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Rudy Garns's Library tagged freedom →  View Popular, Search in Google

  • The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that — to put the matter plainly — we have no idea what we’re doing.
Jan
22
2008

  •  Dennett also points out that human freedom is dramatically expanding. Birds, like most  earthly organisms, live as their ancestors did, and their range of choices is determined  by the stately processes of biological evolution. People, on the other hand, are no longer  tethered to evolutionary change. Language and culture, especially modern science and  technology, enable us to dramatically increase the range of our choices. If you don't  believe it, just think about the much smaller range of opportunities open to Americans  100 years ago.  

      

     As our understanding of our genes and brains increases, instead of limiting our freedom,  it will dramatically increase it. We will be able to prevent and cure more diseases,  improve our social institutions, and even enhance human capabilities. We defend freedom,  especially political freedom, because, among other things, it enables people to make better  and better choices over time. To whatever extent we were ever at the mercy of our genes, we  no longer are. Instead our genes are now at the mercy of our brains.

Jun
27
2008

Educators for Reproductive Freedom is a group of faculty and staff from Northern Kentucky University that aims to build a campus network of faculty and staff interested in promoting reproductive rights; promote campus-wide discussion of reproductive rights through regular programs and a listserv; support NKU student groups with an interest in the issue; and network with community groups who support reproductive rights.

www.efrf.org
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reproductive freedom rights choice grue

Jan
22
2008

  • We have more freedom than a bird that is as free as a bird, or a dog (even a very smart dog standing at the point of bifurcation of a raging river watching his master and mistress being carried away equidistantly down the two channels, looking agitatedly from side to side before plunging in after one or the other), or a smart chimpanzee. And we have more freedom, we take it, than a small child.

    How so? It's simply that we have evolved into self-conscious, self-monitoring agents, language users, with all that that entails. We are creatures who are able to reflect consciously and deliberately on alternative courses of action before choosing between them. We are also creatures who live in complex societies, creatures whom evolution has endowed with natural concern for others, a conscience, a moral sense

  • His claim, then, is that the existence of human freedom, free choice, free action, free will is entirely compatible with materialism, naturalism, determinism and the theory of evolution.

    Is this plausible? Yes. Given that Dennett is talking only about C-freedom, I'm sure he's right. I'm sure he's right that all the freedom of choice and action and will that we actually have is a product of evolution. But his rhetoric is all wrong. He stands forth as the lone ranger of hard truth, the indomitable, beleaguered word-warrior fighting a vast rampant dragon of misguided and aggressive orthodoxy. But most philosophers (and a host of others) fully agree with him that determinism may be true and that a materialist, naturalistic, evolutionary approach is best, and find it obvious that C-freedom is compatible with all these things. They also know that there is no way in which the falsity of determinism -- the existence of truly random or indeterministic occurrences in the universe -- could help to give us greater freedom of will or moral responsibility

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  • So we return, again, to the question of whether decisions determined by non-conscious mental processes can, by being attributed to our conscious self, warrant moral responsibility. How can something that is not primarily causally responsible for an act be morally responsible for it? The case is made even more difficult when we remember what Dennett takes the self to be. It is, he tells us, akin to your PC’s graphical user interface. The self is “the brain’s user illusion” (2003: 253; 1991a: 412-18), a fiction of self-representation that evolved to aid social interaction. Still, if this self-representation feeds back some of its results to the non-conscious mind, future decision making could be influenced. Choices about what means to apply in a given situation could be modified as a result, and goals determining what should be attempted could be altered. All such changes may have been pre-determined from the moment of the big bang, but Dennett is right to argue that a fixed personal future is compatible with our having a malleable personal nature. Indeed, making normal human decisions almost certainly requires a self that reflects on your past, learns from it, and in so doing changes itself. This is a worthwhile freedom, though it is far from the freedom we thought we had. I, however, am not yet convinced it is all the freedom we should want.

  • This is the   same point that shallow readers of Nietzsche miss. His madman does not   discover the nonexistence of God, but rather he declares that a   “murder” has taken place that value, not being, has been destroyed.   Dennett might understand neuro-physiology without correctly   understanding its implications for being human. This would be so if our   humanity, though evolved, is invented by certain kind of regard—a    “moral stance” rather than by chemicals. If so, what we have here with   Dennett’s new book may be a murder, not a scientific discovery. Dennett   claims to have discovered that morally free will—as necessary to   secular ethics as it is to religious ethics is missing. But in fact, he   killed it.

  • Dennett will doubtless be similarly accused of under-estimating free will, although in fact, by “naturalizing” it, he incorporates the concept into the pantheon of researchable questions. As he puts it, “By trying to answer the questions, by sketching out the non-miraculous paths that can take us all the way from senseless atoms to freely chosen actions, we open up handholds for the imagination. The compatibility of free will and science … is not as inconceivable as it once seemed.”

  • In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner argued that 

     
     

    We recognize a person’s dignity or worth when we give him  credit for what he had done. The amount we give is inversely proportional to  the conspicuousness of the causes of his behavior. If we do not know why a  person acts as he does, we attribute his behavior to him. We try to gain  additional credit for ourselves by concealing the reasons why we behave in  given ways or by claiming to have acted for less powerful reasons. 

     
     

    Skinner goes on to applaud the abolition of 

     
     

    autonomous man, the inner man, the homunculus, the  possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity,”  adding that “his abolition has long been overdue. Autonomous man is a device  used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way. He has been  constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very  stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does not dehumanize man, it  dehomunculizes him… Only by dispossessing him can we turn to the real causes  of human behavior (1971).

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  • This strategy comes down to dissolving problems, instead of solving them. Rather than try to answer certain flawed questions, he questions the assumptions of the questions themselves and undermines them.
  • Free will, seen this way, is about freedom to make decisions without duress, as opposed to an impossible and unnecessary freedom from causality itself.

  • The self is not the entity that governs brain   processes, but is the outcome of those processes. Echoing the neurologist   Daniel Wegner, Dennett suggests that 'People become what they think they are,   or what they find others think they are.' Free will, in other words, is not   the capacity to do something but the capacity to know that something is being   done in your name. Dennett has reconciled the seemingly irreconcilable effectively   by redefining freedom out of existence.
  • The real difficulty with Dennett's argument is not his belief that freedom   and determinism must coexist - a proposition with which I agree - but his   insistence on viewing agency simply as a biological phenomenon. Our very possession   of agency reveals that humans cannot be understood in this fashion. Agency   is an expression not just of our embodiment in nature but also of our capacity   to transcend it. It is an expression of our existence not simply as natural   creatures but also as historical beings.
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