Problems of Indoctrination

Giles Fraser says something in this Guardian article defending male circumcision that illustrates how careful we should be when teaching and bringing up our children. Fraser, being half-Jewish through his father, was circumcised as a child and sees this as an element of his identity, so he can see why Jews would object to a ban on circumcision, it being a crucial element of their identity (he describes circumcision as a 'statement of identity'). And it would be irony of ironies if that denial of Jewish identity were to start in Germany, of all places (slight risk of Godwin-ing there), where a judge has outlawed the practice.

With that in mind he writes:

Circumcision marked me out as belonging. Years later, when my wife objected to the circumcision of our new son on the grounds that it was cruel and unnecessary, I reluctantly gave way. Intellectually, I knew that there was little left of "being Jewish" to protect. After all, my wife was not Jewish and I had become a Christian priest. Halachically, it made no sense.

For all of this, I still find it difficult that my son is not circumcised.

There's quite a lot to unpack here. I think he's observing how the physical evidence of the circumcision reinforces his 'belonging' to the Jewish community, even though he's now a Christian. He doesn't want to deny his son that sense of belonging, that connection with his ancestors, by denying him that 'mark'.

The odd thing is that his accession to his wife, reluctant though it was, is an admission that circumcision is cruel and unnecessary. So we can parse out his final sentence above to:

For all of this, I still find it difficult that my son is not treated cruelly and unnecessarily.

Or perhaps, less charitably, we remove the double negative:

For all of this, I still find it easy that my son is treated cruelly and unnecessarily.

He, like most of us, has been exposed to an environment where these things are not only treated normally but are actually venerated because they are the baggage of religion. The insidious effect of this upbringing is to normalise a harmful practice, and to propagate it. Male circumcision is comparatively mild compared to some practices in which humans have indulged, but we can see this effect can be even more harmful.

The other odd thing, mentioned in the judgement of the German court, is the effect of this 'branding', which is that 'people other than the child were determining its religious affiliation'. Now, plainly Fraser doesn't see this as so much of an imposition; and maybe he would point to himself as an example of how such a ritual does not lead ineluctably to determine one's religious affiliation. But just because it is not ineluctable does not mean it doesn't alter one's tendencies, and his difficulty in rejecting a cruel and unnecessary practice highlights that tendency. It is an infringement on another's free will, a coercion, and as such should be resisted by any religious person who takes free will seriously. He even acknowledges this somewhat:

Faith is about being a part of something wider than oneself. We are not born as mini rational agents in waiting, not fully formed as moral beings until we have the ability to think and choose for ourselves. We are born into a network of relationships that provide us with a cultural background against which things come to make sense. "We" comes before "I". We constitutes our horizon of significance.

Well, of course; but what, then, of free will?

The eagerness with which Churches seek to indoctrinate shows their hypocrisy; they pragmatically refute their championing of free will when they teach children their dogma. None of us are causa sui, and church men know this as well as anyone.

So, I'm not for ignoring religious teachings - that would be impractical and illiberal. But an honest education of children would involve an appraisal of all religious teachings in comparative studies, not a proselytising advocacy of one such teaching. I will begin to respect the Churches more when they eschew any opportunity to inculcate their doctrines into minors, and allow their ideas to thrive or fail in the adult marketplace of ideas.

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The Point of Free Will

I've been enjoying (or is it suffering?) another round of free will posts. Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne state the obvious, that contra-causal free will does not exist, and so conclude, contra compatibilists like Daniel Dennett, that free will does not exist. This is not entirely unreasonable, since free will is commonly considered to mean contra-causal free will. And maybe they're right, that it should be held to that definition; for philosophers to amend free will to some other thing allows theologians the get-out of pointing to many respected philos who believe in a free will that has nothing to do with their bankrupt theological concept of free will.

But I'm really not that fussed about the use of the term. I've previously discussed how contra causal free will makes little sense whether determinism is true or false. But rather than rescuing free will, I do think it's worth rescuing the point of free will; or why responsibility is worth laying.

In another piece Coyne says this:

I still see myself as a meat robot, and I don’t accept free will as meaning “I could have done something different had circumstances been different.” For in that sense computers and nearly all living organisms also have “free will”.

This strikes me as a slightly strange thing to say; the first part seems to contradict the second, since if he's a 'meat robot' then obviously robots too can have free will, and we surely treat many living organisms as if they too have free will. I treat my cats as if they have causal influence over their own behaviour, for example. And there's a sense in which Coyne is suggesting some kind of human exceptionalism; if we allow free will then I see no reason to deny it to computers and living organisms a priori. 

I suppose he means something more, that any computer or any living organism would have free will under the definition offered - it's too liberal. But I think this gives a clue to the point of free will; if a computer or living organism is sufficiently complex that it can change its behaviour because it has an internal guiding mechanism that responds in a certain way to external prompts, then we have a reason to talk about the machine having something like 'free will'. We aren't puppeteers in these circumstances, but nudge button operators.

What difference does this make? If we want to affect our futures, and I assume we all do, we need to differentiate between objects that can be remonstrated with and those that can't. Now, although I do remonstrate with my computer, I understand it's pointless: I could change how it operates, but it could not reflect on its actions. However, a more complicated computer, like Marvin, might be worth remonstrating with, if it has an internal guidance and reflection system open to external prompts and information. Similarly, experience shows that my cat is worth remonstrating with too, even if it's less effective than with fellow humans; she doesn't have all the tools or understanding available to most humans. But notice, there are humans who also can't be remonstrated with, so membership of homo sapiens does not determine who is in this group.

In another Coyne piece, in response to some issues that Russell Blackford raises, he says this:

When Russell says “I could, indeed, have chosen to do otherwise,” he seems to mean only, “had I been somebody other than Russell Blackford at that moment, I might have done otherwise.” And in what sense is that free will? It’s one thing for people to chastise somebody for making a “bad choice” (an emotion that feels natural but is at bottom irrational), but it’s a different thing to think that somebody actually can act in different ways at a single time.

To me, this highlights the very point of free will; to identify the nature of particular agencies, so we can take an appropriate course of action in the light of that nature. I don't think Russell, or anyone, would have behaved differently under the same circumstances (that would just make us randomly-acting beings) - but the difference between how Russell behaves and how another person behaves under the same circumstances reflects a freedom to act differently which is open to all agencies. So we can then apply a 'blame' in proportion to the 'culpability' of each agency going back in the causal chain. I use scare quotes to recognise that the agencies weren't 'free' from their own causal determinism, but we can now usefully employ this information to address any problems caused, or reward any benefits resulting, in the knowledge that the responsibility reflects an agency's ability to self-regulate. We wouldn't allocate moral responsibility to the snow in deadly avalanches, but we might to folk who detonate charges setting off deadly avalanches, because the former has no agency that would respond to remonstration, but the latter has. And such allocation would actually require determinism, or, at least, if there are any indeterminate events, these would be irrelevant to any such moral calculation.

So, in summary, I'm happy to jettison free will; I'm just not so happy to jettison the point of free will, if this is what it is. It does appear that Sam Harris, at least, agrees:

...I argue that people are mistaken in believing that they are free in the usual sense. I claim that this realization has consequences—good ones, for the most part—and for that reason we should not gloss over it by revising our definition of “free will” too quickly. Dan believes that his adjustment of the concept has allowed him to provide a description of human agency and moral responsibility that preserves many of our intuitions about ourselves and still fits the facts. I agree, for the most part, but I think that other problems need to be solved.

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Free Will

More from Susan Blackmore's excellent Conversations on Consciousness, and a perennial problem: do we have free will?

As before I will only offer outlines of and quotes from their answers; buy the book for the Full Monty. Be aware that quote context is important, and I'm focussing on those comments that seem particularly relevant to me.

Bernard Baars: not asked.

Ned Block: "Yes...on free will I'm almost exactly of [Dennett's] view [a compatibilist view]. The trouble with free will is that it's both compatible and incompatible with determinism - and it's at once incompatible with determinism and incompatible with indeterminism." Of course, the last line shows that free will (traditional concept of) doesn't exist, since determinism and indeterminism together are jointly exhaustive contradictories. His first remark suggests that he realises that any notion of personal responsibility relies on determinism, so there may be some revised type of free will that can be formulated to account for this.

David Chalmers: "I don't know...[because]...I don't know what it means to have free will." He makes the pertinent observation that we do what we want, but what we want is (probably) determined. But who would want to choose what they want? I would add that if your choosing what you wanted wasn't determined, then why should you be responsible for it? In fact, no-one would be responsible for it, if it's uncaused, by definition, surely. An infinite regress beckons.

Patricia & Paul Churchland Pat - "If you mean 'Are my decisions not caused?' surely not." Paul seems to take comfort from our unpredictability, and the way two similar brains will diverge in their chosen actions due to complexity - "So one mustn't fear the story science seems to tell, that we are just robots."

Francis Crick: He thinks the feeling of will is an illusion, and that free will "must be deterministic."

Daniel Dennett: "Yes...The model that we want for free will is of an agent that is autonomous, not in some metaphysical sense, but in the sense of being able to act on the reasons that matter to the agent, and who's got the information that is needed to act in a timely fashion."

Susan Greenfield: She gives a rather confused answer which suggests she believes in her own free will but admits it might be an illusion. She expresses concern that responsibility cannot be laid if there is no free will, which strikes me as incoherent, and that she believes in a mistaken understanding of responsibility that also leads those of a theological bent astray.

Richard Gregory: Not asked, as far as I can see.

Stuart Hameroff: "I have no choice but to believe in free will!" Hameroff's explanation of free will in his and Penrose's model will appeal to those who see quantum indeterminacy as a factor in consciousness; it will exasperate those who cannot see how it helps!

"...we have quantum computations in the microtubules inside neurons that reaches the threshold for collapse 40 times a second, to coincide with the 40 Hz gamma oscillations that exist in the brain. And the outcome of each reduction is a process of quantum superposition, quantum computation which follows the Schrodinger equation, which is basically deterministic. However, at the instant of collapse there's another influence that enters. This is Roger's non-computable influence which is due to the fine grain in space-time geometry. This has a little influence on the choices, so that choices result from both the deterministic quantum computation and this non-computable influence. The experience of that is free will."

Well. I'm quite willing to believe there's a 'random' effect in there somewhere. The problem, of course, is that this doesn't appear to offer any explanation of the experience of free will. Just as mental content appears to be irreducible to scientific description when we are talking deterministically, so it does if we just bring in an indeterministic element, as Hameroff and Penrose have done. I mean, it's asserting that adding indeterminism is what causes the feeling, but not offering any way for that to achieve the feeling. I might just as well assert that the massive deterministic neuronal computations are what achieve the feeling. Sue Blackmore makes the point in reply, quoting Pat Churchland: "pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum decoherence in the micro tubules." It's hard to see that she's wrong.

Christof Koch: "Probably not...I only mean I am free in the sense that it's not you who is determining my actions; it's not blind force or destiny..."

Stephen LaBerge: He thinks we create an illusory conscious self, and he doesn't think that that 'I' has free will. "But 'Does who I am, and all that I am, decide how to answer this question?', then yes."

Thomas Metzinger: "If I didn't, could I ever have given you any other answer than this one?" His reply highlights a problem with free will; it suggests that people would vary their behaviour even in identical circumstances. If they don't, then it what sense is the decision not determined? This, it seems to me, just shows that the traditional concept of free will is incoherent, and if it were true, would not deliver the results people seems to expect.

Kevin O'Regan: "Yes, everybody does [believe they have free will]. Even robots believe they have free will, even if they don't." Good answer, I think, to a slightly different question to the one I ask above.

Roger Penrose:  "...the simple answer is I don't know." To be fair, unlike Hameroff, he says his non-computational influence is not free will.

Vilayanur Ramachandram: He really only discusses what could be causing the feeling, rather than the philosophical implications. Interesting, for the scientific implications.

John Searle: He points out that free will only makes sense with the concept of self, but thinks the self may be an illusion. It's plain he thinks we must believe we have free will; it's not too clear what his final position is, though.

Petra Stoerig: Not asked.

Francisco Varela: Not asked.

Max Velmans: "...my sense of being free is, I think, a genuine sense. That's not in any way to argue against determinism in science, but I am the kind of creature that's capable of choices - I can do what I want. But I can't want what I want, so there are deep inbuilt constraints." Echoing the comments by Chalmers.

Daniel Wegner: "It certainly seems as though I do." He notes that we don't have this sense of free will about all our actions, and thinks this may be because sometimes thoughts and actions are linked by our brains, and sometimes not.

These responses reflect the current consensus that we don't have free will, except possibly some compatibilist version. It's good to see that a few articulate the fatal problem it has; the traditional concept is not compatible with determinism or indeterminism.

I should point out that this is not a unanimous view; there are some incompatibilist theories of free will; they seem pretty hopeless to me, but knock yourself out reading about them.

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Gene-machine Darwinism and Responsibility

Many folk complain that an 'ultra-Darwinist', or 'gene-machine' Darwinist, view of the world renders us incapable of assigning blame to individuals. The implication is that we are creatures at the mercy of our genes, mere puppets, so cannot be blamed or praised for our behaviour. Is this true?

The view sometimes assigned to sociobiologists, or evolutionary psychologists, that we must follow our genetic blueprints, gains traction from the analogies drawn to illustrate their ideas, such as Dawkins’s ‘lumbering robots’. This inference is unfair, since they do accept cultural influence on behaviour, but, relevant to this question, they would expect the sexes to have evolved differently (even competitively) because of their differing physical characteristics. Women have larger sex cells than men, and carry the foetus for nine months. Because men can afford more reproductions in a lifetime, sociobiology would suggest that emotions would evolve differently to motivate men to spend more than women; i.e., have more promiscuous tendencies. Does this mean that some of the more rabid accusations aimed at evolutionary psychology are true? If we consider this statement, typical of the sort of thing:

If gene-machine Darwinism is true, then we cannot blame a man for sexual infidelity, nor praise a woman for being faithful.

To tease out the implications of this conditional statement, we can consider it the outline of an argument, with the antecedent as the premise and the consequent as the conclusion:

Premise	Men’s genes give them a tendency to sexual infidelity
Conclusion	Men cannot be blamed for sexual infidelity

This is invalid; there is a hidden premise or two. We could complete it like this:

Premise 1	Men’s genes give them a tendency to sexual infidelity
Premise 2	Men cannot be blamed for their tendencies
Conclusion	Men cannot be blamed for sexual infidelity

This looks valid, although there is a slight equivocation on the word ‘men’. Not all men will have a tendency equally, so we cannot conclude that all men are blameless for sexual infidelity. But we’ll pass on this and assume ‘men’ refers to the average man.

The implication of P2 is that our tendencies are overwhelming in their force. This doesn’t seem to be true at all. We are all aware of temptations and understand we can resist them. In such circumstances, other inclinations and reasoning help us to resist. Sociobiology claims we are a basket of competing traits and tools evolved for dealing with the world, and it’s too simplistic to say we blindly follow our tendencies. And to say we blindly follow one tendency, such as a sexual imperative, is even more so. The law recognises in cases of diminished responsibility that in some circumstances, including natural aberrations, we cannot be held wholly responsible for our actions. But this principle acknowledges that the average person is responsible for their actions, and it’s the average person we’re considering.

The ‘gene-machine’ charge might be levelled by a 'blank-paperist' (a believer in the social science model that holds that a large part of our nature derives from the cultural environment), in which case we can ask if their counter position can be justified. This would have to look something like this:

P1	People’s behaviour is determined by their culture
P2	People determine their culture
P3	People can be blamed for what they determine
Conclusion	People can be blamed for their behaviour

Some say that people do determine their cultural environment. In a sense, that’s true about their current situation. But the development of traits that occur pre-adulthood is inaccessible to us as adults. Many traits form in the years before 16, so there may be an opportunity for the blank-paperist to determine them in childhood that is not available to the gene-machinist. That may be relevant to the wider community, but no individual, contra P2, can determine their own culture in their formative years. And there is no reason to believe that how these traits are formed makes them more or less mutable in adulthood.

So, once determined, however that may be, the problem of blame presents itself. To determine one’s own traits, one would have to exist prior to one’s own conception – a logical impossibility. So determinism seems to be the enemy of blame, not genetic determinism.

Looking at P3, we do blame people for what they do, often ignoring prior causes. This arises from a sense of localised or ordinary responsibility because, perhaps, it’s more important to understand immediate causes. Consider a house underneath a cliff that suffers from rock-falls. If the rock-falls are due to an unstable rock face, the instability can be addressed. If they’re due to someone pushing rocks down, then they should be held responsible and prevented from re-offending. Observing that, ultimately, both the unstable rock face and the vandal are simply following causes deterministically as part of one long chain of causality from the Big Bang doesn’t help us to decide a future course of action.

Consequentialists and deontologists would take different approaches to the vandal; the consequentialist would see little value in blame unless it resulted in greater benefits than other responses. Deontologists would lay blame because of the inherent wrongness of the act. But neither would blame, morally, the unstable rock face for falling on the house, because it lacks agency. If agency is a temporary phenomenon, it would not be appropriate to say that someone is, or is not, ultimately to blame, but to say that they are locally to blame is pragmatic. We recognise prior agencies as mitigating factors; if the miscreant has been unduly influenced by another, for example. But the further back from the current moment we move the less responsibility we assign. So the passage of time is relevant to the level of responsibility, in conjunction with agency, and neither rests on the truth of gene-machine Darwinism.

The charge from immaterialists, typically theists, is that determinism follows from materialism (immateriality is redundant in gene-machine Darwinism). Science suggests that materialism may not entail determinism, but we’ll allow this assumption for the sake of argument. Immaterialists suggest that morality is meaningless without ‘free’ choice; if our actions follow unavoidably from prior events, blame cannot be laid:

P1	Materialism entails determinism
P2	Determinism dictates that every cause has a prior cause
P3	Responsibility rests where the causal chain stops; at a cause without a prior cause
Conclusion	Materialism precludes responsibility

We blame the person responsible, but if the causal chain doesn’t stop, neither does the responsibility. The argument looks valid; P1 we are allowing, P2 is just determinism defined, but P3 looks suspect. As discussed above, a local responsibility is understandable, even with a chain of events extending back into the past to other ultimate causes. In fact, to rest the responsibility where there are no prior causes can prevent us laying blame. Consider the following scenario: a woman sees a man advancing toward a baby with his arms outstretched. She hits him with her handbag, knocking him out. Among the reasons for her actions could be:

a)       She knew the man meant to harm the baby.

b)       She’s a lunatic out to hit the first man she sees.

c)       She made the decision to hit the man, or acted to hit the man, with no prior cause.

The first two explanations allow us to draw on further evidence and perhaps assign praise (a) or blame (b, with diminished responsibility). But (c) leaves us helpless, because intentions are a major factor in moral judgements. Indeterministic acts happen for no reason. Further, it’s hard to see why someone could do something without prior cause; how would they know what to do without the knowledge of the situation? Perhaps knowledge of the situation exists, but does not count as a prior cause? But the woman is hitting the man because he’s there, else she’d be flailing at nothing. It is a necessary precursor to the act, so must be a component of some prior cause. So indeterminism stops us placing blame, and gene-machine Darwinism is not to blame for that!

The expanded argument for the second part of the conditional we're considering shares the same problems:

P1	Women’s genes give them a tendency to sexual constancy
P2	People cannot be praised for their tendencies
Conclusion	Women cannot be blamed for sexual constancy

The implication is we have no choice but to follow our tendencies. To expand further:

P1	Women’s genes give them a tendency to sexual constancy
P2	People have no choice but to follow their tendencies
P3	People should only be praised for choosing to act well
P4	Sexual constancy is acting well
Conclusion	Women cannot be praised for sexual constancy

P2 is false per gene-machinists, but P3 is troublesome too. Comedian Richard Herring cracks the joke “I was very moral as a teenager; I was a virgin by choice, but also because no-one would have sex with me.” We recognise a difference between acting well by choice rather than by circumstance (imagine if Herring's setup was that he was trying to be promiscuous, but failing). But the charge against gene-machine Darwinism is a little deeper than this; it’s the suggestion that we have no choice because of our nature and cannot choose to act well, so never act well. But we hear stories of people acting ‘heroically’ and afterwards saying ‘I had no time to think’ or ‘It all happened so quick’. Heroes often act instinctively, not through choice, but we think they are praiseworthy still. We praise them because of the nature that compelled them; the hero could have done otherwise in a way that the rock from the previous example could not, but didn’t, and wouldn’t. The idea that they might do something else in the same circumstances would just make their actions arbitrary, and them unreliable, which would hardly attract plaudits. Natural compulsion, then, doesn’t preclude praise, and gene-machine Darwinism’s supposed denial of choice is not fatal to praise-giving, either.

Whether we can praise or blame, then, may still be an issue, but the fact of it does not turn on the truth of so-called gene-machine Darwinism. The arguments to support the conditional could be constructed differently, so we have not exhausted all possible justifications. Nevertheless, based on the arguments considered above, it's clear that the implications often ascribed to ultra Darwinism are quite unwarranted. Ultimately, all that it argues for is the origin of personality traits, not their strength or immutability. As Dawkins says in The Extended Phenotype, when he complains about the unjustified reputation that genes have acquired as 'sinister' and 'juggernaut-like':

Educational, or other cultural influences may, in some circumstances, be just as unmodifiable and irreversible as genes and ‘stars’ are popularly thought to be.

Quite.

Bibliography:

Radcliffe-Richards, J. (2000) Human Nature After Darwin (A211 Book 4), Milton Keynes, The Open University

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