Fri 9 Oct 2009
Is modern life better than the Stone Age? Why or why not? I recently forced students in my scitech history class to contemplate these questions. I presented their responses in a recent post and said that soon I’d provide my own answer. Here goes.
“In today’s world anyone can try to do anything they want,” wrote Tim, one of my students. “It is this freedom of choice that is the reason why I would rather live in modern times than in the Paleolithic era.” Yes! I agree with Tim. I can live (albeit with difficulty) like a Stone Ager, but he can’t live like me. I prefer modern life because it offers more choices than the Paleolithic era–or, to put it more controversially, more opportunities for exercising free will. Why is that phrasing controversial? Because some scientists have questioned whether free will exists.
Take for example Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner. In his disturbing book “The Illusion of Conscious Will,” Wegner notes that we think of our will as a kind of force that initiates action, but actually will is “merely a feeling.” I think, “I’m going to watch the Giants now instead of writing this essay” and then flip on the TV. I feel like my thought turned the TV on, but as we all know, correlation does not equal causation.
Neurologists can make patients’ limbs jerk by electrically zapping certain regions of their brains. The patients often insist they meant to move that arm, and they even invent reasons why. Neurologists call these erroneous, post-hoc explanations confabulations, but Wegner prefers the catchier “intention inventions.” He suggests that whenever we explain our acts as the outcome of our conscious choice, we are engaging in intention invention, because our actions actually stem from countless causes of which we are completely unaware.
He cites experiments in which subjects pushed a button whenever they chose while noting the time of their decision as displayed on a clock. The subjects took 0.2 seconds on average to push the button after they decided to do so. But an electroencephalograph monitoring their brain waves revealed that the subjects’ brains generated a spike of brain activity 0.3 seconds before they decided to push the button.
Other research has indicated that the neural circuits underlying our conscious sensations of intention are distinct from the circuits that actually make our muscles move. This disconnect may explain why we so often fail to carry out our most adamant decisions. This morning, I vowed to write all afternoon rather than watch football, but somehow I ended up watching the end of the Giants-Chiefs game.
Sometimes our intentions are self-thwarting. The more I tell myself not to turn on the TV, the more I want to do it. Wegner attributes these situations to “ironic processes of mental control.” Edgar Allan Poe’s phrase “the imp of the perverse” even more vividly evokes that mischievous other we sometimes intuit lurking within us. Wegner suggests that the concept of a unified self, which is a necessary precondition for free will, is an illusion, and so is free will.
Summing up, Wegner quotes the scifi writer Arthur C. Clark’s remark that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Because we cannot possibly understand how the fantastically complex machines in our skulls really work, Wegner says, we explain our behavior—and that of others–in terms of such silly, occult concepts as “the self” and “free will.”
I choose to reject Wegner’s conclusion. Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society. To me, choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful. Moreover, our faith in free will has social value. It provides us with the metaphysical justification for ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in free will. I’ll explain why soon.
October 9th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
How to say this. Surveying what people now and in the past it is remarkable that those that take a keen interest in science, and tend to base their metaphysics on it, have a marked tendency to lose sight of the reality of their minds. (I don’t do God either, by the way, being a Buddhist, but I have no problem with Theism–to me it is another way of approaching reality, but I digress).
The great irony is that contemporary physics is actually quite ideal yet there seems to be a big push to regress into 19th C physical reality. Much of academic philosophy seems to have just given up–I saw your blogging heads diavlog with Knobe with some incredulity and thought you seemed to be much the better philosopher, both in your understanding of the issues and your subtlety of presentation. There is a breadth that you bring to the discussion that I think is quite becoming, and your questions seem fresher, more interesting and more important.
The way people talk about the Libet experiments and many other related issues I find tedious, grating and irresponsible. There is a pose about it all that suggests that the propounder is profound and fearless, but I just can’t find profound cynicism all that fearless. It has the feel of the witch doctor mixing up expertise with ignorance to exert and retain power. But I get the impression that you sense there is something wrong with this, and that you bare coming from a more authentic place.
These are sharp words but it is the only way I can find to respond to such suffocating, arrogant and (as I see it) profoundly mistaken consensus that is now very difficult to question.
October 9th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Where there are two desires in a man’s heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
Twain is the MAN, eh?
Curiously, Americans predominately maladapt the theory of karma as something bad affecting you in this life–a cause and effect loop–whereas karma is your individual collection of ‘willful actions’ that will predetermine your evolution on the path towards enlightenment/Nirvana. Karma surrounds reincarnation, each exists for the other.
Only actions made with free will and forethought can affect/produce real karma. Killing a rabid dog would be karma-less, but raising dogs to fight would be bad karma, and socially deviant. Free will deviating from social boundries gives attorneys a reason to live, one of three reasons as I recollect.
Perhaps the best narrative delving into ethics and free will and their perrenial human struggle
is SHANTARAM by Gregory Roberts, which is part Kesey, Kerrouac, Camus and Kafka with a dash of Stienbeck. If this narrative doesn’t expose the nuances of free will, none ever will.
October 10th, 2009 at 2:18 am
I will keep in my bookmark
October 10th, 2009 at 4:06 am
Of course free will is an illusion. Get over it.
October 10th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
“Sometimes our intentions are self-thwarting. The more I tell myself not to turn on the TV, the more I want to do it. Wegner attributes these situations to “ironic processes of mental control.” … Wegner suggests that the concept of a unified self, which is a necessary precondition for free will, is an illusion, and so is free will. … I choose to reject Wegner’s conclusion. Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society. To me, choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful. Moreover, our faith in free will has social value. It provides us with the metaphysical justification for ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in free will. I’ll explain why soon.” – John Horgan
I agree with Bee’s stinging reaction: free will is just an illusion. E.g., contrary to all the romantic fiction in the world, it’s a scientific fact that we don’t fall in love of our own free will, but simply as a result of chemistry.
Hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin are released and our rational consciousness loses control of what we do, just as if we were drunk on alcohol! Love is just an evolutionary chemical system for passing on genes to the fittest possible mates. There is no free will involved. Chemical action on the brain unceasingly forces you to adopt the best potential partner you can find.
Similarly, Einstein wasn’t exercising any free-will in discovering general relativity. He could only become famous by discovering a useful theories, i.e. one which was of some use in modelling nature. If he had discovered string theory instead, he would have been deemed a failure and nobody would have heard of him. Therefore, he had no free will: he had to discover something about nature, which he was unable to alter. He was discovering something about nature, rather than exercising any truly creative or innovative free will.
No mountain climber can really exercise free will either: you are constrained by the topography of the mountain and you don’t really have a choice but have to take what decent foot-holds and hand-holds are on offer.
The abstract artist may seem to be an exception and to actually have free will, but random scrawling is no more free will than that available to the inmate of a lunatic asylum in a straight jacket, scrawling on the padded walls with a crayon held between his toes. I fail to see any real example of free will.
Even when Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the Moon, it wasn’t their free will to do so: it was a decision taken by Kennedy due to the spacerace started by the Russian Sputnik, and going back to the V2 rocket and so on. In any case, the Moon was the only impressive target that could be reached by a human mission in the 60s.
October 10th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Posters declaim “do what you want” is constrained by “suffer the consequences.” US social advocacy since 1965 has been “do what you want and suffer no consequences.” How well did that work out – Welfare, AIDS, education, heathcare, mortgages…?
Pass a law, “every US citizen is entitled to and limited to four years of national median income as a Federal grant.” All other social services are abolished, as is insurance of all kinds, and their costs. Do what you want. Way cheaper than Washington’s alphabet soup of incompetence, and it works. The best citizens are benefitted, the worst citizens are not impeded.
The real median earnings of men who worked full time in 2007 was $45,113. $180K buys four years of college, a car, plus a good chunk of a house. What citizen deserves a bigger dip into the public exchequer? Or dedicate it to healthcare costs, or to nose candy. Free will! and evolution in action.
October 14th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Mathematician Rudy Rucker in his amazing 1982 book “Infinity and the Mind” converted me to the strong frozen space-time view of existence. This interpretation does away with many of the mysteries of quantum theory by postulating that all “chance” is an illusion. In reality past, present, and future are fixed in static space-time and the only thing that moves is the view of the observer, which slides along the frozen milieu perceiving slices of space-time from an angle created by the relative motion between the observer himself and whatever facet of the universe he or she is examining.
The economy of this view of physics is that it eliminates Schroedinger’s Cat, branching universes from every quantum “choice”, and the mysteries of the two-slit experiment. Also it makes for easy accomodation to the idea of time reversed light and every particle being equivalent to its anti-particle traveling backwards in time.
Randomness, probability, and free will are all artifacts of our consciousness which arise after the fact of observation and action by the observer. After we take an action, we suppose that we really had some choice, such as: “I ordered the cherry pie, but there was a 25% chance I might have ordered the decadent chocolate cake, and another 25% chance the lemon meringue, and the last 25% chance I would go for the carrot cake. That leaves a 25% chance of cherry pie every time I go to the cafe, which is a hard number because of my historical record in cafes over the last 50 years.”
Any “probability” is only a guess based on history. The ideas of chance and free will both are only artifacts of consciousness. But dice themselves have no memory of history, further in strong frozen space time they don’t need it because it is already written what the next trillion sequences of roll results will be, just as it is written already that next Friday I will ignore my historical tendencies altogether and order the cheese cake. Similarly, when we develop computers that can compute pi out to a googleplex number of decimals (Rucker teaches much larger possible numbers than even that) it is already “written” what that fantastically expanded pi sequence will be.
October 15th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Glad to see that so many posters here are, unlike Horgan, skeptical about free will.
In his second installment I hope he’ll define what he *means* by free will: is it contra-causal (that human beings are exceptions to causal laws in some crucial respect) or just a matter of being able to choose according to our desires without undue interference from outside? From what he writes, it sounds as if it’s something closely related to consciousness (”a kind of force that initiates action”) as had by a unified self. If so, do consciousness and the self transcend causality in some respect, given that the physical processes they depend on don’t?
In the first installment he says:
“I choose, freely, to reject Wegner’s conclusion. Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life or a society. To me, choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful (hence my preference for a complex, confusing modern life over a simple Stone Age one). Moreover, our faith in free will has social value. It provides us with the metaphysical justification for ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God.”
He says he “chooses, freely” to reject Wegner’s conclusion, but a scientifically defensible rejection has to be based on good evidential and logical reasons, not free choice. The fact that he likes the consequences of belief in free will (it provides meaning and has social value) has no bearing on the truth of whether we have it or not. And that he talks about faith in free will is another indication that for him this isn’t a matter of logic or evidence.
I don’t see how all this is consistent with his being a *scientific* curmudgeon. But perhaps the second installment will prove me wrong.
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:02 am
I think free will is what gives a person his/her personality,
i am an identical twin but we have very different personalities as if we never grew up together,
and i think that’s because we have free will and keep making different choices it impacts on our personalities as well