WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. This is the first of two wrap-ups for Feb. 19.
The Reason Foundation
LOS ANGELES -- Freedom evolves: Darwin + Hume = Daniel Dennett
By Ronald Bailey
Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett's intellectual career has been spent trying to extend the Enlightenment project of putting philosophy and morality on a scientific and naturalistic basis. His newest book, "Freedom Evolves," tries to answer the age-old question: Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world?
Dennett is trying to update David Hume in the light of Darwin's theory of evolution. In doing so, he provides us with fascinating new ways to think about the meaning of choice, the value of morality, and how the evolution of the human brain and its capabilities has made us more free.
As per Hume, we never see the "cause" of an event; we only note the conjunction of two events in time and space and infer that one must have caused the other. As Dennett points out, life depends on just such regularities. If all things really were random, then the complicated processes that produced life could not have arisen. Natural selection shapes organisms so that they can respond to and exploit the regularities in their environments.
Early in evolutionary history, Earthly organisms developed some ability to avoid dangers and seek benefits. For example, amoebas and bacteria use chemotaxis -- the ability to change their direction of movement in response to concentrations of specific chemicals -- thus enabling them to avoid toxins and to find food.
On this rudimentary ability to sense and avoid harm and seek benefits, natural selection has erected ever-higher levels of freedom of choice in Earthly organisms, according to Dennett. For example, complex organisms, like birds, are endowed with long-range senses like eyesight and hearing which help them avoid far-off dangers and take advantage of distant opportunities.
So every animal that lives gets to choose. But there is a big difference between other animals and people. Amoebas and birds and most other animals are "situation-action machines." They are endowed by natural selection with a more-or-less fixed repertoire of behaviors that tell an organism: "In situation A, do action B." Amoebas have fewer choices, while birds have more.
On the other hand, people are "choice-machines." That means that we generate our own reasons for doing something. Unlike birds or amoebas, our reasons are not hardwired by natural selection, although our capacity to reason is. Dennett argues that it is this natural capacity that allows people, of all living beings on the Earth, to weigh and justify to themselves and others different courses of action.
But is this capacity to reflect and choose "real" free will?
Free will is often thought of as a kind of uncaused cause that people generate within themselves. At the moment of decision, a kind of miracle occurs and a choice between alternatives is made.
As neuroscience advances, we have begun to understand that human brains contain many sub-systems, most of them unconscious, all which are amenable to being described in terms of their physical characteristics, leaving less and less space for miraculous occurrences.
Still, some philosophers and others want to argue that free will, an ability to make an uncaused choice, must somehow lurk in phenomena like quantum indeterminacy.
Dennett shows these attempts to bolster miraculous notions of free will are incoherent.
How? There is no way for us to distinguish between a determined and undetermined choice in any case. Assume that a jilted wife is at the precise moment where she will decide either to run over her two-timing husband with her Mercedes Benz or not. Look at two cases.
In the first, at the crucial moment, a random number jumps up from the indeterminate quantum, hits the right neuron and inclines her to floor the gas pedal. Or second, assume that a pseudo-random number (which is obtained from a table of such numbers generated by a deterministic computer) is fed into the same neuron and she floors it.
Neither the jilted wife nor an observer would be able to distinguish between the two cases, yet one is indeterminate and the other determined. Besides, in what sense would her decision have been "free" in any case? The random choice is no freer than the determined choice. It's just random.
As one wag put it: "Either our actions are determined, in which case there is nothing we can do about them, or our actions are random, in which case there is nothing we can do about them."
If driving over her husband were an uncaused choice, what possible reason would society have for punishing her? Some might reply, "We're not worried about uncaused choices, but self-caused choices. She chose to run over him."
But ask yourself: What would a self-caused choice look like? How would you describe that concept scientifically? Where in the brain would you look for it? After all, human brains and selves are never seen one without the other. Selves, whatever they are, occur in human brains. Dennett argues that a self is a metaphor for our bodies and brains as they exist over time that provides each of us an outlook on what is going on in our own brains and in the brains of others.
Selves, according to Dennett, "wouldn't exist if it weren't for the evolution of social interactions requiring each human animal to create within itself a sub-system designed for interacting with others. Once created, it could also interact with itself at different times."
A self, then, is an efficient shorthand sub-system devised by our brains to monitor and interact with our own intentions and the intentions of others.
"Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to his honor, if good; nor infamy, if evil," declared Hume.
Or as psychologist and philosopher William James put it: "If a 'free' act be a sheer novelty that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible?"
So whether the wronged wife should be punished or not doesn't depend on indeterminism or determinism. It depends on her society's moral rules.
In fact, in everyday practical moral reasoning, we expect people's choices to be the result of their previous upbringing, their moral character. Moral character can be thought of as a set of predictable responses to ethical choices.
We know that people develop moral beliefs and habits through life experiences. Our moral reflexes are honed through watching and hearing about which actions are rewarded and which are punished; we learn to be moral in much the same way we learn language.
Just as we know that a caged bird is not free, we also know that a handcuffed person or one being prodded by a pistol-wielding kidnapper is not free.
"Liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains," writes Hume. Dennett, like Hume, points out that in moral discourse, the real question we confront is not between caused and uncaused choices, but between coerced and un-coerced choices. If someone had been holding a gun to the jilted wife's head and ordered her to run over her husband, we would not blame her for her actions.
However, if a person does something without being coerced, she chose to do it and she deserves whatever praise or blame her action merits. This view is well summed up with philosopher Alfred Mele's notion of a Default Responsibility Principle: "If no one else is responsible for your being in state A, you are."
Our everyday practical moral reasoning allows us to figure out which people are morally responsible and which are not. For example, children are held to a lesser standard because they function more like situation-action machines than choice machines. On the other hand, we hold jilted wives who run over their unfaithful husbands accountable because they know or should know that that is the wrong thing to do.
Dennett further shows how Darwinian processes have harnessed selfish genes and self-interest to fashion human morality. Our ability to foresee consequences at much longer range in space and time enables us to quell immediate selfish desires in order to benefit from living in a broader society with a division of labor. We learn that in general the best way to succeed in life is by appearing to be good so that our fellow human beings will trust us and want to truck and trade with us. And the easiest way to appear good is by actually being good.
Dennett also points out that human freedom is dramatically expanding. Birds, like most Earthly organisms, live as their ancestors did, and their range of choices is determined by the stately processes of biological evolution. People, on the other hand, are no longer tethered to evolutionary change.
Language and culture, especially modern science and technology, enable us to dramatically increase the range of our choices. If you don't believe it, just think about the much smaller range of opportunities open to Americans 100 years ago.
As our understanding of our genes and brains increases, instead of limiting our freedom, it will dramatically increase it. We will be able to prevent and cure more diseases, improve our social institutions, and even enhance human capabilities. We defend freedom, especially political freedom, because, among other things, it enables people to make better and better choices over time. To whatever extent we were ever at the mercy of our genes, we no longer are. Instead our genes are now at the mercy of our brains.
(Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent.)
LOS ANGELES -- King of the elves: You can't unmask Michael Jackson
by Jesse Walker
He's an androgynous shape-shifter, standing on the shadowy line between male and female, ugly and beautiful, white and black.
He lives in a country called Neverland, and he's rumored to snatch children. Some say he's a king, and some say he's a criminal; his appetites, people whisper, are inhuman and cruel.
We'll probably never understand Michael Jackson the man, but Michael Jackson the spectacle isn't hard to decipher: The archetypes are probably older than civilization.
Which goes a long way toward explaining why anyone still cares about him. It's been two decades since Jackson made music of any lasting vitality, and his recent releases have been financial as well as artistic failures. But the same public that increasingly rejects him on CD tunes in hungrily when he's dissected on TV: in Martin Bashir's documentary "Living With Michael Jackson," in the recent Dateline special "Michael Jackson Unmasked," in a forthcoming Fox program that pledges to show us footage we "were never meant to see."
Needless to say, none of this renewed interest has anything to do with Jackson's music: Like Ozzy Osbourne, he's found a second career in a different sector of show business.
Nor, I suspect, does it spring from horror at the crimes the singer is supposed to have committed. Jackson provokes a lot of repulsion, but he inspires surprisingly little outrage. Unlike O.J. Simpson, to whom he is frequently compared, his chief public role is not The Man Who Got Away With A Terrible Crime. More often, his alleged pedophilia serves simply as a setup for tasteless jokes.
Why? One possibility, of course, is that people don't believe the charges. The Dateline special made a compelling case that Jackson is rich and strange, but its evidence that he abuses children was quite a bit thinner, unless you think it suspicious that a celebrity would have an alarm in his house, that a showbiz figure would associate with a producer of gay porn, or that a man famous for his arrested development would decorate his bedroom in a way that might appeal to a 13-year-old.
The one factoid that actually sounded incriminating -- that a boy who claims Jackson molested him then accurately described the man's genitals -- was passed over in almost an instant, without follow-up, presumably to make time for yet another shot of the singer's botched plastic surgery. I have no idea whether Jackson is a child abuser --though, for the record, GQ made a strong case nine years ago that he molested no one and was actually the victim of a shakedown.
I'm certainly not convinced that he's guilty, and I can't possibly be the only person who feels this way.
The public fascination with Jackson has less to do with whether he's a criminal and more to do with whether he could possibly be real at all. There used to be a theory that the musician's repeated surgeries were intended to transform himself into Diana Ross. These days you could make a better case for Marilyn Manson -- or maybe, as Anomalies Unlimited suggests, Bizarro Superman.
And what should we make of his entourage? I'm not just talking about all those kids, though his interest in them seems creepy even if it's completely innocent. I mean the adults. The most damning fact in the Dateline special may be that the two most prominent people willing to defend Jackson on camera are Donald Trump and Uri Geller. (Where's Macaulay Culkin? On second thought, don't answer that.)
On Thursday, Fox will air Jackson's rebuttal to the Bashir documentary. I'll probably watch it -- not to expand my understanding of this man or the charges against him, but for the precious pleasure of staring, shocked and slack-jawed, at the television. Jackson's music lost its spark years ago, but who cares? He's raised the freak show to grand opera.
(Associate Editor Jesse Walker is author of "Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America".)
