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Carl Sagan Once Said . . .
. . . "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." -- Cosmos, p. 218.
Surely Carl was being poetic here.
I'd like to think he didn't actually go around to county fairs correcting little old ladies who claimed to bake their pies from scratch.
But he has a point. If you want to bake a pie from ULTIMATE scratch, you must create all the material and processes that led the pie to have its current form.
In order to get to the point where you can mix the basic ingredients, roll the dough, and bake the pie, you must first plant the seeds, harvest the wheat and grind the kernels to get the flour you need.
And before you can do that, you must create the sun, the soil, the air, and the water needed to make the seeds grow.
And so on.
And no human being has ever done THAT. No one has ever baked a pie from ULTIMATE scratch.
Carl's Pies and the "Free Will" Debate
These two takes on "baking from scratch" are analogous to what's going on in the "free will" debate between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris.
Sam Harris claims that, in order to have free will, we must, so to speak, bake our actions from ULTIMATE scratch. In order to be the ULTIMATE authors of our actions, we must be the authors of, not only our choices, but also all the preconditions of our choices, and the preconditions of those preconditions, and so forth. And, since no one is the ULTIMATE author of his or her actions like this, Sam concludes that free will is an illusion.
Uncle Dan, on the other hand, wants to defend Aunt Betty's claim that she baked her pie from scratch. He wants to say that, even though none of us is the ULTIMATE author of our choices, we can still author our choices to a SUBSTANTIAL degree. We can be responsible for some of the preconditions for our choices, even though, if you press back far enough, we are not responsible for the preconditions of the preconditions of the preconditions, ad infinitum. And Dennett claims that this SUBSTANTIAL kind of free will, though not ULTIMATE, is still valuable and worth wanting.
Climbing the Ladder of Increasing "Freedom"
There are varying degrees to which you can bake a pie from scratch. Buying a pie from Costco does not count. And making a pie from a pie mix probably doesn't count either.
If we start from flour, sugar, apples, butter, and perhaps a few other ingredients, then we typically say that we've baked our pie from scratch.
But we can do even better than that. For instance, if we grow the apples and wheat on our own land, and harvest and process them ourselves before baking our pie, and we raise the cows that produce the milk that has the cream that we use to make the butter, and so on, then we might even say we've baked our pie from super-scratch. Though, again, we still stop well short of "ultimate" scratch.
"Freedom" can come in degrees, too.
For instance, in robotics competitions there are sumo-wrestling events where two robots square off in a ring with the goal of pushing the other out of the circle. In some contests the human competitors may control their robots with a joystick. In other contests the competitors cannot do this. Instead, they must program their robots to compete autonomously. In a sense, then, the robots in the latter case (the autonomous robots) are "freer" than those that must be controlled by joystick. They are not ULTIMATELY free. They still have to follow their coded instructions. But they are "freer".
Continuing this line of reasoning, we human beings are considerably more "free" than these autonomous sumo wrestlers in all kinds of ways.
And as individuals we can even become more "free" over the course of our lives (or less "free" if we're not careful). If we spend time reflecting on our own design, coming to learn our natural tendencies and biases, and can correct for these, then we become more "free" than we were before we learned such forms of meta-cognition. Again, we are not ULTIMATELY free. We are just "freer" (as a result of our ongoing evolutionary and cultural design) than sumo robots, bacteria, and less-enlightened versions of ourselves.
I am using the scare quotes around "free" so as not to beg the question in this debate. In some ways the debate boils down to whether we want to call this kind of "freedom" genuine freedom.
And, whether you want to call that progression a progression of "freeness of will" or not, it's still a progression of something that's valuable. There's a very real sense in which we would want to be higher up in the progression rather than lower down in it. And part of the difference, I would think, is that we feel more "free" when we have these kinds of features in our design.
And the winner is:
Scratch that. I don't want to put it in terms of winner and loser. What I'd like to say is that, given their agreement that no one is free "all the way down", I prefer Dan Dennett's approach. (And I'd like to see more evidence that Sam Harris actually understands Dan Dennett's approach).
While we don't have ULTIMATE free will, we do have all kinds of capacities (many of which Dennett explores in Freedom Evolves) for making decisions. These capacities can expand or atrophy depending on how much attention we give toward improving them. And they seem morally relevant in many ways.
At the end of the day, I don't really care whether we use the term "free will" or not when we talk about those capacities, as long as the capacities, and their moral relevance, don't get left out of the discussion.
Note
This is a modified version of an answer I gave on Quora: Jim Stone's answer to a question about Free Will.
References
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos.
- Sam Harris, Free Will.
- Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves.
