I loved the wink/blink and calculator examples, and all the good information here.
But isn't compatibilism just changing the meaning of free will to make it compatible with determinism?
My sense is that free will is largely a meaningless/undefined concept. Defining it the way compatibilism appears to be doing feels a bit tautological, saying free will is essentially just what we perceive as free will.
I'm also a bit unsure what you mean by consciousness having a causal impact? If we don't understand consciousness, how can we say anything about its causal impact? The fact that I "feel" some thoughts (like the "will" to wink) and not others (like the "will" to blink) says little about the impact this subjective feeling has on my brain - i.e. it doesn't negate the p-zombie in any way, as far as we know at least.
As for moral responsibility, I think reason responsiveness makes a lot of sense. Although I don't see it as much from the view of responsibility, but more from the view of which behaviors can be altered. At the end of the day, the reason we blame someone is largely to alter their behavior, it would be pointless to blame someone for something where the blame would have no effect on future behavior.
I agree that the different camps have different meanings of free will. I think there's a strong argument that the compatibilist way of talking about it actually aligns best with what we mean--the ability to say we are the causes of our actions in a robust enough way to ground concepts like moral responsibility. I think the indeterminists add extra requirements on top of that which are unnecessary.
On consciousness having a causal impact: There is pretty broad agreement among different views of consciousness that it has an impact, with the exception of epiphenomenalism, but I don't think there are many epiphenomenalists. We don't need to fully understand something to say it has a causal role. Best example of consciousness playing a role: We are talking about consciousness. It would be pretty weird if that were happening without consciousness impacting our actions. But more broadly, I agree that just having a feeling that you caused something doesn't mean you did--the Wagner book (Illusion of Conscious Will) has great examples of this, and I think that's where the interesting stuff lies, not in the (somewhat tedious imo) arguments about the metaphysics of free will.
Yes it might well be the best working definition, especially in the context of morality. Even if free will doesn't exist (in the non-deterministic sense), it might be useful to pretend it is in some contexts, and in those cases I think a definition related to subjective feelings of will might be good enough.
I agree with you on the point of us thinking about consciousness. While it's theoretically possible to do so without having actual consciousness (I haven't tried, but my guess would be ChatGPT can be pushed to do it), it feels unlikely, so I think you're right in that there is something there, although it might not be causal (the brain might just "know about" consciousness)
I look forward to reading your thoughts around the consciousness side of things, which I agree is the even more interesting part!
I thought about this a bit and don't think the term "free will" is suitable here.
I've written a longer post to avoid spamming the comments too much (https://kwiri.substack.com/p/no-we-dont-have-free-will), but the base case is that I think using "free will" in this context goes in contradiction with the known meaning of "free", which is, at least, confusing.
Wanted to write a comment, but that's basically this, and basically what Sam Harris states: compatibilists just redefine free will, and in that redefinition rob it of most of its usual implications.
Really interesting continuation of the conversation about Sapolsky’s book here — although I know you don’t discuss his arguments here.
I’m intrigued by your understanding of free will but am not sure I fully agree with it. That said, I’m closer to a lay person than a philosopher, so I fall under that “it’s an illusion!” camp 😊
Knowing that our feelings are often powerful and intuitive but also wrong, I don’t like to rely on the sense of conscious willing to justify the reality of conscious willing. And just because it appears that a behavior is responsive to reasons and thus worthy of moral judgment doesn’t mean it is.
For me, the free will question is often one of appearances vs reality — and I worry that philosophical explanations fall short of getting to the heart of it. But this has me reevaluating some of that worry. More to come, I’m sure. Great article and explanation!
Thanks! This coming just as we were discussing Sapolsky was a total fluke -- I had written this last week, it seems Free Will is just in the air lately 😉
Looking forward to your more detailed thoughts on Sapolsky and the whole free will thing!
Some of the arguments here definitely collide with Sapolsky. For example, the Libet studies investigate whether brains makes decisions before people experience intent (i.e., conscious willing), and Sapolsky details the neuroscience of how that intent is just as determined as an involuntary action anyway. So, winking isn't less determined than blinking.
But, presumably smart compatibilist philosophers realize this, and Sapolsky doesn't really get into why that determinism makes free will impossible. It seems obvious to many of us, but that's not an airtight case. However, this does mean that if your compatibilist theory relies on intent/conscious willing as the source of free will, it needs to allow for the fact that intent is formed deterministically.
I haven’t finished Determined, (but I loved Behave years ago).
The main thing I remember from the newer book was his argument that it is impossible to point to one neuron that fires without having been influenced by other neurons around it, hormones, culture, genes, etc. Which he says means there’s no force besides physics that is willing things to happen.
I’m still not sure I understand how the calculator argument counters this. If Sapolsky says the laws of physics initiate every thought and deed, and the calculator operates via the laws of arithmetic (and arithmetic is free will)… are the laws of physics themselves my consciousness?
Or wait. Is that too abstract. Maybe above that level of depth (laws of physics) there is another level (laws of personality) that is my will?
I think there are a couple of things going on here.
First, in the analogy, consciousness isn't the laws of physics. The laws of physics are the laws of physics on either side. Without the laws of physics, nothing would happen--no calculating and no neurons firing. You can describe everything at the level of fundamental physics, but this level of description, just like the wiring description, can be true while it's still true the cause of the 2 is arithmetic and the cause of your actions is you.
Second, the calculator analogy breaks down a bit when you try to think about causes preceding the calculator/you. I think Sapolsky is getting at the intuition that if causes preceding you cause your actions, it doesn't make sense to say you caused them. We didn't get to choose the wiring diagram of our brain, and the neurons in there cause our actions, so we can't be said to choose our actions. The response is to say of course we didn't get to choose who we are, that would be incoherent (how could you choose if you didn't exist to have preferences to choose with?). But once we exist, worrying that the laws of physics are causing our actions is like worrying the math isn't causing 2 to show up on the calculator because it's the electricity that does it--again, just a different level of description
The 'Free Will' debate is the main reason I'm on SubStack. Fascinating stuff. I very much enjoyed the article. I'm still yet to be convinced of a soft-deterministic interpretation of free will, but I grant I'm only a curious layman who lacks any formalised education in the relevant fields,; philosophy, neurology, etc. I do wonder where you would posit the urge to wink comes from prior to one's conscious recognition of the thought? It's seems that the thoughts that we are consciously responding to, and our emotional reactions to them, all must arise without preemptive thought. One never 'chooses' to think about winking (or anything). The concept of winking either arises or it does not. If you 'chose' to think about winking, you would have had to have thought about it, before you thought about it. That seem impossible by definition, so where did the thought come from?
Thanks for the kind words and the really insightful question.
I don't know that I can give a super satisfying answer. So first, to kind of defuse the worry this question raises, my best argument that consciousness can impact actions: We talk about consciousness. That would be a really weird coincidence if consciousness didn't impact our actions.
To more directly answer, I suspect there isn't a super clean delineation between conscious and unconscious. Unconscious processes that gain enough momentum might call our attention so become conscious, so those conscious thoughts/motivations are caused by unconscious ones. But conscious processes can modulate those underlying unconscious processes, as well as change them for future actions, so the causation is sort of both ways.
That's not a great articulation. If you haven't read it, the free will chapter of Owen Flanagan's book (The Problem of the Soul) is the best articulation of this and compatibilism more broadly that I've read
> One never 'chooses' to think about winking (or anything).
That's true (in the sense I think you mean by it). Like blinking, thinking is largely done on auto. We can choose to (try to) concentrate on one topic or another, and may be successful, but that choice would have arisen in a context of automatic -- unchosen -- thinking. Some are concerned that that automaticity undermines our free will.
Compatibilism says that those concerns are irrelevant. There is so much in our lives that we cannot control. (Even those who believe in Libertarian Free Will would not say that we have total control over every part of our lives.) But there are some things that we can control. It is in our control of those things that we **demonstrate** our free will. Those who believe in Libertarian Free Will agree that those actions demonstrate our free will, they just happen to believe that those actions also demonstrate some sort of contra-causal power -- something not controlled by the laws of physics.
I don't think we need (or could even have) contra-causal powers. We have control over some things, and it's our exercise of that control that we refer to when we talk about our free will. LFW proponents merely have some mistaken beliefs about how that control works.
The will is not free of the laws of physics, but there are plenty of senses of "free" in which the will is free. It is not, for example, kept in a zoo.
I also liked the wink/blink example, and was a good lesson on compatiblism thanks Tommy.
Despite this, there is still something that is missing in the explanation for compatiblism for me. Perhaps our own experience (which feels as though we have free will) creates a bias in us to believe it exists. But it begs the question of what does free will mean in the first place?
If we were to assume for one moment that consciousness is a complex illusion manifested by our neurons to make sense of the world, then our brains could in theory store each discrete moment of the illusion into memory. Our brains could then reference our prior 'states of illusion' to make decisions (as it would for any other short or long term memory).
The referencing and processing of past illusions to make choices now would be equivalent to free will in this example. In other words, we have a running trail of the illusion at times T(n-1, n-2, etc) which are referenced for decision making now, i.e. at T(n). This implies that there is no free will, however it would feel like we have free will given that the illusions from past intervals are fed as an input to the neural processing in the current interval.
Anyway, I'm rambling and probably not explaining this as well I could right now. Maybe it'll make for a good future article discussion.
In terms of what it means for free will to exist, I took a crack in another comment: "the ability to say we are the causes of our actions in a robust enough way to ground concepts like moral responsibility". This leaves a lot to be explained (what are "we"? What is moral responsibility? What counts as a cause?), but I think captures what I think people intuitively mean by the concept.
In terms of illusions, sure, it's possible (The Illusion of Conscious Will by Wagner has great examples of cases where we are confused about what we have and haven't caused). But I think the evidence is in favor of our conscious will having an impact on our actions. I think if we dive deep into the neuroscience of consciousness, decision-making, and the feeling of willing, we find a lot of surprising and counter-intuitive things, but on reflection they add up to something like the picture I've sketched in this post--we can meaningfully be said to cause our actions in a way that broadly aligns with our intuitions.
I agree that we do make our own choices, because we are our brains. However, there is no meta-decision making; we cannot choose how we make those choices. We are bound to make the choices that we do.
As such, I don’t think there is free will in the sense that our choices determine which future, from a set of real possible futures, will occur. This is what I feel people are generally referring to when discussing free will, as exemplified by the many-worlds theory. But alternate realities only exist in our imagination.
I think it is incoherent to want to be a chooser that chooses how they choose. You need to be able to choose to choose how to choose (yep, that was a sentence). And I don't think that's what we are looking for out of free will! We just want our willing to be free, as in, we want our actions caused by us!
Well said. I think most people with an opinion on free will have a, usually unarticulated, belief in an immaterial self. However, we are our bodies alone. So even if you believe in absolute determinism, your actions are still your own and you bear full responsibility for them.
I enjoyed the article and it gave me lots to think about. But I still don't understand how "thoughts lead to action" proves anything about free will. (Possibly because I'm a layperson using the wrong terminology).
Could an infinitely powerful computer that knew the position of every atom in the universe the day you were born, predict your thoughts right now? Handwaving away quantum effects and stuff, materialism seems to predict it could. I have a difficult time reconciling that with my feeling of free will, even after reading your post.
Thanks -- I think you've articulated well one of the central intuitions that makes compatibilism hard to swallow. I think the difficulty stems from the difficulty of seeing ourselves as a physical system.
I think the trick is to disconnect the discomfort over predictability from causation. Heat predictably causes water to boil, that doesn't mean the heat isn't causing the water to boil. My wife can reliably predict what food I will order off the menu, that doesn't mean I'm not choosing (it just means I have well defined preferences!)
I get that it's uncomfortable to think that it all could have been predicted, but it's not an actual possibility, and doesn't impact the fact that we're causing things.
(Not sure if that helps -- I'm trying to articulate responses to these sorts of common objections and seeing what helps with which intuitions. If this is helpful, or if it is not, let me know!)
Not a materialist nor a naturalist but I just LOVED this article. And, to a certain extent, I agree that scientific findings can be more fascinating than philosophical problems. Because scientific findings, I would say, make us see that questions about how reality does what it does are, even if it may not he as deep as asking what reality is as such, framed in a way that makes our minds truly see the difficulties of the question because it is not so removed from our thought patterns. Without scientific discoveries much metaphysical pondering would desensitize us to how astonishing the problems we face are, and the world is.
I really appreciate that you wrote this piece. It’s a great vehicle for thinking about this topic.
I’ll just add one more comment for now. It’s probably the key place where my thinking and intuitions differ from yours. It’s where you say “I think it's pretty incontrovertible that conscious thoughts cause behavior.”
I really don’t believe that this is true. My feeling is that consciousness is an emergent phenomena of the brain’s (unfathomably complex) processing of information. I disagree with the critics that evolution would’ve eliminated consciousness in that case. Consciousness must be a necessary effect of our brain’s level of complex and powerful processing. We could not function at the level we do and not experience it. Does this make me an epiphenomenalist? So be it.
The alternative is that consciousness and conscious reasoning are free-floating phenomena independent of neurology and I find that really hard to buy.
It would seem a weird coincidence for us to talk about and try to describe consciousness if consciousness has no impact on our actions. To me that's a pretty strong point against epiphenomenalism
This brings to light an interesting discrepancy between the mental set in contrast to the physical (free consciousness?) and the mental conjoined with the physical (neurological consciousness?).
Also, couldn’t two LLM agents discuss consciousness?
The problem as I see it is that you can’t separate the metaphysical question from the practical question of moral responsibility. Let’s say there are wink neurons and blink neurons, the former being “reasons responsive” neurons.
What does that mean in a materialist framework? And now you come to the problem of consciousness. So compatibilism doesn't really solve the metaphysical problem people are worried about, it only brackets it as something for another discussion (just as you do in your article).
I do think compatibilism is eminently practical and admirably neat, so I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a wretched subterfuge, but it doesn’t answer the question most people are thinking about when they think of free will. Because even if you say “I” am the mathematical laws and not the wires, those laws are still determined. An algorithm is still determined. Compatibilism merely transfers the determinism from the world to our will.
I agree a lot of this comes down to consciousness!
In terms of the worry the will is determined, I don't have that worry. If I'm causing stuff, why would I care that it's "deterministic"? When I choose my favorite meal at my favorite restaurant, that's great--I get to choose it because I like it. I wouldn't want it to be indeterministic and sometimes I randomly choose something I don't like, not because I want to try something new but just because my willing is random. That doesn't sound like free will, that sounds like chaos.
I agree the problem isn’t determinism, but who or what is doing the determining. When it comes to our intuitions about the self that chooses, we’re all dualists. To align with our intuitions, we need to conclude it’s a causai sui soul determining the choice, not any kind of physical structure (which includes algorithms).
And I even think calling it an intuition isn’t strong enough, it’s an experience. And even that doesn’t capture it because we’re not talking about just any experience, but our locus of reality. I think that's what the compatibilist is really up against. And it's only in the context of philosophy where our method is to bracket certain questions, that compatibilism is accepted as a neat and tidy explanation.
But to be more modest in our goals, if it’s just explaining compatibilism so it makes sense, your article is the best presentation I’ve ever read!
I don't think there are good reasons to believe quantum physics is related to consciousness. Those theories aren't taken very seriously in the academic literature on consciousness, and the arguments I've seen for it (admittedly this isn't something I've looked deeply into) seem not very good, like pointing to Godel's incompleteness theorem that points to limits of formal systems--presumably the assumption the human mind doesn't have limits, which seems clearly false to me. For a deeper dive on it, this paper takes it on fairly directly: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15516709cog0000_59
I asked one of my neuroscience professors a similar question years ago and he said something very similar to you. I was wondering if there had been any developments, but after reading that paper it looks like not—which isn’t surprising when we have no means of testing such a hypothesis on the brain.
May I respectfully inquire why you believe the mind/ a mind is with limit? These links are thoughts about others’s thoughts? Is not the best scientific approach to begin with no thoughts on potential end results? Our thoughts drive end results. Our expectations, our beliefs are never separate. It does not matter whether studies are “blind”. Energy is unified.
If we believe things have limits, we can experience them as such, not because they are inherently so, but because we are choosing them as so.
Consciousness is awareness. It is what is. Infinite, expansive, unchanging. Everything else feels superimposed, on top of. It feels this way because it is this way.
Free will: "the ability to say we are the causes of our actions in a robust enough way to ground concepts like moral responsibility".
I don’t love this definition given that it depends on the abstract notion of moral responsibility and intuitions on how justifiable it is. Seems kind of circular? It also seems closer to “libertarian” free will than most compatibilists would condone? Isn’t Dennett’s definitely more along the lines of “actions that are determined and constrained but uncoerced”? I wish in fact he had stuck to defending ‘constrained but uncoerced will’ instead of attempting to redefine ‘free will’ which for clarity’s sake should mean “intentions realized that ultimately arises free of any causal influence”. I think this is actually how most people see it and how they justify moral responsibility. It’s just that they’re probably wrong about us having it 😁
I think I have a couple more things to suggest but I’m going to reread and process your piece before doing so.
I agree there is lots of areas to further clarify in that definition! But I don't think it's particularly libertarian. Saying we're the causes of our actions is different from saying we're the ultimate, metaphysical, uncaused causes.
"intentions realized that ultimately arises free of any causal influence" -> I'm not sure about that definition. I assume there's an implicit "except from you" at the end, which brings it closer to my definition. But I think there are lots of situations where our intentions arise freely but mixed with other causal influences. If I intend to buy ice cream, this intention arising is partially caused by me knowing the existence of ice cream.
Exactly. I don’t think there is such a thing with that kind of power. My appraisal of the self is as a symbolic representation of this shifting collection of body parts, relationships, roles, expressions and a name — an avatar really.
Certainly nothing objective, fixed and independent enough to justify punishing in the cruel and inhumane way we regularly do.
I'm afraid I'm not very sympathetic to compatibilism. I see it as giving up. In its pragmatic approach, it seems to dodge the deeper question of whether causal determinism applies to consciousness. And if not, why not. The problem is that any avowed materialist must answer the question of *how* free will can arise in a universe that is functionally no different from the calculator you mentioned. (Which obviously has no free will.)
I agree our intuition of free will is meaningful. My canonical instance is the case where I've decided to have soup for dinner and am standing at my pantry trying to decide what kind of soup. Such a trivial decision seems entirely up to my putative free will. But what is the mechanism behind it? How does free will (or even consciousness) arise from matter?
My WAG is that the brain is the one non-deterministic thing the universe has created. We can say the brain is the only thing the universe created that named itself. And it seems the one thing the universe has created that becomes self-aware and tries to understand the universe. The brain appears to operate finely balanced in a region between order and chaos. We're capable of having "mixed emotions" and conflicting thoughts. I think at a high level, the myriad thoughts we have vie for our attention and in that finely balanced noise may lie the mechanism of free will.
We know lots about the neural mechanisms of decision-making! There's no reason to think there needs to be something metaphysically different about those mechanisms in order to be able to meaningfully say those mechanisms, which constitute you, made the decision.
I'm not sure why you would want non-determinism in your choices--what does it being truly random rather than chaotic add?
The argument from causal determination is that those neural mechanisms are just as physically determined as the calculator. Metaphorically, given "1+1" they cannot do otherwise than output "2". True free will is the notion that, if the universe could be wound back to your decision point, you might make a different decision. (In my example, I might pick a different soup.)
In a causally determined reality, that can't happen. I always pick the same soup. Choice is an illusion, which offends our intuition, but is what the underlying physics suggests. The way out, I think, is that the brain is the one physical thing that is complex enough to be non-deterministic at its operational level, *probably* in virtue of consciousness, so understanding the mechanism of free will requires understanding consciousness. A hard problem!
"True free will is the notion that, if the universe could be wound back to your decision point, you might make a different decision."
I disagree. I think free will is being able to freely will things, for actions to arise and be caused by us. I don't particularly care if there is some random coin flip the universe does occasionally to throw off Laplace's demon--that doesn't sound like choice and it doesn't have anything to do with me.
Aren't we saying the same thing here? If we can freely will things, doesn't that imply we might choose a different soup? It's not random, it's choosing differently.
I don't think we're saying the same thing! I'm saying I think free will is about being the cause of your actions. You're saying free will is your choices being indeterminant. I'm not sure what it means for something to be indeterminant unless there is some randomness in it, and I think injecting randomness into our decision-making process takes away freedom, doesn't add to it. I don't want to sometimes choose something not because I like it or want it but because random indeterminancy.
I want you to be able to choose a soup and for that choice to come from you. I don't care if when we rewind the tape if you would do it again or not--that's not a practical possibility and the fact that we don't know if that would happen (due to quantum indeterminancy) or not seems to indicate to me it can't matter that much.
I still think we're saying the same thing. I agree choices come from us. I'm saying they are not *causally* determined by physics. But they are not indeterminate, they are determined by our consciousness.
The winding back is just a thought experiment to illustrate the potential to have made a different choice because you decided on a different soup. Put another way, it just says our decisions points aren't *fixed* by physics or immediate histories. They are truly free.
I like the idea of compatibilism. In a sense, it seems to put free will on a spectrum.
I've always liked to think about free will by drawing on unconscious behaviors manifested by unaddressed emotions and thoughts. So long as those thoughts stay unconscious, the behaviors continue to manifest, and thus people get caught in the same cycle of error - which from the outside may look like it is indeed not free will. This is the person who runs failed relationship after failed relationship a very similar way.
Some might say this person does have free will in other behaviors, but I would venture the thought that it may be possible that even at the lowest level of analysis, their behaviors can arguably be conceived as a contributor to the cyclical manifestation of their unaddressed emotional baggage dormant in their unconscious mind.
In this sense, the therapeutic process is almost seems a free will activation practice.
I really appreciate your clear definition of free will as fundamentally intertwined with the issue of moral responsibility. I think that any version of free will that doesn’t include moral responsibility falls short of capturing what really matters in the free will debate.
That said, I disagree with a couple of the premises that you believe point to the existence of moral responsibility. I have a couple of immediate questions about the argument you laid out in this piece.
1) If responsibility is based on reasonableness, more reasonable agents would be more responsible for their actions. Under materialism reasonableness is determined. Agents cannot nondeterministically change how reasonable they are. Therefore they are not responsible for their level of responsibility.
I find this problematic because if you impute different levels of responsibility to different agents based on a deterministic variable, it seems to undermine the basic humanist principle of equality.
Do you see a way to maintain equality or is it a necessary to throw out such a principle for the sake of moral progress?
2) Is consciousness truly necessary for moral responsibility? Would a potential unconscious, rational agent such as an unconscious AGI not be responsible? If so I feel like the argument begins to look dualistic?
I tend to believe that both moral responsibility and desert are irrational due to moral luck, but your argument here is genuinely interesting.
1) This seems like a feature, not a bug! We do assign less moral responsibility based on how well people respond to rational considerations--I certainly don't hold my 3 year old as morally responsible for hitting or biting as I would an adult (but I hold him more responsible than his 1 year old brother). Similarly for adults with cognitive disabilities or mental illness. Even among the majority of adults, we treat actions taken out of passion differently than those out of cold calculation.
2) I wouldn't want to make any strong claims about consciousness being required for moral responsibility. But I think if consciousness causes actions, that's a strong case for moral responsibility because we identify with our consciousness. If you consciously did it, then you did it, so we have a stronger case for you being morally responsible
1) I love that response! I agree that the dissolution of moral responsibility is beneficial when discussing outliers. I’m interested in your thoughts about desert. Do you believe that morally responsible agents who do bad things deserve to be punished? Do responsible agents who do good things deserve to be rewarded?
2) Maybe the place where I diverge from you philosophically is on the point of consciousness. I don’t see consciousness as any different from the ordinary substance of reality. Because I think it would be foolish to ascribe moral responsibility to a tornado or an atom or a rock, I think we shouldn’t ascribe it to humans.
1) Personally I'm more inclined towards consequentialism as opposed to retribution. But I don't have especially strong views here.
2) I don't see consciousness as different from the ordinary substance of reality either! I don't ascribe anything metaphysically special to it. But I also don't ascribe anything metaphysically special to moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is something very much within the human social sphere. You might be interested in Strawson's view of compatibilism--he saw the issue of free will as really about moral responsibility, and moral responsibility really as about social attitudes. Maybe that approach will resonate with you. Here's a slidedeck that outlines the high level argument, and mentions the main book Strawson wrote on this (Freedom and Resentment) https://iweb.langara.ca/rjohns/files/2016/10/7_Strawson.pdf
1) Cool! My negative take on free will and moral responsibility is all about reward and retribution. I totally accept a moral responsibility that leads to consequentialist outcomes.
2) I appreciate the recommendation! I will check out his work.
I loved the wink/blink and calculator examples, and all the good information here.
But isn't compatibilism just changing the meaning of free will to make it compatible with determinism?
My sense is that free will is largely a meaningless/undefined concept. Defining it the way compatibilism appears to be doing feels a bit tautological, saying free will is essentially just what we perceive as free will.
I'm also a bit unsure what you mean by consciousness having a causal impact? If we don't understand consciousness, how can we say anything about its causal impact? The fact that I "feel" some thoughts (like the "will" to wink) and not others (like the "will" to blink) says little about the impact this subjective feeling has on my brain - i.e. it doesn't negate the p-zombie in any way, as far as we know at least.
As for moral responsibility, I think reason responsiveness makes a lot of sense. Although I don't see it as much from the view of responsibility, but more from the view of which behaviors can be altered. At the end of the day, the reason we blame someone is largely to alter their behavior, it would be pointless to blame someone for something where the blame would have no effect on future behavior.
Thanks for the thoughts!
I agree that the different camps have different meanings of free will. I think there's a strong argument that the compatibilist way of talking about it actually aligns best with what we mean--the ability to say we are the causes of our actions in a robust enough way to ground concepts like moral responsibility. I think the indeterminists add extra requirements on top of that which are unnecessary.
On consciousness having a causal impact: There is pretty broad agreement among different views of consciousness that it has an impact, with the exception of epiphenomenalism, but I don't think there are many epiphenomenalists. We don't need to fully understand something to say it has a causal role. Best example of consciousness playing a role: We are talking about consciousness. It would be pretty weird if that were happening without consciousness impacting our actions. But more broadly, I agree that just having a feeling that you caused something doesn't mean you did--the Wagner book (Illusion of Conscious Will) has great examples of this, and I think that's where the interesting stuff lies, not in the (somewhat tedious imo) arguments about the metaphysics of free will.
Thanks again for the thoughtful response!
Yes it might well be the best working definition, especially in the context of morality. Even if free will doesn't exist (in the non-deterministic sense), it might be useful to pretend it is in some contexts, and in those cases I think a definition related to subjective feelings of will might be good enough.
I agree with you on the point of us thinking about consciousness. While it's theoretically possible to do so without having actual consciousness (I haven't tried, but my guess would be ChatGPT can be pushed to do it), it feels unlikely, so I think you're right in that there is something there, although it might not be causal (the brain might just "know about" consciousness)
I look forward to reading your thoughts around the consciousness side of things, which I agree is the even more interesting part!
I thought about this a bit and don't think the term "free will" is suitable here.
I've written a longer post to avoid spamming the comments too much (https://kwiri.substack.com/p/no-we-dont-have-free-will), but the base case is that I think using "free will" in this context goes in contradiction with the known meaning of "free", which is, at least, confusing.
Wanted to write a comment, but that's basically this, and basically what Sam Harris states: compatibilists just redefine free will, and in that redefinition rob it of most of its usual implications.
Really interesting continuation of the conversation about Sapolsky’s book here — although I know you don’t discuss his arguments here.
I’m intrigued by your understanding of free will but am not sure I fully agree with it. That said, I’m closer to a lay person than a philosopher, so I fall under that “it’s an illusion!” camp 😊
Knowing that our feelings are often powerful and intuitive but also wrong, I don’t like to rely on the sense of conscious willing to justify the reality of conscious willing. And just because it appears that a behavior is responsive to reasons and thus worthy of moral judgment doesn’t mean it is.
For me, the free will question is often one of appearances vs reality — and I worry that philosophical explanations fall short of getting to the heart of it. But this has me reevaluating some of that worry. More to come, I’m sure. Great article and explanation!
Thanks! This coming just as we were discussing Sapolsky was a total fluke -- I had written this last week, it seems Free Will is just in the air lately 😉
Looking forward to your more detailed thoughts on Sapolsky and the whole free will thing!
Some of the arguments here definitely collide with Sapolsky. For example, the Libet studies investigate whether brains makes decisions before people experience intent (i.e., conscious willing), and Sapolsky details the neuroscience of how that intent is just as determined as an involuntary action anyway. So, winking isn't less determined than blinking.
But, presumably smart compatibilist philosophers realize this, and Sapolsky doesn't really get into why that determinism makes free will impossible. It seems obvious to many of us, but that's not an airtight case. However, this does mean that if your compatibilist theory relies on intent/conscious willing as the source of free will, it needs to allow for the fact that intent is formed deterministically.
I haven’t finished Determined, (but I loved Behave years ago).
The main thing I remember from the newer book was his argument that it is impossible to point to one neuron that fires without having been influenced by other neurons around it, hormones, culture, genes, etc. Which he says means there’s no force besides physics that is willing things to happen.
I’m still not sure I understand how the calculator argument counters this. If Sapolsky says the laws of physics initiate every thought and deed, and the calculator operates via the laws of arithmetic (and arithmetic is free will)… are the laws of physics themselves my consciousness?
Or wait. Is that too abstract. Maybe above that level of depth (laws of physics) there is another level (laws of personality) that is my will?
Thanks for the great article Tommy!
Thanks!
I think there are a couple of things going on here.
First, in the analogy, consciousness isn't the laws of physics. The laws of physics are the laws of physics on either side. Without the laws of physics, nothing would happen--no calculating and no neurons firing. You can describe everything at the level of fundamental physics, but this level of description, just like the wiring description, can be true while it's still true the cause of the 2 is arithmetic and the cause of your actions is you.
Second, the calculator analogy breaks down a bit when you try to think about causes preceding the calculator/you. I think Sapolsky is getting at the intuition that if causes preceding you cause your actions, it doesn't make sense to say you caused them. We didn't get to choose the wiring diagram of our brain, and the neurons in there cause our actions, so we can't be said to choose our actions. The response is to say of course we didn't get to choose who we are, that would be incoherent (how could you choose if you didn't exist to have preferences to choose with?). But once we exist, worrying that the laws of physics are causing our actions is like worrying the math isn't causing 2 to show up on the calculator because it's the electricity that does it--again, just a different level of description
I agree with your point Rose about philosophical explanations not seeming to get to the heart of it. For me there is something missing here.
The 'Free Will' debate is the main reason I'm on SubStack. Fascinating stuff. I very much enjoyed the article. I'm still yet to be convinced of a soft-deterministic interpretation of free will, but I grant I'm only a curious layman who lacks any formalised education in the relevant fields,; philosophy, neurology, etc. I do wonder where you would posit the urge to wink comes from prior to one's conscious recognition of the thought? It's seems that the thoughts that we are consciously responding to, and our emotional reactions to them, all must arise without preemptive thought. One never 'chooses' to think about winking (or anything). The concept of winking either arises or it does not. If you 'chose' to think about winking, you would have had to have thought about it, before you thought about it. That seem impossible by definition, so where did the thought come from?
Thanks for the kind words and the really insightful question.
I don't know that I can give a super satisfying answer. So first, to kind of defuse the worry this question raises, my best argument that consciousness can impact actions: We talk about consciousness. That would be a really weird coincidence if consciousness didn't impact our actions.
To more directly answer, I suspect there isn't a super clean delineation between conscious and unconscious. Unconscious processes that gain enough momentum might call our attention so become conscious, so those conscious thoughts/motivations are caused by unconscious ones. But conscious processes can modulate those underlying unconscious processes, as well as change them for future actions, so the causation is sort of both ways.
That's not a great articulation. If you haven't read it, the free will chapter of Owen Flanagan's book (The Problem of the Soul) is the best articulation of this and compatibilism more broadly that I've read
> One never 'chooses' to think about winking (or anything).
That's true (in the sense I think you mean by it). Like blinking, thinking is largely done on auto. We can choose to (try to) concentrate on one topic or another, and may be successful, but that choice would have arisen in a context of automatic -- unchosen -- thinking. Some are concerned that that automaticity undermines our free will.
Compatibilism says that those concerns are irrelevant. There is so much in our lives that we cannot control. (Even those who believe in Libertarian Free Will would not say that we have total control over every part of our lives.) But there are some things that we can control. It is in our control of those things that we **demonstrate** our free will. Those who believe in Libertarian Free Will agree that those actions demonstrate our free will, they just happen to believe that those actions also demonstrate some sort of contra-causal power -- something not controlled by the laws of physics.
I don't think we need (or could even have) contra-causal powers. We have control over some things, and it's our exercise of that control that we refer to when we talk about our free will. LFW proponents merely have some mistaken beliefs about how that control works.
The will is not free of the laws of physics, but there are plenty of senses of "free" in which the will is free. It is not, for example, kept in a zoo.
I also liked the wink/blink example, and was a good lesson on compatiblism thanks Tommy.
Despite this, there is still something that is missing in the explanation for compatiblism for me. Perhaps our own experience (which feels as though we have free will) creates a bias in us to believe it exists. But it begs the question of what does free will mean in the first place?
If we were to assume for one moment that consciousness is a complex illusion manifested by our neurons to make sense of the world, then our brains could in theory store each discrete moment of the illusion into memory. Our brains could then reference our prior 'states of illusion' to make decisions (as it would for any other short or long term memory).
The referencing and processing of past illusions to make choices now would be equivalent to free will in this example. In other words, we have a running trail of the illusion at times T(n-1, n-2, etc) which are referenced for decision making now, i.e. at T(n). This implies that there is no free will, however it would feel like we have free will given that the illusions from past intervals are fed as an input to the neural processing in the current interval.
Anyway, I'm rambling and probably not explaining this as well I could right now. Maybe it'll make for a good future article discussion.
Thanks again for making me think 🤔
In terms of what it means for free will to exist, I took a crack in another comment: "the ability to say we are the causes of our actions in a robust enough way to ground concepts like moral responsibility". This leaves a lot to be explained (what are "we"? What is moral responsibility? What counts as a cause?), but I think captures what I think people intuitively mean by the concept.
In terms of illusions, sure, it's possible (The Illusion of Conscious Will by Wagner has great examples of cases where we are confused about what we have and haven't caused). But I think the evidence is in favor of our conscious will having an impact on our actions. I think if we dive deep into the neuroscience of consciousness, decision-making, and the feeling of willing, we find a lot of surprising and counter-intuitive things, but on reflection they add up to something like the picture I've sketched in this post--we can meaningfully be said to cause our actions in a way that broadly aligns with our intuitions.
Beautifully said Tom! I will need to read your book suggestion, thanks for that
I agree that we do make our own choices, because we are our brains. However, there is no meta-decision making; we cannot choose how we make those choices. We are bound to make the choices that we do.
As such, I don’t think there is free will in the sense that our choices determine which future, from a set of real possible futures, will occur. This is what I feel people are generally referring to when discussing free will, as exemplified by the many-worlds theory. But alternate realities only exist in our imagination.
Thanks for the thoughts!
I think it is incoherent to want to be a chooser that chooses how they choose. You need to be able to choose to choose how to choose (yep, that was a sentence). And I don't think that's what we are looking for out of free will! We just want our willing to be free, as in, we want our actions caused by us!
Well said. I think most people with an opinion on free will have a, usually unarticulated, belief in an immaterial self. However, we are our bodies alone. So even if you believe in absolute determinism, your actions are still your own and you bear full responsibility for them.
I enjoyed the article and it gave me lots to think about. But I still don't understand how "thoughts lead to action" proves anything about free will. (Possibly because I'm a layperson using the wrong terminology).
Could an infinitely powerful computer that knew the position of every atom in the universe the day you were born, predict your thoughts right now? Handwaving away quantum effects and stuff, materialism seems to predict it could. I have a difficult time reconciling that with my feeling of free will, even after reading your post.
Thanks -- I think you've articulated well one of the central intuitions that makes compatibilism hard to swallow. I think the difficulty stems from the difficulty of seeing ourselves as a physical system.
I think the trick is to disconnect the discomfort over predictability from causation. Heat predictably causes water to boil, that doesn't mean the heat isn't causing the water to boil. My wife can reliably predict what food I will order off the menu, that doesn't mean I'm not choosing (it just means I have well defined preferences!)
I get that it's uncomfortable to think that it all could have been predicted, but it's not an actual possibility, and doesn't impact the fact that we're causing things.
(Not sure if that helps -- I'm trying to articulate responses to these sorts of common objections and seeing what helps with which intuitions. If this is helpful, or if it is not, let me know!)
Yes, this was helpful. I do think I have a better grasp of the argument now, even though I remain skeptical.
I am math.
Not a materialist nor a naturalist but I just LOVED this article. And, to a certain extent, I agree that scientific findings can be more fascinating than philosophical problems. Because scientific findings, I would say, make us see that questions about how reality does what it does are, even if it may not he as deep as asking what reality is as such, framed in a way that makes our minds truly see the difficulties of the question because it is not so removed from our thought patterns. Without scientific discoveries much metaphysical pondering would desensitize us to how astonishing the problems we face are, and the world is.
Either way, sorry for rambling, amazing article!
Yeah, this was really good. The “no free will” crowd makes compatibilism into a straw man, but you’ve but a little meat on his bones. Thanks.
I really appreciate that you wrote this piece. It’s a great vehicle for thinking about this topic.
I’ll just add one more comment for now. It’s probably the key place where my thinking and intuitions differ from yours. It’s where you say “I think it's pretty incontrovertible that conscious thoughts cause behavior.”
I really don’t believe that this is true. My feeling is that consciousness is an emergent phenomena of the brain’s (unfathomably complex) processing of information. I disagree with the critics that evolution would’ve eliminated consciousness in that case. Consciousness must be a necessary effect of our brain’s level of complex and powerful processing. We could not function at the level we do and not experience it. Does this make me an epiphenomenalist? So be it.
The alternative is that consciousness and conscious reasoning are free-floating phenomena independent of neurology and I find that really hard to buy.
Thanks!
It would seem a weird coincidence for us to talk about and try to describe consciousness if consciousness has no impact on our actions. To me that's a pretty strong point against epiphenomenalism
This brings to light an interesting discrepancy between the mental set in contrast to the physical (free consciousness?) and the mental conjoined with the physical (neurological consciousness?).
Also, couldn’t two LLM agents discuss consciousness?
Excellent article and really well explained.
The problem as I see it is that you can’t separate the metaphysical question from the practical question of moral responsibility. Let’s say there are wink neurons and blink neurons, the former being “reasons responsive” neurons.
What does that mean in a materialist framework? And now you come to the problem of consciousness. So compatibilism doesn't really solve the metaphysical problem people are worried about, it only brackets it as something for another discussion (just as you do in your article).
I do think compatibilism is eminently practical and admirably neat, so I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a wretched subterfuge, but it doesn’t answer the question most people are thinking about when they think of free will. Because even if you say “I” am the mathematical laws and not the wires, those laws are still determined. An algorithm is still determined. Compatibilism merely transfers the determinism from the world to our will.
I agree a lot of this comes down to consciousness!
In terms of the worry the will is determined, I don't have that worry. If I'm causing stuff, why would I care that it's "deterministic"? When I choose my favorite meal at my favorite restaurant, that's great--I get to choose it because I like it. I wouldn't want it to be indeterministic and sometimes I randomly choose something I don't like, not because I want to try something new but just because my willing is random. That doesn't sound like free will, that sounds like chaos.
I agree the problem isn’t determinism, but who or what is doing the determining. When it comes to our intuitions about the self that chooses, we’re all dualists. To align with our intuitions, we need to conclude it’s a causai sui soul determining the choice, not any kind of physical structure (which includes algorithms).
And I even think calling it an intuition isn’t strong enough, it’s an experience. And even that doesn’t capture it because we’re not talking about just any experience, but our locus of reality. I think that's what the compatibilist is really up against. And it's only in the context of philosophy where our method is to bracket certain questions, that compatibilism is accepted as a neat and tidy explanation.
But to be more modest in our goals, if it’s just explaining compatibilism so it makes sense, your article is the best presentation I’ve ever read!
I have a simple question: I know you gently touched it, but what are your general thoughts on the quantum mind?
I don't think there are good reasons to believe quantum physics is related to consciousness. Those theories aren't taken very seriously in the academic literature on consciousness, and the arguments I've seen for it (admittedly this isn't something I've looked deeply into) seem not very good, like pointing to Godel's incompleteness theorem that points to limits of formal systems--presumably the assumption the human mind doesn't have limits, which seems clearly false to me. For a deeper dive on it, this paper takes it on fairly directly: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15516709cog0000_59
I asked one of my neuroscience professors a similar question years ago and he said something very similar to you. I was wondering if there had been any developments, but after reading that paper it looks like not—which isn’t surprising when we have no means of testing such a hypothesis on the brain.
Thanks for the response!
May I respectfully inquire why you believe the mind/ a mind is with limit? These links are thoughts about others’s thoughts? Is not the best scientific approach to begin with no thoughts on potential end results? Our thoughts drive end results. Our expectations, our beliefs are never separate. It does not matter whether studies are “blind”. Energy is unified.
If we believe things have limits, we can experience them as such, not because they are inherently so, but because we are choosing them as so.
Consciousness is awareness. It is what is. Infinite, expansive, unchanging. Everything else feels superimposed, on top of. It feels this way because it is this way.
From experience: As a mind, I run into limits all the time--how many levels of recursion I can follow before losing track.
Theoretically: there is a limit to how much information can be encoded by a finite amount of matter, and brains are a finite amount of matter.
Free will: "the ability to say we are the causes of our actions in a robust enough way to ground concepts like moral responsibility".
I don’t love this definition given that it depends on the abstract notion of moral responsibility and intuitions on how justifiable it is. Seems kind of circular? It also seems closer to “libertarian” free will than most compatibilists would condone? Isn’t Dennett’s definitely more along the lines of “actions that are determined and constrained but uncoerced”? I wish in fact he had stuck to defending ‘constrained but uncoerced will’ instead of attempting to redefine ‘free will’ which for clarity’s sake should mean “intentions realized that ultimately arises free of any causal influence”. I think this is actually how most people see it and how they justify moral responsibility. It’s just that they’re probably wrong about us having it 😁
I think I have a couple more things to suggest but I’m going to reread and process your piece before doing so.
I agree there is lots of areas to further clarify in that definition! But I don't think it's particularly libertarian. Saying we're the causes of our actions is different from saying we're the ultimate, metaphysical, uncaused causes.
"intentions realized that ultimately arises free of any causal influence" -> I'm not sure about that definition. I assume there's an implicit "except from you" at the end, which brings it closer to my definition. But I think there are lots of situations where our intentions arise freely but mixed with other causal influences. If I intend to buy ice cream, this intention arising is partially caused by me knowing the existence of ice cream.
…”except from you”…
Exactly. I don’t think there is such a thing with that kind of power. My appraisal of the self is as a symbolic representation of this shifting collection of body parts, relationships, roles, expressions and a name — an avatar really.
Certainly nothing objective, fixed and independent enough to justify punishing in the cruel and inhumane way we regularly do.
I'm afraid I'm not very sympathetic to compatibilism. I see it as giving up. In its pragmatic approach, it seems to dodge the deeper question of whether causal determinism applies to consciousness. And if not, why not. The problem is that any avowed materialist must answer the question of *how* free will can arise in a universe that is functionally no different from the calculator you mentioned. (Which obviously has no free will.)
I agree our intuition of free will is meaningful. My canonical instance is the case where I've decided to have soup for dinner and am standing at my pantry trying to decide what kind of soup. Such a trivial decision seems entirely up to my putative free will. But what is the mechanism behind it? How does free will (or even consciousness) arise from matter?
My WAG is that the brain is the one non-deterministic thing the universe has created. We can say the brain is the only thing the universe created that named itself. And it seems the one thing the universe has created that becomes self-aware and tries to understand the universe. The brain appears to operate finely balanced in a region between order and chaos. We're capable of having "mixed emotions" and conflicting thoughts. I think at a high level, the myriad thoughts we have vie for our attention and in that finely balanced noise may lie the mechanism of free will.
"But what is the mechanism behind it?"
We know lots about the neural mechanisms of decision-making! There's no reason to think there needs to be something metaphysically different about those mechanisms in order to be able to meaningfully say those mechanisms, which constitute you, made the decision.
I'm not sure why you would want non-determinism in your choices--what does it being truly random rather than chaotic add?
The argument from causal determination is that those neural mechanisms are just as physically determined as the calculator. Metaphorically, given "1+1" they cannot do otherwise than output "2". True free will is the notion that, if the universe could be wound back to your decision point, you might make a different decision. (In my example, I might pick a different soup.)
In a causally determined reality, that can't happen. I always pick the same soup. Choice is an illusion, which offends our intuition, but is what the underlying physics suggests. The way out, I think, is that the brain is the one physical thing that is complex enough to be non-deterministic at its operational level, *probably* in virtue of consciousness, so understanding the mechanism of free will requires understanding consciousness. A hard problem!
"True free will is the notion that, if the universe could be wound back to your decision point, you might make a different decision."
I disagree. I think free will is being able to freely will things, for actions to arise and be caused by us. I don't particularly care if there is some random coin flip the universe does occasionally to throw off Laplace's demon--that doesn't sound like choice and it doesn't have anything to do with me.
Aren't we saying the same thing here? If we can freely will things, doesn't that imply we might choose a different soup? It's not random, it's choosing differently.
I don't think we're saying the same thing! I'm saying I think free will is about being the cause of your actions. You're saying free will is your choices being indeterminant. I'm not sure what it means for something to be indeterminant unless there is some randomness in it, and I think injecting randomness into our decision-making process takes away freedom, doesn't add to it. I don't want to sometimes choose something not because I like it or want it but because random indeterminancy.
I want you to be able to choose a soup and for that choice to come from you. I don't care if when we rewind the tape if you would do it again or not--that's not a practical possibility and the fact that we don't know if that would happen (due to quantum indeterminancy) or not seems to indicate to me it can't matter that much.
I still think we're saying the same thing. I agree choices come from us. I'm saying they are not *causally* determined by physics. But they are not indeterminate, they are determined by our consciousness.
The winding back is just a thought experiment to illustrate the potential to have made a different choice because you decided on a different soup. Put another way, it just says our decisions points aren't *fixed* by physics or immediate histories. They are truly free.
I like the idea of compatibilism. In a sense, it seems to put free will on a spectrum.
I've always liked to think about free will by drawing on unconscious behaviors manifested by unaddressed emotions and thoughts. So long as those thoughts stay unconscious, the behaviors continue to manifest, and thus people get caught in the same cycle of error - which from the outside may look like it is indeed not free will. This is the person who runs failed relationship after failed relationship a very similar way.
Some might say this person does have free will in other behaviors, but I would venture the thought that it may be possible that even at the lowest level of analysis, their behaviors can arguably be conceived as a contributor to the cyclical manifestation of their unaddressed emotional baggage dormant in their unconscious mind.
In this sense, the therapeutic process is almost seems a free will activation practice.
Thought provoking piece! thank you
I really appreciate your clear definition of free will as fundamentally intertwined with the issue of moral responsibility. I think that any version of free will that doesn’t include moral responsibility falls short of capturing what really matters in the free will debate.
That said, I disagree with a couple of the premises that you believe point to the existence of moral responsibility. I have a couple of immediate questions about the argument you laid out in this piece.
1) If responsibility is based on reasonableness, more reasonable agents would be more responsible for their actions. Under materialism reasonableness is determined. Agents cannot nondeterministically change how reasonable they are. Therefore they are not responsible for their level of responsibility.
I find this problematic because if you impute different levels of responsibility to different agents based on a deterministic variable, it seems to undermine the basic humanist principle of equality.
Do you see a way to maintain equality or is it a necessary to throw out such a principle for the sake of moral progress?
2) Is consciousness truly necessary for moral responsibility? Would a potential unconscious, rational agent such as an unconscious AGI not be responsible? If so I feel like the argument begins to look dualistic?
I tend to believe that both moral responsibility and desert are irrational due to moral luck, but your argument here is genuinely interesting.
1) This seems like a feature, not a bug! We do assign less moral responsibility based on how well people respond to rational considerations--I certainly don't hold my 3 year old as morally responsible for hitting or biting as I would an adult (but I hold him more responsible than his 1 year old brother). Similarly for adults with cognitive disabilities or mental illness. Even among the majority of adults, we treat actions taken out of passion differently than those out of cold calculation.
2) I wouldn't want to make any strong claims about consciousness being required for moral responsibility. But I think if consciousness causes actions, that's a strong case for moral responsibility because we identify with our consciousness. If you consciously did it, then you did it, so we have a stronger case for you being morally responsible
Just a quick note here that jails are full of people with cognitive disabilities and mental illness.
Interesting.
1) I love that response! I agree that the dissolution of moral responsibility is beneficial when discussing outliers. I’m interested in your thoughts about desert. Do you believe that morally responsible agents who do bad things deserve to be punished? Do responsible agents who do good things deserve to be rewarded?
2) Maybe the place where I diverge from you philosophically is on the point of consciousness. I don’t see consciousness as any different from the ordinary substance of reality. Because I think it would be foolish to ascribe moral responsibility to a tornado or an atom or a rock, I think we shouldn’t ascribe it to humans.
1) Personally I'm more inclined towards consequentialism as opposed to retribution. But I don't have especially strong views here.
2) I don't see consciousness as different from the ordinary substance of reality either! I don't ascribe anything metaphysically special to it. But I also don't ascribe anything metaphysically special to moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is something very much within the human social sphere. You might be interested in Strawson's view of compatibilism--he saw the issue of free will as really about moral responsibility, and moral responsibility really as about social attitudes. Maybe that approach will resonate with you. Here's a slidedeck that outlines the high level argument, and mentions the main book Strawson wrote on this (Freedom and Resentment) https://iweb.langara.ca/rjohns/files/2016/10/7_Strawson.pdf
1) Cool! My negative take on free will and moral responsibility is all about reward and retribution. I totally accept a moral responsibility that leads to consequentialist outcomes.
2) I appreciate the recommendation! I will check out his work.