The insanity defense and free will

In the wake of the Jared Loughner murders, here’s a debate on Who Qualifies for the Insanity Defense?” (New York Times, January 20, 2011). One ofthe panellists, Dr. Beatriz Luna, who uses neuroimaging methods to understand the development of voluntary control, comments,

The emergence of neuroscience methods that have the ability to characterize brain behavior have the promise of informing the justice system in issues like the insanity plea. However, these methods have not reached the level of identifying if an individual is a criminal and may never reach that level.

Neuroimaging methods can potentially inform the law as to whether someone has the capacity to make knowing and purposeful acts.

Even if neuroscience could provide some notion of the character of a person, the free will that the law protects may not be identifiable by neurobiological markers alone. Neuroscience can only inform the law about one of the many circumstances that underlie a criminal act. It cannot determine the ultimate culpability of a crime, which is an ethical issue.

Neuroimaging methods can potentially inform the law as to whether someone has the capacity to make knowing and purposeful acts. In cases where a person with a psychiatric disorder commits a crime, it may very well be knowingly and purposeful.

Good point. Just because a machinist, for example, believes he’s the President of the United States does not mean he isn’t guilty if he bludgeons the old lady next door to death because she “spitefully”refuses to acknowledge that fact. If the President had done it, he’d be guilty too.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

You can so believe in free will, atheist says

In New Atlantis, Raymond Tallis tackles free will:

This essay is an attempt to persuade you of something that in practice you cannot really doubt: your belief that you have free will. It will try to reassure you that it is not naïve to feel that you are responsible, and indeed morally responsible, for your actions. And it will provide you with arguments that will help you answer those increasing numbers of people who say that our free will is an illusion, or that belief in it is an adaptive delusion implanted by evolution.

The case presented will not be a knock-down proof — indeed, it outlines an understanding of free will that is rather elusive. It is of course much easier to construct simple theoretical proofs purporting to show that we are not free than it is to see how, in practice, we really are. For this reason, the argument here will take you on something of a journey.

That journey will provide reasons for resisting the claim that a deterministic view of the material universe is incompatible with free will. Much of the apparent power of deterministic arguments comes from their focusing on isolated actions, or even components of actions, that have been excised from their context in the world of the self, so that they are more easily caught in the net of material causation.

I don't know that his theory works exactly, but it's interesting that an atheist is trying it.

Influential “neuro” atheists leading the race to nothing?

If “neuroatheist” isn’t a word, I am glad invented it. Someone made a list of the word’s 25 most influential atheists.

No’s 2 and 4, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, have been trashing the mind and free will for years, and now Stephen Hawking, in No. 5 position, has started up on that theme. Oh yes, and Steve Pinker, trailing at 6.

If there is free will, then they rejected God of their own free will, but if their isn’t, the buzz of neurons made them do it. Their neurons buzzed one way, mine another.

A surefire recipe for a meaningful life that.

Lists are fun and good learning tools, even if we wonder how anyone can know who’s the most influential.

Mid-century British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, himself “famous for being famous”, used to send up that kind of thing. He would ask, did anyone know how influential Jesus or his mother would become, in the several generations following their deaths? Think about it.

What it means to be a rational animal: Incalculable even to ourselves

Man is a rational animal. If one knew only the definition and had never met a man, one would assume that a rational animal meant a reasonable animal. In fact we know that man is, just as often, unreasonable. The possession of reason, which distinguishes him from the lower animals, means that he can act reasonably as they cannot, but also unreasonably, as they cannot.

The animals, not having reason, cannot misuse it. Man has it, can misuse it, does misuse it. ... Man is endlessly ingenious in discovering ways of misusing his reason. The commonest way, perhaps, is to leave it unused. Most of us would rather not think at all when any effort is involved. The use of the body is easy, and promises pleasure. The use of the mind is difficult and holds out no such promises. So man is always trying to by-pass the use of the mind.

He thinks with reluctance, which makes him a slave to habit. He thinks with the will, which makes him a slave to desire. He thinks with the imagination, which makes him a slave to slogans. Not using the full power of his mind, he loses perspective. Things closest -- that is, closest to the body’s power to respond to them -- loom biggest. ...

One result of all these ingenious ways of avoiding the use of the mind is that man is intensely gullible: offer him happiness, and all his defenses are down. And the trouble is that man is not consistent: you cannot even rely upon him to act unreasonably: for he is damaged, but not wholly; and he is free. ... The wandering mind can concentrate, the tired will can make a stand, the thrusting self is capable of supreme sacrifice. You never know when. There is that element in man which makes him incalculable, even to himself” - Frank Sheed (1897-1981), Society and Sanity (pp. 55-58).

It was not science that moved away from incisive explanations like this in favour of rubbish about the “God gene” or the evolution of the delusion of free will. It was society, wanting simple answers to come from science, which require no effort on anyone’s part.

Proof that there is - or is not - free will is worth what, in money? $4.4 million from Templeton?

Announcing the $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Alfred Mele,

Do we have free will? FSU philosopher awarded $4.4 million grant to find out
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Since the beginning of time, philosophers, scientists and theologians have sought to find out whether human beings have free will or whether other forces are at work to control our actions, decisions and choices.

Now, Florida State University philosopher Alfred Mele has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to get to the bottom of this question for the ages. Mele, the William H. and Lucyle Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, will oversee a four-year project to improve understanding of free will in philosophy, religion and science.

"This is an extraordinarily large award in the humanities, which speaks volumes about Al Mele's worldwide reputation as a scholar, the excitement provoked by his newest ideas, and the Templeton Foundation's commitment to the highest standards of creativity in ideas and rigor in scholarship," said Joseph Travis, dean of Florida State University's College of Arts and Sciences. "An award of this magnitude and visibility puts our Department of Philosophy, and Florida State, in a very bright international spotlight."

The first big question I would ask is, what is the practical importance of the question? The people who administer the Highway Traffic Act in my province assume that one has free will. Driving while over the alcohol limit is assumed to be an offence under the Act, whereas going off the road due to a pothole is not. But some want to change this:


The project, "Free Will: Human and Divine — Empirical and Philosophical Explorations," is not quite as esoteric as the topic might suggest. For thousands of years the question of free will was strictly in the domain of philosophers and theologians. But in recent years, some neuroscientists have been producing data they claim shows that the genesis of action in the brain begins well before conscious awareness of any decision to perform that action arises. If true, conscious control over action — a necessary condition of free will — is simply impossible. Likewise, some social psychologists believe that unconscious processes, in tandem with environmental conditions, control behavior and that our conscious choices do not.

Mele argues

"It's not as if in four years, we are going to know. But I want to push us along the way so that we can speed up our understanding of all of this."

[ ... ]

"If we eventually discover that we don't have free will, the news will come out and we can predict that people's behavior will get worse as a consequence," Mele said. "We should have plans in place for how to deal with that news."

Actually, there is no news. Every drunk driver claims "drink done him", yet he could not have got drunk except by exercising his free will to drink before driving, instead of going for a walk in the park. Unfortunately, this sort of verbiage tends to promote more and more rules, which the human mind is always capable of getting around.

Other free will stories here.

Neuroscience: Do you really need a refrigerator when you have this?

I found this chilling:

Abstract:
This paper questions criminal law's strong presumption of free will. Part I assesses the ways in which environment, nurture, and society influence human action. Part II briefly surveys studies from the fields of genetics and neuroscience which call into question strong assumptions of free will and suggest explanations for propensities toward criminal activity. Part III discusses other "causes" of criminal activity including addiction, economic deprivation, gender, and culture. In light of Parts I through III, Part IV assesses criminal responsibility and the legitimacy of punishment. Part V considers the the possibility of determining propensity from criminal activity based on assessing causal factors and their effects on certain people. In this context, the concept of dangerous individuals and possible justifications for preventative detention of such individuals in order to protect society is assessed. The concluding section suggests that the law should take a broader view of factors that could have determinant effects on agents' actions.

The part that bugs me is "possible justifications for preventative detention".

That's what always happens when free will is denied.. Somehow or other, the idea gets started that we can detect in advance who will commit a crime. Then you needn't do anything to get arrested and put away. Someone just needs to have a theory about you.

But no one can truly predict the future in any kind of detail.

What about the Fort Hood massacre, you ask? Well, according to a number of reports, that guy had been advertising his grievances for some months. You sure wouldn't need a brain scan or materialist theories about free will to figure out that he wasn't happy in the Army and should have been discharged - which is what he wanted. You'd only need to listen to what he actually said.

Free will: Understanding what it means

A friend writes to say:

Logan Gage has a blog post up at ENV that's a must read. He discusses an AEI panel discussion about genes, neuroscience, and free will. Logan points out that the very distinguished panel (including Charles Murray, James. Q. Wilson, and David Brooks, among others) were dumfounded by the moderator's perfectly reasonable question about free will: if we are not entirely determined by our genes and by the environment, what exactly remains that is free? Doesn't the assertion that we are not entirely determined by our genes and environment mean that we have a ... soul?

Logan points out that this philosophical lacuna is the consequence of our abandonment of the concept of the classical understanding of causation, in this case of essence or form. I completely agree. Our abandonment (beginning in the late 17th century) of the classical Aristotelian/Scholastic concept of four causes - material, efficient, formal, and final- and the replacement with a 'Mechanical Philosophy' of only material and efficient causes, has left us unable to explain, understand and defend free will and even the concept of a human being. Philosopher Ed Feser addresses these issues in a great book "The Last Superstition- a Refutation of the New Atheism" which is the best book I've read in many years.

I'd like to think that the new atheism is the last superstition, but I bet it isn't.

Logan's superb post is a must read as well, and I believe that it addresses vital issues in our current debate with materialists/atheists.

Other free will stories.

Free will: An interesting new experiment

In "Electrical stimulation produces feelings of free will" (Scienceblogs, May 7, 2009) Ed Yong notes, about a recent experiment involving brain cancer patients who were having tumours removed,

These contrasting responses tell us two important things. Firstly, they tell us that our feelings of free will originate (at least partially) in the parietal cortex. It's the activity of these neurons that creates a sense that we initiate actions of our own accord. Secondly, they show that the sense of moving doesn't depend very much on actually doing so - it depends on calculations that are made in the parietal cortex, long before the action itself begins.

[ ... ]

Desmurget, on the other hand, could only ever produce the illusion of movement by focusing on the parietal cortex. And his patients' descriptions of their experiences made it very clear that they were feeling some sort of internal intention to move, rather than feeling compelled by an external force. Without any prompting from the researchers, they all described their feelings with words such as "will", "desire" or "wanting to". One of the patients said, "I felt a desire to lick my lips", after a low burst of current. With more stimulation, he said "I moved my mouth. I talked. What did I say?"

I suspect that the sense arises "partially" in a number of places, including the parietal cortex.

Reading this interesting article reminded me of something: Women in the last stage of labour typically feel a strong desire to start pushing, to expel the child. But modern obstetrical staff urge them to wait until they get to the delivery room. So the mother is confronted with a dilemma - should she follow the urge of nature or the advice of obstetrical nurses? Most women in my part of the world follow the advice, not the urge. A triumph of nurture over nature, if you like, one that suggests that free will can be active even in a critical situation.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Free will: Can you believe in it as a merely irrational preference?

Recently, readers have drawn my attention to this "Mind Matters" article in Scientific American: "Free Will versus the Programmed Brain" by Shaun Nichols (August 19, 2008), who asks, "If our actions are determined by prior events, then do we have a choice about anything—or any responsibility for what we do?"

He reminds us of the recent study by psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara who gave participants passages from Nobelist Francis Crick's popular science book, Astonishing Hypothesis:

Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage begins as follows: “‘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.”

The passage then goes on to talk about the neural basis of decisions and claims that “…although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.”

The other participants got a passage on the importance of the study of consciousness that does not mention free will. All then filled out a survey on their own belief in free will. Now, as Nichols puts it, comes the "inspired" part of the study:

Participants were told to complete 20 arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that when the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen, too. The participants were told that no one would know whether they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.

And can you guess what happened? Yes, of course, those who had read the passage that denies the existence of free will cheated more often. And the less they believed in free will (based on their survey responses), the more likely they were to cheat.)

Nichols' essay then tackles the obvious implications of the study - that scientists who do not believe in free will are more likely to cheat. Of course he cannot acknowledge that, so he tries, not very successfully, to get around it by offering a study that shows that people who don't believe in free will nonetheless hold others accountable for their actions, suggesting

One way to interpret this finding is that if you come to believe in determinism, you won’t drop your moral attitudes. Rather, you’ll simply reverse your view that determinism rules out moral responsibility.

In other words, you will substitute an irrational basis for moral attitudes for a rational one. But then how likely are you to cling, under pressure, to the irrational basis and suffer its outcomes?

Traditional theists, by contrast, believe that the morally correct choice reflects God's intention for them. So when they freely make the morally correct choice, they become more of what God intends. Traditional Eastern thinkers are convinced that there is no free lunch in the universe. Therefore, morally bad choices create, by a sort of natural moral law (karma), future suffering. Both views assume the reality of the mind and of free will. But more to the point, both views make free will a rational assumption and not cheating a rational choice. That is the key difference between both views and materialist atheism.

Nichols concludes,

Many philosophers and scientists reject free will and, while there has been no systematic study of the matter, there’s currently little reason to think that the philosophers and scientists who reject free will are generally less morally upright than those who believe in it.

Actually, there is currently lots of reason for thinking that. The last century and a half has seen the rise of the most murderous regimes that have ever existed, based explicitly on materialist atheist propositions that rule out, among other things, free will. These regimes were often promoted by philosophers and scientists. No, they didn't do the dirty work - but they laid the groundwork.

Here's the Vohs and Schooler paper.

Other Mindful Hack stories on free will:

When did you really decide to adopt that puppy?

Free will: How can a guy who doesn't believe in free will take credit for writing a book? I mean ...

Belief in free will keeps us honest, study finds

Free will: It used to be all my mom's fault, but now it's all my brain's fault?

Atheist indoctrination requires discrediting free will?

Free won’t - one of the keys to free will?

Find all these and other Hack stories featuring free will here.

Neuroscience: When did you really decide to adopt that puppy?

Did you decide to adopt him when you first saw him? When he licked your hand? When you decided to speak to the Humane Society cage attendant? You might be surprised ...

Recent research on making decisions shows that people may actually make a decision ten seconds before they become aware of it.

In "Get Out of Your Own Way" in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Lee Hotz reports,

While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.

Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision, the researchers identified signals that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.

This is very interesting, though not surprising. It provides research support for something that storytellers sense and try to portray - we become aware of a choice after we have already made it.

Shakespeare's villains are especially good at sensing when their victims have already begun to commit to a disastrous course of action - even when they aren't yet conscious of it themselves.

In other research,

Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

That makes a lot of sense too, because consumer choices are essentially a question of what we think we'd be happy with. The more we think about it, the more complex the problem becomes. I suspect that if the problem involved abstract calculation rather than consumer choice, distraction would not be a benefit.

The puppy is from Purina Canada's site. Learn more about puppy needs there.

Free will: How can a guy who doesn't believe in free will take credit for writing a book? I mean ...

God Delusion author Richard Dawkins was asked this very question a while back:

Questioner: ... you seem to take a position of a strong determinist who says that what we see around us is the product of physical laws playing themselves out but on the other hand it would seem that you would do things like taking credit for writing this book and things like that. But it would seem, and this isn't to be funny, that the consistent position would be that necessarily the authoring of this book from the initial condition of the big bang it was set that this would be the product of what we see today.

Dawkins: The philosophical question of determinism is a very difficult question. It's not one I discuss in this book, indeed in any other book that I've ever talked about. Now an extreme determinist, as the questioner says, might say that everything we do, everything we think, everything that we write, has been determined from the beginning of time in which case the very idea of taking credit for anything doesn't seem to make any sense. Now I don't actually know what I actually think about that, I haven't taken up a position about that, it's not part of my remit to talk about the philosophical issue of determinism. What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don't feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do. None of us ever actually as a matter of fact says, "Oh well he couldn't help doing it, he was determined by his molecules. Maybe we should… I sometimes… Um… You probably remember many of you would have seen Fawlty Towers. The episode where Basil where his car won't start and he gives it fair warning, counts up to three, and then gets out of the car and picks up a tree branch and thrashes it within an edge of his life. Maybe that's what we all ought to... Maybe the way we laugh at Basil Fawlty, we ought to laugh in the same way at people who blame humans. I mean when we punish people for doing the most horrible murders, maybe the attitude we should take is "Oh they were just determined by their molecules." It's stupid to punish them. What we should do is say "This unit has a faulty motherboard which needs to be replaced." I can't bring myself to do that. I actually do respond in an emotional way and I blame people, I give people credit, or I might be more charitable and say this individual who has committed murders or child abuse of whatever it is was really abused in his own childhood. And so again I might take a …

Questioner: But do you personally see that as an inconsistency in your views?

Dawkins: I sort of do. Yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable. But it has nothing to do with my views on religion - it is an entirely separate issue.

Questioner: Thank you.

Indeed, it usually is the guy in the prisoner's dock claiming that he is not responsible for his actions, rather than the guy in the author's booth.

G. K. Chesterton, an early twentieth century Catholic journalist and author, wrote, regarding free will:

It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may call their law the "chain" of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a madhouse. You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poeached egg, he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Similarly, you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants or even to say "thank you" for the mustard.

and also,

Some Determinists fancy that Christianity invented a dogma like free will for fun -a mere contradiction. This is absurd. You have the contradiction whatever you are. Determinists tell me, with a degree of truth, that Determinism makes no difference to daily life. That means - that although the Determinist knows men have no free will, yet he goes on treating them as if they had.

The difference then is very simple. The Christian puts the contradiction into his philosophy. The Determinist puts it into his daily habits. The Christian states as an avowed mystery what the Determinist calls nonsense. The Determinist has the same nonsense for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper every day of his life.

The Christian, I repeat, puts the mystery into his philosophy. That mystery by its darkness enlightens all things. Once grant him that, and life is life, and bread is bread, and cheese is cheese: he can laugh and fight. The Determinist makes the matter of the will logical and lucid: and in the light of that lucidity all things are darkened, words have no meaning, actions no aim. He has made his philosophy a syllogism and himself a gibbering lunatic.

It is not a question between mysticism and rationality. It is a question between mysticism and madness. For mysticism, and mysticism alone, has kept men sane from the beginning of the world. All the straight roads of logic lead to some Bedlam, to Anarchism or to passive obedience, to treating the universe as a clockwork of matter or else as a delusion of mind. It is only the Mystic, the man who accepts the contradictions, who can laugh and walk easily through the world

I like the part about mysticism vs. madness.

Belief in free will keeps us honest, study finds

Apparently, believing we have free will keeps us more honest. . In a recent study by psychologists Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia,

The psychologists gave college students a mathematics exam. The math problems appeared on a computer screen, and the subjects were told that a computer glitch would cause the answers to appear on the screen as well. To prevent the answers from showing up, the students had to hit the space bar as soon as the problems appeared.
In fact, the scientists were observing to see if the participants surreptitiously used the answers instead of solving the problems honestly on their own. Prior to the math test, Vohs and Schooler used a well-established method to prime the subjects' beliefs regarding free will: some of the students were taught that science disproves the notion of free will and that the illusion of free will was a mere artifact of the brain's biochemistry whereas others got no such indoctrination.

The results were clear: those with weaker convictions about their power to control their own destiny were more apt to cheat when given the opportunity as compared to those whose beliefs about controlling their own lives were left untouched.

Of course, the study does not show that free will exists; it shows what happens when people believe it doesn't.

Here's the paper.

Free will: It used to be all my mom's fault, but now it's all my brain's fault?

Stephanie West Allen from Brains on Purpose points me to a "Battle of Ideas" seminar on FORA TV: My Brain Made Me Do It.

Quite honestly, I think that - apart from the high tech brain scanning - "my brain made me do it" is just this decade's version of the 1950s' psychiatrist's "it's all his mother's fault."

Neuroplasticity is a fact. We shape our brains through life by what we think about and how we think about it. I am not saying that everyone is in total control all the time, but that we must accept responsibility for a messy mind as we would for a messy house. And that includes the knowledge that we made it that way and that we can do something about it if we want to. And if we don't want to, we have made a choice.

Here's a different view from cognitive scientist and artist Jim Davies:

Descartes's dichotomy of the non-material mind and the material brain still lingers on in our cultural understanding of psychology. One place I think it arises is in the "problem" of free will. Your brain determining how you react to an environment is not a troublesome notion if you think that the brain running your mind is all you are. People say "but my brain controls me!" As though the "me" were some spirit. Your "me" is just the software running on the brain. Your brain and mind determining what you do is your exercising of free will, at least in any meaningful sense of the term.

So, it is not so much that your brain made you do it as that there is no "you" to begin with. It's just software and hardware.

Davies thinks that anyone who would disagree with his materialist view must be a non-scientist, which would come as news to Mario Beauregard and Jeff Schwartz.

I think his view demonstrates the chief reason that the computer analogy for the human brain does not work. Software is a product of a human mind. It is not itself a mind. Minds produce software, but not the reverse.

Atheist indoctrination requires discrediting free will?

Dinesh D’Souza comments on the recent spate of atheist indoctrination projects:

One way in which science can undermine the plausibility of religion, according to biologist E.O. Wilson, is by showing that the mind itself is the product of evolution and that free moral choice is an illusion. “If religion…can be systematically analyzed and explained as a product of the brain’s evolution, its power as an external source of morality will be gone forever.”

Well then, as Mario Beauregard an I demonstrate in The Spiritual Brain, their project is a non-starter. And no wonder they sound ever more shrill.

Free won’t - one of the keys to free will?

A recent neuroscience study showed that the aras of the brain involved with self-control and taking action are separate:

The area of the brain responsible for self-control -- where the decision not to do something occurs after thinking about doing it -- is separate from the area associated with taking action, scientists say in The Journal of Neuroscience.

"The results illuminate a very important aspect of the brain's control of behavior, the ability to hold off doing something after you've developed the intention to do it -- one might call it 'free won't' as opposed to free will," says Martha Farah, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania.

One might indeed. Free won’t has saved many from ruin.

"The capacity to withhold an action that we have prepared but reconsidered is an important distinction between intelligent and impulsive behavior," says Brass, "and also between humans and other animals."

And between prosperity and disaster.

(Hat tip Dr. Jeff Schwartz)

Letters from readers: Wonderful source of continuing education!

Recently, I've been hearing from readers of The Spiritual Brain on people who have inspired and/or intrigued them. Thanks to all, and in your honour I would like to draw attention to

perennial philosopher Mortimer Adler. (A perennial philosopher does not think that the really important things in life depend on who wins the Superbowl this year or where hemlines are going. Perennial = lasts through the years) Here are some
quotes from his writings, and if you like those, you can try to find some of his works.. Here is a free overview of his ideas. And here is the Mortimer Adler archive.

and

Benjamin Libet, who has studied consciousness and free will:

Libet, who says that when young he was convinced of the truth of determinist materialism, no longer believes that conscious mental activity is explainable by or reducible to, neuronal activity, although it certainly requires it. He is not, at the same time, advocating any kind of dualism or spiritual theory: instead (and rather obscurely, I think) it seems that his proposed CMF is an emergent phenomenon: something that arises from the combination of active neurons but amounts to something distinctively more than, and different from, the sum of brain activity.

Mind is not merely brain, Spiked reviewer insists

In a review of Chris Frith's Making Up the Mind in Spiked, British pain management expert Stuart Derbyshire defends free will:

The fundamental mistake that Frith makes – and this is a common error – is to believe that agency or free will are products only of the human brain. The brain is necessary but it is not sufficient, and chasing agency into the brain will only yield disappointment or, in this case, a sense that agency is illusory. If agency is not merely a product of ordinary brains, then it follows that abnormal brains might not be the whole or only answer when there are psychiatric problems and delusions of agency such as in schizophrenia.

To his tremendous credit, Frith is ready to push neuroscience past the hype that can be generated by a pretty picture and into a deeper understanding of what makes mental function. For that alone, Making up the Mind should be read by anyone interested in understanding contemporary neuroscience. The idea, however, that the brain constructs the mind is incomplete, and the quicker we realise that, the quicker we will make progress in understanding both normal and abnormal minds.

Free will and neuroscience: More on the flies that think

Recently, I reported on an experiement with fruit flies that showed that the flies are not robotic, but can engage in spontaneous behavior.

In a recent Daily Telegraph article, Roger Highfield explains:

"The point here is that the people claiming that free will doesn't exist say that one day we will be able to show exactly why a murderer must necessarily have acted the way he did by looking closely at his brain. We can show that you cannot even do this in fly brains, as a matter of principle."

That's the key, of course. It is a matter of principle (actually, fact) that flies do not behave like robots.
Also,

These results caught computer scientist and lead author Alexander Maye from the University of Hamburg by surprise: "I would have never guessed that simple flies who otherwise keep bouncing off the same window have the capacity for nonrandom spontaneity if given the chance."

Great fly graphics too.

I am not sure - as I said earlier - that the researchers have discovered in flies what humans mean by free will. They have discovered something that natural philosophers have always known: Life forms, even simple ones, are not like machines.

Life forms pursue goals generated from within themselves. The difference between your computer and the fly buzzing around your computer is not merely that the fly is vastly more complex than your computer.

A much more important difference is that the fly does not need you to tell it how to be a fly. Your computer, by contrast, has no internal motives or goals and will do nothing you don't ask for (or that someone somewhere in the software industry didn't ask for), except by accident.

The researchers had expected to find that flies behaved like computers (with natural selection presumably playing the role of the software engineer), but they did not.

Contrary to the hopes of the artificial intelligence (AI) crowd, making the computer more complex would probably not give it what the fly has naturally. The fly's autonomy (or spontanaeity, as the researchers called it) is an aspect of life, as opposed to mechanism, that we do not yet understand. I am sure it is understandable in principle, but continued adherence to materialism makes it unlikely that we will understand any time soon.

In that context, the articles I have seen on this subject so far close with the fond hope that this discovery will enable us to build robots that have an inner sense of purpose and provide a (mechanical) fix for people with mental problems that inhibit spontaneity. Sigh.

Free will:In fruit flies, yet?

Researchers at the Free University of Berlin think they have found evidence for free will in fruit flies:

Animals and especially insects are usually seen as complex robots which only respond to external stimuli," says senior author Björn Brembs from the Free University Berlin. They are assumed to be input-output devices. "When scientists observe animals responding differently even to the same external stimuli, they attribute this variability to random errors in a complex brain." Using a combination of automated behavior recording and sophisticated mathematical analyses, the international team of researchers showed for the first time that such variability cannot be due to simple random events but is generated spontaneously and non-randomly by the brain. These results caught computer scientist and lead author Alexander Maye from the University of Hamburg by surprise: "I would have never guessed that simple flies who otherwise keep bouncing off the same window have the capacity for nonrandom spontaneity if given the chance."

I wouldn't have guessed that either, and I suspect that the researchers and I might differ in what we mean by free will. I am surprised that anyone ever doubted that the fly is capable of spontaneous non-random behaviour. But the traditional idea of "free will" requires a considerable intellectual component as well.

Essentially, they have discovered that the fly is not a machine. It has, in its limited way, feelings and goals. If you are not a materialist, you will not find that hard to believe.

Free will and neuroscience: Why free will must be a foundation

Jonathan Kay's wrote a decidedly unenthusiastic column (January 23, 2007) about the recent anti-God crusade, spearheaded by arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins. Kay, an agnostic, noted,

It's something to think about, even if you're not sitting in prison or mourning a loved one. Life finds a way to break most of us long before death arrives. People get divorced; they watch relatives die; they lose their health, their friends, their money. According to my (admittedly casual) observation, the people who snicker loudest about God are either young or lucky -- usually, both. And so they still labour under the conceit that mere cleverness will be enough to see them through life.
The atheists may be right about God. Who knows? But God or no God, it's clear that something in the human soul requires a belief that life has a purpose that transcends the material plane. One would think that a more-rational-than-thou empiricist such as Dawkins would recognize this unchanging aspect of human nature. Our Western faiths provide that spiritual nourishment -- and in their modern form, do so without inquisitions, holy wars or, for that matter, suicide belts. For all his smirking dinner-party arguments against God, does Dawkins really think this world would be a more humane place if we all looked to The God Delusion instead of The Bible for truth and comfort?

A Nathan Pila wrote in response, disagreeing. (For some reason, I cannot find any reference to the post online, but if I ever do, I will link to it.)

Which prompted a response in turn from a colleague of mine, Don Waller, who said:

Re: The Problem With Atheism, letter to the editor, Jan. 24.

Letter writer Nathan Pila's response to Jonathan Kay's column (Thy Rod and Thy Staff, Jan 23) is essentially an assertion of a worldview commonly known as physical naturalism. Specifically, in this case, that there is no mind or soul independent of the brain; all thought and behaviour is purely the result of neurochemical synapses in the brain.

It is true that some biologists have proposed this view, however, it is by no means a commonly held view. There are serious scientific and philosophical reasons why physical naturalism cannot be tenable. One philosophical argument is based on the idea of free will.
Human beings are known to exhibit what is known as libertarian freedom, that is, they can literally choose between bona fide options... A or B.

If all thought and behaviour are indeed only the result of the biochemistry of the brain, then free will cannot exist, and all we have left is pure determinism.

Furthermore, any concept of moral obligation and responsibility is also nonsensical if determinism is true. But we do not live this way because we do not believe this way.
Mr. Pila concludes by asserting that God's existence is irrelevant. If neurochemical determinism is true then one could also argue that indeed nothing truly exists including Mr. Pila -- he and his letter are just a fabrication of my biochemical synapses. Such a position is indefensible. God's existence is therefore a possibility, and if so, that existence is not irrelevant.
- Don D. Wallar, M.Sc. (Neurochemistry), Newmarket, Ont.

Also, here's an article by Andrew Higgins, originally in the Wall Street Journal, on the European version of the atheist crusade.

My next book! The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper August 2007).