I am amazed by all of the insightful comments on my last post. It seems that many of us are comfortable with the idea that perhaps freewill is not a characteristic of an individual, but is somehow implied in the system of the individual and its environment. This is what Carl (our behaviorist commentor) has been telling us all along and it is well aligned with the philosophy of the American Pragmatists. And I do think that our “human-centeredness” is a huge limitation to our ability to perceive reality. We see things and judge things from a distinctly human point of view and we are emotionally deeply attached to a certain human understanding of everything.
That accounts for the emotional response that many of us have when “our” freewill is taken away. But when you start to think about freewill in the context of Creative Systems the freewill is not being taken away. It is simply being dislodged from its human anchor and placed in the more generalized system of human and environment. As Carl has said and Mary, Mette (more commentors see previous blog) and now I am agreeing with, this still leaves room for a generative or creative element in the universe.
But wait! I am not ready to cave completely to the behaviorist view – after all if it were all this simple then we have just solved one of the great philosophical riddles that has plagued great thinkers since pre-Socratic times. (Are we that good?)
One problem that arises for me in this Creative Systems view is the belief in freewill itself. I am beginning to see that Skinner had a very broad view of the environment that conditions us, it includes the physical objects around us, but it also includes our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. This means that one of the things that conditions our behavior is the thought “I believe that I have freewill.” Or the thought “I don’t believe that I have freewill.” This question of believing in freewill was at the very heart of the philosophical position of William James who felt that a belief in ones freewill was essential for living.
It is well known that a person’s belief in their ability to accomplish a goal plays a huge part in their ability to accomplish it in actuality. If I am convinced that I can never bench press 500 pounds it is highly unlikely that I will ever achieve that goal even if I want to. Do we run into problems if we project freewill into the “creative system?” Do we cease to feel personally responsible? How will this affect our behavior?
This has been a long standing problem that libertarians have always had with deterministic philosophies – the fear that without a sense of freewill, people will feel a decrease in responsibility and society will fall into a state of depravity.
The other classic problem with Behaviorism/Determinism is the infinite regress that one gets into when we talk about adjusting the environment. If we are adjusting our environment to optimize behavior, aren’t our choices to adjust the environment also being conditioned? So we end up in the trap of infinite regress, which is one of the great arguments that has been used to justify the belief in God. If every current behavior is conditioned by the past there must be something that started it all. God is the initial cause, the thing that started the ball rolling.
I find all of this hard to think about – but it seems to be more complicated than perhaps the idea of a creative system alone will deal with. Skinner, from my meager understanding, would avoid all this because he considered himself a scientist and didn’t see much value in philosophy. Of course the big post-modern criticism of science is that it refuses to see itself as a philosophy containing a set of implicit assumptions about reality that are not beyond question.
I still haven’t gotten over the fact that the Radical Behaviorist view (to the extend that I understand it) still makes me feel suffocated. Sure we can replace the word “conditioned” with “learned” and I will feel better, but that is only because the two words don’t mean the same thing. Conditioned implies controled from without, learned implies taking in information that increases your abilities.
I also have to look into the work of Epstein, but there seems to me that there is a difference between “generative” and “creative.” It is one thing for me as a human being to act in unpredictable ways, it is another thing for life to emerge from matter. I need to think about novel more, and I also agree with Mette that Skinner does seem to deny interiority – but I am looking through a swarm of half-formed thoughts and emotional reactions and pre-judgements.
I still have a lot of thinking to do. I like the idea of creative systems, but it doesn’t all hang together for me yet. Maybe I should dive back into some of Skinner’s writing – something is coming, but it isn’t there yet.
Thanks to everyone for your fantastic contributions to this investigation.
Megan
/ July 13, 2009I wonder, could each part of a creative system and the whole system itself have access to it free will in whatever measure makes sense at each level? If both free will and inertia are characteristics of the contiguous universe of which we are a part, then we must have some measure of both available to us, both individually and as that contiguous whole …
If that is true, then what is our task as conscious agents of the interplay between free will and inertia, between novelty and continuity?
Carl
/ July 13, 2009Jeff, this is a great post! A lot of interesting questions and points that bring things in sharper focus. Here are a few comments on some of them.
I think the point you make about our “human centeredness” being a problem is really good. Just as we can be ego-centric, we can be species-centric, etc. How about if we were Kosmo-centric and, as you suggest, agree that creativity is a feature or process of the Whole and that it manifests through us, as well as through countless other parts of or nodes in the Universe in countless ways? In that context, I am not sure that the words “free” or “will” have much to add, other than a kind of emotionally conditioned positive feeling. There is choice, the things that lead up to choice, the consequences of choice, and the inner experience of the chooser.
I think it’s pretty funny, as an aside, that there is the feeling of “caving” to the behaviorist view. Skinner’s behavior analysis — his science — was just the same methodology applied to human behavior as other scientists have applied to other aspects of the Universe. Do we say that we “cave” to physics or biology? Interesting that we only seem to have this struggle when it comes to our own behavior. For me the science of behavior, and the understanding I have gotten from it are truly liberating. They enable me to feel the sense that as a species, if we can truly understand what accounts for our behavior then we can actually take charge of it, and of evolution itself. Sort of like the germ theory of illness. Imagine how helpless people must have felt before they knew what they could do to avoid infection!
The idea that our ideas are themselves influences on our own behavior is key, and you put it very well. That is what is so interesting about this whole discussion to me, that as we seek to understand, share, and communicate, that the process itself is self-changing, and one might say creative. It is what people call “recursive” in some fields, a self-influencing cycle or process. That is the exciting manifestation of the Big Bang, it seems to me. But now it’s interesting because it’s not just protons and electrons flying around, but the factor of awareness, language, etc. have entered the picture, empowering the Universe to change itself at ever accelerating rates!
Why is this an “infinite regress”? One could say that it’s just a link back to the Big Bang, which is perhaps modern science’s placeholder for “God” or whatever that explosion of the Ground of Being was, whether it was an originating explosion, or one cycles in an infinite cycle as the ancient theory of kalpas suggested. Either way, our awareness and choices and evolution are simply the Whole expressing itself here and now. Though US! How exciting!!!!
I think Skinner was, indeed, a philosopher. He was an epistemologist (theory of knowing) in the form of philosophy of science. But he did not believe it useful to posit hypothetical variables, or other constructs at what he considered to be “different levels of observation” to explain things at the level of behavior of the “whole organism.” From his perspective, experimental science which changes one variable and then looks for what things that variable affect, was a sufficient methodology for understanding functionally how events interact and are “causally” related to one another.
Skinner absolutely does NOT deny interiority. That was a big change compared with his predecessors — the methodological behaviorists. He said thoughts, feelings and other inner experiences are just as much behavior as any other, only that observation of them is limited to the one behaving. So they are variables in the same system as external events. All one.
One fun thing to read of Skinner might be his essay, “On Having a Poem.” It describes his own experience as a conduit for creativity. It was actually a talk he gave. I couldn’t find it just now on the web, but it might be there. And it has been published in paper.
Mette Mollerhoj
/ July 13, 2009Thoughts around the primary will, the will to live:
If the will to live is the primary will that gives birth to all other kinds of will, then that will is one, and we share it with all other life. The will of an individual is unique in the sense that exactly that developed life has its own history and therefore its own shape. We normally identify our will with that historical self. But if we step back, and maybe even give that narrow perspective up, then we can discover the primary will, that is the cause of our own will, and then we get completely close to the will of all life, (= altruistic love) wich means that we can not only calculate our own cost-benefits, but we are also able to calculate cost-benefits for the whole.
Shizuka
/ July 13, 2009I have a hard time to think “will of live” as beyond subjective experience.
Brian
/ July 13, 2009(All in fun) Jeff won’t cave to science? A sizable share of Americans won’t cave to the science of evolution, either. The result is an ill informed population. Take the science quiz to see how you stack up against the average American at
http://pewresearch.org/sciencequiz
To blog participants from other countries, please be patient with Americans, bless our hearts!
Jeff Carreira
/ July 14, 2009Just for the record (and also all in fun) – I got 12 out of 12 correct on the quiz you sent(Yes, and I am copmetative enought to have done it.) It’s not that I don’t know science – I just like to think for myself.
Mary
/ July 14, 2009Jeff, This post generated a lot of ideas I wanted to respond to, but for now here is one of them.
One of the ideas that really struck me in response to “conditioned implies controlled from without”:
What came to me was, what is “without”? There is nowhere for without to be, no where for “control” to come from. If we are the potential itself arising into being/action/awareness, conditioned behavior is just an expression of who/what you actually are in that moment—what considerations, actions, behavior you are capable of. And the ability to choose one “better” thing over another is the expression of who you are at that moment. We aren’t anything else that “has” any of the capacities or qualities; we ARE these capacities or qualities expressing themselves. And the universal process has a vested interest, it seems, in our expressing all of our qualities and capacities. That expression/action/choice seems to make the world change over time.
Carl
/ July 14, 2009Are we “inside” the Universe, or is the Universe “inside” us?
shizuka mori
/ July 14, 2009I have a hard time to think conditioned behavior as “Big Bang”,creativity.
Tony
/ July 16, 2009… in my experience free will collapses when you experience a permanent shift that thought itself has nothing to do with what is happening … it comments, that’s all …
freedom then arises as free will is shown as the pale ghost it really is …
… and Carl ~ this depends on the level of your view … for myself, all of this hits my senses and plays inside here somehow – like the world appears in a goldfish bowl around your head ( to
use sight as an example ) …
Frank Luke
/ June 11, 2010Hi Carl, re: “Are we “inside” the Universe, or is the Universe “inside” us?”
Just having some fun with you:
If you think of us as fishes, the fish are in the water but the water is also in them. We swim in the atmospere and the atmosphere is within us, right?
You know the story where the man dreams he’s a butterfly. When he awakes he wonders is he’s a butterfly dreaming he’s a man.
They say life is but a dream.
Aloha, namaste!
Aradhana
/ February 10, 2012that x certaed x, he presuppose the existence of x in order to bring x in to existence, however x always was in existence. This is self contradictory, is logically inconsistent & incoherent.But perhaps it’s much worse than that when He says because the law of gravity exists the universe will create itself from nothing. So setting aside the logical problem let’s look at the other noose that Stephen ties around himself. Stephen states that gravity already existed for spontaneous creation; but that’s not nothing. Indeed when physicists talk about nothing, they mean much more than simplistic nothing, they normally mean or refer to quantum vacuum. Hence what Stephen is referring to is not exactly about nothing. But like every other atheist he too can take his freedom to choose to call the cause behind all the effect – nothing. However its impotent to negate the fact that there was a great cause behind all that is.Now the other problem Stephen shies away from is to explain how the gravitational forces ever existed when there was absolutely nothing – Remember he is giving us a theory how everything came in to being from nothing.We all have enough common sense to know that Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of how things behave under certain conditions. To use a simple analogy, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion in themselves never sent a cricket ball racing across the green fields. People using a cricket bat and the actions of their own arms can only do that.What Hawking appears to have done is to confuse law with agency. His call on us to choose between God and physics is quite demanding – its like someone asking us to chose between Thomas Edison and the laws of physics to explain the light bulb. I would say that Hawking’s claim is misguided, when he asks us to choose between God and the laws of physics, as if they were necessarily in mutual conflict.Its quite evident that we need more faith to believe that gravitational forces from nothing, certaed the intensely complex and highly fine tuned world that exists, than to say – In the beginning God….