Contemporary Introduction to Free Will

 

In response to my request for good subway reading Robin loaned me his copy of A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will by Robert Kane. The book begins with a bang! Chapter One, "The Free Will Problem", provoked a plethora of scribbled notes-to-self, including:

  • "slack" as a metaphor for Free Will
  • micro-determinism and macro-determinism
  • the Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken"
  • the paradox of "blameshifting" — does the "buck" ever stop?
  • my need to re-read Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" and other Berlin essays
  • the question, "What do we really know about issues relevant to Free Will? (cf. Free Will Facts)
  • the Roger Penrose habit, as a friend once described it, of pointing to two mysteries and saying that at some deep level they must be related (e.g., mind and quantum mechanics)
  • my need to re-read Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting
  • the difference betweeen taking responsibility and apologizing, and the roots of shame
  • the problem of time

Alas, soon after the first chapter Free Will began to lose me. Maybe my mind's too feeble to follow the modern philosophical debate — or maybe there's less there than meets the eye. As I read onward, the feeling kept arising that a lot of this was only "Argument by Italics" — quibbling over terms, too much typographic emphasis of certain phrases, as if pointing a microscope at commonplace uses of particular words in everyday speech could somehow reveal deep truths. Yes, it happens on almost every page, and after a while it's almost funny. (I do it too, but I don't take it seriously as a foundation for discovery!) I also constantly got the feeling that I was being subjected to "Intuition Pumps", Dan Dennett's delightful term for a deceptively posed thought experiment.

Not to say that Free Will is a bad book; Kane writes well, and the problem is a crucial one. Perhaps some day I'll try studying it again when I'm in a different mood. And the big secret of the entire enterprise is hinted at on page 3, as a mere aside, when Kane says, "... having free will is about being your own person." Maybe that's the best summary of this whole knotty issue!

(cf. BlameStorming (1999-05-15), Mean Meaners (1999-07-03), Many Worlds Demystified (1999-10-24), Free Action (2000-04-03), Most Important (2002-05-16), Freedom Evolves (2003-07-03), No Dogs or Philosophers Allowed (2003-10-13), Strange Loops (2007-10-06), ...) - ^z - 2008-06-15

(correlates: Comments on Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, FreeAction, The Meaning of Life, ...)