Luck versus will

A couple of articles presenting an interesting contrast in viewpoints. Broadly, the embedded one at the bottom says that free will is a nonsensical, meaningless term, that we have no control over anything. Opposing this is a view in Psychology Today that essentially says we're always in control of our responses, even if we can't control every aspect of every situation. Surely there's scope for reconciliation here, to find a sensible middle ground.

Let's start with the Nautil.us piece :

Imagine that an eccentric billionaire has offered you a deal: If you merely intend to drink a toxin tonight, at midnight, that will make you painfully ill for a day, he will wire you a million dollars — it’ll be in your bank tomorrow morning. A sophisticated and reliable brain scanner will determine whether you really formed the intention to imbibe the toxin. After you have the funds in your bank account, you’re free to decide not to drink it. An easy way to become a millionaire, no? Just intend to drink it for the scanner and, once you have the cash, switch your intention. 

This is absurd, of course, and that’s Kavka’s point: We don’t have that sort of control over ourselves. If you intend to drink it (for the sake of the scanner) but also intend, later, to not drink it (to avoid the sickness), you’re really intending to not drink it.

That doesn't ring true to me. I think I can absolutely fully intend to do something and then change my mind about it later on. Happens all the time, it's completely normal. Especially given that the toxin only makes me sick for a day - I would be unhesitatingly and genuinely willing to do that for a million dollars, so that detail is important. I don't think any kind of brain scan is fundamentally capable of revealing that, but the proper test would be to deceive me. Tell me that I'm free not to drink it beforehand, but when it comes to the crunch, tell me that I must drink it or the money will be withdrawn. I guarantee that I'll drink it.

But if the toxin is supposed not to just make me temporarily sniffly, but give me a life-changing affliction or even kill me stone dead within a day or so... then it becomes a very much more interesting challenge. Then it becomes problematic what my real intention is. If I'll knowingly suffer lasting and serious harm, I might well try and fool the test - I would only "intend" to drink the liquid knowing I could change my mind later on, so my intention is not sincere. So yes, fair enough : I don't have full control over my intentions. But I think it would be catastrophically silly to infer that therefore I have no control whatsoever.

Our intentions are only “partly volitional,” Kavka says. “One cannot intend whatever one wants to intend any more than one can believe whatever one wants to believe. As our beliefs are constrained by our evidence, so our intentions are constrained by our reasons for action.”

There's an awful lot implied in that. Again, constraints by knowledge and evidence do not mean we lack free will. Choice of belief is a very interesting one. I can certainly prefer to believe one thing over another in the absence of what I deem to be definitive proof. I can even assume that something is true, and act accordingly, in the absence of proof. That would be more or less what I call faith : an act of trust based on uncertain, incomplete knowledge, perhaps mingled with desire. It is not necessarily the same as belief, wherein I genuinely hold something to be true given limited or questionable evidence. Faith implies uncertainty in a way that belief does not.

Can I choose what to put my faith in ? Yes. I can sit down and consider the evidence and assess it. I can make objective, quantifiable predictions and test them; I do not have to believe in the predictions to be able to trust in them and act accordingly - I trust the methodology itself. Thus do I put my faith in the scientific method.

But can I choose what I believe ? Here the case is murkier. I can act as though it will rain later, by taking an umbrella as the weather forecast told me to, even though the current sunny weather convinces me it will be nice all day : I have at least some faith, but not belief. While my desire for how things should be undoubtedly affects what I actually believe, I cannot seem to directly choose either what I want or what I believe. I can perhaps influence my belief but only indirectly : by paying careful attention to the forecasts and discovering that they're more accurate than my guesses, my faith in them can shift to a full belief. Or if I'm convinced Nessie exists, I can choose to investigate both sides of the argument and eventually become convinced that she doesn't. So I certainly have indirect influence over my belief, though I may well lack direct control.

Nevertheless, the fact that brain damage affects moral behaviour only underscores the reality that, whatever the “will” is, it isn’t “free.” The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break. In a 2016 paper, Darby noted that people who have behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia “develop immoral behaviours as a result of their disease despite the ability to explicitly state that their behaviour is wrong.”

But this is the same as saying external influences should have no effect on us, which is ludicrous. This is a common mistake in many articles against free will : they assume it should be free to an absurd extreme. Only an omniscient and omnipotent deity could act based solely on internal knowledge, will and desires. The rest of us mortals are necessarily acting based on our perception of the external world, which is invariably incomplete and sometimes simply wrong. If our perceptive tools are damaged, or our abilities to act according to what we consciously want as opposed to how our subconscious acts, then of course we will seem to act in a much more constrained, apparently deterministic way. We behave very differently in dreams and while sleepwalking, for example, when our conscious choices are disabled.

The concept of free will doesn’t make any sense to me. As Kavka’s thought experiment shows, we don’t have much control over our thoughts. Take this article I’m writing: The words I’m committing to print pop into my mind unbeckoned. It’s less me choosing them and more them presenting themselves to me. The act of writing feels more like a process of passive filtration than active conjuration.

Really ? I have the exact opposite sensation. My thoughts are neither unbeckoned nor under my direct control. I very much "beckon" them by choosing what to direct my attention to. Although words sometimes have a way of running away with themselves, one thought inspiring another in a chaotic cascade, the author here surely didn't sit down and decide, "Right ! Time to write a gripping novel about a young boy who fights goblins. What's this ? Oh my, I seem to have written a report about the neuroscience of consciousness instead. Whoopsie !". No, the author clearly beckoned the thoughts by intending to write about neuroscience, and "beckoning" is exactly the right word : they probably didn't know exactly what they were going to write before they started; they only beckoned the thoughts, not pulled them along on a rope.

And when I think of what to write, my thoughts are indeed "presented" to me, but not passively : they are there for my review; I then get to choose which ones to set down and which ones to discard. That's what my consciousness does and where the choice lies. I choose, to some degree, which filters to apply, what sort of logic and rhetoric to use, though only ever to a finite degree because again, mortals aren't gods. Finite choice is all we ever have.

Now, I obviously don't choose every thought to have : direct conscious control of thought doesn't make a lick of sense. Thinking exactly what I want to think would imply I've somehow already thought it, and that's bloody daft. No, my unconscious plays a very deep and important role in assembling thoughts into a coherent, consciously comprehensible structure, but my conscious mind then decides what to do with them. I don't get to do this for everything - my brain does an awful lot automatically, thank goodness - but it would be foolish to suggest this implies I don't have control over anything.

On then to the PT piece.

There were countless things that Michael Lewis needed to do before, during, and after the conversation with the woman at the dinner that set him up for success. Focusing just on that chance meeting distracts us from what really happened. Yes, he was fortunate to sit next to someone who was influential in helping him get a job at Salomon Brothers. But, hundreds of people sat next to that woman over the years and she didn’t convince her husband to hire them, and thousands of people worked at Salomon Brothers but none of them wrote a bestseller about their experience.

But did he really have control over what he did ? He probably tried hard to write as best he could, but no-one, with the best will in the world, can write a bestseller on demand. Was he simply lucky that he managed that ? Or did he have control over his writing through years of experience ? And luck is highly subjective. Getting a job in a bank would be highly fortunate for some but bring nothing but misery for others. So :

A well known quote by the famous scientist, Louis Pasteur, states that, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” This is absolutely true… But, what exactly is a prepared mind? What makes us receptive to chance events, and able to capitalise on them?

The thing is, while we have a degree of control over our responses, we can only make uncertain predictions about the future (albeit with varying levels of confidence and accuracy). We can prepare to have the best possible chance of success, but every choice we make closes off other paths : someone trying to be the best possible writer is not likely to also be highly skilled in lion taming. So when that chance meeting comes along with a world-famous circus ringmaster, that's useless for some but a godsend for others.

We have immense control over our luck because it is a direct result of our behaviour. You certainly can’t control everything that happens to you, but you do control your responses.

Yeah but no. A chance meeting on a plane cannot really be said to be a "direct" result of our behaviour : yeah we chose to get on the plane, but no that didn't have any bearing on whether we'd be sat next to someone who'd give us a break. Such a chance event could have happened anyway in a myriad of other places : on a bus, a train, at a cafe, etc. We can somewhat influence our chances, e.g. by going to places where influential people hang out. But again, we only have indirect control of what it is we actually want. If I really really want to stay in and watch Netflix, instead of wandering the streets trying to pitch a novel to strangers, then that's what I'm going to do. And especially if I'm exhausted, I'll have little or no ability to force myself to do things I know are necessary but I don't especially want to do. Faith has its limits.

Don’t be distracted by the way we use the word luck in our everyday jargon. Often it is deployed as an excuse. For example, people frequently attribute their successes to luck, saying they’re “lucky” to modestly mask the skills they’ve mobilised. And, we give others and ourselves a break by blaming poor performance on bad luck. A careful observer will look behind the curtain to see what actually happened to attract or repel good fortune.

The author is clearly trying to inspire people by telling them to take back control. This is a decent enough message for some, I suppose : yes, you do have control over some things, you're not usually entirely at the mercy of fate. But sometimes you are. Sometimes luck is a valid excuse. And underestimating luck leads us to overestimate the abilities of those at the top. We need look no further than politicians to realise that though some of them may have some specialised skills, most of them are not especially gifted compared to the rest of us. Some of them are actually quite a lot stupider. So yes, utilise your agency, but don't forget about chance. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Can Neuroscience Understand Free Will? - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

In The Good Place, a cerebral fantasy-comedy TV series, moral philosophy gets teased. On YouTube, the show released a promotional video, "This Is Why Everyone Hates Moral Philosophy," that gets its title from a line directed at Chidi, a Senegalese professor of moral philosophy who suffers from chronic indecision: The pros and cons of even trivial choices have long paralyzed him.