Against Benjamin Libet & Free Won't

Benjamin Libet provided a simple model of repeatable experiments to verify his findings which reveal that, so to speak, things seem topsy turvy. His findings are widely interpreted to mean that we can veto our actions but we do not decide when to initiate them. In other words, we have veto power but not decision power. (Libet said this is in keeping with the Ten Commandments as most of them are Do Nots.)

I found an interesting review of Libet's book. The review argued against the standard interpretation. I do not know the writer's credentials, nor do I know if he has professionally published--not that the questions must matter--but I did find Carlos Camara informative and intelligent in the points he makes. (English is not his first language, revealed by his spellings, which I corrected below.) Here is an excerpt from his review of Benjamin Libet's book, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness:

"Nor does Libet consider the fact of epilepsy, where brain activity is quite long in duration, but different in amplitude and frequency, and the patient is unconscious. Time cannot be the only factor. If it is, proving so requires more than what Libet offers.

Libet also famously found that brain activity precedes the conscious will to act for about 200 milliseconds. He also proposes that the notion of free will can be maintained, because there is time to veto consciously willed actions. You do not begin your actions, but you modulate them.

Again, his evidence is strong, robust and significant. But what about his 'veto' speculation. It is unnecessary. Firstly, materialists should not be surprised with the fact that conscious will comes late in the game. If conscious will is the result of brain processes, it cannot antedate these processes. Secondly, the obvious question arises if the veto function is not preceded by unconscious brain activity in turn. Libet here argues that it must not, for even if the awareness of the decision to veto requires brain activity, the content of that awareness (the actual decision to veto), need not. This reply depends of course, on the independence of consciousness from its content, an assumption that Libet gives us no reason to accept." More

Ego Is Lord: Philosophers & Neuroscientists in Its Service

"You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994)

I find something supremely ironic in philosophers and neuroscientists who claim ego is a fiction of the brain. They may be right; they may be wrong. But they pursue careers. They seek to make names for themselves, for the sake of something they claim has no significance as a viable "reality." A sense of self and ego rules them as it does everybody else. Their ambitions are motivated by something they claim is a misperception of common sense: ego and self.

I think of The Rape of Nanking in 1937 and the unspeakable, despicable atrocities soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army committed against the defenseless men, women, and children of that city. I think of the International Safety Zone set up in the city by Western men and women, Germans, Americans, British, others, to protect the Chinese from the Japanese barbarians. There was Minnie Vautrin who risked a bayonet each time she shoved the American flag in front of a Japanese soldier about to yank an eleven year old girl away to rape her. There was Nazi party member John Rabe who wept at being unable to save more men and women from being gutted by a bayonet or having a sword lop off their heads. They risked their lives to save others. Rabe said it would be immoral to flee to safety in Germany while so many suffered so horribily. He stayed, risked his life to protect them.

These people had strong beliefs rooted in religious and moral convictions.

As for they who claim that self and ego are fictions, what would they have done? It follows from their views that any moral position we take is a function of a something tenuous at best--our belief in who we are and what we stand for. Imagine these philosophers and neuroscientists in Nanking in 1937. Speaking for myself, I find it hard to think of them as acting with the same conviction.

Don't Underestimate Yourself

Psychologists have observed that depressives have a more realistic view than have optimists. This should offer little comfort to those who are inclined to expect gray skies rather than sunshine. You can spend your life preparing for thunder storms and miss the pleasure of blue skies. Optimists also tend to accomplish more in life.

Do you prepare yourself for the possibility of bad news by assuming the worst?

Well, don't.

In an experiment, students took a personality test. Then they had to wait for the results of the test. Having taken the test on a computer, they sat in front of its screen. The computer randomly offered them a choice. They could predict the results would be good or bad.

What happened? The "official" results were given to the students. Those with bad results felt no less bad even though they had predicted a poor outcome. Those with good results felt no better, though they had predicted a good outcome.

The point here: having low expectations did not help alleviate feelings of students with bad results.

"Likewise, students who had low expectations of their performance on midterm exams did not feel better than students with high expectations after getting their exams back. The authors speculate that people cling to the low-expectations strategy because they falsely assume that the initial emotional impact from learning the actual outcome will last for a long time. "More

Buddhism & Happiness

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I'm Away

Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post until I get back. I hope to resume posting on June 22nd.

Naysayers To Richard Dawkins

A reviewer (Terry Eagleton) on Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be.

Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain.

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. More

Then there is Alvin Plantinga. Among his comments, Plantinga says this in his review:

One shouldn’t look to this book for evenhanded and thoughtful commentary. In fact the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen, and vitriol is astounding. (Could it be that his mother, while carrying him, was frightened by an Anglican clergyman on the rampage?

You might say that some of [Dawkins'] forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.

Plantinga dances rings around Dawkins' thinking on matters theological. He points out a central flaw in Dawkins' reasoning, which I have phrased differently: We know of no irrefutable evidence that God exists. Therefore God does not exist. Correctly reasoned, Dawkins could only say that he thinks God is improbable and that materialism is probably true. In a book supposedly based on reason, he offers no compelling argument.

As for probability, Stephen Hawking has observed that "fine-tuning" was needed for life to exist at all. The question arises, How probable was this fine-tuning to have occurred strictly by chance? More at Plantagina's Review, "The Dawkins Confusion."

From William Paley To Charles Darwin, With Brian Boyd on Purpose

Darwinism "seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration." Back to Methuselah (1921), by George Bernard Shaw.

"In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. . . . [The precision and intricacy of its mechanism would have forced us to conclude] that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at sometime, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use." Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), by William Paley.

Notes from Purpose-Driven Life by Brian Boyd:

"Does evolution by natural selection rob life of purpose, as so many have feared? The answer is no. On the contrary, Charles Darwin has made it possible to understand how purpose, like life, builds from small beginnings, from the ground up. In a very real sense, evolution creates purpose."

"In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin showed how new species could evolve through a process of blind variation and selective retention. He transformed at a stroke our understanding of natural design. Living things manifest complex design but can be produced by a mindless process, one that does no more than passively register, in terms of survival and reproduction, the advantages of particular variations."

"We think of purpose as something prior to decision and action: I want to raise my arm, and, unless I am paralyzed or restrained, I do. But in fact purpose emerges slowly, in the species and in the individual. My capacity to move my arm in as many ways as I can depends on things like the evolution of forelegs into arms early in the primate line, the evolution millions of years later of a rotating socket in the shoulder of great apes, to enable swinging in trees, and the further freeing up of arm movements after early hominids became fully bipedal. Babies flail their arms uncontrolledly and purposelessly for months before they can direct them in a particular way for a particular purpose."

Paley’s example of the watch assumes a purpose we already understand: the intricate integration of material objects into instruments for telling the time.

"If we develop Darwin’s insight, we can see the emergence of purpose, as of life itself, by small degrees, not from above, but by small increments, from below. The first purpose was the organization of matter in ways complex enough to sustain and replicate itself—the establishment, in other words, of life, or in still other terms, of problems and solutions. With life emerged the first purpose, the first problem, to preserve at least the improbable complexity already reached, and to find new ways of resisting damage and loss."

"As life proliferated, variety offered new hedges against loss in the face of unpredictable circumstances, and even new ways of evolving variety, like sex. Still richer purposes emerged with emotions, intelligence, and cooperation, and most recently with creativity itself, pursued naturally, and unnaturally, through human invention, in art, and pursued unnaturally, through challenging what we have inherited, in science."

"Art at its best offers us the durability that became life’s first purpose, the variety that became its second, the appeal to the intelligence and the cooperative emotions that took so much longer to evolve, and the creativity that keeps adding new possibilities, including religion and science. We do not know a purpose guaranteed from outside life, but we can add as much as we can to the creativity of life. We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them." Found here.

Fashionable To Be Devoutly Undevout

"Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion’s most passionate antagonists—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others—have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance" More

Peter Russell On Consciousness

When he is not attending or conducting seminars somewhere on the globe, or not acting as consultant to businesses seeking new ways to think, Peter Russell, a Brit, lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, across the bay from San Francisco. At Cambridge he studied mathematics and theoretical physics under the supervision of Stephen Hawking. He has published several "consciousness-raising" books, among them The White Hole In Time. He has a website where statements such as this can be read:

"The one thing we know for sure is that we are experiencing beings. Yet the one thing that science cannot explain is the fact that we are conscious. Do we need a new paradigm?"

"The really hard problem is consciousness itself. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain lead to an inner experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark, without any subjective aspect? Why do we have any inner life at all?

I now believe this is not so much a hard problem as an impossible problem–impossible, that is, within the current scientific worldview. Our inability to account for consciousness is the trigger that will, in time, push Western science into what the American philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, called a 'paradigm shift'." More

Wikipedia Bans Scientologists

The Church of Scientology has overplayed its hand. As usual, it propagandizes everything it touches, but this time the strategy did not work. Wikipedia has banned the "Church" and its members from editing the Scientology article at the Wiki site. Wikipedia discovered that members of the church were editing articles in order to give the church favorable coverage. More

Mind Shadows posts on Scientology can be read here and here.

Psychopaths are More Common Than You Think

I once knew a colleague who told outrageous lies about people. When I asked him why he did it, he asked Why not? Doing so gave him pleasure, no matter the harm he did to another's reputation. When I began learning about psychopaths I realized that he had many of the characteristics, though I don't know if he was one.

Not all psychopaths are criminals. Not all criminals are psychopaths. Many highly successful executives have the characteristics of psychopaths. CEO Albert Dunlap comes to mind as one possibility. While off on business trips or engaged for days elsewhere, he left his wife without food or money. Psychopaths are far more common than you think.

One man in a hundred is a psychopath. One woman in three hundred is a psychopath. You who are reading this may be one. Unable to feel guilt or sympathy they do not think anything is wrong with them.

"Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it. Largely devoid of guilt, empathy and love, they have casual and callous interpersonal and romantic relationships. Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead. They rarely learn from their mistakes or benefit from negative feedback, and they have difficulty inhibiting their impulses." More