As someone who works in the biomedical imaging business and is also a fan of philosophy, I think this news will matter more to folks in the latter camp. For a couple years now philosophers have insisted that fMRI images prove there is no such thing as free will. Today's revelation should put an end to that whole line of reasoning (and the absurd amount of fatalism that it engendered).
(The back story: Apparently fMRI showed motor signals arising before the cognitive / conscious signals that should have created them, assuming we humans have free will. This has led to the widely adopted belief among philosophers that we humans act before we think, thus we don't and can't act willfully and freely. To wit, science has proven there is no such thing as free will; we're all just automatons.)
Just this week there was an article in The Atlantic on how we all must accept that we're mere robots and we don't really choose our actions (nor can we choose to believe in a god).
Ah well. It seems philosophers STILL haven't learned the importance of applying the scientific method before leaping to a conclusion -- sometimes just to check that someone else didn't just abuse the scientific method.
Why would this put an end to that line of reasoning? I'd expect it to flare up the debate, not end the debate. They didn't disprove behavior being computed, they demonstrated that a class of data supporting it was useless. The natural reaction to this isn't "okay we give up", it's "better go get some good data".
(Also, I don't like mixing the question "Is our behavior computed?" with the question "Does computed behavior imply no free will?".)
The problem with free will debates has to do with its definition. I think once people start hammering out the definition, free will either becomes a wimpy variant that people didn't want to talk about in the first place, or it becomes so ambitious that it's outside the scope of science to discuss.
If you define free will as the ability to generate and choose options based on constraints, then people get bored of that discussion because it seems to lack the freedom they want. If you define free will as the ability to escape biophysics, then it becomes an unscientific discussion of metaphysics.
But what people really want is the freedom from biophysics, not a discussion of a bounded system to generate and choose options. People want a reality where this state does not need to relate to the one before it, a non-markovy world.
That's why people mix the discussion of behavioral computation and free will. People want the most ambitious form of free will, something too special for computers -- freedom from biophysics, freedom from the prior state's tyranny over its future state.
Well put. Serendipitously, Dan Dennett and Sam Harris just discussed this last week and released the recording of their conversation[0].
The conversation was interesting and disappointing.
Harris argues that the commonly-held notion of 'free will' is nonsensical. Dennett doesn't disagree but worries that people may construe this to mean that 'all bets are off' and the world will descend into chaos. Harris attempts to explain why this would not be the case; that we'd still have good reasons to imprison people who want to do harm. Dennett agrees but then restates the same worry differently. They never manage to get past this.
Every time I see Dennett deliver his, "free will exists, but it's not what you think it is" line. I imagine him in a Santa suit, with his grandchildren, when they realize that that is grandpa Dan in there. He must certainly say, "no no children, Santa exists, he just isn't who you thought he was."
Listened to that whole thing as well, and was just as frustrated. I prefer Brian Greene's 1 minute case for the absence of free will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBNzaXx6eKg
Whenever people claim we have free will, the first thing I do is generally to ask them to define it, and that is usually where that conversation ends up in a quagmire.
This has little to do with the study in question. It wasn't about weird metaphysics, it was that MRI scans could predict what choice people would make, before they reported making a choice. Showing that the unconscious mind makes choices before our conscious mind is even aware of it. I don't think this result is affected by this new issue, because it seems to have been done with old fashioned EEGs too.
This adds to other work from split brain patients, that our right brain explains away the choices we've made even if those explanations are totally false. E.g. they ask the left brain to pick up a toy soldier, and ask the right brain why they did that. They say "well because I always liked toy soldiers when I was a kid", or some other made up explanation. There's even cases where one side of the brain is paralyzed and can't move its arm, and the other side makes up explanations why it doesn't want to move its arm and refuses to believe it's paralyzed.
I think it's possible humans don't have Free Will. Not just in a philosophical, or determinism vs nondeterminism sense, but in a very practical sense. That our actions are highly predictable. And that once you start to see the inner workings of the machine that is our minds, it starts to seem a whole lot less magical.
This intuition is hard to explain, but in general many systems seem to have "agency" until you understand how they work, and then they start to seem just like normal "non agency" things. As we learn more about how humans work, we start to look a lot less agenty. More on that here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb0/agency_is_bugs_and_uncertainty/
What are the actionable insights that have come out of fMRI studies? Even when properly conducted (no false positives), the conclusions that are often drawn have always felt dubious to me. Basically you are looking for regions of the brain that light up with various stimuli. Except that's as far as it goes, we don't yet understand much beyond that.
It's as if you figure out that your car is making a funny sound, and you can pinpoint where it is coming from, you can even reproduce the sound on demand - but you have no idea WHY it sounds the way it does.
I was participant in a study in linguistics [1] that compared native Polish and native German speakers who were put into an fRMI and played speech sounds. Both Polish and German ones.
It clearly showed that speech sounds from your native language are processed in a different part of the brain than non-native speech sounds.
Yes, that does not explain much. But it leads towards all kinds of questions. And I found that fascinating.
[1] Silvia Lipski, Neurosci Lett. 2007 Mar 19, „A Magnetoencephalographic study on auditory processing of native and nonnative fricative contrasts in Polish and German listeners.“
A small correction: cited study used MEG, not fMRI, as modality.
The conclusion itself doesn't look very surprising for me. We already know that the sound processing in general is the same in both hemispheres while the speech processing is very lateralized. From the continuity I could say that there should be a border where speech-like sounds sound like speech and therefore they are processed differently between hemispheres. This study seems to estimate this border.
I misremembered because my professor's group did a lot of fMRI stuff, as well, and in the seminars we mostly talked about those.
Speech/language and brain is fascinating. There are resident linguists at major hospitals who are consulted before neurosurgery. Speech sounds are processed faster than other sounds in our brain. Rearranging sentences from active voice to passive voice, silently in your head, lead to easily seen activity in fMRIs, distinct from non-linguistic mental actions. And so on.
When your about to dig a chunk of someone's brain out and have a variety of routes to get to the offending region, it's handy to know what you might be able to avoid knocking off.
Well, the non-pop philosophers will understand that as a minor hit to the model of consciousness as solely concerned with post-facto rationalization and basically removed from the real-time decision making loop. Those studies were never strong evidence anyway, the protocols were pretty weak as they required asking the subjects to self-report at what time they "decided" to act.
The real free will debate is about both the definition of free will (for the compatibilists and libertarians) and a debate about whether the evidence for materialism outweighs the subjective experience of free will.
But yes, this will hopefully stop those confused pop-philosophy stories.
I've never heard of that argument, though I admit I'm new to this discussion.
But, given that people can and have built pretty good random generators, by finding sources of entropy and even with pure math, thus sidestepping our limitations, the point is kind of moot IMHO.
The logic is odd but strait forward. Basically, free will requires people to make choices independent of the past state of the universe. Aka if you replayed to universe up to this point several times they would not always respond in the same way.
If that's the case people should be able to make unpredictable choices by definition. However, when asked to be unpredictable they fail. So, at best people have a limited form of free will.
PS: This is something of an upper bound. At the other end, if replaying someone's life they only have a single non predictable choice they they may have free will. Similarly if they make the same choices in a very large number of universes and only make a different choice in one you could still argue that that's free will. But, the lower bound is not that meaningful of a distinction.
Well OK, but if you want nondeterministic behavior, you can find a source of entropy and make decisions based on a random number (e.g. flip a coin). You chose to do it and it invalidates the hypothesis, because if you replay the universe up to this point, you won't behave in the same way and the choices you just made by flipping a coin are independent of the past state of the universe.
So what am I missing, as I feel we are going into non-falsifiable territory.
If you decide to follow an entropy source and I see the same output as you I can predict your behavior. Free will must be unpredictable as it does not depend on the past state of the universe. (Unless you mean an entropy source outside of the 'universe' which is a rather strange a circular requirement for free will.)
Now, you can argue for a lesser form of free will which is influenced, but not dependent on the state of the universe. However, that's progress even if somewhat obvious.
I've always found that these "Quick, don't think of 'x'" things are a silly example. You end up thinking of X the moment you read X, just before it gets put in context of "not" and "think". It's like telling the parser not to tokenize a given word. Then there's automaticity, which you have to turn off, which is made harder by "Quick", further setting you up to think further of elephants till you get around to grasping the meaning of the phrase.
To be fair, there are more arguments to be made contra free will (thought experiments like: At what point from conception to adulthood would free will develop (if at all), could free will be a merely probabilistic byproduct, etc...) and even if the details are wrong in these fMRI images, the general notion that a motor signal is generated before it appears in consciousness might still be valid.
Funny. One measure when motor signal and sees that it can measure when it appears in consciousness. Do me a favor, how can you be sure that what you measure is actually consciousness. Give me a "measurable" consciousness.
Moreover, Freud basically says that free will doesn't exist because he makes a difference between conscious and subconscious... The latter being a huge bunch of thoughts you don't make/change at will...
Moreover, predicting if a ball will fall when put above the ground is something. Predicting the next second of life of the universe is something else. So predicting a subject will raise its left/right hand is something. Predicting what will be his opinion about abortion is an entire story
All of this reminds me of studies done long ago which tried to predict if someone was a criminal or not by measuring the shape of its skull...
Free will as in "there's something that can't be explained by chemistry and electrical signals in the brain" is just an attempt of some believers to rationalize their belief in the kind of the supernatural "soul."
The brain computes an abstraction of the reality (or most likely multiple competing abstractions) and decides on actions. There's the free will.
There is some kind of idea that the consciousness "floats" on top of this abstract soup as some kind of a running program in an operative system, and is making the calls, but this is most likely not how it works.
All these abstractions of sensory input, probabilities, decisions, etc, is probably what creates the consciousnesses but I doubt that there is a meaningful boundary.
After-the-fact rationalization may be true or not - it's obvious that events can't be processed in no time at all, and that there must be some processing time for the experienced "now."
But trying to build some meaningful philosophical arguments from it is probably a red herring.
After all, when trying to explain the reasons behind a decision made without explicit reasoning and external lists of pros and cons, it's often clear that there are many "hunches" that are not easy to summarize or valuate.
The idea that after the fact rationalization negates free will has never been convincing. Observing the consequences of a "choice" then actively attempting to rewire the brain to make a different one in the future is just as much free will as anything else. Free will doesn't require instantaneous control over decision making.
Are you suggesting there is no room for quantum effects in the brain? Honest question because I thought determinism is out of fashion now-a-days for that reason.
Determinism and non-determinism are both just models that can be converted into each other fairly easily. Either way, that has nothing to do with free will, because getting random outcomes is not 'will' at all, let alone free will -- as ill-defined as that concept is.
I subscribe 100% to the 'free-will as an emotion' description you gave else thread, but to play the devil advocate, a non deterministic acausal process could be the gateway for for a metaphysical soul to affect the physical mind. How this can be done without violating the expected probability density function of the non deterministic process I leave it for others to explain.
Quantum effects are still physical. If your behavior is determined by the collapse of a wavefunction, is that more free-willish than behavior determined by a prior state? A double-slit photon doesn't choose a slit via free will, so I'm not sure how quantum mechanics helps inject free will into the brain.
No one in "mainstream" neuroscience or cell biology takes these proposals seriously. Hameroff and Penrose have proposed some possible mechanisms (e.g., dendritic lamellar bodies), but none of these have panned out experimentally; for example, the DLBs are in the wrong place. They keep revising the theory around these data, but I think a lot of experimentalists have lost interest. I gather there are other more philosophical/first principles arguments against this too.
I don't quite get why quantum effects are required, and the determinism have to be removed to explain "free will".
The deterministic effects in the brain must be negligible, as you can't reasonably reproduce the internal and external state of 100 billion neurons, swimming in a incomprehensibly complex chemical soup that is altered by the brain itself, at the same time experiencing the changing reality.
There's free will as in a decision-making system that generates different options and selects one based on constraints, which is something a computer can do, and then there's free will as in the ability to defy the mechanics of one's biophysics, which is just an indirect way of saying metaphysical soul.
I don't think empiricists can even discuss the kind of free will which defies causal explanation, the kind of mind which exists outside of the brain.
If you reject that kind of metaphysical soul from the discussion, what remains is whatever soul can be housed in a cage of biophysics. And whether you believe there is fundamental randomness in the universe, or whether given perfect information the universe becomes predictable, both perspectives are equally hostile to the kind of free will people dream about.
People who talk about free will want to escape biophysics, and the only way is to talk about the mind outside the brain, or the ghost outside the machine.
Free will is just the sensation of having a brain that models counterfactuals. It allows you to have emotions like hope and regret, since you are capable of imagining the world being different from how it is. It allows you to understand your role in the consequence-that-is-the-current-reality.
And here there's nothing to debate. Of course free will exists. It exists just like every other aspect of mental perspective exists. Nobody is debating whether love, hunger, confusion, or boredom exist just because they aren't quantified and modeled in a properly predictable manner. They're debating free will because religious people want a common experience and a long history of unaddressed confusion to leverage for their self-comfort. A "mystery" that not even scientists can touch.
I don't think there's such a thing as a metaphysical soul. What would that look like anyhow? But I do think any sufficient complex system could show patterns which could be perceived as random. Although they may be hard to reason about.
I believe consciousness arises from such processes, and the perception of free will.
So have these studies been invalidated by the software bug as well? If so, do you have any pointers? I. e. which were the infamous studies, and did they indeed use the faulty software to derive their conclusions?
I'm genuinely interested.
> It seems philosophers STILL haven't learned the importance of applying the scientific method before leaping to a conclusion
To be fair, if you can apply the scientific method it's not really philosophy anymore, it's science. Philosophy exists in order to attempt understanding of domains we cannot rigorously apply empirical reasoning to.
"Apparently fMRI showed motor signals arising before the cognitive / conscious signals that should have created them, assuming we humans have free will."
Has anyone presented any theory where consciousness precedes neural activity that doesn't invoke hard-core dualism and an immaterial soul?
This paper (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19423830) tried to prove exactly what you talk about and called it free will, but they used the SPM software that was invalidated.
I thought someone had found that while "fMRI showed motor signals arising before the cognitive / conscious signals" that they also had found that we could choose to negate/override that signal thus allowing free will. That is free will was expressed by overriding the default.
(The back story: Apparently fMRI showed motor signals arising before the cognitive / conscious signals that should have created them, assuming we humans have free will. This has led to the widely adopted belief among philosophers that we humans act before we think, thus we don't and can't act willfully and freely. To wit, science has proven there is no such thing as free will; we're all just automatons.)
Just this week there was an article in The Atlantic on how we all must accept that we're mere robots and we don't really choose our actions (nor can we choose to believe in a god).
Ah well. It seems philosophers STILL haven't learned the importance of applying the scientific method before leaping to a conclusion -- sometimes just to check that someone else didn't just abuse the scientific method.