January 17, 2003
NICE THEORY, NOW LIVE BY IT:
More Than Good Intentions: Holding Fast to Faith in Free Will (JOHN HORGAN, December 31, 2002, NY Times)
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.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.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.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.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.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."
What's most interesting about the people who propound such theories is that
none of them actually believe them. For instance, imagine that you were
to walk up to Dr. Wegner and beat the living tar out of him and take his
money. Would he excuse your action, since you weren't acting under free
will, or would he have you arrested and sue you? Posted by Stephen Judd at January 17, 2003 8:19 AM
OJ - Where is Rand Simberg on this?
I began posting on your blog about the time Rand was defending the Dawkins/Dennett /Churchland materialistic/deterministic brand of philosophy. Defending it up to the point of losing free will, that is. I thought you had him nicely cornered, but he simply stopped at that point, saying he agreed with most of their writings, but not that
. Which, of course, is incoherent.
Also, Clarence Darrow made the no-free-will defense at Leopold and Loeb's trial, saying that they were merely the product of an evolutionary history of usefulness, not congruence with truth. It may have helped the pair escape the death penalty.
The jury should have thought about it for a bit and realized that they, too, are not responsible for their
actions under this paradigm and thus could have assigned the duo the death penalty without reservation. After all, the jurors couldn't help it, right? Weird.
What's absurd is that anybody thinks Dr. Wegner's experiment is evidence against free will. Suppose it's true that the peak in brain activity coincides with the actual decision, and not with the most complex stage of the decision-making process; even so, that only proves that the decision comes before our conscious mind notices that we have made a decision. It doesn't prove that we haven't made a free decision.
Posted by: pj at January 17, 2003 12:05 PMYeah.
And it is a misconception (though a common one) to think that a materialistic universe is deterministic.
Parts are, but once evolution starts, randomness enters.
Well the arguement that there isn't anything called free will is disingenious.
First off say the answer is no. Does this change anything? Nope. Say the answer is yes? Does this change anything? Nope.
So what was the question again?
No wait! This is a serious response. If the answer to a question doesn't give you a useful result then you haven't asked the question in the right way.
The question that Dr Wegner is asking basically boils down to:
If free will exists then the brain operates in magical ways.
But, see I've proved that the brain doesn't operate in magical ways.
Therefore free will doesn't exist.
QED.
QEBullshit. The first assumption is wrong. Free will is magic.
Going backwards. We know that there is a cultural concept called free will. You can say it doens't exist, but thatz just being simply stupid, instead of smartly stupid like the good doctor.
What free will is: It's the ability to be self aware, and understand the consequences of ones action and make ajustments accordingly.
It's important from a societal stand point.
Harry -
I agree that materialism is not determinism in most physical systems, due to the existence of quantum effects (which are assumed to be truly random). But they seem to be one and the same for free will: it is hard to say that random effects are the same as free will, or that indeterminism is a sufficient condition for free will. No real room for choice and volition.
Isaac Bashevis Singer used to joke that "We have to believe in free will. We have no choice."
Posted by: pj at January 17, 2003 1:57 PMFigure it this way. At some point Xd, a creature (say a
rabbit) is running from a fox. It jumps this way and that..
Are the directions of the jumps determined? How? Not by quantum effects.
But if the rabbit jumps left and lives, or right and dies, that potentially, if the world is darwinian, affects evolution. And if evolution leads to intelligence, then that could not have been determined.
Evolution is not totally unconstrained. But it is not determined either. It is something different.
Harry:
So you believe that evolution trumps the laws of physics? And you call yourself an atheist...
I can't believe he thinks whether a rabbit jumps left or right affects evolution.
Posted by: pj at January 18, 2003 11:07 AMTranscends, not trumps.
Whether the rabbit jumps left or right
affects where the rabbit is later (if he
escapes) and that affects whether a
(more or less) random cosmic ray hits
him in the gonads and creates a mutation
that is passed on to his descendants leading
to -- well, who knows. Rabbits that can
understand computers.
There are about 36 phyla of animals, of
which only 2 have developed anything in
the line of intelligence. We don't know how
it happened, but we do know it was a rare
enough event that it either might never
have happened or might have happened
on a very different time scale -- such as, not yet.
Unless you think the laws of physics somehow
decide which direction the rabbit jumps.