Objectivist Free Will and Reason

“Free will” is necessary for morality. One can’t be held morally responsible for something over which he or she had no choice. And, Objectivists claim to believe in free will, as do Christians. Christians offer us this story about how Adam disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden and ate a fruit from the tree of knowledge. After that, he had knowledge of good and evil and the freedom to choose between the two. This gave him the capacity to sin, to make wrong choices. Well, how did Adam know eating the fruit was wrong if he didn’t have knowledge of right and wrong before he ate the fruit? Sure, God told him not to eat the fruit, but he wouldn’t have known that disobeying God would be a sin before he had the knowledge of what sin was. (Besides, if this was God’s plan, to give people freedom so that they would come to Him of their own free will, then Adam really didn’t go against God’s will. God wanted him to sin. And, as Ayn Rand said, holding all mankind responsible for the sin of Adam, something that happened long before we were born, is a sin against justice and fairness etc.)

Anyhow, back to the subject, Objectivism has a problem with “free will” similar to the problem of Adam not knowing about sin until after he ate the apple. Objectivists maintain that man’s “free will” is his mind’s freedom to think or not. Man is a being of volitional consciousness, and reason does not work automatically. Man must choose to use reason, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. To think or not is the choice to focus or not. However, if man’s initial choice is to focus, to think, to use reason, what guides that initial choice? He isn’t focused or using reason until after he chooses to be focused or using reason. Is that first choice guided by something other than reason?

Well Rand does talk about the sense of life and some pre-conceptual ways of choosing, and she and Nathaniel Branden talked about concept formation in children as they are becoming conceptual. She also alludes to man’s nature as man, that it is his nature to choose reason. However, I think the problem still remains. If man is bound by his nature and the causation of natural laws, then how is that initial choice free. Branden does talk about how it is a prime mover, a first cause. Does he prove it? When theists used first cause arguments to prove the existence of God, Schopenhauer said they were using sufficient reason as a taxi to get to their location and then getting out. It is not fair to say that everything has a cause except God, that he is an exception to the rule somehow. Is man an exception to the rule?  (I think he is, and I have a long explanation, using Existentialism, linguistics, and Chomsky’s creativity principle. However, I’d like to see how Objectivists on this forum deal with this.)

What does it mean, anyway, to use reason and that reasonable people don’t disagree. If my fried gets into an airplane which crashes over the ocean and I don’t hear from him for a long time, it is reasonable for me to assume that he is dead. However, as he is bouncing around in the ocean, it is reasonable for him to believe he is still alive. We are both being reasonable, but we reach different conclusions. One believes A, and the other believes not A.

Another problem with using reason is that it doesn’t reach everywhere. If there are two or more alternatives which, when measured and weighed on the egoistic utilitarian scale, have exactly equal advantages and disadvantages, then what guides the choice? Reason won’t help. It also won’t help if we do not have enough information on which to apply reason. The older we get and the more involved with life we get, the more we find ourselves in this situation. A systematic philosophy which tells us to use reason won’t help us much.

Okay, this has been fun. I‘m presenting this board with several problems: 1. What guides one’s choice to use reason before one has made the choice to use reason?   2. Was Rand wrong when she said, through her characters, that there can be no disagreement among reasonable men, considering the example above? 3. What do we use when the choice is really free, when reason is inadequate or can’t be applied?  I look forward to some lively but reasoned discussion on these questions.

Bis bald,

Nick

No - because they are two individuals, not two peas in a pod, so there be differences between them which would make for a non-equalness in conclusions...

(Ed)Pavlovian dogs learn via repetition (rote memorization). If you take a more generous look to understand what it is that I actually wrote -- then you will see that repetition was not needed (because an adequate understanding was achieved within a single experience). That is the difference between dog and man.

(Nick)No, it is still carrot and stick type training, and some kids need more than a single experience to learn something. Ask parents and teachers. And, if this is the only difference between dog and man, it doesn’t show volitional choice and reasoning. At most, it only shows that humans may be easier to train than dogs.

(Ed)Firstly, reason is a tool of persuasion -- not coercion. And don't you ever forget that. The point is too important ("Reason is the only OBJECTIVE means of communication and of understanding among men ..." --Rand, PWNI).

(Nick)This does not address my point that reason cannot be applied to all situations. Are you evading me?

(Ed)And also, in a sense, it is true that reason is the new God.
In days of old, folks looked to God for guidance through reality. Now, we have a different guide ("Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival."--CUI, 16).

(Nick)If reason is a tool, it is something we control. It does not control us. We ought not subjugate ourselves to it as some would subjugate themselves to God.

bis bald,

Nick

(Ed)While it's true that some kids -- and some adults, even -- need more than a single experience, at times, you miss my point (humans can understand, rather than merely memorize, which is all that animals ever do).

(Nick)You have to prove this, not merely assert it.

(Ed)And now, back to reality. You conjecture that reason isn't always helpful (ie. that, sometimes, it's inconsequential). I retort that reason is man's means of knowing -- and that knowing is never unhelpful.

(Nick)Again, how is reason helpful in making a decision when alternatives are equal or unknown? When you are standing in the middle of an open field with no guide posts, how do you use reason to decide which direction to take or to remain still?

(Ed)Yeah. We ought not "subjugate" ourselves to our only means of knowing reality. Right. Got it. What an existentialist gem!

(Nick)Is reason a tool or not? Do you use your tools or let them use you?

Bis bald,

Nick

(Ed)Now you're being unreasonable (setting it up so that I am called on to prove a negative). No one is called on to do that. Are you prepared to make the positive assertion of conceptual awareness in animals? Are you? Because that is what is required -- in the previous and heretofore absence of any positive evidence of a point.

If something's never been the case, then, in order to stake claim to it's truth, you have to marshal a positive instance of that which has not ever been the case before. That's what being reasonable is.

(Nick)I first asked the question of what guided a human’s initial choice to use reason. You gave me the example of a child learning from experience. I noted that animals, non-rational creatures, can be trained in the same way. You claim that children are using reason in their learning while animals are not. I ask you to prove it, and you accuse me of trying to make you prove a negative. Behaviorists claim that there is no difference. Can you refute them?

(Ed) Making a true (ie. deliberative) "choice" among equal or "unknown" alternatives -- is absurd. "Choices" made among equal or "unknown" alternatives -- are properly conceptually categorized as whims. And, while reason is not helpful in making whimsical choice -- this is because reason was precluded a priori from the issue (due to the conceptual exclusion of what it is that can classify as a whim; ruling out reason from the get-go).

(Nick)No, whims are not agonized over and committed to once made, leading on to other life changing choices. The decisions I’m referring to are the truly free decisions, the ones we make without any life lines. Simply taking a logical path is not making a free choice.

(Ed)Of course reason is a tool, and tools are that which are used by man. What you are saying is -- if you had a desire that was contrary to reason (one that would make you, on net, less happy) -- then, in that instance, reason must be tossed out. But that is absurd.

Existentialist crap.

(Nick)No, Ed. Sometimes, reason does not reach, like I said above. Sometimes we cannot wait around until we have enough knowledge on which to apply reason. We have to take chances. And, sometimes we may choose to take the road less traveled by, live a little dangerously. Being safe all the time is boring. It’s exciting sometimes to boldly go where no man has gone before. But, if we choose to use reason, it is our choice. We are not slaves to it. Read Prufrock and Henley.

Bis bald,

Nick

No, it's a primary choice--that is, you won't be rational if your mind isn't focused. But conversely, once you've acquired the rudiments of reason, you focus your mind consciously and volitionally. But how do you learn to focus it originally? In the same way an infant learns to focus his eyes. He is not born with his eyes in focus; focusing his eyes is an acquired attribute, though it's done automatically. (I'm not sure whether it's entirely automatic; but from what we can observe, no volition on the infant's part is necessary.) Why does he learn to focus them? Because he's trying to see--to perceive. Similarly, an infant or young child learns to focus his mind in the form of wanting to know something--to understand clearly. That is the beginning from which a fully conscious, rational focus comes. [This was in answer to a question asked at her lecture, "A Nation's Unity," at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston in 1972.]

Man's freedom to focus or not to focus, to think or not to think, is a unique kind of choice that must be distinguished from any other category of choice.

It must be distinguished from the decision to think about a particular subject: what a man thinks about, in any given case, depends on his values, interests, knowledge and context. It must be distinguished from the decision to think about a particular physical action, which again depends on a man's values, interests, knowledge and context. These decisions involve causal antecedents of a kind which the choice to focus does not.

The primary choice to focus, to set one's mind to the purpose of cognitive integration, is a first cause in a man's consciousness. On the psychological level, this choice is causally irreducible; it is the highest regulator in the mental system; it is subject to man's direct, volitional control. In relation to it, all other choices and decisions are regulators.

...Just as a man cannot escape the implicit knowledge that the function of his mind is volitional, so he cannot escape the implicit knowledge that he should think, that to be conscious is desirable, that his efficacy as a living entity depends on it.