It’s the title of a provocative new article in Nature Neuroscience. For those interested in free will and the brain.
Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain
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It’s the title of a provocative new article in Nature Neuroscience. For those interested in free will and the brain.
Comments are closed.
ScienceDaily has a 4/15/08 write-up (adapted from materials provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) on the Nature Neuroscience article. It contains this paragraph:
“More than 20 years ago the American brain scientist Benjamin Libet found a brain signal, the so-called “readiness-potential” that occurred a fraction of a second before a conscious decision. Libet’s experiments were highly controversial and sparked a huge debate. Many scientists argued that if our decisions are prepared unconsciously by the brain, then our feeling of “free will” must be an illusion. In this view, it is the brain that makes the decision, not a person’s conscious mind. Libet’s experiments were particularly controversial because he found only a brief time delay between brain activity and the conscious decision.”
Naturally, suggesting that the time lag can be as much as 7-10 seconds rather than the previous 1/2 second will be even more “highly controversial” and will once again allow dismissing “free will.”
I argued in “Man by Nature: The Hidden Programming Controlling Human Behavior” that much of our behavior is indeed caused by unconscious brain activity (our programmed species instincts, to be exact) but that the means to overcome most of our instincts is also wired-in. For example, we always control our ability and desire to have sex at any time with social schemas that restrict such unbridled behavior.
Besides the hardwired instincts affecting our behavior, we also have personal and tribal beliefs that affect our behavior as greatly: beliefs are ideas that are accepted so strongly that they become “firmwired” and can override our instincts in “controlling” our behavior. The power of our beliefs is so great that rather than Man possessing beliefs, beliefs possess Men. Thus we willing die — and kill — for beliefs.
Both our hardwired instincts and our firmwired beliefs operate unconsciously, and contribute to the time delays going on as the brain uses parallel processing to resolve the many conflicts between our many motivations. (The same time delays that show up in word association tests, and led Dr. Jung to propose the existence of “complexes.”)
Hence, it is my personal belief that free will exists to the extent that we consider and choose from the vast marketplace of ideas those that we promote to beliefs and allow to subsequently control our behavior.
As to the 7-10 seconds before being consciously aware we’ve already chosen between two discrete but inconsequential actions, I do not expect this to be of significance, other that hopefully convincing more skeptics that our brain really does unconsciously affect our behavior much more than has previously been acknowledged. Our tribal animal instincts may in fact be the reason Man has never succeeded in “living in peace” for any length of time.
For those interested in this, I of course recommend my book, “Man by Nature …” but must warn that it is written for a general, nonacademic readership.
There’s been some discussion of this study over at Garden of Forking Paths: https://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2008/04/more-free-willi.html#comments
The upshot is that it takes a bizarre view of free will combined with a strange interpretation of the data to find these results threatening to free will. IF our choices could be predicted with much closer to 100% accuracy (rather than the 60% here) AND if it were shown that the relevant brain activity both precedes and is unaffected by any of our conscious deliberations, well, THEN there may be an interesting challenge to our free will.
I’m impressed they got as high as 60% given that they were using MRI (that’s like recording the spectrogram of stadium noise and being able to make out what somebody has said). If it were single units or other temporally fine-grained measures, they’d pop up well above 60%, so let’s assume 100% for argument to avoid any quibbles there. Perhaps instead of pushing buttons with fingers, grabbing or gripping something with the entire hand would have lit thing up more in the MRI .
I think your second point is better, about conscious deliberations and their interactions, if any, with the relevant brain states. I once saw someone argue that these Libet-style results show that consciousness does not affect behavior! Silly. However, the conscious experience of an intention to do X has a stranger relation than we might have thought to the actual doing of X.
Eddy,
I’d agree with you if we added “if our idea of FW didn’t allow for pulling apart what we do freely from what we are conscious of”. However, arguably our idea of FW does allow for such a pulling apart. Consider, for example, the case of the absent minded truckdriver oft discussed in the consciousness literature. He made various turns and stops all while absorbed in his favorite radio show and all while unconscious of the various trafic signals and bends in the road that he responded appropriately to. It’s not incoherent to suppose that his unconscious braking and turning was nonetheless freely willed.
Pete, right, I agree that one can be free and responsible for an action that does not immediately follow conscious deliberation or decisions about it (this is *one* of the reasons I think the research discussed in this article, as well as Libet’s and Wegner’s research, fails to show we lack free will).
However, on my view, free and responsible action does require a relevant connection to one’s conscious deliberations and decisions. For instance, one’s non-conscious (e.g., habitual or automatic) actions should be influenced by one’s earlier conscious activity.
If I consciously decide that (as a sort of policy) when I’m in a hurry then I’m going to run yellow lights, then presumably that influences my future automatic decision to hit the accelerator rather than the brakes when I see a yellow light. And if I hit someone, I think that this “connection to my conscious self” is a crucial part of the explanation for my responsibility for the action.
free will versus what?— necessity?
Could free will be a necessity?
If we are each a part of the operations of the universe–then a question: does the universe operate only according to rules or does it make things up as it goes along?
If it makes things up as it goes along then does this mean it has no choice but to make things up as it goes along–and so has no free choice in the matter? It must act in accordance with its nature.
Or does it mean that there are no rules and so what happens is truly spontaneous—but isn’t spontaneous characterized by not choosing–just happening–and so does a question of free will apply?
Are we stating a rule if we say there are no rules to follow?
Or if we say that the rules are such that we have free will—and they are very strict rules—is that free will?
If the assumption is that there is no other possibility than that which has in fact happened (however that is defined)–does that eliminate free will?
What if there is no possibility other than free will–
is that free will?
I dislike chocolate.
I am free to dislike chocolate
I chose to dislike chocolate.
I had no choice but to dislike chocolate.
What came to be the case is that I dislike chocolate
The state of affairs is such that there is an “I” which dislikes chocolate.
There is a dislike of chocolate.
Chocolate is disliked.
Is any one of the above statements more indicative
of “free will” than another?
I would just like to propose another interpretation of these results:
When relating the status of brain cells to a free decision don’t forget that thought is neither a “thing” nor the “status of a thing”
Our conscience pictures itself as a flux of “instants of conscience”, each being “one without duration”. The “Me-now” appears to me as the present status of my conscience, aware of the present status of the universe. All this included in one global meaning which is “me-now”
It obviously cannot be: The semantic content of this “me-now” is huge. Whatever might be the performances of the brain there is no possibility that all these information, involving probably millions of information units, could be connected at one time to build the “meaning” of an instant of conscience.
We must accept the fact that what we call the “instant of conscience” ( in the experiment it should be called “the instant of the conscious decision” ) is an artefact. It has no duration as a “meaning” but it has indeed duration in the physical world.
An easy (although not pure) example is the sound. When I hear music, as a meaning it appears to my conscience as a flux of notes. My conscience “ears” at each time what note is played. But we all know that, in the physical world there is no such thing as an instant note, even in the brain. The instant note is an artefact (very useful) created by the process of giving sense
If we want to relate the though (as a semantic item) to the physical status of the brain, we first need to understand what the though is as a reality, as a part of the actual world.
It is particularly important if we want someday to make machines “think” (i.e. give sense) by themselves.
After 15 years of work on the subject I came to the conclusion that the sense (the meaning) is correlation.
The sense is not in the status of things but in the fact that their statuses are correlated.
Correlation is a reality of the world. 2 photons correlated represent more reality that if they are not correlated.
Correlation is not a thing, it is not localised (it is not in the things but between them) neither spatially nor timely.
Correlation can trigger events in the material world and events in the material world can create correlation.
Though is an extremely complex set of correlations supporting a extremely complex combination of meanings. Though cannot be accurately located in time only its effects can be.