Faith and the science of free will

Horgan: When I woke this morning, I stared at the ceiling above my bed and wondered: to what extent will my rising really be an exercise of my free will? Let's say I got up right . . . now. Would my subjective decision be the cause? Or would computations unfolding in a subconscious neural netherworld actually set off the muscular twitches that slide me out of the bed, quietly, so as not to wake my wife, and propel me toward the door?

One of the risks of science journalism is that occasionally you encounter research that threatens something you cherish. 

Free will is something I cherish. I can live with the idea of science killing off God. But free will? That's going too far. And yet a couple of books I've been reading lately have left me brooding over the possibility that free will is as much a myth as divine justice.

ACZ: Not only is this arrogant, but the statement about divine justice is highly encultured; many societies (particular Eastern societies) that have a stronger view of fate would not have these problems at all. Of course, the author never details what the difference is between "killing off" God and killing off free will - it's merely a statement of outrage.

SVH:  I never cease to be intrigued by the different gods folks are willing to accept and raise high in the place of the God we know--gods such as science, appearance, money. We seem to think that anything which is not a person can be safely idolized to our heart's content. Take free will, for example. We're OK with science killing off God but not free will. I know I'm on a bit of a soapbox here, but I wouldn't really care for free will were it not for the presence of God. 

PJ: Regarding his statement about the death of God [as brought about by science], perhaps he could give me some scientific explanation of why a bunch of random carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms would struggle for billions of years to create a sentient being? Sure he could write volumes on how this happened, but WHY? 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems “run down” like a clock never rewinding themselves back up. But the theory of evolution argues the exact opposite. Why is there this clash between certain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen who struggle to be “life” and carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen who want to break them back down?

The mathematical probability of life forming on its own is the same as a computer program writing itself. The problem that Horgan has is that he can’t seem to ask the right questions because of his narrow-minded, secular humanist view of the world. He assumes that because science gives an answer to how the universe was created that we don’t have to ask why the universe was created. When science answers why there is something instead of nothing, then I’ll give him his “death of God” statement for free. Science won’t, because science can’t. 

Horgan: The chief offender is "The Illusion of Conscious Will," by Dr. Daniel M. Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard. What makes Dr. Wegner's critique more effective than others I've read over the years is that it is less philosophical than empirical, drawing heavily upon recent research in cognitive science and neurology.

ACZ: Empiricism vs. Philosophy is a categorical error. Empiricism is good, but let's not forget that it is a philosophical system all on its own. And let's not forget that while empiricism is a good way to learn about how things normally work, it's fundamentally reductionistic as a philosophy. 

PJ: It may be good to note that Wegner is a psychologist, and the experiments done were in the field of cognitive science, not psychology. Psychology is no more a science than economics is a science. I cannot think of a field that has been consistently wrong more than the field of psychology, so for me Wegner has a severe credibility issue. 

Horgan: Dr. Wegner also carries out his vivisection of free will with a disturbing cheerfulness, like a neurosurgeon joking as he cuts a patient's brain. We think of will as a force, but actually, Dr. Wegner says, it is a feeling -- "merely a feeling," as he puts it -- of control over our actions. I think, "I'm going to get up now," and when I do a moment later, I credit that feeling with having been the instigating cause. But as we all know, correlation does not equal causation.

ACZ: This is certainly true. On the other hand, if we want to get empirical about things, there is a wealth of empirical evidence that our beliefs do cause our actions, and little evidence to the contrary - this is what tends to let most people tell the difference between their fantasies and their intentions. Since we do have a set of 'beliefs' that doesn't correlate to reality, and another set that does, and we can usually tell the difference between them, one might reasonably think that if we don't control our actions, we at least have foreknowledge of what they will do (Wegner will argue that we actually aren't able to tell the difference, and I disagree.) Again, this is a (true) statement about epistemic uncertainty, not a strong argument against free will.

PJ: My response to this is shaped by The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will edited by Benjamin Libet, Anthony Freeman, and Keith Sunderland (Thorverton, UK:  Imprint Academic, 1999).

As I understand it, Libet was actually one of the scientists that was involved in the experiments that Dr. Wegner was referring to. The fact that Libet's position is NOWHERE mentioned makes me very suspicious of Wegner's agenda. . 

The conscious will appears to be initiated by an unconscious brain event. If the experiment is correct, then this calls into question free will. But potentially available is the ability of the conscious will to veto these subconscious decisions (see page 51 of The Volitional Brain).

The conscious veto may itself have a preceding unconscious process.  But, this would become an unconscious choice of which we become conscious rather than a consciously causal event (52). The conscious veto is a control function, not just simply becoming aware of a wish to act. 

The role of conscious free will would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act, but rather to control whether the act takes place. You could view voluntary actions as bubbling up in the brain. 

The ethical implications of this are actually consistent with most ethical and religious systems. Most of the Ten Commandments are thou shall not commandments (54). Of course, in this sense, there could be physiological basis for original sin. The experiments cited by Wegner give us NO indication that actions cannot be consciously controlled. 

Horgan: "When neurologists 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 Dr. 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.

ACZ: This is true. However, cognitive psychology already knows of a 
mechanism that does this (cognitive dissonance), and it tends to be 
present in more extreme situations (such as a doctor shocking your 
brain or forced compliance). Wegner seems to be suggesting that 
literally every action that we do involves cognitive dissonance, which, as the theory is currently stated (and backed by empirical evidence) seems fairly difficult to justify. The major studies with cognitive dissonance have been done with forcing people to do things (cf. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Festinger/). If this is the explanatory mechanism, I find it overall a bit weak. And without this explanatory mechanism, the argument isn't particularly strong.

SVH: If our actions and feelings of decision-making are completely unrelated (whether causally or in a simply correlative manner), I wonder why we have such a persistent need to express control over our situations. I look back to the Fall here. We're given control over all the beasts and the land and plants in the Garden of Eden, but we screw up by abusing our control. Our ability to have or sense complete control over our lives was confounded at that point (whereas before, we didn't really need it, maybe), and we go through life trying BOTH to seize control and pretend as if we haven't any. Typical human sin, that kind of going to extremes. In one sense, then, as a Christian, I am compelled to think that sometimes scientific evidence or theories are used to extricate humanity from this fine and mysterious web of responsibility (to one another, to God, to the earth, etc.).

Horgan: 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.

ACZ: To sum up: At T seconds I push the button.

At T-0.2 seconds I look at the clock, interpret and put the time in my 
memory and think 'I decide.'

At T-0.3 seconds something happens in my brain.

So there's a 0.1 second latency between when I actually decide and when I note that I decide. But there are a large number of possibilities for this latency. Most obviously, the fact that I have to look at a clock and remember this information, or I need to do the after-button-pushing process. 0.1 seconds isn't that much latency. I think we need more information to evaluate this.

SVH: The idea that will is preceded by a feeling which is now proven to be preceded by the involuntarily firing of a neutron--this does not negate the possibility of free will. What if our will has chosen before we are conscious of the choice? Does that make us any less actors in our own decisions? Could we ever prove that an act which took place by our "volition" was or was not accompanied by that "feeling" of decision-making? Even if we proved that all of our actions were pre-determined by various internal forces or clocks or whatnot, we would still carry with us the notion of "feeling", if only because it speaks to our human connection with the forces of nature or supernature in a way that science cannot touch. 

Horgan: The meaning of these widely debated findings, Dr. Wegner says, is that our conscious willing is an afterthought, which "kicks in at some point after the brain has already started preparing for the action."

ACZ: Can he explain how this afterthought gets kicked into 'consciousness' without relying on vague wording about emergent properties? I'd be surprised. The fundamental problem in cognitive science is not in how neurons interact, but rather how consciousness arises, and, at this point, scientists are strongly divided as to how this occurs.

Horgan: 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 may resolve to drink only one cup of coffee instead of two, or to take a long run through the woods. But I may do neither of these things (and chances are I won't).

ACZ: First, no duh; it's called your cerebrum and your cerebellum. I'm not sure what he's trying to argue here. The real argument he could make would be from 'neural circuits that bypass conscious decision,' but that would be to confuse habit formation and neural optimization with decision-making. It is well known that if we continue to do an action, the dendrons of the particular neurons involved in that action continue to intertwine more closely. The fact of the matter is that these can be changed over time, which can be explained by materialistic models (complex stimulus/response interactions) or by amaterialist ones (a 'self' makes a 'decision'). It strikes me that an informed Christian perspective needs to allow that our brains do much work 'automatically' by following preformed neural pathways--this is how some of us can walk and chew gum at the same time. However, to claim that these neural pathways are determinative of all action seems do be difficult to defend empirically. Free will should allow that we form 'skills' and 'habits,' but this doesn't mean that they can't be changed. It simply means that our brains were built to work at an optimum speed, and when we do things over and over again, we build up the neural pathways that allow us to preform the associated actions. For an excellent outline of research on cognitive science and 
unconscious habits I recommend reading http://www.christian-thinktank.com/priming.html. It's massive, and basically a research outline, but it's very well thought out, and presents the mainstream perspectives in cognitive science.

Horgan: Sometimes our intentions seem to be self-thwarting. The more I tell myself to go back to sleep instead of obsessing over free will, the wider awake I feel. Dr. 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 sense lurking within us.

ACZ: Most of us know that the best way to go to sleep is not to think about anything. And most of us, with a little bit of self-control can do this. I may have an intention to fly, but my knowledge of the world precludes me from thinking that intention immediately affects reality. (Someone once said, 'When you find a universe where your desires translate to reality, invite me in.') This argument also fails to account for the possibility of unconscious or subconscious processes (and not necessarily thought, e.g. worry) that may impact our actions. The existence of such processes seems (at some level) clear, and they need not be a threat to the unity of the person (take for instance one's ability to attend, at different levels, to multiple things--listening to the radio and reading. There's one person, but there are two processes going on, even if they are somewhat degraded by each other.)

Horgan: Brain disorders can exacerbate experiences of this kind. Schizophrenics perceive their very thoughts as coming from malevolent external sources. Those who have lasting damage to the corpus callosum, a neural cable that transmits signals between the brain's hemispheres, may be afflicted with alien-hand syndrome. They may end up, Dr. Wegner says, like Dr. Strangelove, whose left hand frantically tried to keep his right from jutting out in Nazi salutes. 

ACZ: Brain disorders are a whole different can of worms. This is only a problem if you view 'yourself' as a ghost of some kind floating around somewhere. If your mind is an integral part of yourself, you would expect that if it were damaged it would result in strangeness. But believing that one's mind is an integral part of oneself is not to say that one's cerebellum is oneself. Descartes knew about brain damage, but he had no problem believing that the spirit was separate, as he believed that the brain was used to channel and express the soul. Some modern Christian physicists believe that quantum events are the link, occurring in neural pathways to redirect associations - this seems a possible option.

Horgan: Perfectly healthy people may lose their sense of control over actions their brains have clearly initiated. When we are hypnotized, playing with Ouija boards, or speaking in tongues, we may feel as though someone or something else is acting through us, whether a muse, ghost, devil, or deity. What all these examples imply is that the concept of a unified self, which is a necessary precondition for free will, is itself an illusion.

ACZ: A 'unified self' is misleading. Everyone grants that multiple processes go on in our brains at the same time. I'm typing this while listening to someone else's conversation. By 'unified self' the author seems to mean personality, not consciousness (since we can obviously do multiple mental functions at the same time). But I disagree that a unified personality is needed for free will (people with multiple personalities have free will even though they have different personalities at different times.)

SVH: This writer's concept is CLEARLY very Western and Americanized. While these findings may illustrate that we do not have ultimate control of ourselves (because we DO live in a world we can't control), they do not seem to indicate much of anything about the self, except the fact that self-communication is a very tricky business. Also, I think that our concept of "control" was created in part by our obsessive individualism, which seeks any proof for its justification (talk about post hoc). God acting through us does not disrupt the “unity” of the “self”; it unifies the self. The scientist's comment to which I referred earlier reveals an either/or mentality about selves in general--i.e. that the individual human self and the possibility of interaction with a greater self are mutually exclusive, that divine intervention sabotages free will. In fact, it seems to me that people recognize (deep down, though many wouldn't say so) that divine intervention merely sabotages OUR IDEAS of free will and wisdom. 

Horgan: Dr. Wegner quotes Arthur C. Clarke'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, Dr. Wegner says, we explain our behavior in terms of such silly, occult concepts as "the self" and "free will." Our belief in our personal identity and self-control does have its uses, Dr. Wegner grants; without it, "we might soon be wearing each other's underclothing."

ACZ: This remark seems a red herring to me. First, as long as there has been a 'modern' view of the world, i.e. that events have consistent causal relations, we've had the methodology to do basic science. If you can do something over and over under controlled conditions, you can keep doing it as long as you want. But we don't even have a methodology to deal with 'consciousness.'  It seems strange to me that this article should argue for a mechanistic view of humanity without addressing consciousness. Again, we don't even have a basic methodology to understand what consciousness is, thanks to the anthropic principle (i.e. consciousness can only be observed by a conscious person, which puts the results of any empirical test into question, as anything that manipulates the consciousness modifies both the thing observed and the 
observer, making a controlled environment impossible.) This vast difference suggests to me that it is not in the same category as undiscovered technology.

Horgan: Maybe I should lighten up and embrace my lack of free will and a self. That's what Dr. Susan Blackmore, a British psychologist and a practitioner of Zen, advises. In her book "The Meme Machine," she contends that our minds are really just bundles of memes, the beliefs and habits and predilections that we catch from one another like viruses. Take all of the memes out of a mind, and there is no self left to be free.

ACZ: Beyond the developmental question that this raises (how does this start? Do we have all the capacities for thought built in so that we can learn 'memes' from birth? Is this long e-mail simply a chain of memes?), there is no argument here. 

Horgan: Once you realize you have no control over your destiny, says Dr. Blackmore, you will expend less energy regretting past decisions and fretting over future ones, and you will be more appreciative of the vital present. Be here now, and so on. In other words, true freedom comes from accepting there is no freedom.

ACZ: This of course, isn't an argument. It's utilitarian beyond belief (what about societies?) The author also forgets to tell us what 'true freedom' is - lack of worry? Like a slave chained in a cell who doesn't need to worry about obtaining food is 'free'? I don't get it.

SVH: This comment makes we want to be so sarcastic and sneery about the state of pop intellectualism and spiritualism. Bleccch! But, suffice it to say that this comment reveals our deep fear of inconsistency and our pitiful inability to accept paradox. 

Horgan: Dr. Blackmore's reasoning strikes me as less spiritual than Orwellian. 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. Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society.

ACZ: Again, utilitarian, and the author doesn't seem to care if his view is true or not. Moreover, as I have pointed out, the statement "Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society" is incredibly culturally biased. Tell that to a backwater Chinese person who believes that his whole life is goverened by "joss." Plus, we never see a justification for the author's view that while throwing God away is OK, we need to 'take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God.'

PJ: Metaphysics is the study of the nature and structure of reality. There can be no “metaphysical justification” for ANYTHING that doesn’t really exist. If ethics and morality don’t exist, and free will and accountability don’t exist, then justice of ANY sort doesn’t exist either. This is exactly what moral relativism asserts. If human courts are the highest form of authority in the universe, then morality and justice are reduced to mere power. Either power of the government or the power of majority. Right and wrong are merely matters of opinion. Mother Theresa and Hitler merely had differences of opinion regarding human life. There is no way we can say that one was more “right” than the other because no objective standard exists regarding morality.

Horgan: Theologians have proposed that science still allows faith in a "God of the gaps," who dwells within those shadowy realms into which science has not fully penetrated, such as the imaginary time before the Big Bang banged. In the same way, maybe we can have a free will of the gaps. No science is more riddled with gaps, after all, than the science of human consciousness.

ACZ: 'God of the gaps' is a term pejoratively used to describe the God that some theologians allow to be pushed out of all interaction with 
creation (or perhaps one who was wrongly put into some areas of interaction, 
and then was justly removed.) Basically, the author is claiming that in our epistemic doubt, we can believe in free will, but really, we don't have it.

SVH: I think that the experimental "gap" could be the gap between intuition (or primal action or Kantian basic thought or whatever) and our ability to translate that action/intuition into action. Language is not quite as quick as thought, and sometimes in order to think things that require words, it takes us longer than our intuition to think them. Make sense? 

Horgan: As I lay in bed this morning, however, my faith in free will wavered. Scanning my mind for something resembling will, I found a welter of roiling thoughts and antithoughts, a few of which transcended virtuality long enough for closer inspection. One thought was that, no matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will. Abruptly my body, no doubt bored with all this pointless cogitation, slipped out of bed, padded to the door, and closed it behind me.

ACZ: Sounds like Descarte. And sounds like Reformed epistemology. So what would he say if I said, "Scanning my mind for something resembling God, I found a welter of roiling thoughts and antithoughts, a few of which transcended virtuality long enough for closer inspection. One thought was that, no matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in God."? Does the author believe that compulsion to believe something makes it true, or is it just a statement about his internal state?

SVH: This article left a bit to be desired in terms of practical application. It would be a pity for all science to turn out like some of the nihilistic philosophy that basically died of impotence--it can't produce pragmatic fruit. Even if our decisions were dictated to our brain cells by myriad external and internal stimuli over which we have no control, we would be hard pressed to conduct a society around attempting to understand and predict the seemingly random movements of these stimuli. 

PJ: The deeper question here is of free will and determinism.  Remember that the goal of science is ultimately to find the laws of cause and effect. If this is the definition of science, then the only way we could have a science of humans (i.e. psychology; cognitive science) is if humans also operate under the laws of cause and effect.  So one can easily see why the push from these two disciplines is toward determinism.

However, free choices are NOT PREDICTIABLE, even if they are determined.  Determinism itself has not been proven, although many philosophers and scientists assume that it has. At the subatomic level, energy seems to appear and disappear randomly. Scientists to date are still searching for a pattern of some sort. So are we to assume that we operate under the deterministic laws of the universe while the subatomic particles that make up our bodies do not?

The bottom line is, there is a gap between the category of physical phenomena and the category of subjective phenomena.  We could know every physical thing about the brain and still have absolutely no insight to the subjective phenomena. It is almost a universal experience that we feel as though we have free will. If we are to believe something contrary to our universal experience of free will, there should be an experiment set up to prove it. Of course, this would be impossible. I look forward to the day when, in the words of Aldous Huxley, science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.

• Andrew recommends this document on the proof of the existence of the soul: http://www.christian-thinktank.com/hmosoul.html

• See also this defense of atheism:
http://mwillett.org/frames/atheism.htm

• The Oracle: I'd ask you to sit down, but you're not going to anyway. And don't worry about the vase.
Neo: What vase?
[He backs into a vase, knocking it to the floor where it shatters]
The Oracle: That vase.
Neo: I'm sorry.
The Oracle: I said don't worry about it. I'll get one of my kids to fix it.
Neo: How did you know?
The Oracle: What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?
-From The Matrix

• As for us, we will adore with all reverence those mysteries which surpass our comprehension, until the brightness of their full knowledge shall shine forth upon us in that day when He who is seen "through a glass darkly" shall be seen by us face to face. 
-John Calvin

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