Yeah, I know, World War III, serious business. I just can't get into the mood tonight to tell everybody that they're under threat of being drafted after we go to war with Iran, Russia, and possibly China. What I am in the mood for though is some weird science and philosophy discussion. I've actually wanted to write about this for a while now, so I'm a bit excited. Forgive me if this post goes on a while.
First, let me explain the experiment:
If you want to listen to a great episode of WNYC's Radio Lab that discusses this experiment, go here: http://www.wnyc.org/stream/ram.py?file=/radiolab/radiolab030405.ra
It starts at about 38:30
The experiment was on finger-wiggling. If you've heard of the experiment you've probably already thought through a lot of what I am going to say, but bear with me as I detail it for those who have not heard of it. Starting in the 1960's, several times this experiment has been repeated. Scientists decided to take a look at decision making and free will. They hooked people up to a machine that measured their brain waves and then asked them to wiggle their finger. Of course the machines that read their brain waves found a peak of activity correlating to the brain telling the finger to wiggle, and a second peak making the finger wiggle. It would make sense that the procession of events would be: You decide to wiggle your finger, then the peak occurs telling your finger to wiggle, then your finger wiggles. However, what they found was that the order really went: A peak occurs telling your finger to wiggle, then you get the sensation of deciding to wiggle your finger, then your finger wiggles. That's right, the activity in your brain that tells your finger it is going to wiggle occurs not just before your finger wiggles, it occurs before you decide to wiggle your finger! At least, it occurs before you are consciously aware that you've decided to wiggle your finger. Philosophers had a field day with this study, and it seemed everyone had their own conclusions to make of it. Of course I can't get into all of their different theories and suppositions, but I will tell you the questions that this experiment poses, though they're not questions posed only by this experiment, and then I'll tell you how I think things go.
First of all, the immediate question that comes to mind is: Does this experiment disprove feel will? If this machine can tell what you are about to do before you are even aware that you are about to do it, then isn't it logical to conclude that your actions are not the result of your consciousness, but of activities within your brain that you have no awareness of? Maybe your consciousness is but one part of the myriad that composes your brain, and clearly not the decision-maker of the bunch. You can still have free will, but it resides in a part of your brain that is different from the feeling you have about what is you, namely your conscious thought, your inner monologue. Still, if that is the case then how does that change the issue? If it's a part of your brain other than your consciousness that is calling the shots, that doesn't solve the mystery of whether or not it's actions are pre-ordained. In fact, it makes the question harder to answer, because it puts the decision making in a part of the brain in which we have just by definition close off to our conscious, the answer-seeking portion of our minds. Maybe then our consciousness exists only to explain the events occurring within ourselves. Human beings evolved to the point where we are now mostly based on our ability to reason, to link cause and effect. It only makes sense that there should evolve a part of our brain that serves to find reason behind the actions of others, and after time, the actions of ourselves. It serves us well to know why other people do what they do, and as we developed more and more self-awareness, we came to apply those same principles to ourselves. However it wasn't the same as when we applied them to other people. We weren't trying to figure out what their motivations were, we knew our own motivations already. So rather than perceiving our actions as the natural reactions to our motivations, we perceived them as decisions that we made to satisfy our motivations. Our motivations and desires were things that we chose to satiate rather than the drive behind our actions. Think about it for a second, when a dog acts do you think that it has an inner monologue that justifies each action, that believes that it has planned each action out beforehand? We can't know exactly what goes on in the minds of other species, but it seems that they simply act rather than thinking about it beforehand. This doesn't mean that they are unable to plan ahead, just that this planning ahead occurs without the need for an active conscious. In fact, the absence of that internal monologue in animals that are capable of planning ahead may be evidence that it may not be the part of our brains that actually does the planning and decision making.
So which of these do I believe? Well, I just so happen to believe in the last one. Mainly because it's the one that I came up with. It's not that I'm the only one to have come up with it, I'm probably somewhere in the low twenty millions to have thought that since the experiment was done. However it's where I arrived after thinking about it on my own. Now what do I think that this means? Well, when I was younger I happened to think a lot about free will. To me the world seemed able to be broken down to cause and effect in any situation. Leaves moved because wind blew them, people ate because they felt hungry, chemical reactions proceeded because of the immutable laws of thermodynamics. I was certain that everything could be broken down into cause and effect on simple, even microscopic levels. After all, our brains are composed of cells, composed of compounds, composed of atoms that all behave the way they do based on the actions of the other atoms surrounding them. The extrapolation of this was that something as complex as someone deciding to and going for a walk could be explained by the set of atoms that comprised them following the natural cause and effect pathways that were effected on them. It's kind of like if you had a handful of marbles and dropped them, you could, given enough computational power, calculate exactly where each marble would land. I realize the analogy is thin (and I'm not a fan of analogies to begin with), but I hope it helps clarify my point. However, when you get down to subatomic levels, things stop becoming that simple. I've already rambled on quite a bit, so I won't get into quantum mechanics. One, because it's a subject that I know embarrassingly little about, and two, because it's incredibly complex and confusing, and there are few people that know the subject well enough to talk about it without being embarrassed at how little they understand it. Still, when you get to a quantum level, nothing exists in a set state. The quantum world is a world of possibilities. When you measure the path an electron takes between two points, you find that it doesn't actually chose a path UNTIL you try and measure it. Before that it exists as any possibility. (This is very cartoony, but explains pretty simply what I'm talking about: http://youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc) To me, this is where free-will lies. We have the ability to chose, to shape our own realities. In summation, just what the hell is it that I'm talking about?
Well, I do think that our consciousnesses evolved to make sense of the actions of other monkeys. And I do think that our sense of self, and our sense of active decision making came about as a result of our consciousnesses trying to make sense of the interplay of our own actions and motivations and becoming intensely confused. I believe that confusion manifests as our sense of self. But as I said, I do think that free will does exist. Our actions may not always be decided by our conscious selves, but our actions are guided by who we are. And who we are is a creation of our consciousness.
The interesting thing about this is: What I believe may be true for me, but it may also be true only for me. If our consciousness serves the purpose of making sense the events that precede it and compose it, then it makes sense that each person has the ability to construct their own reality, and that each persons reality is just as valid as the next. Of course, I don't believe that for a second. I'd love to hear what people think about this, and feel free to tell me that I'm full of shit. I quite expect that I am.
2 comments:
I'm in the "free will doesn't exist" camp. It seems to me that the brain is comprised of chemicals whose behavior follows very clear rules that we already understand. Although the chemical systems in the brain are extremely complex, whenever we find out how something works in the brain, it always follows known laws of physics.
Our brains exist in some state. We are put into a situation, which our brain reacts to. The ONLY factor I see that can cause the outcome of your brain's reaction to that situation to be at all unpredictable is quantum uncertainty.
Now, can quantum uncertainty affect chemical reactions on a macroscopic level as they occur in the brain? I really doubt it. I suppose that's something that I don't feel qualified to comment on, that would probably require massive experience with both chemistry/physics and chaos theory or something similar. But, that's the impression I have; chemical reactions in the brain are macroscopic events where the uncertainty is drastically reduced.
Not only that, but is it LIKELY that something is really adjusting the quantum probabilities of atomic processes in the brain? Sure, it's a possibility... but it seems so clear to me that that concept arises simply out of a human being's need to think of themself as having "free will". There is no observational evidence to hint that something like that may be occurring. Then again, there's no observational evidence to hint at why we exist in the first place...
Now, I totally have to re-read a bunch of what you said to get all of it :) OK, I agree that our actions are guided by who we are, and that who we are is partially a creation of our consciousness. For example, say you're asked to make a decision on whether to wiggle your finger. If you wiggle your finger at some point in time, a puppy gets a treat. If you don't, the puppy goes hungry. You may decide ahead of time, using your conscious brain, that when the time comes you WILL wiggle your finger. Then, when you actually wiggle your finger, your conscious mind is unaware of the event until after your brain tells your finger to wiggle. In effect, your conscious mind has complete control over whether you will wiggle your finger. It puts your brain in a state such that when the time comes, your reaction will be to wiggle your finger.
However, I don't see how that implies the presence of free-will. I still think the conscious mind follows the laws of physics (predictable on a macroscopic scale).
This is why I think it is SO important to recognize environmental issues when looking at how to combat social problems. I don't think it's constructive to, for example, blame a person for committing a crime. In my opinion anyone, born with their genetics, put in their exact environment, would necessarily commit that crime. But I do think it's very constructive to look at what factors led to that person to commit the crime, and think about how society can be altered to minimize those factors. One area that I think this country, in particular, needs to work on as far as that goes is terrorism. If we're serious about fighting terrorism over the long-run, then that needs to be a large part of our approach.
Of course, when I tell people I don't believe in free will, they look at my funny. So what do I know.
Kev, I hear where your coming from and I think we just have a disagreement about a minor point that leads us to have totally different opinions on the reality of free will. Still, I love that your hippy liberal brain managed to inject social conscientiousness and environmentalism into a debate about free will and quantum mechanics :)
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