I think therefore I am, I think
If I had free will, I would choose to be funnier. I would choose always to have the right witty riposte ready to disarm adversaries and delight friends. But sadly, it is not so. My lot is for the same lame old gags to hobble out whether I will them to or not, like embarrassing aunts at a wedding.
Indeed if we had free will, we might all choose to have the punning powers of the Two Ronnies, combined with the benevolence of Bob Geldof. But we do not. And that is a fact, laboratory proven.
But of course we have free will, you might be thinking. You could prove it by, for example, choosing to raise your arm at some point in the next five seconds. Go on then. Done it? There, that was easy. Of your own volition, at the time of your choice, you moved your arm: QED.
But the American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet has shown that before every such movement, there is a distinctive build-up of electrical activity in the brain. And this build-up happens about half a second before your conscious ”decision” to move your arm. So by the time you think, ”OK, I’ll move my arm,” your body is halfway there. Which means your conscious experience of making a decision - the experience associated with free will - is just a kind of add-on, an after-thought that only happens once the brain has already set about its business. In other words, your brain is doing the real work, making your hands turn the pages of this magazine or reach over for your cup of tea, and all the time your conscious mind is tagging along behind.
It is as if, after years of driving around in your car, you discover that the steering-wheel is not attached to anything, and the car has been steering by itself.
Two neuroscientists working in Australia have taken Libet’s discovery one step further. They found that, when asking people to choose to move either their left or right hands, it was possible to influence their choice by electronically stimulating certain parts of their brains. So, for example, the scientists could force the subjects always to choose to move their left hands. But despite their choice being electronically directed, these patients continued to report that they were freely choosing which hand to move.
So not only is your steering wheel not attached to anything, but if your car was being steered by someone else by remote control, you would not even notice. Every time it turns left, you just move your toy steering wheel and think, ”Ah yes, I want to turn left.”
Thanks to modern neuro-imaging technology, we now know that our minds - our conscious, mental life - are a product of activity in the brain. What Libet’s and subsequent experiments show is that even when we have the conscious experience of deciding, our brains have really already taken the decision for us. Free will is an illusion.
But if this is true, the implications for our systems of morality, of crime and punishment, are shattering. We only punish those we think voluntarily did wrong - not those who literally had no choice but to act as they did. But if there is no free will, then no one has ever had a choice but to act as they did. That Eve ate the apple was as predetermined as the leaves falling to the ground in autumn. None of us could ever truly be said to be responsible for our actions. In very different ways, three new books tackle the question of whether we are free and what it means if we are not.
The neuroscientist and life peer Susan Greenfield, one of 21 eminent thinkers interviewed by Susan Blackmore in her Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think About the Brain, Free Will and What It Means to be Human, is worried. The implications touch ”all of life”, she argues, ”how much a kid at school feels they’re responsible, and feels their destiny is in their own hands”. Another interviewee, the philosopher Pat Churchland, is concerned about ”how the developing knowledge of the genetic and neurobiological causes of irrational violence is going to have an impact on the criminal law”.
The impact could be revolutionary. Imagine, for example, two women - call them Thelma and Louise - who both hear rumours that their husbands are having affairs. Thelma waits for her husband to come home so she can hear his side of the story. Louise waits for her husband to come home, and shoots him as he walks through the door. It turns out neither husband was actually having an affair.
Louise is accused of cold-blooded murder. There is no reason, argues the prosecutor, why she could not have acted just like Thelma, who was, after all, in just the same position. Not so, says Louise’s defence lawyer, producing a map of her brain as it was before she heard the rumour. He then shows the jury how the news made this neuron fire, which caused these other neurons to fire, which eventually, caused Louise’s finger to pull the trigger. He argues that this unbroken causal chain led inevitably from her hearing the rumour of her husband’s infidelity to the awful position in which she now finds herself. Thelma was lucky to have the brain she did, he argues. Louise was not so lucky. Surely this poor widow, a victim of the immutable laws of nature, deserves pity, not punishment?
It may be a long way off before we can map the firing of individual neurons. But we already know that behind every good deed or wicked act, behind every saint and sinner, lies only the mechanical firing of thousands of tiny neurons.
Many will find this hard to accept. But our increasing knowledge of how the brain works is already changing the way we view criminal behaviour. Churchland cites the example of people with low levels of MAOA, an enzyme essential for the proper working of the brain. MAOA deficit is associated with impulsiveness and aggression, and therefore higher levels of criminality. Those who suffer both from an MAOA deficit and an abusive upbringing ”are virtually certain to be irrationally and self-destructively violent”, she claims.
There is already ample evidence that prison is effectively where society sends those whose brains do not work properly. A report released last month suggested over a quarter of the UK’s almost 80,000 prison population have an IQ of lower than 80 and suspected learning disabilities, such as forms of autism and dyslexia. Another study carried out at the Young Offenders’ Institute in Aylesbury showed that if prisoners were given minerals and fatty acids essential for proper brain functioning, they committed 37 per cent fewer violent offences.
When we know that the structure of someone’s brain makes them very likely to be a menace to society, we will increasingly be faced with the choice of medically intervening - even forcibly - or knowing that we could have prevented a terrible crime. ”The interventions may not always be pretty, but of course going to prison is not pretty either,” says Churchland.
None of this will come as a surprise to philosophers. Many have long suspected that humans are as subject to causal laws as the rest of nature. They just did not know how. As the Dutch philosopher Spinoza wrote in 1676, ”Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”
Where two and a half thousand years of beard-tugging has brought us can be seen in Four Views on Free Will, the latest in Blackwell’s ”Great Debates in Philosophy” series. Lay folk might be surprised to hear that there are four views of free will, rather than simply the views that you have it or you don’t. But the majority of philosophers, from Aristotle to Thomas Hobbes, have taken a middle way. They have argued that the truth of determinism is somehow compatible with a degree of freedom and responsibility for our actions.
In fact, none of the four philosophers in this volume suggests we should give up the blame game altogether. For example, Derk Pereboom recognises that our lack of free will means we need to rethink morality - but sees this as no bad thing. It would, he suggests, lead to sensible reforms, such as shifting the focus of the criminal justice system away from retributive punishment and towards re-education and deterrence - or towards protecting society: ”Suppose that a serial killer continues to pose a grave danger to a community. Even if he is not morally responsible for his crimes, it would be as legitimate to detain him as it is to quarantine a carrier of a deadly communicable disease.”
But what this book makes most clear is that, while scientists are making real progress studying the brain in laboratories around the world, many philosophers are going cross-eyed staring at their navels. Now more than ever we need our philosophers to help us make sense of what science is telling us. But the bulk of this book is dedicated to an inward-looking family row revolving around some very implausible thought experiments, all conducted in an arcane cant, and oblivious to developments outside the academy.
But such criticisms cannot be levelled at John Searle. Searle, now one of the grand old men of American philosophy, has throughout his career sought to bring together the findings of contemporary science with the ancient philosophical problems. In his short new book Freedom and Neurobiology he places the question of free will in the context of what he sees as the big question: how do we humans, with our conception of ourselves as free, rational, moral agents, fit in to a universe ”of mindless, meaningless, brute physical particles”?
He is puzzled by why, if we have no free will, we have this peculiar conscious experience of decision-making. If, as neuroscience currently suggests, it is purely an illusion, then ”evolution played a massive trick on us”. But this ”goes against everything we know about evolution. The processes of conscious rationality are such an important part of our lives, and above all such a biologically expensive part of our lives” that it seems impossible they ”play no functional role at all in the life and survival of the organism”.
The alternative is that somehow conscious decision-making can play a role - at least sometimes - in shaping our behaviour. Perhaps in more complex situations, where we mull over in our minds the choices before us. Searle believes we should one day be able to establish this in the lab. So, to some extent, it may yet transpire that we stand, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, in a ”garden of forking paths”.
Perhaps it is too early to throw open the prison doors, close down the courts and resign ourselves to the remorseless laws of nature. But there is no doubt that as we learn more about the mechanics of the mind, we will need to rethink some of our deepest beliefs about ourselves and our society. Each of these three volumes sheds some light on the work that needs to be done. But the book that really does justice to this question is yet to be written.
Indeed if we had free will, we might all choose to have the punning powers of the Two Ronnies, combined with the benevolence of Bob Geldof. But we do not. And that is a fact, laboratory proven.
But of course we have free will, you might be thinking. You could prove it by, for example, choosing to raise your arm at some point in the next five seconds. Go on then. Done it? There, that was easy. Of your own volition, at the time of your choice, you moved your arm: QED.
But the American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet has shown that before every such movement, there is a distinctive build-up of electrical activity in the brain. And this build-up happens about half a second before your conscious ”decision” to move your arm. So by the time you think, ”OK, I’ll move my arm,” your body is halfway there. Which means your conscious experience of making a decision - the experience associated with free will - is just a kind of add-on, an after-thought that only happens once the brain has already set about its business. In other words, your brain is doing the real work, making your hands turn the pages of this magazine or reach over for your cup of tea, and all the time your conscious mind is tagging along behind.
It is as if, after years of driving around in your car, you discover that the steering-wheel is not attached to anything, and the car has been steering by itself.
Two neuroscientists working in Australia have taken Libet’s discovery one step further. They found that, when asking people to choose to move either their left or right hands, it was possible to influence their choice by electronically stimulating certain parts of their brains. So, for example, the scientists could force the subjects always to choose to move their left hands. But despite their choice being electronically directed, these patients continued to report that they were freely choosing which hand to move.
So not only is your steering wheel not attached to anything, but if your car was being steered by someone else by remote control, you would not even notice. Every time it turns left, you just move your toy steering wheel and think, ”Ah yes, I want to turn left.”
Thanks to modern neuro-imaging technology, we now know that our minds - our conscious, mental life - are a product of activity in the brain. What Libet’s and subsequent experiments show is that even when we have the conscious experience of deciding, our brains have really already taken the decision for us. Free will is an illusion.
But if this is true, the implications for our systems of morality, of crime and punishment, are shattering. We only punish those we think voluntarily did wrong - not those who literally had no choice but to act as they did. But if there is no free will, then no one has ever had a choice but to act as they did. That Eve ate the apple was as predetermined as the leaves falling to the ground in autumn. None of us could ever truly be said to be responsible for our actions. In very different ways, three new books tackle the question of whether we are free and what it means if we are not.
The neuroscientist and life peer Susan Greenfield, one of 21 eminent thinkers interviewed by Susan Blackmore in her Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think About the Brain, Free Will and What It Means to be Human, is worried. The implications touch ”all of life”, she argues, ”how much a kid at school feels they’re responsible, and feels their destiny is in their own hands”. Another interviewee, the philosopher Pat Churchland, is concerned about ”how the developing knowledge of the genetic and neurobiological causes of irrational violence is going to have an impact on the criminal law”.
The impact could be revolutionary. Imagine, for example, two women - call them Thelma and Louise - who both hear rumours that their husbands are having affairs. Thelma waits for her husband to come home so she can hear his side of the story. Louise waits for her husband to come home, and shoots him as he walks through the door. It turns out neither husband was actually having an affair.
Louise is accused of cold-blooded murder. There is no reason, argues the prosecutor, why she could not have acted just like Thelma, who was, after all, in just the same position. Not so, says Louise’s defence lawyer, producing a map of her brain as it was before she heard the rumour. He then shows the jury how the news made this neuron fire, which caused these other neurons to fire, which eventually, caused Louise’s finger to pull the trigger. He argues that this unbroken causal chain led inevitably from her hearing the rumour of her husband’s infidelity to the awful position in which she now finds herself. Thelma was lucky to have the brain she did, he argues. Louise was not so lucky. Surely this poor widow, a victim of the immutable laws of nature, deserves pity, not punishment?
It may be a long way off before we can map the firing of individual neurons. But we already know that behind every good deed or wicked act, behind every saint and sinner, lies only the mechanical firing of thousands of tiny neurons.
Many will find this hard to accept. But our increasing knowledge of how the brain works is already changing the way we view criminal behaviour. Churchland cites the example of people with low levels of MAOA, an enzyme essential for the proper working of the brain. MAOA deficit is associated with impulsiveness and aggression, and therefore higher levels of criminality. Those who suffer both from an MAOA deficit and an abusive upbringing ”are virtually certain to be irrationally and self-destructively violent”, she claims.
There is already ample evidence that prison is effectively where society sends those whose brains do not work properly. A report released last month suggested over a quarter of the UK’s almost 80,000 prison population have an IQ of lower than 80 and suspected learning disabilities, such as forms of autism and dyslexia. Another study carried out at the Young Offenders’ Institute in Aylesbury showed that if prisoners were given minerals and fatty acids essential for proper brain functioning, they committed 37 per cent fewer violent offences.
When we know that the structure of someone’s brain makes them very likely to be a menace to society, we will increasingly be faced with the choice of medically intervening - even forcibly - or knowing that we could have prevented a terrible crime. ”The interventions may not always be pretty, but of course going to prison is not pretty either,” says Churchland.
None of this will come as a surprise to philosophers. Many have long suspected that humans are as subject to causal laws as the rest of nature. They just did not know how. As the Dutch philosopher Spinoza wrote in 1676, ”Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”
Where two and a half thousand years of beard-tugging has brought us can be seen in Four Views on Free Will, the latest in Blackwell’s ”Great Debates in Philosophy” series. Lay folk might be surprised to hear that there are four views of free will, rather than simply the views that you have it or you don’t. But the majority of philosophers, from Aristotle to Thomas Hobbes, have taken a middle way. They have argued that the truth of determinism is somehow compatible with a degree of freedom and responsibility for our actions.
In fact, none of the four philosophers in this volume suggests we should give up the blame game altogether. For example, Derk Pereboom recognises that our lack of free will means we need to rethink morality - but sees this as no bad thing. It would, he suggests, lead to sensible reforms, such as shifting the focus of the criminal justice system away from retributive punishment and towards re-education and deterrence - or towards protecting society: ”Suppose that a serial killer continues to pose a grave danger to a community. Even if he is not morally responsible for his crimes, it would be as legitimate to detain him as it is to quarantine a carrier of a deadly communicable disease.”
But what this book makes most clear is that, while scientists are making real progress studying the brain in laboratories around the world, many philosophers are going cross-eyed staring at their navels. Now more than ever we need our philosophers to help us make sense of what science is telling us. But the bulk of this book is dedicated to an inward-looking family row revolving around some very implausible thought experiments, all conducted in an arcane cant, and oblivious to developments outside the academy.
But such criticisms cannot be levelled at John Searle. Searle, now one of the grand old men of American philosophy, has throughout his career sought to bring together the findings of contemporary science with the ancient philosophical problems. In his short new book Freedom and Neurobiology he places the question of free will in the context of what he sees as the big question: how do we humans, with our conception of ourselves as free, rational, moral agents, fit in to a universe ”of mindless, meaningless, brute physical particles”?
He is puzzled by why, if we have no free will, we have this peculiar conscious experience of decision-making. If, as neuroscience currently suggests, it is purely an illusion, then ”evolution played a massive trick on us”. But this ”goes against everything we know about evolution. The processes of conscious rationality are such an important part of our lives, and above all such a biologically expensive part of our lives” that it seems impossible they ”play no functional role at all in the life and survival of the organism”.
The alternative is that somehow conscious decision-making can play a role - at least sometimes - in shaping our behaviour. Perhaps in more complex situations, where we mull over in our minds the choices before us. Searle believes we should one day be able to establish this in the lab. So, to some extent, it may yet transpire that we stand, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, in a ”garden of forking paths”.
Perhaps it is too early to throw open the prison doors, close down the courts and resign ourselves to the remorseless laws of nature. But there is no doubt that as we learn more about the mechanics of the mind, we will need to rethink some of our deepest beliefs about ourselves and our society. Each of these three volumes sheds some light on the work that needs to be done. But the book that really does justice to this question is yet to be written.
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