Time and Free Will David Banach Department of

Time and Free Will David Banach Department of Philosophy St. Anselm College

Time is the problem Some things just take time. An action is one of them. p Many of the puzzling features of free actions come not from the unique nature of their causal origin, but from the way they exist in time. p

Categorizing the Cause Determinism- Cause of action determined by causal law. p Libertarianism or Indeterminism- Cause of action not determined by causal law. p Compatibilism or Soft Determinism – Cause of action determined by causal law but internal to agent. p p Point agent: A B

A Democritean World The world consists of collections of particles in discrete states and laws that determine the next states of those particles on the basis of the past state. p Pixels on a computer screen. p (Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 2003) p

Determinism Doesn’t imply Inevitability (Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 2003)

A New Kind of Compatibilism I. What is an action? p II. Actions as patterns of embodiment. p III. Causes in time. p IV. Evitability and Inevitability. p

Part I p What is an action?

Not Actions Events with origins outside of me: Being pushed out a window p Disconnected collections of changes in me that have an internal origin: p All of my movements since 10 AM. p The wiggle of my right little finger and the sway of my left elbow. p

An action is an integral whole An action is a synthetic unity in time that cannot be reduced to the other individual events that compose it and which transforms those component events. p The whole is more than the sum of its parts and the parts are transformed within the whole. p 1. Resists distraction. 2. Willed as a whole. p 3. Can’t be composed from its parts. p

The Mystery of Follow Through

What does it do after the contact point?

Part II p Actions as patterns of embodiment

The impotent agent p An angel in my body. p I take control of the space shuttle. p A free man in China.

The things an agent wants to bring into being can’t be caused by such an agent. p Point agent: A B p The characteristics of an action have little to do with their causal origin and everything to do with how that cause is distributed in space and time.

Causality is the friend of action Actions are embodied patterns. p How they become embodied in time is essential to their nature. p

Simultaneous and Spontaneously organizing systems of causes. p The unity and coordination of parts in an action is not caused by a serial chain of causes, but require the simultaneous ordering of many such chains.

Self-Organization. 5 . 48 From Ron Knott, University of Surrey, http: //www. mcs. surrey. ac. uk/Personal/R. Knott/Fibonacci/fib. In. Art. html

Self-Organization. 6 1. 2

Self-Organization Various Ratios near. 6

The pattern and its unity are not another particle or particle state.

Balls of Bats

Part III Causes in Time

What are waves?

The Rules Of Life (1) An unoccupied cell surrounded by exactly three filled cells will become full or alive p (2) A full or live cell surrounded by either two or three live cells remains alive p (3) A live cell surrounded by more than three live cells dies, or becomes empty. p

1 -5 Pixel Patterns

Oscillating Patterns

Gliders

Random Pixels

The Reality of Pattern p The most salient features of the objects in the Life world arise from the formal constraints of the patterns that its laws produce, not directly from those laws.

Not Emergent or Supervenient The salient qualities of these patterns do not arise from the causal sequences of the point particles themselves. p They arise from formal constraints on the medium and on the reality that gives rise to the patterns in the particles. p They influence the pattern, without themselves being influenced, not the other way around, as in epiphenomena. p

In the Grip of Form p p p Energy Conservation Laws: The stable forms of matter that persist in our world are all equilibrium points or points of lowest energy for some physical system In mechanistic worlds whose laws have a certain type of symmetry and embody conservation laws, stable patterns will arise whose activities are governed more by the formal constraints of those patterns, than by the rules governing the particles. Objects are patterns of particles in the grip of a form.

Persistent Patterns Objects are temporal patterns with a certain sort of inevitability. p The remain stable. p They resist perturbations. p They sometimes resist the encroachment or interference of other patterns. p

Part IV p Evitability and Inevitability p Could it be otherwise?

Austin’s Putt (Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 2003) p J. L. Austin, “Ifs and Cans, ” 1961. p “I could have made that putt. ” p

Evitability is not undoing the past Under conditions C (totally describing every state and particle), E occurs. Under conditions C, could not-E occur? Obviously not, but this is not what we mean by inevitability.

The conditions of evitability Evitability means that not-E could have occurred under slightly different but relevantly similar conditions C’. p 1. The patterns outside of me could vary slightly in ways that don’t alter the salient features of the pattern. (wind, lay of the grass blades, humidity) p 2. The patterns in me could be different. p I could have tried a new technique or practiced more. p

Evitability in the Game of Life New conditions for a determined event could arise in life in two ways: p 1. Resetting the game with new initial conditions. p 2. Repetition of similar subsets of patterns in future (completely determined) events. p

Who’s more inevitable? A pattern persists through a sort of inevitability. p To act the pattern that grips and unifies my activity must be more inevitable than the external patterns I interact with. p

Inevitability The external patterns and their interactions are so persistent, my pattern cannot overcome then and is ultimately degraded. p I leap, but I keep coming down. p Dancing in a hurricane. p Fighting City Hall p

Evitability My pattern is capable of persisting and shaping my actions even in the face of external patterns. p Dancing in a slight breeze. p The outcome can be evitable precisely because my pattern matters. If I embodied a different pattern the result would be different. p

Is the pattern I embody inevitable? 1. It might change in a completely determined way. p 2. Those determined changes might embody a pattern arrived at by evolution that aims at the evitability of certain environmental outcomes. p 3. It might change in virtue on an ability to represent reasons, to represent the available patterns of action and the evitabilities they produce p

The source of the alternative patterns, doesn’t matter. Evitability arises from power, from the inevitability of your pattern relative to other patterns. p (What we fear is not determination but impotence. ) p Freedom is the inevitable result of the inevitability of your pattern. p

Freedom To be free is to be able to be in the grips of a form whose pattern has a type of inevitability that makes the patterns in one’s environment evitable. p To be free is to be determined in a way that frees us from determination. p