What Makes Decisions?
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 10:06AM 
There are few platitudes I despise more than "Everything happens for a reason." While the statement is clearly true, it's not true in the way everyone who says it means it. Everything does happen for a reason, but I see no reason to believe that said reason comes from a higher power, a benevolent universe, or some sort of guiding force or fate. From my reading of the evidence, it seems to me that everything happens for a reason because life is just part of a long causal chain going back to the big bang (let's set aside the cause of the big bang for now).
Which leads me to my current belief that there is no such thing as free will. Unless you accept some sort of cartesian dualism, I don't see room for free will within the framework of what we know about the world. It's becoming clearer and clearer that the "mind" is purely physical, a function of neuronal activity in the brain. When parts of the brain get damaged, so do corresponding parts of the mind. Accepting the likely truth that thinking is entirely physical, then it is in turn entirely subject to physical stimuli - a super-complicated machine reacting to the rest of the world. What we think of as "choosing" is just an illusion our brains create. Sort of.
Over at Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True blog they've been talking free will, and he links to an interesting study from a couple years back. It certainly doesn't disprove free will on its own, but its a fascinating piece of evidence. In short, subjects were put in an FMRI which scanned their brains while they were asked to make a decision about which button to push. The scans showed that the brain made the decision 7 or more seconds before the person was conscious of having chosen a button. The moment they thought they'd picked a button came long after the choice had already been made.
Obviously it's very early days in all this fascinating brain science stuff, but with each passing study it seems more and more evidence against dualism accumulates.
Reader Comments (22)
On the other hand, photosynthesis has recently been shown to rely on quantum entanglement, so there is still some hope for a recursively-defined (or infinite series) system of quantum-mechanical feedback loops that is effectively 'outside' the normal universe that could be the genesis of free-will. I haven't had the energy to look into the mathematics of that idea though... I guess it wasn't meant to be.
Dennet talks about the quantum indeterminacy stuff and free will in his book Freedom Evolves, and it's pretty interesting. I was reading it in Belize and then got scratched by a howler monkey, which distracted me from the book, so I don't remember his conclusion. Clearly that monkey scratched me for a reason, and that reason was to trick me into believing I have free will.
That is, doesn't the very concept of using evidence to reveal truth imply the existence of real choices? If there are no real choices, how can evidence be employed to help you make them? And if evidence doesn't exist, how can I use it to disprove free-will?
I don't think the concept of using evidence to reveal truth implies the existence of real choices. I mean, I really don't follow your logic here at all. I'm not being snarky, I literally don't follow your logic. How does whether or not we have "Real choices" affect the truth value of evidence about how the brain and indeed the universe work? Evidence in this case means reality, and it's reality that's making our choices. Our brains filter that reality and in the process create things like the illusion of free will (or the illusion that people can see color out of their peripheral vision when in fact they can't).
Are you saying logic and evidence are real, but they've just never been used for anything?
After all, isn't the whole purpose of logic to try and think through how the universe actually works?
What I'm saying is that, yes, you're only imagining that you're weighing logic and evidence, but that doesn't mean the logic and evidence aren't real, just the part where you're weighing it is an illusion.
To me, it seems like using normal logic and evidence to search for free will is rather like using a flashlight to search for the batteries.
Indeed, what would finding evidence *for* free-will with a brain scanner even look like? A ghostly finger must appear out of the ether and nudge neurons?
And um, if it's dark and you need to find batteries, a flashlight is really useful if it already has other batteries in it. Or, if you're feeling around in the dark and blindly testing objects out in your flashlight, when you get the batteries in there, you'll know it. Which is to say, I don't follow this simile.
This single study alone doesn't prove anything of course, but if it showed the opposite result - that the decision is made at the same moment we're conscious of making the decision, that would be more in line with a concept of free will than the actual result, which is a delay of 7 to 10 seconds where our brain looks like it has decided and not bothered to tell us yet.
Yes, you program your own brain over time, and it makes the decision for you (if seeing it that way pleases you). But it's the same thing, innit?
Or perhaps you can say that "free-will" is the process of *countermanding* the conclusions/suggestions of your meat-computer, and this is what accounts for the apparent lag.
I personally have some random hashing factors built into my decision-making system based upon alphabetizing or doing modulo arithmetic on the day of the month. But it's my design (even, choice) whether to follow these or not, ergo: free-will.
- m
I'm suggesting that the kind of free will you describe is just as unlikely as some more spiritual hypothesis. I don't see convincing evidence that there is any will at all - those pathways seem most likely to be the sole result of the physical structure of the brain interacting with the environment and there is no countermanding anything.
I would suggest you don't actually have a choice whether or not to follow those random factors (which are not, of course, truly random), you just have the illusion that you do. The meat machine is a giant flow chart and doesn't really make choices at all. I say this, because I can't see any evidence for anything outside the machine that could make such choices.
But yes, I've always said that we're machines programmed by genes, operant conditioning, and the battle between fear and pleasure. As far as pointing to "what makes the decision", though, I'm afraid we're headed for an infinite regression. After all, if you believe that your meat makes the decision, and not the "self", then who made your meat? Obviously it was "God"!
Even if I lean on pseudo-random seeds, it was "God" that put those methods in my mind, so he's stacking the deck to point me squarely into my predestination. So as much as science might propose surprising theories based on evidence, magic always wins in the end!
(Perhaps more disconcerting to some than the non-existence of free-will, though, it can be similarly argued that "love" exists as nothing more than neuroplastic familiarity with beings that give us comfort, entertainment and pleasure.)
- m
I guess the thing I'm arguing is that there are no actual decisions being made, but rather just reactions to stimuli. That's what I mean by no free will - that at the most basic level it's all action and reaction.
I'd like to agree with Markleford's description of love, but I love my wife and it is some years since she has given me comfort, entertainment or pleasure. Perhaps you need to rework the relationship to include, nagging, poverty and a sense of failure and inadequacy?
If rejecting free will leads a person to Buddha-like calm and Christ-like forgiveness, I seriously admire that person.
If it's used as a tool to paper over the mysteries of our existence, I think we need to slow down and examine our assumptions when we interpret brain scanner results.
Again, this brain scan study is a tiny little piece of the puzzle. Maybe it's not even that. Maybe it's an anomaly in the equipment. But I think it's much more a part of the study of the universe's mysteries than it is a papering over. Consciousness and free will are deep, deep mysteries to be sure, but there is good evidence that they need not always remain a mystery.
This is illustrated by the case of the brain scanner: Our beliefs about free will drive our interpretation of brain scans, not the other way around. In the future, brain scanners will get better, and our predictions will get better, and we will never find a ghost in our heads pushing neurons. So if that's what you mean by "no free will", then you are right and we're done. But brain scanners didn't really help us to that conclusion. Epicurus and Democritus knew we are made of atoms driven by physical forces and thus they had all the relevant facts that we have when they discussed free will.
None of that is too controversial; after some research I think I might be expressing something not too far from the "Compatibilist" view. I'd just take that a step further, and propose that one constructs theories and conducts experiments when one's worldview holds that we have real choices and need facts to help us make them. Thus this is the worldview of the scientist even when he interprets his findings otherwise, and indeed this is the worldview that powers science. So to conclude against free will is possible, it just undermines the validity of the process that brought you to that conclusion.
What closes the loop? This fellow has an interesting take on the exact nature of the assumptions that lead us toward determinism: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/the-end-of-knowing/
Back to the beginning of your post, you state that the source and nature of consciousness and free-will are fundamental facts of existence. On what do you base that? Why would these two phenomenon be immune to scientific inquiry, when so little else in existence is? And certainly research into these areas generally points towards explanations for both of these things. If science does uncover every mechanism for how we seem to make choices, then where is there left for free will to hide. If they do, as you say, show no ghost pushing the neurons, then where will free will be?
And I think it's incorrect to say that Epicurus and Democritus had all the relevant facts. That's just clearly not the case and seems needlessly hyperbolic on your point, diminishing the discoveries that have been made about what does and does not exist since their time. Evolution, biology, physics, chemistry, information sciences have all profoundly changed the conversation.
It seems to me entirely likely that we will at some point be able to perfectly model the human mind in an artificial environment, like a computer. Would such a creation have free will? I don't see how.
Well I don't imagine free will immune like it's wearing science-proof armor -- rather that the scientific method has requirements that this inquiry can't meet. To apply it to the question "Is there free will?", we'd have to describe the experimental outcomes that, in the analysis phase, we would interpret as evidence in favor of free will beyond the finding of an actual ghost.
If we can't, we must say that our model does not permit the possibility of free will, rather than saying we are searching for free will and unable to find it.
Since Epicurus and Democritus discussed this model and its implications for free will in much the same terms, it seems reasonable to think we're pretty much where were two thousand years ago.
I think this particular experiment does have a possible outcome that would've weighed in favor of free will instead of against it. If the results had been the opposite - that our brain arrived at the decision at the exact moment that we think it does, then that would more closely correlate with the idea that free will as we experience it actually exists. I think our model very much accepts the possibility that free will exists, it's just that more and more evidence is lining up against that hypothesis.
To me, calling free-will an illusion has all the problems, scientifically, that calling brain scans an illusion has. The plain evidence of my senses tells me both are real. I experience myself making choices and exerting will at least as forcefully as I experience anything else. Thus either:
a) Free will is an illusion though we plainly experience it as real, or
b) Brain scans are illusions though we plainly experience them as real, or
c) I need to adjust my model of the universe to accommodate two things I plainly experience as real.
For me, option c is most scientific in the same way that if I saw nails falling up, I'd add magnetism to my model of the universe before I called nails falling up an illusion.