Steven Pinker on Free Will & The Fear of Determinism

There was a young man who said "Damn!"
It grieves me to think that I am
Predestined to move
In a circumscribed groove:
In fact, not a bus, but a tram.



"One fear of determinism is a gaping existential anxiety: that deep down we are not in control of our own choices. All our brooding and agonizing over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains. If you suffer from this anxiety, I suggest the following experiment.

For the next few days, don't bother deliberating over your actions. It's a waste of time, after all; they have already been determined. Shoot from the hip, live for the moment, and if it feels good, do it. No, I am not seriously suggesting that you try this! But a moment's reflection on what would happen if you did try to give up making decisions should serve as a Valium for the existential anxiety. The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you. If the most ironclad form of determinism is real, you could not do anything about it anyway, because your anxiety about determinism, and how you would deal with it, would also be determined. It is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time.

A more practical fear of determinism is captured in a saying by A.A. Milne: "No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature." The fear is that an understanding of human nature seems to eat away at the notion of personal responsibility. In the traditional view, the self or soul, having chosen what to do, takes responsibility when things turn out badly. As with the desk of Harry S. Truman, the buck stops here. But when we attribute an action to a person's brain, genes, or evolutionary history, it seems that we no longer hold the individual accountable. Biology becomes the perfect alibi, the get-out-of-jail-free card, the doctor's excuse note. As we have seen, this accusation has been made by the religious and cultural right, who want to preserve the soul, and the academic left, who want to preserve a "we" who can construct our futures though in circumstances of our own choosing.

"Why is the notion of free will so closely tied to the notion of responsibility, and why is biology thought to threaten both? Here is the logic. We blame people for an evil act or bad decision only when they intended the consequences and could have chosen otherwise. We don't convict a hunter who shoots a friend he has mistaken for a deer, or the chauffeur who drove John F. Kennedy into the line of fire, because they could not foresee and did not intend the outcome of their actions. We show mercy to the victim of torture who betrays a comrade, to a delirious patient who lashes out at a nurse, or to a madman who strikes someone he believes to be a ferocious animal. We don't put a small child on trial if he causes a death, nor do we try an animal or an inanimate object, because we believe them to be constitutionally incapable of making an informed choice.

"A biology of human nature would seem to admit more and more people into the ranks of the blameless. A murderer [might have] a shrunken amygdala or a hypo-metabolism in his frontal lobes. . . . Even worse, biology may show that we are all blameless. Evolutionary theory says that the ultimate rationale for our motives is that they perpetuated our ancestors' genes in the environment in which they evolved. Since none of us are aware of that rationale, none of us can be blamed for pursuing it, any more than we blame the mental patient who thinks he is subduing a mad dog but really is attacking a nurse. . . . Should we go even farther than the National Rifle Association bumper sticker--GUNS DON'T KILL; PEOPLE KILL--and say that not even people kill, because people are just as mechanical as guns? . . . .

"People who hope that a ban on biological explanations might restore personal responsibility are in for the biggest disappointment of all. The most risible pretexts for bad behavior in recent decades have come not from biological determinism, but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defense, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics. . . .

"Something has gone terribly wrong. It is a confusion of explanation with exculpation. Contrary to what is implied by critics of biological and environmental theories of the causes of behavior, to explain behavior is not to exonerate the behaver. . . . The difference between explaining behavior and excusing it is captured in the saying "To understand is not to forgive," and has been stressed in different ways by many philosophers, including Hume, Kant, and Sartre. Most philosophers believe that unless a person was literally coerced (that is, someone held a gun to his head), we should consider his actions to have been freely chosen, even if they were caused by events inside his skull. . . .

Few People today argue that criminal punishment is obsolete, even if they recognize that (other than incapacitating some habitual criminals) it is pointless in the short run. That is because if we ever did calculate the short-term effects in deciding whether to punish, potential wrongdoers could anticipate that calculation and factor it into their behavior. They could predict that we would not find it worthwhile to punish them once it was too late to prevent the crime, and could act with impunity, calling our bluff. The only solution is to adopt a resolute policy of punishing wrongdoers regardless of the immediate effects. If one is genuinely bluffing about the threat of of punishment, there is no bluff to call. As Oliver Wendell Holmes explained, "If I were having a philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged (or electrocuted) I should say, ' I don't doubt that your act was inevitable for you but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. . . . the law must keep its promises'. "

(Steven Pinker,"The Fear of Determinism," in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Nature. NY: Vintage, 2002.)

Whose Fault Is It? Did Your Neurons Make You Do It?

Is free will a religious and metaphysical term while decision to act can be regarded without the spiritual baggage? Or will there always be entanglement whatever the term we use?

"We all believe we exercise free will . . . we decide what to do and when to do it. Free will, however, becomes more complicated when you try to think how it can arise from brain activity.

Do we control our neurons or do they control us? If everything we do starts in the brain, what kind of neural activity would reflect free choice? And how would you feel about your free will if [at one and a half seconds beforehand, you are told that you will act] before you yourself became aware of your own choice?"

Using intracranial recording, scientists have found "neurons in the human brain whose activity predicts decisions to make a movement, challenging conventional notions of free will."

Do We Have Free Will?

"Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that free will doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free. This kind of anti-free will stance stretches back to 18th century philosophy, but the idea has recently been getting much more exposure through popular science books and magazine articles. Should we worry? If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility?" More

For a different view of the question, click here. Of course, somebody else takes exception to that view. Click here to read a different view of the different view.

Then, of course, there are more serious, life-consuming issues such as these, which should be on everybody's list:

MUST-HAVES FOR 2010:

Michael Frayn & Dreams in The Human Touch

Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly, and now I do not know if I am a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Lao Tsu

"In so far as you can say anything about it at all, a dream, like a story, is something complete unto itself, not verified or justified or given meaning by any causal relationship with the world. Whatever goes in as input, something happens to it that transforms it and makes it what it is. Something or someone takes over.

The question is: who or what takes over?

The answer's obvious: I take over. The dream, after all, is being performed inside a theatre owned and managed by myself, and I surely have a considerable say in the way things are done here.

At once, though, a difficulty arises. I am also an actor in this theatre. I am in among the action, just as I am in life. I am one of the characters, limited to a particular point of view, and while I'm down there on the stage I can't easily take an overview of the script, or keep an eye on the box-office returns. I often seem to know no more about what's going on in my own theatre than the rest of the cast do. In fact, I often seem to know a lot less than I do in the waking world. Things that I know perfectly well in daylight I don't know at all when I'm dreaming. I also entirely fail to notice the existence or significance of a lot of things that seem obvious as soon as I think back on them in the morning. . . . Perhaps dreaming has no function. If it really does have no bearing on whether we live or die, or whether we mate or fail to, perhaps it's not subject to the pressures of selection. Its functioning seems to be largely random. Perhaps its origins were, too - a random series of mutations in the brains of individuals whose genes were dominant for quite other reasons. . . .

It's difficult not to see elements of the random and the indeterminate in all our experience, most striking in dreams but also present, as we have seen, in waking perception. There is a parallel here with the indeterminacy of particles. (And the indeterminacy of experience prevents it shaping our knowledge and behaviour no more than the indeterminacy of particles prevents them determining physical structure and chemical behaviour.)

Then again, maybe there is an element of pure randomness in the apparently unlocatable deciding force at the heart of dreaming (and of all our thinking). Maybe this generative principle, which is both I and not-I, stems from the quantum behaviour of individual particles in the system, deflecting and shaping the throughput of information from external sources as fundamentally and massively as the random release of the beta-particle affects the state of Schrödinger's cat.

One way or another, we have lost the deterministic thread of the universe right here, inside ourselves." Extract from The Human Touch, by Michael Frayn

A Review in The Guardian. Here are excerpts of the book online.

Whether You Think Free Will or Determinism, Belief Shapes Behavior

Mind Shadows Whether You Think Free Will or Determinism, Belief Shapes Behavior

Popular wisdom has it that everybody will do right or wrong based on moral choice, and that moral choice is just―well, just a personal thing. One person can be as moral as another despite any difference in underlying beliefs about the world. Maybe, but Kathleen Vohs' and Jonathan Schooler's experiment gives us pause to think about the questions. What are the implications for society if people come to believe they have no free will? No moral responsibility?

They had some students read passages from Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis--a very deterministic view of the universe and the human place in it. We are creatures without God and without free will. The students read this: " ‘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 behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

They had other students read inspirational books on how we make our own decisions and forge our own paths in life

They then let each group play a video game in which the groups were allowed to cheat. The students were told to do 20 arithmetic problems and to press the space bar when a question appeared, otherwise the answer would also pop up because of a computer glitch. The students were told that no one would know when the space bar was pushed. Still, the students were asked not to cheat.

So guess who cheated?

The group that read Crick's words.

What are the implications of this? We hold ourselves responsible when we think we choose our actions.
___________________
An interesting commentary on the experiment can be found at Mindful Hack. A different approach is taken at Miller-McCune.

Ramesh Balsekar's Inconsistencies

Ramesh Balsekar's Inconsistencies

Former general manager of the Bank of India in Bombay, Ramesh Balsekar studied under Nisargadatta, often translating as Nisargadatta's native language was Marathi. After the sage's death in 1981, Balsekar held speaking engagements in countries such as Germany, the United States and India. The author of many books, he is retired in Bombay, recently still meeting with visitors almost each morning although he is favored mainly by Westerners rather than by Indians. A good summary of his teachings can be found in the anonymous Consciousness Writes, a title styled after Balsekar's own book, Consciousness Strikes.

Having read his accounts of the enlightened life, I find his explanations are sometimes contradictory as well as self-gratulatory. These two items provide an example.

Item. Here he aligns against mechanistic determinism. "Sir Isaac Newton's physics assumed that the future of the world was precisely predictable from the state of the present. However, the new physics of quantum mechanics has come to the confident conclusion that the future is not determined totally by the past [my emphasis]. In other words, quantum mechanics says that the Source, or Consciousness, has a causal influence on the future. At any point in time, we are told, out of the thousands of probabilities, one probability collapses into an actuality in the present moment. The scientific conclusion is precisely what the sages have been saying for ages." (The Ultimate Understanding)

My comments: In the wave function collapse of quantum physics, the observer begets one observation out of all probabilities allowed by Superposition Theory. One interpretation is that the experiment seems to be a function of its intersection with consciousness. Balsekar means that the present moment contains within itself the probabilities of Superposition Theory until human consciousness "collapses reality" into a deed or thought upon "observation." (For Superposition Theory see Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January 2004.) Balsekar also means that with wave function collapse this situation is indeterministic. Balsekar indicates that "sages have been saying for ages" that the present moment is indeterministic. What does indeterministic mean here? Note his phrase, "the future is not determined totally by the past." He means that randomness in the present moment creates a situation undetermined until the outcome is observed.

Item. In this interview he says the opposite: "If you analyze any action which you consider to be your action, you will find that it is the reaction of the brain to an outside event over which you have no control. A thought comes--you have no control over what thought is going to come. Something is seen or heard--you have no control over what you are going to see or hear next. All of these events happen over which you have no control. And then what happens? The brain reacts to the thought or to the thing that is seen, heard, tasted, smelled or touched. The reaction of the brain is what you call 'your action'."

Elsewhere in the same interview, he is asked this: "Are you saying that everything is predestined? That everything is preprogrammed from birth?"

Balsekar: "Yes. I use the word "programming" to refer to the inherent characteristics of the body/mind organism. "Programming" to me means genes plus environmental conditioning" [my emphasis]. (What is Enlightenment magazine interview, "Close Encounters of The Advaita Kind," no date.)

My comments: In one instance, he says that indeterminism is the case while in another he argues for determinism and this second instance is clearly counter to most quantum theory. The difference between him and Ramana Maharshi is that Maharshi spoke from what he understood and had no interest in intellectual discourse. Maharshi: "There is neither freedom nor destiny. This is the final truth." In his own teachings, Ramana kept the conceptual to a minimum, and by this freedom/destiny statement he again regards concepts as pointless in matters of Consciousness.

On the other hand, Ramesh Balsekar perhaps appeals to people of the West, analytic by culture, because he reflects the analytic tendency in some of Hindu discourse, as distinct from Zen Buddhism's resistance to excess analysis. With his penchant for intellectual explanations, Balsekar reveals a notable inconsistency for somebody who hangs a "guru" shingle outside his shop window.

Admonishing against a desire for explanations, an old Zen parable has a student asking Master Ichu to write something of great wisdom.

With his brush, Ichu stroked "Attention."

"Is that all?," asked the student.

Ichu stroked "Attention. Attention."

That seems shallow, said the student.

Ichu wrote three times, "Attention, Attention. Attention."

The frustrated student asked, "What does this word mean?"

Putting down his brush, Ichu turned to him and answered, "Attention means attention."

For more on problems with Ramesh Balsekar's explanations, see Two Sages and  A Taoist, 9 January 2004 and The Illusion of Free Will, 28 December 2003. Also see Some Notes on Enlightenment, 17 December 2003.