I.
In college, I had a friend who decided to break up with her boyfriend. She didn’t hate him. There was no big sin that prompted it. She just realized that they weren’t compatible and that it would be best to end things and go their separate ways. In the aftermath of dealing with this, she posted
Want is a strange word
I think this is because “want” has two distinct meanings that aren’t separated enough. Think about these statements:
I’ve been on a new diet for a couple weeks and I really want to stuff my face with cookies
I keep stuffing my face with cookies so I want to go on a diet to manage my weight
It’s not hard to imagine these statements coming from the same person at different times or even the same person simultaneously. It seems that the question of what someone “wants” is not so simple.
I think these are two distinct things that are both being represented by the word Want and people get confused. To solve this, I’ve taken to substituting the word want to communicate this better. If I mean that I want something like I want to stuff my face with cookies, I use the word Desire. If I mean that I want something like I want to go on a diet and eat healthy, I use the word Will.
II.
Daniel Dennett is a philosopher who subscribes to Compatibilism, the belief that both free will and determinism exist and are not logically inconsistent. He likes to tell a story to serve as an intuition pump for why he thinks it’s a bad idea to tell people they don’t have free will. Paraphrasing:
Imagine a neurosurgeon operates on a patient with OCD. They implant a little chip in his brain which controls the OCD (this is allegedly a real thing that exists). The neurosurgeon talks to the patient after surgery tells him, the chip will control your OCD, but also our team is able to use this chip to control your decisions and you’ll think you have free will, but we will actually be in control of your every move. The patient then goes about his life and becomes a little indulgent, a little aggressive, and ends up in trouble with the law. He goes to trial and tells the judge that he shouldn’t be held responsible because someone else was controlling him. The judge asks the neurosurgeon about this, and the surgeon says, “Yeah I told him that but I was just messing with him. I didn’t think he’d believe me.”
Dennett argues that what happened here was that by telling this man that he didn’t have free will, she in some way did actually inhibit his free will. She turned him into a morally incompetent person, and that is analogous to what neuroscientists who tell people there is no free will are doing. He mentions an experiment where subjects were asked to read a passage that argued that free will was an illusion. Those subjects were more likely to cheat on a puzzle than a control group.
I want to pause and tell a different story about this man that was told he had no free will. In this version of the story, the surgeon doesn’t tell him that the medical team is controlling him. She just convinces him that determinism is true and that he has no choice in what he does. Pondering this and thinking about what it means for his life, he goes home from surgery and realizes that his apartment has gotten a little messy so he cleans it up. Once he’s done, he sees that it’s getting late so he gets into bed and to get a good night’s rest. Waking up the next morning, he goes to the gym to workout. Normally, he would stay in bed and watch TV for a couple hours in the morning, but he can’t decide to do that now. He has no choice in the matter. Whatever it was about the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe pre-ordained that this was what he was going to do today.
The next day the laws of physics cause him to create a schedule for himself. He writes down what he wants to do in the next week, complete with work assignments, leisure time, and meal plans. He follows that schedule exactly and ends the week feeling good about himself for accomplishing everything he had written down. When he thought he was making a choice, he’d end up watching TV shows that he barely liked and eating a batch of cookie dough for dinner. Now that he believes that he can’t do anything other than whatever it is that happens, he just does whatever is on his schedule and is living his best life.
III.
My question is, why does Dennett end his story with the man breaking the law? He doesn’t think he has free will so he starts acting badly. He becomes indulgent. If he has no choice, shouldn’t he be equally likely to become the best version of himself? Why is it that when the subjects of the experiment read about not having free will, they become more likely to cheat rather than more likely to be honest?
It’s as if Dennett is talking about a series of coin flips and when he starts believing in the randomness of the coin, it starts coming up tails more and more. The man believes that he has no choice, so he keeps indulging more and more. It’s true that 8 tails in a row is as likely as any other specified sequence of coin flips but I think there’s something more intuitive about Dennett’s version of the story than mine. You expect someone who doesn’t think he has responsibility to be impulsive rather than following a schedule.
I argue that this is because this is what we mean when we talk about free will. It’s using the intentional, long term way of making decisions, rather than the short-term impulsive method. You don’t need to talk about metaphysics at all here. These are two different systems in the brain for making decisions about what you want. Free will is the name that we give to the longer term method, the Will aspect of want. If you didn’t believe you had free will, you’d start acting more on Desires and thinking more short term. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.