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Brain Study Calls Free Will Into Question
siddster notes an account up at Wired of research indicating that brain scanners can see your decisions before you make them. "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... Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will... The experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions... Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision."
Free will is an important concept because it FEELS like we've got free will.
I hypothesize that a society with a widespread belief in free will would produce a higher proportion of "moral" behavior (based on local ethics and standards) than one which believes that free will is an illusion. If we take the concept of free will out of the decision-making process, even if it is only as a theoretical construct not backed up by neuroscience, we remove one more barrier to society-damaging behavior.
Of course, this entire theory depends on my ability to convince anyone of anything.
I am a person who believes very strongly that God gives us agency and that agency is essential to our progression through life. I also believe that most decisions are made automatically. Our brain acts just like a muscle. We train it and it has reflex like decisions. But there are many times when we exercise a higher consciousness to make decisions. But who would ever accuse Slashdot of having over-sensationalized headlines?
No. There is a real problem here. Our ordinary conception of personal decision making is that it is conscious and occurs at the time the decider is aware of making the decision. This experiment goes a long way to proving that conscious experience of making a decision is epiphenomenal.
Let's conduct a simple thought experiment. We'll hook you up to a machine that replicates the experiment and which predicts pretty much everything you choose before you are aware of it. How long is it going to take you, personally, to become convinced that you, as a conscious being, have no free will? Not long, I'd wager.
The only reason people believe in free will is that much of religion makes no sense without it, and some people believe that libertarian politics makes no sense without it. The first is true, the latter is not, since political freedom and metaphysical freedom are distinct.
This is another in the series of nails being driven into the coffin of the religious conception of humanity. Evolution was the first major one. Brain science threatens to complete the project.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
The theory is (and it's not a new one) that your conscious mind merely interprets and rationalises decisions that your subconscious mind already made in a non-free-will manner. You fondly imagine that your conscious mind is doing the decision making - when in fact it's merely organising those decisions into a consistent result.
Our conscious minds have been shown to reorder events in order to 'edit out' the effects of prolonged reaction delays and other processing artifacts.
The brain does this kind of thing all the time - for example, if you look off to your left - then very quickly look off to the right - your conscious mind makes it appear as though you saw continuous 'video' as your eyes traversed the intervening distance. In truth, once the rate of motion gets more than some certain amount, your eyes turn off and your brain fills in the intervening imagery from memory or imagination.
(Actually - that's an over-simplification - this effect is called 'Saccadic Masking' and there is a great Wikipedia page that describes an experiment you can do with no more equipment than a mirror and a friend.)
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still haven't made a choice
*note/trivia* Geddy sings "still HAVE made a choice" but Neil wrote "still haven't made a choice"
I took a research study doing tests like this at UPMC. A lot of it was horrible tests such as:
A green or red square will appear every 15 seconds, along with an arrow that points right or left. If the square is green, you press the mouse button that corresponds with the direction of the arrow (if it points left hit the left button. If it points right, click the right button). If the square is red, you press the button opposite the direction the arrow is pointing.
Now, imagine doing this for an hour or more straight, with wet electrodes attached to your head. After about 10 minutes (at most), you can't help but completely wander off mentally and stop paying attention to what you are doing. Maybe that is the intention. Your goal is to do your best, because this is a "worth while" study after all on how the brain operates. Things start to flash up and you consciously don't pick up what just flashed, so you spend a good part of those 15 seconds trying to dig up any memory of the past 15 seconds. Maybe you had to be there. You don't even want to know the torture of doing these kinds of tests for HOURS inside an MRI machine.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Actually the lag can vary. In another one of Benjamin Libet's experiments (not mentioned in the article) he stimulated different areas of the human brain (he had a neursurgeon friend that he worked with during surgeries) and asked the subject to press a button when he perceived the stimulus.
It turned out that no one pressed the button until 500 milliseconds after the stimulus. So, there appeared to be at least a 500ms lag between stimulation and conscious acknowledgement of the stimulus.
Here's the funny bit: a 500ms lag time to perception is incompatible with a whole bunch of human activities. Take tennis for example; if there's a 500ms lag between watching the ball getting hit and actually perceiving it as getting hit the ball has already flown past you. (assuming a ball hit at 200km/h=55 meters/sec)
Yet we play tennis.... Intriguing eh?
Most great athletes say that they rarely, if ever, "think" about what they are doing. They just do it. Ever play an FPS (or paintball, or whatever) and get off a really good shot because it seemed like your finger had a mind of its own? That is basically what happens. The nervous system in your body can do (and learn to do) a lot without any input from the brain whatsoever.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I'm reading a great book that addresses this. Julian Jaynes' book entitled, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind works through a lot of examples to prove that nearly all human activities are done in the absence of conscious thought. The general theory he puts forth in the book is that human consciousness only happened 3,000-3,500 years ago. He suggests that before this change (over a great deal of time, not instantly) humans had split minds where one half would communicate it's type of information to the other half via auditory and visual hallucinations. To support his theories he uses early written language examples which lack the concept of free will, let alone will at all. He argues that it was much more than just a literary device, but was in fact an accurate representation of human thinking in that time.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
First, I want to compliment the GP of this thread. He hit the nail on the head -- seven second lag between a decision and realizing you've made a decision is very different from not having free will. I can very easily imagine people subconsciously (or even consciously) knowing what their decision will be well before they "decide". I find personally that most of my "decision making" is trying to understand why I feel a particular choice is correct, not deciding which choice is correct.
Secondarily, to comment on the parent. I teach karate, and in fighting matches I have observed this in quite a bit of detail. If you try to decide what to do, you are invariably ~100ms too slow in reacting (varies from person to person and experience level).
One of the most critical elements of training is to move intellectual responses into the automatic response regime, which gradually reduces the reaction time while simultaneously freeing conscious brain-power for higher level guidance. For example, at a low level, your body is handling blocking and striking without your conscious intervention while at a high level, you're observing the rhythm of the fight and observing your opponent's posture and techniques.
Then, you set up a "trigger" in your reactions so that as soon as a particular opening appears again, you immediately capitalize. Usually you do this by repeating a motion many, many times, but it eventually happens. That capitalization definitely happens in under 100ms (I can punch about 6 times in one second, and in order to break the rhythm you need to get at least a factor of four faster than that).
To see this (maybe), imagine that your opponent does a quick punch. If you notice that he's a bit slow to recover, a good option is to sidestep and punch before his punch is over -- but a punch is over in 200ms, tops. You have to start your punch in at most 50ms after she starts hers (switching genders for the sake of the female karateka in my club). Of course, I might be convinced that this is more a matter of picking up on a rhythm and predicting a punch... but if you do this then you're screwed by a fake, and it wouldn't explain quick responses to the very first attack of a sequence, so I'm fairly sure it's a real reaction time.
p.s. Can you tell I teach at an engineering school? It's always entertaining when the class is completely at a loss to understand a move until I draw a force diagram.
If we don't have free will, then what's the point? If all of our decisions are predetermined, why debate the origins? Without free will our lives are meaningless. I take the existence of free will as an axiom, because the alternative is stupid.
We often think we are making a conscious decision which is in fact unconscious. I have been studying and practicing hypnosis lately, and the reason it is effective (in some people) is that the subconscious mind acts before the conscious. If we program the subconscious mind to behave a certain way, the conscious mind will go along with it unquestioningly (unless it conflicts with the will of the subject).
It's like the old schoolyard trick:
A: "Milk, milk, milk, milk,..."
B: "What do cows drink?"
A: "Milk. No, wait..."
Furthering what you are saying, there are some interesting experiments referenced in steven pinkers book "The blank slate", which are done on patients that had the connections between the two brain hemispheres removed (due to crippling epilepsy) - they instruct one side of the brain to do something (ie go out of the room) and then ask the other side of the brain why they did it. The other side never says "I don't know" it always makes up a reason, and the patients can get quite heated insisting that they had a reason. This would suggest that consciousness is a story telling device to explain our actions rather than the source of our decision making.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
When you model human behavior in terms of deterministic principles (i.e. the laws of physics and the metaphysical assumptions that underlie them), you shouldn't be surprised to find no room for the expression of free will.
If your first premise is "not A" then any subsequent premise which affirms "A" will be seen as the logical contradiction that it is.
So long as reduction is king, we shouldn't expect to find "free will" lurking among the emergent phenomena either...wherever it emerges it will just again be reduced to deterministic expressions, and hence seem to be deterministic (and hence profoundly unfree).
Our analysis of the brain doesn't disprove free will anymore than the English language disproves that nouns have tenses. Nor, by the same token, does any mystical tradition prove it.
The key is in how you model it, and whether or not your model is useful. That is all.
"It is the high tension precision of play/guess/play/guess"
.1 seconds and thus is too fast to see), and very minute differences in the angle of the pitching arm's down stroke (imperceptible to the naked eye). From experience I know that only after a pitch has traveled 1/5th of the way to you do you have any idea which way the ball is traveling. In the case of a curve ball or a slider you also can note the pitch required a lot of effort but the ball is moving too slow for a fastball, but you still cant be certain how much or how little the ball will change direction. You literally have to start your swing and continue making adjustments to the angle of your swing while reading the ball. The bat you are trying to hit the ball with is about the same thickness as the ball itself, thus require a near perfect alignment to get a clean hit. Guessing isn't good enough.
.4 seconds. A curve ball, usually 65-70mph, travels the same distance (actually a little more) in just under .6 seconds. A difference between your swing and the ball of greater than .08 seconds will put the ball in the left or right bleachers.
That stops working in say... baseball. In baseball the pitches body language and stance (intentionally) tells you nothing about the coming pitch. The only thing that changes between different kinds of pitches (and their angle) is the position of his fingers on the ball (hidden by the the glove until the pitch begins) the way he releases the ball (the pitch itself takes less than
Add to this that you also have to predict the exact moment that the ball will pass in front of you and how long it will take for your swing to bring your bat in front of you so that the bat and ball are passing in front of you at the same moment.
To put some numbers into all this a 95 mph fast ball travels from the pitchers hand to the catchers glove in just over
Oh... and no, "the ability to use available information to arrive at good outcomes of any decision" is not free will. That is called reason. Free will comes in when you knowingly chose not to take the better of two options... such as a randomly deciding to use a nail gun to attach your hand to a wall. Free will is the ability to choose in SPITE of the known outcome.
The article is sketchy (to say the least) about the details of this test. Were people told they were going to have to press a button? How long were they told to wait before pressing it? Did they start thinking about pressing it before they were even asked to do it? Was any of the test subjects a Jedi?
;-)
Just because you start thinking about making a "random" decision a few seconds in advance, that does not mean you cannot change your mind a fraction of a second before, if something else happens (ex., a sudden external stimulus). In fact, the article points this out:
"Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision."
I think it's pretty obvious that people can react to external stimuli in less than seven seconds, including stimuli that they had no way of predicting.
Anyway, unless our brains have some sort of mystical particles, they are essentially very complex and highly parallel (but still fundamentally deterministic) electro-chemical computers, with an insane amount of inputs. So this really boils down to consciousness and a concept of present.
What this study shows is that decision-making isn't an instant process (did anyone think it was?), that we are not conscious of the early stages of that process (did anyone think we were?) and that there is a significant subconscious stage to random decisions, possibly because our brain tries to "validate" its decisions before submitting them to the "conscious" mind, and random ones have a low confidence level, making them go through extra sanity checks.
Subconscious: Tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button!
Mr. Conscious's P.A.: Did you say something or was that just random noise?
Sub.: I said "tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button"!
P.A.: Why should I tell him that?
Sub.: Because he asked me to make a random decision.
P.A.: Not good enough. Mr. Conscious will need assurance that that is the ideal course of action. Please produce the complete paper trail that led you to that decision.
Sub.: What paper trail? This is a *random* decision, you idiot.
P.A.: I'm afraid you will at least have to find some evidence that hitting the left button will not have any negative effects. If Mr. Conscious simply followed every random advice he got, how would he justify his salary?
Sub.: Look, the guy conducting the study hit the button just now and nothing happened to him, right? It's safe. Just hit it.
P.A.: Well, alright. The left button, you said?
Sub.: Yes!
P.A.: I'll transmit that to Mr. Conscious.
Sub.: About bloody time, too. Wasted seven seconds of my life.
P.S. - Several studies have shown that top athletes don't have particularly faster reflexes than other people; they just do the "Jedi trick" of starting to react before something happens. How can they react to something that hasn't happened? Experience. Their brain knows what are the 5 or 6 most likely developments, and it starts to plan ahead for all of them. When the times comes to send the decision to the body, the actual action is already buffered. On top of that, frequently we react to indicators rather than to the event itself (ex., in tennis the other player's body position will generally allow you to guess how he's going to serve before he hits the ball; if you wait for the ball to be hit, you won't get to it on time). To put it in computer terms: speculative execution and intelligent branch prediction.
P.P.S. - In Stanislaw Lem's short story "137 seconds" a news-gathering computer develops the ability to predict reality 137 seconds in advance, so this brain scanner still has a long way to go.
The human monkey is a vehicle for the soul. Left to its own devices, it is an automatic, albeit complex machine which is a sort of bridge between states of existence. --That is, souls grow and need work to develop, and the human monkey is the vehicle for this process.
If there is no exertion of the Will, then the human monkey basically is just a reaction machine, responding to stimulus and being generally predictable in its behavior as demonstrated by the neurologists in the article. The Spirit sits between the mind and the body. If the spirit is not exercised, then the monkey is happy to run on autopilot, usually being selfish in nature, seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and thinking of no other individual other than itself unless in a manner to better attain pleasure and avoid pain. The psychopath is just a broken monkey which has learned how to feed on others but with a failure of its own survival circuits. (Psychopaths are very good at feeding, but their actions are ultimately self-destructive. Regular monkeys are more balanced and know how to survive better).
With the introduction of the soul, which as it grows learns how to care and feel for others, the whole equation becomes more complex and more interesting.
When you, as a soul, choose to be aware of the flow of instructions between mind and body, and decide to act in a manner different than that which would be automatic, then you are exercising your Will. This takes effort and the monkey and mind push back because it is no longer acting along the path of least resistance, as it were. But the monkey will obey, (that's what it's there to do), and through continued exertion, the spirit and soul grow and become strong and increasingly self-aware.
A note of interest. . . The point of alchemy is not, as I see it, about turning lead into gold; I think those are just metaphors for the creation and purification of the soul; the effort and resistance of exerting the Will creates 'heat'. In the various alchemical texts, repeated heating of the 'crucible' are described. With repeated heating, the soul is purified until enlightenment comes within reach.
Anyway, it seems to me that if one pays attention, then one can become ever more aware of the mind/body communication, (during the seven seconds indicated by the experiment under discussion?) Perhaps I am fooling myself in this, but that's the sensation I seem to experience when I observe my own mind in its workings.
-FL
I don't think of the brain this way. Therefore your argument collapses. :)
Seriously though, I don't like the I/O models that so many people run around with. Its a model, only a model, and more often than not when we confuse models with reality we are led astray. A model is only useful as long as we realize that we're dealing with only an abstraction.
My brain is not a computer, it is not even like a computer. My brain is like a brain. Its like comparing a horse to a car, and trying to get useful information, all we get are analogies, but not real answers.
I have issues with people who put too much stock in reductionism. Its useful, but I don't know if it is a good way of getting meaningful data.
If we must run with the computer analogy (and I will not bring up Searle's chinese box), then we must accept that the brain has almost unlimited inputs, since it mirrors its own functioning internally, and mirrors external systems internally as well, meaning more than half its inputs are internal. Also we must then realize that half of these internal inputs are NOT logical inputs, but creative factors. This starts making the computer model not at all computer like.
There is no neuron or group of neurons that is "you."
Again, I disagree. The gestalt of neurons (the full set) is "you". Obviously there is a difference between "you" and "~you", and as you say we are all brain, and no mind, this difference must exist in the neurons, or more precisely, the arrangement of them. Or in a smaller sense, the connection of groups to other groups, and the connections within each group.
And, as an interesting mind game, try to live a day of your life as if you did not have free will. The idea (if not the thing itself) is innate.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I'm a former student of Searle. I'm pretty familiar with the state of Anglo-American philosophy. I've simply come to the conclusion that, while certain thinkers such as Putnam, Austin, Strawson, Ayers, Feyeraband and such have produced interesting work, that the analytical tradition is not really the mainstream of philosophy, and that it is increasingly consigned to a "god of the gaps" position by its ahistoricism and positivist posture (even when its content isn't positivist, its rhetoric is.)
Too often there are claims made that should be made empirically, such as Dreyfus' insistence that computers could never become competent chess players, or accounts of choice that assume rationality (that is, the conscious or symbolic representation of possible outcomes before choice.) There is a profound reluctance to do real metaphysics, and so much of the analytic work strikes me as moving chairs around the desk of the Titanic.
Why aren't there thinkers of the scope and profundity of Hegel, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty? Why is Deleuze's reading of Hume so much more compelling than those of any of the anglo critics? When did philosophy become so timid and twee?
I don't know what precisely you mean when you refer to "much of religion", but it can't be the Christian faith as described in the Bible, which makes very clear that belief in "free will" is not part of the Christian faith, see e.g. Exodus 9:16 and Romans 9:17ff.
However moral responsibility for one's actions is an essential part of what the Bible teaches. You can be morally responsible for what you do even if your will isn't totally, entirely free. Such moral responsibility requires only the ability to consciously veto proposed actions that the unconscious part of the mind is proposing, and this veto ability has in fact been experimentally observed, See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57.
Therefore, free will and moral responsibilty are not the same thing. It is true that some people have been preaching a version of Chrstian religion which is based more on philosophical assertions like "free will" than on what the Bible actually says, but that is not a valid argument against religion. It only demonstrates the foolishness of listening to people who try to base religion on human philosophy instead of focusing on what the Bible says.
You might want to read the book, rather than that very short summary of it. You are right that it is essentially unfalsifiable, making it not-science. (Note that most history and anthropology are similarly not-science).
To quickly address some of the issues you mentioned:
There are essentially no groups left on the earth where the split mind is "normal", but there are isolated cases. Some forms of schizophrenia, for example, can be considered as very similar to the split mind. One big reason they are gone today is that the societies they could survive in are gone, replaced with our familiar conscious societies. Another reason is that they were regularly hunted down and killed (many examples in the old testament).
I think you underestimate the quantity and quality of very ancient literature. Take a look at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature: http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/ Some of it is quite good, and most of it is very, very alien to modern readers. There are plenty of examples from other cultures, I just use that as an example because of my interest in cuneiform writings.
The hallucinations involved weren't like the impression of a drug trip that you see on TV, and they weren't random. Think of it like your intuition having a personality and shouting commands in your "ear". More like Baltar's visitors (from the new Battlestar Galactica series) than like Reefer Madness.
In that context, the hallucinations can be a good thing. What if the voice tells you the right time to strike? Or if it tells you to duck because it noticed a sabretooth tiger hunting you while you hunted the mammoth? But even that is misleading, because it assumes someone with our modern narritive/conscious mind with the addition of voices from the reasoning/analyzing portion of our brain.
See that "Preview" button?