[Music] Okay, I'm Bob Doyle and I should start by saying this is my first philosophical lecture. So, I've worked hard to get my wife Holly uh who like me is also trained as a scientist at Harvard. We both have PhDs in astrophysics. Most of my career has been involved in science and technology and development of entrepreneurial ideas. Through the years, I've been away from my academic career, but I've never left one part of my academic academic interests, which began in 1956 when I took a course in the philosophy of religion from Kurt Ducas who was a colleague of William James in the time 1908 1910 until his death and like James an experimental with mellow and a few other ways of getting new insights. I didn't go that path with the messcll or even many of the other drugs and I didn't even inhale but over the years I have developed uh a new way of working in philosophy which is not analytic language philosophy it's not the logical positivistic philosophy all the behaviorism that put William James to sleep for 40 years or more as we heard Trevor Ro quoted from Bob this morning instead I always have been pursuing um this alternative way of thinking about what's going on in the world as information structures and as a cosmologist I think I have things to say about how information was created in the world by something that when I take a serious liberty and become a little back to dass and philosophy of religion a kind of creative uh force in the universe which is as close as a scientist will ever come to finding a providence if not if not a personal god sort of So I'll come to back back to that at the end of my talk. But I am an information philosopher. I hope to be more of a formal philosopher because now I'm in the astronomy department. But I hope this fall to be a visiting scholar in Harvard's philosophy department. Um so my website is a link. When you see a link in blue on my presentation slides, you click it. you go to my website which has at this moment over 130 philosophers and over 60 scientists who've thought about 10 problems that I am working on and the most important problem I'm working on is the one I'm going to talk to you about today which is an idea I had to explain or bring up a plausible way of thinking about the problem of free will back in the 1960s and over the years I found 11 other thinkers who think similarly to the way I think but far and away the most important of all of Um, although there are some really great people in there like Carl Pa, far and away the most important is William James because he was the first to think what I'm about to tell you about. Now, why doesn't that go for me? I've got that on. There we go. To start off with, a short poll. How many of you think that science can find causal laws for everything? Someday the neuroscientists will see into our brain and ex figure out exactly how we're working. A super intelligence would be able to predict all our futures. This is a a philosophy in the free world called determinism or compatibilism. How many of you basically would buy determinism? John is going to be solid with that. There's a hand waving. Okay. Um then let's see if I can do this. How many of you think that we're fundamentally free and unpredictable that we are the creative authors of of our lives? This is generally called free willist or libertarian and John in the true dualist mode of operation. Compatibilist we like um no compatibilist compatibilist is in the first category. This is an unmititigated freedom I'm talking about at the second level John. Okay. In any case, uh that way I had eight or 10 on the free will side and a few on the compatibilist side. So, let me say how many of you never answer questions in meetings like this? Just Yeah. Good. Good. I I thought there were a lot of uh phenomenists out there. Okay. Why William James? This is a 2400 year old problem. So, why William James? 140 years ago, he simply asserted that his will was free. As his first act of freedom, he said he chose to believe his will uh was free. In the diary entry, you've all read this in all the major biographers, they deal with this crisis in James life, very down on himself, partly because everything seems so damn determined. How could he ever be anything different? How could he make a difference in the universe? I think that yesterday he wrote was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renovier's second essay and I see no reason why his definition of free will and we'll see whether Renovier actually anticipated James uh quote the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts need be the definition of an illusion at any rate I will assume for the present until next year that it is no illusion. My first act of free will be to believe in free will. Here is the core of the man who thinks we have a will to believe. Okay, I got to learn to control this. Now, whereas James denied it to be an illusion at the get-go, today most books on free will deny that it exists. Now these may be hard for you to see but the most important of these books is the one by uh Harvard professor Daniel Wgner in the psychology department who wrote the book called the illusion of conscious will in which he shows that we think we did it for a reason a but it turns out there were other reasons B etc that were unknown to us they were genetic they were conditioned hereditary all these kinds of things uh other books like living without free will free will and delusion by Saul Solansky the non-re reality of free will and the lights make it hard to read the slides. Did my neurons make me do it? That's where neuroscientists are going. And as a scientist myself, it's a rather appealing thought that I could be a scientist who could figure out how everything works. But actually, William James had already figured this out a long time before me. William James thought that an individual act of his will could make a difference in a causal and deterministic universe. He understood pretty well what physics was telling in those days. And yet he thought he could make a difference. That the strength of his belief in something like free will could actually make it uh could increase the chance of there being true was perhaps wishful thinking that my thoughts are going to convince you and everyone will be convinced and is a relief. But James was not just a believer. He had an idea of how free will free will actually worked. He didn't develop this idea for another 15 or 20 years. But he began simply by believing in his freedom. Okay? He had a model that was opposed to what he called hard and soft determinism and famously entered into the uh taxonomy of all free will positions. Some very famous positions compatibilism that John mentions there in the back was what James called soft determinism. But the harder form was the really the one that was more honest because if you believed in determinism, if you believe physics of the day, Newton's laws, you believe that every single thing that happens in this room, including my mo hand motion, was determined at the beginning of time. The soft determinist also believe that because they're also determinists, but they also believe that because the causal chain, the arisatilian prime mover that set it all going or Newtonian clockwork travels through a chain of effect cause followed by effect which is a cause for an effect which is a cause for an effect and it lands in my mind and I just happen to be one of the little steps in the chain and that's what they think of as freedom. It's a little bit like the freedom that Hegel described that a falling stone has to fall freely which of course is what we say under the force of gravity. Okay. Today there are many hard and soft determinisms. Uh my website deals with each of these you see James name the modern name and three other important positions including illusionism and those 130 philosophers I've written about occupy various of those boxes. Now what's compatibilism? It was originally known as volunteerism and Thomas Hobbes is the most most important modern thinker. Chrysopus was the first Greek thinker to argue this position though and basically they were defining not freedom of will but freedom of action. They wanted to be free of any external coercions and so although the will is determined as long as the will is one of the causes in that great causal chain that would be enough freedom for them. They found free will to be compatible even with a complete predeterminism since the beginning of time. And William James is excellent at knowing the difference between determinism and predeterminism. As we will see, Hobbes said, quote, "The cause of the will is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. Voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes and therefore are necessitated. For Hobbes, talk of free agents was nonsense." If free means uncaused and random, Hume said, and he's generally regarded as the leader of compatibilism in modern philosophy, it is impossible to admit any medium between chance and an absolute necessity. And we'll see how William James is going to get around that binary choice. He embraced chance. He said, quote, "The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance." And you must understand that for centuries chance has been regarded as atheistical because if it is objective chance it questions the omniscience of God. So it was never an easy thing to say and James was an amazing thinker that he could go out on a limb and say as soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our friends we find a number of them shaking their heads. This notion of alternative possibility a link to my website on alternative possibility and the positions of a very large number of philosophers on that issue. They say this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is after all only a roundabout name for chance and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind can for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it they ask but barefaced crazy unreasonation of intelligibility and law? And if the slightest particle of it exists anywhere, what's to prevent the whole fabric, the whole connected causal fabric from falling together, the stars from going out and chaos from recommencing her topsyturvy reign? James really understood the issue. Most people thought if there was anything really random things fall apart. Now just to see where indeterminism his original word into the debate is today. There are many many positions again um agent causality under libertarianism event causality non-causality and others and again there are philosophers in each of those positions. So, let's get back why William James. He was the first thinker to announce clearly annunciate clearly what I call a two-stage decision process, not a free will moment. If it's a single moment and it's got freedom in it, it's random. If it's a single moment and it's determined, we're not free. We need to break it apart. And James saw that it was two things and not one. James and now these words that are italics are James language in my sentence. So he says a two-stage process with chance in a present time of random alternatives leading to a choice which grants consent. his phrase, we pay attention, we focus, and we give the one possibility, our consent, to one of those possibilities. And at that moment, it transforms an equivocal, ambiguous future, his term, into an unalterable and simple past. The past goes beyond. We can't change that. There's the real determinism. Oh, so he he had a temporal sequence of undetermined possibilities that his phrase present themselves. a very important phrase. They present themselves followed by an adequately determined choice or a decision. And James saw a strong similarity between genetic evolution and his idea of idea evolution. But before I go on to Darwin, I just inserted a slide. Bob Richardson was kind enough to send me the comments that he's written on the essays. The most important of which I told him was the dilemma of determinism. And this is what Bob found in the dilemma of determinism and shows me that he really understood William James in the new book. And here's a little picture. Sorry for the can't see it in this room. It gives us he he said that James gives us a clever and hard to dislodge argument that in many perhaps most of our life situations we are free to choose between alternatives. And James he says attacks all forms of determinism the philosophical, theological, the behavioral or the genetic. And he says again, we're quoting uh Bob here, accepting the possibility of chance does not mean accepting a world that is random. Despite the thinking of centuries of philosophers and mathematicians and scientists, it instead means realizing that chance is another word for freedom.