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Mele deceives himself, June 23, 2009
This review is from: Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton Monographs in Philosophy) (Kindle Edition)
Mele Self-Deception Unmasked
A woman told me that she knew that she had to believe in God. Apparently when she didn't believe in God, she became depressed. This gave her insight as to how her mind worked and convinced her that it was 'best' to believe in God. So, her reasoning went, "I believe in God."
The point is that one can believe one thing intellectually and another thing intellectually 'because of emotional needs'.
The human mind consists of many modules which contribute to logic, reason, intuition, imagination and various emotions. Some of these human modules are similar to parts of reptile brains, other modules are more evolved and the neo-cortex in humans is the most advanced of any animal.
Certainly a human may believe in something from one viewpoint while disbelieving in the same thing from another viewpoint.
His method of trying to convincing us of his theory is to focus on the logical part of our brain. Since we are logical, we cannot believe in both proposition p and not p. One part of my brain asks whether Alfred Mele is like a salesman trying to sell his 'product' and as such is willing to bias the arguments toward his product by getting us to focus only on the logical parts of the brain. Simultaneously another part of my brain indicates that he is not only trying to deceive the reader but that he has also thoroughly deceived himself. I do not have one consistent conclusion about what Mele is trying to do or why. As a result, I believe multiple ideas simultaneously and to different degrees sourced in different parts of my mind. Not all of my emotional feelings and intellectual theories are consistent.
In my opinion, this indicates that I have a normal mind.
Perhaps his method of attempting to deceive us simply evolved as he attempted to argue his point of view with different people. People do sometimes become obsessed with wrong ideas and try to defend them. Perhaps he is trying to prove that he is smarter than all of the other professors. After all, 90% of professors think that they are above average. In any case, his resultant argument attempts to fool us by focusing only on the logical and conscious parts of our minds.
Herbert Fingarette, "Self-Deception", page 168:
"What makes self-deception seem puzzling is a misconception of the nature of this normal mental activity. The error consists of assuming, in effect, that everything of which we are currently taking account and to which we are responding intelligently must be within the field of our attention. The language usually used obscures this assumption. For example, the proposition that intentional behaviour is necessarily conscious implicitly contains, as usually used, the affirmation of this false and highly misleading assumption."
Humans believe contradictory things all of the time. We even make attempts to deceive ourselves. When we watch a movie, we know "in the back of our minds" that when our hero leaps from one buiding to another that the actor is actually a stunt double. But we intentionally suppress such knowledge so that we may "enjoy the film".
A poor film is one in which we are constantly aware that we are watching a film. A good film is one which is sufficiently realistically presented that we may allow our brains to be deceived into believing that we are actually 'inside the movie' to the point that we grab our armrests with emotion. If you cannot thus deceive yourself, why bother going to the movies?
The very foundation of society is that people have 'free will'. If we, as ethical beings do not believe in free will, then how are we to govern our society? A criminal may be punished only if he has the ability to choose and he chooses to do the wrong thing.
Picture a college student taking a course in ethics. Certainly such a student would answer any question from the ethics teacher with an ethical frame of mind. As such, the student would declare honestly that she believed in free will.
Let's say that the same student is also be taking a course in scientific or critical thinking. This second teacher might ask her to explain how humans can logically believe that a machine created from a DNA genetic blueprint to specific parents and a specific environment with various chaotic inputs can have any 'free will' at all. The same student could be in a scientific frame of mind and honestly answer that the concept of free will makes no logical scientific sense. Where is this will located? It would have to be a source of control which is free of control. Some body of 'will' that is located somewhere in the human body and is currently making decisions 'on its own'. It would have to be independent of human genes, past experience, neurotransmitters, psychology, etc. This makes absolutely no sense scientifically. We know that everything that happens is caused by natural forces.
From a scientific point of view, 'free will' is simply an illusion or self-deception which evolved "because of societal survival" and must be accepted ethically in order for society to function smoothly. People who lack the mental mechanism for such self-deception may end up as sociopaths.
Kindle location 861 Alfred Mele states:
"The thrust of some of the responses to my challenge is that certain empirical or theoretical results provide direct or indirect support for the idea that mental operations are layered, partitioned, or segmented in a way that favors the possibility or probability of someone's believing that p while also believing that ~p. I myself would like to see
convincing evidence that this dual-belief condition is satisfied in some cases of self-deception. Such evidence would settle one significant question about self-deception, and it might even provide indirect support for my own belief that if there is self-deception of the dual-belief variety, it is remote from garden-variety instances. As I argue, however, the alleged evidence I have seen is unconvincing."
So, Alfred Mele, since you state that you believe in free will, then where is your independent 'free will' located? You don't have the backing of logical scientific critical thinking.
The only way a normal intelligent human can view the world is ethically to believe in free will and simultaneously scientifically to believe that free will is impossible. This is not the only self-deception humans engage in.
For a longer discussion of the subject of free will, see Steven Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, pp. 53-56.
Kindle highlight at location 792 in How the Mind Works
"As science advances and explanations of behavior become less fanciful, the Specter of Creeping Exculpation, as Dennett calls it, will loom larger. Without a clearer moral philosophy, any cause of behavior could be taken to undermine free will and hence moral responsibility. Science is guaranteed to appear to eat away at the will, regardless of what it finds, because the scientific mode of explanation cannot accommodate the mysterious notion of uncaused causation that underlies the will. If scientists wanted to show that people had free will, what would they look for? Some random neural event that the rest of the brain amplifies into a signal triggering behavior? But a random event does not fit the concept of free will any more than a lawful one does, and could not serve as the long-sought locus of moral responsibility. We would not find someone guilty if his finger pulled the trigger when it was mechanically connected to a roulette wheel; why should it be any different if the roulette wheel is inside his skull? The same problem arises for another unpredictable cause that has been suggested as the source of free will, chaos theory, in which, according to the cliché, a butterfly's flutter can set off a cascade of events culminating in a hurricane. A fluttering in the brain that causes a hurricane of behavior, if it were ever found,
would still be a cause of behavior and would not fit the concept of uncaused free will that underlies moral responsibility."
--
An example of constant self-deception:
We know that it takes hundreds of milliseconds for light hitting our retina to be processed by our brains into the virtual reality we call 'consciousness'. Yet we deceive ourselves all day long that we are living in the present and now and actually 'seeing the real world'.
Self-deception is not only possible but a requirement for a sane human mind.
Donald Paul Martin
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