Psychoneural Pairs

Letters

Vol. 10 No. 11 · 2 June 1988

From Ted Honderich

None ever wished it longer, said Johnson of Paradise Lost, thereby making us forget what else he said of it. Professor Sir Alfred Ayer maybe wished shorter my A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes (LRB, 19 May). Still, he approves it for a singularity or two, and it is lovely to have the approval of someone who has never been in much danger of the fulsome. I reply with gratitude, then, but reply I do, in something like his own spirit of independence, since he has not convinced me of anything.

His principal objection is to what he certainly over-describes as the central feature of my book, part of my solution to the mind-brain problem, the problem of the relation of a mental to a simultaneous neural event. What I say is taken to depend on my view of causation. That view, in sum, is that an effect is an event preceded by a set of things – a causal circumstance – such that the event would still have followed whatever else had been happening in addition to the causal circumstance and the event.

Professor Ayer’s objection has the premise that we typically do not or cannot specify a whole causal circumstance for an effect. Rather, we may think of something or other prior to the effect such that if certain things had been happening in addition to it, the effect would not have occurred. When the match lights, we may think of the striking and a bit more, and leave out the absence of a gust of wind. I agree with all that, and talk a lot about it in the book. I do not at all agree that it supports the conclusion he tries to draw from it, which is that we do not understand effects to be events related in the given way to antecedents, that we do not have that conception of them. It plainly doesn’t follow. Further, anyone who supposes we do not take effects to be related in the given way to antecedents is on the way to supposing we take them to be a kind of mystery, which exactly we do not.

Professor Ayer has therefore found no vital flaw in my mind-brain solution. That solution, by the way, as I am reassured to report, does not contain the second part of a thought he assigns to it. That is the thought ‘that a mental event is necessary to the occurrence of the simultaneous neural event: in other words, the mental event would not happen in the absence of its neural partner.’ Other words needed, dear Freddie, and a correction, too, to something similar in your fifth paragraph.

In dealing with the third and culminating part of my book, which he likes best and to which he gives least attention, Professor Ayer does not shed a clear and consistent light. He gives no leg up to that Common Reader he mentions earlier. He says that I agree ‘with Hobbes and Locke that a person can properly be said to be acting freely when he is not prevented by external or internal constraints from doing what he chooses.’ That report, since absence of constraint is of course compatible with determinism, makes me sound like yet one more Compatibilist, one more member of what must surely be a wearied philosophical tradition, whose burden is that determinism and freedom are logically consistent.

In fact, it is exactly as true or false that I agree with Kant and with, say, Bradley and Sartre, all of them of the opposed Incompatibilist tradition, that a person can properly be said to be acting freely when he is not constrained, and also has originated the action. Further, I do not, in the sense Professor Ayer says, reject all concepts of origination or Free Will, allow them no meaning. I don’t come close to thinking them insignificant in our lives either – absolutely the contrary – nor suppose that determinism poses no threat to rationality. In a way it does.

Professor Ayer does indeed go on to convey something of this, but tardily, and without making at all clear what is in fact a new view of things, whether right or wrong. It has to do essentially with what are called life-hopes, and, more important, is a view that escapes darkening preconceptions given us by Hobbes, Kant et al – by both of the traditions of thought about the human consequences of determinism. It is a view, too, that is relevant not only to determinism but to something more popular, near-determinism, which is the idea that there is irrelevant micro-indeterminism down below, as suggested by an interpretation of Quantum Theory, but macro-determinism up above, certainly including neural determinism.

Finally, to look at but one secondary matter about which Professor Ayer has not convinced me, he may sound a bit persuasive when he remarks that ‘it is at least not obvious that the proposition “If Queen Victoria thought Prince Albert handsome, King George V collected postage stamps” expresses a causal truth entirely on its own.’ However, what he is supposed to be showing, at bottom, if I have him right, is that if some causal circumstance including Victoria’s inclination really had as an effect some later fact about the existence of George, and that later fact really caused him to collect stamps, it nevertheless isn’t right to say that the initial circumstance caused the collecting.

Who, as Johnson might have said, unsound as he was on Free Will, could cudgel the mind to believe it? If A caused B, and B caused C, then A caused C. This fact is perfectly preserved when causal statements are analysed into what they are, which is certain conditional statements. Nor would the conceptual truth be complicated, as Professor Ayer suggests, if the period of courtship and gestation for the Royal Family were longer, and George appeared on the scene only some millions of months after Albert caught Victoria’a eye.

There is more to be said, Common Reader, much more – about those bits on Quantum Theory and classical mechanics, and whether causes are individual properties, and that fast argument about margins of error for the reality of Chance – but necessarily I stop.

Ted Honderich
University College London