Latest / Art of the Question / The Philosophy of Free Will - Prof. Taylor Cyr - #61

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The Philosophy of Free Will - Prof. Taylor Cyr - #61 · Art of the Question

• Julius Moorman: Taylor, thank you ⁓ so much ⁓ for coming on the show. ⁓ today's ⁓ discussion will be about free will. I've been meaning to do an episode about it and yeah, to have it with someone that has done many episodes on the topic. I believe you have your own show, which is called the The Free Will Show. ⁓ that you have done more than a hundred episodes. ⁓ you are an assistant professor in philosophy ⁓ as well. ⁓ so yeah, lots to unpack there. But what I always find interesting and I think will be a good starting point now as well, is what is actually the first moment that you can remember being interested in free will and what sparked your your fascination and and what do you still find fascinating about it? Yeah. Well thanks, Julius, for having me on the on your podcast and ⁓ thanks for plugging the free will show. That that question that you asked is the question we start with every time we interview someone on the show. I I host it with my friend Matt Flummer. And it's interesting the variety of answers that we get. There's some people who realize that there's a question or a set of questions about free will as as children. And then there's people that come to it in graduate school and other disciplines and end up in philosophy or science investigating agency. ⁓ for me it it's maybe not young childhood, but definitely in adolescence, ⁓ growing up you know, Christian church and thinking about theological questions related to free will. Those are probably the first times that I bumped up against it. Although, you know, as a young kid, you're you're interested in like whether pr you know, praise and blame are appropriate at given times and questions about being ⁓ fairly or unfairly blamed come up quite a bit. So maybe earlier, but definitely like thinking about prayer and about ⁓ divine foreknowledge and how that relates to my agency, other human ⁓ beings' agency. I think those were the first times that I was ⁓ started to really think about free will. But then I didn't I didn't come to philosophy until college. And in college, ⁓ especially at Florida State where I did my ⁓ bachelor's degree in philosophy and and in religion, ⁓ I was able to take courses where the question of free will came up. I remember first coming up in an early modern philosophy class and in a philosophy of mind class. ⁓ with John Roberts, who's a his ⁓ retired professor from Florida State. ⁓ th yeah, those were my first experiences. And then in grad school I was very fortunate to get to work with people like Al Mealy and John Fisher, who are some of the biggest names ⁓ working on free will ⁓ as philosophers today. And they've really shaped my thinking about the ⁓ how to frame the problems of free will and also some of my positions on free will issues. Yeah, that's super interesting. And yeah, for me it was during law school ⁓ because Some people who haven't been to law school may not realize that our entire legal system is based on philosophy essentially and what we deem to be righteous, if you will. And something that is very important in those discussions to determine whether something is right or s whether something is wrong stems from responsibility and stems therefore also stems from having free will, having agency. Could you have acted otherwise is is a very important question that needs to be answered in many, many legal proceedings. So that was kind of my first introduction to the concept of free will. ⁓ haven't really thought about it in a very philosoph philosophical sense since ⁓ then when we actually come a bit further in in law school and especially not as a practicing one. I I I went and and studied tax law. So ⁓ it got got a bit more technical ⁓ after that. But yeah, now that I have more discussions with people about philosophy, it is definitely something that I'm thinking about much much more often. And yeah, we'll get into the importance of free will in our legal system as well as well. I have a few examples that I'd like to share with you and I'm very curious to get your take on them. But I think for starters it would be interesting to set yeah, to to kind of set set some ground to understand what we are talking about when we are talking about free will, right? Because it's a term that has been popularized that gets ⁓ thrown around a lot. But I was curious to understand ⁓ how you define it. Mm-hmm. I sort of follow the the norm in the last few decades, which is to treat free will as a kind of technical term where it it picks out the kind of control that we have over our behavior ⁓ that's relevant for moral responsibility. And that's related to the things that you're talking about in ⁓ in law and especially in ⁓ criminal law and holding people responsible, especially punishment. But what kind of control would we need to have over our behavior in order for us to be accountable for having done what we did or not done what we d didn't do? ⁓ that's how I think about free will. So if you kind of tether it to the concept of moral responsibility or accountability in particular, then the question becomes, well, what sort of free will or what sort of control is necessary for responsibility? ⁓ I think, you know, before the last few decades. ⁓ philosophers had to be very careful to say what they meant by free will because it i I mean, it just even now it's used in all that term is used in all sorts of ways. ⁓ even I mean, ⁓ the term free will is used outside of science and outside of philosophy and outside of the law. But if you ask ten different people what they mean by free will, you'll probably get ten different answers, even outside of academia. So i it's complicated. And I think the thing that ⁓ is sort of like the common thread or maybe the like The thing that most conceptions of free will sort of have a family resemblance to is something like this notion of control. And you know, it's been helpful in the last few decades to focus on the control required for moral responsibility. But I think we've always been interested in, are we in control? ⁓ is what we do up to us? That's the sort of thing that people have in mind with free will. so then if you think free will is just whatever control is required for moral responsibility, if that's how we choose to use that term, ⁓ We could ask questions like, well, does moral responsibility require the freedom to be able to do differently than what you actually do? Or does it require ⁓ you know, not being caused by something outside of yourself? Or we could ask all these sorts of questions. And this is really what the heart of the free will debate in philosophy is, is what is this ⁓ kind of control that's necessary for responsibility? Yeah. And how do you think does free will enter into our daily lives because it's a very famous topic within philosophy, of course. ⁓ it is also ⁓ a very important topic within confines of the law, like we've briefly discussed. ⁓ but other than that, do you think it when we have these discussions How does that translate into our lives and and why is it so important to think about ⁓ having free will and and one's ⁓ capacity to show agency and and and and has yeah, responsibility. Right. Yeah, for me I think the most important thing are the the ⁓ practices surrounding moral responsibility. So when I you know, express gratitude to my friend for helping me out when I needed it. ⁓ I'm expressing praise in a way that I'm I'm holding them accountable for the good thing that they've done. It's a sort of positive accountability. And, you know, if I didn't think that my friend had any kind of control over their behavior, I wouldn't have the same grounds for expressing that gratitude, right? Saying thank you might be a nice pleasantry, but it wouldn't have the same weight behind it. And then on the negative side, and this is where I think we need even more justification for the practices, but like if I'm gonna express, you know, resentment or indignation or some other negative attitude because someone's done something wrong, right? If if they couldn't help it, if they didn't have any control, if if they weren't free in the relevant sense, it seems unfair and really unjust to to chide them for doing wrong. So I think our practices really depend on having the sense of free will or control. ⁓ and then you know, i it could be that there's other practices that are sort of more peripheral to that, but that are related. I think even like the way we regard ourselves as ⁓ with, you know, pride over our accomplishments or guilt over the bad things that we've done, I I think those wouldn't be fitting in the same way if we didn't have free will. ⁓ so it really it really matters for those reasons. Now, philosophers often saw their Although a few there are a few pla places, especially at like in introduction volumes to the topic of free will, where people will say, Well, here's all these other things that might be, you know, that free will might be necessary for and that are good things. It might be that like, I don't know, creativity requires a kind of free will or genuine love between persons requires that the people in love ⁓ are free ⁓ in a certain sense. And all sorts of things too. And that's to that's even setting aside ⁓ what I think of as as Different but but familiar ⁓ issues about political freedom and the freedom of of the governed and that sort of thing. So there I think there are all sorts of directions that one might go, but it's it's enough it's in in my view that w that it matters for moral responsibility and our practices of ⁓ holding each other accountable and ourselves accountable. Yeah, I completely agree. And I really like what you said there about when you thank someone ⁓ as showing gratitude, that that only makes sense when that action was inspired by free will, and that the other way around is also true. That when someone doesn't have free will, perhaps in a particular instance where one couldn't have done otherwise, ⁓ Then it would also be unjust to punish them or express resentment towards that person. And it reminded me of people like myself sometimes get annoyed with when interacting with artificial intelligence, for example, or when you have an interesting conversation with an AI tool where you say thank you, which is kind of ridiculous. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize machines in a way. ⁓ but when you think about it that way, the machine doesn't seem to have free will. It just reacts to what we tell it to do. And yeah, w it it it is working, operating on some sort of algorithm, on on certain metrics, and produces an answer that based on its best prediction we are likely to enjoy. But yeah, it does that's I think it's a great distinction ⁓ to make there. ⁓ this conversation is not necessarily about AI, but ⁓ while we are on the topic, like ⁓ w w would you would you agree there or w w what do you make of that? Yeah, that's a really interesting case. I think I do agree. I do th here's one thing. I I I've wrote one paper that was it's it was more science fiction at the time because this was back in I think I wrote the paper in 2016 or 2017, but it was about ⁓ artificial intelligences, especially the kind of AI ⁓ that you see in robot stories in science fiction. ⁓ but I did make a case for thinking it's at least possible that you could have ⁓ you know, free will and agency in a in an artificial intelligence. ⁓ and for reasons ⁓ well, I I drew some parallels between ⁓ human agents and I wouldn't say algorithms, but the sort of way that we're wired ⁓ being not relevantly different. From the ways that, you know, at least a sophisticated ⁓ artificial intelligence might be sort of wired. But I do think you're exactly right about ⁓ LLMs and the kind of AI that most people are familiar with right now. And but I do think that that the practice of saying thank you might make sense, just not for the same reason that my thinking my friend makes sense. So a lot of times philosophers who write about blame and praise talk about The kind of accountability I've focused on, which is like looking back at what someone did and saying, you deserve some credit for that, or you you deserve some ⁓ some blame for that. ⁓ that's a kind of accountability sense of responsibility. And it it sort of relies on this idea of desert, that people deserve to be treated in a certain way based on what they've done. But there are other reasons for for blaming people and for praising people even when they don't deserve it. Now, th this might be a little shocking at first, but like You know, very young children who don't yet have the same understanding of morality, impulse control, other capacities that are related to control and and free will, I think. I I it still makes sense to praise and blame them, maybe not very harshly or like, you know, ⁓ super positively when they do good things, but like it helps to educate them about morality and it helps to reinforce good behavior, deter from bad behavior. So they're sort of forward looking reasons. ⁓ for children to praise and blame them, even if there are no backward looking reasons yet in their case. And I mean I don't know if we think that the L LMs are gonna grow up and, you know, become moral agents, but at the very least we want them to act in certain ways in the future. And saying thank you, they're already programmed to realize that that's positive feedback. And so there's reasons for expressing it you know efficiently with the words thank you. Instead of saying, I realize that you don't have free will in the way that I do, I realize you're not a child who's gonna develop moral agency. But I want you to keep doing the same sort of thing that you just did. So thanks. Yeah, it it also it does honestly also seem to make a positive impact on the outcome of of future ⁓ yeah, output. So I I get I think that's true. It also reminds me of something I very recently read ⁓ when I was reading a book about consciousness from Anil Sef, the British ⁓ neuroscientist. ⁓ great book, by the way. And in it he gives this example of how in Europe at least we used to prosecute animals. And there was an example of a pig who had killed a child. By accident, I mean by accident, I don't know, does it pig was it on per maybe it was on purpose actually? Maybe it was the the goal of the pig to harm the child. I don't know why it did. But the the truth of the matter is that it in it did. And they prosecuted this pig, ⁓ with lawyers and and the whole shebang. And Eventually the pig was indeed found guilty and was publicly executed within the the town square, which sounds of course ridiculous when we view that through a modern lens, but in a sense, I think it also underscores in some sense it's it's an ethical way of approaching things because it implies some sort of agency and free will, if you will, on the pigs end. Have you heard of this ⁓ example before and and what do you think about it? Yeah, I have, and I I don't know what to think about it. ⁓ I've given it some thought I guess it seems to me that part of what what might have been happening in that case, even if ⁓ the people involved in convicting the pig didn't really think that the pig had the the mens rea requirement that, you know, satisfied that requirement that human beings normally do or would need to in order to be convicted of this charge. There's some kind of expression of the community that like this was a a tragedy. This was a very bad thing that happened. And there's got to be some outlet for that. And so maybe this was the sort of most natural way to do it was to treat the pig as though it were a moral agent and could be convicted of ⁓ of murder or whatever it was convicted of. ⁓ but yeah, I'm not I'm not really sure because at the same time that ⁓ you know if it were a human being who didn't satisfy the men's ray at other requirements for the the charge, like I think we would all think, well, it would be unfair to respond this way to a human being. So why is it different in the case of the pig? Is it you know, does the pig have a lesser moral status? So this kind of treatment is okay. ⁓ it's It's more complicated than probably it was treated you know in real time. ⁓ but it's a really interesting case, especially to like look back at. Yeah, I agree. And it it wasn't a one-time thing. I believe the pig is like the most famous example, but I believe there are also examples of rats being prosecuted for destroying crops and they couldn't make it to the hearing. So then their lawyer had the argument like yeah it was too dangerous for them to come to the hearing because there's too many cats around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a it's a it's a crazy, crazy ⁓ example of of how we ⁓ used to to run our our legal system. ⁓ but be before we get into ⁓ further views and and dive a little bit deeper into certainly your views of ⁓ free will, I think one thing we cannot ignore is The topic of determinism. It's often it's often mentioned in this discussion where people say you either have free will or we are deterministic as this very binary approach. ⁓ I believe you have a slightly different view on this, and please correct me if I'm wrong, of course. But for the people that aren't very familiar with these terms, can you maybe explain what we mean by the deterministic view? Yeah. Yeah. And you're exactly right. There are a lot of people who think of the problem of free will as are you going to choose free will or are you going to choose determinism, which assumes that there's these two things and you have to be in one of the camps and also that they are sort of exclusive of one another. So ⁓ you you can't be ⁓ both a determinist and a free will. You can't think of them as compatible. But actually, ⁓ the sort of central debate in f the philosophy of free will is the question of whether Free will and determinism are compatible with each other or incompatible with each other. And so, you know, you could you can divide up the views or the positions in the free will debate ⁓ along these lines. There are compatibilist views. ⁓ most compatibilists affirm that we do have free will, and they think ⁓ you know we could have free will even if our world is deterministic. ⁓ some of them are act actual determinists, but nowadays with contemporary science where it is. Few people are determinists. I should come back to this and say what determinism is, but let me just finish this sort of taxonomy. There are incompatibilists as well who think free will and determinism are incompatible. ⁓ among those, some people are just skeptical that we have free will, and others endorse a position that's usually called libertarianism, which is not the political thing, but in the free will debate, it means ⁓ we have free will and it's not compatible with determinism. Okay, so what is ⁓ determinism in In philosophy, ⁓ there's actually debate about how best to characterize determinism, but in the free will debate, the sort of implication of determinism that a lot of people use as a characterization of the thesis is this idea that if there are deterministic laws of nature, there's only one way that the future can unfold from a given time. So think of like the state of the world right now and not just like what's happening where you are, where I am, but like the location and velocity of every particle in the universe. So like take a this is kind of complicated with relativity and contemporary physics, but imat you know imagine sort of freezing the whole world, taking that time slice of it. If you think of that as like an input and you think of the laws of nature like a function, ⁓ if the laws of nature are deterministic, they're going to tell you exactly what state of the world would have to follow, and then what state of the world would have to follow that. And so there's just one way that from them from the way things are now that things can unfold in the future. ⁓ so if it turns out that five minutes from now I'm gonna like raise my hand as an example, ⁓ if that's if that's going to happen, it's sort of determined from now and from the laws of nature that that's gonna happen in the future. ⁓ and here's the worry. It's not just that like given the way things are now, the future is in some sense set or Sometimes people say faded, although I think that's a little bit misleading. It has to be a certain way though, given the laws and the present state of world. It also follows that like given the way the world was millions of years ago in the distant past, if the laws of nature are deterministic and they're constant, then the way things are now, the way things are at every time of our lives, it has sort of been set from before we were born. And that a lot of people think at least raises a puzzle about our agency. ⁓ 'cause it seems like if you know, what we do now, what we're gonna do tomorrow is sort of the inevitable consequence of the past, together with the these laws of nature, then ⁓ we can't really do anything other than what is the inevitable consequence of these things. After all, like it's not up to me what was going on a thousand years ago, well on a million years ago. It's not up to me what the laws of nature are. I don't have any control over you know, laws of gravity, for example, or anything any of the laws of nature. So it seems like if it's if those things settle that I'm gonna raise my hand now, well then I'm not really settling it. It's not really up to me. At least I can't do otherwise than than raise my hand if if that's sort of set by things that are beyond my control. ⁓ so I think because that's an intuitive idea, this is why a lot of people like the binary. It's like, well, do we pick determinism or do we think we have free will? And I think a lot of physicists buy into that binary and at least since the early to mid twentieth century, a lot of physicists have opted for indeterministic models of the laws of nature. That's partly because of developments in quantum physics, especially quantum mechanics. ⁓ but there's it's still an open question scientifically and philosophically, whether determinism is true. In other words, whether the laws of of nature in our world are deterministic. ⁓ there are deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics and indeterministic ones. And there's good philosophical reasons for endorsing determinism, but not it not very many philosophers are convinced by them. So there is sort of an open question even about in the philosophy ⁓ of determinism, whether it's true or not. So this for this reason, most philosophers in the free will debate don't identify as determinists or indeterminists, at least not primarily. They do they identify as compatibilists or incompatibilists. So would determinism be a threat to free will or not? That's sort of the question that philosophers are are more interested in. Yeah, and it's interesting, right? Because even if if you believe in a truly deterministic view, then that also implies that randomness doesn't exist, not even in quantum mechanics, that that that there is no way to achieve true randomness. Because if we were to have this some sort of supercomputer based on all the information out there of every molecule, ⁓ every atom, then still the information is already out there to predict the future, which also implies that randomness is a hoax, basically, because ⁓ randomness is not compatible with true determinism. But even if you do believe in randomness, whether it's Through quantum mechanics, rolling of dice, or or or some other form of things that we think of as random, I still that think that sits apart from the free will debate, because even if we say like if the dice ⁓ if it's heads or tails, for example, and if ⁓ let's assume for a second that the the coin flip is indeed completely random, then still ⁓ apart from the physics and that we could calculate whether it falls on heads or tails. Like this is a truly random heads or tails ⁓ scenario. Then still if if there is no free will, even though our our ⁓ options are fixed, ⁓ if if it goes on on heads, I will raise my hand if it goes on tail, I won't raise my hand, then still raising one's hand wasn't a voluntary action because that was already then also predetermined. So I I think it's always it it's kind of a complicated issue, but I think ⁓ they are separate discussions and do not really prove or disprove ⁓ free will. W what is your take on that? Yeah, I guess it depends on what the what we're trying to capture when we talk about randomness ⁓ or chance. I do think Yes, there is a sense in which if determinism's true, you know, the the outcome of the coin flip is settled by things that happen and the laws of nature ⁓ like long before the coin flip happens. And so is there any chance that it you know won't it suppose it lands heads, is there any chance that it won't land tails given the past and given the laws? Well no, but is there a chance given these like more local considerations like my control over the flipping of the coin? ⁓ gravity, these sorts of things. If you only hold that local set of things fixed, you might be able to get ⁓ to capture ⁓ genuine chance. ⁓ but it it depends on exactly how we want to a a account for chance. I tend to think even you know if determinism's true, it it might be that nothing's a matter of chance, strictly speaking. But because we ⁓ are sort of cognitively limited. We and because we don't know the state of the world at any given time, like in all its complexity, we don't know the f full set of the laws of nature. ⁓ it wouldn't be predictable for us whether it's going to be heads or tails. And again, given these sort of like local considerations, ⁓ we can treat it like a 50-50 thing. But that's a more epistemic rather than ⁓ sort of I don't know, deeper metaphysical point about whether there's chance. ⁓ but yeah I do think ⁓ I do think whether there is that genuine chance or not, it it might bear on the question of our our control. There there are some people who think if ⁓ determinism's false, and in particular if like my making the choice to, let's say, agree to come on your podcast, if that was not determined by what came just before it and the laws of nature, then maybe it's more like a genuine chancy coin flip. And that also doesn't look like control because it looks ⁓ you know, lucky or unlucky as the case may be. ⁓ so there are these puzzles for especially for libertarian views of free will that introduce indeterminacy as a requirement for freedom. There's this question, well, how does that actually ⁓ help you get more control than you would have if things were determined? ⁓ or, you know, is it even possible to have control if it's undetermined? ⁓ those are kind of related but distinct puzzles that philosophers wrestle with. Yeah. It's it's incredibly interesting. And you mentioned ⁓ compatibility ⁓ earlier. ⁓ I believe your view is what you've described as semi compatibilism, ⁓ which also is tied to the the Frankfurt case. Can you maybe elaborate on what the Frankfurt case is and also how your view ⁓ fits in there and and what semi compatibilism is? Sure thing. ⁓ always happy to talk about semicompatibilism. ⁓ the term comes from John Martin Fisher, who was my ⁓ dissertation supervisor and who, yeah, he coined the term. He was inspired himself by Harry Frankfurt and by these examples that you just ⁓ referenced. So we'll start with ⁓ Frankfurt type example. Frankfurt starts this very classic paper from the nineteen sixties ⁓ called I believe it's called Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility, but I could be having the word slightly out of order. In any case, nineteen sixty nine Harry Frankfurt classic paper. He says a lot of people, and maybe almost all philosophers have taken moral responsibility to require alternative possibilities or the ability to do otherwise at the time of action. But consider a case like this. Consider ⁓ you know, you're about to make an important decision. Almost always in this literature, it's it's a voting case. So you're trying to decide whether to vote for candidate A. or whether to vote for candidate B. And let's suppose you know you know quite a bit about the candidates ⁓ and you're sort of torn. ⁓ you you kind of like this person's policies, but you like these this person's policies. And you're deciding sort of at the last minute ⁓ which of these candidates to vote for. We'll just call them candidate A and candidate B. And I won't even tell you ⁓ whether one's conservative or liberal or anything like that. Okay. So suppose though that I really want you to vote for candidate A. But I also don't wanna like coerce you into doing it by like threatening you, like vote for candidate A or or else. ⁓ instead what I wanna do is I want I want you to decide to vote for candidate A instead of me deciding for you. ⁓ and so what I do is I you know, this is a little bit science fiction-y, but I've got this ⁓ chip that I can implant in your brain. And if I do this, I'll do it overnight secretly and you won't even notice. Like my technology is so good, you won't even have a scar the next morning, no recovery time, anything like that. I'm gonna plant this chip in your brain though again without you knowing it. And what that ⁓ chip is gonna let me do is it's gonna let me observe your process of deliberation. And so I can see whether you're more inclined to vote for A or B, and I can tell just before you make your decision which one you're gonna vote for, whether you're gonna decide to vote for A, whether you're gonna decide to vote for B. Also, I have this sort of remote control and it's just a fail-safe button. If it becomes clear that you're gonna you're gonna choose to vote for candidate B, I press the button and it basically shuts down your brain and forces you to make the choice to vote for candidate A. ⁓ I don't wanna use the button, it's just a fail-safe, but I've got that ability to make sure that you don't choose B. You're gonna you're gonna choose A. And so ⁓ as things happen, I'm sitting with my screen watching your deliberative ⁓ mental activity flickering. And it becomes clear that you are gonna vote for c you're gonna decide to vote for candidate A, and you do. And so all I've done, other than like, you know, tinkering with your brain a little bit to put this device in there, all I've done is watched and I was ready to press a button to make you do what you in fact did on your own, which is you decided to vote for candidate A. I never had to press my button to like force you to decide one way or other. I just watched, but ready to intervene to make you do what I wanted you to do, if if necessary. Okay. And so Frankfurt, his case is a little different, but he, you know, he he's credited for, you know, introducing the the cases that are now called Frankfurt cases. ⁓ there's lots of varieties of them and there's yeah, there's so many different versions that actually fall into different categories that we we don't want to get into here. But What he said was, this looks like a case where, you know, I didn't actually make you vote for candidate A or make that decision. You did it on your own. It looks like you did it volitionally. It was your choice. It looks like you're morally responsible for that choice. If it was a good one, maybe, you know, we should thank you for for making the right vote. If it was bad, maybe we can criticize you for it. ⁓ and yet, although you're morally responsible for that decision, you couldn't have done otherwise than make that decision. in the case. Now why is that? That's because although I never pressed my button, having that ability to press the button should I need to made it so that deciding to vote for B wasn't a live option. You were gonna vote excuse me, you were going to decide to vote for candidate A one way or another. And so this looks like a case ⁓ where someone is morally responsible for a decision and they couldn't have avoided making that decision. So it looks like the sort of leeway or ⁓ ability to do otherwise that a lot of people have have associated with free will isn't actually necessary for moral respon moral responsibility. It looks like you can be morally responsible without having the freedom or ability to do otherwise. Now that's what the Frankfurt case as as Frankfurt envisioned it sh ⁓ sort of attempted to show. And he has a little bit more at the end of his paper that doesn't get as much attention, but I think is really crucial for understanding where semi-compatibilist or people kind of in the sort of ballpark of Frankfurt's own view ⁓ of how they should ⁓ develop their positions. But the way that ⁓ John Martin Fisher, who you know, introduced this term semi compatibilism, the way that he uses that term is to pick out the view that says freedom and responsibility are compatible with determinism, even if determinism rules out the freedom to do otherwise. So it might be that determinism does take away some sorts of freedom. And I mentioned earlier reason to think that it does. Like if I don't have any control over the past or the laws of nature and those things on a d in a deterministic world guarantee that I'm gonna make a decision or raise my hand, then it looks like I can't avoid making that decision or raising my hand. And yet, as long as I'm making the choice and I'm raising my hand and I'm like the source of those things in the same way that you are in the voting case. looks like having the freedom or ability to do otherwise might not be necessary for moral responsibility. So that's sort of the the two ⁓ I don't know sources or motivations for the semi-compatibilist position. It looks like there's reason to think determinism takes away a certain kind of freedom, the freedom to do otherwise, but on the other hand, that kind of freedom isn't necessary for moral responsibility, as we learned from the Frankfurt cases. So that's the kind of position that that I go for. It's a compatibilist view. But it's only a semi compatibilist view because it admits we might not have leeway freedom in a deterministic world. And there are other compatibilists, excuse me, ⁓ including some very influential ones in the early modern period, like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, who did think that we had leeway in a deterministic world. ⁓ and there are some today, ⁓ compatibilists today who disagree with semi compatibilism. ⁓ it's also interesting that it's different, of course, from a skeptical position that denies free will, but it's also different from a libertarian position that says determinism would rule out free will. And so the world must not be deterministic. ⁓ my own view is a sort of rival to all of those, I guess. Yeah, it's it's it's super interesting. And it r it also begs the question, do you do you think that it differs per person and what I mean by that is ⁓ we often when we're talking about free will it means an expression of one's agency is is how you you could define it. But famously there are ⁓ more high there are high agentic people, ⁓ entrepreneurs are a good example. They have a strong belief that they can change the world. ⁓ by ⁓ undergoing certain actions and they happen to life if you will and there are people who believe that life happens to them. So they say, hey, I can't find a job because the economy is doing so bad right now and yeah my parents were too poor to send me to college. So yeah it's really not my fault ⁓ that I am unable to get a job right now and therefore I I can't really be held accountable for for not having a job and having to rely on on welfare. ⁓ do you think free will is the the the sense of having free will is differs from from person to person? Yeah. I mean in the cases that you just gave, I think that is part of what's going on is that ⁓ a person's sense of their own agency sort of varies across those cases. I I wonder though if if that might be a different sense of of freedom e even from the ones that we've already distinguished, because it seems like the more Agentic person, maybe the entrepreneur, not only thinks of themselves as making their own choices or and being responsible for them, but they think like, I don't know, maybe their their scope of influence is bigger than some of these other agents. And maybe they're right about that or maybe they're wrong. I I do think it could be that someone thinks they have less agency than they do in fact have. But in s in many cases, circumstances do constrain what's possible for a person, regardless of whether they think they have a lot of free will or not, in this sense. ⁓ yeah, that gets complicated. It this is related to, I think, the sort of some of the biggest challenges to any view of free will, including a semi-compatibleist one like mine, which is there are so many aspects of our lives, what we're like, especially at an early age, what circumstances we find ourselves in. ⁓ what happens after we act, like what the what the ⁓ sort of chain reaction after our actions ⁓ is. That you know, in some cases we have some control over these things, but in a lot of cases a lot less than we might initially think. And reflection on how much is not up to us should make us think, well, I didn't have as much control as as I might have initially thought. And I think that should make us a little bit sober-minded, more sober-minded about the scope of our own agency, and also something good to keep in mind when we think about others. ⁓ this is this is something that comes up in the literature on moral luck, which is a term that comes from Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel. But the idea is like ⁓ if someone else ⁓ you know would have done something similar in my position, or if I would have done something very different in different circumstances, or had I, you know, been more naturally brave or something like that. ⁓ it it makes us think maybe our agency is diminished, but at least maybe certain praise and blame, ⁓ certain degrees of praise and blame might not be warranted. It it it makes us, I think, a little bit more humble. ⁓ so that that's sort of what I would think of as the in in those, you know, real life cases you're imagining when People's sense of their own agency varies. I think in a lot of ti in a lot of cases, it may very well be that one type of person is overestimating the scope of their agency and another might even be underestimating it. But they they could both be right. And I think they could both be right and still both be morally responsible for some of what they do. But of course, they're gonna end up doing different things and for different reasons and end up, you know, responsible for different things and to different degrees too. We'll go back to the conversation in just a second, but first I have an important announcement to make. If you've made it this far, I'm going to assume that you're enjoying the show. If you want to support the show, you can do so by leaving a like or a comment if you're watching on YouTube, or by rating the episode if you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. However, the single biggest thing you can do to support the show is by sharing it with someone you think might enjoy this episode. This could be a friend, it could be a family member, it could be a colleague. It doesn't really matter. If everyone who's currently listening to this episode would share it with just one person, the show would blow up in no time. Which also means that I could go full time. That means more episodes, it means better episodes, and it also means a happy host. So Please consider sharing the episode. It really helps me a lot. And I thank you. Now let's get back to talking. Yeah. And the I recently did an episode about Growth Mindset. And the power of Growth Mindset is really incredible. There was this study that was performed where they just ⁓ taught ⁓ students about Growth Mindset and about how humans and the brain is able to learn. And about how having a growth mindset can can help you in life. And they followed these students for two years, I believe. And the the difference was pretty astounding because the the the small group of students who believed that they could in fact change and ⁓ that they could learn, that they could become better, ⁓ performed way better throughout those years than the group who hadn't received those lessons. ⁓ there are a few more examples, but I think part of the reason why I think it's it's important to think about free will and to think about agency is because it can just by having the belief of being able to change things by trying to improve, it can have severe outcomes on on the rest of your life, on on on your performance, and also yeah makes yeah makes makes people want to want to want to want to work and and perform better. So that's why I think it's it's it it's an interesting parallel. ⁓ It is not exactly the same as as the free will discussion, but it seems that just having the knowledge about getting more agency, therefore believing in one's free will, ⁓ exercising one's free will it can have a very positive impact on ⁓ on one's ⁓ one's life. So d d do you think that yeah the d d do you do you agree that like having or being open to free will and and perhaps opposing the the binary view of a fully ⁓ the fully deterministic ones is not a yeah a more positive one and and perhaps can lead to better outcomes? Yeah, it's a it's a good question. I I guess I w I wanna kinda give my answer as a philosopher of free will and then like my all things considered answer in light of data from the like social psychologists and others like who are getting that kind of data. So like on the latter, y I think you're exactly right and that like this is a good reason to encourage a growth mindset. ⁓ and I think that's sort of separate from the question of whether we ever are to blame for what we do or to praise for what we do, because like like you said they're tracing positive outcomes ⁓ of the belief ⁓ in a kind of yeah, ⁓ the possibility of growth. But I also think it just is true. It is true that we change and that what we do at earlier times affects what we what we're like at later times and what's what we're capable of at later times. ⁓ Yeah, philosophers have used examples like this for for millennia. I like Plato and Aristotle have examples, especially in Aristotle's ethics of people developing virtue ⁓ by practicing it. So someone who's not courageous finds ⁓ you know an exemplar, someone who is courageous, emulates them, does what the virtuous person would do, and thereby becomes courageous. ⁓ I do think that that's true. And I think I think people should buy into that picture r even if they're skeptical that we're ever responsible for being courageous or anything like that. But my own view is that we are. And so this is actually related to another kind of puzzle for and challenge for compatible with some views of free will. There are times ⁓ there's cases, and some of them are more science fictional than others, but there are cases where what we're like at a time or what we end up doing is very much not up to us when we're manipulated into having new desires that we didn't have before or a new kind of character ⁓ than we than we had cultivated before that. And in those kinds of cases, I want to say, you know, regardless of whether like taking ownership of that new character is going to have that's going to give you a growth mindset that's going to produce good outcomes. I want to say, well, if you didn't choose it, if it w it wasn't ⁓ something that you freely endorsed or cultivated, you're not as responsible for acting from that character as if ⁓ this was something that you had undertaken freely. ⁓ and so I think there are cases where people ⁓ are responsible for ⁓ what they're like and and and their character and then they can become more responsible for how they act from that character. But then there are these cases, some of it's ⁓ you know, nefarious involvement from other agents. Some of it is just ⁓ pure luck, I would think. but where somebody ⁓ goes through some kind of radical shift that wasn't something they freely chose. And then I would want to mitigate ⁓ responsibility in those cases. Yeah. this there's also an interesting parallel to be made here. I recently did an episode about ⁓ psychological tricks that marketers use in order to persuade ⁓ you to buy ⁓ their products and a lot of them are actually focusing on the subconscious, right? So it is all of course presenting the product in a way that we think best suits us. But a lot of the tricks actually happen subconsciously or we aren't necessarily aware of it. And what humans often do is that they after they've made a decision, they then after ⁓ rationalize it after ⁓ the fact. Yeah, I chose the BMW because I needed the the four wheel drive and and and ⁓ they have the new ⁓ thread on the tires and ⁓ the the the the car system is really good. But but apparently like w we just come up with those arguments after the fact rather than and if if we there there's a there's a lot of studies done on subconscious decision making and some philosophers and and alex o'connor for example ⁓ from ⁓ within reason ⁓ the b big philosophy podcast he argues that there is not really such a thing as subconscious decision making because even if we aren't necessarily aware of why we've made a decision and even if if the subconscious Bit quotation marks happens before our conscious reasoning, and even if we try to reason after the fact why we did something, try to it rationalize it, explain it, ⁓ then still that subconscious decision is still part of our consciousness, even though we aren't fully aware of it. w what do you make of ⁓ subconscious decision making in the light of free will? Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of ways to go here. And ⁓ and yeah, this isn't the I haven't written on that topic ⁓ in particular. And so I guess I tend to think ⁓ what matters for freedom and responsibility are choices that we're making consciously. But I totally agree that like a lot of the things that are influencing the choices that we make, even at the conscious level, aren't ⁓ things that we're aware of, right? And it could be that it's ⁓ that people are intending for it to be that way, like for me to f feel more inclined for this product rather than that one without even realizing that like maybe they're the same in the in the relevant respect. It could be other reasons. But in any case, I guess because I think ⁓ moral responsibility sort of most fundamentally is about choices and then more indirectly about the things that are shaped by choices, like what what we're like at later times and what the consequences of our choices are, what our over bodily actions are. ⁓ I tend to think, well, there's got to be whatever the control for that's required for responsibility is, it's got to be located right there at the ⁓ moment of choice. And if it were if it were the case that most or all of our decisions were not consciously made or that we didn't have control over them, ⁓ that would be a big problem for my view of f free will. But I do think there's good reason to think even if there's a subconscious dimension or things that we're not in control of. ⁓ we have good reason to think that our our at least some of our choices that are consciously made, ⁓ that we do e exhibit the relevant kind of control for those. Yeah. And you've done more than a hundred episodes on your show talking to people about free will, having discussions, hearing different opinions about it, different views. Is there anything that has changed over all those episodes within your own ⁓ view of ⁓ To topic of free will? That's a good question. ⁓ you know, by the time that I had started the the podcast and my friend Matt and I had done it, we were both already done with grad school, but we were pretty early in our careers, ⁓ and especially in our teaching careers. And ⁓ I think mo we kind of thought that we had figured out most of what we thought. I the biggest surprise for me was ⁓ early on, I I believe it was our third season. We do 10 episode seasons and we try to do a couple a year. We're on a hiatus right now, but w our third season, so episodes like twenty one through thirty, we talked mostly to scientists or to philosophers who are doing work that's involved with empirical science. And I guess what I learned from that season especially was there are very there are more ways for philosophers and scientists to explore these questions about free will and to break new ground by cross pollination, by working in a kind of interdisciplinary way than I had realized before. And in particular, I guess I'm interested in ⁓ like how various ⁓ studies in neuroscience and in social psychology can inform the way that we spell out ⁓ particular accounts of ⁓ of free will. And it can help us to sort of realize what mechanisms are most important for control over choice or other kinds of other things related to free will, and like where in our development I'm I'm really interested in in children and ⁓ how not just moral formation happens, but like this kind of control over choice, how that arises. That that's a question that you can't just figure out from an armchair or even just from watching your own kids, which is what I spent a lot of my time doing. But just but you know, studies about lots of children in the sciences. So the I guess I've learned I need to listen more to the to the scientists. At the same time, one thing I learned is that not all scientists are interested in philosophical categories or in making sure that their studies sort of translate into helpful upshots for philosophers. So it's helpful to find scientists who are very philosophical ⁓ minds themselves or in conversations with philosophers, and vice versa, philosophers who are open to working with or learning from scientists. Thankfully, like a lot of the people that we interviewed, especially Uri Mao's have pioneered those kinds of conversations and whole centers and conferences with those aims. Yeah. And I I was also curious, you ⁓ are an a assistant professor, correct? I was just last year promoted to associate professor. I just learned last week ⁓ from a friend who told me online I have not updated that title in all the places. Okay. So my mistake is forgiven. It's not your mistake. That's right. Okay. Okay. Great. So asso associate professor. i in academia. So so you are also in in a touch you in in in the classrooms, you you have discussions with a lot of ⁓ students as well. I did a boring study. I thought it was interesting sometimes, but I I study text law. which many people may think of as as very boring. But I'm I'm very curious to understand ⁓ what does ⁓ what do these discussions look like in in the classroom and how does free will ⁓ c come into play? Are there certain discussions that are being held? ⁓ presumably papers to be written, but I'm I'm just curious what that process looks like as someone who who has never experienced it firsthand. Sure. It it depends on a lot of things. So I teach at Sanford University, which is ⁓ for the US a relatively small private liberal arts college. We have ⁓ university. We have ⁓ I think about forty five hundred undergraduates and then another fifteen hundred or so graduate students. No graduate students in the humanities. So I I don't work with ⁓ graduate students, but ⁓ you know, my ⁓ my philosophy courses are relatively small. So ⁓ I'll probably have twenty or twenty-five students in an intro to philosophy course. I also teach in a ⁓ kind of great books curriculum that we call Cortex and we talk about free will as it comes up in literature over the years. But ⁓ in my upper level, like ⁓ co ⁓ philosophy courses for for majors and it's also some minors, a few students who take these courses as electives, I'll usually have 10 or 15 students. And so we become very interested in each other's personal views and get to know them very ⁓ intimately over the course of the semester. And there are a lot of ⁓ discussions. Now, I ⁓ it ⁓ it's probably not surprising that even though I teach a lot of different courses, free will comes up in ⁓ virtually all of them. ⁓ so like when I teach metaphysics, ⁓ I talk about not just questions about like whether God exists or the nature of time and I'm I'm really interested in time travel, but I also talk about Free will and actually time travel and free will, which is ⁓ something I've just written a bunch about for ⁓ this short book on time travel that I that I've been writing. ⁓ but anyway, that so I I you know, I'm in a metaphysics course, I'm gonna get to free will at some point. In my ethical theory course, we talk about moral luck, and I get into some of the things that I was just talking about, about shaping our character and the effects of our choices, the consequences of them. All those sorts of things come up just from a different angle in that course. And then I also have a course that's just on free will. And we get to focus on this stuff over the course of a whole semester. And ⁓ Sanford is a Christian university and a lot of the students are are are Christians. So a lot of them are interested in theological issues related to free will that we haven't really focused on. So like I mentioned at the outset that my own background and like concerns about prayer and divine foreknowledge, but there are also questions that are more ⁓ specific, I think, to Christianity about the nature of grace and about what we control and what God controls, questions about divine providence. So a lot of the topics end up going in that direction just because of the population of students and and myself, ⁓ just the beliefs that we have and that are it we're interested in exploring. But it varies quite a bit from even even in the same course, just from one group of students to another, where exactly the conversation goes. But I say most people are interested in the topic once they realize how much of ⁓ the way they think about themselves, the way they think about others kind of depends on certain assumptions about freedom and control. And then the puzzles can become ⁓ don't know, they're they're more pronounced and they have to be taken seriously. The students can see that quickly. Yeah, it's that sounds incredibly interesting. And Well, you mentioned ⁓ free will in relation to time travel there. Yeah. And they j y you're currently writing a book about it? Yes, I've just finished a manuscript for the ⁓ Cambridge Elements series. They're short books and when it first gets published, it'll be free online for a couple of weeks ⁓ to download as a PDF. But the book is on time travel and th that'll be its title. But the last at least quarter of the book is about time travel and free will. And some of the literature on the paradoxes of time travel, especially if you're familiar with time travel stuff, the grandfather paradox is one of these well-known ⁓ widely discussed paradoxes. It's I think of it as a it's about free will. It's about what people can and can't do in certain scenarios. So that's what I'm kind of teasing out at the end of the book. That's ⁓ I I really I I'm really interested in in reading that. I know the book still has to to come out and and we don't want to give give away too much, but can you maybe elaborate ⁓ slightly on some of the interesting connections to free will there? Yeah, yeah. So ⁓ I I actually I because I just finished it, ⁓ my deadline was like a month and a few days ago, ⁓ it's still very fresh. And the last chapter on time travel and free will is kind of divided into four sections and they all come after some discussion of the grandfather paradox. So one is the connections between time travel and ⁓ positions in the free will debate. So like if you're a compatibilist, what would you say about certain time travel cases? If you're a libertarian, what would you say? And it turns out a lot of the people who've written on the grandfather paradox have also contributed in one way or another to debates about free will. ⁓ and as a semi-compatibilist, I'm gonna have one kind of take on a on a grandfather paradox scenario that someone else might might not. So Very, very quickly, I'll give the the shortest version of this case. But like if you go back in time to a time when your grandfather was a young child before he had any children, including suppose it's your paternal grandfather, before your father ever came into existence. ⁓ and you had a loaded gun with you, and for some reason or other, maybe you're just a very bad person, you want to kill your grandfather, right? Imagine you're you're a good shot, you've got ammunition, you go to pull the trigger, you know, he doesn't see you and y you're in close range. Can you kill your grandfather? ⁓ it looks like there's reasons to think yes, you can't, and there's reasons to think no, you can't. And those can't both be right, because that would be a contradiction. ⁓ and then some people think, well, it is a contradiction. So, you know, this hypothesis that you could go back in time, we've got to give that up. Time travel's impossible. I think, although it does seem like in some sense you can, what what's stopping you, right? You've got the gun, you're a good shot, all this. There's a pretty clear sense in which you can't kill your grandfather because succeeding in killing your grandfather would undermine your own existence. You couldn't be there with the loaded gun in the first place if you were to succeed in killing your grandfather. ⁓ now this is assuming that time is linear. If you give that up and you think of like different universes or different timelines, all bets are off. You can go all different sorts of directions. And I do that in in the book, there's a quick preview there. ⁓ but anyway, the one of the other ⁓ so I t I talked about positions in the free will debate. There are certain arguments for incompatibilism about free will and determinism that mirror some of the literature about time travel. And then the other two areas focus in on divine foreknowledge and the way that time travel has been invoked in that literature, debates about divine foreknowledge and free will. And then the last one is actually related to Frankfurt cases. ⁓ it turns out that especially ⁓ Joshua Spencer but others have discussed versions of the grandfather paradox scenario that look like Frankfurt cases. Right. Suppose that you don't kill your grandfather. Maybe you choose to do so for good reasons, ⁓ having just traveled back in time. It could be that you're responsible for that choice, even though you couldn't have done otherwise. You couldn't have killed your grandfather. ⁓ so it looks like we have another kind of a very different kind of Frankfurt case. No brain chip or button ⁓ required, just a time machine. Yeah, just ⁓ the the the contradiction, the the impossibility it would create ⁓ by killing your grandfather and therefore removing the the possibility of of creating your own life down down the line. Yeah, that's so that's so interesting. Well, ⁓ w when when we ca when can we es expect ⁓ the book? That's a good question. The short answer is I don't know, but I hope that it's ⁓ months and not years away. So probably in the next year. ⁓ but hopefully sooner. All right. Yeah. Well I'll I'll definitely ⁓ be on the on the lookout. ⁓ if more people are interested in keeping up with ⁓ your work and perhaps read some of your earlier ⁓ papers and and stuff as well, or if they want to find your your own show, ⁓ what is the best place for them to go? A best place I try to keep my personal website up to date and it's just ⁓ my name with my middle initial dot com. So Taylor W Cyr ⁓ spelled C Y R. ⁓ dot com. But if you just Google Taylor Sear, ⁓ philosopher, maybe even if you just Google Taylor Seer, it might be the first thing that comes up. ⁓ but my my podcast is linked there. All of my publications are listed there. And if you you know don't have access to any of the papers that you're interested in reading, I try to put them all up in the preprint form in on either academia.edu or Phil Papers, which is what a lot of philosophers use. But you know, my contact info's on there too. People are welcome to email me if they want a copy of anything. ⁓ I can share it with them. Perfect. Well, ⁓ Taylor, thank you so much for for coming on the show. This was incredibly interesting. ⁓ yeah, I'll definitely be on the the lookup for that book because I also love ⁓ time travel, I love science fiction, and this seems like a very cool way to combine ⁓ philosophy into ⁓ into that as as well. So ⁓ yeah, thanks again and ⁓ let's ⁓ let's stay in touch. Sounds good. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Julius.