Conscious decision belated. Anti-racism belied. But as with these, so with you and me.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 17 April 2008 13:27.

A study by Professor John-Dylan Haynes, who is the Bernstein Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute, has cast fresh doubt upon the existence of free will.

Unconscious decisions in the brain

Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. This is shown by a study of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. “Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings.”

... In the study participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally researchers look what happens when the decision is made, but not what happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is a striking finding.

This unprecedented prediction of a free decision was made possible by sophisticated computer programs that were trained to recognize typical brain activity patterns preceding each of the two choices. Micropatterns of activity in frontopolar cortex were predictive of the choices even before participants knew which option they were going to choose. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.

... Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts even up to 7 seconds ahead of time how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: “Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. Especially we still need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed.”

Now, there is no small difference between the self equipped with free will and the self bereft of it. It is the difference between consciousness and mechanicity, between “I” and “it”. What emerges from John-Dylan Haynes study is a model of Man in whom Mind, in its ordinary waking state at least, weaves the story of a decisive self over the endless blizzard of electro-chemical impulses in the brain?

And from that, if we are honest, there emerge only questions for which we never have more than an inadequate answer.

For example, if “I” am only a dream of self, a piece of artifice made in the moment and remade in another, is there really any sense in which “I” can be said to exist at all? In a mechanistic sense only, perhaps. If one is prepared to dispense with the usual dignifications, the mechanicity of Man is not so great an affront. It is what it is, and there are a fair number of reflective people who have always known it. None of them are radical liberals, of course. The notion of the “fully-human” director of a free and unfettered will absolutely does not fly. It never could. Liberal political philosophy is a flightless bird.

So what about that favourite of the postmodern sociology department: social construction? If to himself a man is but a dream, is this not woven from the steel threads of cultural meanings and practises? Well, no ... not in the vulgar sense that the European male has learnt to be authoritarian or sexist or racist or homophobic, or any another kind of hater. Actually, common attutudes to Woman, to members of other races, and to the sexually disabled are inevitably the manifestations of adaptive behaviours. Or in Haynes’ terms, the decisions are taken in advance - and, in fact, the entire edifice of hegemonic warfare collapses in consequence. It’s rather good.

So what is Homo sapiens, if he is not sapient in the sense we have always understood? A creature of Nature, a small part of Life of towering importance to himself, to be sure. But in the greater order of things, he is an anomaly, an environmental accident. One way or another he evolved a uniquely large brain with a third vital capacity - thinking. It is the source of his power and the seat of his consciousness. But it is also the progenator of his illusions.

It may be a very long time before science unfolds the rest of the story. But this study in Berlin is an intriguing contribution.

I’ll end with a prediction. Haynes concludes, “... we still need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed.” My guess is that it can, but only by a very specific effort of attention. For that’s when mechanics ends and, if only for a fleeting moment, consciousness enthrones the real self. Perhaps.

Tags: Science & Technology

Comments:

Posted by Nux Gnomica on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:27 | #

My guess is that it can, but only by a very specific effort of attention.

But does the specific act of attention begin in the subconscious? And can it be reversed?

I myself have never been able to see how free will is possible, but denying it could have unpleasant consequences.

Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 19:22 | #

Anthony Burgess, author of the book “A Clockwork Orange” was the artist in residence while I was in the undergraduate program at the Iowa City Writer’s Workshop back in 1974. I think he based his book on the work of Jose M.R. Delgado, M.D. published under the book with the damn spooky title: “Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society”. I managed to get a copy of the book finally, and discovered wonderful passages such as the following on page 115:

ESB [electrical stimulation of the brain—JAB] may evoke more elaborate responses. For example, in one of our patients, electrical stimulation of the rostral part of the internal capsule produced head turning and slow displacement of the body to either side with a well-oriented and apparently normal sequence, as if the patient were looking for something. This stimulation was repeated six times on two different days with comparable results. The interesting fact was that the patient considered the evoked activity spontaneous and always offered a reasonable explanation for it. When asked, “What are you doing?” the answers were, “I am looking for my slippers,” “I heard a noise,” “I am restless,” and “I was looking under the bed.” In this case it was difficult to ascertain whether the stimulation had evoked a movement which the patient tried to justify, or if an hallucination had been elicited which subsequently induced the patient to move and to explore the surroundings.

This passage is eerily reminiscent of a passage from Richard Dawkins’ “The Extended Phenotype” chapter titled “Host Phenotypes of Parasite Genes”:

“Many fascinating examples of parasites manipulating the behavior of their hosts can be given. For nematomorph larvae, who need to break out of their insect hosts and get into water where they live as adults, ‘...a major difficulty in the parasite’s life is the return to water. It is, therefore, of particular interest that the parasite appears to affect the behavior of its host, and “encourages” it to return to water. The mechanism by which this is achieved is obscure, but there are sufficient isolated reports to certify that the parasite does influence its host, and often suicidally for the host… One of the more dramatic reports describes an infected bee flying over a pool and, when about six feet over it, diving straight into the water. Immediately on impact the gordian worm burst out and swam into the water, the maimed bee being left to die’ (Croll 1966).”

Posted by Desmond Jones on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:22 | #

Seizing on the failures of reason, the well-known philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga—a man who dislikes modern science and loathes and detests (and, if the truth be known, fears) evolutionary theory—thinks that the unreliability of reason in the Darwinian scenario is reason enough to reject evolution and embrace God. Actually, Plantinga is less interested in the specific problems of rationality (as we have been discussing in the last paragraph) and more with the general ways in which natural selection might fail to produce good thinkers. As Plantinga points out, what counts in evolution is success and not the truth. So how can we ever be sure of the truth? Perhaps none of our thoughts can tell. Perhaps none of our thoughts can tell us about reality. Perhaps we are like beings in a dream world:

“Their beliefs might be like a sort of decoration that isn’t involved in the causal chain leading to action. Their waking beliefs might be no more causally efficacious, with respect to their behavior, than our dream beliefs are with respect to ours. This could go by way of pleiotropy: genes that code for traits important to survival also code for consciousness and belief; but the latter don’t figure into the etiology of action. … It could be that one of these creatures believes that he is at that elegant, bibulous Oxford dinner, when in fact he is slogging his way through some primeval swamp, desperately fighting off hungry crocodiles.¹”

Everything we believe about evolution could be false. And this is obviously to reduce Darwinian epistemology to a reductio ad absurdum. If our theory of knowledge embraces indifferently the true and the false, so long as it is expedient, we are in deep trouble. Plantinga calls this “Darwin’s Doubt,” because it was even expressed by a worried Darwin himself, in correspondence written toward the end of his life: “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (As a matter of fact, Darwin immediately excused himself as a reliable authority on such philosophical questions, but Plantinga leaves this somewhat awkward point unmentioned.)

De Sousa has a two-part response to this criticism. First, he argues that our mathematical abilities cannot be the result of natural selection. “On the evolutionary scale, mathematics is part of our present rather than of our evolutionary past. It is therefore out of the question for mathematical talent as such to have been a factor in evolution by natural selection.” Then he goes on to say:

“Once mathematics had emerged into the light of day, there was still nothing to guarantee that it could prove useful outside the domains in which our practical skills had already been operating for millennia. And yet, pure mathematics notoriously finds all kinds of startling applications in the solution of technological and scientific problems that our ancestors could not possibly have conceived of, and it does so by generating theories that would have remained wholly unintelligible to them. That strongly supports the idea that mathematics can uncover aspects of the universe of which neither the usefulness nor even the existence could possibly have been manifested in the environment of our evolutionary adaptations (EEA) in which the basic functions of the brain were being shaped by natural selection. As [Eugene] Wigner has argued, this constitutes at least prima facie evidence for the conclusion that the truths of mathematics do not merely reflect projective constructions of our brains, but probably correspond to an objective reality.”

Posted by expf on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:44 | #

Thats a fascinating find, GW.

So maybe we should think: we can tweak culture to achieve some kind of “optimal setting”,
(I’m thinking of an electronic device as an analogy), but we essentially can’t use culture
to tweak ourselves, at least not very much.

It would be interesting if historical comparisons of our present world with that of the past would
reveal that:

– We focus too much on the consumer aspect of our lives, and not on ourselves as members
of a community, thus resulting in the sub-optimal organization of our societies and a tacitly
felt spiritual emptiness.

– We have lost sight of basic principals in education and thus educate our children sub-optimally.

– Something in the way we organize our relationships (my opinion, the alternate availability
of sex-as-commodity and relationship-as-fairytale-romance memes, neither of which describe
reality well) is causing us to form families sub-optimally and thus divorce more often.

– The prevalence of junk food and cigarettes causes people to organize their diet/metabolism sub-optimally.

Perhaps the whole of cultural evolution is an adjustment of our evaluations of these different
factors to optimally live. And when a new factor emerges as ‘tweakable’ – such as for example
the movement of large numbers of people and the interaction of foreign peoples facilitated by quick mass
travel and the critical analysis of xenophobia posited by jewish theorists over the last 150 years–
there emerges the possibility to socially experiment with both extremes, or in our case, with the previously
forbidden extreme: extreme xenophilia.

If it later became easy to ‘tweak’ another essential factor of our lives, for example genetics–
to automatically give each child the possibility of being born with ‘genius genes’ for instance, guaranteeing
a high IQ, we would almost certainly see the same experimentation and pursuit of previously unknown
extremes.

What I guess I think we wish to do is just to make clear to people: here is an aspect of your lives which,
when you regulate it according to common sense principles, you can live optimally.

Posted by daveg on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:02 | #

How do people on this blog feel about a classical education, with lots of latin, roman and greek history?

Has that been covered elsewhere?

Posted by onlooker on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:15 | #

Let’s see a show of hands of those who are going to the movie theater tomorrow to view the release of “EXPELLED” by Ben Stein. LOL

http://www.expelledthemovie.com/playground.php

Posted by expf on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:12 | #

How do people on this blog feel about a classical education, with lots of latin, roman and greek history?

Has that been covered elsewhere?

I wonder if the Greeks and Romans had learnt cuneiform and sanskrit so as to be cognizant of the history of civilization in the near and middle east, and if every man had dedicated a fair portion of his tender years to committing these languages to memory and reading clay tablature, if we would still find Greek and Roman history so inspiring. Its just a plain fact of life that how many things you pack in your rucksack determine how high you get up the mountain, if you follow my metaphor. Living other peoples’ lives vicariously has a few other things that may be wrong with it, besides just the time that it swallows up. My 0.02. *understands the implicit message and fux off*

Posted by onetwothree on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:03 | #

Free will, of course, requires proving rather than disproving. There’s no reason to believe that the molecules in the brain behave apart from the laws of physics.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:05 | #

Nux,

I’ve never been very happy with the term “sub-conscious”. It sows confusion. What we are talking about here is mechanical brain activity in the absence of the first-person singular. It isn’t a case of something going on underneath consciousness. There is no consciousness at the point of decision. “Unconscious”, then, is the more appropriate term (but never the unconscious).

So, to answer your question ...

This unconscious state IS what we know as normal waking consciousness, and all our thoughts and the stories we tell of ourselves proceed in it. The decision to make an effort of attention belongs to it like everything else. It is not a decision of the conscious state, for that state does not yet exist and the effort is, of course, intended to bring that into being.

So it follows that in our normal waking UNconsciousness there must somewhow come to be formed sufficient noumenal triggers (operating by association, ie mechanically) to remind us why and how to make this effort.

Another way of putting this is: consciousness is intentional, and intent exists mechanically, if at all. According to this model Man might yet become the transcendent being philosophy and religion presumes him to be already. But it is not a given, and the vast majority of men and women live out their entire lives with scarcely more than a few moments of deja-vous to prompt them to understanding.

This is the tragedy of the human condition.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:53 | #

PF,

... we can tweak culture to achieve some kind of “optimal setting” ... but we essentially can’t use culture to tweak ourselves, at least not very much.

That is not quite correct. Automatically, nothing arises from within the culture of unconsciousness that would inform aspirants as to why and how consciousness might be step-changed. But at all times in history there have been groups holding this information.

The part of your comment which elides ethnic or racial consciousness with this reification of the self is in error. In the political context, the importance of the human norm of mechanicity and unconsciousness lies in its power to defenestrate our enemy’s house. He cannot perfect a mind sans self. He cannot free a machine. But in a state of absence Man is highly suggestible. So the enemy can screw things up a heck of a lot - which he has. But perfection and freedom, no. These terms lose all meaning.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:01 | #

James,

The quote from the Delgado book is fascinating. Here is the story of self being woven over brain activity, and believed totally.

It must be obvious to everyone of us that a great artist with an immense and sweeping power of imagination lives in us all, regardless of intelligence. When we enter REM, the artist will create. But he never sleeps, and if his handiwork is less dramatic in the light of day, he is no less attentive to his duty.

Desmond,

De Sousa is wrong about mathematics. Even fish count.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:33 | #

onlooker,

This isn’t about the existence or otherwise of a Creative Intelligence. But since you raise the point, Dawkins is right: there is no reason to bias for the existence of a Jewish god. A Leprachaun will do just as nicely.

Posted by JayZ on Fri, 18 Apr 2008 01:05 | #

Guessedworker,
What exactly is free will, in your view? I’ve never known what “free will” is supposed to be. The freedom to choose what we will? The capacity to decide or act in ways that are totally uncaused, i.e., not even caused by one’s own mental states? These seem like things no one would want anyway. The more sensible notion of a free action, however, can be defended in a way that’s consistent with determinism or mechanism (regardless of whether those things are true). Roughly: an action is free if it’s caused by the agent’s own desires, beliefs, feelings, or other intentional mental states. So even if those states (desires or whatever) are themselves produced by some non-intentional, unconscious happenings prior to decision making, the action or decision could still be free just because the agent wasn’t forced to act by something external to himself.

Posted by D.E. Johnson on Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:23 | #

So, what is free will? What is Creative Intelligence? Why is Dawkins concerned about the existence of a Jewish god? So many questions—- so few answers. That’s what you get when you try to be philosophical.

But please: leave the leprechauns alone; they haven’t hurt anybody.

Posted by onlooker on Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:08 | #

“But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings.”

Practically all our conscious decisions are influenced and or motivated by our subconscious before we act on them. The scientists are detecting subconscious brain activity that precedes the test subjects’ conscious decisions, that’s all. In a mentally healthy individual, the conscious mind, practically in all instances, is dominate over the subconscious. Hence, humans exercise their God given free will.

But if scientists induce ESB [electrical stimulation of the brain] (as James Bowery points out), what they are acually doing is short circuiting the normal resistance of electrical flow from the subconscious to the conscious mind, which in turn produces abnormal reactions.

Posted by Nux Gnomica on Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:46 | #

“Unconscious”, then, is the more appropriate term (but never the unconscious).

Why not? Using the definite article doesn’t give it any special status, other than to mark that it has a unique status within an individual (whether or not it has subdivisions).

This unconscious state IS what we know as normal waking consciousness, and all our thoughts and the stories we tell of ourselves proceed in it. The decision to make an effort of attention belongs to it like everything else. It is not a decision of the conscious state, for that state does not yet exist and the effort is, of course, intended to bring that into being.

But not “intended” as an act of free will or by an “I”.

So it follows that in our normal waking UNconsciousness there must somewhow come to be formed sufficient noumenal triggers (operating by association, ie mechanically) to remind us why and how to make this effort.

Another way of putting this is: consciousness is intentional, and intent exists mechanically, if at all. According to this model Man might yet become the transcendent being philosophy and religion presumes him to be already.

Transcendent in what sense? Man is already transcendent in some very important ways (language, mathematics, art, self-awareness), even if you don’t believe he has free will.

Posted by Desmond jones on Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:28 | #

Yes, GW, but not past four.

Hardly Issac Newton.

Posted by J Richards on Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:38 | #

The existence of free will is obvious

Guessedworker, sometimes I wish you didn’t write so well and make flawed interpretations/implications sound profound. Look at it this way. In a universe where free will does not exist, yet there are some patterns that unfold with time or there exist events that can be predicted with non-zero percent certainty, some forces have to orchestrate it all. These forces need to create a universe that is predictable, and if events in this universe are anywhere as intricate or elaborate as in our universe, then it needs to be near 100% predictable, which requires that all laws governing it are known and all initial conditions have been determined with 100% precision.

We know that in our universe there are some patterns or events that can be predicted with non-zero percent certainty. But we also have many systems, particularly in the physiology of living organisms, that, though deterministic, have outcomes that are highly sensitive to slight changes in initial conditions, i.e., the outcome can be very different depending on a small change in initial conditions. These systems are said to manifest chaotic dynamics. We also know that measurements cannot be made with 100% precision in our universe (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle), i.e., the initial conditions cannot be determined with 100% precision. In other words, outcomes in our universe cannot be predicted with 100% precision even with full knowledge of all laws that govern it. In such a universe, a viable living organism must be able to chose among multiple possible behaviors in the face of uncertain future outcomes. Free will simply has to exist though it doesn’t follow that all behaviors in their entirety result from free will, but the latter is a different issue. What is important is that free will must exist in our universe.

Even in animals with hardly what we would recognize as conscience, their neural system must be able to choose among different options in the face of a non-100% certain future. In humans, the way the neural system makes its decision also manifests to some extent in a conscious perception of the process. So free will isn’t using conscious perception to cause behavior, but consciousness itself is partly a manifestation of free will. This is not a philosophical issue. It is a matter of showing how a neural network achieves it.

Posted by silver on Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:01 | #

Guessedworker, sometimes I wish you didn’t write so well and make flawed interpretations/implications sound profound.

Within the bounds of GW’s own insights, conditional (on otherwise remarkable writing) doozies like “extanct,” “suzeregnity,” and now “deja vous” could well be considered built-in fail-safes.

Posted by Manly on Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:35 | #

I blame the Feminazis for this.

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