The Economist believes that "modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will":
In the late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?
While this example of a tumor in the orbitofrontal cortex is certainly fascinating, I disagree with the philosophical implications that The Economist draws from it. While there certainly are diseases of the brain that are deterministic in nature - no amount of "free will" can cure you of schizophrenia, or Huntington's, or ALS - we should also not assume that every brain disease is equally deterministic. There are two main reasons why I'm not ready to give up on free will.
The first reason is plasticity. One of the great themes of modern neuroscience is the malleability of the mind. While a genetic program specifies the gross anatomy of our brain, the all important details are determined by experience. In fact, the best metaphor for the mind might be our immune system. Just as our antibodies are constantly altered in response to the pathogens we actually encounter (we do not have the B-cells of our parents, or of our identical twin), the brain is constantly adapting to the particular conditions of our own life. This is why blind people can use their visual cortex to read Braille, and why the deaf can process sign language in their auditory cortex. Lose a finger and, thanks to neural plasticity, your other fingers will take over its brain space. In one particularly audacious experiment, the neuroscientist Mriganka Sur literally re-wired the mind of a ferret, so that the information from its retina was plugged into its auditory cortex. To Sur's astonishment, the ferrets could still see. Furthermore, their auditory cortex now resembled the typical ferret visual cortex, complete with spatial maps and neurons tuned to detect slants of light. Michael Merzenich, one of the founders of the plasticity field, called this experiment "The most compelling demonstration you could have that experience shapes the brain."
An important discovery closely related to plasticity has been the discovery of neurogenesis. I've spilled a lot of ink elsewhere on this phenomenon, but it's important to remember that your brain is constantly generating new neurons. The brain, far from being fixed, is actually in a constant state of cellular upheaval.
The second reason I'm not convinced that freedom is nothing but an illusion is the amount of randomness (or stochasticity) inherent in living organisms. Fruit flies, for example, have long hairs on their body that serve as sensory organs. The location and density of those hairs differ between the two sides of the fly, but not in any systematic way. After all, the two sides of the fly are encoded for by the same genes and have developed in the same environment. Instead, the variation in the fly is a consequence of random atomic jostling inside its cells, what biologists call "developmental noise." (This is also why our left and right hands have different fingerprints.)
This same principle is even at work in our brain. Neuroscientist Fred Gage has found that retrotransposons--junk genes which randomly jump around our genome--are present at unusually high numbers in neurons. In fact, these troublemaking scraps of DNA insert themselves into almost 80 percent of our brain cells, arbitrarily altering their genetic program. At first, Gage was befuddled by this data. The brain seemed intentionally destructive, bent on dismantling its own precise instructions. But then Gage had an epiphany. He realized that all these genetic interruptions created a population of perfectly unique minds, since each brain suffered from retrotransposons in its own way. In other words, cellular chaos creates our individuality. Gage's new hypothesis is that all this mental anarchy is adaptive, as it allows our genes to generate minds of almost infinite diversity.
Like the discovery of neurogenesis and neural plasticity, the discovery that biology thrives on disorder is paradigm shifting. The more science knows about life's intricacies, about how DNA actually becomes protein and about how proteins actually become us, the less life resembles a finely honed Swiss clock. Chaos is everywhere. As Karl Popper once said, life is not a clock, it is a cloud. Like a cloud, life is "highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable." Clouds, carried and crafted by an infinity of currents, have inscrutable wills; they seethe and tumble in the air, and are a little different with every moment in time. We are the same way. As has happened so many times before in the history of science, the idée fixe of deterministic order proved to be a mirage.
This is why I'm not sorry worried about free will being erased by the facts of biology. Neuroscience hasn't discovered that our mind is nothing but a genetic machine. Far from it. In fact, the most profound discoveries of modern neuroscience have focused on all the ways our mind is not determinstic. Of course, much of this indeterminacy is simply randomness, the stochastic flutter of our cellular machinery. For lack of a better term, I'll call this negative freedom. But a significant part of our freedom is also positive: we are also beginning to understand all the ways the structure of our brain responds to our personal, individual experiences. Free will is here to say. As usual William James said it best, "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."
[Thanks for the tip Steve!]
Comments
Free will? Oh boy, here we go again.
1) First, before attempting to prove or disprove free will, you should define it. Even perfeshunal philosophers frequently try to save free will by redefining it, and that just doesn't accomplish anything.
2) Why do you think plasticity is going to save free will? Is neurogenesis somehow exempt from natural laws? Or does your conception of "determinism" only cover genetic programming and not the laws of nature? I don't see a point in getting too deeply into this one until you have provided your definition of free will.
3) Randomness? I think you're on the wrong track there. Most people's conception of free will is not randomness.
Now a quote from "Free" Will Provine:
Posted by: Mustafa Mond, FCD | December 20, 2006 11:58 AM
Posted by: Mustafa Mond, FCD | December 20, 2006 11:59 AM
I dread philosophical discussions of free will just as much as the next person. Of course, there are many different defintions of free will, and parsing their details is way beyond my limited qualifications. I was simply trying to demonstrate why neuroscience isn't becoming a deterministic science, one that is bound to erase our "free will." And I agree that most people's conception of free will isn't randomness. Nevertheless, I believe that the stochastic flux at the center of life provide us with the "elbow room" that makes free will possible.
Posted by: Jonah | December 20, 2006 12:12 PM
As for myself, I will wait for someone to give a coherent definition of free will and provide evidence that it exists, before I spend time wondering what makes it possible.
Posted by: Mustafa Mond, FCD | December 20, 2006 12:35 PM
I think you need to be careful about using the term 'indeterminate'; it can mean a slew of things, all the way from the indeterminancy of quantum measurements, all the way to a mere 'I can't predict the result, knowing what I know'. And in the end, nothing is really indeterminate; the equation of motion of the universe is deterministic, as far as we know.
The 'stochastic randomness' of molecules diffusing towards receptors is closer to the ''can't predict" definition. It's entirely governed by deterministic physical laws; we're just not in a position to measure the initial conditions or calculate the evolution of the system from those conditions.
We are machines which are designed to see ourselves as free actors. It makes no sense to worry about whether in fact we are deterministic machines at the moelcular level - of course we are - any more than it makes sense to analyse a computer's operating system in terms of 1s and 0s.
Posted by: Gerard Harbison | December 20, 2006 12:53 PM
The brain is plastic AND remarkably stable. Two-photon imagng of live animals has shown that dendritic spines in the adult mouse hardly change.
Posted by: Erin | December 20, 2006 2:43 PM
"I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless--a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors" - Daniel Dennett
Free will requires mind-body dualism to be a meaningful concept. Without a non-physical mind to talk about, free will degenerates into either the "can't practically predict" definition, in which case it is trite, or the "not bound by physical laws" definition, in which case it is absurd.
Posted by: MattXIV | December 20, 2006 3:36 PM
Hi,
I think that there is no set of descriptive scientific theories that can erase the notion of free will as subjective concept. When I do something, I am supposing that what I do is because of my decisions, thoughts, will, etc.
You´re invited to my philosophy blog!
Posted by: Esteban | December 20, 2006 4:06 PM
The free will debate becomes pretty interesting when you toss in the possible implications of Libet's delay.
Posted by: Stephen Rowley | December 20, 2006 4:11 PM
Plasticity doesn't save free will. "Determined by experience" means just that _determined_. Adding in more levels doesn't result in free will but just a more complex deterministic process.
And the randomness you talk about is just determinism with an occasional dice thrown in.
The only solution is to adopt an instrumentalist stance towards free will.
In sentencing the man with the tumor, we have no more choice in sentencing him that he had in committing those acts.
on a side note: There is no moral dilemma if we get away from our view of prison as punishment. Prison should be about rehabilitation. If the man, with his tumor removed, is no longer a danger to society then he should be released. If he is still a danger to society then he shouldn't be released.
Posted by: Lincoln | December 20, 2006 5:56 PM
Largely supporting Gerard Harbison' viewpoint, I would warn against confusion of arbitrary "randomness", "stochasticity" (these terms define probabilistic phenomena) with the mathematical definition of "chaotic" and "fractal patterns" (these are totally deterministic).
Thus, Fred Gage is correct in the above citation, but he is, in my opinion, grossly misrepresented:
---
"This same principle is even at work in our brain. Neuroscientist Fred Gage has found that retrotransposons--junk genes which randomly jump around our genome--are present at unusually high numbers in neurons. In fact, these troublemaking scraps of DNA insert themselves into almost 80 percent of our brain cells, arbitrarily altering their genetic program. At first, Gage was befuddled by this data. The brain seemed intentionally destructive, bent on dismantling its own precise instructions. But then Gage had an epiphany. He realized that all these genetic interruptions created a population of perfectly unique minds, since each brain suffered from retrotransposons in its own way. In other words, cellular chaos creates our individuality. Gage's new hypothesis is that all this mental anarchy is adaptive, as it allows our genes to generate minds of almost infinite diversity"
---
Knowing Fred Gage, I would not like to think he used the word "arbitrarily", or if he did, used it more in the sense that there is an "arbiter" (deterministic laws governing), rather than "arbitrarily" used in the sense of "randomly".
In view of the explosion in our knowledge (if not yet in our understanding) of short repetitive elements of DNA and RNA, (most of them emanating from Junk DNA) and the current findings (see at http://www.junkdna.com/new_citations.html) that the (human) DNA leaves about 1/8 for DIVERSITY, it may just be that the fractal (and, mathematically, chaotic) patterns governing our neural networks make our individual thinking different from one-another.
pellionisz_at_junkdna.com
Posted by: Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz | December 20, 2006 10:38 PM
Posted by: Mustafa Mond, FCD | December 21, 2006 10:33 AM
That was a very good, thought provoking post. I did read the original article in Economist and I think that neuroscience is blurring the very definition of free will. In fact so much so that ‘free will’ suddenly is starting to become vapor-like to me and seems to not exist (or exist in a much narrower space). Risking being a dunce on the internet, I would stake a claim to say that the very fact that experience driven genetic modification of synapses means that we DO NOT have free will. In fact the very argument that you had put out in favor of free will (neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity) is also paradoxically against it. In many cases a human being seems to be driven to certain actions because of the very fact that experience driven genetic modifications lead to plasticity of neural substrates and those original environmental experiences are codified and wired into an individual’s brain helped by a process of neurogenesis. Propagating these two arguments for ‘free will’ does not seem to cut this argument - at least in my own humble way...
Swami Vivekananda’s definition of free will:
“the very words ‘free will’ are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is molded by conditions of time, space and causality. ... To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here”.
Posted by: Sunil Gangadharan | December 21, 2006 3:33 PM
That was a very good, thought provoking post. I did read the original article in Economist and I think that neuroscience is blurring the very definition of free will. In fact so much so that ‘free will’ suddenly is starting to become vapor-like to me and seems to not exist (or exist in a much narrower space). Risking being a dunce on the internet, I would stake a claim to say that the very fact that experience driven genetic modification of synapses means that we DO NOT have free will. In fact the very argument that you had put out in favor of free will (neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity) is also paradoxically against it. In many cases a human being seems to be driven to certain actions because of the very fact that experience driven genetic modifications lead to plasticity of neural substrates and those original environmental experiences are codified and wired into an individual’s brain helped by a process of neurogenesis. Propagating these two arguments for ‘free will’ does not seem to cut this argument - at least in my own humble way...
Swami Vivekananda’s definition of free will:
“the very words ‘free will’ are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is molded by conditions of time, space and causality. ... To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here”.
Posted by: Sunil Gangadharan | December 21, 2006 3:33 PM
To really have a "free will" we would need to get rid of all the senses, needs and motivations, since all these external and internal influences affect our executive output. What would left to constitute the free will is hard for me to imagine.
Posted by: ivan | December 21, 2006 11:20 PM
We don't know whether stochaistic or chaotic event series are deterministic or indeterministic. There are fully developed mathematical theories of chaos that are indeterministic and those that are deterministic. So Dr. Pellionisz's assertion that such chaotic or stochaistic patterns are deterministic is unwarranted.
Lincoln's assertion that all human experience is determined by prior experience is also unwarranted. The fact that past human experience may affect or influence our behavior doesn't warrant the inference that all human behavior is determined by past experience. There is a good deal of novelty and creativity in human behavior and interaction. The notion assumed by Lincoln and ivan here, input-output, just isn't truly descriptive of human behaviors requiring imagination, foresight, creativity, rationality and moral judgment -- not to mention the phenomenal nature of consciousness itself (which is no mere output of an input or computers would already be conscious).
However, it appears that the chaotic neral patterns of the cortex are capable of self-organizing into ordered patterns and that ordered brain activity arises from such chaos. A lot more work needs to be done before we can get dogmatic about free will. It may well be that the reafferant feed-back systems give rise to an emergent experience of consciousness of the self that then can downwardly cause brain activity. Bio-feedback rests on such principals so that we are not merely the result of brain or neural events, but the brain's very behavior is the result of "conscious choices" that then effect the brain's neural behavior.
I don't know enough about the stochaistic or chaotic patterns of DNA formation to have an opinion about what role it may or may not play in formation of the brain's "make-up".
However, I agree with Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz (if I have properly understood him) to the extent he warns against equating random and chaotic events with free will. Free actions for which we could be held accountable as an agent are not merely random or chaotic. The very notion of free will requires something like an emergent self (arising from up-ward causation of neural events but which can transcend mere events as such) that can exercise downward causation in making choices, acting and so forth. However, while there is a great deal of data that suggests that there is indeed the ability to make such choices and that we are not merely our brains because we also act upon the brain as it responds to decisions we make, we just don't know enough yet to begin making final conclusions. The issue remains philosophical despite some advances in neuroscience.
Posted by: Blake | December 30, 2006 10:55 AM
Can free will and naturalism coexist? Are you a philosophical naturalist?
Posted by: Adrian | July 5, 2007 6:02 PM