Freedom Is Doing What You Never Even Knew You Could Have Done

I had one of those minor philosophical epiphanies that I probably won’t do anything with professionally, at least not directly. In order to produce publishable (in academic journals) material around this epiphany, I’d have to read at least the last twenty years of evolutionary philosophy and psychology, and the freedom vs determinism debate going back at least twice as far, and then well into the seventeenth century. I really don’t have time for an extra project that long, so I’m going to blog about it. There’s a few steps in this, so it’ll take a few paragraphs to spell out.

Why are the opponents of evolution so frightened by the prospect? It has to do with what exactly that prospect is. The more theatrical anti-evolutionists have made rhetoric of jokes about an orangutan being their uncles or aunts. But the weirdness of existing on a continuum with other species is only evoked to disgust people. Conceptually, a deeper meaning underlies it.

The way humans have understood themselves morally is as free agents. Human morality and the complex societies that produce these moral systems are typically seen as exceptions to the natural order. We humans are artificial. That which is natural is governed by deterministic linear causality, the most advanced form of which is instinct. But humans are not purely instinctual: we are moral. Morality is an exception to instinct, animal behaviour not subject to linear causality.

But evolution is a natural process. If humans are the product of a natural process, then our moral systems do not constitute an exception to the deterministic natural order. This produces a contradiction in which morality loses, in those people who think of the deterministic natural order in a particular (but very popular) way. Actions which are not freely chosen cannot require the moral responsibility of their actors. If morality is a natural process, then it is a complex evolution of instinct, an entire determined process. So we have moral concepts by which we attribute responsibility, but no actual responsibility because we are not an exception to the deterministic natural order.

The greatest fear underlying opposition to evolution is the fear that there is no genuine moral responsibility.

I laid out this chain of reasoning, but I don’t believe in it, because I think several of the premises according to which this makes sense are not actually the case about the universe. It hinges on a metaphysical point. I used the term deterministic linear causality above, and I did that on purpose. Causality in general is an underdetermined process: an event can have a huge number of conditions and causes, and very complex relations among them. The image of one snooker ball hitting another snooker ball is an example that oversimplifies an amazingly complex universe. Determinism is similarly underdetermined: an event can have a huge number of different effects, can change a system in a wide variety of highly complex ways, and each of these effects interfere with each other apart from the event that was their genesis.

Here’s where the word ‘linear’ comes in. Precisely because of these underdeterminations in how events actually interact and cause each other, very few relations of causality are actually linear, like the snooker balls. The world we live in is enormously complex, and even though the mathematics that describe these complex systems that are our world are deterministic, there are enormous possibilities within the deterministic development of a system. One event does not cause a single set of effect events. One event sets off an enormous chain of interrelated events with millions of possibilities that its constituent bodies can choose from. That choice among possibilities is especially open to creatures with highly complex perceptual and reasoning skills who can analyze situations with an eye towards all that can be, not simply what there is.

Instinct is a reactive response to stimulus, a pattern that an organism follows according to what is there. The ability to conceive of possibility, either through colloquial reasoning, or highly complex phase space chaos mathematics, is a step far beyond instinct. This way of thinking about the metaphysics of the universe and causality takes us out of the trap by which moral responsibility disappears. Freedom, the capacity to understand and act on what can be rather than simply on what there is, is an evolved trait.

The natural order itself constitutes creatures that are more free than any creature before, so free that they can imagine themselves to be unnatural, and believe their dreams.

The Dangerous World of an Elite Philosophy

The follow up arguments to these posts have been on Brian Leiter’s blog for over a week now, but I only just got around to watching it. Last week, Jerry Fodor and Elliott Sober had an hour-long argument on bloggingheads.tv about the subject matter of Fodor’s new book, co-written with Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini, What Darwin Got Wrong. In the book and the conversation, Fodor argues that natural selection is not actually a scientific theory, despite the popular conviction that it is the theory of natural selection. The argument is provocative, but in my view considerably dangerous politically, but I think understanding this argument can show how dangerous and reckless philosophy can be when it’s done without reference to the role it can play, whether faithful to the purposes of its writers or not, in the formation and battles of ideologies.



People familiar with Fodor’s writings will find it rather strange that I’d call him reckless. Fodor is a writer who spends literally decades perfecting his arguments. Last year, I read his previous book, Language of Thought II, the main thrust of which was his argument for the modularity of mind and nativism of concepts. This argument he first formulated in the original Language of Thought, which was published in 1975. Since then, the argument has changed in its particular derivations, and how it connects one concept with another, but the basic structure and goal has remained the same. Essentially, Fodor’s writings on philosophy of mind have continually revised a single argument for thirty-five years.

How could a writer this meticulous about the creation of his argument be called reckless? Keep this question in mind as I walk through the argument between Fodor and Sober. I’ve embedded the full video a couple of paragraphs ago, but here’s Fodor’s basic point. A scientific theory, says Fodor, is a set of universally generalizable statements about what can and cannot happen, about how a system can behave. Such statements are the sole content of any scientific theory. By Fodor’s standards, if natural selection was genuinely a scientific theory, then it would be able to make universally generalizable statements about whether some trait is adaptive: for all occurrences of trait x, trait x is adaptive.

The natural selection principle cannot do this, because it can only tell you about what traits are adaptive in some particular situation. The predictions of natural selection as a theory can only be made in some particular context: Some of the particular contexts Fodor and Sober discuss are predator-prey relationships, sex distribution ratio in some particular ecology. Evolutionary biologists reproduce these contexts in mathematical models to make predictions about the development of these ecologies. According to Fodor, these concepts are mere particulars, which he dismisses as gossip, stories granny tells about lions and zebras, turtles, fungi, etc. No specific predictions can be made about what THE adaptive traits are.

But here is what Fodor doesn’t understand about evolutionary biology: no trait is adaptive in all situations. That fact is why species evolve in the first place: a trait is adaptive to an ecological context. The statement “Trait x is adaptive,” said without specifying an ecological context, is neither true nor false. Without an ecological context, such a statement is meaningless. Trait x is always an adaptation-to, and natural selection is always a selection-for. A statement in evolutionary biology is contingent, dependent on the particular ecology in which the organisms and traits in question exist. It cannot make universally generalizable statements about what traits are adaptive, because adaptation is not a universally general process: it is contingent and singular in its articulation and its situation.

If you share Fodor’s definition of ‘scientific theory,’ then you will agree with him that natural selection is no scientific theory. And perhaps as a corollary, you will believe that evolutionary biology is no science. This is Fodor on top of his game: he builds ironclad arguments based on premises that sound entirely plausible in the abstract. But as soon as those abstract premises and arguments are applied to real-world situations, then we end up assenting to what we never would have otherwise. Has Fodor convinced us of a truth of which we were previously ignorant? Or has something more dangerous happened?

Here is where we see the recklessness of Fodor’s method. Just put his argument into the contingent context in which he makes it. You could flippantly (or Frippantly; see Fripp, Robert) say we’re now working in an evolutionary ecology of ideas. Fodor and Sober spend their hour long conversation arguing over what is properly a definition of a scientific theory, about what kinds of propositions should properly be called theoretical and what should properly be called empirical field research (or gossip, in Fodor’s terms).

As a side note, I have never liked Fodor’s dismissive attitude towards philosophies he holds to be wrong. His contemptuous and insulting words I find rude and spiteful, no matter the calm and apologetic tones in which he may say them in conversation.

Now imagine how a fundamentalist religious campaigner may take Fodor’s words and twist them to his agenda. A respectable, scientific philosopher appreciated throughout his field for the rigor and care with which he crafts his arguments, is saying that natural selection, the key principle of evolution, is no theory. It doesn’t matter that Fodor is arguing over the definition of the word ‘theory’ and whether natural selection fits his definition.

Fodor is just trying to isolate his argument over definitions from the context of education and science programs and support in the rest of the world. Such political debates would, according to such a philosopher interested only in truths discovered through dispassionate (yet so very rude) argument, be mere gossip, grannies bickering at each other. Yet these debates craft the structure of our culture itself. One cannot understand the thought of Charles Darwin without reference to how he developed it. And one cannot understand this development without reference to the religious, social, and political climate in which Darwin worked and wrote. His ideas had a social power that may not be inherent in the propositions themselves, but constituted a profound revolution when placed in an ecology of Victorian Europe and North America.

Ideas themselves are developed in a contingent context, and while some may consist of universally generalizable propositions, the propositions alone cannot tell us how an idea will be put to work in the world. A philosopher who sees his discipline as above this riff-raff of mere politics, partisan gossip, and bickering grannies, may craft ideas that those grannies can take from him and pervert into a form the philosopher might find ethically repugnant. A genuinely mindful philosopher will keep her eye on the world in which her ideas are taken up, and think so as to help create the world where she wants to live. From riff-raff we are born, in riff-raff we live, and to riff-raff we will return. The highest philosophy is not the most abstract and distant from the distasteful, but the most powerful in transforming taste.