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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Think about the last time you got bored with the TV channel you were watching and decided to change it with the remote control. Or a time you grabbed a magazine off a newsstand, or raised a hand to hail a taxi. As we go about our daily lives, we constantly make choices to act in certain ways. We all believe we exercise free will in such actions – we decide what to do and when to do it. Free will, however, becomes more complicated when you try to think how it can arise from brain activity.
Do we control our neurons or do they control us? If everything we do starts in the brain, what kind of neural activity would reflect free choice? And how would you feel about your free will if we were to tell you that neuroscientists can look at your brain activity, and tell that you are about to make a decision to move – and that they could do this a whole second and a half before you yourself became aware of your own choice?
Scientists from UCLA and Harvard -- Itzhak Fried, Roy Mukamel and Gabriel Kreiman -- have taken an audacious step in the search for free will, reported in a new article in the journal Neuron. They used a powerful tool – intracranial recording – to find neurons in the human brain whose activity predicts decisions to make a movement, challenging conventional notions of free will.
Fried is one of a handful of neurosurgeons in the world who perform the delicate procedure of inserting electrodes into a living human brain, and using them to record activity from individual neurons. He does this to pin down the source of debilitating seizures in the brains of epileptic patients. Once he locates the part of the patients’ brains that sparks off the seizures, he can remove it, pulling the plug on their neuronal electrical storms.
Such epileptic seizures are random. No one knows when to expect them, so after the electrodes are implanted everybody sits around and waits. This gives researchers a unique opportunity to observe human neurons in action: During the wait, patients may volunteer to participate in experiments, allowing scientists to discover what functions the recorded neurons carry out. The invasive surgery required to implant electrodes (performed routinely in animals like rats and monkeys for research) cannot be done in humans unless a medical condition (such as epilepsy that does not respond to drugs) calls for it. Such investigations are, therefore, rare.
Fried and his colleagues implanted electrodes in twelve patients, recording from a total of 1019 neurons. They adopted an experimental procedure that Benjamin Libet, a pioneer of research on free will at the University of California, San Francisco, developed almost thirty years ago: They had their patients look at a hand sweeping around a clock-face, asked them to press a button whenever they wanted to, and then had them indicate where the hand had been pointing when they decided to press the button. This provides a precise time for an action (the push) as well as the decision to act. With these data the experimenters can then look for neurons whose activity correlated with the will to act.
Such neurons, they found, abound in a region of the frontal lobe called the supplementary motor area, which is involved in the planning of movements. But here is the interesting thing: about a quarter of these neurons began to change their activity before the time patients declared as the moment they felt the urge to press the button. The change began as long as a second and a half before the decision, and as early as seven tenths of a second before it, this activity was robust enough that the researchers could predict with over 80 percent accuracy not only whether a movement had occurred, but when the decision to make it happened.
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74 Comments
Add CommentThis isn't mind boggling at all, it is exactly what I expect and assumed was the case ever since I can remember. This is how I have always assumed the brain works, and I suspect it show millions of people assume the brain works, how could it possibly work any other way?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Free will" is fundamentally an oxymoron and doesn't even make sense. It is a religious concept, and thinkers as far back as Democritus in the 5th century BCE argued against it.
However, to claim that determinism, or lack of "free will", would mean that we are not accountable for our actions also make no sense at all, on multiple fronts.
1) Predicted consequences are part of the input that goes into decision making, so individuals have to remain accountable for their actions in order for predicted consequences to influence decision making.
2) The notion of "control" as it pertains to justice simply has to be revised from its popular concept. In a justice system we hold people less accountable to the degree to which we believe they had control over their actions, but if we conclude that fundamentally "no one has control over their actions", that doesn't mean that no one is accountable, it simply means that we have to look at control on a relative basis. How much control does an individual have in relation to other individuals? Control has to be evaluated as a relativity.
See my blog post on morality for some related discussion (The evolutionary role of morality):
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/blog/index.blog?entry_id=2037264
I don't find it mind boggling that the mind works this way either.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat I DO find mind boggling is your assertion that free will is an oxymoron, and this article's assertion that because I may make a choice before I am concious that I have done so would mean that the choice was necessarily constrained.
I would buy that there are often constraints on our choices that we are not conciously aware of, I find it absurd to think that all or even most of our actions are born of determinism.
Predestination only works for those who never make mistakes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis doesn't say anything about Free Will.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis (and lots of similar experiments in the past) merely talk about the lag between the subconscious deciding something and the conscious mind becoming aware of it, a phenomena which makes sense if you think about it.
First, your neurons are you. Second, so our conscious mind doesn't make all the decisions. That's a *good* thing. Do you want to micromanage everything your body does? Third, why should we think our unconscious mind any less us than our conscious mind?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article is an example of writers who do not use terminology correctly. In fact, it would appear that the scientists who performed the study do not understand "free will" either. This error is not surprising, since one expert on free will, Dr. William Provine (Cornell), observed that:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Comments from the evolutionists [149 eminent biologists] suggest that they were equating human choice and human free will. In other words, although eminent, our respondents had not thought about free will much beyond the students in introductory evolution classes."
How disturbing! If eminent scientists (and the reporters that popularize their work) do not understand the basic concepts associated with free will, then their work is simply an exercise in futility.
Unless you believe in a soul, or something similar that can act on the brain or body how can you conclude anything else? Thoughts and actions are the activity of neurons. The activity of neurons is a chemical and electrical process governed by the laws of physics. It is most likely unpredictable, except in special cases as described in this article, due to the incredible complexity of the brain, but not at all 'free' in the usual sense of the word.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo argue that we must have free will because otherwise morality makes little sense is putting the cart before the horse. It is still reasonable to hold people accountable for their actions because by doing so we can change their actions in the future, and teach others a lesson.
I agree.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe book "the illusion of conscious will' is good on this issue. If you ever space out driving to work, it is because you really are not making conscious driving decisions. Your subconscious is driving you to work. There is still "free will". You want to go to work; you could go somewhere else if you wanted to. You can end up driving to work rather than the home depot on the weekend though.
To me the question of free will is something like creationism vs evolution. One believes in something supernatural, another in pure science. Maybe science can't explain everything now, but it's getting there. And, as history shows, even very "supernatural" things eventually get explained. It's just sad to watch how bloated human egos can't agree with something that makes them just another form of matter in so complex ways, that they can't even begin to understand the underlying mechanics. That said, there's still the question of quantum mechanics, which throws away our deterministic view of the world...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“felt the conscious will to act”: apart from exceptional circumstances, this never happens. Such a thing is not part of actions or decisions. A will to do something is not something you feel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“precede our awareness of wanting to move”: this awareness is not en event. It is more like a multi-track ability to report, explain, etc. that we want to do something. Similarly, wanting to move is not an event. So both the awareness and the “wanting” are not dateable in the way the research assumed. The researches (Libet etc.) misunderstand psychological concepts and therefore look at things that are irrelevant to the subject they are investigating.
“To conclude that we aren’t fully responsible for our actions, for example, would be extremely far-fetched”: No: it would be utterly confused. Brain research is irrelevant to the question, whether we act freely. You act freely if your behaviour is responsive to reasons, to reward and punishment. Our actions often are, and therefore we then act freely.
Is the moment of feeling of the free will in action the moment of decision making which expresses the free will? Couldn't the feeling of the free will be just a confirmation that a decision has been made during some earlier mental and brain processes that are not necessary for consciousness and represent the true free will?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe authors ask at the beginning: "Do we control our neurons or do they control us?" It's very strange for scientists. It means they believe that 'we' and 'our neurons' are separate entities. So, what do they mean by 'us' then? Do they believe that there is some kind of supernatural entity 'me' that is affected by material 'neurons'????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, sometimes we see someone eat something and get hungry. But we can control ourselves (and our neurons that are part of us) and wait, e.g. That is the ability to choose (which is in traditional terminology - 'free will') that developed during EVOLUTION. Without this ability to chose we WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO EVOLVE with all our neurons. Our ability to choose gives us ability to evolve. It’s very clear if you really read Darwin and it becomes just a terminology question.
These findings say nothing about free will. All they indicate is that there is a lag between the time a thought is formed in a person's brain and the time the person becomes aware of that thought. We are unaware of how thinking is done in general and of our thinking in particular. When I say or think such things as "I am thinking of eating a sandwich" I am in fact referring to the process of reviewing the output of the thinking that has already been completed. If I have yet to decide yea or nay, another thinking process may start. I will become aware of its outcome after it is done.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsider for instant your thoughts when (a) you perform 2 + 2; or (b) you misplaced your keys and, failing to find them after an exhaustive search, you give up. Then some time later a thought crosses your mind where the keys might be. You check and you find them right there (or not.) In the first case, it is unlikely that you know how you performed the computation or sifted through and retrieved the answer from your memory. In the second case it is unlikely that you were aware of whatever process your brain engaged to come up with another place to look for the keys.
Most of the time we know that we don’t know how we thought of something. And when we think that we do, upon reflection, it is apparent that what we think to be our thinking process is too simple to be so. Last example: just seconds ago I was not sure “simple” was the right word to use at the end of the preceding sentence. I weighed other words. But the actual thinking was done beyond my awareness.
Back to free will: If I am unaware I am thinking of X, how can I determine the time I decide anything that is the outcome of these thoughts?
Ah... a subject I have thought and studied in some detail. There are some very surprisingly good comments here regarding the obvious illusion of CONTRA-CAUSAL FW, which of course, is the accepted notion of most people on the planet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs others have rightly asserted, this is a touchy subject for those whose idenities are bound up in religious delusions and for whom unfettered (uncaused) FW is mandatory for all the claptrap that flows from "faith in god", sin, and eternal damnation for those who see reality differently. Ditto for absurd notion of a FW'ing "soul" (camera cuts to the Pope pontificating on divine "ensoulment" occuring when haplid spermatozoa meets Ms. OOcyte). There's just not a shred of evidence to support some unknown, ethereal "free willing soul-agent" beyond the physical brain that by some unknown means, supervenes upon it.
Neuroscience has indeed made the late Sir Francis Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis" more a theory: that our minds are fully and completely instantiated by the wonderfully evolved neural network ... our physical brains.
Final point: just because we are a product of our genetic and environmentally shaped neurochemistry does not free us from moral, societal responsibility. We, in fact, are our very actions... and thus, are the "proximate cause" of them and bear responsibility for them. Who else could?
Cheers!
Um... sure, but that negates "free will" as commonly espoused. The confirmation of a decision already made, subconsciously, is defacto proof of how our neurochemistry, our brains, not some moral, soul-based agency, is operating in a CAUSAL system.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is NOT random. Look about the Universe as it inexorably evolves... are we arrogant enough to believe we are outside it? No, we are clearly embedded within the Cosmos. Accept the obvious grandeur of such underpinnings, and... enjoy the ride!
The simple(!) question is "Do we have free will or not?" To me the question itself is misleading because it assumes it is one or the other. But seeing a dichotomy where there is none is the most basic of mistakes (over-simplification here).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImagine the belief in only black and white, where there are a thousand shades of grey in between.
The decision we arrive at (should I get out of bed today and go to work?) has thousands of input parameters. We may not be conscious of most of them but we are conscious of some. So the final decision definitely gets input from our conscious knowledge. However just like over-eating, smoking and many other things we don't want to do but we keep doing any way, we can never discount the unconscious processes that are determining our final decisions.
There is no free will: There are 100 things I want to do but I never take action. Some factors are giving me enough fear and excuses to put them off.
There is no determinism: Due to the butterfly effect on complex chaotic systems, such as the human brain, who can deterministically predict anything we will do in 10 days time, let alone 10 years from now?
If you are on a diet, can you say for sure that in the next 10 minutes your (Free?!) will would not be broken with the temptation of a Choc Chip Ice Cream offered unexpectedly by a persuading friend, telling you it is ok just this one time? Ah, but she made it herself, especially for you ... you can't break her heart. You think that is free will you are exercising? Damn, even when the decision is conscious it is not free will, let alone when it is not.
But the ultimate point scientists would probably want to make is that "even when you think your decision is conscious it is really driven by unconscious knowledge/forces, therefore there is no free will". But ponder this, a person's "belief" in free will or the lack of it, is yet another input in the whole decision-making process; and a strong one at that.
So how will I resist that Ice Cream if I believe the will to resist it is not mine versus that indeed the will is in me?
The belief itself is not "THE" determining factor but it is nevertheless "A" factor.
Weirdest thing for me though, is that I was just reflecting on my thoughts on free will, and what do you know: the SCIAM newsletter featuring this article drops into my mailbox. "How about them neurons?!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn a more serious note though, I don't believe any pure form of free will excist, but due to macroscopic influences that exclude our brain from acting free of self reference and conditioning of all sorts. The human brain is a self referencing logical system and therefore has no way of applying free will actions to impulse. You have a favorite restaurant and a favorite dish right? A dish that is just simply the best on the menu. But have you tried everything on the menu, preferebly twice? Can you set out to refrain from ordering your favorite plate the next time you go there untill you have? Yet still, you are convinced your favorite dinner is the best. So how free is your will when you're ordering food? Try it.
Anyway, and as a sidenote, isn't this article more about impulse than free will?
Oh dear...we get caught in the same old questions. Let me propose you think about the question of free will in a slightly different way. I propose that 'free will' has little to do with whether we make decisions, of course we make decisions. I also suggest it makes little difference whether our sub conscious knows what the decision will be before our conscious mind knows. To me the only non trivial definition of free will is: Free will would be the ability to choose other than as we do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would further suggest that we are who we are, but we have little or nothing to do with who we are. We are the persons we are because all of our genetics and all of our experiences (nature and nurture) have come together such that at a particular time and place we are who we are. Who we are is what makes our decisions. Since we are not free to be other than as we are, we are not free to decide differently than we do.
Please don't suggest I am saying we can not change our minds and make other choices...again, of course we can. It is just not relevant to the discussion. We do what we do because we are who we are. We are who we are by no choice of our own, therefore our choices are not, in any relevant way, free.
Just because we can not predict what will happen does not mean there is no determinism. It is true that billions and billions of actions combine to make what is what is at any given time...but the fact we can't know what they all are, and therefore we can not predict what will happen does not negate determinism.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think this is right. There's a big leap into a deep philosophical problem that isn't warranted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNeuroscience consistently shows that we are not in control of our actions, at the very least in part, and perhaps in full. After talking about the actual experiment, the author just speculates to try to prop up the idea of free will, but it is just speculation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the end what neuroscience finds doesn't really matter when it comes to the question of free will, because causality makes free will impossible, regardless of how the brain works. Even if your brain did allow for "choices," what choices you make would still be determined by a chain of causal events that originated before you were ever born. Your mind is shaped by every experience and input you've had in your life, and in turn those experiences and inputs are caused by the inputs and experiences that preceded them. How you think and feel about a thing, and therefore what you choose to do about it, would be completely different if you had received different input throughout your life and come into contact with different experiences. Even reading this paragraph now is a link in a chain of events you didn't control.
The truth is sometimes unsettling.
I agree. The question of "free will" is one of the most perennially controversial questions in philosophy. It's a bit silly to think that this series of experiments can really advance this issue since they don't make a serious references to the important work that has explored this issue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHumans in the modern world use the brain in ways it did not evolve to be used. It evolved over millions of years among hunter gatherer ancestors who did not have speech, until modern humans evolved about 200,000ya.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpeech meant that, for the first time in millions of years, humans had words to differentiate "I" from you, we and they. Richard Leakey claimed that the first signs of consciousness appeared in human practices about 170,000ya, but for the next 160,000 years they continued to live as hunter gatherers in the Stone Age.
The main innovations of modern humans were better stone tools, until a mini Ice Age, the Younger Dryas, forced a major change in behaviour, producing herder farmers about 10,000ya and a change in how humans used the brain, evidenced by innovations such as pottery, the wheel and bronze. Innovation required use of short term memory (STM) to apply conscious thought to issues that had not previously been thought about.
What did STM evolve to do? People with damage to STM are unable to learn facts. They can learn behaviours, but much more slowly than normal, consistent with the brain evolving when there were no facts, only behaviours to be observed and absorbed. This suggests that STM evolved to speed up learning of existing practices, consistent with the lack of innovation until 10,000ya.
A study of macaques shown familiar situations recorded fast, consistent responses from neurons. A change in the situation showed the fast response being intercepted and modified by STM, producing a slower and more variable response, suggesting that STM also evolved to check the fast, automatic response from long term memory and modify it or override it to suit specific circumstances.
Looks to me that humans invented consciousness when they started to use STM for conscious thinking as a major function of the brain sometime within the last 10,000 years.
Free will depends on the extent to which individuals exercise choice. They can choose to think consciously about attitudes and beliefs that the brain learns, or let it load up the attitudes and beliefs of surrounding culture without conscious control. They can also choose to intercept and modify automatic responses produced from those beliefs.
The mechanism that evolved to pass on practices that made our ancestors expert hunter gatherers now creates cultures, ideological belief and prejudice, unless the individual consciously overrides both the learning and/or production of the automatic response.
www.ideasintuitionandthinking.com
Spin-oza: "As others have rightly asserted, this is a touchy subject for those whose idenities are bound up in religious delusions and for whom unfettered (uncaused) FW is mandatory for all the claptrap that flows from "faith in god", sin, and eternal damnation for those who see reality differently. Ditto for absurd notion of a FW'ing "soul" (camera cuts to the Pope pontificating on divine "ensoulment" occuring when haplid spermatozoa meets Ms. OOcyte). There's just not a shred of evidence to support some unknown, ethereal "free willing soul-agent" beyond the physical brain that by some unknown means, supervenes upon it."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know why you say there is not a shred of evidence to support the existence of a "free willing soul-agent." I have had a great many encounters with that kind of evidence, and I assure you my identity is not bound up in it. I was an agnostic for years until the weight of evidence persuaded me that there is absolutely no doubt of such an agent. But that is completely independent of any belief in sin, eternal damnation and other dogmas. I suggest you look at the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" for a more uplifting account.
One problem is that when other people recount an anecdote about such an experience, it is just a story that could have been made up or imagined. When it is your own experience, grounded in events that, by any materialistic view of the universe, could not possibly have happened, then it becomes much more real. I wish for you to have such experiences, even though I fear it will be unpleasant for you to have to change your mind about deeply held convictions.
However, mainstream science will eventually stop being so rigid in its dogmas about what is possible and what can be investigated. Fortunately science eventually rejects theories that don't fit the facts, and the facts here are that there is a great deal going on that is not compatible with the strictly materialistic view of the universe. In fact consciousness itself is not explainable by a mechanistic universe. Thought is explainable, intelligence, data, memory, sense organs and computation are all explainable, but not consciousness. (If you think it is, then you are not thinking about the same consciousness that I am.)
Furthermore, even though Quantum Physics uses "observers" everywhere in its math, and even though physics has proven the effect of the observer countless times, the "observer" is not defined anywhere. If you want to postulate the nature of the "free willing soul-agent" that might be a candidate.
"This doesn't say anything about Free Will.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"This (and lots of similar experiments in the past) merely talk about the lag between the subconscious deciding something and the conscious mind becoming aware of it, a phenomena which makes sense if you think about it."
I agree. This doesn't say anything about free will. It just pushes the origin of the neurological processes that affect it back a little bit in time, and out of the light of consciousness into the shadows of the unconscious.
"To me the question of free will is something like creationism vs evolution. One believes in something supernatural, another in pure science. Maybe science can't explain everything now, but it's getting there. And, as history shows, even very "supernatural" things eventually get explained."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI sort of agree, except that you seem to be saying that what is "supernatural" is the opposite of "science." Science is a way of figuring things out. It is not the set of current materialistic beliefs about the universe. Eventually science will look at the supernatural and then its horizons will expand dramatically beyond materialism, which simply can't handle an enormous variety of experiences and events. There is a reason that billions of people believe in the supernatural, and it's not because they are deluded. It's because their everyday lives make it plain that there is a whole lot more going on than dogmatic materialists admit, and they just laugh when you try to tell them different. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet Act 1)
You said it yourself: "That said, there's still the question of quantum mechanics, which throws away our deterministic view of the world..."
I'm sorry but I have to say this, 'reconstruct the idea of free will'? These tests seem rudimentary, they're based on simple actions like moving a body part or doing some kind of action, where as free will should be more focused on the decisions we make during crucial moments, where more complex thought is required. I wouldn't find it hard to believe if I woke up tomorrow and at the end of the day got a hamburger that my mind had already decided on earlier that morning. But to bring together ideas from the past, present, and thoughts of the future to make decisions in the spur of the moment would produce radical ideas and decisions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy brain has to think of my actions either way, it only seems correct for it to think of it first. Where time may not exist.
"Do we control our neurons or do they control us?" This is property dualism ie the assumption that there is a 'will' independent of the brain. That genes and brains are the agent of control has nothing to do with free will as the self, the me, and the will are also a result of genes and brains (in science, only religion and some philosophical positions, usually older views, believe in a self and 'will' independent of the brain).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThus if desire is a result of the action of the brain it is in no way restricted if the brain has a deterministic (ie can be relied upon to perform as expected) nature.
Here is another way of looking at this issue, this time assuming property dualism: if you are the will and your computer plays the part of the brain, would you be freer if the computer did exactly as you commanded and followed the instructions of its designer and programmer or would you feel freer if the computer did its own thing??? In other words there is no reason why a deterministic brain is not determined to follow the instructions of the will. As one can demonstrate free choice at any time, following instructions is obviously at least part of a deterministic brain's mandate.
"I was an agnostic for years until the weight of evidence persuaded me that there is absolutely no doubt of such an agent…..When it is your own experience, grounded in events that, by any materialistic view of the universe, could not possibly have happened, then it becomes much more real".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have had such an experience, but I still am an agnostic. I wish I could find that supernatural being that can persuade me of its existence. In my view, religion is a self referenced system, and can not do the job.
Since you understand it better, it would be appreciated if you would please explain to us what is free will then.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is choice, which is a rational activity, that has a history behind it regardless of the length of time of that history. But physical action comes from the emotive action of the brain/mind. We do not commit our bodies to action, whether that is physical action or speech acts, without an emotion to motivate the body to movement. Thinking rationally, however, one contemplates for however long it takes, seconds or days, or longer, to make comparisons, weigh consequences, etc., but once that is completed, it takes an emotional force to move the body to act. It might be a case where the same situation is faced as once faced before so the mind/body learns and reacts faster to the new event. In some cases there is a combination of mental reflection and emotional response, other times, there is pure reaction from emotional response as in flinching from the sensation of extreme cold or heat or howling in response to perceived danger like an object on a trajectory towards one, or knocking one's head on something... Or there is thoughtful deliberate choice, but in any case, the body only moves to action from the natural instinctive state of the mind called emotion. That does not mean the emotion must be intense as there is a range of degrees of emotion just as there is a range of degrees of depth of contemplation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"This is NOT random. Look about the Universe as it inexorably evolves... are we arrogant enough to believe we are outside it? No, we are clearly embedded within the Cosmos."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, we are not outside the universe? But is there an "outside" of the Universe? Since we are embedded within the Cosmos, including our minds, brains, free will and consciousness, we can make no complete set of assertions that are consistent about the 'Cosmos and supernatural agents', according to Goedel. Therefore I would rather be very careful in making any decision about "free will and making decisions".
Determinists seem to fail to realise what is at stake with free will: it is not whether we are to be held accountable for our actions before society, as they assure us we are, as if this platitude should cast out all dangers. Accountability before society does not touch the moral problem at all. I realise this is a science magazine, not a philosophical one, but since the philosophical consequences of this matter have often been touched upon here, I say:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course, the knowledge that we will be held accountable and likely punished or rewarded will have an influence on our choices, so we should be held accountable for practical reasons, whether or not we are ultimately, ontologically so. But whether I take myself ultimately responsible has an influence on my actions and my happiness that goes well beyond that:
- On what actions I objectively do, for very often there will be no witnesses to my actions – even victims are often unaware of who their offender is - to hold me accountable for them, so if I feel like doing something which I know will “unfairly” harm others, but I know I will get away with it, then the “unfairly” will remain between quotation marks and will be less likely to stop me doing the harm.
- On my subjective well-being, for with the assumption of ultimate personal responsibility I am taking away the feelings of moral admiration and outrage, which greatly impoverishes life; as Chesterton put it, adventure and epic go altogether if the hero has to act as he does, or only a living thing can swim upstream. Determinism is another nail in our coffin.
About your fears that believing in free will will make you unscientific and even religious, I suggest you study some philosophy (mainly Kant) to realise how this is not so.
When we consider the individual neuron as an actor in the process of "will", free or otherwise, what is the underlying mechanism we assume to exist? Is the neuron "self-aware"? Does it have its own sensory channels and response pathways? Is it "aware" of the various states of surrounding neurons? Can it lobby on its own behalf in terms of formulating a response?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReductionism is all well and good as a method for collecting, and in a more limited sense, interpreting data.
However, IMHO anthropomorphizing individual neurons by ascribing to them a central role in "free will" seems a bridge too far.
On the other hand, my own position could simply be the act of one errant, but extremely influential, neuron directing my fingers to type.
The discussion about this article has gotten very complex and convoluted. I prefer simplicity. It really is quite simple and easy. My neurons fire. My neurons are in my brain, thus my brain makes the decision. The only time my will does not control me is when outside restraints such as gravity or a straightjacket or pharmaceutical products inhibit my ability to control myself. OK we have to include neurological disorders as well or this article wouldn't exist but still, I am not a puppet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have never seen any evidence to suggest that my brain does not make my decisions. Free will does not require the ability to ignore physical reality. Free will does not require God-like beings that can leap tall buildings in a single bound or just plain walk through the buildings walls. Free will is the ability to accept sensory input and act on that input. Sorry if that makes humans much the same as say, maybe a cat or a chimp but there you go.
I totally agree!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems to me that the "free will" problem evaporates if we abandon the inevitable dilemma of dualism. For example, the question "Do we control our neurons or do they control us?" assumes a dualistic position. Monistic materialism would posit that there is no "we" apart from our neurons. Our mindbrains act freely in that they are not externally constrained. Beyond that the question is only for navel-gazing. How we as a society respond to the antisocial acts of particular mindbrains seems to me to be a separate issue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLeon McGahee
@Spin-oza - "this is a touchy subject for those whose idenities are bound up in religious delusions and for whom unfettered (uncaused) FW is mandatory "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDeterminism vs. free will is often a subject of debate between one religion and another, one philosophy and another and one scientist and another. There are many different kinds of alleged determinism, ranging from purely supernatural to purely scientific.
Trying to characterize the subject in those terms is to ignore much, if not most of the debate.
You say, "We, in fact, are our very actions... and thus, are the "proximate cause" of them and bear responsibility for them." Yet, if everything we do is the deterministic result of our genes and experiences, then you assert that we bear responsibility for things we did not choose and cannot control. That hardly seems logical. At most, if all is deterministic, we are subject to the deterministic results of our deterministic actions.
Much of what you would call deterministic factors, I would call influences with varying degrees of strength. In a purely deterministic universe where I have no more choice in my future than a rock has in its future, I don't see how a person could take any satisfaction in a job well done, any joy in creative expression. What is the motive for getting out of bed if I have no choices? Oh, right, there are no motives, just determining factors.
Fine, then...what is the function of the illusion of choice? If we truly have no choices, what could possibly be the value of thinking we have choices? To stop us from killing ourselves? But that would be a choice! Isn't the fact that this discussion is taking place an indication that determinism is a paradox? Was the fact that I am about to type the phrase "Malmborg in Plano" a foregone conclusion at the moment of the big bang?
Crap, even religious determinism makes more sense than that!
A person touches a very hot object accidentally. I can predict with 100% accuracy that she/he will remove her/his hand.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHmmm.... where to begin?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst of all, Determinism and Causality are not identical concepts... the latter clearly is operative, at least in this Universe, the former a matter of interpretation and definition. I challenge anyone supporting CONTRA-CAUSAL FW to offer their proofs for this unconstrained agency... and ditto for a soul-based agency supervening on our physical neuronal network.
This Universe is inexorably unfolding spacetime... and there are no nodes of decision being made to alter that brute fact. Quantum mechanics has no bearing on the structure of the Cosmos evolving... and "randomness" would actually be a less desirable state for those clinging to childish notions of FW.
Back to humanity: it is clear that "ourselves" is the result ("causal") of many complex interacting factors. Yes, there is a neuro-anatomic basis for consciousness and our "minds"... if you doubt that, let me introduce you to some anesthetic agents or slowly divert the blood flow from your carotids.
Science, via neurochemistry, neuroanatomy... and most importantly functional imaging techniques, plus the contribution of genetics, is peeling back the proverbial layers of the onion. There is no supernatural soul or ethereal FW'ing agent... other than our remarkably evolved human brains. There is NO wizard in the Land of OZ... and no god "rolling dice" with the evolution of the Universe.
We know that the heavy lifting of our neuronal network is far and away subconscious... our attentive consciousness is but a pittance. Heck, our enteric nervous system (gut)trumps any conscious processes.
Finally, consider yourself: you are exactly the person you were "determined" to be. You cannot will yourself to be otherwise. For better or worse, you are your very actions, and they play out as you "experience" them as choice or "will". I think it was Spinoza who rightly stated that while you may be aware of your actions, you have no idea regarding their source or will. Neuroscience has proven that to be true.
Consider the nature of addictions in their myriad forms. There are of course genetic, neurochemical and anatomical determinants... but the point is does anyone "freely will" to be addicted (to whatever)... or obscessive-compulsive... or mobidly obese... or a serial killer... or a paranoid schizophrenic... or agoraphobic... or demented with Alzheimer's? How absurd.
FW is an illusion... like much of what we experience in the world around us. Does that make our experience and life less valuable? In my opinion, absolutely not.
@rajnish - "A person touches a very hot object accidentally. I can predict with 100% accuracy that she/he will remove her/his hand."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisApparently you're not familiar with G. Gordon Liddy...or were you just rounding up?
More significantly, how does the introduction of complexity influence your ability to predict? A person likes chocolate. That person sees chocolate. Predict whether that person will eat the chocolate. Diet, ownership, price, time of day, time of last consumption of chocolate, and a dozen other questions spring to mind, and hundreds of more subtle ones likely apply.
The truth and/or extent of determinism can't be tied to humanity's ability to predict.
Can someone give me the scientific definition of "will"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWithout that, how can we interpret the observations made in this article as bearing on free will? Is will something isolated from brain? Is it some unknown organ within the brain? In other words, what are you talking about? I think that observation in the article is interesting. I just don't know how to make the leap from brain activity to mind.
You have denied a lot of things I have not implied or asserted, so, let me ask more directly. Do we make choices where it is possible that we may have chosen another way, or is the action we take always the only possiblity and other "choices" just an illusion?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Spin-oza - "Consider the nature of addictions in their myriad forms. There are of course genetic, neurochemical and anatomical determinants... but the point is does anyone "freely will" to be addicted (to whatever)... or obscessive-compulsive... or mobidly obese... or a serial killer... or a paranoid schizophrenic... or agoraphobic... or demented with Alzheimer's? How absurd."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the same token, if we accept determinism, no one "freely wills" to give, to share, to love, to build, to create, to sing, to dance...all things it is not so absurd to think one might choose.
I would be an idiot to assert that EVERY action we take is purely the result of free will, but I find it equally absurd to think EVERY action is purely the result of determinism. Absolutists drive me buggy!
Free choice and free will are different concepts, as discussed extensively in basic reviews of the subject. (eg. search for the plato encyclopedia site at stanford). Yet this study by Fried, et.al, and this article, present the concepts as identical. Provine points out that this error is a common mistake of young college students who have not put a lot of thought into this subject.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpecifically, my understanding of free choice is that it may be a physical threshold phenomena, where the subject builds up an inclination toward a behavior due to biology or personal history, and then an event triggers corresponding behavior. But free will requires a deliberation of right and wrong, which entails a morality derived from universals which are, by definition, non-physical.
So the article reminds me of those who failed to "weigh the soul" when it allegedly departed from the body after death; and, after observing no change of mass, they might be inclined to declare that there is no such thing as a soul. But this was an effort to physically measure something which, by definition, is non-physical. What could they be thinking?!
hatemnagdi: "I have had such an experience, but I still am an agnostic. I wish I could find that supernatural being that can persuade me of its existence. In my view, religion is a self referenced system, and can not do the job."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI sympathize. I had several experiences that made me realize that the universe around me was not what I was taught, but I remained an agnostic because the religions I was familiar with were so dogmatic, cruel and impossible to believe. Then I had more experiences that were very clearly directed by a higher intelligence for my benefit. I know it exists and it does things for people, and that's about all I know about it. I prefer to call it by the old-fashioned name "Providence," because it provides.
I agree that most big religions are self-referential, and cannot do the job. For me most religions are useful only as an EXPRESSION of belief, and cannot actually be the SOURCE of that belief. But some religions are more. There are still cultures that maintain a connection with the divine so closely that they would probably laugh at my poor experiences, such as Native Americans in North and South America, Africans, etc. In a way they don't need "religion" because because they live their whole lives on the borderlands of the supernatural. Calling it religion makes it sound like it is a separate thing, like you have to go to church to find it, when it is really more like breathing. Tibetan Buddhism has formalized it into a religion, but retains the connection with the divine.
Somehow it seems like this Providence thing does not want to be proven. Otherwise it would be easy enough for it to prove itself. Does the author of a story provide proof the the characters that the author exists? I think maybe we are supposed to take our own private experiences as our own private proof and have faith for some reason.
If you have had a numinous experience, maybe you don't have to go find the being who provided it. Maybe it has already found you. Just breathe it and say thank you.
@Spin-oza: "I challenge anyone supporting CONTRA-CAUSAL FW to offer their proofs for this unconstrained agency... and ditto for a soul-based agency supervening on our physical neuronal network."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think you are asking for a miracle, and all I could offer would be a description of a miracle. Not at all the same thing. Anyone could make up a miracle. My own experiences turn into anecdotes if I post them here. On the other hand I can refer you to a pretty good book about the subject, "The Power of Premonitions" by Larry Dossey. Nothing at all to do with God or religion, just a zillion well-documented accounts of people getting warnings that something was about to happen.
Spin-oza: "This Universe is inexorably unfolding spacetime... and there are no nodes of decision being made to alter that brute fact."
Nicely phrased. Is it yours or are you quoting someone? However, this seems more like the dogma of the materialistic point of view rather than data or scientific finding.
Spin-oza: "Back to humanity: it is clear that "ourselves" is the result ("causal") of many complex interacting factors. Yes, there is a neuro-anatomic basis for consciousness and our "minds"... if you doubt that, let me introduce you to some anesthetic agents or slowly divert the blood flow from your carotids."
I agree completely. There are many complex interacting agents, and I have had experiences with what seems to be a higher intelligence independent of space and time. The fact that it exerts its influence sparingly and privately does not make it non-existent.
Spin-oza: "Science, via neurochemistry, neuroanatomy... and most importantly functional imaging techniques, plus the contribution of genetics, is peeling back the proverbial layers of the onion."
Yes, thank God. Eventually science will throw off its dogma of materialism and be able to accept a far larger and more complex universe.
"There is no supernatural soul or ethereal FW'ing agent... other than our remarkably evolved human brains. There is NO wizard in the Land of OZ... and no god "rolling dice" with the evolution of the Universe."
It seems to be important to you to assert this, even though of course you cannot have any proof of the absence of a soul or god.
Spin-oza: "We know that the heavy lifting of our neuronal network is far and away subconscious... our attentive consciousness is but a pittance. Heck, our enteric nervous system (gut)trumps any conscious processes."
I agree, but that still leaves room for the influence of a soul.
@solspot "So the article reminds me of those who failed to "weigh the soul" when it allegedly departed from the body after death; and, after observing no change of mass, they might be inclined to declare that there is no such thing as a soul. But this was an effort to physically measure something which, by definition, is non-physical. What could they be thinking?!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wonder if you are thinking about the experiments in which someone weighed people at the moment of death, and actually found that there WAS a change of mass. Not sure the experiments were accurate, though, and I don't know if they were replicated. Or maybe the soul is made of dark-matter or dark-energy or something.
Someone mentioned altruism... and "free to love, sing, share, etc"... as if this proved the notion of humans as freely willing agents. Ridiculous.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are basically social animals and these are all learned behaviors, shaped by our fundamental needs and our particular environment: parenting, social interactions... culture and society.
Any basic trait you claim for humans exclusively is, like FW itself, an illusion. Altruism is documented among many species of primates... elephants... dolphins... canines... penguins... etc. Do all our animal friends have FW as well? If you claim that trait for yourself, then you MUST then grant it to animals... and then, where does that lead morally? Ditto for "love", which of course is at base a selfish act (self-validation as "desirable") to effect reproduction and spawning of one's own genes. Anyway, none of this has anything to do with commonly accepted notion of FW.
Of course all animals (homo sapiens included) make choices on some level or another, but what is clear is the choice is already made and determined on a subconcious basis. If it were posible to "rewind" spacetime to any point... we would find ourselves in exactly the same place, doing the same thing today after the "play button" was hit.
Finally, predictability has absolutely zero to do with the fact that we inhabit a causally determined universe. I may throw a small pebble in a torrential stream, yet have no means to "predict" its course or where it will eventually land. Did the pebble exercise FW or make decisions about it's course? Was QM theory operative? Umm... I think not. Under the EXACTLY same conditions, if we repeated the experiment, we would get the same results... ad infinitum.
It's way past time humanity accepts its humble place in the grandeurand majesty of the Cosmos... fully embedded and interconnected within the unfolding of spacetime. Cheers to all who ... ponder.
Here we go again. Free will is not synonymous with decision making. We make decisions. That is not questionable. The question is, are we free to decide other than we do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf all you mean by free will is that no one else forces you to make the decision,well, sure there is free will, but so what. If by free will you want to include moral responsibility, well, sorry folks, 'you' made the decision, but 'you' did not make 'you', and 'you' can not change who 'you' is, and 'you' can not choose other than as 'you' do.
Sure, I'd love to always be perfect in every way and never make any decisions that I will later regret, but hey, that ain't going to happen, because I can not change who I am and I make the decisions I make.
We evolved to feel as though we are moral agents, because feeling that way helps us live in social groups. It is also useful in raising our children to act as if they can do other than as they do... Feeling a certain way, does not, however, make it so. You were born with the genetics you were born with, and you can not change that. You have had the experiences you have had and you can not change that. You are you, and you can not change that. You make the decisions you make because you are you...but you can't be other than who you are, so you can't make decisions other than as you do, so you do not have free will. As disturbing as that may feel, it is what it is.
KAREN00100 IS OUR CLEAR THINKING AWARD WINNER!!!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will leave others more mentally challenged with the thoughts of some truly great minds to ponder (there are many other brilliant minds who have come to a similiar conclusion regarding the foolishness of FW and all it implies):
*Schopenhauer similarly concluded: "a man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills".
* Voltaire: “Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will….The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.”
"Everything happens through immutable laws, ...everything is necessary... There are, some persons say, some events which are necessary and others which are not. It would be very comic that one part of the world was arranged, and the other were not; that one part of what happens had to happen and that another part of what happens did not have to happen. If one looks closely at it, one sees that the doctrine contrary to that of destiny is absurd; but there are many people destined to reason badly; others not to reason at all others to persecute those who reason."
*Charles Darwin (from his notebooks): “…one doubts existence of free will [because] every action [is] determined by heredity, constitution, example of others, or teaching of others…This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything…nor ought one to blame others.”
*Einstein's insight: "Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." ... or this: "If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will."
"Do we control our neurons or do they control us?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho is that "WE"?? Without our neurons?
Well, you are in good company...here is another quote in support of determinism.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"God foreknows nothing by contingency, but that he foresees, purposes, and does all things according to his immutable, eternal and infallible will. By this thunderbolt, "free will" is thrown prostrate and utterly dashed to pieces. Those therefore, who would assert "free will," must either deny this thunderbolt, or pretend not to see it, or push it from them." -Martin Luther
Gotta love that clear thinking!
We have no free will.We are dancing through out our life on a tune of our unconscious mind. Great philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote in his book Ethics "Men believe themselves to be free,simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFree will... hmmm...???? lest see. First, pressing a button is a learned behavior, hmmm... Second, following instructions is another learned behavior, because even language is learned too, hmmm... Third, by evolution, learning to control body functions were first that learning to speak, hmmm. So learning to control any device (using tools) were first, evolutionary speaking, then describing what is doing and following instruction were later. In conclusion, learning to 'read' a device that is sensitive enough to register brain movement, I mean, having a tool that gives you information before someboy talks about what he or she already thought is to say that first he he or she learned to use tools and later to talk, ontogenetycally speaking (development. Isn't this like discovering that water wet spending millions of dollars in training and developing tools something that is already known??? I thing that the question is: "how the brain is changed by experiens" or a much broader hypothesis could be: "following a verbal instruction (stimuli) has different initials effects on certain brain areas" (Staddon, J. E. R. (2001). The new behaviorism. Mind, Mechanism, and Society. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Spin-oza: "I will leave others more mentally challenged with the thoughts of some truly great minds to ponder (there are many other brilliant minds who have come to a similiar conclusion regarding the foolishness of FW and all it implies)"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAd hominem attacks are not proof. Insulting those who disagree does nothing to prove your point, though it works wonders in politics. And citing authorities who agree with you also does nothing to prove your point, though I'm sure it is comforting. Great minds also thought that the atom could not be subdivided (Aristotle), that God does not play dice with the universe (Einstein), that species evolve by the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarcke). Frankly, one accurate observation by a peasant can disprove decades of thoughts by brilliant minds. I don't care how many truly great minds concluded that free will does not exist, based on incorrect assumptions that they all shared. All their logic is a house of cards that falls when actual observations are introduced. It is true what is said of scientific debate: The heat of the discussion is inversely proportional to the amount of data available. Try reading the book about premonitions I cited before.
Spin-oza: Voltaire - "It would be very comic that one part of the world was arranged, and the other were not; that one part of what happens had to happen and that another part of what happens did not have to happen. ... If one looks closely at it, one sees that the doctrine contrary to that of destiny is absurd"
Speaking of logic, whether something is comic or absurd does not sound like a very logical determination of what is true. (Just ask Sherlock Holmes.) Those who opposed evolution also said that the idea of man descending from apes is a comic idea and obviously untrue. Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics are both completely absurd. But true. Seems to me that truth does not depend on someone's sense of humor.
With all that said, I actually have some sympathy for the idea of determinism. I see supernatural influences happening every day, and therefore I believe that our thoughts and actions are not completely determined by the mechanistic universe. However, it is still possible that the greater reality is deterministic. But we won't know until we investigate.
SkepticalKen:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"God foreknows nothing by contingency, but that he foresees, purposes, and does all things according to his immutable, eternal and infallible will. By this thunderbolt, "free will" is thrown prostrate and utterly dashed to pieces. Those therefore, who would assert "free will," must either deny this thunderbolt, or pretend not to see it, or push it from them." -Martin Luther
I'll take Martin Luther's choice, and be with those who assert free will. I deny "this thunderbolt". I don't think Martin Luther knew the mind of God any more than I do, so all his logic is based on his assumptions about the nature of God, derived from whatever theology was acceptable at the time to the religious authorities, either the Catholic Church or his own church. I don't think I would want to cite the Catholic Church regarding Galileo and Copernicus. Why cite it regarding free will?
"A person touches a very hot object accidentally. I can predict with 100% accuracy that she/he will remove her/his hand."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis has nothing to do with free will. Free will, in its common meaning implies that tow person present in the same conditions will most likely act differently. I, you a little one year old child and a cat will remove hands immediately when touching a very hot object accidentally. This is a natural mechanism of self defense.
GreenMind: "I know it exists and it does things for people, and that's about all I know about it. I prefer to call it by the old-fashioned name "Providence," because it provides."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOk, or call it "Caretaker" because I feel really that it takes care of us. But what disturbs me is that the human agents of the "holly! God" may find in these names some kind of acceptance of holiness of religions.
On the other hand, the gentle- men and ladies who are joining the discussion of this article will criticize us because we are basing a discussion of a scientific article on mere subjective feelings and experiences. Are we from those people who have strong activities in brain locations described in the article "Searching for God in the Brain, By David Biello, October 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind?", which justify our "subjective feelings?
rajnish: I am sorry for the mistake I made. The last tow sentences of my last reply should read:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I, you, a little one year old child and a cat will remove hands immediately when touching a very hot object accidentally
Determinism, Free will ,Turing machine and Quantum uncertainty:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe brain can be modeled by a multi input-multi processor-multi output Turing machine: the same inputs and initial states of the processors, give the same outputs. Now when the numbers of inputs and processors are huge, the possible outcomes are also huge, which gives rise to what seems to be a free choice, although it is imposed by the inputs and initial states of the processors.
The sentence "what seems to be a free choice" implies that there is some external observer of the brain. And when you make a decision, that observer can't be me or somebody else, because you are who becomes aware of that decision. So, who is that observer? Some may say that it is your consciousness? But is consciousness something that is different from the mind? Is the mind separate from the brain? And the questions go on endlessly.
Quantum theory, on the other hand, says that the Turing machine with its inputs, processors and outputs (and also the brain) is represented by a wave function, and that the wave function collapses to give a real outcome only when there is an external conscious observer who sees the results. If no conscious observer sees the outcome, the machine remains in a suspended state. Who is that observer again?
All that lead to some kind of self reference, which can't be relied on in postulating any claim about free will, mind and consciousness, because that can lead to paradoxes. We, our brains, minds and consciousness, whether separate from each other or not, are part of the Universe in its totality, and therefore can't make any complete set of postulates that are consistent about those things that are united in its totality. According to Godel theorem, logical systems consistency can't be proved by their own means.
Let us admit that we, including our brains, minds and consciousness are not qualified to answer any such questions that relate to the ultimate cause. This does not mean that we have to stop the quest to reveal more and more about our world. It only means that the result of the quest will grow continuously without an end. Imagine that you have arrived to the ultimate truth! What a boring and disappointing end!
Fried’s research demonstrates that the brain initiates voluntary actions before the person becomes aware of the time of deciding to act. But what does this prove?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaking a decision must precede the observation of the time that a decision has been made. These are separate acts, and since the latter is contingent upon the former, the former must come first. Although Fried’s electrodes pick up decision-related neuronal activity before the subjects observe the time, that implies nothing about conscious intention or free will.
The interpretation of Fried’s experiments doesn’t depend on the sequence of events. Rather, it turns on the length of time that passes between them. Does so much time pass between the onset of neuronal activity and the observation of the time that the experimenter is justified in concluding that conscious intention plays no role in making the decision?
Schiller and Carmel wrote that neuronal activity begins as much as “a second and a half before the decision,” and could predict the decision as soon as 0.7 sec earlier. Is that enough time to rule out free will?
At least 3 other activities, unmentioned by Schiller and Carmel, must occur in the subjects’ brains during the 1.5 sec time interval: (1) The decision must register in working memory; (2) the clock image must be received and processed in the visual cortex; and (3) the time must register in working memory.
Those three events involve neuronal activity, take time to occur, and must happen before the observation of the time of the decision is completed. Those events (and perhaps other brain processes) could account for the delay. If they do, then there may be no delay between the onset neuronal activity and conscious decision-making.
There may be a better explanation for what Libet, Fried and others have found: The readiness potential observed by Libet and the neuronal activation observed by Fried are the neurophysiological correlates of the conscious intention and decision process.
Conscious intention and decision-making are not instantaneous, like pushing a button. The process gathers strength and reaches a threshold. That is how it is perceived in consciousness, as well. The process involves the recruitment of growing numbers of neurons, until a point that a decision is made. The increasing activation of neuronal synapses, dendrites and axons is the conscious intention we feel when making a decision. When the level of neuronal activity has reached the decision threshold, we can check the clock and note the time.
Response to hatemnajdi:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou bring up quantum mechanics in this discussion on free will. That is appropriate. It would be strange, indeed, if the best model physics has of the nature of the universe did not bear significantly on this question.
But you seem to turn away from the implications of QM: You write that the brain is "represented by a wave function, [and] the wave function collapses to give a real outcome only when there is an external conscious observer who sees the results." But since the brain and the observer are one and the same, "that lead[s] to some kind of self reference, which can't be relied on in postulating any claim about free will."
You should not give up so soon! As you note, "We, our brains, minds and consciousness, whether separate from each other or not, are part of the Universe in its totality." That is true, and so QM must be involved in free will, just as it is involved in everything in the universe. The nature of wave function collapse is unknown, even in QM, and the role of the observer is unclear. But whatever the nature of collapse, the brain and its wave function must be related to each other through collapse, just as is true of all other objects.
If free will exists, it is a process that has the characteristics of collapse of a wave function. Consider: A wave function is a superimposition of a number of possible alternative states; when it collapses, one of those states appears in the material world. The exercise of free will also involves selection from among a set of possible alternatives. Free will chooses one and puts it into effect. The collapse of the wave function of the brain, as is true of the wave function of any object, is a process of selecting from a set of alternative possible states, so that one of them comes it into effect.
In the case of the brain, the set of possible alternatives is the set of possible states of the brain. Free will is truly free, because QM requires that the collapse of the brain wave function, which results in particular brain state, is random and unpredictable.
There is evidence of this randomness: The methodology of opinion polling and the reason polls work is due to the fact that the brains of the humans responding to the polls freely choose the responses, and, collectively, the choices conform to random distributions.
@GreenMind - "I don't think Martin Luther knew the mind of God any more than I do"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you look at some of my other posts you will see that I agree with you. The post you replied to was, sadly, a tongue in cheek, ad hominem attack on the determinists. It was a childish reaction to some of the stupid arguments I've seen here.
A good example would be when Spin-oza cited the existence of addicts and murderers as evidence that there is no free will, then railed at my "ridiculous evidence" when I pointed out that determinism would also mean that no one freely wills to give, love, sing, etc., completely missing the point that he had condemned his own evidence at the same time.
I appologize for the confusion, unless I am wrong and the universe really is purely deterministic, in which case I am not responsible for my actions and therefore don't care.
Marketing title. This is what the reference to "free will" is in this article, and I am disappointed that SA allows this kind of "non scientific" approach to promote the reading of their papers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo me (and, I gladly observe, to most commenters) there is no moral or ethical consequence in the observation that our brain may "prepare" for an action a whole second and a half before the action takes place. Whether this "preparation" consists in the choice between multiple possibilities or is just a generic warm-up can be debated, but anyway the final decision taken depends only on our brain, be it on the basis of principles or of random circumstances.
I would find much more interesting analyzing what happens during the time lag between an action and our consciousness of it, but this is out of the scope of this article.
"You should not give up so soon!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not giving up. I am just confused and trying to find the fine thread that can connect these intellectual arguments about free will and determinism.
First, the original subject here is a proposal for the explanation of some experimental scientific work concerning the temporal order of events happening in the brain and their relations to the consciousness. The question is: Is consciousness external to the brain? Is it something metaphysical? How does it interact with the mind? etc..
Second, on physical grounds, the brain can be modeled as a multiple input- multiple processor- multiple output Turing machine because it consists of atoms and molecules that obey the laws of nature. Not everybody is happy with representing the brain with a Turing machine. I agree, but I am talking here about the physically and chemically functioning brain, not about the "thinking" brain. For determinants this means that the brain will always give the same outcome, given the same inputs and initial conditions. No role here for free will. But are the brain functions free from the "effects" of the mind?
Is the brain just a clockwork machine?
It must be emphasized here that the neurons firing in the experiment is followed by a feeling of conscious will to act. And this is an indication of the presence of some kind of conscious observership in the process.
Third, the brain can be modeled by a physical system that is defined by a QM wave function. This makes you happy, but you do not explicitly acknowledge the role of the conscious observer in the process of the collapse of the wave function. The conscious observer is an integral part of this process, and its role is so profound that John Wheeler once said: "is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be?"
Where is the conscious observership in the QM wave function model? Again, it must be that feeling of will to act.
In both cases, the consciousness is a part of the events taking place during the brain activities. And so, we are trying to explain something present in ourselves by itself. Is that possible? I think the answer lies somewhere in the Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem.
Hatem Najdi, hatemnajdi@gmail.com
@hatemnajdi Good point.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Ok, or call it "Caretaker" because I feel really that it takes care of us. But what disturbs me is that the human agents of the "holly! God" may find in these names some kind of acceptance of holiness of religions."
I agree, but I don't see any way to avoid that.
"On the other hand, the gentle- men and ladies who are joining the discussion of this article will criticize us because we are basing a discussion of a scientific article on mere subjective feelings and experiences. Are we from those people who have strong activities in brain locations described in the article "Searching for God in the Brain, By David Biello, October 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind?", which justify our "subjective feelings?"
Actually I am not basing my opinion on subjective feelings. I have had actual physical events that made me start questioning my faith in the mechanistic universe. Once that happened I had to pay close attention to the boundary between the "physical universe" and "greater universal area" (kind of like a city vs. the "greater metropolitan area") of which it is a small part. I believe that a very important role of science is to investigate what can be investigated, and we need to push the boundaries beyond mechanistic dogmas. Even though I know to my own satisfaction that supernatural events exist, not all claims are valid claims. I appreciate Michael Shermer's column "The Skeptic," except that he treats so much that is simply mysterious as fraudulent or superstitious. It is important to separate the true from the false or fraudulent.
@Mark Pine: "If free will exists, it is a process that has the characteristics of collapse of a wave function. Consider: A wave function is a superimposition of a number of possible alternative states; when it collapses, one of those states appears in the material world. The exercise of free will also involves selection from among a set of possible alternatives. Free will chooses one and puts it into effect. The collapse of the wave function of the brain, as is true of the wave function of any object, is a process of selecting from a set of alternative possible states, so that one of them comes it into effect."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like that a lot. Suppose we are faced with a decision and we are evaluating alternatives that occur to us. In a deterministic universe only predetermined alternatives will be produced by the physiology of our brains. If QM allows additional non-deterministic set of choices to appear in the brain, then we may have access to truly creative and very unlikely alternatives that cannot appear under any circumstances in using a deterministic process. It would be like an electron tunneling out of a black hole: It can't happen except by QM processes.
Then after the various alternatives are in mind, we can use ordinary brain physiology to evaluate them, or perhaps some other process based on QM. I think this can be be considered a mechanism for the operation of free will.
@SkepticalKen "If you look at some of my other posts you will see that I agree with you. The post you replied to was, sadly, a tongue in cheek, ad hominem attack on the determinists."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry, I missed the irony of your comment.
"I appologize for the confusion, unless I am wrong and the universe really is purely deterministic, in which case I am not responsible for my actions and therefore don't care."
Even if you are wrong and the universe is purely deterministic, the illusion of free will remains, and therefore you still care, but in a deterministic way indistinguishable from the real thing.
I think.
I'd like to ask those who believe in determinism this question: if two human Dollies were cloned at the same time, under the same conditions and using the same genetic sample, and if they were brought up in exactly the same environment, would they behave always identically? It is known that true twins have common, but not exactly identical, behaviors although they are brought up in very similar environments, especially in their early days.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm amazed when people try to link consciousness with quantum mechanics and wave function. It sounds too much like New Age mumbo jumbo. Quantum mechanics applies to subatomic particles but not in large objects like the brain, even if large objects are made up of atoms. A wave function is a mathematical device for calculating the probabilities of subatomic particles existing in certain regions of spacetime. Don't take abstract mathematics literally or you might end up with metaphysics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"If everything we do starts in the brain, what kind of neural activity would reflect free choice? And how would you feel about your free will if we were to tell you that neuroscientists can look at your brain activity, and tell that you are about to make a decision to move – and that they could do this a whole second and a half before you yourself became aware of your own choice?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow does this disprove "FREE WILL"? Can the brain activity also tell these neuroscientists if the brain activity will tell the scientists if we decide to "move" in goodness as Mother Theresa or "move" in evil as Hitler?
What about the Many-worlds interpretation of the Quantum mechanics? Isn't there a universal wave function, in theory at least? Is Schrödinger's cat a subatomic particle?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCommon sense tells me Free Will is an illusion. It's nice to have some empirical confirmation in these experiments, but it certainly isn't necessary.
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