Great Illusion

by Paul Singh

  It simply isn’t true that conscious intuitions guarantee that our sense of freedom is really due to an unnatural detachment from our nervous systems and our environments. Philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris helpfully summarizes why conscious freedom couldn’t be so detached, yet in so much control.

  Although we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce them. In fact, we can be very poor witnesses to experience itself. . . . I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. . . . The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in unconsciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.

  The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made. More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it. These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it. [Sam Harris, Free Will (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), p. 8-9. Harris cites these research reports: B. Libet, “Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action,” Behavioral and Brain Science 8 (1985): 529—566. I. Fried, R. Mukamel, and G. Kreiman, “Internally generated preactivation of single neurons in human medial frontal cortex predicts volition,” Neuron 69 (2011): 548— 562. P. Haggard, “Decision time for free will,” Neuron 69 (2011): 404—406.]

  As Harris goes on to emphasize, it is one thing for conscious awareness to exhibit reports about the brain processes regulating voluntary actions as they develop across moments of time, and quite another to imagine that conscious awareness itself is always the driving force initiating and controlling those brain processes.

  Ultimately, defenders of freedom of the will are suffering from a deep aversion to the idea that people and their brains are really the same thing from two different perspectives. What else could account for the stubborn refusal to admit that voluntary choices are caused by ongoing cognitive processes conducted by interconnected neural networks? In order to have genuine freedom of the will, its defenders say, this free will cannot be causally compelled, not even by its own neurological foundations. But that’s just another way of stating the core issue. These free will defenders simply can’t bear the thought that a person’s will is simply a component of that vast intermeshing network of cognitive processes. They repeatedly refuse to admit that each person’s ability to make voluntary choices is nothing but the brain’s manner of intelligently controlling how actions shall be done.

  So long as defenders of freedom of the will stubbornly reject any possibility that “the will” stands for nothing more or less than a person’s capacity to guide action towards desired goals while managing environing opportunities and obstacles along the way, these defenders can’t and won’t admit that the will is completely determined by brain states. However, that stubbornness illustrates how all of their sophisticated arguments boil down to elaborate circular arguments. They presume from the start that a person’s will can only be free if it is not determined by natural brain processes in the first place. Those arguments assume what they set out to prove, that a person’s will (and perhaps their entire consciousness as well) must already be unnatural and free from natural causes. That explains how both PAP and especially Cartesian PAP have their meaning and function only within that tight little circular presumption. So long as an agent can do otherwise, no matter what the rest of the physical universe (including one’s brain) happens to be doing at the time, that agent could freely do anything. Or so they say. But they are entirely wrong.

  Free Will and Morality

  Philosophers (especially dualist philosophers) often go into panic mode about human morals the moment it is mentioned that we don’t have a free will. Perhaps concepts of free will and consciousness are human constructs that do not exist as independent entities free from the brain’s activity. Biology has for a very long time maintained that genuine altruism is an illusion. The pro-social side of human behavior is explained well through evolutionary psychology. The seeds of morality are present in our hominid ancestors. It is more accurate to say that the seeds of both good and evil already exist in our hominid ancestors. Moral proclivities are documented in human babies as well as in our primate relatives. Both groups never needed to read the Bible or required religious instruction to be moral.

  There is now a wide range of fascinating studies in biology and psychology ranging from mirror neurons to mechanisms of oxytocin, empathy, and the internal rewards associated with doing good that collectively provide data confirming that biological mechanisms draw us into sphere of others to promote empathy by blurring the lines of identity. Our ability to see others as ourselves explains altruistic behavior. This ranges from maternal care to giving up one’s life for family, tribe, or country.

  The need to invoke God (as John Eccles does) to explain how our brain can produce altruism is just plain silly. Also to say that what makes us special is the existence of human altruism (as Ramachadran claims) is a failed argument in the light of discovery of so many species of birds, mammals, and primates that are found to have similar tendencies. These arguments are not only inherently weak but also disconnect the human brain from a long evolutionary past that preceded it. Social attachment, which is at the root of empathy and prosociality, functions essentially the same in all species from mammals to higher primates.

  Maternal care and sexual behavior are the first forms of social connection which we also share with many other species. Patricia Churchland and Philip Kitchner offer insightful accounts of how our species may have moved from prosocial tendencies to a system of prescribed standards that address right and wrong. Cognitive and societal processes may be contributing factors in human morality but there is no mystery about how we may have come to acquire such social rules, given that we had the inherent evolutionary selection to form such rules such as mutual cooperation and benefitting from scratching one another’s back. It would be wrong to say that we cannot translate attachment and emotion into judgments of right and wrong, we clearly can. In short, morality comes naturally to our species. There is no reason to invoke supernatural arguments to justify human morality.

  We are intensely social creatures and group life requires compromise and merging of interests—something that the evolution of the human brain demonstrates. Our social nature automatically leads to empathetic behaviors that build mutual trust in family and commerce. It also dictates how society will deal with bad or disruptive behavior. It is important to remember, however, that the brain is equally involved in less noble tendencies. Whether we like it
or not, all our thoughts, desires, and choices are determined by the brain, not by some transcendent self.

  Morality is a product of millions of years of evolution. It is a simple biological and social fact that human beings are moral beings. How to explain this fact is a different question. Defenders of absolute free will (Cartesian free Will, Kantian free will, Sartrean free will, to mention only a few) link free will with moral responsibility. But from a scientific view absolute free will is, as we have seen, an illusion. It thus follows that absolute moral responsibility is also an illusion. We certainly do feel morally responsible for our actions and we hold others responsible for their actions. That is simply a fact. But it seems to be the case—at least the scientific study of the brain strongly suggests that it is the case—that absolute free will is an illusion. Hence absolute moral responsibility is also an illusion. We might not like this conclusion, but this is what science strongly suggests is the case. Maybe future discoveries in science will reveal that there is a place for absolute free will and absolute moral responsibility. Maybe. But don’t bet on it.

  Further Reading

  Baumeister, Roy, Alfred Mele, and Kathleen Vohs, eds. Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

  Baumeister, Roy, E. J. Masicampo, and Kathleen Vohs. “Do conscious thoughts cause behavior?” Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 331–61.

  Caruso, Gregg D. Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012.

  Churchland, Patricia. Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

  Eccles, John, The Neuropsychological Basis of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953.

  Felsen, Gidon, and Peter B. Reiner. “How the Neuroscience of Decision Making Informs Our Conception of Autonomy.” AJOB Neuroscience 2.3 (2011): 3–14.

  Filevich, Elisa, et al. “Brain correlates of subjective freedom of choice.” Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013): 1271–84.

  Flanagan, Owen. The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

  Frede, Michael. A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

  Haggard, Patrick. “Does brain science change our view of free will?” In Free Will and Modern Science, ed. Richard Swinburne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 7–24.

  Libet, Benjamin. Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

  McGrath, Alister E. Christian Theology: An Introduction, 5th edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

  Donald W. Pfaff. The Altruistic Brain, Oxford University Press 2014.

  Ramachandran, V. S. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. Norton: New York, 2012.

  Runyan, Jason D. Human Agency and Neural Causes: Philosophy of Action and the Neuroscience of Voluntary Agency. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

  Shepard, Joshua. “Free will and consciousness: experimental studies.” Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012): 915–27.

  Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ed. Moral Psychology: Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

  Tse, Peter Ulric. The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

  The most famous proponent of consciousness being separate from the brain is Roger Penrose, a reputable mathematician who has collaborated frequently with Stephen Hawking in the past. He is one of the handful of scientists who believe that the nature of consciousness suggests a quantum process. His views are rejected by most physicists, biochemists and neurobiologists and overwhelmingly rejected by all branches of researchers dealing with neuroscience, neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology. Understanding quantum mechanics and mathematics is not enough to explain consciousness. It is a serious mistake to ignore all research in neurology, neuroscience, brain physiology, and biology and instead seek answers for consciousness in the most unlikely of all places. Theoretically, one can argue that everything ultimately needs to be explained at the fundamental level and therefore we should look up physics and mathematics, the most fundamental of all sciences. However, we are not even close to understanding what quantum mechanics is telling us. To use science that is not well understood to make predictions about consciousness is a mistake. Spending a couple of years doing research with researchers in different areas of brain research might help Roger Penrose abandon wishful thinking about explaining consciousness by invoking quantum mechanics.

  Those who believe that quantum mechanics somehow gives us free will or a “quantum consciousness” make the following false assumptions. First, since quantum mechanics is non-deterministic, quanta effects must sever the connection between us and the initial conditions of the universe. It is hard to see how one can reach such conclusions without any evidence. Free will and consciousness, regardless of how they are defined, are explained very well as originating from the brain and may have little to do with quantum mechanics. The commonsense thing to do is to consider what the brain has to do with consciousness before speculating about what quantum effects in the brain have to do with it

  Almost all quantum physicists understand that the quantum behavior of particles does not explain behaviors at macro levels. We do not know how quantum effects are related to our brains. We do know, however, how cause and effect are related to our behavior and brains. The naiveté of a minority of physicists who promote ideas of “quantum consciousness “and “free will” lies in the fact that they seem to pretend they understand quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman’s remark that if you think you understand quantum physics you don’t understand it is still true today

  The laws of nature (of cause and effect) make very precise and accurate predictions about the behavior of things at the macroscopic level, just as the laws of quantum physics make extremely great predictions at the microscopic level. The human brain is an entity that is not exempt from the laws of macroscopic physics and biology. Perhaps we will understand the underlying reality of all phenomena in nature in another hundred years, a reality that may be far different from what know today, but until then we need to stop speculating and let science continue to do its work. There seems little reason to posit non-determinism if it is not necessary to do so, as deterministic explanations invariably have more explanatory power. The reality when finally understood (if it is discovered) could be simpler than what is suggested by quantum physics.

  Probably the biggest mistake promoters of free will and consciousness make is to assume that science already reached its full potential just within four hundred years of scientific discovery, a time scale which is a tiny part of the history of Homo sapiens, not to mention an infinitesimally small fraction of the overall history of evolution. One wonders why it does not occur to these physicists that perhaps it is a good idea to first try to understand the human brain to understand free will or consciousness. Perhaps it is even far more important to first define what they mean by “free will” or “consciousness” before they plunge into quantum explanations. It should be common sense that consciousness may have something to do with the brain after all. The brain transmits electrical and chemical signals through the 100 billion neurons and a quadrillion synapses, and is capable of creating as many patterns of thought and memory as the number of particles in the entire universe. Thus the brain has the potential to achieve things as complicated as what philosophers, following Dave Chalmers, call the “hard problem”—consciousness. The only logical conclusion one can draw is that either these physicists, influenced by philosophers of mind, are poorly informed about the on-going research on the brain or they think that quantum mechanics somehow trumps all areas of scientific inquiry and that all answers must come from quantum physics. That seems to be a foolish assumption.

  They also assume that when we conduct experiments on quantum particles
, we exercise our free will—that is, we make choices about what precisely to ask the particles. Or at least we think we exercise our free will. How these particles respond depends on what we really do. Today’s neuroscience is working on a completely different level of analysis. All researchers in all branches of brain research agree that Goldman and Nernst equations govern the process of neuronal transmission and that brain function may have no direct correlation with quantum mechanical behaviors. The principles of these equations are derived from electrochemistry, fluid mechanics, and classical electrodynamics. In fact, neurotransmission is equivalent to resistance-capacitance circuits in classical electrodynamics. So it is classical physics and not quantum mechanics that governs the brain. The problems of the brain are best understood at the level of physical and biological chemistry and not at the level of the particle physics. Using quantum mechanics to explain free will is like explaining building ships using the theory of relativity. It simply does not make sense.

  To say that quantum mechanics makes precise predictions is not the same thing as to say that we understand quantum mechanics. It is one thing to predict things based on a law but another to understand that law. It is like saying that we understand gravity because we can make precise predictions by using the mathematics involving gravity. We don’t yet understand how the laws of quantum mechanics work, because they make no sense, but we do understand most of the macroscopic laws that govern neuronal pathways in the brain. Do we want to do science by using the laws we understand or do we want to employ principles that we don’t yet fully understand? Which one is a scientific and logical approach? So I would like to suggest that these physicists are “not even wrong” in proposing such speculative theories about free will and consciousness.