Free will - real or illusionary?

[OutwiththeOutCrowd]

I have an interest in free will. (Whether that interest is freely willed is a moot point!)

As a student, I read Roger Penrose’s book The Emperor’s New Mind about minds, machines, quantum mechanics and consciousness. Several sections in the book attracted my attention at the time but one part that I have been thinking about more recently discussed the experiments of Benjamin Libet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet

Libet’s work involved monitoring the timing of brain signals associated with actions perceived by the subject to be voluntarily willed. His experiments appear to suggest that the subconscious mind is already gearing up for an action before the conscious mind is aware that it has made a decision to execute that action. If the results are taken at face value – and many scientists do so – they seem to suggest that free will is just an illusion.

Here is the well-known neuroscientist Susan Greenfield being a guinea pig for a reproduction of one of Libet’s experiments.

What is your reaction to these results?

Atheists, suppose you adopt this scientific view and accept that free will doesn’t exist. Suppose you are up a creek without a paddle. If you then find a floating plank and use it as a paddle, your solution is not down to your own ingenuity, it’s predetermined. And as you start to paddle your canoe, it’s not really you that’s doing it. You are trapped in a paddling automaton with the mere illusion that you are controlling it.

Does that sound satisfactory to you?

Theists, suppose you refute the scientific view that Libet’s experiments seem to push us towards. Suppose you are also up a creek without a paddle. You know that your sinful nature – or that of others – has brought this bad situation into being. If you then find a floating plank to use as a paddle, it’s down to divine providence. And, as you start to paddle, you know that God wants you to paddle home safely but you still have the free will to mess up.

Does that sound satisfactory to you?

Personally, I find myself resisting the apparent implications of Libet’s work. I don’t think the results are wrong – just that they might be being misinterpreted. Why would consciousness evolve in the first place if it was an entirely passive construct and there were no evolutionary advantage to it? I find it hard to accept that I am a spectator watching my own biopic rather than a player participating in it.

What do you think? Do you care? Do you think Outwith should cease cogitating and make the (illusionary?) choice to start cleaning her house instead?

Thanks for reading this far!

a kind of world soul/cosmic consciousness

Such an idea is appealing, isn’t it?

It reminds me of what the inventor Nikola Tesla said:

My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.

As his training was in electrical engineering, it is perhaps not surprising that he would come up with this sort of ‘picking up a signal’ analogy. A religious spin could be attached to his words, although Tesla himself claimed not to be ‘an orthodox believer’.

In his book The Science Delusion – one of a number of literary responses to Dawkin’s The God Delusion - Rupert Sheldrake expresses a similar idea countering the standard mind-as-a-product-of-brain materialist dogma with the idea that the mind is a kind of field that the brain can detect and the brain itself acts as an interface between the body/environment and mind.

A somewhat related notion is to be found in Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious.

Since we are living in an era of wireless electronic devices receiving and transmitting information invisibly, so that we can – for example - all tap into the hive mind that is Mumsnet, maybe these sorts of ideas should not seem so mad!

If you are religious and believe in an afterlife or even if you just want to rescue the notion of free will, and you don’t wish to rely on quantum effects in an ill-defined way, it seems to me that it is necessary to switch from pure materialism to these sorts of dualistic ideas.

Those who study Near Death Experiences have put forward similar explanations for the experience of continuing consciousness reported by individuals who have experienced cardiac arrest and whose brains have apparently ceased to function for a short period before being resuscitated.

I rather like the idea of a mind existing independently of the brain. Who wouldn’t prefer having a genuinely free will to being a slave manacled to the brain’s biochemistry?

There just doesn’t seem to be enough evidence for the notion though.

What do you think?

For anything other than a materialist answer, you have to rely on subjective experience. That doesn't mean that a dualist approach is inherently wrong, just that it doesn't of course lend itself to objective scrutiny. Anyone, scientist, philosopher, psychologist who puts a foot in the dualist camp is generally roundly ridiculed (sometimes with good cause) by the scientific community.

I personally think it is a mistake to ignore personal experience as evidence. That isn't to say it isn't massively problematic - of course it is since we bring all our previous experiences, prejudices and beliefs to bear on our interpretation of any event. Buddhism however counsels us to trust only our own experience. The Buddha said:

"Don't blindly believe what I say. Don't believe me because others convince you of my words. Don't believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts. Don't rely on logic alone, nor speculation. Don't infer or be deceived by appearances. Do not give up your authority and follow blindly the will of others. This way will lead to only delusion. Find out for yourself what is truth, what is real. Discover that there are virtuous things and there are non-virtuous things. Once you have discovered for yourself give up the bad and embrace the good."

I obviously have great sympathy with the Buddhist approach, and also with the stoics (like Buddha, Marcus Aurelius was big on equanimity). They can be a bit more fatalistic than i'm comfortable with, but the philosophy of learning to be content with how things are rather than how we want them to be resonates with me. Taoism says much the same. Of course there are things we don't want to happen - i don't want my child to ever be unhappy or my mum to have cancer again, but i couldn't control those things even if i had free will.

Jung said that free will exists only within the limits of consciousness. This again fits with the idea that we only have control or free will in a very restricted sense. I do very much like the idea of the collective unconscious and the idea that when we die we don't go anywhere because we (our true selves) are already there. It intuitively seems right to me, but since we can't know i think the advice to do good not bad where we have a choice is the best we can live by.

As to whether i want to rescue free will from the shackles of my brain's biochemistry? Well, yes in the sense that anxiety stops me doing what i'd like to do in life. My hormones make me behave in ways i would not choose to. Past events have bruised my self confidence. I would certainly like freedom from those particular constraints, then maybe i could increase my quota of influence, if only by a little bit.

Have i deaded the thread with my rambling? Sorry if so. It has made me acutely aware of how little i know about something that is so important. I guess the question covers so many areas - physics, biology, philosophy, psychology, that not many are going to be knowledgeable in all areas, but i feel pretty ignorant in most.

I've been thinking a lot about the issue of language that was raised earlier. How we only become aware of a decision once it is framed by language in the conscious mind. How is our subconscious deciding without language? How does the communication between front and back office work if they are communicating through different media? There is an interesting (if not wholly supported) theory that the patriarchy only rose with the advent of written language. Before that the feminine was in the ascent - male v female, word v image. The implication is obviously that our thinking when dominated by image was very different to when it became dominated by words.

I'm not sure what i think about that, but i do tend to think that intuitive thinking is not as valued as rational thought. I've already nailed my colours to the mast and argued that subconscious activity is as valid as conscious thinking - all still part of us, and possibly more valid since it is not processing all our sensory input, worrying about what might happen in the future and ruminating on what has already been. Maybe it is better at dealing with what is rather than what might be, so does make better decisions as that link suggested. It would seem that it is doing far more than simply acting as a data bank of memories and experiences. If i can be a bit woo for a minute,

It has raised some interesting thoughts about when and how consciousness evolved, how free will applies to other animals, whether, as sentient beings, we can operate in a way different from the rest of the physical universe, neither deterministic nor random.

The closest I can come to a conclusion is that the self does have free will, but the self is a construct, an illusion, and so also therefore is our free will. I do like the idea of the subconscious being our interface with the collective unconscious, tapping into that wisdom, while our conscious mind is the interface with the physical world. Of course i have no evidence beyond the experiential.

When we move beyond the sense of self we have no need for free will as we are more accepting of things as they are. That isn't going to help anyone who believes that their self is a real, distinct and tangible entity. I do though think that there is a little bit of wiggle room given that we are unique in being aware of our consciousness, and that awareness in itself may mean that our behaviour does not necessarily conform to that of any other physical entity.

Thanks for starting the thread Out - my amazon list has grown exponentially as a result (and the hounds will be learning quantum physics)!

Hi Velvet you have not killed off the thread! I've been really enjoying the conversation - and you've certainly prompted me to look into Buddhism again and to look at free will from a different angle. I'm going to add more later.

I got a bit sidetracked with starting the Saving Jesus thread plus I'm trying to help DS revise for exams in subjects I know zilch about so I've been quickly mugging up on stuff from his books and my mind has been a bit all over the place from music theory to the English Civil War and back again!

The problem for me with free will is that we know a lot now about how early childhood experiences (first three years) shape the forming brain and the long term and potentially permanent effects this can have. People can't just overcome these effects by sheer 'free' will. We are formed more than free.

Velvet also mentions how rational thought is valued more than our intuitive self. True. But was is barely recognised by most people, I find, Is that we are animals and our feelings and thoughts are driven by our evolved instincts. Specifically we are social mammals. Our need to see out the company of others? That is because we are social mammals. That powerful instinctive drive is what brought you to the social media site, mumsnet. That feeling you get when you feel humiliated or rejected by a group? Instinct. That nice feeling you get when you feel praised or appreciated? Instinct. As a social mammal you have an instinctive need to feel accepted and valued as part of a group. How does free will fit into our instinctive evolved selves and how these instinctive drives shape our individual behaviours and the societies our collective selves form?

Hi Lordylor. We are very much constrained by our genetics, our history and our environment. We obviously make decisions, but those decisions can hardly be described as free when they are so confined. I don't think decision-making and free will are actually the same thing at all.

Does anyone who believes in free will believe that it applies to all life, higher life forms or only humans? Thinking again about the role of language in decision making, i've been wondering how it applies to other animals. Some animals - bats, wolves, whales, clearly have language. In the case of primates some have been able to learn sign language as well as communicate in their own. What they don't have is complex speech, restricted by their physiology, or written language. There are criticisms of some of the research, but it seems clear that there is some level of understanding behind the communications, rather than a simple reward response, unlike in the case of birds that can repeat words but without any understanding of what they mean. We only began to develop our own capacity for complex speech about 100 000 years ago, and have only had our current throat/tongue/mouth arrangement for about 50 000.

If the conscious mind requires language to articulate a decision how does that apply to other animals - how did it apply to humans earlier in our evolution? Doesn't it make sense that our responses were more instinctive before the advent of complex speech and language, and that the illusion of free will came about as a consequence of the development of language?