Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

I've been reading Dan Dennett's Elbow Room, The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting for the last week or so, and I have very mixed feelings. While he takes some very interesting approaches has some excellent points to be made regarding various deterministic (and nondeterministic) perspectives on the problem of free will, it seems to me he still hasnt quite situated himself outside of the problem of universal causation.

It would seem that Dennett, within his theory of evolution and free-floating rationales, views Free Will, at least in some minimal sense as having a real ontological existence. As mother nature has formed creatures able to respond to the environment in ways which take into account, through predictive behavior, at least some possibility of alternate futures, Dennett views these deliberative behaviors as unique in the causal nexus. These representations of alternate futures which may never come into being (here Dennett has an excellent description of the future as what happens, that in my opinion demolishes the view of any real alternative future), are still part of the natural deliberative process, and in Dennett's view, would have their own effects on the final outcome of the deliberative process (as any good determinist would have it).

While these 'deliberations' no doubt occur, I would argue that Dennett wants somehow, if not to remove them from the causal network, at least to place them above it in some way. While his discussion of the complexity and 'practical' unpredictability of events certainly lends a view of infinite possibility to actions as effects, Im not convinced that his view is as compatibilist as he would have us believe.

The chaotic (in the theoretical sense) nature of evolved rational deliberation, though, is no less a result of antecedent factors than the snowstorm is the result of the oft quoted Butterfly wings of chaos theory. So while it is certainly so that deliberation acts as a very complex cause, likely to be inexplicable by science if only by nature of its complexity, it is no less determined by the state of the universe prior to the onset of the act itself. The Laplacean Demon might in some sense still be able to predict the outcome of any deliberation, and even the coming into being of the deliberation itself. The emerging complexity from the vast number of contributing factors, however, would require a Laplacean Demon of almost infinite capacity. Here, Dennett makes another excellent point regarding the nature of heuristics in a natural, finite, evolved deliberator. By virtue of its finite resources, the deliberator must focus on those events and objects in the universe that are most useful, those that will matter most to his decision. This honing of evidence will inevitably lead to the ignoring of some possiibly crucial microphysical event, which might affect the outcome of the decision in unpredictable ways. This seems to be where Dennett would then situate Free Will as it matters, within the unpredictability of a complex universe.

I would argue that though he is correct in his view of deliberation as a finite natural process, he still seems to want to remove that act from the deterministic universe. He would likely disagree on this point, since it is a subtlety that he takes great pains to cultivate. Chaotic physical behavior is not 'unnatural', and I doubt that Dennett would view it so. He may not agree with my analysis, and it is a very subtle line that he walks here. The recursive representation of our thoughts about thoughts, and our unique heuristic ability to consider the effects of our future actions does not in any way remove that process from the causal network.

Regardless of how complex and recursive and even unique we view this process, it is still no more or less than a result of the temporally preceding state of the universe. So yes, it is deterministic, but it is also NOT free will as the compatibilists would have it. In this analysis, thorough and enlightening as it is, free will still does not transcend physical predictability in the hard deterministic sense. Dennett does not remove the deliberative will from the physical universe; nor would he claim too. But he does seem to believe that the unique, recursive nature of mind somehow crosses over. By acting in ways that form input into the deliberative process, humans do further complexify the nature of meaningful behavior.

In the intentional view of decision making, our wants, though complexly caused, are in the end, still wholly determined by the physical (or microphysical) states of the universe in an infinite regress. That our decisions and behavior, even as deliberated as they are, are the inexorable outcome means that this is not a free will worth wanting, at least not as most compatibilists would want.