My Approach to the Problem of Free Will
Introductory Comments
This is the second of two videos on free will. It has some new content to the blog on the website, so I am going to put it up on the site as a separate blog. The site is:
https://www.armchairsceptic.com
I will also present this as a (audio only) podcast
In the first video on this channel, I sought to explain Sam Harris view on free will which is a rejection of it as an illusion. Haris has recently in some of his blogposts doubled down on his views indicating that free will is an impossibility. I assume he means that it is impossible because that means it is understood of being free of any physical cause.
I am not aware of any writer on free will (even libertarians) who rejects that decisions are free of brain function. Almost all accept that without brain function no action or thought is possible. My view is that Sam does not speak of any interaction between brain and mental events. He does not allow that mental events may have some impact on brain function and even brain structure. Mental events for him have no causal impact on the brain itself they are simply an outcome of already made what I would refer to as ‘brain decisions’ (my term).
There is considerable evidence to indicate that thought does alter brain functioning. There is an interaction between brain functioning and thought. Free will is helped along by brain processes that have been altered by an individual’s experience in the world. In the scientific literature it is referred to as Neuroplasticity, also called brain plasticity. it refers to the capacity of the brain to change and adapt in structure and function in response to learning and experience. I can’t find any reference to this in Harris’s book.
I’m going to present a suggestion below that free will is an acquisition (I mentioned this is the earlier video part one) not a given, and I am going to use some prominent developmental psychologists (mainly LS Vygotsky and Jean Piaget) to suggest that free will is an acquisition of developmental processes. Developmental psychology has developed since both Piaget and Vygotsky. Some other developmental psychologists include Urie Bronfenbrenner, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Barbara Rogoff, and Esther Thelen. Some of these have looked at development beyond the childhood/adolescent stages to young adulthood, middle age and even adaptations in old age. However, I am going to focus mainly on Piaget and Vygotsky who were pioneers in this area and whose work still has important relevance today.
And I am presenting some biological information about Vygotsky to honour him ninety years after his death. He was an extraordinary human being who left us work that still must be explored.
Developmental Psychology
Developmental psychology has a long history in psychology. It was known as genetic psychology (from the term ontogenesis meaning the process of the development of the individual) and recently referred to as Life Span Developmental Psychology. Initially, developmental psychology focused on the development of cognitive and physical acquisition from infants to adults, so the focus was on child development, and it was important in educational practice. Life span developmental psychology focuses on the whole of life and the changes that occur both cognitively and physically over the whole of life. What we can say about developmental psychology in general is that it seeks to understand how humans develop the cognitive and physical skills through an interaction between biology (mainly brain processes) and culture – abilities that enable humans to participate in social life. In this section I will focus on those studies that look at how a human infant develops cognitive and physical skills that enable social participation. I will not cover the later developments in these abilities, that is the object of life span developmental psychology.
Piaget and Vygotsky are major figures in the history of developmental psychology. Both were born in1896 Vygotsky unfortunately died suddenly of tuberculosis at early age of thirty-eight. Piaget lived to 84 years. Both knew and respected each of the others work despite significant differences. My goal here is to focus on Vygotsky whose work I have studied. Readers may question why I am mentioning Piaget. I consider it is important as I mentioned to provide an overview of Piaget’s position as his developmental approach has dominated educational theory and child development in the late twentieth century. There is hardly any higher degree thesis in education and educational psychology that does not refer to Piaget’s work.
In this section I will not be relating Piaget’s theory in detail my object is to compare certain aspects of it with Vygotsky’s approach. There was a mutual interchange between Piaget and Vygotsky, they both were familiar with each other’s work so an understanding of Piaget’s position will assist in understanding Vygotsky’s approach.
Piaget was interested in how infants with certain hard wired primitive cognitive and physical capacities form the basis of adaptation to the external environment. Piaget was one of the first scholars to suggest that children are not like adults in thought or action. They think differently and it is important to understand that thought to see how changes occur in cognition.
Through quite detailed empirical observations of children’s behaviour, Piaget, over four decades from infancy to adulthood, proposed that children journey through four stages of developmental change. These were referred to as, the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations. In this progress all children’s cognitive abilities change qualitatively irrespective of the cultural and physical environment they were born into.
To give an example of Piaget’s position I will refer to his first and second stages of development. The sensorimotor stage is a stage where initially the child has no language and their actions and thought are based on basic sensory experience only – seeing , feeling, thought is not abstract as language acquisition is required for that. Sometimes it was referred to as egotistic or sometimes autistic thought, the use of the term autistic was not that of the recent modern use of the term autism but to the fact that the child was acting instinctively and not yet socially.
In proposing this mode of activity, Piaget was influenced by Sigmund Freud’s idea of the unconscious ‘Id” drives that followed what was referred to as the pleasure principle – seeking pleasurable experiences and avoiding painful ones. Piaget following Freud saw development or socialisation as a process of adapting the pleasure principle to external reality (called the Reality Principle). The idea that humans and all animals were driven by pleasure pain goes back to antiquity to the Greek philosophers. For Piaget development in children requires an adaptation to reality and some deferment of pleasure as necessary for survival. Adaptation for Piaget involved two processes of adaptation to the physical and psychological environment. These he named the processes of Assimilation and Accommodation. Assimilation is where elements of the environment are integrated into the organism’s preexisting organizational mental structures (in young children it is the sensorimotor stage). Accommodation is the process whereby the child’s existing schemes are modified in response to the environment. Through these two processes the child through its own actions moves from one stage to another.
To briefly illustrate development in the sensorimotor stage which extends from to about 2 years old Piaget proposed that at this stage infants and young children lack what is referred to as object permanence. Object permanence means that we can recognise that objects in our environment exist whether we see or experience them through the senses or not. An infant cannot do this and if they cannot see objects through the senses then they do not exist. Later at the age of about 18 months infants exhibit what Piaget called deferred Imitation the ability to bring into their thinking a model of an object they experienced in the past. They begin to understand that that objects remain permanent even when they cannot be empirically experienced ( i.e. by sight, touch smell, hearing).
The second stage of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory is the preoperational stage it begins around 2 years and progresses through to about 7 years of age. Children begin to use words as symbols to understand the external physical world. Children can also draw images though they cannot think conceptually. Also, at this stage children do not have the ability to distinguish between living and non-living phenomena. This is a form of Animism where everything in their world is alive. Another important aspect of the second stage is the Egocentrism of the child. This is form of what we refer to in philosophy as solipsism meaning I only exist. At this stage, a child cannot distinguish between the view of themselves and others. They do not perceive that other individuals see the world with a distinct perspective different to theirs.
In the latter two stages children begin to think conceptually. Without going into the detail here, the final cognitive stage among children is the formal operational stage. Piaget proposed that when children reach about 11 or 12 years of age their ability to think and use abstract reason develop significantly.
It is obvious that Piaget’s idea of qualitative development change in stages should be incredibly significant for teaching and learning in educational practice. It offers teachers some concrete structures about a child’s level of ability and capacity to change. Teachers must be aware of what stage a child is at before introducing new or advanced information as added information will not be integrated by the child unless their cognitive and physical abilities have matured enough.
While Piaget’s work has had an immense influence on educational practice recent research has shown that infants at birth have capacities that are innate or are acquired earlier than suggested in Piaget’s work. Also, Piaget’s work focused on individual accomplishments and did not consider in any detail the interaction between culture and physical development.
Readers may ask at this point what these ideas have to do with free will. To answer this my goal is to argue the point that free will is not a given in humans but an accomplishment or a skill. I consider that developmental theory may provide a way of understanding how this might be achieved. Also, developmental theory might show how human menta processes, or brain activity, are impacted by cultural and social integration. I have included Piaget as he is the best-known developmental psychologist and has had more impact on areas of education than any other scholar. Piaget’s work is also relevant to understanding Vygotsky’s which I regard as a basis for a critique of Harris and biological determinism.
I aim to show in the following section how Vygotsky’s proposals on development in children challenge some of the assumptions underlying Piaget’s (and Freud’s) positions to show how cultural factors impact on biological or mental processes. As mentioned, Sam Harris’s determinist position does not allow for this two-way interaction. Harris does not refer at all to how an individual’s cognitive and cultural development can lead to an ability to make choices characteristic of free will.
Biography
Vygotsky was born on November 5, 1896, in the town of Orsha in the Russian Empire (now Belarus) Vygotsky was raised in the city of Gomel,[] where he was homeschooled until 1911 and then obtained a formal degree with distinction in a private Jewish gymnasium, which allowed him entrance to a university. In 1913, Vygotsky was admitted to the Moscow University by mere ballot through a “Jewish Lottery”: at the time a three percent Jewish student quota was administered for entry in Moscow and Saint Petersburg universities. He had an interest in the humanities and social sciences, but at the insistence of his parents he applied to the medical school at Moscow University. During the first semester of study, he transferred to the law school. In parallel, he attended lectures at Shanyavsky Moscow City People’s University. Vygotsky’s early interests were in the arts and, primarily, in the topics of the history of the Jewish people, the tradition, culture and Jewish identity.
In January 1924, Vygotsky took part in the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd (soon thereafter renamed Leningrad). After the Congress, Vygotsky met with Alexander Luria and with his help received an invitation to become a research fellow at the Psychological Institute in Moscow which was under the direction of Konstantin Kornilov. Vygotsky moved to Moscow with his new wife, Roza Smekhova, with whom he would have two daughters. He began his career at the Psychological Institute as a “staff scientist, second class”. He also became a secondary teacher, covering a period marked by his interest in the processes of learning and the role of language in learning
Vygotsky’s developmental approach differed significantly to that of Piaget (and Freud) through the three of them accepted an understanding of human cognitive and physical achievements could only be gained by an analysis of the process of their development. Piaget and Freud analysed this process of development from the perspective of the individual and their adjustment to, adaptation of their external environment. They look at the way innate biological processes transform themselves because of interaction with the external environment. As we shall see Vygotsky emphasised the role of social interactions as a transformative process. For Vygotsky social interactive processes were central in cognitive and physical development.
Vygotsky’s work was not only focused on child development but of the acquisition by individuals of what he referred to as, “The Higher Mental Processes” These were associated with the emergence of a sense of self, the creative ability that humans exhibit in art, architecture, science, mathematics and thinking itself. He said that such abilities came from the emergence of deliberative and autonomous action, which I understand as related to free will the ability be creative. He recognised the problem of explaining how such higher mental processes could emerge from simple basic natural processes.
For Vygotsky explaining this process involved interaction between the social and the natural dimensions. For Vygotsky this interaction was a problem for the psychology of his time. The psychology of the time followed two distinct and irreconcilable lines, both unsatisfactory for Vygotsky. One branch; Psychoanalysis, Gestalt , Phenomenology, emphasising mental functions without reference to the physical and the other, Behaviouralism, Reflexology, Experimental psychology all emphasising physical processes with little attention to mental and social processes even to deliberately ignore such phenomenon as the mental.
Vygotsky sought to overcome this dualism in psychology (which I argue still exists) not by reference to Marx or Lenin both of whose work he knew intimately, he turned to the Dutch Philosopher Benedict De Spinoza whose monistic naturalism and critique of dualist approaches (such as that of Descartes) suggested some ideas towards a solution this problem. As an epigraph to his book “The Psychology of Art,” Vygotsky refers to Spinoza’s’ reply to the objection that the study of body and nature alone will not reveal the creative powers of the human being.
“No one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body…but it will be argued, it is impossible solely from the laws nature considered as extended substance, we should be able to deduce the causes of buildings, pictures and things of that kind which are produced only by human art; nor would the human body, unless it were determined and lead by the mind, be capable of building a single temple. (Spinoza replies), ‘However I have just pointed out that the objects cannot fix the limits of the bodies power or say what can be concluded from a consideration of its sole nature’. ”
Spinoza’s writing is very dense and difficult, but the point here is (I think) we are not fully aware of the limits of nature of the human brain and its capacity to produce such creative mental abilities that he referred to as the higher mental processes. It would seem to me that Spinoza and Vygotsky are prefiguring recent studies on brain plasticity where studies show the interaction of the natural brain processes and social experience can lead to changes in the functioning of the brain and consciousness. This is a contemporary line of study itself that I think will prove fruitful in understanding the interrelation of brain function and socially based culture.
In Vygotsky there is some suggestion of brain plasticity in that he follows Spinoza in suggesting that we do not know the limits of the capacity of the brain to change its structure. In the following I will discuss Vygotsky’s notion of development of physical and mental abilities. Readers may see in this account how there is in Vygotsky certain hints of brain plasticity.
Vygotsky’s Developmental Approach
Vygotsky, as did Piaget, considered that the basic method for studying the emergence of cognitive and physical abilities was to study it in the process of change from more simple forms to the complex behaviour of socialised human beings. One of Vygotsky’s best known and one of his most important works for understanding human development and the unique aspects of human behaviour (basically what he referred to as the ‘Higher Mental Processes) was entitled in English, ‘ Thought and Language’) . It was first published in Russian by Vygotsky in 1934 as a unified work on the development of consciousness . In 1962 it was published in English, though that version was seriously flawed as it was heavily abridged by editors and translators and excluded certain discussions not considered relevant to the main theme. In a time of the Cold War many of these omissions were seen as having communist or Marxist sources so they were excluded. Thus the 1962 version was thus greatly limited. More comprehensive translations into English have however been made in the late 1980’s . In 1987 Many of Vygotsky’s works were published in “The Collected Works of L S Vygotsky’, It appeared in two volumes, Thinking and Speech in Vol. 1:
Vygotsky’s approach focused on two features of human achievement, the use of speech (Language) to communicate (Speech is a crucial aspect of human society) and the capacity to think conceptually. He argued that these comprise a revolutionary capacity to make meaning to create new ways of life by new ways of thinking. These capacities are not derived by any biologically inherited structures, or instincts. Nor are they be seen as imposed by some external cause on the individual organism, they are acquired through a process of internalisation of social skills. For Vygotsky individuals were able to become, through their internalisation of social activity, self-determining entities. I view Vygotsky’s notion of ‘self-mastery’ as a capacity of humans to be creative, to choose one’s destiny by an act of (free) will. This view radically distinguishes Vygotsky from the biological determinists such as Sam Harris all of whom reject the notion that humans can choose their destiny instead, he argues it is caused by biological brain process, the source of which the individual has no knowledge. As Harris says, ‘…we are a puppet (The puppet image is the cover of his Book) [who] is free as long as he loves his strings”, meaning (I think) we can feel free only if we are happy with the thoughts that control us .
Vygotsky, like Piaget, describes the process through which a child develops their mental (cognitive) and physical skills that enable adaptation to the world around them. The world includes the physical external world and the social world. Both see adaptation to these worlds as a staged process where elementary mental functions (of the child) are transformed by interaction with the physical and cognitive realities. As we have seen Piaget’s approach focuses mainly on a child’s individual physical and cognitive adaptation (by the processes of assimilation and accommodation) to the world around them. This adaptation process brings changes to the child’s way of relating to the world. So, the child is active in their own developmental change.
Vygotsky like Piaget is known as a developmental constructivist where children are active in changing themselves. However, Vygotsky differs significantly to Piaget in how the child progresses to more complex levels of interaction with the internalisation of speech that serves as a tool that changes the nature of consciousness.
Vygotsky argues that children are born with a pre intellectual capacity to communicate with others such as the adults that surround them. Such communicative action comprises actions such verbal babbling, smiling and crying. These are initial means of communication with adults. This differs from Piaget who sees instinctual actions, such as pleasure over reality as having to be overcome or controlled, there is little reference in Piaget’s work to any notion of inbuilt abilities to communicate. Vygotsky’s principles of development are presented in his major work ‘Thinking and Speech” to which I will now turn.
Vygotsky’s Approach to Child Development
Vygotsky does not look at development as a process of becoming socialised from a pre-social early period, as do both Piaget and Freud. He argues that young infants even from birth are social beings and have innate capacities for communication. Even as infants their behaviour is communicative. The verbal babbling of a baby and young infant of which most of us are familiar is not a senseless verbalisation that simply accompanies what the baby or child is doing, as Freud and Piaget maintain. For Vygotsky it is in fact a means ((a tool) for directing and accompanying their behaviour, as we will see below, a tool directing their activity.
Thiis leads me to make the general point that Vygotsky proposes that development from infancy to the complex behaviour and thinking of adults is a study of the development of mental processes. For Vygotsky mature human consciousness refers to the sophisticated mental processes that engender the achievements of civilisation. Such achievement is not just a biological given but evolves because of its socialisation which for Vygotsky argues is through language acquisition. Mature human consciousness is a unique phenomenon as it based on the internalisation of language which is a purely social phenomenon that brings about a physical change in the functioning of biological systems. It could be argued from this, the mind (consciousness) of human beings is an interrelation between the biological and the social. Vygotsky did not elaborate his theory of how changes in the use of the psychological tool, or speech (that engenders new mental abilities) brings about changes in physical activity. However, he did indicate that the physical and culture have evolved in an interrelated process.
The growth of the normal child into civilization usually involves a fusion with the processes of organic maturation. Both planes of development—the natural and the cultural—coincide and mingle with one another. The two lines of change interpenetrate one an- other and essentially form a single line of sociobiological formation of the child’s personality. (Vygotsky, 1960, p. 47
Vygotsky’s position is that human activities such as thinking do not originate in the brain as biological determinists maintain but is a function of the interrelation between the social (language) and the biological substrate. Thinking is not just a biological action in the brain that appears in consciousness spontaneously, but also a social acquisition without which human thinking is not possible. In the following section I want to , briefly, indicate the process by which a child moves through a series of stages which enable the capacity to think conceptually and how language itself serves as a tool for that process.
The process of development of a child’s abilities passes through periods of qualitative change. These critical periods can be stressful, but they are the result of the maturing of the physical abilities being impacted by changes in the child’s social environment. When a child, starts school, for example, they encounter new forms of social relations, new individuals in their lives and new expectations. Interaction with peers and adult teachers makes new demands on the child’s behaviour and thinking. Vygotsky saw these changes as new ways of experiencing the world requiring more elaborate physical and mental abilities.
Theis initial stage is referred to as an egocentric period. The child can communicate with others with words (speech), though these not the complex communication skills of adult conceptual thought but are effective forms of communication between children. Adult teachers are aware of this and adjust their speech to communicate with the children they teach.
At the early stages of development, a child learns to solve problems that confront them with the assistance of others, mainly more mature individuals. Vygotsky referred to this process of acquiring new skills as occurring within a relationship with other more competent individuals as, ‘The Zone of Proximal Development’ or the ‘ZPD’. The ZPD has now become a well-known educational practice. In this relationship the child has not fully acquired a certain skill so the adult in the situation (the ZPD) supplements the child’s actions to enable them to complete the action in question. In time the child becomes able to complete the action without that assistance, the skill becomes internalised as an individual competency. The notion of learning in the ZPG in quite common in early social life. Mothers and significant others in the child’s early life will interpret what a child is seeking to achieve and provide them with assistance to enable them to complete that action. The child will eventually be able to complete that action without assistance from the competent others; in others words they have internalised that action that becomes a personal competency.
What is occurring in these transformations of mental (and physical) processes is that the child begins to use the speech (Vygotsky refers to it also a ‘the sign’) as an aid. Vygotsky argues that the sign or speech serves as a tool for the transformation of mental functioning. The tool analogy was borrowed by Vygotsky from Marx’s notion of the material tool in production. According to Marx the tool is an instrument that mediates the production process by enabling natural resources to be transformed into human artifacts. Thus, Vygotsky refers to speech or the sign as enabling the transformation of a child’s mental functioning, it is referred to as internalisation. Speech reflects the culture in which the child is immersed and enables the child to communicate with others. This is a transformative action as at first the child communicates socially with others and then that becomes internalised as a new formation in the child’s mental processes (their mind). In this Vygotsky has reversed a trend in western society which traditionally regards individual development preceding social interaction. For Vygotsky socialisation by means of speaking (using language) precedes and results in individual mental change. The internalisation of social speech becomes Vygotsky says, ‘inner speech’. I consider this notion of inner speech an alternative to Harris’s view that ideas just pop up into consciousness without us having any idea where they originate.
It has been pointed out by certain Vygotsky scholars that mental functioning extends beyond the individual and individual mind and is also a social phenomenon where even individual thought depends on the internalisation of social speech as inner speech. As Vygotsky says the mind is a sociobiological formation. I would submit that this differs substantially from the stance of biological determinists such as Sam Harris. Biological determinists distinguish between brain processes and mental processes. They argue that thinking originates as a process of brain functioning and only later appears in consciousness. The process of how thinking processes are acquired through enculturation is virtually ignored. I think from Vygotsky it can be argued that thinking is only possible through the acquisition of language which is a social phenomenon. However, this is not to say that brain processing is not involved, it is that which enables language to be internalised. Harris and biological determinists do not even mention the impact of language on thinking, but ideas seem to just pop up from unconscious brain processes.
Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, will- power, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviours, and behaviours lead to outcomes in the WORLD. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.
And
Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behaviour, but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter and there are paths toward making wiser ones, but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do for instance, after going back and forth between two options—I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness. I must take a first step, or a last one, for reasons that are bound to remain inscrutable.
The position Harris takes here contradicts the Vygotskian perspective I have sought to express. To say that thinking, decisions, goals are simply caused only by brain states ignores completely the role of language in thinking as I have sought to show above. I consider that Vygotsky’s notion of inner speech may serve as an alternative to this idea of Harris’s that ideas, reasoning, intentions simply originate from brain processes that just pop up into conscious without us have any idea of where they came from.
Inner speech
Inner speech is Vygotsky’s term for the internalisation of social speech, it becomes changed in this process as an individual’s private thought and thinking. For Vygotsky, thinking is spoken language internalised into the structure of the individual’s consciousness and, I would argue into the structure of the brain. My interpretation of what Vygotsky means by the process of internalisation of speech is that it is that it transforms wired in mental processes we may have in common with other primates to a qualitatively different level. It becomes internal thought which itself is qualitatively different to social speech from which it derives and becomes the individual’s private mode of thinking. Inner speech has a different structure to social speech. Innate and natural forms of behaviour are reconstructed and integrated with conceptual thinking that enables generalisation, abstraction, logical memory, attention and memory. Thus, adult thought and consciousness are not distinct from the activity of the brain as determinists argue, brain processes and consciousness are an integrated single entity. Vygotsky also speaks of how creativity emerges from this integrated system and refers to the impact of emotions though I will not discuss this further it complex and needs to be the subject of another paper.
Conclusion
I have sought to show by referring to the process of the development is that brain process and consciousness or mental processes are not to be seen dualistically (as brain processes and consciousness, seen as two different entities) as determinist claim. They are integrated into a single system, a social biological system. This level of the higher mental processes allows for thinking conceptually , to plan what we will do, to be creative , fantasise and image entities that cannot be observed. Our ideas, our thoughts, our future plans, do not simply pop up out of the blue (from the brain) but are an act of thinking which is not an unconscious brain activity alone. These free actions we can are not of a supernatural or religious nature they are gained from a developmental process of integration of natural biological processes with the internalisation of social structures.
The notion that ideas just appear in consciousness are linguistic phenomena. Conceptual language has a function of abstraction and generalisation, and concepts or words can have multiple meanings. I mention in passing the role of metaphor in language. I have not dealt with this above in any detail as the study of metaphor use in language it a large topic and would require another presentation. But metaphor is important in language in general and is used frequently in everyday language to convey meaning. Basically, metaphor brings two unrelated phenomena to together and they can render an abstract idea clearer by relating it with concrete experiences. I must mention here what Donald Trump aimed to achieve as President – his answer, ‘to drain the swamp’. It was quite clear to everyone what he meant but is also conveyed multiple meanings. People use metaphors to reason about certain difficult abstract issues. Iin short, my point here
