Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

48 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
whim of the roulette table. If our wills are not capricious, our actions can to
that extent be predicted; insofar as our behavior can be predicted it would
then appear to be determined.
The materialist position appeals to many for its simplicity and logic,
which it achieves at the expense of excluding consciousness. Marvin Minsky,
a vocal advocate of the view that the brain is nothing but a computer
and the mind nothing but a computer program, put the argument clearly
in his book on minds and brains: “Everything that happens in our universe
is either completely determined by what’s already happened in the past or
else depends, in part, on random chance” (306). If it is not determined, to
the extent that it is not, it is random. People find both of these unacceptable,
so to “save our belief in the freedom of will from the fateful grasps of
Cause and Chance, people simply postulate an empty, third alternative”
(307). This third alternative is empty for inexorably logical reasons: the
categories of Cause and Chance exhaust all possibilities. Another way to
put this is to say that Chance = Not-Cause. This is a powerful argument.
Indeed, if you accept that free will is incompatible with determinism, it is
unanswerable.
The usual answer to arguments for simple determinism is a doctrine
called “compatibilism,” outlined originally by David Hume. The thesis is
that determinism is compatible with free will so long as we understand
freedom correctly. Our behavior is determined by the nature of our characters,
but we can say that we are free if we are not constrained—if, in
Hume’s phrase, we are not in prison and in chains. Modern compatibilists
would include such things as psychological compulsions as forms of “constraint.”
The philosopher John Searle, an opponent of reductionism, objects
that compatibilism does not really address the question. “Compatibilism,
in short, denies the substance of free will while maintaining its
verbal shell” (Minds, Brains 89). It becomes clear in his discussion that
his difficulty stems from his acceptance of the mechanistic worldview of
modern science. “Since all of the surface features of the world are entirely
caused by and realised in systems of micro-elements, the behaviour of micro-elements
is sufficient to determine everything that happens” (94). He
rejects the idea that our wills could possibly be “capable of making molecules
swerve from their paths” and doubts that the idea is “even intelligible”
(92). But the reason that the argument Hume found acceptable
seems sophistical to Searle is that they are operating with different sets of
assumptions. There is nothing in Hume’s chapter “Liberty and Necessity”
or the rest of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding to suggest