Hey!
Britmonkey!
Michael here.
Have you ever had a refreshing drink of tea?
I take mine Black….
Mirror is a horror anthology series.
In 2018, their episode Bandersnatch was a postmodernist interactive film dealing with
themes of free will and decision making.
In one scene, the film’s viewer is able to make a choice; destroy a cup of tea, or
don’t.
Data released by Netflix showed that people who live in countries where tea-drinking is
more common, such as Turkey, the United Kingdom, or Ireland, viewers selected this option less
often than viewers in countries where tea is not as popular.
It would seem that whether we destroy a cup of tea in a video game is determined by where
we grow up.
Our entire orderly society is based around the idea that we are free to make our own
choices, be punished when they are morally wrong, and take praise when they are good
decisions.
But what if they couldn’t make that choice at all?
What if everything we do is just a response to the world around us?
What if...free will does not exist?
Philosophers have debated this topic for millennia and there are countless branches and theories
but ultimately the “determinist argument”, the idea that you don’t have free will,
boils down to this: Everything in the universe conforms to the
natural laws of the universe; everything has a cause that produces the same outcome every
time.
You put a spoon in the microwave and it blows up one hundred percent of the time.
You mix mentos and coke and it blows up - guaranteed.
Why should the human brain be any different?
You input sensory information, it undergoes a chemical process in the brain we don’t
yet understand, and decisions come out the other end.
Every action you take, from picking up a book to deciding what college to go to are the
result of neurons firing.
Neurons fire in a way determined by the laws of chemistry and physics, which acts the same
way every time.
You can’t decide if or when a neuron fires.
Think of a game of chess.
There are trillions of ways to play a single game of chess, but cut that game of chess
down to a few pieces and the number of possible outcomes becomes severely limited.
This version you see on screen only has seven possible outcomes based on the input of the
players.
The human brain is just a giant version of a chess board; external inputs go in, result
comes out.
So you don’t have free will; all of your decisions are just complex chemical brain
responses to external stimuli, right?
But for philosophers on the opposing side of the debate, this middle bit is the point
of contention.
We don’t know how the brain works.
Who knows what could be happening at this stage.
Humans are pretty unique as far as animals go; we can be creative and artistic, we can
imagine abstract concepts and four dimensional objects.
Why would evolution give us consciousness if that consciousness was useless?
Maybe the decision-making mind is separate from the brain, using the brain as some sort
of looking glass into the real world.
This would make your consciousness exempt from the natural laws of physics and thus
able to independently make decisions.
There are entire fields of study based on the idea that the universe doesn’t always
conform to the laws of physics as we know them.
This position is called “Libertarian Free Will”, which has nothing to do with Ron
Paul and taxes it just means you are completely free to make your own decisions.
There’s also a mystery third position that we’ll get to later but we have to move on;
we can argue about philosophy all day as hundreds of other philosophers did for millennia before
we discovered: neuroscience!
Can we answer the free will question with neuroscience?
Most proponents of determinism will point to the work of neuroscientist Benjamin Libet
in 1983.
Libet asked volunteers – wait if free will isn’t real then technically they weren’t
volunteers… whatever.
Libet asked participants hooked up to a brain-scanning-machine to stare at a ticking clock and flick their
wrist whenever they felt like it.
Before they flicked their wrist, Libet instructed them to make a mental note of what time the
clock said when they decided to make the action.
The results were...kinda spooky.
The participant’s brains began the process of contracting the muscles to flick the wrist
roughly half a second before the participant said they decided to.
The time on the clock they claimed they made the decision was after the time their body
began to execute the action.
This would imply that something else in the participant’s brain decided to flick the
wrist and the consciousness merely thinks that it made a choice, when in reality it
was just doing what the body told it to do.
The human brain is really good at using past experiences to infer new information – could
it be that every decision you think you’ve made is just coming up with excuses?
This was pioneering stuff that laid the groundwork for nearly all future studies on free will,
but of course was not without criticism.
For starters, asking the participants to remember when they decided to start the action immediately
casts doubt on the accuracy of these brain scans.
Making a mental note of the clock’s time happens after you decided to flick your wrist.
Of course it would appear like your brain began the process before you decided it.
And of course, being told to flick your wrist is a lot different to, say, deciding to commit
arson.
There’s a difference between decisions, urges, intentions, and plans.
Libet seems to assume that what he measured should be interpreted as a “decision”
rather than the more probable “urge”.
In a similar experiment, Libet attempted to solve these flaws in this experiment by adding
a new variable.
Subjects were told to push a button when they felt like it, but if they heard a buzzer [BUZZ]
during the movement, they had to stop moving.
The results were the same; the subjects’ bodies began moving to push the button before
the subject said they decided to.
BUT when they heard the buzzer and stopped the action, there was no recorded brain activity
to tell the body to stop doing the action.
It simply stopped.
Very curious.
Where did this command come from?
This could be an indication of a “veto” system, or as Libet put it: “Free won’t”.
Your body knows you are going to flick your wrist at some point, and so prepares to make
the action before you decide whether to or not.
If you decide against flicking your wrist...the brain activity subsides.
This veto comes with its own conditions, like the point of no return; If you decide against
pushing the button too late, you cannot stop it.
If you try to remember hard enough, you know you’ve done this before.
OK.
The Determinists have had their pitch.
What kind of science do the Libertarians have to support their arguments?
Uranium 238.
This goes somewhere, I promise.
Pure Uranium-238, where every particle is exactly the same, acts unpredictably.
A lump of the stuff in a pure vacuum will begin to decay and shed off alpha particles
at random.
Yes, truly random.
You can’t predict exactly how much or how quickly the Uranium will decay.
And nothing is causing it to do that.
No external force is making uranium 238 shed off particles.
This is not to say Uranium is sentient and decides how often it ejects particles, but
it does suggest that there is an element, no pun intended, of randomness and chance
in the universe.
Not just at the atomic level either; on the planetary scale, once three or more orbital
bodies begin to interact with each other, the system is no longer predictable.
No matter how many simulations you run, you cannot predict how these three colliding objects
will react.
So not everything can be determined like mentos and coke, potentially including the human
consciousness and decision making process.
But it isn’t very comforting to think that our choices are random and these decisions
are still not freely decided by you.
Some Libertarians point to the existence of an unseen, undetectable magic substance that
doesn’t exist in our dimension, which can override the laws of physics and make all
our choices free.
But in my opinion, this is a flimsy piece of evidence.
What’s more likely; Could it be that your brain is a super cool, super special quantum
science computer that contains a consciousness bending in and out of reality to a cool metaphysical
realm where it can make choice unimpeded by the real world?
I guess so, but what’s more likely?
That Or
Your brain is just a weird piece of electrical meat.
(I think it’s the second one.)
Back to experiments.
Scientists in Paris led by Aaron Schurger attempted a repeat of Libet’s experiment
from earlier but with one key difference; some of the participants would be told not
to move at all.
Schurger hypothesised that Libet had been cherry-picking data, and the slow increase
in brain activity before the conscious decision to move was just background brain noise that
they had misinterpreted as the body gearing up to move.
They used a computer to pinpoint the moment when the brain activity of the moving group
diverged from the brain activity from the non-moving group.
Lo and behold, the point where the activity was clearly not background noise coincided
with...the point of conscious decision.
To put more clearly; the point people say they decided to move was at the same time
that they actually began to move.
Later still, scientists in California found that decisions based on abstract concepts,
for example, asking participants to chose which charity to donate $1000 to, did not
produce the same results as the Libet experiments.
There was no build-up of brain activity – the decisions were simply made.
OK, sure, maybe that casts doubt on Libet’s experiments, but disproving determinism doesn’t
demonstrate indeterminable decisions.
What is the strongest possible neuroscientific evidence for the existence of free will?
Wilder Penfield was an American-Canadian neurosurgeon.
In his memoir, Mystery of the Mind, Penfield speaks of the thousands of brain operations
he undertook on conscious patients in his career.
By stimulating different parts of the exposed brain, he could make the patient do things,
like move their limbs, taste sourness, evoke memories, or make them feel a certain emotion.
Things that we know the brain is responsible for.
But in not a single one of these operations, no matter what parts of the brain he stimulated,
he could never change the patient’s free will.
He couldn’t make them think two plus two is five, change their moral beliefs, or make
them want to learn to play the violin.
Couldn’t do it.
Similarly, Penfield noted that nobody ever had seizures that changed how people think
– seizures are electrical storms in the brain that cause all sorts of devastating
physical actions, but never anything in the mind.
If all of our choices, thoughts and actions are caused entirely by brain chemistry, why
don’t people occasionally have seizures that trigger involuntary will?
Why don’t we have morality seizures?
Seizures that make you believe in Mormonism.
You might change your beliefs as a consequence of a seizure – for example, many people
become religious after near-death experiences – but not in the mountains of scientific
evidence, in the billions of seizures throughout human history, has a single instance been
recorded of a seizure directly changing a person’s conscious will.
Is this not proof that the mind is separate from our physical brain and body?
Capable of making decisions unimpeded by external stimuli?
Maybe.
Penfield didn’t make any solid conclusions from his work, though he did say it is...unlikely
that consciousness and the brain are the same thing.
But recent research casts doubt on this too: French scientists in 2009 were able to manipulate
part of the brain and give patients the strong desire to move their arms, with some patients
even feeling like they had moved their body.
“Wait, but even then, patients were able to tell what desires were stimulated by researchers
and what desires had arisen naturally.
Surely that is proof that you can’t truly manipulate willpower.”
Yes, but that could show consciousness is merely neurological background noise and just
an accidental occurrence that serves no purpose to the functioning of the body- [fast forward]
We can go back and forth about this all day, so let’s move on to the third mystery position
from earlier; Compatibilism.
Compatibilism is best described by philosopher John Locke in his Voluntary Prisoner thought
experiment; suppose there is a criminal who wants to be in prison.
He doesn’t check the door to his cell, so it could be locked or unlocked.
Is he truly a prisoner, or is he a free man?
Put more simply; “If your action is not coerced by external factors, then you have
free will, even if it is predetermined by brain activity”.
Compatibilists argue that whether you are controlled by a soul-like consciousness, or
if you are just a biological puppet, the result is the same.
You are still...You.
And unless that puppet is being controlled by something else, say you’re being brainwashed
or hypnotised or whatever, then it’s basically the same as having Libertarian free will.
It’s tough to get your head around and it’s basically a cowards way out of calling yourself
a determinist, but this model is supported by a majority of philosophers – nearly sixty
percent in fact.
Not that I put any weight on their opinions.
Neuroscientists, too, are increasingly moving towards this position, but only to avoid unproductive
arguments with philosophers.
Instead of “Free Will”, scientists are now calling it “Conscious Volition” – did
you A) Do the thing without being forced to by
external factors?
And B) are you aware you did the thing.
If yes to both, you have free will.
The final experiment I want to talk about was conducted in 1990 by researchers in Australia.
Right-handed individuals were asked to make a conscious choice to raise one of their hands
when they felt like it.
Naturally, being right handed, they were more prone to lifting their right hand, doing so
sixty percent of the time.
But, when the brain was subject to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation without their knowledge,
this changed; they instead lifted their left hand eighty percent of the time.
Despite being toted as proof against free will, I think this is actually proof of its
existence.
Note that despite being influenced to lift their left hand more often, it was not one
hundred percent.
While you can make a decent prediction of what someone is going to do, you can never
be certain.
Think back to the philosophical views from earlier; you put a spoon under a microwave
and it blows up one hundred percent of the time.
You put a human brain under a microwave and it doesn’t always react the same.
A rock sliding down a mountain, or a domino tipping over has no say in the matter and
cannot stop it, but a human being can deliberate on their choices, they can pause to think
before acting, and they can weigh the pros and cons of each decision.
Maybe the human body is like a ship; the crew, or your conscious thoughts, can steer the
ship the best they can using all the sensory inputs they have.
But the condition of the ship and the sway of the ocean also affects the captain’s
decision and how easy it is to navigate the waters.
Still, as we’ve discussed, the seeds of doubt are still everywhere for both sides
of the argument and no matter how compelling you might find one piece of evidence, evidence
to the contrary is still there.
This sort of thing used to keep me up at night and I was terrified of the possibility that
my entire life is just watching something else pilot my body and I’m just along for
the ride.
I think we’d all like to believe that the people we love, our life goals, or even what
we had for breakfast this morning wasn’t decided for us at the start of the universe.
But then I read about philosopher William James.
He was extremely depressed for months on end, because he wasn’t sure free will existed.
Until one day, on the 30th of April 1870, he instantly cured this depression, by writing
in his diary “I will assume for the present that it is no illusion.
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will”.
And as always, thanks for watching.