Flickers of Freedom

At Last

An eminently reasonable popular article on free will and neuroscience. Enjoy.

3:AM Interview with Mele

Yet another interesting and illuminating interview by 3:AM's Richard Marshall.  This time, Al Meletalks about free will, self-deception, neuroscience, experimental philosophy and a number of other themes.  Check it out!

Crowd-sourcing my SPA Remarks

At the annual International Free Will Conference (you know, the Pacific APA), the Society for the Philosophy of Agency is having its inaugural meeting. There’s going to be a panel discussion on the State of the Field, and I’m tasked with talking about free will. Among the things I’m supposed to be ready to talk about are the current central issues in debates about free will, interesting developments, and emerging topics over the next 5+ years.

For the talk, I thought about consulting my intuitions on the matters. However, I’ve been told that my intuitions are generally defective. So, I thought I should do some Serious Experimental work and just ask you, dear blog reader, what you think about these matters. I can’t promise that I will use your remarks in my talk, but I can’t promise that I won’t. I can promise that I won't run a regression analysis on the frequency of various remarks.

So I bleg of you: what do you think is Big Time in free will, what’s new and exciting to you, and what do you think will be Big Time in 5+ years? 

Why a Pseudonym?

Does anyone know why Dickinson S. Miller published his famous free-will paper under the name R. E. Hobart?

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists one other paper published under the pseudonym and several published by Miller under his own name.

Problems of the Self at CEU

Central European University’s summer school (http://summer.ceu.hu/self-2012) invites applications from graduate students, junior faculty and researchers from all over the world. 

The course aims to present the state of the art in research on the self from philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, sociology, and cognitive anthropology. Themes revolve around the nature of the self, as revealed through self-consciousness, body perception, action and joint action, and its embedding in society and culture. Historical and developmental perspectives provide other angles on the self. The course presents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion on the self from multiple perspectives. It is directed at advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty working in philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience and cognate disciplines.

Course Directors:
Natalie Sebanz, Cognitive Science Department, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary/Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Raboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands; Hong Yu Wong, Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Philosophy of Neuroscience Group, University of Tubingen, Germany

Faculty:
Peter Callero, Department of Sociology, Western Oregon University, Monmouth, USA; Guenther Knoblich, Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Budapest, Hungary; Beatrice Longuenesse, Department of Philosophy, New York University, USA; Christopher A. B. Peacocke, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, USA; Phillipe Rochat, Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, USA; Paul Snowdon, Department of Philosophy, University College London, UK; Manos Tsakiris, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; 

Guest Speakers:
Maurice Bloch, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, UK; Gyorgy Gergely, Department of Cognitive Science/Cognitive Development Centre, CEU, Budapest, Hungary

The application deadline is February 15, 2012 (late applications will be reviewed until all course places have been filled).

Financial aid is available.

Metaphysical Mayhem!

Metaphysical Mayhem is back! Rutgers University will be hosting a 5-day summer school for graduate students May 14-18, 2012. John Hawthorne, Katherine Hawley,  Ted Sider, Jonathan Schaffer, and Dean Zimmerman will lead the seminars on a variety of topics in metaphysics, including: natural properties, composition as identity, grounding, metaphysical explanation, and stuff like that...

For more information, see:

http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/mbenton/mayhem.html

Fun, Frankfurt Style

Many of you will already have seen this, but for those who haven't there is a new 'interactive activity' exploring Frankfurt-style cases on the Philosophy Experiments site.

Randy Clarke Wins NEH!

For his project, "Omissions: Metaphysics, Agency, and Responsibility."  An announcement is here.  Congratulations to Randy!

APA Commentary

If anyone is interested in commenting on a paper on blame at the 2012 Pacific APA, contact me offlist. Can't be on the main program already!

Degrees of Desert

The other day, while taking my kids to school, I held up traffic by trying to cut over a lane to make a left turn, and a car stuck behind me honked long and loud.  My son, Lucas (10), said matter of factly, “You deserved that, Dad.”  (I think he was right.)  Of course, I then had to go Socratic on him and try to figure out what he means by ‘desert’, and I won’t bore you with the details.  But it reminded me of an issue I’ve raised here before (e.g., here), and I’d like to get more explicit answers from people, especially skeptics about ‘genuine desert’ (by way of skepticism of ‘desert-entailing’ free will).  Let me pose the questions this way:

1. Either (a) I didn’t deserve to be honked at (children don’t deserve to be reprimanded for bad behavior, top musicians don’t deserve their awards, bad politicians don’t deserve to be voted out of office, etc.) or (b) I did deserve it (they do deserve it).
2. If (a), is it because even low-level degrees of desert are unjustified for the same reasons that all desert is unjustified—i.e., we lack the powers of self-creation, sourcehood, agent causation, or unconditional choice that would be required for any and all desert?  (If so, does this mean that Lucas was implicitly assuming that I have such metaphysical powers when he made his comment? And I was misusing the concept when I thought I deserved to be honked at—and that others deserve things—since I don’t think people have such powers?)
3. If (b), is it because ‘desert’ is properly used in different ways, and it applies to my case and other low-level desert cases because those cases don’t require the metaphysical powers, but it does not apply to other cases that seem to involve more significant degrees of desert, like deserving to be punished retributively?  (If so, does this mean that Sandusky or this guy do not deserve blame and punishment, but I do, because the concept is being applied differently across the cases? Or does it mean that they deserve blame in the same watered down sense as I do, but not in the genuine sense that would justify more significant responses, such as retributive punishment?)
4. Or is there some other explanation I’m missing?

Of course, I think I deserved my low-level reprimand for the same reasons most people deserve blame and punishment, praise and reward (when they do and to the degree that they do):  I had the capacities to recognize that what I was doing was (low-level) wrong (i.e., d-baggish), and I had the opportunity to act differently (in the ordinary sense that nothing prevented me from exercising my capacities to recognize what I was doing, to choose and act otherwise, etc.).  And I think that’s roughly what Lucas was implicitly assuming (I also think he’d be quite good at picking up on mitigating circumstances based on these compatibilist conditions—from fanciful manipulators to ordinary excuses such as my being unable to see whether there were cars behind me or our being really late for school or my being so tired I couldn’t think straight, etc.). 

Skeptics (and libertarians?) about desert tend to focus on heinous crimes and criminals, perhaps thinking that if those guys (Robert Harris, Hitler, etc.) don’t deserve blame, then obviously no one does.  But this strategy may make the case more plausible, both because those guys may seem so crazy that it’s hard to distinguish whether what they lack is libertarian powers or compatibilist capacities and because those crimes are the sort that invoke the G-Strawsonian idea of heaven-and-hell responsibility/desert.  I’m thinking the case is harder to make working from the bottom up rather than the top down.  Convince us that no one deserves anything, including clearly rational, knowledgeable, self-controlled people, to any degree (and in both directions—blame and praise), or explain why low-level desert is different in kind from the sort of desert that you claim is not justified.