Some neuroscientists recently claimed that free will is an illusion, partly because injecting an impulse into a nerve (say, along a test subject’s arm) can cause a subject to move (say, a finger), and subsequently report that the action was conscious and deliberate.
Because the action preceded the awareness, it demonstrates that the action was not free will. Therefore free will is an illusion.
I submit that if the experiment were done by sending an impulse to the brain, similar results could be achieved, except nobody would claim free will was dead because of the results. If you zap a person’s brain, of course they’ll do something that they thought was conscious. That doesn’t mean all free will goes away.
So I think the model is wrong. The nervous system outside the brain has to be considered part of ‘the mind.’ Scientists put a message in the system to cause a movement. A message that, if it had originated in the brain, the person would properly identified as voluntary. If a busy post office in Chicago arrived in New York with a Chicago post office, they would say the letter came from Chicago, even if it were created surreptitiously in Cleveland.
Consider also:
[ul]
[li]muscle memory is real - practiced motions can be *remembered *by the nerves themselves[/li][li]jellyfish have no brain, but have eyes, and can learn very simple things[/li][/ul]
As long as we consider the whole nervous system part of what’s capable of learning and memory, part of Des Cartes’ mind, the apparent problem goes away, doesn’t it?
Do you have a cite for neuroscientists making those claims for that reason?
Before thios thread takes off, can you please define free will? Too many times threads like this are incoherent because posters are defining free will in different ways.
Box jellyfish are the jellyfish with eyes. They are the ones that do have something that can be loosely defined as brains.
That’s cool. Since compatibilism (also here), which already presumed (at least arguendo) the results of this study, and compatibilism is by now a well-developed retort to the prima facie case for determinism (I express no opinion as to whether it is a successful retort, but an extant retort it is) … I guess the question is: Have you addressed any of the compatibilists’ arguments? Because if not, you’re just rehashing ground that has long ago been adequately set forth.
Sometimes we think we are making a choice when we aren’t, so whenever we think we are making a choice we aren’t.
That seems like a bad argument. Even so, if we were always wrong about choice making that would show our experience of free will was, literally, an illusion. But it wouldn’t show that there was no free will.
A cite would be good here. This doesn’t sound like new stuff, re the actual neuroscience.
Good question. I can’t find it right now, I’m pretty sure I can find a news article in the past several months at home. I’d better review it, though, since news articles often get things wrong.
Yeah, that’s a tough one. How about “decisions truly made by a person’s mind that have a real effect on the world outside the person’s mind?” I’m open to help on that score, though.
Thanks. That’s fine that the collar can be ‘loosely defined as a brain’ because it helps make my point - there’s nothing magical about brain neurons. Neurons in one’s arm are capable of learning (altering behavior as a result of experience) and memory, and I’m convinced it really is the neurons outside the brain that really retain the memories in what we call ‘muscle memory.’
Hmm. I guess my position is using a different definition of free will than, say, Dennett. It seems compatibilists limit what can be said to not be free will. In other words, so long as it’s not another *person *limiting my freedom, they might say ‘good enough.’ Even though I’m limited in the sense that everything I’ve ever done was predetermined by physics and never the result of my intentions branching one way instead of a possible other a some decision point, they say that’s good enough. It makes things easier to talk about and measure, but by robbing the concept of free will of its crux.
Perhaps the thing I’m really trying to argue, though, is that we should stop thinking of the brain as the organ of consciousness, and allow that consciousness, in the ‘constantly moving and never anywhere particular’ model, has no natural boundary at the edge of the brain. The whole nervous system is a conscious net, with the ‘gravity well’ centered in the brain.
Free will is a concept that interesting only because of the implications it has for other topics (namely, moral responsibility). This is the crux of free will; that is, we care about whether free will exists because the answer to that question makes a material difference to our theories about moral responsibility.
So the compatibilist account does not necessarily rob free will of its crux, because it validates two propositions that most “naive” materialists (i.e., non-philosophers who believe that the material, rule-governed world is all that exists, which is kind of a default position for most modern science-minded types) would endorse:
(1) The material universe is deterministically governed by universal rules. This includes the biological substrate that operates to instantiate our consciousness.
(2) People are by and large morally responsible for their actions.
You seem to think that compatibilists are in the business of giving lip service to (1), but I don’t think that’s accurate. Rather, their efforts are to explain how (2) can be true (as it indeed seems to most of us to be true).
I don’t think this is a particularly controversial belief. I’d be surprised if it weren’t already held by the overwhelming majority don’t already believe it (and even distribute some mental functions outside the body as well: think how your shopping list can be seen as an extra-anatomical adjunct to the faculty of memory). The Cartesian task of locating the organ that houses consciousness hasn’t been in fashion in a very long time.
Yes, I’ve heard that argument before. Or even consider something as simple as counting on your fingers.
It’s my understanding that the brain also relies on body functions as part of its emotional state; things like tensed muscles, a faster heartbeat and so forth aren’t just reflections of our emotions, to a degree they are our emotions. Damage to the nerves that prevents those physiological reactions also produces a flattening of the emotions.
If the mind is distributed throughout the body, what effect should we expect upon the mind when limbs are amputated? Or when a person is paralysed from the neck down?
When an anvil falls on my head I don’t have the free will to keep my head from getting crushed. I don’t have the free will to stop my fingernails from growing, or to keep my hair growing. I don’t see how any of things have an impact on the concept of free will, whether the brain extends into the nervous system or not.
The mind is a phenomenally (… heh) tricky concept. It always seemed to me that for any (materialist) conception of “the mind” to really work, it had to include the endocrine system as well, because hormones can control and influence your mental state and behavior (in some cases, to an even greater degree than the brain). Keep in mind that my background stems primarily from philosophy of the mind as it relates to AI. It seemed to me that “making a robot that acts like a human” was fundamentally flawed if you tried to just copy the neurons of the brain as a simple network without taking into account other internal factors like hormones and other chemical interactions.
I’ve never thought of the mind as existing in any way other than metaphorically (which is important). How can mind be proven other than as another name for brain? If there is a non-physical mind, does it survive death?
“The mind”, while a bit fuzzy, is a concept that is at the very least well defined enough that we can reason about it (imo). It’s considered something along the lines of “what internal mechanism makes you you/act the way you do” (or perhaps “the part the does the thinking and controls your actions”) The soul used to be the goto answer for this, or at least some dualistic metaphysical “thing” literally called the mind.
Unfortunately, there’s still a readily observable phenomenon where people act in characteristic fashions, and thus while some people may be materialist and have rejected souls and dualism, “the mind” is still a valid concept that presumably has an explanation.
The same way that a painting is both a physical object, and a particular pattern that just happens in that instance to be made out of paint and not something else. Just as our genetic code is both the physical substance of DNA, and information that can be read & uploaded into a computer or printed on paper.
Your body and your brain are all part of one system. So “mind” really includes your entire body, not just the nervous system.
You would expect the person’s brain to rewire itself so the parts of the brain responsible for those parts or functions are used for something else. The original capabilities and sensations get lost. (When they don’t you can see problems like Phantom Limb Syndrome.) Even more interesting, I have read that if a person the ability to perform a particular task like making certain facial expressions, they often lose the ability to recognize those expressions in others.
Why limit it to the nervous system? Why not other parts of the body too, and even things outside the body? There is nothing magically mental about nervous tissue, and, as B.F. Skinner said, years ago, the skin is not all that important as a boundary. Cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind have been talking about embodied cognition and “the extended mind” for decades now.
Here is a very recent article on the subject (although somehow the authors still seem to believe this is something “new”).
Mind you, whether the embodied cognition or extended mind theories (which now come in many versions) are correct or not really has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem of free will (where the smart money has been on some version of compatibilism for many, many decades now).
Sure, the body is a system, but I don’t think that’s quite where the OP was going with this. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
You’re just predicting what we already observe - it’s consistent with the body as a system, but doesn’t seem to compellingly suggest that cognition is distributed - or amputation would be more akin to traumatic brain damage in effect (IMO).
I accidentally the ability to perform tasks.
Does that still happen when the loss of ability doesn’t arise out of the brain? That is, does it work that way for people who have botox? (If so, I’d be interested to know if depriving them of a mirror has the same effect)
Yes, I was describing what has already been observed. Otherwise I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. Amputation is probably not similar to traumatic brain damage in this sense: if a limb is amputated, the brain will make changes over time, not right away.