Nine
Compound Individuals and Freedom

As we have seen, freedom is the hard-core commonsense notion that is most often denied. Even Searle, after castigating others for doubting "obvious" facts of our experience, says that even though we cannot in practice doubt the reality of freedom, it must be an illusion. To be sure, one reason that freedom can be denied by Searle, McGinn, and many others, none of whom would dream of adopting an eliminativist strategy with regard to consciousness, is that freedom is not as obvious as consciousness. The denial that we have a degree of freedom is not prima facie as absurd as the denial that we enjoy a degree of conscious awareness. However, the denial of freedom does involve one in self-contradiction just as surely, because it denies a hard-core commonsense belief, meaning one that we all inevitably presuppose in practice. Whitehead pointed to this self-contradiction with the example of professors who write papers with the purpose of proving that purposes play no causal role in human behavior (FOR, 14). Some philosophers, to be sure, admit the causal role of purposes while denying freedom, saying that the purposes are themselves fully determined by antecedent causes. Whitehead's point, however, is that in practice we presuppose that our purposes are not thus fully determined. As Searle points out, "The experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behaviour" (MBS, 98).

The problem of freedom and determinism is one of the two central dimensions of the mind-body problem (the other being, of course, that of how conscious experience could arise from the body). It has not, however, been portrayed as central in most treatments of the mind-body problem in recent times, except by some dualists. This is an aspect of our wishful-and-fearful perceiving: If we have no solution for a problem, we tend not to

perceive it as a genuine problem. But a problem it is. Whitehead illustrates the nature of the contradiction between theory and practice in these terms: "The enterprises produced by the individualistic energy of the European peoples presuppose physical actions directed to final causes. But the science which is employed in their development is based on a philosophy which asserts that physical causation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the final end" (SMW, 76). Whitehead then adds: "It is not popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction here involved." It is not popular because we do not like to be confronted with contradictions in our own thinking, especially if we can see no way out.

Considerable energy has been devoted to this question by some philosophers. If they are not dualists, however, their solutions generally reduce to variants of one of two strategies: (1) denying that we have freedom or (2) redefining freedom such that it is compatible with our actions, even our beliefs and attitudes, being completely the products of deterministic (or, allowing for a degree of quantum indeterminacy, virtually deterministic) efficient causation. The second solution (compatibilism), however, finally reduces to the first, because freedom as we presuppose it in practice is, as Searle has stressed (MBS, 87, 92, 95), freedom in the sense of a choice among alternatives in the moment . In looking back at our own actions with pride or shame, or in responding to the actions of others with praise or condemnation, we presuppose that the agent at that moment, with all the antecedent conditions just as they were, could have done otherwise. Compatibilism denies this and thereby, as Searle points out (MBS, 89), denies freedom as we presuppose it.^[*] (The question of whether moral responsibility really implies metaphysical freedom, as I here imply, is discussed in Section V, below.)

The conflict between our intuitions supporting freedom and those supporting determinism has been one of the chief cultural problems of modern times. Whitehead, in pointing to this fact as one of the effects of scientific materialism on the modern world, describes two inconsistent attitudes:

A scientific realism based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilisa-

[*] Sometimes compatibilism involves, instead of a Pickwickian definition of freedom, simply the claim that explaining our action in terms of a genuinely free decision among alternatives is not incompatible with also explaining it in a fully reductionistic, mechanistic way. But such a position runs afoul of our regulative principle of causal-explanatory exclusion, affirmed in chapter 4. That is, if the state of our bodily atoms fully determines the state of our minds, including our apparent decision among alternatives, it is not intelligible also to refer to "free choice" as an explanation.

tion. It would [not]^[*] be going too far to say that it distracts thought. It enfeebles it, by reason of the inconsistency lurking in the background. (SMW, 76)

Whitehead illustrates this enfeeblement in terms of Tennyson's In Memoriam . On the one hand, one line in the poem alludes to the problem of mechanism: "'The stars,' she whispers, 'blindly run.'" On the other hand, although Tennyson deals with many other religious and scientific problems, he does not directly face this one. His problem, Whitehead suggests, is this: "There are opposing visions of the world, and both of them command his assent by appeals to ultimate intuitions from which there seems no escape" (SMW, 77). One intuition is that we are significantly free. The other, which is implicit in Tennyson's poem, is explicated by Whitehead thus: "Each molecule blindly runs. The human body is a collection of molecules. Therefore, the human body blindly runs, and therefore there can be no individual responsibility for the action of the body" (SMW, 78).

The perplexity resulting from this conflict between two "opposing ultimate intuitions" has been widespread and of long standing. Whitehead, in fact, describes the nineteenth century as "a perplexed century" (SMW, 82). The perplexity was not, as with most previous issues, simply that of the onlooker, confused by the seemingly intractable opposition between warring camps: "Each individual was divided against himself." Most philosophers in our time have not admitted to this perplexity, at least publicly. But Nagel and Searle are two exceptions.^[**] As we saw earlier, Nagel says that he changes his mind about the problem of freedom every time he thinks about it (VN, 112). This internal division is described in terms of conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, "in ordinary life" he cannot help holding himself and others responsible. On the other hand, given seemingly inescapable intuitions about the nature of the world and of persons within it, he can find no way to make rational sense of freedom. Searle describes the conflict as a "philosophical conundrum," which can be formulated as follows:

[*] The "not" is not in the text. That it should be is shown by Whitehead's reference on the next page to "this distracting inconsistency."

[**] A third is Kim, who says that the "central issue of the mind-body debate" is, "how can the mind exert its causal powers in a world constituted by physical stuff and governed by physical law?" (SM, xv). Although Kim characteristically describes the problem in terms of the reality of "mental causation," not of freedom as such, the former is clearly a necessary condition of the latter. The tension between Kim's two basic assumptions—the truth of physicalism and the reality of mentality and thereby of mental causation—is at the heart of my analysis of his position in the next chapter.

On the one hand, a set of very powerful arguments force us to the conclusion that free will has no place in the universe. On the other hand, a series of powerful arguments based on facts of our own experience inclines us to the conclusion that there must be some freedom of the will because we all experience it all the time. (MBS, 88)

Although Searle would like to be able to reconcile his scientific beliefs and his belief in freedom, he is unable to do so. His "solution" is to affirm a position that excludes freedom, while adding that no arguments against freedom, including his own, could possibly convince him that his behavior really is unfree.

A precondition for a real solution, as I suggested in chapter 5, is to recognize that of the "opposing ultimate intuitions," the intuition about genuine freedom is more ultimate. That is, it is a hard-core commonsense intuition. The intuitions that seem to lead dialectically to its negation are less ultimate, being at most merely soft-core commonsense intuitions of late modernity. They, accordingly, are the ones to examine. Searle, as the above extract indicates, assumes the opposite. That is, he says that the arguments from science "force us" to conclude that there can be no freedom in the universe, while the series of arguments from our own experience merely "inclines us" to think that we really must have freedom. In constructing his position, accordingly, he allows the former arguments (based on soft-core common sense) to outweigh the latter (based on hard-core common sense), concluding that although his belief in freedom is "unshakable," it must, nevertheless, be an illusion (MBS, 5, 94). In examining this paradoxical conclusion, he says, "For reasons I don't really understand," evolution has built the experience of freedom "into the very structure of conscious, intentional human behavior" (MBS, 98). His statement that he does not understand the reasons for this implies that the reason is not that we are genuinely free. However, if we cannot really give up our intuition about freedom, because it is inevitably presupposed in practice, we should instead turn our critical eye to those (soft-core) intuitions that seem to "force us" to deny freedom in our scientific and philosophical theories.

I. Five Principles Presupposed in the Denial of Freedom

The first step in working toward a real solution is to see what those latter intuitions are. The various presuppositions behind the denial of human freedom in our time seem to be the following.

1. The behavior of physical entities, such as atoms and molecules, is entirely determined by the laws of physics and chemistry and is therefore fully deterministic. (Even if there be ontological [not merely epistemic] indeterminacy with regard to individuals at the

quantum level, it is canceled out in aggregations of such individuals by the "law of large numbers.")

2. The human body is composed entirely of atoms and their subatomic constituents.

3. There is no "mind" distinct from the brain.

4. Even if (per impossibile ) there were a mind distinct from the brain, it would not be capable of self-determining freedom. (This would be complete epiphenomenalism.)

5. Even if (per impossibile ) there were a distinct mind capable of self-determining freedom, it would be capable of determining only some of its own states, not those of the body. (This would be partial epiphenomenalism.) The reasons for this conclusion are the following.

a. Being different in kind from physical matter, such a mind would not be able causally to affect it.

b. Even if the problem created by Principle 5a could be avoided by reconceiving mind and/or matter so as to affirm a nondualistic interactionism, such interaction would violate the law of the conservation of energy.

c. Even if the problem created by Principle 5b could be solved by enlarging the notion of "energy" so as to include the mind with its "psychic energy" as part of the closed system of nature within which energy is conserved, there would still be the fact, enunciated in Principle 1, that atoms and subatomic particles within the body obey the same physical and chemical laws as they would outside the body, so that their behavior could not be partly determined by a mind. If there were a "ghost in the machine," it would, like all ghosts, be impotent.

From these five principles, taken as premises, it follows that, even if we could squeak out an affirmation of partial internal freedom so that we would be partly responsible for our beliefs and attitudes, our outer, bodily behavior would be as fully determined by a chain of efficient causation, stretching back into the indefinite past, as is the behavior of the stellar masses. Indicting a thief for stealing would, to use an example of Whitehead's, be like indicting the sun for rising (FOR, 14).

Searle's argument that the "contemporary scientific view" does not allow for human freedom (MBS, 93) can be seen to be based on these five principles. With regard to the first principle: Although Searle knows better than to say that the behavior of everything is determined by "laws" (MBP, 144), he does assume that the behavior of all more or less complex things, from molecules to human bodies, is determined by events at the microlevel (MBP,

141, 144). Scientific explanation, according to Searle, is in terms of "bottom-up causation," which means that the features of every aspect of nature "are determined at the basic microlevels of physics" (MBS, 93). Searle recognizes, to be sure, that contemporary quantum physics "allows for an indeterminacy at the level of particle physics," but he argues (with an implicit appeal to the "law of large numbers") that it provides no support for "any indeterminacy at the level of objects that matter to us" (MBS, 86f.).

With regard to the second principle—that the human body is composed entirely of molecules and their atomic and subatomic constituents—Searle believes it to be one of "the obvious facts of physics" that "the world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force" (RM, xii), of "atoms in the void" (MBWP, 225).

With regard to the third principle—that there is no "mind" distinct from the brain—Searle says of the human head that "the brain is the only thing in there" (RM, 248) and that "consciousness is just an ordinary biological, that is, physical, feature of the brain" (RM, 13). Whereas we might think that human beings, or any other animals—especially those with central nervous systems—are structurally different from things such as pieces of glass or bodies of water, Searle says otherwise. Having said that "we explain the behaviour of surface features of a phenomenon such as the transparency of glass or the liquidity of water, in terms of the behaviour of microparticles such as molecules," he says that "the relation of the mind to the brain is an example of such a relation" (MBS, 93).

Searle's acceptance of the fourth principle—that if there were a distinct mind it would not be capable of self-determining freedom—is shown by his rejection of the idea that "consciousness gets squirted out by the behavior of the neurons in the brain, but once it has been squirted out, it then has a life of its own" (RM, 112).^[*] Leaving no doubt, Searle says of the mind that "like the rest of nature, its features are determined at the basic microlevels of physics" (MBS, 94). This (allegedly necessary) feature of science, that it explains all surface features in terms of bottom-up causation from the microlevel of nature, is why science allows no place for free will (MBS, 93).

[*] In denying that consciousness has any independent causal power, Searle is denying the position sometimes known as "radical emergentism," which holds that, in Seager's words, "some assemblages of physical parts have causal powers that don't depend entirely upon the causal powers of those parts" (CIP, 276). My Whiteheadian panexperientialism affirms radical emergentism in this sense; to deny it is to deny the possibility of genuine freedom. What my position denies, by contrast, is magical emergentism, in which parts wholly devoid of spontaneity could be assembled in such a way as to have spontaneity. Given the premise that all "parts" are wholly devoid of spontaneity, accordingly, radical emergentism would be magical emergentism, so that its denial would be fully rational. What is less than fully rational is to rest content with the premise leading to that conclusion.

The fifth principle—that even if the mind had self-determining freedom it would not be able to direct the body—is also affirmed by Searle. That particles are only statistically determined, he argues, is no reason to think that "there is or could be some mental energy of human freedom that can move molecules," causing them to "swerve from their paths" (MBS, 87). His reasoning here is based on the assumption that if there were a mind distinct from the brain, it would be an ontologically different kind of thing, so that the problem of dualistic interaction would arise (Principle 5a):

If our thoughts and feelings are truly mental, how can they affect anything physical? . . . Are we supposed to think that our thoughts and feelings can somehow produce chemical effects in our brains and the rest of our nervous system? How could such a thing occur? Are we supposed to think that thoughts can wrap themselves around the axons or shake the dendrites or sneak inside the cell wall and attack the cell nucleus? (MBS, 17)

Searle, to be sure, does affirm that consciousness can cause behavior. But this is, as he puts it, because "thoughts are not gaseous and ethereal" but are instead "physical states of the brain" (MBWP, 227). As such, thoughts are not at all self-determining but are fully determined by neuronal activity.

I do not know whether Searle somewhere buttresses his argument against this kind of mind-brain interactionism by appeal to the conservation of energy (Principle 5b). But he does clearly assume that particles within the body are determined by the same kinds of forces as those outside (Principle 5c). For example, in stating that quantum indeterminacy is irrelevant to the issue of human freedom because all indeterminacy is canceled out at the level of objects that matter to us, he specifically includes human bodies (MBS, 87). So, because one can say neither that the brain itself, being composed of trillions of particles, has freedom nor that there is a distinct, self-determining mind that influences the brain, freedom of bodily behavior is ruled out. Although in practice we cannot help presupposing that we have freedom, we must in our theory conclude that freedom is an illusion.

The crucial assumption in Searle's position is that all part-whole relations are structurally the same . The fact that the macrolevel behavior of some wholes, such as rocks and bodies of water, is fully determined by events at the microlevel, accordingly, implies that this principle of bottom-up determinism holds universally. This assumption depends, in turn, on Searle's presupposition—criticized in chapter 8 as flowing from the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—that the ultimate units of nature are insentient particles wholly devoid of experience and spontaneity, because such ultimate units would be capable of forming only the kind of aggregational wholes that can be understood entirely in terms of the causality of their tiniest parts.

Searle has said to eliminative materialists, "If your theory results in the

view that consciousness does not exist, you have simply produced a reductio ad absurdum of the theory" (RM, 8). Because Searle, however, agrees that freedom as well as consciousness is inevitably presupposed in practice, it would seem that by implying that freedom is illusory, he has produced a reductio ad absurdum of his own theory.^[*] When we have a reductio, of course, the implication is that at least one of its premises must be faulty. Indeed, Searle himself has said, "I am confident that in our entire philosophical tradition we are making some fundamental mistake, or a set of fundamental mistakes in the whole discussion of the free will problem" (MBP, 145). My argument is that all five of the above premises are faulty, that they together constitute the "set of fundamental mistakes" that has made the problem of freedom and determinism seem insoluble.

Many scientists and others who have imbibed the scientific orthodoxy of late modernity summarized in the above five principles do not, of course, think through the implications of these principles sufficiently to realize that they, taken together, imply that the behavior of human beings is fully determined. But the contradiction between these principles and our presuppositions about our own freedom is there, lurking beneath the surface, waiting to be evoked into consciousness by an inconsiderate philosopher. I had the experience of being such a philosopher a few years ago. In a lecture I gave at a conference in which the other participants were all scientists, I dwelt on this problem of the contradiction between scientists' presuppositions about their own freedom, even in their scientific activities, and the implications of their philosophic-scientific theories. Later that evening, another participant—one of the world's leading scientists in his field—struck up a conversation with me, saying that he did not really feel the force of my argument. I proceeded to go through the various steps. "You assume, don't you," I asked, "that the physical processes you study are all fully determined by antecedent causes?" He said, "Yes, I assume that they are all influenced by previous events." "Influenced? Isn't that too weak?" I asked. "Don't you assume that they are fully determined?" He replied that that

[*] One could maintain that it is not necessarily self-contradictory to believe that all of one's behavior and beliefs are strictly determined while admitting that one necessarily acts in practice as if one had freedom. After all, one could believe that we are determined to believe that we are free . (Some suggest, for example, that the belief in freedom had been selected for in the course of human evolution, because this belief increases the chances of survival.) But such a move would itself have self-defeating implications: If we once say that we have been programmed to believe a false proposition, why should we not become suspicious of all the other propositions whose truth we in practice cannot help presupposing? We could, for example, conclude that although we cannot help believing in the principle of noncontradiction, it is simply a helpful illusion. This conclusion, however, would undermine the basis for all arguments. Even if one declared purely logical truths, such as the principle of self-contradiction, exempt from this skeptical treatment, one could still apply it to the substantive premises used to lead to any conclusion—such as the conclusion that determinism must be true.

indeed is what he assumed. I then said that I presumed that he was not a dualist, that he did not believe in a nonphysical soul or mind. He said that he absolutely was not a dualist. "Does the combination of those two principles," I concluded, "not imply that your own behavior is as fully determined as that of the physical processes you study?" At this point he turned white, saying that he had never thought of that.^[*] Our conversation then drifted to other matters, but at the end of the evening he said, "I don't think I'm going to sleep very well tonight. You've really bothered me." At the close of the conference the next day, as we were all saying our farewells, he suggested that if I were ever in his city I arrange to come by so that we could talk more about this problem.

As this story illustrates, even if the problem is not widely acknowledged (in part because, as Whitehead says, it has not been popular to dwell on it), there is an absolute contradiction between the freedom that we all presuppose in practice and the implications of ideas that are widely accepted as established scientific fact. Philosophy can have no higher calling than to try to resolve this contradiction at the heart of contemporary culture. Whitehead's philosophy was devoted in large part to doing precisely this. The widespread neglect of his alternative by philosophers has meant that his suggested solution has been largely unknown to scientists and others to whom it might prove helpful.