It sounds interesting.

From reading your post, I get the impression that you believe animals don't have free will. Why is that?

It seems to me that animal behavior, like human behavior, is not deterministic. For example, consider pigeons that develop "superstitious" patterns of behavior when they are provided with non-contingent reinforcement. The patterns of behavior that develop under these conditions can't be predicted in advance.

Baumeister and others such as Vohs and Schooler have done research purporting to demonstrate the corrosive moral effects of belief in determinism. But their results should be taken with many grains of salt. Philosopher Tamler Sommers has commented on this research at his own Psychology Today blog:

"My goal here is not to trash [the Vohs and Schooler] study, or even to nitpick about the methods, but rather to argue that the results, even when accepted at face value, don’t shed light on the most important questions about the implications of denying free will. The reason is simple: The way people might react in the short term upon having their belief in free will challenged likely has very little bearing on than how they would behave over the course of their lives once the initial shock wears off. (Having your worldview shaken up will certainly have some short-term negative effects on behavior. Right after Grady Little inexplicably allowed Pedro give up the lead to the Yankees in game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, I would have done a lot worse than cheat on a psychology quiz!)

"In sum, there's no reason to think that our behavior just after hearing that a cherished belief is false has any bearing whatsoever on how we'll act after further reflection. Has there been a single study that documents such a correlation? If there is none, then it seems that this study only shows that it’s undesirable for people to find out there's no free will fifteen minutes before they submit their tax return. What really matters is how people would handle this belief in the long run."

Sommers goes on to suggest that in the long run, disbelief in free will, or belief in determinism, wouldn't be morally corrupting, that "the masses can handle the truth." He also proposes a research design to test for this. Meanwhile, evidence that convinced determinists can be perfectly moral, upright citizens can be found in first-person reports by determinists themselves, see http://www.naturalism.org/living1.htm As John Bargh suggested in his talk on free will at SPSP, Baumeister and others might want to consider researching the *positive* effects of giving up belief in free will.

Determinism might seem initially demoralizing, but that's because our traditional notions of agency and responsibility are tied to the idea that to be free and responsible, we have to be undetermined first causes, like little gods. Discarding that untenable supernatural assumption, we find that there are still good reasons to act morally even if it turns out that determinism is true, see http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm

Here is my idea. Roy and John are both wrong, and both right. Here’s how. (This is a response to their pieces in the spring 2009 Dialogue, and to what I remember of the SPSP session. I haven’t read the other postings on this blog.)

Everything, including human behavior, is caused in a deterministic way. So if we knew enough about all relevant antecedent conditions, we could predict behavior perfectly. Our inability to do so, and our probabilistic descriptions are a reflection of our imperfect knowledge (i.e., ignorance, error variance), not any inherent indeterminacy in causal chains involving human behavior. There is no evidence that Heisenberg’s principle operates at the scale of phenomena under consideration. In all this, Bargh and I share the same metaphysical assumptions, and disagree with Roy. And this implies that free will in Bargh’s sense (“an agent’s ability to act on the world independently of purely physical… causes and prior states of the world.”) does not exist. It is an “illusion” that “is caused.”

But of course free will does exist, as almost everyone (including Roy and I) knows. What’s missing in this discussion is the understanding that “free will” (in another sense) is a social construction, part of a culturally shared belief system at the center of cultural theories of responsibility and blame, deservedness and credit. In this sense, if you could not have done otherwise (e.g., someone held a gun to your head), then you were not free. If you could have done otherwise (i.e., you “had a choice”), then you were free and could have exercised your free will. And (critically) you can only be held responsible, or praiseworthy, if you could have done otherwise (see Hart & Honoré). It’s all about social agreement on counterfactuals, as a way to assign responsibility in the service of social control of society’s members. We can speculate about possible evolutionary origins of such belief systems in the service of social survival and cooperation (as some have), but that’s a tangent. The point is that free will in this sense is real, and functions as a central concept in socially constructed and shared theories of credit and blame, in the service of social coordination.

Is such a concept of free will a “physical cause” in Bargh’s sense. I don’t think so, unless he admits beliefs, values, goals, and even such an abstraction as “information” as “physical.” But such a kind of free will is very real, with real consequences, as Roy and any student of the tragic and glorious human condition will point out. You can’t blink it away any more than you can un-believe a conviction, wish away slavery, or convince everyone “to just get along.” It’s as real as money or justice or mind (as in “theory of mind”). In other words, it’s a “social” cause of the kind that social psychologists are not only familiar with, but trade in daily. If we all simultaneously stopped believing in it, it would disappear (like the value of some currencies). But we can’t and won’t (unlike some currencies).

Loose ends: 1) Roy’s beliefs about probabilistic causality are not necessary to believe in free will; see above. 2) John’s public flight from his painful religious upbringing is no reason to reject “non-physical” causes. There are lots of them (see above) that have nothing to do with the soul or deity. Most of what we take to be “reality” is, after all, a construction of our minds. Fortunately our perceptual systems are incapable of perceiving the “physical fact” that reality is mostly empty space and energy fields that are organized in complex ways. But this all reminds me of a bad trip I had once. 3) Calling these things “illusions” rather than “social constructions or beliefs” is primarily a value judgment (i.e., name calling) and a way of saying they are not real. See above, and Dan Wegner. They’re real in any functional social sense. 3) Roy and John are both responsible for their views, because they are freely chosen and (when I have my scientist hat on) completely determined. Light is both a wave and particles. That’s not too complicated, is it? Free will is an illusion in one sense (i.e., it is determined and deterministic) and a reality in another (a distributed social construction that we share and co-create to make society possible). And there’s no obvious contradiction between these two, unless you fall into the semantic traps that abound in this argument. When we use single terms for multiple meanings, we get confused.

I'd like to share that there is no real and actual proof of evolution. To say that we have evolved is untrue. Rather, it would be wise to even mention such a concept. And, it would be even wiser to discover this truth to the unbeliever.