Robert “Bob” Hilary Kane died on April 20, 2024, at the age of 85, after a brief illness. He spent his final moments surrounded by family and friends at his home in Guilford, CT.
Kane had moved to Guilford in 2022, and I've read that until very recently he remained a regular at his grandchildren’s sporting events and noted for his daily walk on the town green.
In lieu of flowers, his family suggests people contribute what they can to his preferred charities: The Union of Concerned Scientists, The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, The National Alliance on Mental Illness, or Fair Vote. (Intriguing list of causes there.)
But he isn't here because of any of that. He gets an obit on Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed because he was, for decades until his passing, the most distinguished contemporary advocate of the incompatibilist/ indeterminist view of the philosophical issue of free will, the view associated with William James, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and ... your humble blogger.
I will carry on the fight for the propositions that (a) there is a zone of human action that is NOT strictly determined by what has come before and (b) we ought to be very glad that there is, because we have deep moral intuitions that are incompatible with the proposition that there is no such zone.
A new book by Kane on this subject may be about to appear, death notwithstanding. It is reportedly to be called THE COMPLEX TAPESTRY OF FREE WILL.
Some of you may know that Daniel Dennett also passed away quite recently. Dennett argued for both determinism and compatibilism. I'm told that in one of his books on the subject, Dennett devoted a whole chapter to rebutting Kane's views: if true, I'm sure that was received as a singular honor by the recipient of the rebuttal. Perhaps Kane's "Tapestry" includes a surrebuttal.
As to Kane's argument proper, here is a quote that conveys a critical link in the chain of inference:
"[I]ndeterminism does not have to be involved in all acts done 'of our own free wills' for which we are ultimately responsible, as argued earlier. Not all such acts have to be undetermined, but only those by which we made ourselves into the kinds of persons we are, namely 'self-forming actions' or SFAs. Now I believe these undetermined self-forming actions or SFAs occur at those difficult times of life when we are torn between competing visions of what we should do or become. Perhaps we are torn between doing the moral thing or acting from ambition, or between powerful present desires and long term goals, or we are faced with a difficult tasks for which we have aversions. In all such cases, we are faced with competing motivations and have to make an effort to overcome temptation to do something else we also strongly want. There is tension and uncertainty in our minds about what to do at such times, I suggest, that is reflected in appropriate regions of our brains by movement away from thermodynamic equilibrium--in short, a kind of 'stirring up of chaos' in the brain that makes it sensitive to micro-indeterminacies at the neuronal level. The uncertainty and inner tension we feel at such soul-searching moments of self-formation is thus reflected in the indeterminacy of our neural processes themselves. What is experienced internally as uncertainty then corresponds physically to the opening of a window of opportunity that temporarily screens off complete determination by influences of the past. (By contrast, when we act from predominant motives or settled dispositions, the uncertainty or indeterminacy is muted....)"
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