Determinism and Free Will - Part 2 of 3

It turns out that philosophers aren't anywhere close to consensus on these issues despite centuries of thinking on the topic of Free Will.  The above graphic organizes (to some extent) the current positions (taken from a website that offers a great summary of the aforementioned history...not exactly a quick read, but not an entire book either).

I found out that Robert Kane, the author of A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (the book I summarized in my previous post) is a leading figure among modern Libertarianism.  This made me feel the need to read some other perspectives, which I have subsequently done.  In so doing, I also found that Kane's book is considered by many to be the most comprehensive summary of the current state of the debate, so I guess it was a good place to start.

Some additional summarizing:

New Compatibilists (free will and determinism are not at odds) - In recent decades much of the focus of compatibilists has turned to the idea of moral responsibility and alternative possibilities.  Classical compatibilists felt that alternative possibilities were necessary for free will, but their description of how determinism and alternative possibilities are compatible was hard to defend (they basically said things like, you could have done otherwise, if doing otherwise was determined rather than doing what you actually did).  Through a number of examples (most famously those known as Frankfurt Cases), new compatibilists argue that if an agent is unwittingly constrained to take a certain action, but they would've have taken the action anyway, then they should still be held morally responsible for the choice even though they could not have done otherwise.They also equate free choices to those choices for which a person should be held morally responsible.  The point being that free will can exist without alternate possibilities.

The indeterminists counter that it would be impossible for any entity (sometimes cast as Frankfurt's Demon) to know in advance which choice an agent will make, so they will need to interfere every time and the agent could then not be held responsible.

Hard determinists would say that since an agent's choices are determined (and always have been), that moral responsibility is impossible.

Quantum Mechanics - Most scientists and philosophers agree that QM throws a wrench in determinism (not to mention causality), though many feel that the effects of quantum indeterminism (the original name that Heisenberg gave to the uncertainty principle) are limited to the subatomic world.  "Quantum weirdness" appears to wash-out when considering large systems, hence why we don't see tunneling, entanglement, non-locality, etc. in the macroscopic world.  Yet a number of philosophers (and some scientists) have conjectured the idea of an uncertainty amplifier.  For example, certain chaotic systems can be very sensitive to initial conditions (the Butterfly Effect) and it could be that a quantum mechanical process could influence the state of a chaotic system in such a way that there were macroscopic consequences.  Feynman gave a pretty straight forward example: a bomb could be rigged with a Geiger counter as the trigger, and the click of the Geiger counter is directly linked to the probabilistic emission of a particle of radiation.

Even if the probabilistic nature of QM were able to be preserved in complex systems, most philosophers don't see how this would be beneficial to free will.  It's hard to argue that replacing determinism with chance would give an agent any more control over their choices.  Yet there's so much we don't understand about what is really happening at the quantum level that many remain convinced that QM is key to free will.  Roger Penrose (whose name carries almost as much weight as Hawking's in physics circles) brings up mind-body dualism in his book Shadows of the Mind: 

With the possibility that quantum effects might indeed trigger much larger activities within the brain, some people have expressed the hope that, in such circumstances, quantum indeterminacy might be what provides an opening for the mind to influence the physical brain. Here, a dualistic viewpoint would be likely to be adopted, either explicitly or implicitly. Perhaps the 'free will' of an 'external mind' might be able to influence the quantum choices that actually result from such non-deterministic processes. (p.349)

Some feel that since the probability wave in quantum mechanics is neither matter nor energy, maybe it provides the metaphysical connection to the physical world that the Libertarians have been hoping for.  We certainly have no idea what the probability wave actually is, nor do we have any theories for why it collapses in certain situations (when a measurement is made) and remains intact in others.  Not to mention that its collapse at one location can instantaneously change the physical state of another location (potentially on the other side of the universe).

Philosopher Karl Popper is among those who entertain the idea of a two-step process:

The selection of a kind of behavior out of a randomly offered repertoire may be an act of indeterminism; and in discussing indeterminism I have often regretfully pointed out that quantum indeterminacy does not seem to help us; for the amplification of something like, say, radioactive disintegration processes would not lead to human action or even animal action, but only to random movements.

I have changed my mind on this issue. A choice process may be a selection process, and the selection may be from some repertoire of random events, without being random in its turn. This seems to me to offer a promising solution to one of our most vexing problems, and one by downward causation.

Informationphilosopher.com points out:

Note Popper's not so subtle shift of the realm of chance to the material body and the realm of determination to the mind. The traditional dualism from the ancients to Kant made the material body the realm of phenomenal determinism and the mind or spirit the noumenal realm of freedom, God, and immortality.

Kane offers a description of Libertarian free will that also includes a two-stage process of sorts.  He imagines certain situations where we have sufficient reasons to choose either of two (or more) options.  One of his examples is a woman witnessing a crime on the way to an important business meeting.  The woman has good reasons to continue on her way since closing the business deal is important to her, but she also has good reasons to take the time to call the police since giving assistance to those in need is also desirable to her.  Kane imagines these competing choices as being analyzed through separate neural pathways (what he calls dual-processing), where the existence of each process makes the other undetermined.  He argues that some randomness is involved in how the situation plays out, but because the agent has sufficient reason for either choice and because it was through the agent's efforts that the final choice was made, that the agent is ultimately responsible for the outcome (and thus has free will).  Many have criticized just where the chance ends and the influence of the agent begins, as well as just how the agent does the influencing.

Kane has called these situations where the agent's efforts determine an action Self-Forming Actions (SFAs).  An important contribution of SFAs was to show that an agent need not have all of their actions be undetermined in order to be morally responsible for even the non-SFAs.  He introduces the idea of Ultimate Responsibility where he addresses the problem of being a causa sui.  To be ultimately responsible for all of your actions, you need only to have freely chosen some of them.  Having done so you will have influenced who you are (self-formed) and are thus responsible for subsequent actions even if they were not freely chosen.