Evolution, Enlightenment and American Philosophy a blog by Jeff Carreira

Entries tagged as ‘Freewill’

Is Freewill compatable with Determinism? Some thoughts on Jonathan Edwards

July 25, 2009 · 9 Comments

I am posting today from the beautiful hills of the Tuscany region of Italy and I am about to start a 20 day spiritual retreat with teacher Andrew Cohen. During my travels here I decided to read something aligned to the more spiritual side of American Philosophy. And so, I have been reading about the great American Protestant Minister, Jonathan Edwards. In the 1730’s Edwards led his congregation into a collective experience of spiritual enlightenment that lasted for 5 months. This event catalyzed the protestant revivalist movement that was later called the Great Awakening and led to the conversion of thousands of people to the Christian faith up and down the East Coast of the United States.

Jonathan Edwards was a Yale graduate and later became the president of Princeton University. He is sometimes called America’s first philosopher and is certainly one of this nation’s greatest theologian. I found myself engrossed in his thinking and discovered that he and those around him were engaging in a variation of many of the discussions that we are having. Specifically, Edwards was deeply contemplating the relationship between freewill and determinism. In his case it was not scientific determinism that he was referring to, but the religious determinism of God.

Edwards was a Calvinist and he believed that the determination of who would enter into the kingdom of heaven was made by God at the moment of your birth and there was nothing you could do to change that. The Religious conversions that happened around him were not decisions to lead a holy life, they were recognitions that you had been elected to the holy life by God. Edwards and other ministers of the time were also reading the early books of the Enlightenment and were trying to find a rational way to understand Christian doctrine and prove that freewill was compatible with determinism (sound familiar – read Brian’s comment two posts ago).

Even more, and perhaps because I am about to enter into a spiritual retreat, I am thinking about the difference between science, philosophy and spirituality. It is not as easy to determine as you might think. At first I thought that clearly spirituality involves philosophy, but it is a philosophy that’s expressed purpose is to act as guiding principles for ones entire life – but then philosophy for many also acts in the same way – and many scientists relate the same way toward science. So that definition is not enough.

In thinking more about it I realized that the difference really is that spirituality involves faith in that which is unknowable – not simply unknown and waiting to be discovered, but not able to be known. Science includes the unknown, as Carl pointed out in an earlier post, but its faith rests in the known. Philosophy is somewhere between the two. And both Science and Philosophy can be pursued without them being the guiding principles of one’s life. But a spirituality that is not seen as a guiding force in life is not really a spirituality.

I hope to have more insight to share on this question after I spend so much time on retreat. I also have a few posts saved that will go up during the retreat, these I think you will enjoy as they give some historical background to some of the philosophy of America that we have been contemplating and discussing.

Please keep the conversation going!

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Is there any Intelligence in the Universe?

July 20, 2009 · 21 Comments

I have been reading more about Behaviorism, including the article that Carl sent us by Robert Epstein, so that we could get a little clearer here about exactly what we are looking into.  Maybe I will start with a few definitions of some of the basic learning mechanisms of Behaviorism.

Classical Conditioning – Pavlov’s dog:  A dog salivates when it sees food. You ring a bell every time you bring the food out and pretty soon the dog salivates when he hears the bell. You have created a conditioned response. In other words, the dog has been conditioned to salivate to the sound of a bell.

Extinction – when you stop bringing out food when you ring the bell, eventually the dog stops salivating when he hears the bell. (This is what allows us to lean what to ignore.)

Operant Conditioning – (the kind Skinner pioneered) You put a pigeon in a box that has a door operated by a lever. The pigeon flaps around until it accidently hits the lever. The bird is rewarded by having the door open. If you keep putting the bird in the box, eventually it starts hitting the lever faster and faster – i.e. it learns to hit the lever to get out of the box.

Shaping – is creating complex behaviors from simple ones. First you learn to pick one foot up, then you learn to put it down on the ground in front of you, then to shift your weight on it, then to do the same with the other foot and soon you have learned to walk.

Robert Epstein’s paper on Generativity explains how a combination of the simple learning mechanisms can become creative. Let’s say that a chimp has separately learned how to step up onto a box, how to climb a ladder, how to climb through a window and how to put objects on boxes. Then we lock the monkey in a room with an open window too high to reach with either the box or the ladder. Given enough time the monkey might try using the ladder, then try the box and eventually he might start putting the ladder on the box until he would be able to climb out the window.

If you think about this in terms of tremendously intricate skills combining over and over again that would give you an enormous amount of creative potential. Think about how many words you can make with the alphabet, and how many sentences you can make with those words and how many novels you can write with those sentences. Still I wonder, are there higher forms of novelty that are not accounted for in this? – I mean no matter how many novels you write, words alone will never build a house. I can see how behaviors can pile up infinitely, but in the end they will only be behaviors…and that I think gets me to my deeper question…

Summary: Classical conditioning showed us how automatic biological and psychological responses (i.e. salivating in the presence of food) could be transferred to new stimuli (i.e. ringing a bell). In this way animals can be conditioned to respond to an infinite number of stimuli. Operant conditioning showed how circumstance itself could act as the conditioning agent and how life is constantly conditioning all of us by the rewards and punishments that it affords in different situations. Generativity is exploring how the complexity of multiple layers of conditioning can produce novel behaviors that appear creative in nature. My question is, are they really creative? And to answer that I think we have to get clearer about what we mean by creative. And to get clearer about the nature of creativity we must examine the “metaphysics” upon which Behaviorism (which I see as representative of a “hard” deterministic view) is built upon. For the sake of clarity, I am sure that not all (and perhaps very few) behaviorists believe in hard determinism, but still the complaints against that school of thought are mainly against that potential implication.

The essence of the difference between a Behaviorists point of view and a more traditional Psychological point of view can be illustrated like this. In the example with the chimp above the Behaviorist would describe the monkey’s actions in terms such as: the behavior of trying to reach the window by using only the ladder was attempted and fell into extinction, the behavior of using the box also fell into extinction, the behavior of putting the ladder on the box was sufficiently shaped through reinforcement to lead the chimp eventually to place it upright and then the chimp climbed the ladder and left the room. In this picture there is no need for the chimp’s interior workings to be employed as part of the process. This is the sense in which I meant that Behaviorism denies interiority, not simply denying the existence of thoughts and ideas, but denying the “willful agency” of the thinker.) In this description there is no “intelligent being” included in the picture. In a more traditional psychological view you might say: The chimp thought to try standing on the ladder and realized that it wouldn’t work, then she tried the box and realized the same. Then it occurred to the monkey that there might be some way of using the ladder on top of the box and so she tried a few different placements until she found the right one. This description relies completely on there being someone to talk about. Someone with ideas and volitional power.

In the traditional psychological description there is an “actor” in this case a chimp with thoughts and motives and insights and ideas and experiments. In the Behaviorists model there is no need for the “actor” there are just behaviors and reinforcers that interact over time to create new behaviors. There doesn’t have to be “anyone” in there scene figuring anything out. Now if you are only working with non-human animals this doesn’t get you into too much trouble, but when Skinner started to generalize this to describe all human behavior he ran into a heap of resistance (some of which I have expressed.)

This is the question I want to get at. Is there a somebody or not? And I don’t mean do behaviorists think so or not, I mean is there one.  And I also don’t mean only the separate self. The question herinise is universal and it is the heart of the friction between behaviorism and other forms of psychology, and between science and religion, and strong Darwinists and Intelligent Design folks. It is the question of whether there is any intelligence behind this universe or not. Is the universe a deterministic unfolding of cause and effect – or is there some form of universal intelligence at work. Is that universal intelligence the same intelligence that we as human beings experience in ourselves?

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The Freewill of a Creative System

July 13, 2009 · 10 Comments

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.

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More thoughts on the freedom of so called “Freewill”

June 15, 2009 · 11 Comments

“Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own will . I add to this only that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognize in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognize as will.”  Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea

I came across this quote and thought that it might have something to add to our discussion. Schopenhauer, a German philosopher and contemporary of Hegel is here referencing the Dutch philosopher Spinoza. In the context of our discussions on freewill is it possible that we are like the stone, projected through the evolutionary process and imagining our actions to be the result of our own freewill? Perhaps freewill is simply the term we use to describe the result of evolutionary forces that create all evolutionary movement forward including our choices. Because we are conscious, we see this movement in ourselves and from our perspective it “feels” like we are doing something, when in fact it is just something happening to us.

After all, isn’t the main reason we believe so strongly in freewill simply because it feels like we can make free choices. Isn’t that freedom always contextual? A young man may decide he wants to be a doctor and he may feel that it is a decision based on his own freewill, but if we find that his father, his father’s father and his father’s father’s father were all doctors we might wonder how free that choice really was. Is there not some aspect of family expectation or even simple familiarity that plays a role in that choice? Many American’s love cheeseburgers, many Indians love dhal (an Indian dish made with lentils) and many Israelis love having salad with olives for breakfast. Are these free choices, or are they culturally conditioned? Aren’t all the choices that we make, and the range of options open to us completly limited by the physical characteristics of our bodies, the mental characteristics of our minds and the environmental characteristics of our planet? How free is our will?

One of the things that I find very powerful about the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce is his insistence that we must always remember how fallible all of our understanding is. Human beings are studying life forms on a single planet in a huge universe. We are studying through a physical form with very limited capacity for sensation. We may find that what we are currently examining and calling the universe is in actuality a minuscule part of the actual entirety of the universe. Perhaps our conviction of freewill is a result of our limited understanding of ourselves and the universe of which we are a part. I believe that my insightful commentator Brian, sometimes uses this logic to point out the fallibility of the sweeping generalizations in my own thinking.

Pragmatically I suppose William James would settle the question of freewill by asking what difference in action would result from my either believing in or not believing in freewill. If I believe in freewill, does that belief leave me with a deeper sense of my creative powers? Does it make me a more productive and useful human being? If I don’t believe in freewill does it make it easier for me to feel victimized and give up all sense of responsibility?
The strong negative response that many people have to materialistic and deterministic notions of reality arises from the fear that it will strip us of our moral sense of responsibility. If we believe that all of our actions are the simple result of past actions and external forces then we are not ultimately responsible for what we do. Our actions occur not as a result of will, but because that is the way that it had to happen.

Does this morally debased state necessarily result from recognizing that there is no freewill? Is it even truly possible to give up belief in freewill? We may say that we do not believe in freewill, but in the end we still make choices and when we make a choice it seems almost a prerequisite that we believe we are making it. If we sit before two options and wait for a choice to be made for us nothing is likely to happen, and isn’t the choice to sit and wait also a choice?

Or are we more like the stone flying through the air? The evolutionary air that we are flying through is “change” itself. We see ourselves passing through this ocean of change and think “I am changing” and we assume that the change we see is occuring as a result of our own freewill. We mistakenly assume that  ”I am choosing to change.” But everything in an evolving universe is changing and what is propelling that change is something we are not clear about yet.

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The Evolution of Freedom in the Universe

June 10, 2009 · 14 Comments

I am inspired by all of your thoughtful and provocative comments to my last post and captivated by this idea that what we experience as freewill is not actually a quality of a human being, but a characteristic of the universe itself as embodied in a human being. As we explore what we know about evolution it seems clear that evolution has generally occurred in a direction that has led to the general increase in the range of freedom that can be expressed by the evolving forms of the universe.

Energy, atoms and molecules have very narrow ranges through which they can express creative freedom in response to circumstance. Energy and atoms can combine to form molecules and then molecules can form substances like water and minerals. These substances can in turn combine to form something as complex and varied as a planet.

When molecules advance to the point of forming living cells, the amount of creative freedom that can be expressed increases dramatically. Cells can combine into organisms, both plant and animal, that exhibit a much greater range of freedom to respond to circumstance and environment than any non-living combination of molecules or atoms. The development of the animal kingdom in particular demonstrates the tendency towards greater and greater creative freedom – dogs express a greater range of response than do tadpoles for instance. When Organisms develop nervous systems complex enough to create an abstract concept of self the potential for freedom of choice explodes.

Individuals who can recognize themselves as a “separate something” in the universe become capable of a degree of individuation and specialization that dramatically increases the efficiency through which they can organize into social structures. As societies of human beings become more efficient at meeting the basic needs of the individuals within them they create more freedom in the individuals to choose to act outside of the dictates of personal survival. Individuals liberated from survival necessity begin to pursue higher forms of cognition and understanding of themselves and the universe in which they exist. This higher understanding leads to increased freedom to respond to circumstance and environment.

So it seems that on the whole the relative degree of freedom that can be expressed through evolving forms in the universe tends to increase over time. I would like to propose a definition of Conscious Evolution based on this conception.

“Conscious Evolution is the deliberate development of: our understanding of the universe, our concept of ourselves, and the workings of the society in which we live, for the purpose of increasing the range of freedom of choice that can be expressed by the individuals in society.”

This is a conception of Conscious Evolution very much aligned with the philosophy of John Dewey who wrote extensively about Education, Democracy and Ethics all with the basic assumption that increase the opportunity for freedom of growth was the essential direction of goodness in the universe.

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So what is so FREE about freewill anyway?

June 4, 2009 · 6 Comments

Now that we have discussed more about continuity and spontaneity as fundamental aspect of the universe, and opened up the discussion about what Conscious Evolution actually is, it is time to update my thoughts about freewill. In an earlier post I boldly asserted that if there was such a thing as Conscious Evolution there had to be such a thing as freewill. Lots of questions were raised in your thoughtful comments and I now have to admit that my position has changed. 

I no longer believe in freewill – at least not in the same way that I did all those posts ago. In thinking about it more it is hard to imagine what freewill in the ultimate sense would mean. If it were to mean that you were free to make any decision at any time – well, that just doesn’t make sense. I can’t decide to fly, or live without eating, or have a million dollars without making effort for it. Our ability to choose is tempered by chance and physical and social circumstances. Someone born into a low caste family in India probably can’t become the president of India, and certainly can’t simply decide to be president necessarily.

Our will is limited, it is constrained, and it is conditioned. As I looked for sources to read in consideration of this discussion of freewill I came across a philosophy text book which described this type of constrained freedom as belonging to a school of thought known as “Qualified Libertarianism.” It is most frequently associated with schools of Eastern thought. In these schools people are seen as having the freedom to choose, but it is also recognized that human choice is restricted by karma.

Karma is the notion that everything results from that which came before and that implies that the reality we experience is at least partially created by the results of our own choices. This self-imposed limitation is fairly obvious. You cannot choose to hike three hours into the forest and then once you arrive in the heart of the wilderness choose to see a movie back in town that starts in 30 minutes.

As I see it now (always subject to change) freedom is a fundamental characteristic of the universe, not of an individual. It is the spontaneity that Charles Sanders Peirce wrote about. It manifests in human beings as our ability to make choices, but it is not a characteristic of a human being, it is a characteristic of the universe. By way of analogy, I may use my hand to pick up something, but I don’t say that it is a characteristic of hands that they can pick up trash from the floor, it is a characteristic of human beings – the hand is the part of the human being that is used. Similarly the universe has freedom and it is in the human ability to choose that that characteristic enacts itself.

This being said, it seems to me that the evolution of the universe tends to evolve in ways that increase the level of relative freedom that the universe can express through the forms that have evolved. For instances atoms can exhibit very little freedom, very little ability to change. Molecules can exhibit more freedom and organisms even more. Sexual reproduction led to a massive explosion in evolutionary change because there was so much freedom to create diversity when two parents came together to create a third completely different organism.

The human mind with its ability to conceptualize abstractly gives us a degree of freedom to construct and interpret reality that is unprecedented in the universe. Many people can come into the same situation (assuming it is complex enough) and because of the enormous perceptual interpretation that affects how they perceive realty no two will necessarily see things or respond to things in exactly the same way. But does that mean that there really is free choice? Are the choices that we make free or are they only the predetermined outcome of all of the impossibly complex mixture of our internal cognitive functioning and the environment we encounter? It may be impossible as yet to prove either with certainty. I would contend that our ability to conceive of freewill and to wonder about it actually gives an even wider range of possibility to choose. Perhaps the important question isn’t “Do I have freewill?” Maybe the question we should be asking is “How wide is the range of my ability to choose?”

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William James, The Stream of Consciousness and Freewill

May 25, 2009 · 9 Comments

The view that I presented in my last post is very similar to the ideas of consciousness and attention expressed by William James. James was trained as a medical doctor at Harvard University and became generally recognized as the first psychologist in America and his first and arguably most significant written work was “The Principles of Psychology” published in 1889. James’s later philosophical work always retained a certain tendency toward the psychological and many of his core ideas were first expressed in this early work.

James was the first to describe consciousness as a stream – a continuous succession of experiences. He saw the most significant function of consciousness to be the role it played in selecting what to pay attention to.

James saw the stream of consciousness as an unending parade of thoughts, feelings, images, ideas, sensations, conceptions, emotions, etc. that appear before our conscious awareness and then pass away. But James, like Darwin did for species, and Dewey did for stimulus/response, recognized that the lines between these seemingly separate objects of consciousness was not as discreet as we at first might assume. In fact, he postulated, if each of our experiences was truly unique and separate from that which came before we would live in a chaos of random disconnected experience.

Instead of this chaos, our experience is a stream of consciousness in which the last thought we had is recognized to be part of a stream that our current thought is also a part of.  In fact, all of our thoughts, yesterday and everyday are recognized to be part of that same river of awareness. According to James our cognitive experiences overlap so that each experience has a “fringe” in front and behind it. In this way, our present experience is always most obvious to us, but the tail end of the last few experiences that we had are still trailing off and the leading edge of our next few experiences are already entering into our awareness.

James had an intriguing conception for how the process of consciousness, including the process of thinking, can go on in a line that looks intelligently directed, but that does not require the existence of any independent entity that could be called a “thinker.” (Hummmm….sounds a little like Darwin who discovered how what looks like an intelligently directed process of evolution could occur without any intelligent entity needed to direct it.)

Thinking is a goal oriented process and, as James envisioned it, a great deal of what propels our thinking forward is the feeling of satisfaction that we get as we perceive our next thought taking us closer to our goal. In this sense you can imagine thinking as a purely automated process that developed as an evolutionary advantage and doesn’t require the existence of any spiritual entity that is in control of the process. I am not sure what Carl (our resident expert on BF Skinner) will tell us, but I imagine this is very close to Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism.

There are three reasons that I feel this conception adds something to our conversation. The first is that it is yet another example of a view of reality that is founded on inherent continuity – or oneness. The second is that it calls to mind an image of psychology that I find very compelling. James envisions that we are all aware of a process of cognition and perception that can largely go on without us. We mistakenly see ourselves as the guiding force of that process, when in fact much of it – if not all of it – is a completely automated process being led by our desire to experience the satisfaction of believing that our thoughts are leading us somewhere. The last is that it brings us back to a fundamental question of freewill that must be asked if we are to come to a better understanding of what the heck we mean when we talk about “conscious evolution.”

For James the question of freewill was one that belonged in the domain of metaphysics not psychology. In the last chapter of his “Principles of Psychology” he states that as a science, psychology must assume a deterministic process guided by elements of perception and relations. Personally, James was a believer in freewill. At the moment of epiphany that many believe was the guiding insight of his life, James discovered that belief was a choice and that the first thing he would choose to believe in was freewill. In his essay “Are we Automatons?” he tackles the question of freewill directly. He concludes that we are not automatons, that we are a selecting organ. While we may not consciously select what object initially appears in our awareness, we do choose to either hold that object with our attention or not once it appears.

I was never satisfied with our earlier discussion of freewill and have continued to think about it since then. I am ready – or almost ready – to dive into that once again.

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Conscious Evolution and Free Will?

April 20, 2009 · 13 Comments

Part of the controversy over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has always been its deterministic tone. Darwin saw evolution as happening through the combination of chance variation and natural selection. The theory goes something like this. Individual organisms of any species are born with variations that occur randomly. Some of these variations are inheritable, meaning that they can be passed on genetically from parent to offspring. Of those variations that can be passed along to offspring, some have survival advantages. Over time more and more individuals with this new beneficial trait will be born until having that trait becomes the norm. Over time change of this type results in the evolution of one species into another.

With this explanation for evolution, Darwin had no need of God. He had no need to postulate some guiding force outside of “chance variation” and “natural selection.” His thinking is deterministic in the sense that there is no intelligence required to guide the process. The guidance system is inherent in the need to survive in order to produce offspring.

When this line of thinking is applied to the development of our intellects it can lead to the conclusion that every choice we make is determined by conditioning resulting from past choices that we have made. Essentially the idea is that if you have a choice between A and B and choosing A results in pain, then the next time you face the same choice you will choose B. Taken to its extreme it is possible to imagine that all of our choices are “determined” by what we have been conditioned to do because of all of our past choices.

Those of us interested in what is known as conscious evolution believe that our newly emerging understanding of the evolutionary process (from which we have been produced) puts us in a position to consciously participate in guiding the future development of evolution. To my mind that immediately raises the question of the existence of human freewill. It would seem that if human beings were going to be in a position to guide the evolutionary process they would need to have free will in order to make choices outside of the bounds of “chance variation” and “natural selection.”

Certainly William James and John Dewey put the fact of human choice at the forefront of their thinking about what it would mean to consciously participate in the evolution of consciousness. James in his essay “Are We Automatons?” concludes the function of consciousness is to act as a selecting organ for choosing what part of our experience to give our attention to. He refers to consciousness as an “organ of selection’ and in this he is following the same line of thinking that led Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Spiritual Laws” to define man as “a selecting principle.” Dewey in his book “Human Nature and Conduct” states that the question of morality and ethics only arises in situations in which it is possible to make a choice between two or more alternatives. The fact that this choice is “free” is implied.

But I wonder if “free will” in the personal sense is truly required for a possibility of conscious evolution to be there. Certainly “freedom” is required. No one would argue that in order for there to be any evolution at all it would have to be possible for something “new” to emerge. If there was no freedom for something new to emerge in the universe, nothing could ever change. So freedom, or as Charles Sanders Peirce would call it “spontaneity” has to exist in order for evolution to be possible. The question is, “Does the necessity of spontaneity in an evolving universe require the existence of personal free will for the human being?” This is a question that I would like to think about and respond to in future posts – and I would appreciate any insights from my readers.

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