I read an article in New Scientist today that I just had to write some kind of response to. Well, it turned into something much, MUCH longer than I'd anticipated! It's hardly a polished academic paper, but here it is.
The Experience of Having Free Will
Yancarlo Ramsey
In response to "Tackling the Problem of Free Will" by John Searle, from New Scientist Magazine, 13 January 2007, page 48-49, http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/brain/mg19325861.700-tackling-the-problem-of-free-will.html
The fact that we all feel like we have free will is undeniable. But what does that mean? John Searle seems to define free will as "free, rational decision making". But the question he quotes near the end of the article shows that there is a problem with the way he examines free will.
"If Hypothesis One [that free will is an illusion] were demonstrated to be true, would you accept it?" Notice the form of the question: if it were demonstrated that there is no such thing as free, rational decision making, would you freely and rationally decide to accept that demonstration?
In Searle's rephrasing of the question, he effectively relates apples to oranges. In attempting to show that it is ridiculous to propose that free will could be an illusion, he translates 'X is an illusion' into 'there is no such thing as X'. But everyone who has seen a rainbow should understand that these are two completely different things. The fact that a rainbow isn't the solid object made of bands of color that it sometimes looks like, or is portrayed as in cartoons, doesn't mean that there is no such thing as a rainbow.
An illusion is information perceived by our senses. The fact is, the way we perceive things is subjective. Our experience of perceiving light refracted by rain, of touching and being touched, of being hungry or tired or happy or angry, these are all real. Happiness and anger, of course, are emotions we feel inside rather than information received through our senses, but they are still experiences. The way we perceive our own feelings and thoughts, and indeed everything that goes on inside our heads, are all experiences. Following Searle's definition of free will, the way we perceive our own capacity to freely and rationally make decisions is an experience.
But by misconstruing an illusion as something that isn't real, Searle is implying that if free will is an illusion, then free will isn't real. Because we all know from our own experiences that free will IS real, the reader must therefore draw the conclusion that free will cannot be an illusion.
Believing something about the nature of free will won't change the nature of free will, just as believing the sky is pink won't make people see pink when they look up, or start saying pink when they see blue. The former may seem to be an obvious claim, but some might argue against it. What they are really arguing is that your beliefs about free will can change how you view your experience of free will. This is true, but it is also just as irrelevant as saying that your beliefs about the sky change how you view the sky. Thinking about how you experience free will isn't going to change the fact that you have the experience of free will, nor will it cause you to stop having that experience.
In his article, Searle claims, "It is a feature of conscious human thinking, deciding and acting that we experience these activities not as causally continuous, but as containing causal gaps." He continues elsewhere, "So if the experience of freedom is real, there must be an indeterminism in the brain corresponding to the gaps. If free will is real, there cannot be causally sufficient neurobiological conditions moving us from contemplating alternatives to deciding between them." So either Free Will must be an illusion, or it must be due to some kind of indeterminism in the process leading from thinking about acting to actually doing so. Turning this around, if free will is real, it cannot be based on deterministic processes. The two must be mutually contradictory. After all, deterministic causes of our behaviour, of our choice to act, would undermine the very concept of freedom, right? This appears to be what Searle believes.
How do we know that real free will cannot be based on deterministic processes? The main evidence is our own experience, our own subjective view of our decision making processes. Humans are infinitely capable of surprising others, and even ourselves. We can generate unexpected behavior that no one could have predicted. But for something to be impossible to predict does not imply that it has no cause, or that it is nondeterministic.
The human brain is one of the most complex systems we know of, but there is one feature of that brain that is particulary important. People do not decide on a course of action based solely on the information received through their senses. There is an enormous amount of additional information being used. Where does this information come from? Experience, both past and present. The brain's current state, encompassing all of a lifetime of memory and training, is absolutely crucial in determining what it will do next. Even if all the processes going on are deterministic, there is simply so much information involved, such a tremendously large 'pre-existing condition' being fed back into the system, that it is impossible to say just what will come out.
Feedback within highly complex systems is a large field of study, and the above summary will have to suffice here, but the concept of feedback is important to explaining how free will can exist. With the amount of feedback involved in a system as extroardinarily complex as the human brain, indeterminism is, quite simply, unnecessary. The experience of free will can be sufficiently explained without requiring it. Does this mean it is impossible, or even unlikely, that nondeterministic processes are involved? Of course not. But it is possible that there are no nondeterministic processes involved, and thanks to the study of complex systems and feedback, this possibility need not conflict with our subjective experience of free will.
This is an important point. The experience of free will is real and valid, not illusory, regardless of the nature of the processes that are responsible for it. I, the entity who exists as a result of (one might say as an emergent feature of) processes in my highly complex brain, experience the feeling that I have 'free will'. Knowing this does not change my experience of 'free will', and that subjective experience does not in any way dissuade me from accepting that 'free will' itself has a cause (or many causes, depending on how detailed one wants to be) in the biological workings of my brain.
Having evolved in a system that promotes the survival of the most capable species and individuals, our brain incorporates a certain set of basic urges and responses that it generates based on conditions in the environment and in my body. Beyond that, it is also able to learn a near-infinite range of additional behaviors, is able to develop new urges based on experiences or changes in the body, and is able to discover new means of satisfying urges.
Thanks to certain features which our complex brain possesses, it is capable of recognizing that alternative courses of action exist, predicting the consequences of each course of action based on past experience, and judging which course of action would have the most beneficial results and the most desirable reward compared to the difficulty or risk of following that course of action. It is also capable of ruling out courses of action based on complex reasoning and emotions.
Based on these predictions and judgements, the brain is capable of selecting a course of action which is most consistent with the urges and behaviors it produces. I experience this process of selection as 'free will', because it is my brain in which the process occurs, and my experience of existing, my consciousness, is a result of all the processes in my brain, even if I am not consciously aware of all these individual processes.
Even though we don't know what the exact processes are that fill the 'causal gaps' Searle refers to doesn't mean that there is nothing to fill them. Nor does the existence of such processes imply that the processes have to be deterministic, nondeterministic, or that there can be no 'other influence' involved. (While there is no need to hypothesize that there is a non-physical entity of some sort influencing the processes in your brain to tip the decision-making in one direction or another, those who wish to believe that are, of course, free to do so.) The inner workings of each of these processes is a topic for neurobiologists (and perhaps theologians). The existence and nature of these processes is what is important to the discussion of the free will that I and all other humans experience.
Indeed, being aware of all these processes could be counterproductive. It might distract my attention from the need to make those important decisions, such as "what should I eat for dinner". Thinking about the decision in more specific detail, such as "what kinds or flavors of food would best satisfy the urge to eat that I am currently experiencing", would certainly be a waste of my time.
Refusing to order and instead waiting to see what one 'ends up' ordering because what one was going to order was 'predetermined' would be just as much of a waste of time. It would simply show that we are free to make those decisions. What could cause such behavior? The desire, the strong urge, to believe that what we decide is up to us and not caused by any external agency beyond our control, causing one to decide to reaffirm the truth of this belief by doing so.
And this belief is, indeed, true. Our decisions are not caused by any external agency. They are not caused by what we see or hear or feel through our senses. They are caused by an internal agency... the highly complex brain that allows us to question the very existence and validity of our own conscious experience of free will. |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
yancarlo's journal