The Ideal - William James and Other Things | Dr. Alexander Klein

What if consciousness isn’t just an inner observer watching the world go by, but an active engine designed specifically for movement and choice?

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Alexander Klein, author of Consciousness is Motor, to dismantle traditional views of the mind through the lens of philosopher and psychologist William James. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Okay, Dr. Alexander Klein, thank you for joining the show.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Now, Dr. Klein, you are the Canada Research Chair and Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Center at McMaster University. You also wrote the book Consciousness is Motor, William Jeans on Mind and Action. I want that book to be the stepping stone for this conversation, but before we get into that, let's lay down some groundwork. Alex, how may my audience know you and how did you get interested in philosophy?

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Well, uh, I got interested in philosophy, I guess, through the kind of traditional way of you know majoring in it as an undergraduate and going kind of one foot in front of the other to graduate school and and beyond. Um for me, I always had kind of a love-hate relationship with analytic philosophy, which is what my training is in. So I kind of showed up to graduate school fascinated by analytic philosophy, but also kind of frustrated by it. And William James, uh, you know, he's a bit uh he's a bit of an iconoclast, like he's a sort of scientifically driven philosopher, and in that way he's kind of in keeping with the analytic tradition. But he's just he goes against the grain in a number of ways. So I think I got attracted to James in particular, uh, because of that. You know, he's uh he's an unusual character in the tradition.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Yeah, no, absolutely. And let's let's unpack the man himself a little bit. Uh, who exactly is William James?

SPEAKER_02 1:56

So James first got his reputation actually through uh empirical psychology. So in the late 19th century, psychology and philosophy are not very clearly uh distinct from one another. You know, for centuries there had been really one academic discipline, if you can even call it that, that studies the mind, and that's philosophy. So you have people trying to do more trying to use more empirical scientific methods to study the mind. I think of people like Barclay and Descartes in the early modern era. But it's not until the late 19th century that you get a an actual laboratory, you know, rigorous discipline that emerges where people are trying to study the mind using the techniques of natural science. So James is one of the kind of founding figures of this movement in the late 19th century. He has a bit of philosophical training, but really his training is more in the sciences. He uh studied physiology, he got a medical degree, and so by about the 1870s, when he's kind of starting his professional career, he has this idea to essentially bring the science of physiology into contact with, I guess you could say, philosophy, with um issues that are are studying the mind, uh, or issues connected with the mind rather. And so he builds the world's first psychology laboratory in 1876. Uh Wilhelm Wundt the same year also had a psychology laboratory. So uh the two of them, uh, Wilhelm Wundt was in Germany, William James was in the United States at Harvard. Um, and so people usually trace the rise of a science of psychology to that period, and that's really where James gets his start.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Um he was the first to offer a psychology course in the United States, correct?

SPEAKER_02 4:15

That's right, that's right. He taught uh a graduate level course in empirical psychology, and that was one of the uh, you know, like epoch-making moments in the rise of this science. Um, he always had philosophical interests also, and philosophers know him probably more for his work in epistemology, so he's one of the founders of this movement, pragmatism, um, which we can get into if you want. Uh, and he also had some really provocative work on religion. So he did a bunch of different things, but he came out of this moment in the 1870s and 80s where uh he's trying to help build this new science of mind.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Yeah. No, I actually would like to double-click on pragmatism. Actually, I had a conversation uh recently with Dr. Lodell McWarder, and we we kind of touched on the subject for a little bit. A lot of the people she reads are would consider themselves pragmatists. What do you mean by pragmatism?

SPEAKER_02 5:20

Well, let me start with what I think most people mean by pragmatism, uh, just to orient listeners, and and then I maybe we'll modify that a little bit. I think people usually think of uh uh very um they think of a particular theory of truth when they think of pragmatism. So pragmatists are supposed to have thought that true ideas are ideas that are useful in some way. Uh this is not entirely false, right? This is definitely the kind of view they would propose. So people like James especially tended to think of thoughts or ideas as instruments, right? And if you think of a thought as an instrument, you're it's natural to think of truth in terms of utility. So I make an analogy. Um a screwdriver, like a a nice sharp screwdriver that drives screws really well. That's a that's a tool that we're gonna assess in a positive way. We're gonna say it's a good tool if it's fulfilling its function, if it's if it's useful to us. Traditional accounts of truth did not think about ideas as instruments. So probably the most typical theory before the pragmatists came along was a correspondence theory of truth. So it just said that an idea is like a picture. So my idea of my kitchen is somehow a depiction of the kitchen. And on this traditional view, we'd say that the idea is true of the kitchen, just in case it copies or matches in some way the thing that it depicts. So it's very different to think about ideas as instruments rather than, I don't know, reflections of the world. And it's this kind of instrumental approach to ideas that pragmatists are connected with, right? And in particular, it's this assessment of truth, right? Truth is just in ideas being practically useful for something I want to undertake, right? So my idea of the kitchen, if you're a pragmatist, is gonna be true just to the extent that it helps me do stuff in the kitchen, right? If I want to like go to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, the uh the idea is true just in case it helps me actually go there, find the coffee, and so on.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah, one of my biggest gripes with people who criticize consequentialism is that that I I feel like they're often misinterpreting it or not getting the full picture. So I I want you to call me out if I'm doing that with pragmatism. But is it true to say the a pragmatist would say we we never really come in contact with naked truth? We we always find truth within our current conversation, and it's it's always a matter of kind of interpretation and and how useful something is to determine whether or not it's true. Am I getting that correct?

SPEAKER_02 8:36

This is where it's hard to talk about pragmatism generally, because we think of James as one of the three classic figures in this tradition, one of the three main founders. The others are Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey. Um, but pragmatism has had a long life after these characters were around. James died in 1910. Um, but by the late 20th century, you see a number of people reviving certain pieces of the old pragmatist tradition. Uh I think of Richard Rorty as having, I think, the kind of view that you're gesturing at, right? That truth always involves interpretation in some way. Um, I guess I would resist that a little bit with James, just because, you know, modern philosophy of language, uh, modern philosoph, sorry, modern analytic philosophy is really has been very focused on the analysis of language, right? We talk about the linguistic turn in philosophy where metaphysical problems, epistemological problems got transformed into problems about how to interpret language. I think people like Richard Rorty today tries to take classic pragmatism and sort of translate it into this linguistic way of doing philosophy, which was very popular in the 1970s when he came around. Um, I try to resist too quickly running together the kind of old stuff that I work on with these newer forms of pragmatism. James was not thinking about philosophy in terms of language. That's just not, you know, he's coming out of psychology. He's thinking about mental states and, you know, their role in actual animal organism, right? Like that's a very different way of thinking about the mind than somebody who says, oh, we have to start with language, and language always involves interpretation. Um, so yeah, there's definitely pragmatists who go in that direction, but I think James kind of predates that.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's it's a very interesting direction to go into to always find truth nested in our human languages, right? That seems like a very inconvenient way to talk about truth. But leaving pragmatism aside, I had mentioned in my introduction, you know, you're director of the Bertrand Russell Research Center. James was also friends with Bertrand Russell, that's correct.

SPEAKER_02 11:21

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

They were the relationship.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

Many philosophers think of Russell as an archenemy of James because Russell published some very widely read criticisms of James's theory of truth. So Russell really did not like the idea that truth is has to be understood in some kind of instrumental way, and published some major objections to that view. However, as you just mentioned, James and Russell were friends going back to at least the 1890s. So Russell's first wife was American. And when Russell was a student in the 1890s, he and his wife had visited the United States, and in fact, they stayed for several days with the James family. So Burton Russell, as a as a very young man, already was intimate enough with William James that he stayed in his house. Um they kept in touch over the next couple of decades. Russell, uh, you know, at the time James died in 1910, Russell was still very critical of the pragmatist theory of truth. Uh James had also developed a metaphysical position, which is now uh called neutral monism. And this is uh this gets a bit uh technical, but basically it's a theory of the relationship between mental states and physical things that basically says that the world is somehow composed of one basic kind of stuff that's metaphysically neutral between being physical and mental. This gets us into metaphysics, which I'll mostly leave to one side, but just to say about the relationship with Russell and James. Russell was a sort of staunch critic of that position as well, until he wasn't. By the end of the 19 teens, Russell actually adopted the position and decided: no, this is the position we need to develop and run with. By the late 1920s, Russell even defended uh what he himself called a kind of pragmatism about knowledge. This is a little bit different from a theory of truth, but closely related. And so, yeah, Russell and James, despite this usual view that they're, you know, arch enemies, they they actually have quite a convergence of views. And I would just say one last thing quickly. Russell was very involved in pacifist and progressive politics in his day. You may know that Russell was jailed during World War I for his opposition to British involvement in the war. Um, he published pacifist writing. James also had published some very influential pacifist works that Russell greatly admired. So, in addition to there being this kind of conversation on epistemology and philosophy of mind, you also get an important background between the two coming out of their politics, their shared pacifism. Um, they both were internationalists, they both confronted nationalism in their own country in various ways. So there's quite a lot, it's quite a complicated and interesting relationship.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Yeah. Yeah, and you had mentioned the neutral monism. I always thought that was kind of an interesting topic, and it's kind of hard to wrap your brain around. I think the analogy that comes that the mind first is, I guess, kind of like a computer. So like you have the hardware and the software, they're not the same things, but they're still part of the same electrical processes. So I think the modernist would say, you know, mind and matters is somewhat like distinguishing hardware and software. Are you familiar with that analogy?

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Yeah, so that kind of mind, that sort of hardware-software analogy has often been defended by functionalists in philosophy of mind, right? People who want to define particular types of mental states in terms of a functional role they might be playing, right? And and so just like a computer program functions to, I don't know, take certain inputs and give certain outputs, functionalists in philosophy of mind think of mental states that way, right? So maybe pain is going to be defined in terms of, I don't know, damage to the body as a kind of input, and maybe the output is, I don't know, avoidance behavior or something like that. Um, and I think you're right to see neutral monism as developing a kind of functionalism, except for them it's a functionalism that's gonna differentiate all conscious mentality whatsoever from sort of bare physical states. But it's definitely a kind of functional attitude, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

Okay, let's start to touch upon the book a little bit. Um, but let's let's lay down some terms for the audience members who may not be completely familiar. Um, so the book is consciousness is motor, uh, William Jane's on mind and action. What do you mean by consciousness?

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Oh man, you're kidding me. I know that's a loaded term. It's in the title, so fair enough. Um so uh right. People in my generation in philosophy, you know, I was an undergraduate in the 90s, graduate school in the 2000s. We all came up in this world when you you'd already had a like a revival of interest in consciousness. And there's a certain way of thinking about consciousness today that kind of emerged at that time. Um even though the book is historical, I do take some time just to try to relate James's views on consciousness to today's kind of conceptual way of cutting up this idea, just because I think a lot of philosophers will read older materials, and it's easy to assume that they meant by consciousness more or less what we mean by consciousness. So um let me just start with a distinction that people make today. Um, a very common distinction is well, there's the way an experience feels, but then there's also the kind of functional role that experience might play in the body. So some people think that uh I I don't know if you've heard of these inverted qualia thought experiments. It's kind of a mouthful, but um just maybe for your listeners, like the idea here is to say, look, uh, you know, the the character of red that I see when I look at a red ripe tomato, in theory, it seems like that character of color experience could actually match what you see when you look at like a green pea. As long as our kind of visual experiences were systematically arranged in the same way, right? So as long as I'm disposed to react to red ripe tomatoes the same way all the time, it doesn't seem like there's anything stopping my kind of particular color experiences from really not matching on to what anybody else might experience. So philosophers have used thought experiments like this, so-called inverted qualia thought experiments, right? Scenarios where we imagine that my experience of red is like your experience of green and your experience of red is like mine of green. These inverted qualia thought experiments are supposed to motivate the idea that consciousness has a kind of character to it, which is in some way independent of its role in making me do anything. Right?

SPEAKER_00 19:39

So the And the punchline, and the punch it's hard not to cut you off, but that for the audience, the punchline to this thought experiment is that you know physical facts may not completely determine conscious experience.

SPEAKER_02 19:51

Exactly. And function not just physical facts, but functional facts. This is a kind of distinction that was used early on to cut against people who thought of consciousness in a functional way, right? Because if this kind of thought experiment is coherent, then it seems like you have to say that the functional character of my experience of red has to be distinguished in some fundamental way from the actual experiential character. So we're supposed to, like, I kind of grew up in a time when we're supposed to really divide up the the qualitative character of an experience, which is not defined in a functional way, from the actual functional role an experience plays. Right? Nowadays, philosophers say, oh, what is consciousness? Well, oftentimes they associate it specifically with this kind of qualitative character of experience that in theory could change radically without changing behavior. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 20:55

Yeah, no, it does. But what would you say to uh, you know, I I think a lot of physicalists would they have problems with this type of thought experiment. And they would say that not they say we probably would say it's not possible. Like every color experience is connected to, you know, associations in your brain, memories, emotions. If there truly were like let's say the red and green were swapped uh for the purposes of the thought experiment, those connections, your your memories, emotions, and relationships, those will also be changed as well. And eventually those differences in the brain would emerge.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

Well, so first of all, I James himself, I think, does not and cannot accept this distinction either. Um you're giving uh kind of physicalist reasons that uh, or maybe I should say, reasons a physicalist philosopher today might resist the distinction. Um part of the book is devoted to explaining why James on biological grounds or evolutionary. Grounds, I think, would have to resist this distinction. So if I can just kind of reframe the question a little bit, like the the biological worry about this distinction that I think flows from James's philosophy goes something like this It says, look, for any trait to be selected, like by natural selection in evolutionary history, that trait has to have some kind of causal power. Like it has to be able to improve the creature's reproductive success in some way, otherwise it can't be selected. Like that's how natural selection works. Survival of the fittest. A trait that makes absolutely no causal difference to any creature's behavior, it cannot in principle be selected. It would be invisible to natural selection. And so James has this argument that says, you know, if we're gonna understand consciousness as a natural trait that evolved, he thinks, for reasons I get into in the book, that it it sure looks like a trait that is the product of natural selection. And if you accept that, then it it becomes very hard to draw a sharp line between the character of experience and the functional role it plays in experience. So that would be his kind of way to resist this distinction. And I suppose this was all meant as a long-winded way to explain what consciousness means for James. Um, but we could just say something like, look, it's it's definitely a term that refers to some kind of experience with qualitative character. So he doesn't like, you know, deny that we're conscious or say that, well, consciousness is nothing but some kind of functional role. No, consciousness is some kind of, you know, there's a light on, there's a there's a distinctive feel, like there's some kind of qualitative experience. But because he's thinking in this kind of post-Darwinian evolutionary way, he thinks that the character of experience always has as some kind of essential feature, a physical, functional role. So it feels good to eat food when I'm hungry for James. Not just by accident, you know, not just like it's not just like a weird coincidence that putting food in my belly feels great when I'm hungry. Like that good feeling, he thinks, was shaped by natural selection to go along with a certain kind of behavior that is evolutionarily helpful for us, right? Like, if we did not tend to eat when we were hungry, we would probably die off pretty quickly. So, what is consciousness? It's uh it's some kind of mental state that feels like something, but that's also inherently connected to bodily change.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Yeah. Yeah, it really seems as though the thesis of your book is, you know, James was not asking what is consciousness made of. He's asking why did it evolve and what does it do? And why does it exist to help us uh act in the world?

SPEAKER_02 25:20

100%. That's exactly right. He he one of my challenges in writing the book is, you know, I felt like so many philosophers today are really hung up on the metaphysical questions. What is consciousness? How could it arise in the physical world? How could a physical thing change something seemingly ineffable, like a like a conscious state? Those are all interesting questions, and indeed, as I mentioned earlier, they're questions that James later in his life would would address. But his more psychological work on consciousness, just as you say, it was really focused on understanding consciousness as some kind of trait that is that is doing something in animal bodies, you know, like animals evolve, presumably not just humans, but lots of animals evolve to have some kind of qualitative experience. He's trying to explain that experience in the sense of identifying what functional role it might be playing. So it's not the only thing you could say, you know, if you there are other sort of explanatory questions about consciousness, but yeah, James's focus is kind of the evolutionary one. What role did it evolve to play, and what role does it actually play now in the kind of overall physiological economy of any conscious creature?

SPEAKER_00 26:44

And and what methods did James use to arrive at his conclusions about consciousness?

SPEAKER_02 26:51

Yeah. So again, I I always start with the character the caricature of James. The caricature of James is that he essentially used introspective description as his most important tool. James is a wonderful writer, especially for a scientist. I mean there's lovely passages all throughout his m psychological writing, you know, where he describes experience in these very evocative, uh really just beautiful, observant terms. And so that's certainly one Yeah, the stream of consciousness, that phrase we owe to James. Like he's not the only one who's used that phrase, but it seems that he's the one that really kind of put that expression on the map. The stream of consciousness, the uh philosophers may know the expression the specious present. This is a term used to describe the this idea that the our experience of what is present seems to actually extend in time some way, right? So if I'm like listening to a melody, what I experience as present in the melody is not just a like a an instant, but it's a it's a couple of seconds, right? Where that all sort of feels present. But again, that this terminology that he coins and popularizes, he's really known for that. So introspective description for sure is part of his methodology. Um, but I think one of the big projects of this book is to point out that he also makes a great deal of use of observational results from science. So this means not only uh psychophysical experiments, which were very popular at the time, psychophysical experiments are tests of the connection between often the intensity of an experience with some kind of stimulus. So, you know, you might give somebody an increasing series of weights, put them in their hand, and ask the person to assign a number to their experience of heaviness. These kind of these are psychophysical experiments that chart some kind of systematic relationship between stimuli and actual experiences. He relies on some of that sort of material, but I think what philosophers have not appreciated up to this point is is how much animal experimentation he relies on as well.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

So there's also uh experiments are pretty controversial.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Yeah, well, I think they're pretty gruesome, right? When we now look back at some of these experiments, we are uh not super excited because they're yeah, they're often very rough experiments performed on live animals. Um, there's all kinds of moral moral concerns that crop up for this kind of experimentation. Actually, those worries were um very much a part of the conversation at that time as well. It's it's not just that we look back on this and worry about it. Like at the time, these experiments were controversial. Um, but at any rate, there's a good deal of animal experimentation uh in the principles of psychology, his main psychological work. So that's a really important method. Um, and there's also uh a good deal of clinical observation as well. So, like reports from around the world of patients that have different kinds of neurological disorders. That was also a source of uh important evidence for James in thinking about conscious mental states, right? How you know when the brain is altered in this way or that way, what is the effect on experience? So, really, there's I think much more objective, if you can call it that, evidence in his psychological writing than philosophers have tended to think, right? There's animal experimentation, clinical results, and and so on.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

Yeah, uh double-click on that a little bit. What would you say is the biggest misconception people have about James and his theories on uh consciousness?

SPEAKER_02 31:10

Well, I think I I would say it's this idea that he is just a so-called introspective psychologist. Um, you know, that is to say, a psychologist that really thoughtful psychology began and ended with a description of one's own experience. Um I use a metaphor in the book to describe the relationship between the descriptions of experience that James is most known for, and the sort of lesser-known uh objective evidence like the clinical studies and the animal experiments. So the metaphor that I use is um warp and weft in a in a cloth. So a weaver weaves a cloth by laying down what are called warp threads. This sort of gives the the the cloth its original structure. But then the weft yarns are what you actually see when you're looking at the cloth, right? They're the the colorful yarns that are woven over and under the kind of structural pieces on the, you know, that are at the foundation. Um, and so I use this as an analogy, right, to say that there's a kind of basic structure that um sets up the whole psychological enterprise for James. And that structure is really given by objective, kind of third-person evidence, right? Again, evidence from animal experimentation and clinical observation. The the introspective description is is important. It gives uh, you know, it's it's James also appeals to it in fleshing out his theories about consciousness, about particular aspects of consciousness. But again, I I think that philosophers have sort of missed the deeper import of James's work on mind because they haven't paid attention to the kind of scientific objective evidence that it's really staked on.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

Mm-hmm. Yeah. But there is also no doubt that introspection is it's such a useful tool for just living, just navigating a good life. Being able to be aware of what you're paying attention to and how that affects your experience is so vital. And once people unlock that tool and and and recognize how powerful introspection could be, um, it really does open, you know, many doors in one's life.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

Absolutely. Yeah. I think James was uh Yeah, would have appreciated the comment and and agreed with it. Yeah, he's he he's somebody who he had a knack for paying attention to his own experience. He had a knack for describing that experience to others. Um so yeah, I think he would have been on board with that idea.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

Yeah. Yeah, James also wrote that um attention is taking possession of one object while withdrawing from others. Why did he think attention is so key to consciousness?

SPEAKER_02 34:09

Well, um that is a good question. So maybe it helps to get into his uh kind of evolutionary view of what consciousness is for, um, because I think that it can help us make sense of why he would see attention as playing an important role. So James has a hypothesis about the role of consciousness, which goes like this: it says, look, if you go back into like deep evolutionary history, right, creatures are getting, you know, as we draw away from ourselves back deeper and deeper into time, creatures are presumably getting, on the whole, simpler and simpler in terms of their physiological structure. Once you get organisms that have a nervous system, and once that nervous system grows to a certain degree of complexity, James thinks that you're gonna get a kind of trade-off problem, right? The trade-off is gonna go something like this: a creature that has a really complex nervous system is gonna be one that's gonna be sensitive to lots of different kinds of stimuli. So if you just think of the human case, right, we can perceive things by sight, by hearing, smell, touch, you know, so on. We've got these different sense modalities, we can react to the the environment around us on the basis of any one of them. James thinks that as creatures grow more and more complex, if they were just set up to be sort of like pure machines, right? Just reacting to each stimulus in some sort of predetermined mechanistic way, he thinks that there's gonna be a cost. And that cost would be behavioral instability, right? Like, if I just reacted reflexively to every little movement in my visual field, I'm probably not gonna be able to sit in one place and have a conversation and do much of anything, right? If every time, like there's motion in the periphery of my visual field, I, you know, change my gaze or react or move or something, I'm gonna become a very unstable kind of creature from a behavioral perspective. So essentially James's idea, his hypothesis, which he tries to bear out through scientific evidence and so on, is that consciousness is a is a behavior regulator. Right? It's some kind of trait that we have to help us smooth out our behavior so we don't have to react in a mechanical reflexive way to every single change of stimulus. So if you think of consciousness as playing some kind of behavior regulating role, it would make sense that attention is gonna end up being an important part of it. Right? Because essentially, if I am gonna be a creature that does not react reflexively to every movement in the visual field, to stick with that example, I need to be able to pay attention to the things that really do matter around me, right? So I'm talking to you right now. I need to be able to pay attention to, let's say, the auditory signal in my headphones. Not that we evolved for podcasting, but you get the idea, right? I need to be able to pay attention to what you're saying and to ignore other things that are going on around me. I need to be able to ignore the fan noise in my room. I hope you you can't hear that, but I do, right? I need to be able to ignore all kinds of things. Right. We'll get we'll get the comments later. I need to be able to attend to something that matters and ignore everything else, right? And that's that makes a lot of sense if you think of consciousness as playing some kind of behavior-regulating role as James does.

SPEAKER_00 38:18

I asked this question to Dr. McWarder, and I'm gonna ask it to you because I think it's undoubtedly tied to consciousness. How do you think about free will?

SPEAKER_02 38:30

Well, uh I'm gonna try to answer on James's behalf for a second, and I because my, you know, I j the the project of the book is to try to excavate James's way of thinking of these issues. So I actually don't get into free will too much in the book, uh, except to say that James takes what might be kind of a surprising line on free will. So he himself, in his own more purely philosophical writing, defends free will. But he's very careful to say that his psychological account of consciousness and his account of action, which is very closely connected to the theory of consciousness, that both of those views are compatible with either believing in free will or not believing in free will. So he thinks that, look, it could be the case that we actually are not in some metaphysically strong sense free to do otherwise, and and yet consciousness could still be acting as some kind of behavior regulator, right? Think about human-fabricated machines, right? I'm no car mechanic, but I believe that like car engines have regulators, right? They have mechanical um uh uh what tools, mechanical pieces whose job it is to regulate the power output so that the engine can operate properly. James seems to think that it's at least possible that we don't really have free will, that we we're no more free than a car is, but that consciousness still plays some kind of regulating role. So he doesn't think that his own psychological theories force us one way or the other, even though in his heart of hearts, right, he he sort of personally believed in free will.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

And how about you, uh, Dr. Klein? What do what do you what are your thoughts on this?

SPEAKER_02 40:44

Well, I personally find it hard to move through the world and not take my own experiences of freedom seriously. Like denying free will. I get the arguments, I get the moves, but it's a kind of uh you have to be really motivated by let's say logical arguments, metaphysical arguments, in order to really come across uh, you know, to really give up on this feeling that we are free. I, like I assume most everybody, sure feel as though I am making decisions in real time and that, you know, when I choose to do one thing, oftentimes I could have chosen something else. To me, that kind of experience just holds more evidential weight, right? In in terms of my own beliefs. It's I just find it more convincing than just about any argument you can give me. So I don't know, in some ways it's not a very philosophical response, but you know, you you you hang around philosophers long enough and you realize, man, people can make super clever arguments about lots of seemingly absurd ideas, right? Any idea under the sun, some philosopher can come along and give you a great, logically airtight argument, and you can spend your life trying to figure out, oh, is there something wrong with this argument? What is, you know. Um, I I don't really work on free will, but that's sort of my attitude about free will, right? Is that sure, there's great arguments for, you know, why we couldn't possibly have free will. Um but you know, if I'm not gonna spend a lifetime threshing through those arguments, I just kind of choose to, I choose to believe my own experience. Um, in fact, there's a a very famous, well, I don't know, very famous, there's a a little bit famous line from a diary entry of William James's, where James had been in a personal crisis. This is in the early 1870s. So he's he's coming out of school, he's dealing with a lot of what we would call depression today. Um, and he himself was more interested in free will at the time. Um, but there's this famous diary entry that says something like, Hey, today I think I hit rock bottom, like it was a terrible day. But he kind of resolves to, I don't know, pull himself back up and and and get through this bout of depression. But the thing that he finds inspiring is this philosopher, Charles Renouvier, a French philosopher of the day. He finds this Renewarian, I'm not sure the adjective form, this uh this view of free will coming from Charles Renouvier. Um, that's the thing that he finds really inspiring. And so the line from the diary entry is Um My first act of free will shall be to believe in free. Free will. And I sort of it sort of resonates with me, right? It that's not an argument, right? Like that is not that line is not uh you're not gonna publish a a paper in a philosophy journal like teasing out that argument. It's not an argument, but it's a kind of description of a of an attitude that I definitely resonate with, right? An attitude that sort of says, um, I'm gonna take my experience here, I'm gonna accept the the what my experience testifies here, right? Which is that I'm free and I can make choices. Uh so that's I know that's my attitude.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Yeah, I'm I'm I'm gonna linger on this topic just for a little bit longer. I think I'm getting the sense maybe you, like my uh family and friends, might want to change the topic, but that's the privilege of being the host. I get to decide where the conversation goes. I'm gonna ask you w what would be the negative consequences for if you just if you recognize that there wasn't this thing called free will, and you you recognize instead that yeah, you have a life, you have an experience, and even if you're not the author of your thoughts and uh motivations, and you you recognize that your preferences are just the consequences of you know everything that came before you and your genes and your DNA and so on and so forth, what will be the consequences of that? How would that actually change your life? You still have a life to live, even if you're not, you know, the sole author of you know everything in your mind or everything that you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 45:36

Yeah, so I think philosophers usually worry about responsibility here, right? That if I'm not really free, then I can't be responsible for my actions, right? If I murder somebody or, you know, whatever, well, if I didn't make the choice to do it, like then I can't be responsible for that action in a moral sense, in a legal sense.

SPEAKER_00 45:56

There's not there's not responsibility, but there's still consequences, correct? So if someone were to go on the rampage, yeah, they didn't create their DNA, they didn't create their brain chemistry, but we still need to protect society. So the consequences of doing such a thing, uh however much it was your fault or not, you know, you still go to prison, right?

SPEAKER_02 46:17

Sure. And and there's, you know, again, very smart philosophers who will try to defend certain kinds of consequences, even in the light of you know, this possibility that we could not be free. Right. So people will say, look, society needs to quarantine people who go on a rampage or do terrible things, right? It's not that we're punishing you because we think you could have done otherwise, but like, you know, if we don't believe in free will, we could still sort of meet out consequences. But I I put that out there just to say that that's kind of not my you had asked me, you know, what difference does it make if we accept free will or not? And I that kind of issue is actually not uh maybe for me the main motivating factor. For me, the issue is alienation. Like it's an experiential thing. What would it what would it be if I went through my life and really internalized the idea that my experiences, uh sorry, that my decisions are in some sense not really mine. Like I think that would involve a deep sense of alienation from well, from my own experiences, and maybe even from the people around me. Like, what would that be like to I don't know, do something nice for your mother on Mother's Day, right? But then to I don't know, really internalize the idea that like I didn't uh that wasn't me that did it. You know, that was that was determined for all of time. I that's a very to me if I'm really taking that, you know, no free will position seriously, that's just a very sort of self-alienated way to run through the world. And it's it and I I think I would also feel alienated from the people around me as well. Like my connection to the people around me in in my experience fundamentally goes through a sense that I make choices with them, about them, that that matter. But I you can't say that if you don't think we have free will. Like, no, it's all just you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:29

It's certainly self-destroying, and but I think there's still a lot of power to that, right? Once you recognize that there really is no self, that there is no ego, you recognize that everything kind of just comes down to luck. So yeah, you can't take credit for really anything that you've done. You really were just placed in a situation and things are happening to you, and that leads from one thing to the next to the next. But that same that same token goes for you know, people who were born in sub-Saharan Africa or Afghanistan, and um you have compassion for these people because they really are just placed and given the life that they're given, right? So it cuts both ways, and I don't think that it necessarily, you know, destroys uh you know, the connection that you might have for your loved ones, because actually what it does in my brain is that it extends compassion to not only your loved ones, but for literally every conscious being, because every conscious being has the same circumstance that you have, and they only have that through uh not for anything that they've done, but through sheer luck. I mean, what's your response to that?

SPEAKER_02 49:39

Yeah, but I think you can believe in free will and also accept that luck plays a tremendous role in people's lives and shaping people's lives, where you're born, who you're born to, all these factors that you cite. I think somebody who accepts free will can still say, uh, you know, those things are absolutely massive. And they could still think that um, you know, most of what happens to you in your life is affected by things that you have no control over that are luck. And and I think I would I would say something like that myself.

SPEAKER_00 50:14

Um but when was that when does that turn off? When does it become the thing that you're not in control of versus the thing that you are in control of? Because to me, it if you just always take that one step back, whatever you know you say that you're in control of is again the product of something that you had no control over.

SPEAKER_02 50:32

Yeah, I would say an intentional action. Like when I do something on purpose, that's where that's where free will kicks in.

SPEAKER_00 50:44

So you feel like your intentional actions step outside of what came before it? Like the it's it does not just merely a cause of a state in your brain that you know is the product of something that you had no control over, or you're stepping outside of the physics of things where you know you you're now doing something that really had, you know. I I I just I think you kind of get what I'm getting at. I I feel as though is you either what you're doing had a cause or it didn't. And if it had a cause, then you were in control of that. If it doesn't have a cause, then that's not free will either.

SPEAKER_02 51:16

Sure. So I wouldn't necessarily separate a free choice from something happening in the brain. Right? It could be that when I freely decide to raise my hand or whatever, that in some sense that process is like completely coextensive with some physical neurological process. And yet you could have an account of free will according to which physical processes like brain and neurological processes can have it, can exhibit it. So that's one thing. I don't think just, you know, if you are inclined towards being a physicalist in some way that you can't have free will, I think you you can still have free will. Look, uh, one way of thinking about intentional action is to say, hey, look, when I intentionally raise my hand, what's going on is I've got some kind of prior mental state that I'm gonna count as an intention, right? I intend to raise my hand. What does that mean? It means I, I don't know, I want to raise my hand, and I believe that I'm able to do so by flexing my muscles in a certain way, right? A lot of people will say, look, intentional action in some deep way involves this kind of uh intention causing a physical movement. And yet, you know, it's a sort of common observation that just having an intention doesn't seem to fully determine our actions. I can intend to raise my hand and then not raise it, right? I can intend to start grading student papers without actually starting to do it. It seems like there's some kind of volitional moment that has to kick in there. And, you know, what exactly is involved there is I mean, that's that's the where the free will kicks in. How does it kick in? You know, it's it's very hard to say. But I so I think, you know, a lot of people who don't believe in free will will say, oh, well, your intentions themselves, right? Your desire to raise your hand, your belief that you can do it, whatever. Maybe that was in some way causally determined by, I don't know, your personal biography. But my point is that even when we fully flesh out intentions, it doesn't quite seem to be enough to get us into a full-on intentional action. Uh, what do you need? Some kind of agent's input. The agent has to make some kind of contribution. I don't, you know, nobody can tell you what is that contribution, how does that work, how does that fit into the kind of natural world we think we live in. Nobody unfortunately can tell you that, but um, but that's the view, right? Is that the agent has to make a contribution to some actions, and in particular to those actions that we think of as really robustly intentional. And that's that's where I would kind of put agency, put free will into the picture.

SPEAKER_00 54:23

Yeah, no, it's absolutely fascinating, Steph. And I I love having the conversation. Let's pivot back to the book a little bit. Have you had any critiques on your interpretation of James the book at all?

SPEAKER_02 54:34

Yeah, uh, there's a couple of critiques that are that are out there. Uh, we have uh like an author meets critics session coming right now where there's you know a couple different philosophers have sort of pressed me on a few issues. Um maybe one of them I can mention is uh a criticism of the idea, well, of the role that I think representation plays in James's philosophy of mind. So let's see how to kind of put this into a. Okay. So there's a whole strain of philosophy of mind today that is very suspicious of the idea of a representation. Um, if you think back to our the earlier part of our conversation where we were talking about truth, right, where the old school view was that, you know, true ideas are like pictures, they represent states of affairs, and they're true just in case they match, right? Or correctly picture that state of affairs. Um a lot of philosophers have grown weary of this kind of way of thinking of the mind, and they have tried to do philosophy of mind. Indeed, they've tried to do all of cognitive science without the idea of representation. So, you know, that the the I the thought is to sort of fully embody mental states in such a way that mentality itself becomes um in no way separable from just action, from bodily action. So people may have heard of like embodied views of mind. This is the sort of thing I have in that I'm gesturing at here. Well, embodied approaches to mind, they really do not like the idea of representation, right? My idea of the kitchen does not represent the kitchen. It just what? It's some kind of instrument that helps me navigate down to the kitchen. You can see why somebody like James would appear to be an ancestor of that tradition. And maybe in some ways he has inspired a part of this tradition. However, uh the idea of representation ends up being quite central to James' views on consciousness. And at least on my reading of James, and that's been the criticism, right? Is to say, oh come on, you know, James, James is our guy, right? He's this like this early embodied theorist, like surely, you know, if he's talking about representation, this has to just be disposable, right? So that's the criticism, is to say, hey, James is not this like old school correspondence theory. Like, there must be some something wrong with your reading of James if you're telling me that, you know, he's relying on representations. So that's the criticism. Um The knocking it down part, I guess, goes like this. So the place that I think representation is crucial for James is in his theory of action. I said earlier that James thinks of consciousness as some sort of adaptation for regulating behavior, right? It's it's a trait that arose in evolutionary history to allow us to more prudently control our behavior. Right? We're not just gonna go off half-cocked every time we see, hear, feel, smell something, right? We can regulate our behavior because we're conscious. Well, how does that work? It it turns out James has a quite sophisticated story about how exactly consciousness enables more prudent action. And the story involves a lot of anticipation, right? So if we go back to this example of raising my hand, James has a this detailed story about how exactly the agent manages to intentionally do something like that, right? How do I manage to intentionally raise my hand? He's got a story. And the story basically goes like this. He thinks that we hatch a goal by by forming an expectation. So I form some kind of expectation in particular of what it would feel like to execute this action. So how do I raise my hand? I think about what it should feel like to have my hand up in the air, and he thinks that we are hardwired as a kind of brute psychological matter to enact the actions that we represent to ourselves. Right? So when I think of what it feels like to raise my hand, all other things being equal, I will tend to just physically raise my hand. That's in a nutshell the story about intentional action. But if you notice the thought, the the expectation here is a representation. It's a representation of a an expected kinesthetic feeling, right? An expected feeling of my body being in a particular attitude or going through a particular motion. I don't see how to make sense of that story if you have no kind of representation in the model. Right? So to me, representations play a very crucial role. For James, it's the the really important thing is representations of expected future states. Right? It's a bit different than maybe an old school approach that just says, oh, you know, when I see the cup, uh, what's happening is I've got an idea that resembles this physical thing in some way. It's that's it's questionable whether that kind of representation is in James. But I think uh representations of future bodily states are absolutely central to his story. So, you know, maybe some clever person can sort of update the Jamesian model and and somehow purge those representations from the picture, but I don't he certainly did not do that, right? He he had representations on on my reading playing a really important role.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:18

Dr. Klein, uh, where can people find the book? And is there anything else you want to plug before we leave?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:24

So the book is out from Oxford University Press. Um you know, these academic books uh unfortunately can be expensive. The best way to find it is if you have access to uh, you know, an academic library. You can get the book on, you know, the big online retailers. Um they I I think it's you know, I think it's still priced at like 60 bucks or 70 bucks or something like that now. Uh these academic books, unfortunately, are not cheap, but uh you can order it online. You can find it in an academic library or uh go to a local uh bookseller that has academic books.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:05

In my opinion, well worth the price. Thank you. Um Dr. Klein, thank you for joining me today.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:10

Thank you so much. This has been fun.