PHIL 201 (STOLZE)

Notes on Massimo Pigliucci, Answers for Aristotle, chapters 6-10

Key Issues in Chapter Six

Pigliucci explores ways in which our brain can “be manipulated into believing that we are making a rational decision when in fact we are doing anything but” (p. 78):

•Priming = “once you start thinking about something, even though it is logically unrelated to the task at hand, you take a certain attitude toward the task that is best explained by the priming effect, not by any objective characteristic of the task” (p. 78)

•Framing = nudging people toward one decision or another “depending on how one poses the exact same problem to them” (p. 79)

•Brain injuries and delusions:– Cotard’s Syndrome– Capgas Syndrome– Split Brain (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfGwsAdS9Dc)– Confabulation

Key Issues in Chapter Seven

• Decision-making and intuition• Adam Alter on disfluency = “a measure of how comfortable we are

with the information we are receiving. It turns out that the more disfluent we are about something, the less we rely on intuition and the more we engage in full-bore analytical reasoning.” (p. 97)

• Causes of disfluency• An interview with Alter on his new book Drunk Tank Pink (

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaDIwe_9vdk)• Gender and cultural differences in decision-making • Three phases over which an individual acquires skills (pp. 103-104):

– as a beginner– performs quasi-automatically and with reasonable proficiency– attains “deliberate practice”

Key Issues in Chapter Eight

• Two Types of Scientific Reasoning:– Deductive– Inductive

• Hume on the Problem of Induction (Ex: the “Inductivist Turkey,” pp. 113-114)

• Popper’s Criticism of Verification and Defense of Falsification of Scientific Theories

• Kuhn on Normal Science (“Puzzle Solving”), Paradigms, Observational Anomalies, and Paradigm Shifts

• Three Philosophies of Science:– Realism– Antirealism– Perspectivism

The Key Issue in Chapter Nine: The Status of Human Freedom

There are three possible philosophical positions:

•Compatibilism = “the universe is deterministic, but this in itself does not preclude free will”

•Libertarian Incompatibilism = “the universe is not deterministic, but if it were that fact would preclude free will”

•Deterministic Incompatibilism = “determinism is real and therefore free will is precluded”

A Simple Determinist Argument

1. Everything we do is caused by forces over which we have no control.2. If our actions are caused by forces over which we have no control, we do not act freely.3. Therefore, we never act freely.

NOTE: If you challenge premise #1, then you are defending a version of libertarianism. However, if you challenge premise #2, then you are defending a version of compatibilism.

The Neuroscientific Argument for Determinism

Recreating Benjamin Libet’s classic experiment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ4nwTTmcgs

Three Libertarian Challenges

• A weak argument: “If most current interpretations of quantum mechanics (the most accurate of physical theories proposed so far) are correct, then the universe isn’t deterministic because there are truly random events (uncaused and completely unpredictable) at the quantum level. Many neurobiologists and some philosophers have seized on this to claim that therefore quantum mechanics provides a scientific answer to the issue of free will. Unfortunately, this is nonsense on stilts, so to speak. Even if quantum events might conceivably ‘bubble up’ to the much more macroscopic level at which the chemical and electrical processes of the brain take place, thus influencing what we do, this would be an example of ‘random will,’ not free will. Nobody associates freedom of choice with random decision-making, as if our brains were a roulette machine picking whatever course of action corresponds with a random draw of the wheel” (p. 137-138).

• The experience of anxiety when making a decision (Jean-Paul Sartre)• The experience of complex and protracted deliberation leading up to making a

decision and/or adopting a course of action• The experience of self-control when not yielding to temptation and maintaining a

resolution (Richard Holton)• Pigliucci suggests that there are even five distinct ways to understand what is

meant by “free will”

A Compatibilist Reconciliation?

“Free” doesn’t mean uncaused but only uncoerced. As a result, whether or not your behavior is free depends not on if is caused but on how it is caused. Pigliucci argues that “the compatibilist acknowledges that our actions have to be caused, and that they are limited or channeled by physical, biological, and psychological constraints. But the compatibilist claims that this is the kind of free will a ‘worth wanting,’ in the phrase of Daniel Dennett. No magical hand-waving here, invoking a free will that cannot be, nor the simplistic, existentialist-like rejection of the reality of being human. Quite simply, free will is in this sense our (demonstrable) ability to consider information, balance it against our desires, and take a particular course of action among several available to us. Of course, our desires are themselves the result of our upbringing, our genetic constitution, our experiences in life. How could it be otherwise? And of course, our way of reasoning is also the result of all those things. Again, what would it mean if that were not the case? So compatibilism is a compromise between the undeniable fact that we are a particular type of biological being, with all that entails, and our sense that we own our decisions and can therefore ‘within limits’ be held responsible for them or praised for them” (p. 140).

Pigliucci argues, then, against forms of scientific reductionism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t55SAOeoCxI&sns=em

An Analysis of Willpower

Roy Baumeister on Willpower, Self-Control, and Decision Fatigue:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjZdtpXXxpw

Key Issues in Chapter Ten

• Plato's Tripartite Division of the Soul (Rational, Spirited, Appetitive)• Hume on Reason as a Slave to the Passions• Our Inner Zombie: Current Research by Paul Cisek on the Evolution

of Human Decision Making and the Inadequacy of the "Central Executive" Computer Metaphor of the Brain (http://andara.uqam.ca/Panopto/Content/Sessions/94abe96c-2885-48a4-98de-836b2390c025/746a467f-64d0-4279-a61c-0fbfe67de2e6-3ad1eb8f-70c4-4ccd-9e55-93e1b9d56bac.mp4)

• Teenage Risk-Taking• "From Oral to Moral"--Disgust and Politics:

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_pizarro_the_strange_politics_of_disgust.html