Libet Unreadied

Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments have been among the most-discussed topics of neuroscience for many years. Libet’s experiments asked a subject to move their hand at a random moment of their choosing; he showed that the decision to move could be predicted on the basis of a ‘readiness potential’ detectable half a second before the subject reported having made the decision. The result has been confirmed many times since, and even longer gaps between prediction and reported decision have been claimed. The results are controversial because they seem to be strong scientific evidence against free will. If the decision had been made before the decider knew it, how could their conscious thought have been effective? My original account (14 years ago, good grief) is here.

Libet’s findings and their significance have been much disputed philosophically, but a new study reported here credibly suggests that the readiness potential (RP) or Bereitschaftspotential has been misunderstood all along.

In essence the RP is a peak of neural activity, which seemed to the original researchers to represent a sort of gathering of neural resources as the precursor of an action. But the new study suggests that this appearance is largely an artefact of the methods used to analyse the data, and that the RP really represents nothing more than the kind of regular peak which occurs naturally in any system with a lot of background noise. Neural activity just does ebb and flow like that for no particular reason.

That is not to say that the RP was completely irrelevant to the behaviour of Libet’s subjects. In the rather peculiar circumstances of the original experiment, where subjects are asked to pick a time at random, it is likely that a chance peak of activity would tip the balance for the unmotivated decision. But that doesn’t make it either the decision itself or the required cause of a decision. Outside the rather strange conditions of the experiment, it has no particular role. Perhaps most tellingly, when the original experiments were repeated with a second group of subjects who were asked not to move at all, it was impossible to tell the difference between the patterns of neural activity recorded; a real difference appeared only at the time the subjects in the first group reported having made a decision.

This certainly seems to change things, though it should be noted that Libet himself was aware that the RP could be consciously ‘over-ruled’, a phenomenon he called ‘Free Won’t’. It can, indeed, be argued that the significance of the results was always slightly overstated. We always knew that there must be neural precursors of any given decision, if not so neatly identifiable as the RP. So long as we believe the world is governed by determined physical laws (something I think it’s metaphysically difficult to deny) the problem of Free Will still arises; indeed, essentially the same problem was kicked around for centuries in forms that relied on divine predestination or simple logical fatalism rather than science.

Nevertheless, it looks as though our minds work the way they seem to do rather more than we’ve recently believed. I’m not quite sure whether that’s disappointing or comforting.

Feeling free

Eddy Nahmias recently reported on a ground-breaking case in Japan where a care-giving robot was held responsible for agreeing to a patient’s request for a lethal dose of drugs. Such a decision surely amounts to a milestone in the recognition of non-human agency; but fittingly for a piece published on 1 April, the case was in fact wholly fictional.

However, the imaginary case serves as an introduction to some interesting results from the experimental philosophy Nahmias has been prominent in developing. The research – and I take it to be genuine – aims not at clarifying the metaphysics or logical arguments around free will and responsibility, but at discovering how people actually think about those concepts.

The results are interesting. Perhaps not surprisingly, people are more inclined to attribute free will to robots when told that the robots are conscious. More unexpectedly, they attach weight primarily to subjective and especially emotional conscious experience. Free will is apparently thought to be more a matter of having feelings than it is of neutral cognitive processing.

Why is that? Nahmias offers the reasonable hypothesis that people think free will involves caring about things. Entities with no emotions, it might be, don’t have the right kind of stake in the decisions they make. Making a free choice, we might say, is deciding what you want to happen; if you don’t have any emotions or feelings you don’t really want anything, and so are radically disqualified from an act of will. Nahmias goes on to suggest, again quite plausibly, that reactive emotions such as pride or guilt might have special relevance to the social circumstances in which most of our decisions are made.

I think there’s probably another factor behind these results; I suspect people see decisions based on imponderable factors as freer than others. The results suggest, let’s say, that the choice of a lover is a clearer example of free will than the choice of an insurance policy; that might be because the latter choice has a lot of clearly calculable factors to do with payments versus benefits. It’s not unreasonable to think that there might be an objectively correct choice of insurance policy for me in my particular circumstances, but you can’t really tell someone their romantic inclinations are based on erroneous calculations.

I think it’s also likely that people focus primarily on interesting cases, which are often instances of moral decisions; those in turn often involve self-control in the face of strong desires or emotions.

Another really interesting result is that while philosophers typically see freedom and responsibility as two sides of the same coin, people’s everyday understanding may separate the two. It looks as though people do not generally distinguish all that sharply between the concepts of being causally responsible (it’s because of you it happened, whatever your intentions) and morally responsibly (you are blameworthy and perhaps deserve punishment). So, although people are unwilling to say that corporations or unconscious robots have free will, they are prepared to hold them responsible for their actions. It might be that people generally are happier with concepts such as strict liability than moral philosophers mainly are; or of course, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that people just tend to suffer some mild confusion over these issues.

Thought-provoking stuff, anyway, and further evidence that experimental philosophy is a tool we shouldn’t reject.

Just deserts

Dan Dennett and Gregg Caruso had a thoughtful debate about free will on Aeon recently. Dennett makes the compatibilist case in admirably pithy style. You need, he says, to distinguish between causality and control. I can control my behaviour even though it is ultimately part of a universal web of causality. My past may in the final sense determine who I am and what I do, but it does not control what I do; for that to be true my past would need things like feedback loops to monitor progress against its previously chosen goals, which is nonsensical. This concept of being in control, or not being in control, is quite sufficient to ground our normal ideas of responsibility for our actions, and freedom in choosing them.

Caruso, who began by saying he thought their views might turn out closer than they seemed, accepts pretty well all of this, agreeing that it is possible to come up with conceptions of responsibility that can be used to underpin talk of free will in acceptable terms. But he doesn’t want to do that; instead he wants to jettison the traditional outlook.

At this point Caruso’s motivation may seem puzzling. Here we have a way of looking at freedom and responsibility which provides a philosophically robust basis for our normal conception of those two moral basics – ideas we could not easily do without in our everyday lives. Now sometimes philosophy may lead us to correct or reject everyday ideas, but typically only when they appear to be without rational justification. Here we seem to have a logically coherent justification for some everyday moral concepts. Isn’t that a case of ‘job done’?

In fact, as he quickly makes clear, Caruso’s objections mainly arise from his views on punishment. He does not believe that compatibilist arguments can underpin ‘basic desert’ in the way that would be needed to justify retributive punishment. Retribution, as a justification for punishment, is essentially backward looking; it says, approximately, that because you did bad things, bad things must happen to you. Caruso completely rejects this outlook, and all justifications that focus on the past (after all, we can’t change the past, so how can it justify corrective action?). If I’ve understood correctly, he favours a radically new regime which would seek to manage future harms from crime in broadly the way we seek to manage the harms that arise from ill-health.

I think we can well understand the distaste for punishments which are really based on anger or revenge, which I suspect lies behind Caruso’s aversion to purely retributive penalties. However, do we need to reject the whole concept of responsibility to escape from retribution? It seems we might manage to construct arguments against retribution on a less radical basis – as indeed, Dennett seeks to do. No doubt it’s right that our justification for punishments should be forward looking in their aims, but that need not exclude the evidence of past behaviour. In fact, I don’t know quite how we should manage if we take no account of the past. I presume that under a purely forward-looking system we assess the future probability of my committing a crime; but if I emerge from the assessment with a clean bill of health, it seems to follow that I can then go and do whatever I like with impunity. As soon as my criminal acts are performed, they fall into the past, and can no longer be taken into account. If people know they will not be punished for past acts, doesn’t the (supposedly forward-looking) deterrent effect evaporate?

That must surely be wrong one way or another, but I don’t really see how a purely future-oriented system can avoid unpalatable features like the imposition of restrictions on people who haven’t actually done anything, or the categorisation of people into supposed groups of high or low risk. When we imagine such systems we imagine them being run justly and humanely by people like ourselves; but alas, people like us are not always and everywhere in charge, and the danger is that we might be handing philosophical credibility to people who would love the chance to manage human beings in the same way as they might manage animals.

Nothing, I’m sure, could be further from Gregg Caruso’s mind; he only wants to purge some of the less rational elements from our system of punishment. I find myself siding pretty much entirely with Dennett, but it’s a stimulating and enlightening dialogue.

No problem

The older I get, the less impressed I am by the hardy perennial of free will versus determinism. It seems to me now like one of those completely specious arguments that the Sophists supposedly used to dumbfound their dimmer clients.

One of their regulars, apparently went like this. Your dog has had pups? And it belongs to you? Then it’s a mother, and it’s yours. Ergo, it’s your mother!!!

If we can take this argument seriously enough to diagnose it, we might point out that ‘your’ is a word with several distinct uses. One is to pick out items that are your legal property; another is the wider one of picking out items that pertain to you in some other sense. We can, for example, use it to pick out the single human being that is your immediate female progenitor. So long as we are clear about these different senses, no problem arises.

Is free will like that? The argument goes something like this. Your actions were ultimately determined by the laws of physics. An action which was determined in advance is not free. Ergo, physics says none of your actions were free!!!

But there are two entirely different senses of “determined” in play here. When I ask if you had a free choice, I’m not asking a metaphysical question about whether an interruption to the causal sequence occurred. I’m asking whether you had a gun to your head, or something like that.

Now some might argue that although the two senses are distinct, the physics one over-rides the psychological one and renders it meaningless. But it doesn’t. A metaphysical interruption to the causal sequence wouldn’t give me freedom anyway; it might give me a random factor, but freedom is not random. What I want to know is, did your actions arise out of your conscious thoughts, or did external factors constrain them? That’s all. The undeniable fact that my actions are ultimately constrained by the laws of nature simply isn’t what I’m concerned with.

That constraint really is undeniable, of course; in fact we don’t really need physics. If the world is coherent at all it must be governed by laws, and those laws must determine what happens. If things happened for no reason, we could make no sense of anything. So any comprehensive world view must give us some kind of determinism. We know this well enough, because we are familiar with at least one other comprehensive theory; the view that things happen only because God wills them. This means everything is predestined, and that gives rise to just the same sort of pseudo-problems over free will. In fact, if we want we can get the same problems from logical fatalism, without appealing to either science or theology. Will I choose A tomorrow or not? Necessarily there is a truth of the matter already, so although we cannot know, my decision is already a matter of fact, and in that sense is already determined.

So fundamental determinism is rock solid; it just isn’t a problem for freedom.

Hold on, you may say; you frame this as being about external constraints, but the real question is, am I not constrained internally? Don’t my own mental processes force me to make a particular decision? There are two versions of this argument. The first says that the mere fact that mental processes operate mechanistically means there can be no freedom. I just deny that; my own conscious processes count as a source of free decisions no matter how mechanistic they may be, just so long as they’re not constrained from outside.

The second version of the argument says that while free decisions of that kind might be possible in pure theory, as an empirical matter human beings don’t have the capacity for them. No conscious processes are actually effectual; consciousness is an epiphenomenon and merely invents rationales for decisions taken in a predetermined manner elsewhere in the brain. This argument is appealing because there is, of course, lots of evidence that unconscious factors influence our decisions. But the strong claim that my conscious deliberations are always irrelevant seems wildly implausible to me. Speech acts are acts, so to truly believe this strong version of the theory I’d have to accept that what I think is irrelevant to what I say, or that I adjust my thoughts retrospectively to fit whatever just came out of my mouth (I’m not saying there aren’t some people of whom one could believe this).

Now I may also be attacked from the other side. There may be advocates of free will who say, hold on, Peter, we do actually want that special metaphysical interruption you’re throwing away so lightly. Introspect, dear boy, and notice how your decisions come from nowhere; that over and above the weighing of advantage there just is that little element of inexplicable volition.

This impression comes, I think, from the remarkable power of intentionality. We can think about anything at all, including future or even imaginary contingencies. If our actions are caused by things that haven’t happened yet, or by things that will never actually happen (think of buying insurance) that looks like a mysterious disruption of the natural order of cause and effect. But of course it isn’t really. You may have a different explanation depending on your view of intentionality; mine is briefly that it’s all about recognition. Our ability to recognise entities that extend into the future, and then recognise within them elements that don’t yet exist, gives us the ability to make plans for the future, for example, without any contradiction of causality.

I’m afraid I’ve ended up by making it sound complicated again. Let me wrap it up in time-honoured philosophical style: it all depends what you mean by “determined”…

 

Quando Libet

New light on Libet’s challenge to free will; this interesting BQO piece by Ari N Schulman focuses on a talk by Patrick Haggard.

Libet’s research has been much discussed, here as well as elsewhere. He asked subjects to move their hand at a time of their choosing, while measuring neural activity in their brain. He found that the occurrence of a ‘Readiness Potential’ or RP (something identified by earlier researchers) always preceded the hand movement. But it also preceded the time of the decision, as reported by subjects. So it seemed the decision was made and clearly registered in brain activity as an RP before the subjects’ conscious thought processes had anything to do with it. The research, often reproduced and confirmed, seemed to provide a solid scientific demonstration that our feeling of having free conscious control over our own behaviour is a delusion.

However, recent research by Aaron Schurger shows that we need to re-evaluate the RP. In the past it has been seen as the particular precursor of intentional action; in fact it seems to be simply a peak in the continuing ebb and flow of neural activity. Peaks like this occur all the time, and may well be the precursors of various neural events, not just deliberate action. It’s true that action requires a peak of activity like this, but it’s far from true that all such peaks lead to action, or that the decision to act occurred when the peak emerged. If we begin with an action and look back, we’ll always find an RP, but not all RPs are connected with actions. It seems to me a bit like a surfer, who has to wait for a wave before leaping on the board; but let’s suppose there are plenty of good waves and the surfer is certainly not deprived of his ability to decide when to go.

This account dispels the impression that there is a fatal difficulty here for free will (of course there are plenty of other arguments on that topic); I think it also sits rather nicely with Libet’s own finding that we have ‘free won’t’ – ie that even after an RP has been detected, subjects can still veto the action.

Haggard, who has done extensive work in this area, accepts that RPs need another look; but he contends that we can find more reliable precursors of action. His own research analysed neural activity and found significantly lowered variability before actions, rather as though the disorganised neural activity of the brain pulled together just before an action was initiated.

Haggard’s experiments were designed to address another common criticism of Libet’s experiments, namely the artificiality of the decision involved. Being told to make your hand for no reason at a moment of your choosing is very unlike most of the decisions we make. In particular, it seems random, whereas it is argued that proper free will takes account of the pros and cons. Haggard asked subjects to perform a series of simple button-pushing tasks; the next task might follow quickly, or after a delay which could be several minutes long. Subjects could skip to the next task if they found the wait tedious, but that would reduce the cash rewards they got for performing the tasks. This weighing of boredom against profit is much more like a real decision.

Haggard persuasively claims that the essence of Libet’s results is upheld and refreshed by his results, so in principle we are back where we started. Does this mean there’s no free will? Schulman thinks not, because on certain reasonable and well-established conceptions of free will it can ‘work in concert with decisional impulses’, and need not be threatened by Haggard’s success in measuring those impulses.

For myself, I stick with a point mentioned by Schurger; making a decision and becoming aware of the decision are two distinct events, and it is not really surprising or threatening that the awareness comes a short time after the actual decision. It’s safe to predict that we haven’t heard the last of the topic, however.

Limits of Free Won’t

Another strange side light on free will. Some of the most-discussed findings in the field are Libet’s celebrated research which found that Readiness Potentials (RPs) in the brain showed when a decision to move had been made, significantly before the subject was aware of having decided. Libet himself thought this was problematic for free will, but that we could still have ‘Free Won’t’ – we could still change our minds after the RP had appeared and veto the planned movement.

A new paper (discussed here by Jerry Coyne) follows up on this, and seems to show that while we do have something like this veto facility, there is a time limit on that too, and beyond a certain point the planned move will be made regardless.

The actual experiment was in three phases. Subjects were given a light and a pedal and set up with equipment to detect RPs in their brain. They were told to press the pedal at a time of their choosing when the light was green, but not when it had turned red. The first run merely trained the equipment to detect RPs, with the light turning red randomly. In the second phase, the light turned red when an RP was detected, so that the subjects were in effect being asked to veto their own decision to press. In the third phase, they were told that their decisions were being predicted and they were asked to try to be unpredictable.

Detection of RPs actually took longer in some instances than others. It turned out that where the RP was picked up early enough, subjects could exercise the veto; but once the move was 200ms or less away, it was impossible to stop.

What does this prove, beyond the bare facts of the results? Perhaps not much. The conditions of the experiment are very strange and do not resemble everyday decision-making very much at all. It was always an odd feature of Libet’s research that subjects were asked to get ready to move but choose the time capriciously according to whim; not a mental exercise that comes up very often in real life. In the new research, subjects further have to stop when the light is red; they don’t, you notice, choose to veto their move, but merely respond to a pre-set signal. Whether this deserves to be called free won’t is debatable; it isn’t a free decision making process. How could it be, anyway; how could it be that deciding to do something takes significantly longer than deciding not to do the same thing? Is it that decisions to move are preceded by an RP, but other second-order decisions about those decisions are not? We seem to be heading into a maze of complications if we go that way and substantially reducing the significance of Libet’s results.

Of course, if we don’t think that Libet’s results dethrone free will in the first place, we need not be very worried. My own view is that we need to distinguish between making a conscious decision and becoming aware of having made the decision. Some would argue that that second-order awareness is essential to the nature of conscious thought, but I don’t think so. For me Libet’s original research showed only that deciding and knowing you’ve decided are distinct, and the latter naturally follows after the former. So assuming that, like me, you think it’s fine to regard the results of certain physical processes as ‘free’ in a useful sense, free will remains untouched. If you were always a sceptic then of course Libet never worried you anyway, and nor will the new research.

Freedom – why worry?

chainWhy does the question of determinism versus free will continue to trouble us? There’s nothing too strange, perhaps, about a philosophical problem remaining in play for a while – or even for a few hundred years: but why does this one have such legs and still provoke such strong and contrary feelings on either side?

For me the problem itself is solved – and the right solution, broadly speaking, has been known for centuries: determinism is true, but we also have free choice in a meaningful sense. St Augustine, to go no earlier, understood that free will and predestination are not contradictory, but people still find it confusing that he spoke up for both.

If this view – compatibilism – is right, why hasn’t it triumphed? I’m coming to think that the strongest opposition on the question might not in fact be between the hard-line determinists and the uncompromising libertarians but rather a matter of both ends against the middle. Compatibilists like me are happy to see the problem solved and determinism reconciled with common sense, whereas people from both the extremes insist that that misses something crucial. They believe the ‘loss’ of free will radically undercuts and changes our traditional sense of what we are as human beings. They think determinism, for better or worse, wipes away some sacred mark from our brows. Why do they think that?

Let’s start by quickly solving the old problem. Part one: determinism is true. It looks, with some small reservations about the interpretation of some esoteric matters, as if the laws of physics completely determine what happens. Actually even if contemporary physics did not seem to offer the theoretical possibility of full determination, we should be inclined to think that some set of rules did. A completely random or indeterminate world would seem scarcely distinguishable from a nullity; nothing definite could be said about it and no reliable predictions could be made because everything could be otherwise. That kind of scenario, of disastrous universal incoherence is extreme, and I admit I know of no absolute reason to rule out a more limited, demarcated indeterminacy. Still, the idea of delimited patches of randomness seems odd, inelegant and possibly problematic. God, said Einstein, does not play dice.

Beyond that, moreover, there’s a different kind of point. We came into this business in pursuit of truth and knowledge, so it’s fair to say that if there seemed to be patches of uncertainty we should want to do our level best to clarify them out of existence. In this sense it’s legitimate to regard determinism not just as a neutral belief, but as a proper aspiration. Even if we believe in free will, aren’t we going to want a theory that explains how it works, and isn’t that in the end going to give us rules that determine the process? Alright, I’m coming to the conclusion too soon: but in this light I see determinism as a thing that lovers of truth must strive towards (even if in vain) and we can note in passing that that might be some part of the reason why people champion it with zeal.

We’re not done with the defence, anyway. One more thing we can do against indeterminacy is to invoke the deep old principle which holds that nothing comes of nothing, and that nothing therefore happens unless it must; if something particular must happen, then the compulsion is surely encapsulated in some laws of nature.

Further still, even if none of that were reliable, we could fall back on a fatalistic argument. If it is true that on Tuesday you’ll turn right, then it was true on Monday that you would turn right on Tuesday; so your turning that way rather than left was already determined.

Finally, we must always remember that failure to establish determinism is not success in establishing liberty. Determinism looks to be true; we should try to establish its truth if by any means we can: but even if we fail, that failure in itself leaves us not with free will but with an abhorrent void of the unknowable.

Part two: we do actually make free decisions. Determinism is true, but it bites firmly only at a low level of description; not truly above the level of particles and forces. To look for decisions or choices at that level is simply a mistake, of the same general kind as looking for bicycles down there. Their absence from the micro level does not mean that cyclists are systematically deluded. Decisions are processes of large neural structures, and I suggest that when we describe them as free we simply mean the result was not constrained externally. If I had a gun to my head or my hands were tied, then turning left was not a free decision. If no-one could tell which way I should go without knowledge of what was going on in the large neural structures that realise my mind, then it was free. There are of course degrees of freedom and plenty of grey areas, but the essential idea is clear enough. Freedom is just the absence of external constraint on a level of description where people and decisions are salient, useful concepts.

For me, and I suppose other compatibilists, that’s a satisfying solution and matches well with what I think I’ve always meant when I talk about freedom. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see what else freedom could mean. What if God did play dice after all? Libertarians don’t want their free decisions to be random, they want them to belong to them personally and reflect consideration of the circumstances; the problem is that it’s challenging for them to explain in that case how the decisions can escape some kind of determination. What unites the libertarians and the determinists is the conviction that it’s that inexplicable, paradoxical factor we are concerned to affirm or deny, and that its presence or absence says something important about human nature. To quietly do without the magic, as compatibilists do, is on their view to shoot the fox and spoil the hunt. What are they both so worried about?

I speculate that the one factor here is a persistent background confusion. Determinism, we should remember, is an intellectual achievement, both historically and often personally. We live in a world where nothing much about human beings is certainly determined; only careful reflection reveals that in the end, at the lowest level of detail and at the very last knockings of things, there must be certainty. This must remain a theoretical conclusion, certainly so far as human beings are concerned; our behaviour may be determinate, but it is not determinable; certainly not in practice and very probably not even in theory, given the vast complexity, chaotic organisation and marvellously emergent properties of our brains. Some of those who deny determinism may be moved, not so much by explicit rejection of the true last-ditch thesis, but by the certainty that our minds are not determinable by us or by anyone. This muddying of the waters is perpetuated even now by arguments about how our minds may be strongly influenced by high-level factors: peer pressure, subliminal advertising, what we were given to read just before making a decision. These arguments may be presented in favour of determinism together with the water-tight last-ditch case, but they are quite different, and the high-level determinism they support is not certainly true but rather an eminently deniable hypothesis. In the end our behaviour is determined, but can we be programmed like robots by higher level influences? Maybe in some cases – generally, probably not.

The second, related factor is a certain convert enthusiasm. If determinism is a personal intellectual achievement it may well be that we become personally invested in it. When we come to appreciate its truth for the first time it may seem that we have grasped a new perspective and moved out of the confused herd to join the scientifically enlightened. I certainly felt this on my first acquaintance with the idea; I remember haranguing a friend about the truth of determinism in a way that must, with hindsight, have resembled religious conviction and been very tiresome.

“Yes, yes, OK, I get it,” he would say in a vain attempt to stop the flow.

Now no-one lives pure determinism; we all go behaving as if agency and freedom were meaningful. The fact that this involves an unresolved tension between your philosophy and the ideas about people you actually live by was not a deterrent to me then, however; in fact it may even have added a glamorous sheen of esoteric heterodoxy to the whole thing. I expect other enthusiasts may feel the same today. The gradual revelation, some years later, that determinism is true but actually not at all as important as you thought is less exciting: it has rather a dying fall to it and may be more difficult to assimilate. Consistency with common sense is perhaps a game for the middle aged.

“You know, I’ve been sort of nuancing my thinking about determinism lately…”

“Oh, what, Peter? You made me live through the conversion experience with you – now I have to work through your apostasy, too?”

On the libertarian side, it must be admitted that our power of decision really does look sort of strange, with a power far exceeding that of mere absence of constraint. There are at least two reasons for this. One is our ability to use intentionality to think about anything whatever, and base our decisions on those thoughts. I can think about things that are remote, non-existent, or even absurd, without any difficulty. Most notably, when I make decisions I am typically thinking about future events: will I turn left or right tomorrow? How can future events influence my behaviour now?

It’s a bit like the time machine case where I take the text of Hamlet back in time and give it to Shakespeare – who never actually produced it but now copies it down and has it performed. Who actually wrote it, in these circumstances? No-one, it just appeared at some point. Our ability to think about the future, and so use future goals as causes of actions now, seems in the same way to bring our decisions into being out of nowhere inside us. There was no prior cause, only later ones, so it really seems as if the process inverts and disrupts the usual order of causality.

We know this is indeed remarkable but it isn’t really magic. On my view it’s simply that our recognition of various entities that extend over time allows a kind of extrapolation. The actual causal processes, down at that lowest level, tick away in the right order, but our pattern-matching capacity provides processes at a higher level which can legitimately be said to address the future without actually being caused by it. Still, the appearance is powerful, and we may be impatient with the kind of materialist who prefers to live in a world with low ceilings, insists on everything being material and denies any independent validity to higher levels of description. Some who think that way even have difficulty accepting that we can think directly about mathematical abstractions – quite a difficult posture for anyone who accepts the physics that draws heavily on them.

The other thing is the apparent, direct reality of our decisions. We just know we exercise free will, because we experience the process immediately. We can feel ourselves deciding. We could be wrong about all sorts of things in the world, but how could I be wrong about what I think? I believe the feeling of something ineffable here comes from the fact that we are not used to dealing with reality. Most of what we know about the world is a matter of conscious or unconscious inference, and when we start thinking scientifically or philosophically it is heavily informed by theory. For many people it starts to look as if theory is the ultimate bedrock of things, rather than the thin layer of explanation we place on top. For such a mindset the direct experience of one’s own real thoughts looks spooky; its particularity, its haecceity, cannot be accounted for by theory and so looks anomalous. There are deep issues here, but really we ought not to be foxed by simple reality.

That’s it, I think, in brief at least. More could be said of course; more will be said. The issues above are like optical illusions: just knowing how they work doesn’t make them go away, and so minds will go on boggling. People will go on furiously debating free will: that much is both determined and determinable.

If atoms are real, we’re free

chainThe Platopus makes a good point about compatibilism (the view that some worthwhile kind of free will is compatible with the standard deterministic account of the world given by physics).

One argument holds that there isn’t effectively any difference between compatibilists and those who deny the reality of free will. Both deny that radical (or ‘libertarian’) free will exists. They agree that there’s no magic faculty which interrupts the normal causal process with volitions. Given that level of agreement, isn’t it just a matter of what labelling strategy we prefer? Because it’s that radical kind of free will that is really at issue: that’s what people want, not some watered-down legalistic thing.

That’s the argument the Platopus wishes to reject. He accepts that compatibilism involves some redefinition, but draws a distinction between illegitimate and legitimate redefinition. As an example of the latter, he proposes the example of atoms. In Greek philosophy, and at first in the modern science which borrowed the word, ‘atom’ meant something indivisible. There was a period when the atoms of modern physics seemed to be just that, but in due course it emerged that they could in fact be ‘split’. One strategy at that point would have been to say, well, it turns out those things were never atoms after all: we must give them a new name and look elsewhere for our indivisible atoms – or perhaps atoms don’t actually exist after all. What happened in reality was that we went on calling those particles atoms, and gave up our belief that they were indivisible.

In a somewhat similar way, the Platopus argues that it makes sense for us to redefine freedom of the will even though we now know it is not libertarian freedom. The analogy is not perfect, and in some ways the case is actually stronger for free will. Atoms, after all, were originally a hypothesis derived from the purest metaphysics. On one interpretation (just mine, really), the early atomists embraced the idea because they feared that unless the process of division stopped somewhere, the universe would suffer from a radical indeterminism. Division could not stop until the particles were of zero magnitude – non-existent, and how could we make real things out of items which did not themselves exist? They could not have imagined the modern position in which, on one interpretation (yes) as we go more micro the nature of the reality involved changes until the physics has boiled away leaving only maths.

Be that as it was or may be, I think the Platopus is quite right and that the redefinition required by compatibilism is not just respectable but natural and desirable. I think in fact we could go a little further and say that it’s not so much a redefinition as a correction of inherent flaws in the pre-theoretical idea of free will.

What do I mean? Well, the original problem here is that the deterministic physical account seems to leave no room for the will. People try to get round that by suggesting different kinds of indeterminism: perhaps we can get something out of chaos theory, or out of quantum mechanics. The problem with those views is that they go too far and typically end up giving us random action: which is no more what we wanted than determined action. Alternatively, old-fashioned libertarians rely on the intervention of the spirit, typically with no satisfactory account of how the spirit makes decisions or how it manages to intervene. That, I submit, was never really what people meant either: in their Sunday best they might appeal to the action of their soul, but in everyday life having a free choice was something altogether more practical; a matter of not having a knife at your throat.

In short, I’d claim that the pre-theoretical understanding of free will always implicitly took it to be something that went on in a normal physical world, and that’s what compatibilism restores, saving the idea from the mad excrescences added by theologians and philosophers.

Myself I think that the kind of indeterminism we can have, and the one we really need, is the one that comes from our power to think about anything. Most processes in the world can be predicted because the range of factors involved can be known and listed to begin with: our mental processes are not like that. Our neurons may work deterministically according to physics, but they allow us to think about anything at any time: about abstractions,  remote entities, and even imaginary things. Above all, they allow us somehow to think about the future and enable future contingencies (in some acceptable sense) to influence our present decisions. When our actions are determined by our own thoughts about the future, they can properly be called free.

That is not a complete answer: it defers the mystery of freedom to the mystery of intentionality; but I’ll leave that one for now…

Neurons and Free Will

wiring a neuronA few years ago we noted the remarkable research by Fried, Mukamel, and Kreiman which reproduced and confirmed Libet’s famous research. Libet, in brief, had found good evidence using EEG that a decision to move was formed about half a second before the subject in question became consciously aware of it; Fried et al produced comparable results by direct measurement of neuron firing.

In the intervening years, electrode technology has improved and should now make it possible to measure multiple sites. The scanty details here indicate that Kreiman, with support from MIT, plans to repeat the research in an enhanced form; in particular he proposes to see whether, having identified the formed intention to move, it is then possible to stop it before the action takes place. This resembles the faculty of ‘free won’t’ by which Libet himself hoped to preserve some trace of free will.

From the MIT article it is evident that Kreiman is a determinist and believes that his research confirms that position. It is generally believed that Libet’s findings are incompatible with free will in the sense that they seem to show that consciousness has no effect on our actual behaviour.

That actually sheds an interesting side-light on our view of what free will is. A decision to move still gets made, after all; why shouldn’t it be freely made even though it is unconscious? There’s something unsatisfactory about unconscious free will, it seems. Our desire for free will is a desire to be in control, and by that we mean a desire for the entity that does the talking to be in control. We don’t really think of the unconscious parts of our mind as being us; or at least not in the same way as that gabby part that claims responsibility for everything (the part of me that is writing this now, for example).

This is a bit odd, because the verbal part of our brain obviously does the verbals; it’s strange and unrealistic to think it should also make the decisions, isn’t it? Actually if we are careful to distinguish between the making of the decision and being aware of the decision – which we should certainly do, given that one is clearly a first order mental event and the other equally clearly second order – then it ceases to be surprising that the latter should lag behind the former a bit. Something has to have happened before we can be aware of it, after all.

Our unease about this perhaps relates to the intuitive conviction of our own unity. We want the decision and the awareness to be a single event, we want conscious acts to be, as it were, self- illuminating, and it seems to be that that the research ultimately denies us.

It is the case, of course, that the decisions made in the research are rather weird ones. We’re not often faced with the task of deciding to move our hands at an arbitrary time for no reason. Perhaps the process is different if we are deciding which stocks and shares to buy? We may think about the pros and cons explicitly, and we can see the process by which the conclusion is reached; it’s not plausible that those decisions are made unconsciously and then simply notified to consciousness, is it?

On the other hand, we don’t think, do we, that the process of share-picking is purely verbal? The words flowing through our consciousness are signals of a deeper imaginative modelling, aren’t they? If that is the case, then the words might still be lagging. Perhaps the distinction to be drawn is not really between conscious and unconscious, but between simply conscious and explicitly conscious. Perhaps we just shouldn’t let the talky bit pretend to be the whole of consciousness just because the rest is silent.

Experience and Autonomy

angelanddevilTom Clark has an interesting paper on Experience and Autonomy: Why Consciousness Does and Doesn’t Matter, due to appear as a chapter in Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Responsibility (if your heart sinks at the idea of discussing free will one more time, don’t despair: this is not the same old stuff).

In essence Clark wants to propose a naturalised conception of free will and responsibility and he seeks to dispel three particular worries about the role of consciousness; that it might be an epiphenomenon, a passenger along for the ride with no real control; that conscious processes are not in charge, but are subject to manipulation and direction by unconscious ones; and that our conception of ourselves as folk-dualist agents, able to step outside the processes of physical causation but still able to intervene in them effectively, is threatened. He makes it clear that he is championing phenomenal consciousness, that is, the consciousness which provides real if private experiences in our minds; not the sort of cognitive rational processing that an unfeeling zombie would do equally well. I think he succeeds in being clear about this, though it’s a bit of a challenge because phenomenal consciousness is typically discussed in the context of perception, while rational decision-making tends to be seen in the context of the ‘easy problem’ – zombies can make the same decisions as us and even give the same rationales. When we talk about phenomenal consciousness being relevant to our decisions, I take it we mean something like our being able to sincerely claim that we ‘thought about’ a given decision in the sense that we had actual experience of relevant thoughts passing through our minds. A zombie twin would make identical claims but the claims would, unknown to the zombie, be false, a rather disturbing idea.

I won’t consider all of Clark’s arguments (which I am generally in sympathy with), but there are a few nice ones which I found thought-provoking. On epiphenomenalism, Clark has a neat manoeuvre. A commonly used example of an epiphenomenon, first proposed by Huxley, is the whistle on a steam locomotive; the boiler, the pistons, and the wheels all play a part in the causal story which culminates in the engine moving down the track; the whistle is there too, but not part of that story. Now discussion has sometimes been handicapped by the existence of two different conceptions of epiphenomenalism; a rigorous one in which there really must be no causal effects at all, and a looser one in which there may be some causal effects but only ones that are irrelevant, subliminal, or otherwise ignorable. I tend towards the rigorous conception myself, and have consequently argued in the past that the whistle on a steam engine is not really a good example. Blowing the whistle lets steam out of the boiler which does have real effects. Typically they may be small, but in principle a long enough blast can stop a train altogether.

But Clark reverses that unexpectedly. He argues that in order to be considered an epiphenomenon an entity has to be the sort of thing that might have had a causal role in the process. So the whistle is a good example; but because consciousness is outside the third-person account of things altogether, it isn’t even a candidate to be an epiphenomenon! Although that inverts my own outlook, I think it’s a pretty neat piece of footwork. If I wanted a come-back I think I would let Clark have his version of epiphenomenalism and define a new kind, x-epiphenomenalism, which doesn’t require an entity to be the kind of thing that could have a causal role; I’d then argue that consciousness being x-epiphenomenal is just as worrying as the old problem. No doubt Clark in turn might come back and argue that all kinds of unworrying things were going to turn out to be x-epiphenomenal on that basis, and so on; however, since I don’t have any great desire to defend epiphenomenalism I won’t even start down that road.

On the second worry Clark gives a sensible response to the issues raised by the research of Libet and others which suggest our decisions are determined internally before they ever enter our consciousness; but I was especially struck by his arguments on the potential influence of unconscious factors which form an important part of his wider case. There is a vast weight of scientific evidence to show that often enough our choices are influenced or even determined by unconscious factors we’re not aware of; Clark gives a few examples but there are many more. Perhaps consciousness is not the chief executive of our minds after all, just the PR department?

Clark nibbles the bullet a bit here, accepting that unconscious influence does happen, but arguing that when we are aware of say, ethnic bias or other factors, we can consciously fight against it and second-guess our unworthier unconscious impulses. I like the idea that it’s when we battle our own primitive inclinations that we become most truly ourselves; but the issues get pretty complicated.

As a side issue, Clark’s examples all suppose that more or less wicked unconscious biases are to be defeated by a more ethical conscious conception of ourself (rather reminiscent of those cartoon disputes between an angel on the character’s right shoulder and a devil on the left); but it ain’t necessarily so. What if my conscious mind rules out on principled but sectarian grounds a marriage to someone I sincerely love with my unconscious inclinations? I’m not clear that the sectarian is to be considered the representative of virtue (or of my essential personal agency) more than the lover.

That’s not the point at all, of course: Clark is not arguing that consciousness is always right, only that it has a genuine role. However, the position is never going to be clear. Suppose I am inclined to vote against candidate N, who has a big nose. I tell myself I should vote for him because it’s the schnozz that is putting me off. Oh no, I tell myself, it’s his policies I don’t like, not his nose at all. Ah, but you would think that, I tell myself, you’re bound to be unaware of the bias, so you need to aim off a bit. How much do \I aim off, though – am I to vote for all big-nosed candidates regardless? Surely I might also have legitimate grounds for disliking them? And does that ‘aiming off’ really give my consciousness a proper role or merely defer to some external set of rules?

Worse yet, as I leave the polling station it suddenly occurs to me that the truth is, the nose had nothing to do with it; I really voted for N because I’m biased in favour of white middle-aged males; my unconscious fabricated the stuff about the nose to give me a plausible cover story while achieving its own ends. Or did it? Because the influences I’m fighting are unconscious, how will I ever know what they really are, and if I don’t know, doesn’t the claimed role of consciousness become merely a matter of faith? It could always turn out that if I really knew what was going on, I’d see my consciousness was having its strings pulled all the time. Consciousness can present a rationale which it claims was effective, but it could do that to begin with; it never knew the rationale was really a mask for unconscious machinations.

The last of the three worries tackled by Clark is not strictly a philosophical or scientific one; we might well say that if people’s folk-dualist ideas are threatened, so much the worse for them. There is, however, some evidence that undiluted materialism does induce what Clark calls a “puppet” outlook in which people’s sense of moral responsibility is weakened and their behaviour worsened. Clark provides rational answers but his views tend to put him in the position of conceding that something has indeed been lost. Consciousness does and doesn’t matter. I don’t think anything worth having can be lost by getting closer to the truth and I don’t think a properly materialist outlook is necessarily morally corrosive – even in a small degree. I think what we’re really lacking for the moment is a sufficiently inspiring, cogent, and understood naturalised ethics to go with our naturalised view of the mind. There’s much to be done on that, but it’s far from hopeless (as I expect Clark might agree).

There’s much more in the paper than I have touched on here; I recommend a look at it.