch, and you're trying to choose whether you're going to have a Pepsi or a Diet Pepsi. Your decision may be influenced by how you're feeling about yourself, by whether your spouse has recently made a comment about your waistline, by whether you have a strong dislike for the aftertaste common to diet sodas, by whether you suffer from diabetes or chronic hypoglycaemia, by whether you have a sweet tooth, by whether your father used to drink a Diet Pepsi while he worked on the car, by whether you just saw a magazine with a really slim model on the cover, or by whether you've decided that aspartame (or high-fructose corn syrup, for that matter) is part of a secret government mind-control project.
Do we have options in a deterministic universe? Does it make sense to say that you chose the Diet Pepsi over the Pepsi? Doesn't that imply that things could have worked out differently?
Well, in a sense, things could have worked out differently—had a different set of contingencies been in play. When choices or options are presented to us, we don't necessarily know which we will choose, but that doesn't make our choice free from causal influence.
Imagine that you are standing before a door. You might say, "Maybe there's a person behind that door." Either there is or there isn't; only one of those propositions is true, and which is true has already been determined. Your statement, "Maybe there's a person behind that door," reflects only your ignorance of which of these options has been determined. Similarly, "Maybe I'll have the Diet Pepsi," doesn't have to reflect "real" options; it may simply reflect your own uncertainty about which option you will eventually choose.
The Evidence for Causal Determinism
"Yes, we have a soul. But it's made of lots of tiny robots."
—Giulio Giorello
Although they are not without their critics, the studies of Haynes and Libet have provided evidence that decisions that we think we're making are actually made before we're even aware of them. This suggests that the "choice" that we consciously experience may be more a self-report, an epiphenomenon.
There is also a significant body of evidence from the field of psychology showing that our decisions can be predictably, causally affected by psychological priming and by transcranial magnetic stimulation.
There is also the case of Phineas Gage, a nineteenth century railway foreman who was seriously injured on the job. In an accidental explosion, he had a steel rod blown in through one eye and out through the top of his head. Although he survived, his personality and behaviour were severely affected. According to the attending physician, he became profane and impulsive.2
This handful of examples serves to demonstrate that our decisions are not freed from the web of causation.
And where does does this leave libertarian free will? To again quote Laplace, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là."
Common Objections to Determinism
"If determinism is true, our concepts of morality and justice are meaningless! We would have no responsibility for our actions!"
There are two main problems that I have with this objection. First of all, it isn't true. While it may be that we can't assign ultimate blame to people for their actions, even actions that we may find morally repugnant, there are several ethical systems which don't rely on assigning ultimate responsibility to the actors involved (consequentialism, for example, or even virtue ethics).
As far as justice goes, while a punitive system of justice makes no sense within a deterministic framework, a correctional system does. We can also focus on the prevention of crime. A system of justice based upon retribution avails us nothing.
Second, even if it were true that our concepts of morality and justice would fall by the wayside within the deterministic framework, that's not actually an argument against the truth of determinism. This is what it's known as an argument from final consequences, a fairly common logical fallacy.
In fact, many of the other arguments levelled against determinism come in the form of the argument from final consequences: "If determinism is true, then I'm just a robot!" Yup. I guess so. "If people think that their actions are determined, they're more likely to cheat and steal!" Probably true, actually, based upon some recent psychological studies. But again, that's not really an argument.
"But what about the soul?"
I'm more or less assuming monism for the purposes of the talk. I think that the principle of parsimony and fairly solid neurological evidence suggests monism over dualism. Dualism really falls apart when examined in light of modern psychology and neuroscience. It is a fact that core personality attributes can be altered by a physical change to the brain. The soul, if it exists, would seem to be completely redundant.
"Quantum indeterminacy. That is all."
It is true that quantum indeterminacy may pose a problem for a strict interpretation of determinism.3 The quantum uncertainty gambit is a red herring, however, in that it actually does nothing to rescue free will.
Modern physics tells us that there are genuinely indeterminate events that occur on a quantum level, so there may be a sense in which (on a very small scale) events are not strictly deterministic. But there are two primary reasons to think that this has no bearing on the issue of free will. First of all, that quantum indeterminacy seems to cancel out at the macroscopic level. Neurons and synapses, while small, are not at all likely to be impacted by this uncertainty. Second, even if there is some way in which quantum indeterminacy may have some impact on the functioning of the brain, how would a random, indeterminate event open the door for free will? As Jeremy Beahan, Adjunct Instructor of Philosophy at Kendall College, put it:
An indeterminate event is even more frightening than a determinate event, because even in determinate events you can say, "Hey, look, my past experiences, the influence of my environment, everything like that goes into this choice." A genuinely indeterminate event, if that could affect consciousness, then that's something that just happened. And something that happens randomly is not the same thing as freedom.
"Determinism is unfalsifiable."
Of all of these criticisms, this is the one that I find most coherent. However, I still disagree. Lab studies can and do show predictable, and replicable causal influence on our decision making. Now, you may well object that influenced does not mean determined. I have two responses to that: First, I would contend that given the obvious difficulties in controlling for all variables when conducting these tests, we shouldn't expect to get a 100% determined outcome. The physics of the brain is immensely complex. Second, if our decisions can be even influenced by factors outside of our understanding or control, how can they be called in any meaningful sense "free"?
Saying that we may be influenced, but there's still perhaps a tiny place for a free agent to make free decisions really boils down to a free-will-of-the-gaps argument.
I have also encountered other objections, but time constraints do not allow me to discuss them at length.4
Compatibilism
There are some definitions of free will that are compatible with determinism.
Rather than asserting that a decision could have come out differently even had all of the contingencies been the same (the libertarian position), compatibilists may define "free will" simply as an agent's capacity to act in a manner that is not coerced or restrained.
Daniel Dennett articulates his two-stage model of decision making in his essay, "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want":
[W]hen we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent... Those considerations ... then figure in a reasoning process, and … ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.
That's not only compatible with determinism, that is determinism!
Free Will: Do we have it?
Again, it depends what you mean.
We've looked at libertarian agency, we've looked at determinism, and we've looked at compatibilism, which attempts to marry the two.
Libertarianism? Certainly not.
Why I'm a Determinist
To wrap up, I'll briefly recap the three reason that I come down (provisionally) on the side of determinism.
First of all, given that our brains are made of "stuff", and our minds seem to be entirely the product of our brains, we're left without any known mechanism for free choice, from a contra-causal perspective.
Second, we have solid evidence from psychology and neurology that our decisions are not causally free, and can be strongly influenced by factors outside of our understanding or control.
And finally, we already acknowledge, both in our legal systems and in our quotidian lives, that there are reasons for our choices. Those reasons serve as explanations for our actions precisely because they have a causal influence on our decision-making.
Remember...
Either your actions are determined or they're not—but you are no more a robot if you believe in determinism than if you believe in free will.
"A theory about a thing does not change the thing the theory is about."
Harlow, J.M. 1868. "Recovery from the Passage of an Iron Bar through the Head". Publications of the Massachusetts Medical Society. 2:339–342.
Libet, B., Gleason, C.A., Wright, E.W., Pearl, D.K. 1983. "Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act". Brain. 106 (3):623–642. PMID 6640273. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273
Dennett, D. 1981. "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want". Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. MIT Press.
Moreland, J.P. 1997. "Naturalism and Libertarian Agency". Philosophy & Theology. 10, 2. http://afterall.net/papers/490937
Schopenhauer, A. 1839. "Prize Essay on Freedom of the Will".
Notes
1 A more accurate translation of Schopenhauer would be:
You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing."
—Arthur Schopenhauer, "Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will"
2 I hesitate to mention Phineas Gage, as there exists so much exaggeration and distortion surrounding his case, with both the naturalists and the dualists of his time citing it in support of their claims. A careful review of the facts, however, supports the claim that specific damage to the brain results in specific damage to the mind and specific changes to personality.
To be clear, misinformation about the Gage case is not limited to proponents of dualism, with some (admittedly minor) misstatements of fact being presented even by the folks at Reasonable Doubts. That in mind, even a conservative reading of the known facts supports a naturalistic understanding of the mind. Although he misremembered the date of Gage's death (which I wouldn't count remarkable, save that it has been noted by several critics), Dr. John Harlow's account of the events seem balanced and fairly reliable, and supports (in my opinion) the central contention of this presentation.
Harlow writes:
The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was "no longer Gage."
3 Proponents of some sort of quantum free will often point out that, since the advent of quantum physics, we can no longer be said to live in a clockwork universe. Perhaps it's trite of me to say so, but I think that certainly we can! When we look at clockwork, we see gears turning in a determined fashion, interlocking, all connected. We see inevitability. But, with our understanding of quantum physics in mind, we know that every clock ever commissioned was subject to the same quantum indeterminacy—and yet its gears continued to turn, day in, day out.
"If determinism is true, then the future is fixed. We couldn't change anything!"
In a sense, that's true. But don't despair: the future will still be shaped by the present, just as the present is shaped by the past. Our actions may be causally determined, but those actions still impact the thoughts and deeds of others. It's important not to confuse determinism with predeterminism or fatalism. You're no one's marionette. I'm not suggesting that your path is laid out for you: just that you will forge your own path, and that there is a path that you will forge.
"But I feel like I have free will!"
Our senses are fallible! We may seem to have free will, but we also seem to have a complete visual field, when in fact we each have a fairly sizeable blind spot in each eye. Memory seems to accurately record events, but psychological studies continue to demonstrate that it is fickle and unreliable.
"What does it matter if we don't have free will? How could this possibly be relevant?"
First off, I think that understanding that nobody is "perfectly free" to make choices might allow us to move from a justice system that is less punitive and more focused on reformation of criminals and prevention of crime, which I think that any person in their more lucid moments would agree is a step in the right direction.
Second, exploring new areas of knowledge has proved beneficial in the past, even when no immediate application of this knowledge is readily apparent. There could be medical/neurological applications, perhaps. Determinism also makes the idea of general artificial intelligence plausible, which I find to be a hopeful prospect. I don't think that it's ever a mistake to nurture intellectual curiosity.
Third, it further hamstrings that (already quite stupid) theist response to the Problem of Evil: "Humans have free will, and thus they must have the choice to do evil. Evil is caused by free will." There are many other problems with that response, of course, but pointing out the false premise can't hurt.
