Dennett vs Sapolsky on free will: A clash over different claims?

Question

On a recent Youtube episode of Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal Daniel Dennett, author and Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, discusses his views of Robert Sapolsky's recent work around free will. Sapolsky has been doing the rounds of webcasters to promote his new book, Determined: a Science of Life Without Free Will amd is Professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University.

Dennett states (00:00:10):

"Robert makes one big mistake and it's right at the centre of his work...What he's missed is the difference between control an causation".

Dennett then describes a boulder crashing down a mountain. He states the boulder is caused to do this by "...wind pressure, bumps on the way, material, etc, etc".

"Now, if we rewound the tape of life and replayed the tape of that exact circumstance, it would roll in exactly the same way. That's determinism".

He then compares the boulder's journey with that of a skier who skis down the mountain. The skier differs from the boulder, claims Dennett, in that she is in control.

"Now the path of the boulder is determined. The path of the skier is determined. The difference is that the skier's path is controlled. The rock's path is not".

"If you make the distinction between control and causation, then Sapolsky's argument simply falls apart".

[To give some insight into what Sapolsky's position is - and I hope I'm doing him justice here - he invokes a determinism that extends back to the Big Bang in order to deny free will].

Dennett continues:

"...it doesn't go back to the Big Bang. Because once life gets started...life generates controllers. It generates self-controlled little agents. Things that are alive".

He then goes on to focus on the notion of predictability and how "indeterminism is not required for unpredictability". He states that being unpredictable - whilst still being determined - gives us freedom as agents in the sense that it protects us from other agents. He also states that "...determinism doesn't prevent you from acting locally, and making your own choices and not being controlled by the past".

This is where he confuses me. He is asserting control from determined agents. [I have a feeling this what he came to loggerheads with Sam Harris about in their pub debate following Harris's release of his book 'Free Will').

How can there be control within a determined sequence of events? Isn't this merely the illusion of control?.

"Evolution pseudo-randomly makes a lot of mutations and the ones that survive survive because they do things that the competition doesn't do, and this", he says, "is what gives them a kind of control; a kind of reliability".

Jaimungal asks Dennett what Sapolsky's reaction to his basic position was. Dennett paraphrases Sapolsky as saying, "No, no. You're still determined by the events going back to before your birth".

He then goes on to give a 'parable of the bathtub' as a means of describing that we "...are reliable in spite of variations in our past". I can only assume that he is referring obliquely to the patterns of behaviour we form as identities that have evolved over time, but I still don't see how this gets us any closer to free will.

Am I correct in concluding that Dennett and Sapolsky are at odds in relation to very different views of free will? Ie: That Sapolsky is denying the free will that would somehow overcome determinism whereas Dennett is happy with a free will that bestows an illusion of control?

Answer 1

Great question, well posed.

Dennett is the clearest champion of Compatibilism about free-will. Many scientists take from the fact human actions must be reducible to atoms and the void, that we only need the latter for a full account, and any appearance of causal power by agents is so subsumed by the causal narrative of atoms that we can call free will an illusion. This is like saying literature is an illusion, only letters and words are real.

Biology is constituted of vast chains of contingencies. And we can consider genes as an encoding, an image, of a lineages evolutionary niche. Similary when a large-language-model predicts a next word, it does so not from words and letters, but from a low resolution image of their use across the entire internet. You need to know the abstraction in the system, which shaped the control algorithm, to predict the system.

David Krakauer is Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. I feel his term 'teleonomic matter' can most clearly reveal why these kind of systems are different. He uses it to describe what the domain of Complex Systems Theory is: that it's systems which get information about their environment, record it, and change their dynamics in some way as a result.

This can provide a truly abstract account of what subjectivity. And crucially, of what an observer is in quantum mechanics, where an observation makes the observed part of the observers wave function, the information about which state quantum system is in goes from being isolated from the observer, into the observer's system. The mixed or coherent state goes from being in the wavefunction of the observed quantum system, effectively into the 'wavefunction of the universe'.

It's an over simplistic view of a deterministic universe, to think that the information that fixes or determines future outcomes is distributed evenly everywhere. Quantum systems make it very clear that is not the case. In the same way, the information to predict the skier is disproportionately localised in their control systems, not the shape of the mountain.

A way to picture the physical significance of an increasingly more accurate control algorithm, is to think how the best abstraction of physics could allow energy life and the technology tree to be recovered even the poorest resources, like a patch of interstellar dust, using only very minimal initial resources like data, a fusion device, and a Von-Neuman machine.

I would point to the similarity to high-sensitivity-to-initial-conditions of classical deterministic systems like say three-body systems, which requires measurements of initial conditions that become increasingly difficult, and ultimately can go below the Planck scale, the limit imposed on investigation by the point where any probe would generate a blackhole. See: Gargantuan chaotic gravitational three-body systems and their irreversibility to the Planck length. Similarly improving control algorithms, can amplify sensitivity to initial conditions, to the point where a patch of cosmic dust could do incredibly improbable things.

Answer 2

Both debaters are wrong. Our universe is not determined. PARTS of it may be mostly determined, but QM is indeterminate, and chaos theory shows how uncertainties can leverage into the macro scale.

Dennett's conception of a controlling skier is partly correct. Once we have an idea in our heads of what to do, then the guiding of our bodies IS deterministic.

But the idea itself, if one is a physicalist, AND committed to the random/determined dichotomy, is most plausibly seen as the result of a semi chaotic process, where QM effects in the interaction of our neural system produce random events, which then get sorted by the inherent structure of our neurology into poor, good or better choices. MAYBE this is what Dennett means. But then he would be a semi=randomist, not a compatibilist determinist.

If one is a spiritual dualist, or an agent emergentist, then the origin of ideas, OR the selection between them, can have a spiritual or emergent plane component too, which would matrix with the random then bounded/sorted chaotic neurology.

Answer 3

"...determinism doesn't prevent you from acting locally, and making your own choices and not being controlled by the past".

This statement makes no sense. Determinism means that everything is caused/controlled by the past. There are no agents capable of self-determining their own actions.

How can there be control within a determined sequence of events?

You have reached the main problem with Dennett's compatibilism: How an action can be determined by both the agent herself and the past events? I don't know how he explains this, but it is quite obvious that he must redefine both free will (=agent determines) and determinism (=past events determine) beyond recognition.

There cannot be any control within a determined sequence of events. Nor can there be any evolution or anything random (pseudo- or true).

The problem with both gentlemen is that they are both trying to shoehorn determinism into reality.

Answer 4

Dennett's thoughts are consistent with the overall philosophical landscape and with free will too, as we understand it that is. Sapolsky has a point too and his skiing example is apposite.

At times like these I suggest we employ our knowledge or wisdom, if possible, and, let's not forget, imagination. There's a boulder, there's a skier; both on a hilltop. What follows has a structure to it and we conduct, either a gedanken experiment or carry out a scientific experiment.