The Darwin meme

Posted to History and Theory Listserve

Memetics is pretty poor fare, junk theory to be exact. Dawkins has confused more people in the last generation than almost any other figure. He is one of those smart idiots the Darwin paradigm is full of. Isn't his whole game a species of reductionist nonsense? Students stumble in from the cold with all that bad evolutionism in their conditioning and need to encounter something more nourishing. Trying to fit cultural discourse into the straightjacket of memes on the analogy of genes is a wretched idea, and I don't see any successful examples that have explained anything. Mostly it seems to be a tactic to beat religionists over the head. But I find Darwinist discourse an equally dreary meme itself.

Jeff Irvin seems a bit cavalier on the subject of free will. The question of free will is certainly a tough one, but its negation is equally problematical! One can certainly distinguish the idea of freedom from that of free will, and look in some sense at the 'evolution of freedom' in a meaning to be defined, but closer to the classic philosophy of history than to the Darwinist will o' wisp of trying to making 'free will' the result of a standard Darwinian adaptationist scenario (viz. Daniel Dennett, in Freedom Evolves). Silly.
Actually most Darwinists seem to avoid the issue.
The classic treatment of this lies in Kant, and all discussions in later lineages are either a state of philosophic decline or simple positivism rampant. You may not agree with Kant, but he has cast the basic issues in the best form, let's say as a question.

In general reductionist negation of free will is biased in its methodology, and refusal to let go of dogmatic scientism obsessing over causal explanation. We can't really deny the basis of the concept without gross distortions of cultural history. We are supposed speak in hushed whispers about science, but it gets confused and stays that way on this question, for reasons the generation of Kant classically made clear. They make sure you don't study that anymore in philosophy of science courses.
All Darwin blah blah now.

In my own thinking (check out my website) there is an ingenious way to bridge the confusion via the concept of self-consciousness taken in contrast to and in conjunction with consciousness, a distinction that has died out in the current scene, but which exists in most classic philosophies of history, and in the great sutras of the Indian or Buddhist tradition.
Self-consciousness is related to the power of attention. Discussions of 'free will' rarely invoke the issue of the 'will', if any, behind the power of intention.
Bypassing possibly degenerate mystic usages of this simple and practical idea for my own, I would take 'self-consciousness' as a relative degree of freedom, whose variable presence or absence corresponds to fluctuating degrees of will or determination, if not determinism. This needs more work, but in a nutshell it allows us to deal with the issue in a practical way, instead of forever trying to prove the existence or non-existence of free will, which Kant suggests is dialectically hopeless.( Kant recommends taking on faith in an operational sense.)
That's actually how we always take it in practice, i.e. if, to take an extreme artificial example, an alcoholic is 'self-conscious' about his 'alcoholic determination' he can 'nudge the elephant' in a different direction. Potential outcome, and habit, or drive, are not the same, etc.. This situation is about freedom without much 'free will'! There are endless examples, and this kind of situation corresponds to our fluctuating expressions of will. The status of 'will', free or not, is certainly a problem, but it is a part of the human software, however evanescent, and attempts by science to wish this away in the name of causal explanation is a merry-go-round.
I saw a humorous case of this recently, a scientist fussing, fussing, 'what causes Buddhist enlightenment'!! Perfectly valid question, but...
That's a hint most scientists are out in left field, don't know it, and may never find out where they went wrong. On to the next Nobel Prize.

The issue impinges on the Kantian noumenon/phenomenon, and our representations of the phenomenal self are contraposed to the noumenal aspect of self. This classic Kantian distinction suggests the reason for our permanent confusion about free will.
This Kantian approach is a bit castor oilish, and keeps getting 'refuted'.
But I think he got it right about what we don't know. We never have knowledge of our deeper self, or the sources of 'will', yet it some way it impinges on phenomenal body/mind all the time. Kant was right to set up the direct contradiction as unavoidable, without blanching.

The approach via 'self-consciousness' in practice doesn't require the assumption of free will, yet gets most of the benefits without violating necessarily issues of deterministic explanation. One good example of the difference would be 'self-conscious creativity'. We can have creative consciousness, yet not be free to control that state, a point obvious from the history of art.

More generally the idea of freedom, not the same as the idea of free will, is absolutely essential to the right understanding of any kind of social science. The issue is the conjunction of freedom and necessity, not just their contradiction. We use the term 'free' a lot, and I can't suppose scientists can talk us out of it.
To take an example, consider the way we use freedom thinking, must use freedom thinking.
A man sits at a computer, with a mouse. He is 'free' to give the input he chooses. This has nothing to do with free will necessarily, although it might. Choice is a real phenomenon, and must be taken into account.
Compare that with a programmed computer without a user, i.e. some deterministic program doing some task by itself.
These two situations are distinct, real, and valid in their own right. But in the first the concept of freedom enters by definition into the situation. We don't have to have opinion about free will to deal with those distinct situations.
Let's face it, science can never it right here, although my self-consciousness approach is easily adapted to science. That's the reason for the revolt of the philosophy of history in the Romantic period, etc,...
We live in a culture of philosophic amnesia, pinning medals on ourselves in the name of science. It goes on and on, the bad science meme in action, I guess.