In this episode, Peter van Inwagen and I discuss free will.
We talk about what kind of thing free will might be, whether there’s an ordinary notion of free will, whether we should focus on free agency instead of free will, the cost of getting hung up about ‘the will’, the relation between free will and determinism, the relation between free will and indeterminism, the relevance of agent causation, the relevance of moral realism, the relevance of probabilistic thinking, and much more.
In short, we do some philosophy! I hope you enjoy it...
TRANSCRIPT
[The following transcript was generated by AI, so while it’s been checked over, it may contain small errors.]
REBECCA: Hi, I’m Rebecca Lowe and welcome to Working Definition, the new philosophy podcast in which I talk with different philosophical guests about different philosophical concepts with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition.
Today, I’m joined by Peter van Inwagen. Now, at this point I usually list some things about my guest. Maybe their jobs or things they’ve written. But Peter is a bit different. Because I can’t remember not knowing Peter. He was one of my dad’s best friends. A family friend since I was a kid. A great friend to me. One of my favourite people to talk with about anything. So this feels quite special.
I should probably also note however that Peter is one of the best philosophers in the world. Easily. He is John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He’s Research Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He writes on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, many things. Including, of course, the thing we’re going to discuss today, which is free will.
Thanks so much for joining me, Peter.
PETER: I’m very happy to be here, Rebecca.
REBECCA: So, I thought we’d begin by asking what ballpark of a kind of thing free will is. So, is it a power? Is it a capacity? An exercise of a capacity, an ability, a state of affairs, a value, a certain set of conditions, a lack of certain conditions? What kind of a thing are we looking at?
PETER: Oh Rebecca, I’m afraid I’m going to have to begin by deconstructing that question. [laughter] Let me explain what I mean by that. So, back in the 1960s, when I began to write about free will, everybody — all analytical philosophers — knew exactly what they meant by ‘free will’. And it was something like this.
For someone to have free will is when that person is deliberating between different courses of action. He or she is able to perform each of them. Or other phrases, where ‘has it within his power to’, and, well, there were even just ‘can’. But ‘can’ is a radically ambiguous word, so… [laughter] And ‘is able to that not something’. Like, you know, if you promise to do something, you shouldn’t promise to do something, unless you think you’re able to do it, right?
REBECCA: Yep.
PETER: It was that sense of ‘able’. So, we didn’t really think much about the question whether that was the right definition of ‘free will’, because we thought ‘free will’ was a term of art. And it was like, you don’t argue about whether you’ve got the right definition of, say, ‘abelian group’. You know, or a ‘moment of inertia’, right? [laughter]
These are not phrases like ‘exists’ or ‘cause’ or ’knowledge’ or something. So, then people became dissatisfied with this definition, as if there was a reason for being dissatisfied with the definition of a technical term. And well, they began to think that it means something in ordinary speech, ‘free will’.
Well, of course, one thing ‘free will’ means in English is determined by its occurrence in the phrase of ‘one’s own free will’.
REBECCA: Yep.
PETER: Of his own free will, of her own free will, of my own free will, of your own free will. And that just means ‘in absence of coercion’.
REBECCA: You didn’t push me down the hill, I decided to go down the hill. I went down the hill of my own volition. Something like that.
PETER: Of my own free will, yes. Yes. But that obviously isn’t what’s being meant if a psychologist announces that her experiments have shown that human beings lack free will. She isn’t obviously saying that psychologists have proved that human beings always act under coercion.
And you begin to get people saying we’ve got to have something that’s adequate to this actual conception of ‘free will’ that’s in the background. That’s not another phrase of this ‘of your own free will’, but is really what… Well, I mean, suppose a woman picks up the paper and reads about the psychologist who says that her experiments show that no one has free will. She may or may not agree with what she reads, but she thinks she understands it. Right? Yes, no free will, huh?
But actually, what does she mean by that? What does anyone mean by that? I would suggest that ‘free will’ as it occurs, outside that one fossilised phrase ‘of one’s own free will’, doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s a technical term, which has made its way into ordinary speech from philosophy and theology. The way ‘entropy’ is a technical term that’s made its way into ordinary speech from physics.
And it doesn’t mean anything in ordinary language, and not much, anyway. The way probably ‘evolution’ taken into ordinary… doesn’t mean much. I don’t think ‘free will’ means much in ordinary language. It’s one of those things that people think they know what it means, but if you ask them, then nothing would be forthcoming. And that’s because I think there is no such concept.
It’s an extremely interesting question, you know, whether every time you want, you are trying to decide whether to do A or B, you’re both able to do A and able to do B. Or even if, any time, you’re always able to do both those things. There are interesting arguments to show that you must lack the ability to do at least one of those things. That’s an interesting problem, and that’s more or less the problem, which, back in the sixties, we thought of as ‘the problem of free will’.
But now, I’m not going to name the philosophers that have added all these bells and whistles to this concept. They said, well, yes, that’s obviously part of what we meant by ‘free will’, but actually it means ‘ultimate responsibility for what you’ve chosen’. But then, of course, nobody really knows what ‘ultimate responsibility for what you’ve chosen’ means.
REBECCA: So, I wonder if that offers an alternative interpretation of what’s going on. Which is that, rather than there being this one central idea, and then these other things, which kind of don’t really mean anything, or people don’t really know what they mean. That, instead, people have just become concerned about different kinds of ways in which we’re constrained from doing this original thing. Which is something like ‘being able to do either A or B’.
So, you get this classic philosophical question about causal determinism. Maybe understood — I know you talk about it in terms of laws of nature and events in the past. But, when the science…
PETER: But what would it mean to say that causal determinism constrains you from…
REBECCA: Well, something like, ‘if determinism is true, then we don’t have free will’, so…
PETER: Well, wait, wait! That’s free will is what we were trying to define, right? [laughter]
REBECCA: Right, yes. But all I’m saying is something like, somebody might say, look, what the scientist is trying to do when you read the paper in the science journal, and the scientist is saying something like, “Hey Rebecca, you can’t possibly have free will, because it turns out that your brain ‘knew’ what you were going to pick before you decided it!”, or something like this. These kinds of experiments, which seem to show that we were going to do the thing before we became aware of our results of our reasoning, or something like this. I mean, scientists often don’t talk about…
PETER: Yeah, well, but all right. But why does that show that we don’t have free will?
REBECCA: But that would just be another kind of constraint on our capacity to... Because, in other words, there are different reasons for which we might think that we never really had the open choice.
PETER: Ah!
REBECCA: So, one of those is because everything was determined before you were born, because that’s literally how the laws of nature work, and events cause events. Another of them is something like, well, we have this capacity, and determinism in that sense isn’t true, but there’s an evil demon who has come about in the last five years, who is constraining your capacity to exercise your free will. And then there’s a third thing, which is something like, look, just the way your body is and how it works. Like, you don’t have control over your desires, or your brain is actually doing the stuff and not your mind. It’s just, like, your synapses, or whatever the scientists want to say.
It seems to me like these are just different reasons for thinking that it’s not truly the case that when I feel like I could have eaten the apple instead of the pear, it’s not really the case. I was always going to eat the apple.
PETER: Well, that comes back… You came back in the end to the ‘is able to’.
REBECCA: Yeah!
PETER: But the question was, is that actually everything that ‘free will’ is? And what I’m arguing against is the idea that there is this pre-analytical or ordinary language meaning attached to free will, such that we can then decide whether we’ve got it right.
It makes sense to say that this philosopher set out to give a definition of ‘causation’, but he hasn’t got it right. Because ‘cause’ is a word that we use and we understand it, at least in certain contexts. ‘Knowledge’, yes. Have we got the right definition of ‘knowledge’? Yes.
Well, but I say that ‘free will’ is not like ‘know’ or ‘cause’, where it has… It just doesn’t have any real antecedent meaning. Again, outside that one limited phrase. It is a word that occurs in ordinary language. But there I say it’s a word like ‘entropy’ or ‘vibration’ or ‘evolution’, where people just don’t mean much by it. But they think they understand it, but they don’t.
REBECCA: What about the idea of there being some relation between those other uses. Could they be, for instance, parasitic on the narrow original idea?
PETER: Sorry, ask that again. I missed something.
REBECCA: So, let’s say that these are the uses of the term ‘free will’ that don’t really mean anything. But there is this kind of standard understanding, on which ‘free will’ is, how you put it, ‘being able to do either A or B’. And then there are these other uses. Could we say something like: they are parasitic on the ‘free will’…
PETER: Yeah, well the trouble is the other uses have not been adequately explained. That is, I hate to… I don’t want to go mentioning names, proper names, you know. [laughter] But you know who you are, all right? These people who say we have to add something, or maybe even the ‘double ability’ idea gets swallowed up in the new thing, so we don’t have to mention that anymore.
REBECCA: Yep.
PETER: But I say that there isn’t any antecedent meaning to ‘free will’, such that we can say we haven’t got it right in the original one. And this view, I should say, this is my view alone. I think I don’t know of any other — I flatter myself as being a specialist in the problem of free will — I don’t know of any other one, any other specialist in the problem of free will, that would agree with me about this. But then I’m just putting forth my own opinion, here.
REBECCA: It seems like a pretty reasonable opinion to me. It still seems like, even though, if we just reserve the discussion to that one particular thing, we can still have quite a rich conversation about what it is.
PETER: Notice we wouldn’t have to use the words ‘free will’, at all, in that conversation. I could have written… I wrote a book about the problem of free will, called An Essay on Free Will.
REBECCA: Yep.
PETER: I could have written essentially the same book without using the words ‘free will’, at all. That these other philosophers I’m talking about could not state their positions without using the word ‘free will’. And this has led me to accuse them of verbal essentialism.
REBECCA: Yep.
PETER: That is, philosophers are guilty of verbal essentialism, if there’s some one phrase, generally some technical philosophical term, such you could not state your position without using that term.
REBECCA: Yep. So, one concern I think I have about the term ‘free will’, which is a different concern from the concern I think you’re voicing, is that the very idea of ‘the will’ seems to me a bit of a hang up from early modern times.
PETER: Oh, yes.
REBECCA: I worry that it maybe biases our conversation, a little. I mean, if you think of some of the classic understandings of ‘the will’, like Rousseau and Schopenhauer, it’s something external to us. Something that, even if you have these kind of internal conceptions of ‘the will’ being, like, part of me, it still kind of biases you towards saying things like ‘Rebecca’s will acts on her’, as opposed to ‘Rebecca does things’.
PETER: Yes.
REBECCA: So, I would prefer, I think, to frame these things in terms of something like ‘agency’. It seems like what we’re talking about when we say things like…
PETER: Yeah, ‘free agency’ was a term that was often used.
REBECCA: Yeah, so I wonder if it might actually be more useful, when we’re picking out the thing that you think the people are picking out when they really are talking about ‘free will’ — this idea of ‘could Peter really have chosen A rather than B?’
PETER: Yes, well we always said…
REBECCA: This seems to me like a conversation about ‘agency’. And if we make it a conversation about ‘will’, we start going into these weird things like, ‘Oh, Rebecca’s desires caused her to do something’ or ‘Rebecca’s volition caused her’. And this seems like maybe there’s just this kind of unnecessary extra step, which is a hangover from this very weird concept of ‘the will’.
PETER: Well, we always said… There was usually a little paragraph, or a couple of sentences saying, “Of course, the term ‘free will’ is merely a traditional term. The concept of ‘will’ will not actually occur in any of these concepts”.
I mean, there is, you know, Locke said the question is not whether the will be free, but whether man be free. The ‘free will’ meant that the will — that is what you choose to do, what you will to do — is not determined by something that’s beyond your control.
REBECCA: But I think the problem of talking about it as ‘the will’ does lead people to think that my will might be beyond my control.
So, the people who say, “Well, okay, I’ll accept it’s Rebecca’s will, but Rebecca can’t control her will!” Or, “it’s Rebecca’s desires, but Rebecca can’t control her desires.” My worry is that this starts making us think of these things as not something like… I think my desires are some of my psychological states. I don’t think it makes any sense to say, you know, “my desires cause me to do something”.
PETER: Well, well, agreed. The word ‘will’ can only be a source of confusion, if it isn’t properly ignored.
REBECCA: And even Locke himself talks about ‘the will’ as opposed to his ‘desires’. He makes a distinction there, right?
PETER: Not that I recall, but I speak under correction. Not being a Locke expert.
REBECCA: Even Locke, he has this funny little chain of things where it’s like, you know, “Oh, my conclusions about the correct ends have an impact on my conception of the good, and my happiness has an impact on my uneasiness, has an impact upon my...” It’s like all of these little layers, separating out from just, “I did the thing!”
PETER: Well, possibly so. I don’t recognise that part of Locke, but then, I’m no historian.
REBECCA: Yeah, I’m less interested in what I think people in the past said. But that’s my recollection of the agency chapter in Human Understanding.
PETER: Yeah. But suppose we went to the term ‘free agency’ instead of ‘free will’. Then, I would have to say “we don’t know what ‘free agency’ means”! We’re free to use it as a technical term. You know, you say a person exhibits ‘free agency’, just in the case that when a person is deliberating between alternative courses of action, he or she is sometimes able to perform each of them. Not both of them, but each of them.
REBECCA: Yes. So, I think one concern I have is that maybe the term ‘free’ might be redundant here. That the thing we’re talking about is ‘agency’, rather than ‘free agency’.
PETER: Well then, what term would you use then?
REBECCA: I’d probably just use ‘agency’. I feel like ‘agency’ — I’d probably go with Locke on this, it’s the power to reason on things and come to some…
PETER: Yeah, but wouldn’t a person who was absolutely unable to do anything other than what he did still exhibit ‘agency’? After all, he does things. ‘Agency’ is doing things.
REBECCA: Yeah, so this is… I think this is a useful distinction. And this can help us think about, at least, why the free will problem is important. So, I had lunch with a friend today, who basically thinks — he’s a very smart and interesting guy — but his view is something like, me making a choice is the same as a machine making a ‘choice’.
Now, for someone like him, it’s very hard to get them exercised about the free will problem. Because it seems to me this problem arises broadly because you’re like, “Hey, it feels to me like I have these choices. It feels to me like I have the options. But do I really?” Now, if I’m just…
PETER: Yeah, well, why would you think that you’re able to do something other than what you do? Because it feels like you’re…
REBECCA: What would it feel like not to have this thing? What would it feel like?
PETER: Well, to take a very simple example, and this is an adaptation of something from Locke. You are sitting in a room deliberating about whether to leave. Suddenly, you hear a click, the door is being locked.
REBECCA: Yep.
PETER: Suddenly, you’re no longer able to leave the room. If you hadn’t heard the click, you would feel just as able to leave the room. So, feeling doesn’t establish that you’re able to do something.
REBECCA: Oh no, absolutely. I don’t think it does. It’s not something like consciousness, where, you know, the fact that I feel the thing gives me some insight. All I’m saying is that the problem in the first place arises, I think, because we do have these feelings. That’s what makes us ask. If we were just… It doesn’t really make any sense to talk about this in relation to the machine, or the rock. Like, there’s no problem of free agency…
PETER: But there are other reasons. I mean, for instance, we tell people sometimes that they shouldn’t have done something, or that they should do something. Now, it’s an old discovery that, you know, telling somebody that they should do something is like moral advice.
REBECCA: Yep.
PETER: And you don’t advise somebody to do something, unless you believe they’re able to do it.
REBECCA: Yeah, totally.
PETER: Right, I mean, suppose you ask, you know, “What’s a good restaurant for me to take my boyfriend to?” And you say, “Well, how about the Du Paris in Paris?” — “You can’t mean that! I couldn’t get to Paris in a couple of hours, at any rate.” And you say, “Oh, I know you’re not able to take him there, but that’s my advice! You asked for my advice of the best restaurant to take him to. That’s the one!”
No, your advice has to be for something a person is able to do. Moral advice. You can’t tell somebody that they should do something, unless you believe they’re able to do it. But if a person is actually able to do only one thing, then you would never know whether your judgment that a person should do this thing was correct.
You see, it isn’t just psychology or feelings that lead us to say that a person is ‘able to do’ something, when, quite independently of our judgments about determination — it’s our whole system of moral categories are predicated upon this.
REBECCA: Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of that. In fact, I think — at least a standard objection levelled against the people who want to claim that we don’t have free will, is that — we all act as if we have free will. I mean, you get these moral and political philosophers these days who want to say something like, “Look, we know we don’t have free will, but we should still act as if we have free will, and punish the bad people”. I mean, this is kind of hilarious, because acting as if you have free will implies that you have free will.
But yes, I think many people have made the point that we all just act as if we do have free will. It seems like a very ordinary position to have. It seems quite hard to think what you would even do if you didn’t have free will. Like, what the world would look like if we didn’t have free will. Some people just say it would look exactly the same...
PETER: Well, just think about what it would be like to try to give people advice of any kind, if you never knew what people were able to do.
REBECCA: Right, but I mean, you’d still have the problem about yourself. So, if you come to the conclusion that it means something to ‘give advice’, that your ‘giving advice’ can be something. I mean, I think baked into the idea of 'giving advice’ is…
PETER: Yeah, well again, to deliberate seems to be…
REBECCA: That’s right.
PETER: It’s a plausible thesis that to deliberate between A and B, is to have the belief that you’re able to do both A and B. Here’s a case that is from Locke, similar to the one I mentioned.
You’re deliberating about which of two rooms to leave the door by. Suddenly, you hear a click which sounds very much like one of the doors being locked, but you’re not sure whether that’s what it was. But if the door has been locked, then you’re not able to leave by that door. Can you now deliberate about which door to leave by?
REBECCA: Yeah, of course you can, and that to me is the important thing. I can reason about it. I can come to some conclusions. Some of my conclusions might be wrong.
PETER: No, you can deliberate conditionally on the doors being unlocked about whether to leave by it. But you can’t simply deliberate about which door… You can’t be trying to decide which door to leave by, if you don’t believe that both doors are open to you.
REBECCA: Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. But the very fact of the matter that I can do some deliberating at all — I can do some deliberating about whether I should walk over to the door, and see if the door actually is locked.
PETER: Yes, but that, of course, you believe you can do. You can walk over to the door, to see whether it’s locked.
REBECCA: But the problem is just doing that doesn’t prove that I’m actually doing it, does it? Because it could be the case that my deliberation, itself — what I feel like is deliberation — is out of my control. So, my feelings, in the same way that this suffices for, it gives me good reason to think I’m conscious, the fact that I...
PETER: Well, remember what we were talking about is the implications of deliberating for what you believe.
REBECCA: Yeah.
PETER: You can of course deliberate when you’re not able to do one of the things that you’re deliberating about. But you can’t deliberate if you don’t believe that both those things are open to you.
REBECCA: Yeah, I don’t... What are the other things you have to be able to do? Like, what kind of thing could have this power? So, for instance, I already said I don’t think the rock or the bicycle can do deliberation. It seems to me that you have to be alive. It seems to me you have to be able to have psychological states. Do you have to be conscious?
PETER: I would… You have to be able to use language. And I don’t think… Does it make sense to think, speak of a.. Now we’re going beyond metaphysics, right? We’re going into the philosophy of mind, now.
REBECCA: Sure.
PETER: But does it make sense to think, speak of somebody who can speak, use categories, but isn’t conscious? Well, I mean, you know, people talk about AI being able to do this, and it’s doubtful whether there’s anything conscious, there. I mean, I have my own views about AI, but I mean just the…
REBECCA: Do you think AI could be conscious? Is conscious?
PETER: I don’t think that if you’re talking with an AI…. Say you have this chatbot at home that you’ve become infatuated with. [laughter] The trouble is there isn’t anybody on the other end of the line.
REBECCA: I agree.
PETER: Not even an unconscious… Not a machine, not an unconscious thing.
REBECCA: This is my main problem with the idea of AI being conscious. I mean, I don’t think anybody in the world actually thinks AI is alive. And I think only living things could be conscious, in the phenomenological sense. But I think an easier thing for us to pick out than ‘what are the things that are alive?’ is ‘what are particular things?’ And I don’t know what the particular thing is, in the instance of me being told that the AI I’m talking with is conscious.
PETER: Well, there isn’t a particular thing!
REBECCA: That’s right.
PETER: Look, all things are particular things, right? There aren’t any non-particular things. And there isn’t anything that you are talking with, there.
REBECCA: I agree.
PETER: There are a lot of machine parts operating together to produce the illusion.
REBECCA: Yeah, I agree.
PETER: You could have, for example, a group of a hundred human beings each picking a little… One decides you say something. One human being decides what kind of reply you’re gonna get. The next one decides how many words it will be. The next one decides the grammatical structure of the sentence, and so on. So, nobody actually writes the sentence that you hear. Well, then, there’s nobody you’re talking with. AI is something like that.
REBECCA: Yeah, I broadly agree. Can we say something similar about free will? That only particular things that persist across time with identity have free will? Can have free will?
PETER: Well, I mean, you would have to… You can’t have free will unless you make decisions, I suppose.
REBECCA: Yeah, that seems right to me.
PETER: And you can’t make a decision, unless you last a little bit of time.
REBECCA: It seems right to me. It seems like you have to have the capacity to do things like bear knowledge, in order to deliberate. Your point about having a belief about whether the door is unlocked, or the door is locked. So, we can rule out some kinds of things, it would seem, from being the kinds of things that could have free will. Which gets us somewhere in this investigation.
PETER: Of course, we can still talk about what we used to call ‘the problem of free will’.
REBECCA: Yes.
PETER: That is the problem… First of all, this ‘double ability’ — the ability to be able to do both A and B when you’re just trying to decide between them — is that consistent with determinism? Is the world deterministic? Is it consistent with indeterminism? You know, because there are good arguments for its inconsistency with determinism and its inconsistency with indeterminism.
REBECCA: Yep.
PETER: So, all this was part of what we used to call ‘the problem of free will’. And all of that, of course, could have been investigated without using the term ‘free will’, at all.
REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, I think there still has to be this central power, or ability, or something…
PETER: Yes, power or ability. Yes, that… But remember there was always this idea that, well, you can’t simply define ‘free will’ in terms of power and ability. There’s more to it than that. There’s ‘ultimate responsibility’, or something.
REBECCA: Nonetheless, it seems like it’s some feature of being a living thing or something.
PETER: Oh, certainly.
REBECCA: And we want to say, you know, could it be the case that this feature exists if determinism is true, in this sense of — you’ve talked about the sense of, you know, the laws of nature and the past states of the world.
PETER: Yes.
REBECCA: If they make it the case that there’s one ‘unique future’, or however you want to put it. But then of course there does come, as you said, the indeterminism problem.
So, you get something like, “hey, we’ve gotten some part of the way, which is, we think that for free will to be true, for somebody to have free will, it can’t be the case that we have determinism. Therefore, we need non-determinism.” But then it seems like there are some problems with the compatibility of free will and indeterminism, too!
PETER: Well, yes. If you… I mean, suppose you’re deciding what to do and it’s undetermined what you’re going to do. Then, suppose there were a thousand perfect duplicates of you, at that moment. Then, if it was undetermined what you were going to do, wouldn’t some of them do one thing and one of them do the other?
REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, the problem with this… I get that it’s a thought experiment, but I think, the way I see it is that, when I do pick one of the options, I reason on it and I pick that particular option, I worry that we might be kind of stacking the deck to think about it in terms of, you know, going back, and Rebecca could have done this, Rebecca could have done this, Rebecca could have done that.
PETER: I didn’t go back, no. I said, we have a lot of parallel Rebeccas, at the same time. And some of them do… you’re trying to decide whether to have vanilla or chocolate. Some of them have vanilla, and some of them have chocolate. How was it up to you, or within your power, to be…
REBECCA: So, I mean, to me, it’s just going to be quite simple — because I reasoned on it! I have a kind of ‘agent causation’ view.
PETER: Yes, but so did the others! The ones that went the other way. They both reasoned.
REBECCA: Yeah, but the one that’s me, in actuality, reasoned on it and made these choices. I also think that...
PETER: Right, the others weren’t you. That’s true. But they were just like you.
REBECCA: Yeah, but that’s not enough!
PETER: Qualitatively.
REBECCA: That’s not enough to be me.
PETER: But it shows that your qualitative properties were not sufficient, for what you did.
REBECCA: Yeah. So, one problem I do think I sympathise with, is the idea that if Rebecca is like Rebecca, then Rebecca would come to the same conclusion if Rebecca had the same options, or something like that. That seems to be my way of seeing what the problem is.
PETER: Sounds like determinism to me, Rebecca.
REBECCA: Well, that’s right. But, I’m fine — I don’t think I have to come to that conclusion! I’m just trying to translate the problem into something which makes it a problem. But then I’m not going to have that problem, because I’m just going to say something like, “Well, if that is how I reason on the things and come to the conclusion, that’s me coming to the conclusion”. I don’t need to have this extra little problem about ‘Rebecca’s reasoning acting on Rebecca’.
PETER: Rebecca, if it’s your conclusion, of course you came to the conclusion! Otherwise, it wouldn’t be your conclusion. But the question is…
REBECCA: That’s right. And just because I could’ve come to other conclusions…
PETER: But no matter how little free will you have, to use the phrase ‘free will’, you’re still… It’s still gonna be your conclusion.
REBECCA: Yes, that’s right. But I think just because I could have come to other conclusions, and, in fact, it needs to be the case that I could have come to other conclusions for this to mean anything here, I don’t see why that means that that’s a problem for me having come to my conclusion.
So, as I understand it, the problem is something like: because there were lots of different options, in some sense the choice I make is random. Or, it’s up to chance, rather than being up to me. Is that a correct understanding of the problem here?
PETER: I don’t think ‘chance’ and ‘you’ are names of two alternative things it might have been up to. [laughter]
REBECCA: Sure.
PETER: The point is it’s either up to you, or up to no one. Chance is a way of saying it’s up to no one.
REBECCA: That’s right. So, I’m wondering why it is the case that I should conclude that it wasn’t up to me, if I’m willing to accept that I reasoned on it and came to the conclusion by deliberating.
PETER: Well, because all the others were in exactly the same initial position. They reasoned on it, and they came the other way.
REBECCA: But they didn’t, though! [laughter] That could have been the case, but they didn’t. I did…
PETER: Okay. You mean they all came to… All those thousands of…
REBECCA: No, there was only… There’s only ever one Rebecca, and Rebecca did the reasoning! Just because Rebecca could have come to other conclusions, doesn’t mean that Rebecca, what Rebecca did, was not determined by Rebecca. That’s the confusion I have here.
PETER: Well, I don’t think we should use the phrase ‘determined by Rebecca’. The question is: what accounted for the fact that Rebecca came to this conclusion?
REBECCA: Yes, yes.
PETER: You say, “Well, she decided.” All right.
REBECCA: Yes.
PETER: But why did she decide that way? And, I mean, well, let’s try it in terms of replays.
REBECCA: Okay.
PETER: Then you replay… Would you find it disturbing if, when you got replayed a thousand times, seventy per cent of the time you did one thing, and the other thirty percent of the time you did the other thing? And maybe you could imagine people watching you do this, and taking bets on what you would do next, and what the bookies would give the odds on.
REBECCA: Cool.
PETER: Which had better be seven to three. And so on. Looks a lot like chance, what you’re going to do next time.
REBECCA: I don’t understand why I conclude... I’m glad we got to this, because I just don’t really understand the problem. I think the problem is a problem if I’m some kind of, like, probabilistic machine, or something. But as long as part of the story is that the actual Rebecca did reasoning and came to the conclusion, the fact that the actual Rebecca was relatively likely to have done something else doesn’t seem to me to be such a problem.
And I also think that the, kind of, ‘by chance’ nature that I know some people are worried about — although I think you’re saying that’s not the case — seems to me to be much more likely if, for instance, you could say Rebecca was equally likely to do all of the things. So, if it was something like I had five options and — I don’t really know what it means to say ‘Rebecca is equally likely to do all of the things’ — maybe that might lead me to being concerned that it’s not really ‘up to me’, in some sense.
The problem for me is going to arise, though, because I think I, as I was, actually did reason! I also would say, I think in many instances there are multiple options, but I generally think there are some options that you wouldn’t pick, or you couldn’t pick.
PETER: Oh yeah. No question about that.
REBECCA: So, for instance, I’d like to think I couldn’t pick to run a hundred meters in nine seconds.
PETER: Well, you probably…
REBECCA: And I wouldn’t pick to throw the baby off the bridge.
PETER: That’s right.
REBECCA: So, that reduces down the option set. And the reason it reduces down the option set is to do with things like my capacities and my reasoning. The reason I don’t throw the baby off the bridge is because I’ve reasoned it through, and I’ve come to the conclusion I should never throw a baby off the bridge. So...
PETER: Probably has more to do with your moral training than your reasoning, but yeah.
REBECCA: I’m happy to give away quite a lot of things on my moral training. On quite a lot of things. But I can think of some instances where…
PETER: Well, I mean, the reason you would never do something… The reason you would never do something under any circumstances, is that you can’t.
REBECCA: Yeah, so, for instance, I’d like to think, because I’m pretty hardcore about this, that I would never torture another human being.
PETER: Yeah.
REBECCA: Now, of course, if I was being tortured myself, maybe I would be ‘weak-willed’, to use that horrible word again. But the point is that the reason why that option seems to me much less likely is to do with things like my beliefs and my reasoning. And I don’t have a problem with the idea that my beliefs cause me to do things, because my beliefs are just a psychological state of me.
So, it’s a problem if you’re the kind of person who is concerned about your beliefs ‘acting on you’ and ‘causing you to do’ stuff. I’m not worried about that. And it’s also a problem if you’re somebody who thinks only events cause events. I’m somebody who thinks agents can kick off chains of events. So, I’m not really sure why, if I’m buying the idea that I reason on things, and this means some options are less likely than others, that just because there were more options available means that, in some sense, it’s chance.
I just, I don’t — I think I’m just being stupid. I don’t get why someone like you, who thinks it’s smart to believe in free will. You seem to think free will is more likely than the other options. I don’t see why…
PETER: You mean being able to do both things?
REBECCA: Yeah. I think I read that you said… I tried not to read too much of your stuff, although I have read it previously, because I wanted the conversation to be more fun. And it’s more fun if I don’t already know the answers to what I think you’re going to say! But my understanding is you’ve said things like, “it’s even weirder to think we don’t have free will than we do have free will”, or something like that.
PETER: Well, if you go through what I believe are the consequences of it, yeah.
REBECCA: Oh interesting! So, it’s the consequences. Because, of course, there are these other...
PETER: Well, for instance, that nobody ever did anything wrong or morally objectionable. There was nothing wrong with the Holocaust or the Atlantic slave trade. Or I’ve seen, for example, an FBI picture of a couple of guys planning a snuff film with an eleven-year-old boy. Nothing wrong, nothing wrong with that. That’s weird, right?
I mean, look, if somebody reliable — God, say — were to tell you that there was nothing wrong with that, you might say… Maybe your initial reaction would be one of horror, but you would also, I think, have a purely intellectual reaction. Which is, “I don’t see how that could be. I don’t see how it could be that there is nothing wrong with that.”
REBECCA: I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I know some non-moral realists, for instance. I think it’s crazy…
PETER: Yes, but you’re not one of them, right?
REBECCA: But, I understand their arguments. I also understand the views of people who say things like ,“God imposed the bad things on us so that we could…”, or something. I mean, you know, there are intellectually defensible — I agree, more weird — positions to be held.
But I think what I’m saying is something like, this type of reasoning… I would also think that when you come to this indeterminism problem, and you get these three options. One of them is free will is compatible with determinism. One of them is free will is compatible with indeterminism. And the other is that free will is not true. We know that you think that ‘free will is not true’ is weirder than ‘free will is compatible with determinism’, or ‘determinism is true’. I don’t know why...
PETER: That’s not quite right, no...
REBECCA: Okay sorry, so you should clarify it better…
PETER: What’s weird is that there’s no free will.
REBECCA: Yes, all right, sorry. Yes, of course. Right, good. So if it’s weird… if it’s more weird that there’s no free will than there is free will, you’re taking the weirdness approach seriously.
PETER: So, Noam Chomsky said, look, free will is obviously compatible with determinism, but we just don’t see how that could be. It’s a mystery. [laughter] And it’s probably because the human mind isn’t capable of everything. And you know what? I feel a lot of sympathy with that — I just feel the other way around. I don’t see how free will can be compatible with indeterminism. I just think, well, it must be! [laughter] That’s why I get called a ‘mysterian’. For that reason.
REBECCA: Yes, I know that. I’m just not sure why you don’t place more weight on the agent causation thing, as being a solution. And I know you’ve argued that even if it’s true, even if it’s possible, it still doesn’t solve the problem. I think that’s where I don’t get it. Because my guess, my assumption would have been, before I started thinking about these things, that you would have gone down that kind of route, because I assume that that’s why you think…
PETER: Nah, nah!
REBECCA: …that it’s not weird to think that we have free will.
PETER: Because… Well, about agent causation, at any rate. Well, I mean, suppose, say that you agent-caused some action of yours. Let’s replay that. If determinism is not true, then sometimes you’re gonna agent-cause one thing, and sometime you’re gonna agent-cause the other. Seventy percent of the time, you’ll agent-cause the lie, the other thirty percent of the time, you’ll agent-cause the truth.
REBECCA: But again, why is it that 70 per cent I do A, and 30 per cent I do B? Why? Why is there more likelihood that I do A than B?
PETER: Well, there are cases….
REBECCA: It seems to be about me!
PETER: Well, look, if you want to say every time something’s undetermined, it would have to be fifty-fifty…
REBECCA: Mmm! That seems to be much more problematic.
PETER: That’s not gonna make any difference to my argument.
REBECCA: I think it might, because I think I’d be more likely…
PETER: All right, well, let’s grant that, then. So, every time you agent-cause, you’re trying to decide whether to lie or tell the truth. So, you agent-cause telling the truth. The next time, you agent-cause lying. Then, you agent-cause telling truth.
REBECCA: I think we’ve then written free will out of the problem, though! If it is truly the case that I do 50-50, then I’m…
PETER: Well, if you agent-cause the same thing every time, that’s determinism.
REBECCA: Right. But I’m…
PETER: The past determines what you’re gonna agent-cause.
REBECCA: I totally get that. All I’m saying is, if it’s truly the case that I can pick between A and B, but 50 per cent of the time I always pick A, and 50 percent of the time I always pick B, it’s either the case that I’m not really having any impact on it, because it’s the case just probabilistically, and this, in some sense, controls me in what I do. Or, it’s the case we come back to this set of problems, which are ‘Rebecca’s reasoning is acting on Rebecca’, and I don’t have that problem.
PETER: Let’s try going through the argument carefully. So, you have determinism and agent causation. Then, you’re gonna agent-cause the same thing every time, right?
REBECCA: Sorry, explain what you mean by that. If determinism is true…
PETER: Yes, determinism and agent causation implies that…
REBECCA: How do I have agent causation, if there is determinism? I mean…
PETER: I don’t know. I just said if you had both those things, then you would...
REBECCA: Yeah, I think…
PETER: All right, but look… We’re just looking at the logically possible alternatives. Maybe the formally possible alternatives. [laughter] All right, so you say it’s not possible to have agent causation and determinism. Fine. Then we’ll have agent causation and indeterminism. That means you’re not going to agent-cause the same thing every time.
REBECCA: But I don’t think I have a… I mean, aside from the fact that I don’t think it… I understand the value of doing thought experiments, but I worry that having the idea that I could go back and do it again seems to me to bake in some stuff which might, kind of, bias our conclusions. But even if I...
PETER: How can we tell… How can we say what determinism means? How can we say what determinism means, if we can’t go back? Determinism means if you went back to exactly the same state, it would go forward the same way.
REBECCA: So, I think this is why I have a problem with… when you ask somebody in simple terms to say what 'free will’ is, sometimes they say something like ‘having had another chance’, or something. This seems to me like a weird way to describe something that I see as being an active power in the present moment! So, the question to me is: do I have both of the options? Can I reason and pick which of the options, and then act on it? So this is an account of agency. It’s quite a Lockean account of agency…
PETER: Well, see, I don’t know what a lot of those words mean. [laughter] What I do understand is ‘able’. So, that’s why I say, yep, what I meant by ‘free will’ when I wrote the book An Essay on Free Will, is that when you try and decide what to do, you’re able to do both those things. That’s all put together from words I understand.
REBECCA: I understand. So, I want to say, there are some senses in which people are not able to do things. In terms of this, I would probably divide them into, like, do I actually have the capacity to do it? And can I exercise the capacity? It might be the case that I have the capacity for free will, but the evil demon is preventing me from exercising it. Or, I have the capacity for free will, but you’re manipulating me to do all of the things.
PETER: But you already… When you go to capacity, you’ve already introduced a problematical term. We would have to stop and say what we mean by that, if we can, which…
REBECCA: Yeah. I think the conversation we had, though, in which we said something like, we talked about free will as some kind of power, presupposes… We can use the word ‘power’, instead. Being able to do something…
PETER: Yeah, power just means ability, right?
REBECCA: Yeah, or ability. Fine. We can just say ‘ability’. I have the ability. Like, there’s something within me that is able to do the thing. Yes, there could be some external constraints on me, whether those are, like, physical constraints or…
PETER: It’s not something within you that’s able to do things. It’s you.
REBECCA: It’s me, it’s me. Exactly. No, that’s right. But there are other kinds of things that can’t do those things. So, the bicycle can’t. We come back to the active-passive distinction. If the rock wrecks your car, right? The rock has moved because something has caused the rock to move. You might still want to call a rock an ‘agent’ — I know some people do that. I actually find that quite confusing.
But you want to say something like, for the rock to wreck your car, Rebecca had to, like, push the rock. For Rebecca to wreck your car, at least on the agent causation story, the agent here… This is not reducible to event causation, or however you want to put it. There’s something different about these agents….
PETER: That’s a possible point of view. But now, agent causation, as I understand it, is defined in opposition to event causation. And it is that a substance or continuant can be the cause of an event. It doesn’t… the cause of an event does not have to be an earlier event.
REBECCA: Yeah.
PETER: First of all, I don’t believe in events. [laughter] So, I don’t think there are any such things. So, that’s a little difficult for me. And secondly, I think causation is a relation between substances or continuants, such as the earth attracts the moon. That’s my paradigm. Now, we have stories about causal processes. About, you know, what happens when the key goes into the lock, and you turn the key, and the teeth mesh, and so on. None of those really requires events. Just talking about how things push on things. Maybe… I mean, is there something to us besides things pushing on things?
REBECCA: Yeah! I mean, I think, like my…
PETER: How do you know ‘you’ isn’t a very, very, very complicated system of things pushing on things?
REBECCA: Well, I mean, I think, for instance, it depends on what you count as ‘things’. I believe in mental substances of some kind. I do think that my beliefs play some role in the causal story, for instance.
PETER: But beliefs are propositions, aren’t they? Abstract objects?
REBECCA: I mean, I’d say something like, when I want to talk about some story of causation… some story about ‘why it is that Rebecca?’ Like, ‘why’ is important, here, as just ‘how’. Why it is that Rebecca picks the Chinese restaurant over the Indian restaurant, is a very different story from why it is that the earth attracts the moon. And that story there, the explanatory story in terms of ‘why’ — let’s put ‘how’ out the side, for one second — is the kind of story that we’re interested in thinking about when we think about the free will problem.
PETER: Why a bear breaks into a country store at night and gets into the fruit jars is a very different kind of ‘why question’ from, say, why water has surface tension.
REBECCA: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. I agree. It seems some kind of categorisation of these different kinds of ‘whys’… So, we’ve got why Rebecca picks the Chinese restaurant over the Indian restaurant. We’ve got why the earth attracts the moon. We’ve got why the bear breaks into the restaurant. And why… the question about the water and the surface tension. These are different. They’re trying to, seeking to explain quite different kinds of things.
And the one that we’re interested in here, in this conversation, is the ‘why Rebecca picks the Indian restaurant over the Chinese restaurant’. Now, I can’t necessarily give you the perfect answer to that, or explain ‘how’ it is. But one thing I can say: I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a different kind of story than the stories explaining the ‘whys’ in those other instances. The closest one is going to be the bear breaking into the convenience store.
On my understanding, very limited understanding, of animal psychology, which — and I work on the assumption we don’t know very much about the interior worlds of animals, if animals have interior worlds — I’m pretty happy to say things like, bears are not blameworthy, on my understanding of how it is. And if bears are not blameworthy, bears don’t have the kind of responsibility that I do.
Now, if I pick the Chinese restaurant by reasoning on it, as opposed to being pushed in through the door, or even as opposed to being, you know, having a gun pointed to my head… These are just not questions that are ever going to arise when we talk about why is the earth attracting the moon!
PETER: Well, there’s the question: how much did God have to do to create the world? And now, let’s just leave aside the fact that according to quantum field theory, there aren’t even any particles. [laughter] Let’s just say there are electrons and quarks and things like that.
REBECCA: Sure, sure.
PETER: Did God have to do anything except create all the electrons and quarks and the forces that… I think not. Everything supervenes on those things. That is, I think I’m a physical thing, a living animal, just like a bear. Only, maybe more, much more, complicated in some respects.
REBECCA: You think you’re physical all the way down? You think you’re just a physical thing?
PETER: I think I’m physical all the way down.
REBECCA: So, then, I’m kind of bemused why you’re so committed to thinking that free will is less weird than non-free will.
PETER: Sorry, why…
REBECCA: So why free will, believing in free will, is less weird than not believing in free will?
PETER: Well, because if we didn’t have free will, then all this weird stuff would be true. Like, there’s nothing wrong with the Holocaust. Nobody is to blame for the Holocaust. It’s nobody’s fault. Those things are horrible, but they’re also intellectually frightening.
REBECCA: Yeah. So, it’s your moral realism in part that makes you believe in free will.
PETER: By moral realism, you believe that there’s…
REBECCA: You think there are truths to the matter about... You know, there are moral facts.
PETER: That if some… That those things happened are somebody’s fault, or somebody’s to blame for them, yeah.
REBECCA: Yeah. Which is dependent on the idea about there being moral facts.
PETER: Is it? Well, maybe. But I’m convinced that it’s real, whatever it may be dependent on.
REBECCA: So, this is what it really… Because I was intrigued by this. You’ve written various times, for instance, things like you say — you had this nice passage — I forget, it’s maybe in the thing where you talk about Chisholm. You say something like, “Look, there are decisions I’ve made, which I’m just so certain that I was responsible. Or actions I’ve taken. I’m just so certain I was responsible for those things. I’m more certain about that than I am about the conclusions of any philosophical argument.”
PETER: Yeah, I think that’s true.
REBECCA: You’ve said something like that. Why?
PETER: Aren’t you more convinced… Aren’t you more convinced that your mother exists than of any theory of personal identity?
REBECCA: Umm… I’m not sure, no. I think we may just have a different conception of ‘convinced’. For me to be convinced, I think I have to… As opposed to me, just, to sense something, or for me to depend upon hearsay, or something like this. I don’t know. Although, that said, I also don’t believe in this kind of instinctive perception thing. I think if I see the tree, that’s not enough to think there’s the tree, there. I have to know what tree-ness is. I have the weird Aristotelian stuff about that.
But, no. I think, when I think of the word ‘convinced’, it comes back to me about this stuff about deliberation. To be convinced, I think I have to have considered the alternatives. And for a start, I haven’t ever considered the alternative of my mother not existing!
PETER: Well, you can!
REBECCA: I can. And I’m not fully… I might be wrong. Maybe she doesn’t exist!
PETER: Suppose somebody says to you, “Susan Lowe does not exist”. You know, you’re under an illusion to think there is such a person as that…
REBECCA: Yeah, yeah.
PETER: You know that’s wrong, right? You know that isn’t true.
REBECCA: Actually I have, I think, an insanely high bar on claiming I know anything. I know that I’m conscious in this particular moment. I’m not sure it’s necessary that… I don’t know it was me who was conscious in the previous moment. I’m not really sure there’s anything else I would actually say ‘know’, and mean ‘know’, in the hardcore sense.
So, I don’t think I do know that my mum exists, actually. I mean, the world is — I mean, goodness me, that’s gonna have a lot of… But I’m also not the kind of person who wants to believe something because of the impetus of not believing the thing.
PETER: But it’s not so much whether you assign a probability of one to that. [laughter] As whether you assign a higher probability to that than you do to any philosophical thesis.
REBECCA: But it’s still the ‘convincedness’, to me, speaks of deliberation. Speaks of reasoning, these kinds of things. And that brings me back to the point about the philosophical argument. So, what is it you think makes you have this instinct? Maybe this is just a category-error question. Why is it that you feel such an instinctive draw? Because of the conclusions. I think that’s what we’re getting to. You think the implications would be so catastrophic to everything else that we think we know, and the ways we behave, and all of this stuff. That, therefore, free will.
PETER: Well, it would be. But that’s not the point I was making.
REBECCA: No.
PETER: It’s just we start out with certain prior probabilities, right? I assign a higher prior probability to the Holocaust was somebody’s fault, than I do to any philosophical theory about blame and fault.
REBECCA: But why is it… What would you say if I asked you to go through why it is that you assign a particular probability to that?
PETER: But you don’t defend your priors like that. They’re what you start with. You’ve got nothing to defend them with. That’s what you… They’re the things that you use to construct your defences of other things.
REBECCA: But can’t I question… It depends on what you’re counting as a prior, here, but I think there are plenty of things that people count as priors, which they can change their mind on. In other words, you can have different priors from me…
PETER: Yeah, they certainly can. But not on the basis of some argument.
REBECCA: Really?
PETER: Not if they’re really independent. I mean, what would the argument use as premises?
REBECCA: Well, I mean, you give me an example of one of these priors that you think I can’t change through deliberating on it, and realising I was incorrect. In the context that you can have different priors from me. So, you can be like, these are Rebecca’s priors, and these are Peter’s priors. You give me an example of one of those things where you can’t be like, “maybe I should have one of Rebecca’s priors!”
PETER: “I Rebecca, am able to speak English.” What kind of argument would convince you?
REBECCA: I mean, that’s going to come back to what ‘able’ is for a start, right?
PETER: Well, I mean, you asked for an example. Well, tell me what kind of argument would convince you…
REBECCA: I want an example of something which is a Rebecca prior and something which is a Peter prior, which are different, whereby you can’t bring yourself to be convinced….
PETER: Well, you assign essentially a probability of one. Look, I mean, let me talk about essential probabilities. You can admit theoretically, on the basis of quantum mechanics, say that if you were to toss a pencil on to your desk it might pass through the desk. But you assign a practical probability of one to saying the pencil would not pass through the desk.
REBECCA: Based on my limited understanding of how the world is — I’m not a scientist, but if I read a science paper tomorrow which tells me that, look, in some instances, owing to the particular angle of the pencil...
PETER: Don’t you think that you are not likely to read such an article? I assign a probability of one to ‘I’m not going to read such an article’.
REBECCA: Quantum physics, like, blows my mind!
PETER: Yes, but the probabilities are, like, you have to go sixty decimal places to get to a non-zero in there. Yeah, that’s what I precisely meant by practical probability. Yes, there is a certain probability, it’s just so remote, that we are…
REBECCA: I think all I’m saying is that the person who knows more about these things, or has different knowledge about, or has different beliefs about this thing, has learned different things about it, can well assign different probabilities from someone else.
PETER: Well, I mean, perhaps you’re right about that. A person might know little enough about science to be convinced of something. But certainly you assign a probability of one to the proposition that you speak English.
REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, except I think it could be the case, though, for instance, that speaking English has to meet a certain bar, right? So I myself think I meet the bar for speaking English. But if I have a catastrophic accident tomorrow, which causes me to lose my…
PETER: Yes, but you haven’t yet. The question wasn’t, well, I shall speak English…be able to speak English tomorrow. Yes, that that might well be less than one.
REBECCA: What I’m trying to get at is why I assigned the probability. And I assigned the probability in the awareness that there are instances in which that wouldn’t be true about me.
PETER: Well, I think you would have to… Now here I’m going back to, I’m afraid, to Wittgenstein.
REBECCA: Oh no!
PETER: Despite your poster. [Note from Rebecca: there is a Wittgenstein poster in my office where I was recording this episode.]
REBECCA: Yeah, you know that poster’s a joke, because, I mean, I just don’t get anywhere with Wittgenstein.
PETER: I have to tell you that once… Who was the guy that wrote the biography of Wittgenstein?
REBECCA: Oh, Monk. Ray Monk.
PETER: Yes, right.
REBECCA: That’s a great book.
PETER: I was discussing that book with Hilary Putnam, back in the nineties, and he said, “That Monk just does not understand Wittgenstein!” [laughter] And I said, “But Hilary, everybody who writes on Wittgenstein says everybody else who writes on Wittgenstein doesn’t understand!” [laughter] And he said, “Yes, but he really doesn’t understand Wittgenstein! Not just the way other philosophers don’t understand Wittgenstein. He really doesn’t understand Wittgenstein!”
REBECCA: That’s very funny! We’re gonna have to finish in a minute. You tell me the relevance of Wittgenstein here, because then you’ll give me something to think about.
PETER: That is, you would not be able… If you don’t believe that you speak English, you wouldn’t be able to formulate any questions about anything.
REBECCA: I speak French. I can formulate questions in French.
PETER: [laughter] If you don’t speak English, you don’t speak French either….
REBECCA: Yeah, I mean this comes back to Quine and all these things. Yeah, this stuff is very interesting. I also think, I mean, you said earlier on, which I think has bearing in it, I think that probably pre-language children can deliberate.
PETER: There’s an interesting passage in Wittgenstein about that. Somebody quoted William James… who quoted a person who had been non-linguistic until adolescence, that he had formed the idea of creator god before he was able to speak, just by looking at design in the world. And Wittgenstein said, why should we believe that?
REBECCA: [laughter] I try to… I mean, the only time I’ve ever gotten anything out of... I get that Wittgenstein is very clever and very important. I understand that. But one time when I was in Vienna, I went to see the amazing house that he designed for his sister. And I was so taken by this house, I went straight to read some of On Certainty, and all of a sudden, it seemed wonderful to me. And I was like, oh my goodness, I’ve been missing all this, all this time! And then, when I got back to the UK, I tried again, and I just went back to this... [laughter] I think it’s like, you know, wine tastes better in the place, or something.
PETER: Yeah.
REBECCA: Peter, this has been wonderful. I’m going to finish by asking you the question I always ask people on this podcast, and you can completely divorce this from the fantastic conversation I really enjoyed. If a little kid comes up to you and says, “Hey, Peter, I hear that you write about free will. What is free will?”
I could imagine, even with all of these caveats, you saying something like, “when it’s up to you”, or something. Is there some starting point, for the little kid, in getting into this, that you’re happy to offer?
PETER: Well, yeah, I would ask him to think about the last case when he was trying to decide what to do. And then I would ask him what he did do. I mean, let’s hope that he actually comes up with a plausible system of alternatives [laughter] and can clearly decide that he decided. Then, I’d ask him whether he thought he was able to do the other thing. That would be the starting point for me.
REBECCA: So, ‘being able to do the other thing’.
PETER: Mmm-hmm.
REBECCA: That’s nice. This has been wonderful. Peter, I’m very grateful to you. This has been very fun, as indeed all our conversations are. I feel like we’ve covered a lot of stuff. So, thanks very much for joining me.
PETER: I’m very grateful to you for asking me.
