Philosophers are doing something different these days
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Photo by Robin Lyon on Unsplash
At the beginning of the German movie Run Lola Run, the protagonist Lola receives a phone call where her boyfriend tells her that he is in trouble and urgently needs a large sum of money without which he will possibly be killed. She has 20 minutes to help him and starts racing against time. Her efforts go in vain and things don’t end well. The movie resets her life and she is back to the moment where she got the phone call and she tries again to save her boyfriend. She does some things differently, but again she is unsuccessful. She gets a third and final chance. This time she does all the right things and manages to save herself and the boyfriend.
The point this movie is trying to make is that every little thing we do can have a huge impact on our lives and we can change the course of our lives through our actions - just like Lola did when given enough chances. But it also seems to be saying the opposite: someone else’s actions - someone who lives far away and whom you have never met - can also influence your life’s outcomes. In the movie, Lola fails in her second attempt because she trips over someone which delays her and ultimately leads to her failure. So, you might get hit by a car on the way to work because the guy driving it didn’t sleep last night because he was out late at a friend’s birthday party which was supposed to happen 3 days earlier but didn’t because the birthday girl had to work on her birthday because something suddenly came up at work because…it can go on. Our whole life can feel like a chain of events that is just chugging along on its own.
So, the question is, how much of a choice do we really have in what happens to us?
This is a philosophical question and is referred to as the problem of “free will”. The laws of physics suggest that we can predict the future states of an object based on its current state. We know exactly where the earth is going to be, say, next year this time, because we have equations that explain and predict how planets move. So, it is possible that any universe that started like ours would end up in this exact same state. That, what you will do next is already decided in some way because of the manner in which things have unfolded so far in the universe. But this view of the world - known as determinism - doesn’t feel right. Today morning when I woke up, I decided to drink coffee. I could have drunk tea or nothing at all. So, it sure felt like I had a choice and I was choosing to drink coffee. It feels like a choice because it was equally likely that, all other conditions (weather, quality of my sleep among others) being the same, I could just as well have chosen to drink coffee. This freedom to do otherwise is a hallmark of free will. And so, we come to the problem of free will and determinism. Our scientific understanding of the world seems to tell us that the world and everything in it is deterministic, whereas our personal experience of dealing with the world tells us that we make our own choices. These two ideas intuitively seem incompatible and much of philosophy has been preoccupied with this conflict.
Philosophers, for thousands of years, have relied mostly on their ability to make carefully thought out and reasoned arguments to address such issues. But more recently, there has been a change in how some philosophers are doing philosophy. A new movement has gained momentum within cognitive science - experimental philosophy - which claims to use methods from experimental psychology to address philosophical questions.
What does this mean?
Free will and determinism seem intuitively incompatible. But, according to whose intuitions? So far this conclusion has been based on the intuition of a few philosophers. But is that a true reflection of the beliefs of common people? Experimental investigation of such an issue starts with a simple premise. If you want to know what people think of a certain idea, the best way to find this out is to actually ask them. In one of the earliest studies done on free will and determinism, participants were described of a time in the future when all laws of nature are discovered such that given the current state of the universe it would be possible to determine what will happen at a future time point. In short, they were asked to imagine a completely deterministic universe. They were then told about scenarios of people committing various actions such as robbing a bank or saving a child from harm. For each of these actions, participants overwhelmingly responded that the people performing the actions were doing so out of their own free will. That is, the person robbed the bank did so because he wanted to and that he deserved to be blamed for it.
This reveals something startling. People can believe that everything that happens in the universe is determined through a set of laws while simultaneously believing that humans are capable of choosing their actions freely. The crucial point here is this: while many philosophers for centuries have argued that free will and determinism are counter-intuitive notions and you can’t believe in one if you believe in the other, common people seem to have no such problems in holding seemingly counter-intuitive views.
Some of you might be wondering whether this tells us anything important? Let’s say we do find across many experiments that people do NOT find the idea of free will and determinism incompatible. That still does not say much on whether the two ideas are really incompatible. All we know is how people think about free will, not so much about whether free will really exists. So, the question I started this article with - how much of a choice do we have in what happens to us - can not be answered by these methods. So, how useful it is to find out what ordinary people - with no formal training in philosophy or logic - think about complex philosophical issues? As it turns out, it matters a lot.
Last year, a woman in Hyderabad was sexually assaulted and brutally killed in Hyderabad. Four men who were accused to be the perpetrators were arrested a few days later and subsequently killed when they allegedly tried to escape from police custody. I won’t get into the legal merits of the case. Let us assume for a minute that everything that the public was told was actually true. There were widespread celebrations across the country when the news came out that the accused had been killed. Because most people believed that the men deserved this kind of death for the act they committed. The underlying assumption here is that the four men could have chosen to walk away from that woman when they encountered her, but instead they chose to assault her and so they deserve retribution. Instead, a person who believes that those men had no real choice and that their entire life and everything that happened before them mechanistically brought them to the point which leads to the incident might have been less inclined to celebrate when they were killed. Coronavirus, for instance, is killing millions of people across the world, but we don’t think of punishing the virus because it is not leading to destruction out of choice. It has no freedom to do otherwise so the concept of retribution does not apply.
This idea was experimentally tested by Azim Shariff and colleagues in a study published in Psychological Science. Participants were first asked to read a passage from Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis which rejects the idea of free-will. Then, they had to decide the appropriate amount of punishment for a man who beat another man to death. The participants were told that the punishment would be given AFTER a 100% effective rehabilitation treatment. The attempt was to convince the participants that there was a complete guarantee that the man would be reformed and would most likely not commit such a crime again. Would they still want to punish him, just because he deserved to suffer for what he had already done? The study found that people who read the anti-free-will passage were more likely to suggest a lighter punishment. That is, people who were lead to believe that our Universe is deterministic because of which the man probably did not have full control over his actions thought that he should be given a lighter sentence. Similar results were seen when participants read popular science articles or when participants sat through an introductory neuroscience class before giving the responses- all meant to convince the participants of a mechanistic view of human nature.
People’s philosophical intuitions on free-will and moral responsibility have broad social consequences. They have immediate implications specifically in countries like the USA which relies on the jury system where common individuals picked from the public make decisions on criminal charges. Needless to say, each jury member’s intuitions about free-will has consequences on their judgement of somebody’s innocence or guilt. It is not easy to investigate these issues with the kind of experiments I have described. And of course, many, many more studies need to be done before we can come to any conclusion with some certainty. But the point is, there at least seem to be new ways of tackling the old questions.
Does this mean it is the end of the road for traditional ways of doing philosophy? Certainly not. As Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols - pioneers in the experimental philosophy movement - have carefully elaborated in this manifesto, experimental philosophy is supposed to add another tool to the philosopher’s (and the cognitive scientist’s, in my view) toolbox. Nobody is trying to replace the arm-chair. The point, rather, is to take the arm-chair inside a laboratory.