Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

From the Lockean point of view, all the scientist may have discovered is that when the brain is in some specific state, we get symptoms of consciousness. But that might just tell us what consciousness is annexed to, by happenstance. It does not make the combination intelligible. And it also presupposes a right to shove the Zombie and Mutant possibilities out of sight, for otherwise the scientist could never establish the correlation, except at best in his or her own case.

Why should we be sure that mental events—thought of as entirely distinct, remember, from anything physical—leave reliable traces in memory? I can check that my memory of the physical world is reliable enough.

In Locke’s terms, why should it not be ‘God’s good pleasure’ to annex certain mental modifications to me today, together with the delusive memory that similar ones were annexed to me yesterday?

Wittgenstein tried to show that there could be no significant thought about the nature of one’s past (or future) mental life if that mental life is divorced from the physical world in the way that Cartesian dualism proposes. It becomes, as it were, too slippery or ghostly even to be an object of our own memories or intentions.

Leibniz, remember, wants there to be a ‘rational’ relationship between the physical and the mental, so that the mental event of seeing a colour is some kind of rational expression of what is going on physically, not an accidental annexation to it.

We can’t see a surface as yellowy blue, because yellow and blue are produced by mathematical opposites: we get yellow when L > S, and blue when S > L.

You cannot have transparent white because something is only seen as white when it scatters light.

Subjective colour experience becomes not just a queer addon, but the inevitable, rationally explicable, expression of the kinds of physical functioning of the creatures that we are. If the same can be done for all the elements of our consciousness, the problem is solved.

We could imagine a culture in which the same physical object, which is to us a signpost, had a quite different function: a display board, or a totem, or a piece of abstract art.

It is the ‘take’ that makes the thought.

The mistake of supposing that to every noun there corresponds a ‘thing’ is sometimes called the mistake of reification

Thoughts are expressed in both linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour, and perhaps we can hope for some kind of reduction: ‘X thinks that p’ if and only if X’s plans or desires or behaviour are somehow in line with the world being such that p. The trick would be to fill out the ‘somehow in line

determinism, which can be put by saying that every event is the upshot of antecedent causes. The state of the world at any moment is the result of its state immediately before, and evolves from that preceding state in accordance with unchanging laws of nature.

People who accept this argument are called hard determinists, or incompatibilists, since they think that freedom and determinism are incompatible.

quantum physics, is standardly interpreted as postulating uncaused events. In the quantum world, there are microphysical events that ‘just happen

If anything, physical indeterminism makes responsibility and the justice of blame even more elusive. This is sometimes called the dilemma of determinism. If determinism holds, we lose freedom and responsibility. If determinism does not hold, but some events ‘just happen,’ and then, equally, we lose freedom and responsibility. Chance is as relentless as necessity.

Wittgenstein imagines the leaf falling in the autumn winds, and saying to itself, ‘Now I’ll go this way, now I’ll go that.

The brain and body bring the Real Me messages, and this Real Me then issues them instructions. The Real Me sits in the control room, and the whole person behaves freely when it is in command. If it is not in command, the brain and body get on with their (‘mindless’) physical evolutions. This is mind-body dualism again.

The dualist approach to free will makes a fundamental philosophical mistake. It sees a problem and tries to solve it by throwing another kind of ‘thing’ into the arena. But it forgets to ask how the new ‘thing’ escapes the problems that beset ordinary things.

far from helping to understand human freedom, the idea depends upon it. For the ghost is really a kind of ethereal little human being, a ‘homunculus’ that takes in information, deliberates, wants various things, is swayed or influenced or guided by different pieces of information, and that in the light of all that does something. If we cannot understand how human beings are free, we cannot understand how such a homunculus can be free either.

Epicurus (341–270 BC) had already suggested that the spirit of a person could step in and make the atoms ‘swerve’ in direction.

the spirit itself must be understood in mechanical terms

Lucretius explains the way in which this subtle stuff is ‘of seeds extremely small, through veins, flesh, sinews, woven’. The soul has to be made of thin stuff, for ‘dreams of smoke and mist can move it

But the schoolteacher’s attitude will have a point if laziness responds to incentives in a way that stupidity does not. If respect for the teacher’s opinion can make you work harder, whereas it cannot make you smarter, then there is one justification for the asymmetry. The teacher is in the business of resetting your evaluating module.

It is an empirical fact, a fact to be learned from human experience, how far modules do get reset by interactions with others, including the unpleasant ones in which the others display their anger or contempt for us.

compatibilism

There is no ghostly power stepping in to interfere with the natural causal order of events. Second, in moral or political terms, the ‘soft’ determinist may actually be pretty hard, in the sense of harsh. If you come to her with the heartrending excuse that your biology or your environment made you the way you are, she turns deaf, and vents her anger on you just the same.

A subject acted freely if she could have done otherwise in the right sense. The subject could have done otherwise in this sense provided she would have done otherwise if she had chosen differently.

Compatibilism on the other hand substitutes a view of you as entirely situated inside the causal order of nature. Your freedom lies in the way action flows out of your cognitive processes.

And according to compatibilism, that is how we control things. We are involved in the causal order. We are part of the way in which the past controls the future. And therein lies our responsibility. We can call this conception of control, inside control, control from inside nature.

It may be that if you are angry with me that will alter my decision-making system for the future, but it does not show that I could have acted differently in the past.

there actually exists a parasite that lives by colonizing the brains of ants. Under its influence, the ant climbs blades of grass. This makes it more likely to be ingested by passing sheep, which the parasite then infects [the particular individual in the ant’s brain itself perishes, but others hitch-hike]. For all one knows, the ant feels free as air as it climbs its blade of grass.)

When the objector claims that in that case the subject is a mere victim if the modules are ‘set’ wrong, the reply ought to be to introduce another level of flexibility.

The subject acted freely if she could have done otherwise in the right sense. This means that she would have done otherwise if she had chosen differently and, under the impact of other thoughts or considerations, she would have chosen differently.

revised revised compatibilist definition: The subject acted freely if she could have done otherwise in the right sense. This means that she would have done otherwise if she had chosen differently and, under the impact of other true and available thoughts or considerations, she would have chosen differently. True and available thoughts and considerations are those that represent her situation accurately, and are ones that she could reasonably be expected to have taken into account.

Aristotle rather desperately held that negligent people have actually chosen to make themselves negligent, perhaps in early childhood, and that this is the only reason they can be held responsible.

An incompatibilist, for instance, might insist that thoughts are only available if they are themselves the objects of free (interventionist) selection, and this would put us back to square one.

And we can see that the revised revised analysis is not at all hospitable to the Twinkie defence. A defendant would have to work awfully hard to show that enough sugar literally takes our behaviour out of the range of our decision-making modules and our thoughts.

Compatibilism tries to generate the right notion of control out of the reflection that under different circumstances the agent would have done otherwise.

These are called ‘causal overdetermination’ cases. In such a case something does control some outcome, although the outcome would have been the same anyway because of a ‘fail-safe’ mechanism.

Imagine the mini-Martians sitting there not actually interfering with things, but ready to do so whenever the outcome looks set to be one that they don’t want. These cases are surprisingly tricky to handle.

The compatibilist is not intending to deny agency, but to give a particular account of it. The account is in terms of modular brain functions, in which data are taken in, and alternatives generated and ranked, until eventually an output comes ‘on line’ and initiates action. True, these events are all things that ‘just happen’ (passively, as it were) but, according to the compatibilist, they are the things that happen, and all that happens, when you, the person, do something.

‘That is surprising,’ said Death, for here he is on my list. And I have to collect him tomorrow, in Samarkand, of all places.

Doing nothing is invariably followed by no omelette, or no summit. Which events unfold from time’s womb depends on what we decide to do—this is what the inside control of a person or a thermostat means. Our choosing modules are implicated in the process, unlike those of mere spectators.

Fatalism is usually thought of as dissolving choice rather than recommending one kind of choice over another. It is supposed to show that choice is an illusion.

How could thoughts about the passage of time show that their operations are unreal or illusory? It seems no more plausible than suggesting that because of the passage of time, the operations of computers, or thermostats or chainsaws are illusory.

We have seen that fatalism affords no argument for conducting that deliberation one way or another. And it affords no argument that the process itself is unreal, unless the process is construed in the outside way we have considered and rejected.

He knows whether we will have an omelette in one frame of the film. But then he also knows whether we will set about preparing the omelette in a slightly earlier frame. There is no reason for him to know that the future

will be what it is whatever we do, any more than he knows that the tree will blow down whatever the wind does.

The View from nowhen,’ from outside time, sees our doings, and their upshots, but it doesn’t see upshots without doings. God sees us eating omelettes, because our choosing modules set us to break eggs. And he only sees us eating omelettes when he sees, in the previous time frame, us breaking eggs.