My Interview With Galen Strawson, Part II

On free will, the self, the meaning of life, and Galen’s future projects

Note: Galen was not, in fact, suspended from Twitter/X (this was an imposter account, which caused an amusing misunderstanding).

The following is Part II of the transcript of my interview with Galen Strawson (you can find Part I here). In this portion of the interview, I ask Galen about his views concerning free will, the nature of the self, and what makes for a good human life — and about his future projects (as of the time of the interview, at least: October 2022). As before, I’ve edited the transcript for the purposes of brevity and readability (and this time I’ve also rearranged a little bit [in the free will discussion]). You can find the full, unedited live interview here. Enjoy!

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Free Will

Early in your career you wrote on free will. You have a well-known book on it Freedom and Belief, and an influential paper, “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility”. What is your position on free will?

I'm kind of burnt out on free will, but I do hold that there is a very core sense in which we cannot be ultimately morally responsible for what we do. So, if you want the argument, here it is:

(1) We do what we do because of the way we are.

(2) In order to be truly, ultimately responsible for what we do, we'd have somehow to be ultimately responsible for the way we are.

(3) But we can't be ultimately responsible for the way we are.

So,

(4) We can't be ultimately responsible for what we do.

Of course, it's (3) that that people will query first: “Why can't we be ultimately responsible for the way we are?”.

There are various ways of expanding on what I mean. First of all, we're born with the genetic inheritance we have, and then there's the early upbringing we have — and whatever we do later is presumably because we were shaped in the way that we were shaped by our genetic inheritance and our early experience. So, as it were, there’s an a posteriori argument there.¹

But there's also the a priori argument.² It raises the question, “Well, what would we have to do to be ultimately responsible for how we are?” Clearly, we'd somehow have to have brought it about that we are the way we are. Suppose we did that. In that case, we would already have to have been there with a certain character, and certain preferences about how to be, in the light of which we chose how to be. But then what about the way we already were before? And so on, where you get what's called an infinite regress argument according to which you cannot get back behind yourself in some radical way as to be able to make yourself, without already having preferences about how to be.

Just to put a fine point on that: Your argument here doesn't depend upon considerations adduced from behavioral genetics or psychology — and it has nothing to do with causal determinism.³ We could be immaterial souls as far as you’re concerned and yet still lack ultimate responsibility because we wouldn't have had any say over the fundamental nature of our soul.⁴

Yeah, it's metaphysically impossible to be ultimately responsible because you'd have to be, in the Latin phrase, causa sui; that is, the cause of yourself. And I would agree with Spinoza, who says not even God could be a self-cause because he’d have to be there already with a certain nature in order to determine what nature he had. It's a logical impossibility. So, it's a different ball game — nothing to do with empirical facts, as you say.

Oh, yes, and also it makes no difference whether determinism is true or false. We should make that clear. If determinism is true, well, then everything that you've done was fixed at the Big Bang, as it were. But if indeterminism is true — if there's truly random stuff going on — that doesn't help, either, because that doesn't give you any way to somehow create yourself; to be ultimately responsible for the way you are.

I mean, I don't like the conclusion, and to sort of anticipate what you're going to say: I suppose I still naturally live, in some sense, in the belief in free will.

What is the connection between what we're calling “free will” and this notion of ultimate responsibility? Is it your view that the impossibility of ultimate responsibility — our inability to create ourselves — entails that we don't have free will at all, or is there some notion of free will that could survive this impossibility?

Yeah, sure. Certainly there is. And actually I would agree with someone with whom I often disagree very deeply, and that is Dan Dennett. His interesting 1984 book, Elbow Room, has the subtitle The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting — and he makes the point (which Hume also makes) that, really, what matters is to be able to do what you want to do or think right or think best to do. And we can have that freedom, but it also can be taken away from us because we can be locked up. And so free will can only, insofar as it's something that we can have, be something like that.

It's occurred to me that, in principle, somebody could accept what you say about the impossibility of ultimate responsibility and still think that we have libertarian freedom⁵ of a kind — even Chisholmian agent-causal libertarianism⁶ — but just deny that this secures ultimate responsibility.

I guess. I guess so. But then I would want to know exactly what this person thinks the radical freedom consists in.

I think it could be the freedom to act just because you, as an agent, have decided to act — and I think you could grant that, but then just say, “Well, you still wouldn't be ultimately responsible for what you did because you weren't responsible for the nature that drove you to take that act”.

Right. Cool. And presumably if this was meant to be something worth having, you would want your acts to be in the service of what you valued — so, again, it would be flowing from how you are, and that in turn would be something for which you weren't ultimately responsible. So, I don't know. Is it a bit like Sartrean and existential freedom or something?⁷ I don't think they want the ability to make a kind of seemingly random, perfectly unmotivated choice. Of course, libertarians don't think it's random. But how, exactly, it's not random no one's ever been able to explain to me. So, yeah. I don't know.

One last question on free will. You say we can't deny that consciousness is real because we experience it immediately. In the same way, some people seem to think they experience themselves as having free will; that their freedom is immediately apparent to them. So, why couldn't we make the same sort of experiential argument for free will that you make for the reality of consciousness?

Well, the best answer I can think of is that they're different things. The claim that you could know the nature of experience [consciousness] is based on the fact that you're immediately acquainted with it. But you're not immediately acquainted with actual free will: You're immediately acquainted with the experience of having it; the feeling of it. And the feeling of it isn't the thing itself. I mean, the impossibility of ultimate moral responsibility isn't, as it were, an experiential thing.

Georges Rey has always said to me, “Look you were kind of radical about free will. Why aren't you equally radical about consciousness [by denying it]?”

Anyway, yeah. Not the same.

Right, so I think your view is that we can, on reflection, see the impossibility of ultimate responsibility — but on reflection we can't but see that consciousness is real.

You see, the thing is that there's a sense in which we can't help experiencing ourselves as free, and I have my little toy story about that. The story:

It's the evening of a national holiday and you've got some food ready for a party, but you think that you'd like to have another cake to make everything nice. So, you go to the shop. You've got ten dollars, and there's one cake left in the shop — which is about to close, and it costs ten dollars. And so you think, “Great!” You're going to go in and buy the cake. But on the doorstep of the shop there is someone collecting for a charity. And you know there's a great deal of poverty and famine in the world, and you've already got stuff at home. You could put your ten dollars into the Oxfam box. So you have a choice: You go in and buy the cake, or you put the money in the Oxfam box.

And my claim is that even if you believe the argument that shows ultimate moral responsibility is impossible, you cannot help living that moment as a moment of radical freedom. You can either put the money in the box or go in and buy the cake. You may even think that determinism is true, so you may think that in two minutes’ time you can turn around and look back and say, “Oh, well, what I did was determined!” But in, as it were, the lived moment, you must experience yourself as free. That's the idea.

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The Self

You say that you don't feel a strong sense of connection to your past and future selves. Can you describe that a little? What is it like to be Galen Strawson?

I'd like to know what it's like to be someone else who does! I basically have no personal memory. If I think about the boy I was, it could be anyone; I have no sense that that's me. I think there's not much more I can say than that kind of thing.

And this holds true with respect to “future you”, as well?

Yeah. I think of myself as though in the future; if I think about tomorrow or next month, it has no force. That’s not to say that I’m not able to plan perfectly efficiently and so on…

You can complete big books, for example!

Yeah, but it’s interesting you should say that because they're not…They sort of happen. They sort of grow from the inside, and they grow by insertion. You don't have to have a sense of yourself persisting through time in order to to do something like that because you sit down at the table and then you read the last sentence, and that's it — you're locked in by that.

Do you think that your experience is reflective of the underlying metaphysical truth? That is: Do you think your lack of identification with your past and future selves reflects the way things really are — that the self is fleeting and impermanent?

Well, not really. If you were to ask me what I think is the best account of the self — if we have to use that word to name something, what should we use it to name? — then I would be inclined to say that, as it were, there's a new self with every experience.

That would lead to another point: I don't actually believe people think that experience within a given day is a kind of continuing stream. I guess that's ultimately an empirical question, but I think that it's kind of gappy; it might even be linked to the 40 Hertz oscillation in the brain, and we have a lot of stitching software that makes it seem that it's smooth and continuous.

But on the other hand of course there are enormous consistencies in the character of any human being and what they know and so on. There is real long-term continuity, but I think of the self as something that's essentially alive, or active, in in the moment of experience, so I don't think all this, as it were — the stuff that's stored in the brain — is the self.

You could think of the self as a kind complex brain structure that that persists through really throughout your life and that grows and evolves, and that would, by our normal standards of continuing things, be a genuinely continuing thing.

I'm not saying that picture of the self is wrong. I'm just saying that, insofar as I think of the self as the thing that is live in the moment, then I think that it's short-lived and that there are many of them.

Do you think that people who do a lot of self-narration — who see all sorts of connections between past, present, and future — should try to change Should they try to be more like you?

I've thought about this quite a lot, and I've been fairly cautious. I'm sort of tempted, polemically, to say that I do think there's a great deal wrong with having a very sort of narrative view of one’s life. But overall I don't think that there's a kind of positive correlation between leading a better life and being what I call episodic.⁸

And some — most — people would think it was the other way around. It's a common view that in order to lead a meaningful life right you have to do a lot of soft narrating and so forth.

I think that, as Iris Murdoch would say, it’s best not to think too hard about yourself and your life.

There are, though, fundamentally different types of people, and there is a best life for someone who's naturally very narrative and a best life for someone who's more episodic.

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The Meaning of Life

What do you think makes a life go well?

Well, I really don't like using the word “meaning”. I think meaningfulness is meant to be something good — but then I'm going to say, “Well what about Hitler? You know, Hitler's life was full of meaning; it was driven by an intense purpose. The events of his life were extremely interesting, and in that sense meaningful — although of course what was most interesting about them was how awful they were. So, I need someone to tell me what “meaningful” means…

For that sort of reason it seems like meaningfulness must be connected to the moral truth in some way…

Right, all right. But then I wonder: Is leading a meaningful life different from just leading a morally good life? And I'm not sure about that at all.

I would say, a bit like [Joseph] Butler, I think that that self-interest and morality coincide. So, how should you live your life? I think the answer is to strive to be kind and good, and for no other reason that you will live the happiest, best life that you're capable of.

I don't think that having a driving purpose is a necessary part of a meaningful life. I think you can be a farmer, as it were, sowing and reaping your fields and doing all your daily tasks just in order to survive and lead the best life that a human can live.

So, I don't think you have to be a great artist or anything like that…

I love the simplicity of “Be kind and good”.

I think the greatest achievement of life is to live in harmony with another human being, over a reasonably long term — and that’s the most rewarding thing to do, too.

So, just drop the word “meaning”; that's a good life.

Of course, Aristotle says there are four cardinal virtues. You should be just, prudent, temperate, and courageous (not in the sense of going to war, but just facing up to life). And those are pretty good; that's a pretty good start.

But actually I don't think they're necessary for a good life because I think you could be very weak and very erratic, you might still be a kind and good person — so I have a different priority. This is not because I've been infected by some dodgy Christian point-of-view⁹ — just an empirical guess about how people who live best do so.

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Future Projects

What are you working on?

There are lots of things that I would like to get finished — and then I might like, as it were, do something else (to some extent). There are no grand new future projects.

I once thought I was going to write a whole book about this narrativity issue, but it's not going to happen. I've written some articles, as it were — the basic content of what I think is there.

I do want to finish a thing about Descartes. I think everybody is absolutely wrong about what Descartes thinks a mind is…To add to my little list [of misunderstandings of important philosophers of the Modern Era] — I think almost everyone's wrong about what Hume thinks about causation, almost everyone's wrong about what he thinks about personal identity, almost everyone's wrong about what Locke things about personal identity…So I now want to add this to my list.

I suppose I’ll have one more go at putting the case for panpsychism, but I'm feeling a bit daunted by that.¹⁰

Something about sex and love because I think almost everyone's wrong about that, too…¹¹

That one would probably sell!

Well, yeah…I'll give you one thing. A lot of people cite [Marcel] Proust when they talk about this, but I think Proust knows absolutely nothing about what love is. And I actually think he knows that…

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1. An a posteriori argument is one which proceeds from data collected by way of observation and experience.

2. An a priori argument proceeds by way of pure metaphysical deduction.

3. Causal determinism is the view according to which all events are necessitated by prior causes.

4. I wanted to achieve clarity here to make clear that Galen’s argument does not depend upon some kind naturalistic or reductive physicalist program: it’s a challenge for everyone; you can’t dismiss the argument simply because you reject naturalism, materialism, or determinism.

5. Libertarian free will is a conception of free which depends upon indeterminism: Libertarians think (a) that freedom requires the ability to actually to otherwise and (b) that an act can be undetermined and yet not random.

6. My reference here is to the great 20th Century philosopher Roderick’s Chisholm’s agent-causal libertarianism. Chisholm argues that the libertarian needs to hold that we have a kind of agency which allows us to be the uncaused cause of our acts. The classic 1964 paper in which he sets out this argument is “Human Freedom and the Self”, which is readily available online.

7. The reference here is to the conception of freedom advocated by Jean-Paul Sartre and other 20th century existentialist writers. These existentialists seem to have thought the experience of radical freedom is all that matters: we experience ourselves as free and must affirm this self-understanding in order to lead an authentic life. In this way, they can be understood as removing the free will problem from the domain of metaphysics and place it

8. That is experiencing one’s life as a series of myriad distinct episodes, rather than one continuing grand narrative.

9. I wouldn’t say such a point-of-view is dodgy!

10. Happily, this project did come to fruition! The result was 2024’s Stuff, Quality Structure: The Whole Go.

11. I have to say that this one caught me by surprise! I don’t know the current status of this project.