ID theorist (and IDthefuture contributor) Steve Meyer had a friendly debate with Darwin defender Will Provine at the National Press Club in Washington DC today. Rob Crowther and Logan Gage give a report on the event over at the Evolution News blog.

George Will has written an evocative Newsweek essay on the late Pope John Paul II, Terri Schiavo, and the secularist program of willing consciousness and free will into oblivion:

A bemused John Paul II, no stranger to materialism, dialectical and otherwise, might have responded: There you go again—that word “consciousness.” What is the grandeur in the spectacle, however interesting, of the blind, brute, violent necessity of physical laws at work? Is consciousness of an existence supposedly governed by such laws really much of a privilege?

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Our colleague Steve Meyer spoke at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC yesterday on DNA and intelligent design. Heritage is so well organized that they already have the lecture video available (free) at their website. To view it, go here.

In a previous post, I remarked that John Paul II “seemed to sign off on conventional evolutionary theory save for the divine infusion of souls at the origin of humanity.” This is not quite accurate. As a friend and colleague who knows the Catholic world much better than I do noted to me by email:

I don’t think any of us should be promoting (or at least going along with) the canard that John Paul II accepted “evolution” in some inappropriate sense. The 1996 Message on evolution was, indeed, a weak document,… MORE

During the past year and a half, I have been working on a research project with Eddy Nahmias, Steve Morris, and Jason Turner. The project–which was an attempt to probe folk intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility in an empirically informed manner–has produced three papers. The third paper–entitled “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?”–has just been accepted for publication by Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Since we talk a lot about the relevance of folk intuitions to the free will debate–I thought some of you may be interested in checking it out. Here’s the abstract:

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach.

In a number of areas of philosophy one might be tempted to put forward what I am going to call an “as if” theory in an effort to respond to skeptical arguments. An “as if” theory has the following form:

Even if we have good evidence and/or arguments to the effect that humans lack some property or capacity x, it is nevertheless in our interest to continue believing and/or acting as if x is a property or capacity that we do not lack.

Take, for example, the suggestion that even if humans happen not to be “metaphysically” free–we may be better off living under the general illusion that we are. Both David Velleman’s “epistemic freedom”(2001) and Saul Smilansky’s “illusionism” (2000) come to mind. It is easy enough to imagine similar stories being told in other areas as well. In the wake of John Doris’ attack on robust character traits via what he calls situationalism (2002), for instance, it would be easy enough for a virtue theorist with consequentialist tendencies to argue that we should continue acting as if our character traits were more robust than the empirical data suggest they actually are. Consider another possible “as if” theory–even if it turns out that harsh penalties do not deter violent crime (indeed, even if it turns out that harsher penalties make matters worse!), we are nevertheless better off as a society pretending that harsher penalties do in fact reduce the amount of violent crime.

“As if” theorists have an easy was of shielding themselves from the impact of skeptical arguments. Indeed, they can essentially grant the skeptical premises while at the same time arguing that we can avoid the potentially negative social implications of accepting these skeptical premises by simply pretending that these skeptical premises are false. Hence, even if humans are descriptively unfree or even if events are entirely determined (or entirely random for that matter) or even if many (if not most) of the springs of action are beyond (or below or above) the folds of consciousness or even if our belief in moral objectivity is false or even if there is no God (or gods), it is still to our advantage to maintain certain illusions about the contrary being the case. In this respect, “as if” theories allow us to respond to the “real” threat of skeptical concerns along roughly Humean lines—i.e., we accept the premises and conclusions of skeptical arguments at face value while in our studies. Having done so, we nevertheless eventually find ourselves once again playing backgammon with our friends and engaging in other “mundane” affairs—living as if all of those skeptical arguments were a distant bad dream. On this view, we may naturally have a preference for certain socially adaptive fictions and fantasies. Hence, another benefit of “as if” theories is that they can be coupled with evolutionary explanations for why humans prefer the illusions that we do. And they also receive some empirical support from the research into the positive societal upshots of self-aggrandizement and other forms of cognitive biases. It turns out that people are generally better off–socially speaking–if they are somewhat out of touch with the truth about their own physical and mental limitations. If so, this gives us all the more reason to consider the possibility that even if we lack some property or capacity x, perhaps we really would better off pretending that we nevertheless have x after all.

The problems with self-deception writ large notwithstanding, does anyone think that the “as if” argumentative strategy is an effective one? I haven’t really thought it through myself–I am really just curious to see what others think–either about some of the examples I have discussed or others that I have overlooked.

The recent issue of The Journal of Consciousness Studies is centered on an interesting paper about free will by David Hodgson (a justice of the Australian Supreme Court of NSW) entitled, “A Plain Person’s Free Will.” The list of commentators–which includes, e.g., J.C.C. Smart and Robert Kane–is impressive. However, it is disappointing that no one in the entire issue mentions any of the work that has been done on folk intuitions concerning free will by Eddy Nahmias, Steve Morris, Jason Turner, and myself or by Shaun Nichols (and more recently, by Nichols and Joshua Knobe). In Hodgson’s defense, much of the research has yet to come out. But given that our piece on the phenomology of free will–which appeared in JCS less than six months ago–is very relevant, it would have been nice if any of the authors in this issue had at least acknowledged that perhaps we should pay more attention to what “plain people” actually believe before we place views, beliefs, and intuitions, in their mouths. In any event, the issue is full of a number of interesting discussions concerning free will and moral responsibility–so, people interested in these issues should certainly check it out. Once I have had time to wade through the whole thing, I will try to post something more about it. The abstract for Hodgson’s paper is as follows:

Abstract: In my experience, plain persons (here meaning persons who are neither philosophers or cognitive scientists) tend to accept something like a libertarian position on free will, namely that free will exists and is inconsistent with determinism. That position is widely debunked by philosophers and cognitive scientists. My view at present is that something like this plain person’s position is not only defensible but likely to be closer to the truth than opposing views. To put this to the test, I have written a simple and straightforward outline of what I hope is a philosophically and scientifically respectable version of the plain person’s position on free will, and have offered it for demolition by those who say such a view is untenable. My account of free will is a robust one, explicitly inconsistent with determinism and intended to support equally robust views of personal responsibility for conduct.