The Revised Principle of Alternate Possibilities and Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument

What follows is a work in progress, and I would greatly appreciate any constructive feedback pertaining to my argumentation and the strength of my reply to the RPAP. As stated in the body of the post, additional information on the two primary articles cited can be found in the endnotes at the end of this post.

 

Frankfurtian-style counterfactual intervener scenarios of all different stripes hold a special place in discussions of free will and moral responsibility. In some situations, they are a necessary evil with which one must contend, and in others they are an insurmountable obstacle for some theories. Many journal articles and full-length books on these topics dedicate large sections of text to attempting to reconcile Frankfurtian-style counterfactual intervener scenarios (CIS) against Frankfurt’s modification of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP). I believe that, using Galen Strawson’s iteration of what he deems the “Basic Argument” for the impossibility of moral responsibility, I can at best obviate Frankfurt’s Revised Principle of Alternate Possibilities (RPAP) and at worst side-step the need for addressing the PAP/RPAP by way of positing a new principle based on Strawson’s Basic Argument, what I shall call the Principle of the Basic Argument (PBA).

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Eliminative Materialism, Bayesian Probability, Beliefs Gone Wild, and LSE Choice Group

Patricia Churchland discusses eliminative materialism:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzT0jHJdq7Q

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Libet Revisited: Reduction and Prediction in Neuroscience

In “Agent Causation” Timothy O’Connor makes a passing assertion that there are many unresolved questions for materialist agency as he posits it, and that many of these questions are empirical in nature and can only be resolved with “extensive advancements within neurobiological science.” [1] Two particularly salient questions are (1) “Precisely to what extent is an ordinary human’s behavior directly regulated by the agent himself, and to what extent is it controlled by microdeterministic processes?”[2] And (2) whether microdeterministic processes can be predicted or not. While O’Connor may believe that advances in neuroscience will reinforce rather than call into question his theory, this is not the case. Stretching from the 1980s to a recent study in 2008, neuroscience has demonstrated that predictive brain activity can be seen to occur prior to a test subject’s consciousness of making a decision. From Libet to present, these studies provide damaging replies to the questions which O’Connor’s theory leaves unanswered.

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Reid on Motives & Actions: Cogent?

Hello to All!

In my previous post (also on Reid), one of our fellow contributors made note of the role of motives in differentiating Hume and Reid on the topic of Freedom & Determinism. This reminded me of some of the interesting things that Reid mentions about motives in one of his Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind. I wish to present excerpted quotes from the work, which encompass the 8 points made by this philosopher on the topic. You can find the work I’m pulling the quotes from here (make sure to click on “Complete Text,” and, once the pdf has opened, go down to Chapter 4).

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Experimental Philosophy of Free Will: Bootcamp and Workshop

Yale will be hosting a bootcamp and workshop on Experimental Philosophy of Free Will for graduate students and faculty:

The Experimental Philosophy of Free Will Workshop and Boot Camp is an opportunity for philosophers to gain the skills they need to conduct cutting-edge research in the experimental philosophy of free will.

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Moral Responsibility vs. Moral Judgement

Aaron requested a more full-blooded iteration of my stance on morality for consideration and I thought I would oblige, as it is something on which I would certainly like feedback. In what follows I would like to first address why I do not believe human beings are morally responsible for their behavior in the manner commonly thought necessary, and second posit that the moral responsibility of human beings is not necessary for possessing judgements as to what actions are right or wrong.

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“I’m Just a Machine”

From a recent article in the Telegraph on neuroscience, freewill, and determinism:

“What happens if someone commits a crime, and it turns out that there’s a lesion in that brain area? Is that person responsible? Is the damage to the machine sufficient for us to exempt them from that very basic human idea that we are responsible for our actions? I don’t know.” He refers to a major project in America, where “lawyers, neuroscientists, philosophers and psychiatrists are all trying to work out what impact brain science has on our socio-legal sense of responsibility.”

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The Trap…

…is an Adam Curtis documentary about the creation and use of game theory in Cold-War America and how this led to our society’s conception of freedom and of the individual. If you haven’t seen it and if you are at all interested in game theory or political philosophy, then it’s worth watching. Here is the link to the documentary, on Google video. It features interviews with John Nash, Friedrick von Hayek, John Maynard Smith, Jean-Paul Sarte, Isaiah Berlin, Madsen Pirie (founder of the Adam Smith Institute), among others. Even if you ultimately don’t agree with the politics of this documentary or it’s boarder-line polemical tone, the interviews make watching this series (3 hour long installments) worth while.

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“The Maze of Free Will”

Galen Strawson discusses free-will, or the lack thereof, in the New York Times. (HT: Felipe Leon)

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More on fMRI’s: A Psychopath’s Brain

There’s an interesting couple of posts over at Psych Central about using fMRI techonology to image the brains of psychopaths. Such techonology, if available, brings up interesting questions all around. One ethical question is one that has already been explored in science fiction–if we are able to tell who is (potentially) a psychopath and capable of horrendous behavior, what should we do? Curtail deviant behavior? Let it happen? What about the rights of the patient/participant in a study?

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Reading Your Mind with fMRI

Researchers say they can now trace your memories and tell which memory is being recalled through fMRI:

FORMATION of a memory is widely believed to leave a ‘trace’ in the brain – a fleeting pattern of electrical activity which strengthens the connections within a widely distributed network of neurons, and which re-emerges when the memory is recalled. The concept of the memory trace was first proposed nearly a century ago, but the nature of the trace, its precise location in the brain and the underlying neural mechanisms all remain elusive. Researchers from University College London now report that functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) can be used to decode individual memory traces and to predict which of three recently encoded memories is being recalled.

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Bad News – Good News

The bad news — for those interested in intelligent and civilized philosophical discussions on the Internet – is that about a month ago, the Garden of Forking Paths (GFP) ended its excellent run.

The good news is that yesterday a number of the contributors for GFP launched a similar blog: Flickers of Freedom. I encourage you to check it out … regularly.

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Abstracts of Papers, Part 3

Here are the last of the abstracts for the conference’s concurrent sessions. Abstracts of the plenary sessions will follow next week.

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Freewill in the NYT

… featuring FSU’s Al Mele, here.

(HT: The Garden of Forking Paths)

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Conference Papers

Congratulations to the students whose papers have been accepted for presentation at the 12th Annual Northeast Florida Student Philosophy Conference at UNF on February 7th:

“How to Motivate the Maxim that ‘Ought Implies Can’ to Defend the Principle of Alternate Possibilities”
Sean Armil (University of Florida)

“On the Limitations of Formal Methods”
Wataru Asanuma (Florida State University)

“A Defense of Lewisian Contextualism”
Yael Benjamin (University of Massachusettes at Dartmouth)

“The Impact of Chalmers’ Theory of Consciousness on the Theistic Argument from Consciousness”
Andrew Brenner (University of North Florida)

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The Milgram Experiment

The Milgram Experiment is standard in psychology classes and a hypothesis Stanley Milgram raised has been increasingly taken up and examined by philosophers, “[O]ften it is not so much the kind of person a man as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” This hypothesis, the situationist hypothesis, is sometimes seen as a threat to certain conceptions of virtue, as well as some philosophical views of rationality, action, personality, moral responsibility, and moral psychology.

The Milgram Experiment was designed to test the hypothesis—also raised by Hannah Arendt, whom Milgram read—that horrible events, like the holocaust, do not require an especially evil group of people conspiring together. Rather, they require that normal people simply do what they are told.

Neuroskeptic, a neuroscientist blogger, writes about little-known aspects of the Milgram Experiment, for example, that participants were paid $4.00 each, a description (and photo) of the confederate whom participants “shocked”, and that recent experimental results show findings similar to Milgram’s.

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Stimulating the Cerebral Cortex

Stimulating points on the cerebral cortex with the tip of an electrode can make a subject experience various sensations. A patient may move an arm and experience this movement as external, i.e., not originating from the subject, experienced as a reflex. Some have taken this to show there is part of the mind (higher order cognition, perhaps) immune to physical manipulation because such stimulation does not manipulate the intentions of the subject. Neuroskeptic explains why it isn’t surprising that stimulating points on the cerebral cortex doesn’t affect the intentions of the subject:

[T]o take this as evidence for some kind of a dualism between a form of conciousness which can be manipulated via the brain and another, non-material level of conciousness which can’t (the “soul” in other words), is like saying that because hammering away at one key of a piano produces nothing but an annoying noise, there must be something magical going on when a pianist plays a Mozart concerto. Stimulating a single small part of the brain is about the crudest manipulation imaginable; all we can conclude from the results of point-stimulation experiments is that some kinds of mental processes are not controlled by single points on the cortex. This should not be surprising, since the brain is a network of 100 billion cells; what’s interesting, in fact, is that stimulating a few million of these cells with the tip of an electrode can do anything.

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The less they know, the less they know it?

Via In Socrates’ Wake, I find this psychological gem:

[C]ognitive science offers some fairly sobering observations about our ability to judge ourselves and others…

[T]wo Cornell psychologists began with the following assumptions.

1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.

To put their theories to the test, the psychologists asked a group of Cornell undergraduates to undergo a series of self-assessments, including tests of logical reasoning taken from a Law School Admissions Test preparation guide. Prior to being shown their test scores, the subjects were asked to estimate how they thought they would fare in comparison with the others taking the tests.

On average, participants placed themselves in the 66th percentile, revealing that most of us tend to overestimate our skills somewhat. But those in the bottom 25 percent consistently overestimated their ability to the greatest extent. For example, in the logical reasoning section, individuals that scored in the 12th percentile believed that their general reasoning abilities fell at the 68th percentile, and that their overall scores would be in the 62nd percentile. The authors point out that the problem was not primarily underestimating how others had done; those in the bottom quartile overestimated the number of their correct answers by nearly 50 percent. Similarly, after seeing the answers of the best performers — those in the top quartile — those in the bottom quartile continued to believe that they had performed well.

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Schroeder on Bloggingheads

Mark Schroeder (USC) discusses his book Slaves of the Passions.

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Does moral responsibility skepticism entail moral realism?

In order to be a skeptic about moral responsibility, does one also have to be a moral realist? Tamler Sommers offers an interesting argument at The Garden of Forking Paths.

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Cognitive Neuroscience, Moral Psychology and Psychopathology

Interesting stuff right here.

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An Interesting Discussion of Freewill…

At the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ the relationship between moral responsibility and mental illness is discussed.

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The Science of Freewill

Here is a story on Talk of the Nation, on NPR which discusses studies on the science of decision making using fMRI’s.

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Michael McKenna Interview

Interview with Michael McKenna (FSU) right here!

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Philosophers’ Carnival #53

Class is officially in session for the 53rd Philosophers‘ Carnival!

Since we at the Florida Student Philosophy Blog have recently returned to class, we thought you should too. We would like to thank all those who submitted, and we hope that you find the current selection as engaging as we did. Courses (or posts if you prefer) are organized by major subject, so go straight to your specialty or feel free to survey the catalog.

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