I must admit that I’m struggling to accept the linked experiment as being indicative of what you are suggesting. I’m not a neuroscientist so my assumptions may be completely misguided, but I’m not seeing anything resembling a double blind study approach here. Not that I can imagine one being possible in this case. The experimental data relies heavily on the experience of the subject moving his finger and accurately recording the moment at which the will to move his finger occured. Similarly RP awareness is claimed to be pre-cognitive (before the subject is aware of his will to move). So what? As For You points out, there are no allowances for latency. Moving a finger may sound trivial but I don’t know if we have enough knowledge of the activity in the brain to be able to time the flow of information though the synapses of the human brain and the nervous system resulting in the action of a raised finger. Indeed, a thought may occure in the human mind before the person is aware of it. But I’m not ready to accept that as evidence for a strictly determinite human conscience.
For sure.
Yes, that’s what the brain does - it makes decisions based on its structure, experience, and available information. That all can be explained without spooky “free will.”
Your brain is processing myriad inputs and coming to a decision, as a result of physical electrochemical processes in the brain. It’s just a very complex, convoluted computer. Each neuron involved does what it does as a result of the laws of physics.
Again, I think we must be using different definitions of “free will.” Does everyone here agree that what the brain decides to do is a result of those laws of physics?
If we can agree on that, then we agree that the idea that the vast majority of the general population has about free will is wrong.
Some people here like to define free will as something that a complex physical brain can do while it simply obeys the laws of physics, but that is not what most people mean by free will.
Yes, we are in agreement.
Perhaps I missed something… what does the majority of the general population believe about free will that contradicts what we just agreed about?
Okay… once more with feeling… I define FW as a cognitive process governed by the laws of physics (i.e. not supernatural in any way). So far so good, right? However, the OP suggests that determinism is how the universe works and decisions based on input only give the appearance of the human brain evaluating information and making decisions when in fact, it’s all been pre-determined (i.e. given the choice of strawberry of chocolate, you’re going to sometimes pick one and sometimes the other but you won’t be really be making those decision through free will, you’ll just think you are).
Or have I completely misundestood everything so far? :dubious:
The vast majority of the general population would believe that their choices are not simply the result of physical processes in their brains. Not that they’ve put that much thought into it, but sometime suggest to an acquaintance (preferably a religious one) that his choices are a result of physical processes in his brain and just watch his reaction.
Please don’t ask me to build a coherent picture for what these people do believe, because ultimately I think it’s not coherent. Most people just haven’t put that much thought into it.
Careful with using words like “pre-determined.” That makes it sound like fatalism, where something is fated to happen from the outset of the universe. With quantum uncertainty and chaos, that can’t be. However, your brain’s decision is determined at the time that it makes the decision by the laws of physics. Personally, I don’t think that QM indeterminacy has any significant effect on the brain’s decisions while it’s deciding, so yes, it’s deterministic.
QM does have a significant effect, however. Had a cosmic ray hit a DNA molecule and that caused Hitler’s grandparent to get cancer and die in childhood, we would be living in a completely different world right now.
But what the brain does is pretty much determined by the laws of physics. To your average person on the street, his brain will short-out if you tell him that because it violates his conception of free will.
There have been criticisms of the research (as there should be for all research) but it is now firmly in the canon of the neuroscience of causation. The latest MRI research is even more convincing.
“You may think you decided to read this story – but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.
In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people’s decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.
The decision studied – whether to hit a button with one’s left or right hand – may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?
“Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done,” said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.
Haynes updated a classic experiment by the late Benjamin Libet, who showed that a brain region involved in coordinating motor activity fired a fraction of a second before test subjects chose to push a button. Later studies supported Libet’s theory that subconscious activity preceded and determined conscious choice – but none found such a vast gap between a decision and the experience of making it as Haynes’ study has.
In the seven seconds before Haynes’ test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. Haynes’ team monitored these shifting neural patterns using a functional MRI machine.
Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand – a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation. For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis of other brain functions.
Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will. For instance, the experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions.
“Real-life decisions – am I going to buy this house or that one, take this job or that – aren’t decisions that we can implement very well in our brain scanners,” said Haynes.
Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision.
“We can’t rule out that there’s a free will that kicks in at this late point,” said Haynes, who intends to study this phenomenon next. “But I don’t think it’s plausible.”
That implausibility doesn’t disturb Haynes.
“It’s not like you’re a machine. Your brain activity is the physiological substance in which your personality and wishes and desires operate,” he said.
The unease people feel at the potential unreality of free will, said National Institutes of Health neuroscientist Mark Hallett, originates in a misconception of self as separate from the brain.
“That’s the same notion as the mind being separate from the body – and I don’t think anyone really believes that,” said Hallett. “A different way of thinking about it is that your consciousness is only aware of some of the things your brain is doing.”
Hallett doubts that free will exists as a separate, independent force.
“If it is, we haven’t put our finger on it,” he said. “But we’re happy to keep looking.””
As far as I can tell, the baseline definition of “free will” would be that the individual is presented a choice that is free of coercion and constraint, so the option or course they select must arise from within. Obviously, the constraint part is contextual: if there are only nine flavors of ice cream to choose from, your choice is limited by that scope, but within it, you are unconstrained (assuming you have the means to obtain the ice cream).
So why are you standing in front of the freezer in the first place? Well, you were sitting in front of the TV when you suddenly decided you wanted some ice cream. You were not aware of the biochemical and environmental processes that conspired to make you feel a desire for ice cream, you just wanted some. And the choice you make may be hard to predict if more than one of your preferences is available. Given an impasse, you will toss a mental coin, because the need for some ice cream has become paramount.
It all feels like “free will” because you are not aware of the underlying processes. And while the calculations involved in decision making occur internally, their arguments and operands at least partially originate outside the individual. Even uncoerced and unconstrained, we are subject to external factors that shape the choices we make.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the bandwidth for this discussion at the moment, but regarding Post #226, here’s a link (pdf) to the original study. Notice the subjects were making TWO choices, only one of which (the less important one) was predictable long in advance. It’s an interesting result, but not particularly significant.
FWIW, Pjen, here’s a thread I opened two years ago developing at length my thoughts on this old chestnut. We agree in some respects and disagree in others. As I said, I don’t have time at the moment for a debate. But I thought you might find the linked thread of interest.
I would say that any result that shows that decisions that were claimed to be made of free will could be predicted from physical measurement seconds before the person was aware of the decision is a pretty good sign that cognitive awareness is not part of the casative chain of human reaction.
It is worth noting that this type of result also goes to explaining another old paradox- that of the amount of time for efferent signals to reach the brain, be calculated, issue afferent signals and then act in response. It would seem that the brain is always the best part of a second behind the real world, so how does it avoid making crass errors.
One answer seems to be that the brain engages in massive modeling of the environment and predicts (usually successfully) what the likely real world position is, and the brain reacts to the predictions of that model rather than awaiting the latest news.
I agree almost totally with your old post.
Where we may differ is that I am quite happy to say that whilst human organisms have the ability to react in a complex (and unpredictable by reductive means) manner, the conscious awareness of doing so is not part of the causative chain, but merely an artifact of the current analysis and the storing of it for future conscious and unconscious reflection.
I do not deny that human organisms as a whole have volition- drives in a certain direction, but I hold that the awareness of such volition is not part of the causation of behaviour.
How consciousness fits into the puzzle is a question on which I’ve been working since that thread, as part of a larger inquiry into what neuroscience has to say about how the brain functions. I’m still working on that, so I’m not yet prepared to propose a thesis, even if I had more time. I will say, though, that it appears to me likely we’re appropriately responsible for unconscious decisions in most cases. (When not is actually the part of this issue which interests me most.) After all, it’s still us who are making the decisions. And, perhaps more importantly, it’s still us who (usually consciously) put them into effect. Indeed, as you probably know (it’s obvious you’ve spent a lot of time on this), at least in the common law tradition, conscious action generally is all that’s required by criminal law to satisfy the intent requirement.
Aye, and there’s the rub!!
Common law excuses for lack of mens rea. That involves the awareness of the wrongness of the action and the means to avoid acting in that way.
In some cases (Children, Mental disorder to the point of lack of understanding of criminal intent, being an animal or an object etc, it is an assumption based on societal decisions. In others it is directly related to the role of consciousness in the process of deciding to act (enforced intoxication, sleep-walking and fugue states, any other automatism).
If we exclude people for the reason that they effectively had no control over their actions, and if we accept that determinism is true (everything is as it is becasue of the previous state of the universe, then responsibility of the conscious individual goes out the window. The Meat Machine itself may be “responsible” technically, but the act would have happened anyway- the brain is like a complex bagatelle.
This has two possible results- one of which is that we reassess our usage of the words praise and blame and see that they are mere descriptors of determined events, or we excuse all people (from automatists to child killers) becasue the fault lies with their bodies rather than with any illusory criminal intent.
If we do that we face a different world of social, psychological, sociological and criminological description which might place all of them on a more empirical and rationally moral basis than the mish-mash we currently adhere to!
I’m not with you there - we can still hold people responsible for their actions even when we all recognize that their decisions/actions were the result of the laws of physics. We don’t have to excuse child killers just because there was no spooky “free will.”
After all, if you use the analogy that the brain is just a really really complex computer, when a computer is malfunctioning and is a danger to other computers, you get it off the network. If the computer is programmed for self-preservation, you give it inputs that if it continues the bad behavior then its goals of self-preservation will not be met.
What we don’t do is carry out retribution against computers, just like retribution should not be part of our human justice system.
Curently if a child killer is in a class of people for whom we hold that free will does not exist- other children, the mentally disordered with certain features, automatism etc, we do not hold them criminally responsible. If in fact no-one has Free Will (whatever their conscious awareness at the time of the crime (men rea- guilty mind) it would have happened anyway, what is the difference between that and the current excused classes?
You seem to selectively take away free will from some (individuals) while granting it to others (justice system). If there is no free will, we may as well keep punishing murderers. It does not matter what we choose to do, since we could not have done anything else.
I think you misunderstand.
Our current Justice system allows certain classes of people exclusion from punishment because of their inability to act in a criminal manner becasue there was no criminal intent (mens rea) This is a useful myth to humanise a justice system so that we no longer execute or imprison children, brain damaged or severely mentally disordered people.
It is a myth that in order to be fully responsible, one must have been in control- ‘one’ here being the conscious mind of a human. If the conscious mind of the human has no direct effect on the behaviour of the person, then logically they should be in the same category as those excused above.
So Free Willy has free will.
Note: Every time I see this thread I read it as questioning whether Free Willy exists.
Alas, other duties intrude, so this will have to be my last post in the thread. Which is a pity, as it’s an interesting discussion. I won’t go into why I disagree, as I think post-and-run is bad form. I will mention, though, that the consistency argument you make has had the unfortunate effect, in America at least, of hardening criminal law and making it less accommodating of those with impaired capacity. See this law review article (pdf) by Michele Cotton. It’s long (forty-eight pages), but the first four-and-a-half give a nice summary. And you probably will find the whole thing worth reading. Bottom line, consistency is a dangerous argument if the political and legal reality is that it will be resolved the other way. Better the mish-mash, imho.
Incidentally, I should mention that Cotton has no credentials other than a law degree. In an article like this, it’s all about the citations. IMHO, those support the conclusion she draws.
That is an excellent article. Thank you.