Free Will Revisited

Just over a year ago, at the request of Cornucrapia, I made a post discussing my outlook on the concept of free will. Since free will seems to be one of those topics that refuses to keep its ugly head down, Robert sent me an email mentioning that it had come up at the new atheist group at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While I directed him to have a look at my original free will post, I thought it might be worth rattling off some more musings on the matter. The subject of free will, after all, is ostensibly a question about the function of the brain, so one would think that I might have something sage-like to say on the matter.

As I mentioned in my original post, I am actually not a fan of the topic. My dislike is not based on finding the topic itself dull, but rather because it is such an old topic weighed down by the nonsensical baggage of eminent names that have come before it. For some reason the combination of trundling theological dogma overly concerned with the divine judgement and punishment of immortal souls, the psychologically pressing intimacy of the question, and our current dearth of information about many aspects of mental life makes the subject of free will (as well as 'consciousness') burdened by a disproportionate number of eminent thinkers from completely unrelated fields all deciding that it is a perfect problem to which they should devote their retirement treatises. The opinions of these thinkers are then bandied back and forth, all with a great deal of undeserved weight given the phenomenal intellectual prestige of the thinkers' earlier works.

While the explanation of my discontent turned a little more vitriolic than I had originally planned, it is nice to have gotten it out of the way. Now I can press on with my own meandering thoughts on the matter. One of the difficulties that plague many discussions of free will is a lack of definition. With such a vague (though intuitive) definition as "do we control our own actions", it is difficult to engage the topic in a meaningful manner. To start with, I think the anyone who brings up the debate must also seriously consider the rejoinder, "Does it matter either way?" To a great extent, the consternation gripping many people over the topic of free will rests with the theological roots I was railing against in my previous paragraph. After all, if we live in a deterministic universe (which itself is not a settled matter, but most people treat it as such), how can we be divinely judged on actions we had no choice but to perform?

Treating the matter outside of the theological realm in the domain of empirical philosophy, I admit the question of free will can still carry some weight when it comes to the issue of earthly justice (such as our criminal justice system). The justice system is a complex entity, however, and, though some people view it as such, does not exist solely for the purpose of delivering retribution. People, including criminals, are remarkably complex dynamical systems. As I mentioned in my previous post, such systems are virtually impossible to fully model, and sometimes impossible to even remotely predict, and thus we have no recourse but to act as if free will exists even if there is no mystical soul or tiny homunculus making choices. In my mind imprisonment and fines therefore remain ethical and necessary institutions. I tried to more fully elucidate my feelings on the matter, but it threatened to take over the rest of my discussion, and I had one more area that I wanted to address. If people take issue with my brief remarks on crime and punishment, let me know and I will try to more completely discuss the matter in another post.

As an atheistic scientist, I strongly doubt the existence of the aforementioned immaterial soul or decision-making homunculus. Of course, there is always the possibility of discovering some previously unsuspected aspect of our mental lives (after all, we only recently uncovered the quantum nature of photosynthesis) which makes our brains fundamentally different than other computing devices, but at the same time that does not mean we will not be able to reproduce our cognitive abilities following such a leap in knowledge. While the strong AI hypothesis (basically, that the brain is a computing device akin to any other computational model) is by no means proven, it is an open question with I think very little current evidence against it. As I said, even if our brain operates in a fundamentally different and as-yet unknown manner from a Turing Machine, every piece of evidence we currently have still points to it being a physical device beholden to physical laws. Damage the brain and you damage your mental faculties. Accepting this physical nature, however, does not equate to relegating our mental lives to that of deterministic automatons. As I have said before, we are still simply too complex to fully predict.

There is one final argument that I would like to address along the lines of neurophysiology. I do not know if I have the argument entirely correct, as I am getting the report of the argument second-hand, but it is a supposed proof against free will. Rather than further mangle the argument by summarizing it again in my own words, I will reproduce it here as it was sent to me:

When I think about moving my finger I am already moving it, and therefore the decision to move my finger must have been made before I thought to do it. Free will would, in this case, be an illusion. Because, the argument goes, there is a slight delay in the signal being sent from my brain to move my finger. Therefore, if I were to have conscious control (and actually making decisions about such things) then I would think about moving my finger, and, half or a quarter of a second later, my finger would move. Instead, at the same time I think about moving my finger, my finger moves, implying to those advancing the argument, that there must be something beyond our control in our heads making us do stuff. So, we do not have free will.

This is, to me, an almost entirely nonsensical argument. As far as I can understand it, the claim is that because one's actions appear to happen in the same instant that one thinks about doing the action, there must be some sort of unconscious automatic decision making device controlling both the thought that the move should be made and the move itself. What the argument is actually doing is basing a conclusion off of the acknowledgement of the latency of some neurological processes but not others. We do not entirely understand at what point one becomes aware of a conscious desire for action, but even assuming that the command is sent to the motor cortex at the same instant it is consciously acknowledged, there is still the latency of the visual and proprioceptive systems in checking that the command was executed. So perhaps there is a two hundred and fifty millisecond delay before one's finger starts to waggle, but one could reasonably expect an equally large or larger delay in the visual and somatosensory cortices as they decide whether or not the waggle is going on, and then report that knowledge back to the administrative cortical regions. What is actually an amazing property of our brain is that it gives the impression of a complete, simultaneous, and coherent picture of the world.

New Blog Excitement

My girlfriend has a new blog called The Language of Bad Physics. Although I don't understand everything that she talks about, if you like physics and like nonsense getting eviscerated, you will probably enjoy her blog.

A Clarifying Note on Philosophy, Empricism, and Emotion

I had a small number of people lodge objections to my discussion of Timothy Williamson's talk, saying that I neglected a very real portion of human cognitive life - namely our emotional experiences - when I stated that worldly knowledge was rooted in empirical data. To clarify, my essay on Williamson was focusing on the philosophical underpinnings of the field of philosophy as a discipline that seeks to understand the fundamental system underlying the world and our existence therein. I very much recognize that not all thoughts are rational or based on empirical evidence, and, as one of my correspondents pointed out, emotions are facts to the people experiencing them. Not to belabour the point, but not so long ago I brought up the very real existence of irrationally motivated thought when I discussed the irrationality of our individual mental lives in relation to public policy. Thus, all I was trying to say in my post on Timothy Williamson was that, in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, it is necessary to base our reasoning on empirical underpinnings and engage in informed cognitive introspection to try and eliminate subjective or irrational reasoning from muddling our conclusions. While in the essay I was concentrating on the field of philosophy, I think such a process should be applied to most professinal pursuits.

For example, I think it is an important ethical consideration for any political advocate to at least try and ensure his policy is supported by strong reasoning motivated by an empirical basis. While holding fast to an ideological stance is both easier and, unfortunately, usually more popular with voters (people seem to like certainty), it is irresponsible and damaging. A good example of this is with the debate over sexual education. There are numerous studies showing that abstinence-only education is far less effective at reducing sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancy than comprehensive sexual education, yet numerous politicians continue to advocate for abstinence-only education based on the ideological principle that sex outside of marriage is sinful. To the politicians, their feelings that premarital sex is a sin are fact, but it is not fact to everyone in their society, nor is the classification of a behaviour as sinful enough to dissuade everyone (including a good number of politicians) from doing it. Thus, in order to most effectively govern, one must put aside one's own biases and concentrate on the empirical evidence of what is the most effective strategy. This is the same way that effective scientists and philosophers must be willing to put aside their own possibly flawed intuitions in light of new evidence. The danger of any dogmatic ideology (religion is my most common target, but politics is rife with ideologies resistant to change as well) is that it actively resists the adoption of new practices despite new evidence. The power and beauty of science rests with its fundamentally self-correcting philosophy (even if self-correction is not always perfectly performed, complicated as always by the personal facts of the scientists themselves. The best we can do is simply strive to eliminate those tendencies).

Once again, I would like to stress that all of this talk of eliminating responses based on emotion is in the realm of understanding and interacting with the world at large. I am in no way advocating that people should strive to eliminate all emotion, but that they should not be afraid of introspection into why their emotions tell them that the world is a particular way. It is hard work, but I think it is worth the effort.

Also, I would like to point out that I recognize the practical reason why politicians are not so ideal as to be guided solely by the empirical ramifications of their policies. Elected politicians must pragmatically deal with the realities of getting elected, and if the majority of the population (or at least the portion of the population that controls their election funds) wants a politician to enact an ideologically based set of policies, the politician only has so much leeway before being replaced by someone more willing to follow the given ideology. I don't have a solution for getting around this, other than through public discourse and staunch resistance to ideological proponents. I recognize that my voice is a small one, but for now it is all I have. This, too, is hard work, but I think it is also worth the effort.

Note: I don't actually have a reference to any abstinence-only studies on hand. I believe this is fairly close to Robert's field of study, so perhaps he would be kind enough to offer some supporting citations (or tell me I am remembering the conclusions of studies incorrectly).

Edit on 29 July, 2009: Robert and I have continued to discuss this topic through private messages. While I have more to say on the topic, I am putting it to rest for now while I deal with the more pressing matters of report writing and exam preparation.

Timothy Williamson and the Philosophy of Philosophy

A couple weeks ago, I went to a lecture at the Paulinerkirche given by Professor Timothy Williamson, a philosopher from Oxford, entitled Armchair Knowledge and the Philosophy of Philosophy. The talk was for a general audience, so I am sure Professor Williamson simplified his arguments and glossed over some of the supporting ideas that have helped spur his own, but I still felt somewhat dissatisfied with overall presentation and thrust of his argument.

Professor Williamson started with a description of the general practice of philosophy as an exercise of cogitation one performs from the comfort of an armchair. He then gave a humorous anecdote about an Irish chemist being surprised that English universities regularly also had philosophy departments (the chemist had assumed that Dublin's Trinity College philosophy department continued to exist as a matter of tradition rather than for any sort of pragmatic utility). Thus, Williamson set up the central conflict on which his talk centered as the question of whether or not the criticism of philosophy as antiquated and made obsolete by experimental science was apt, and what that meant for the motivations and practice of philosophy (the philosophy or philosophy, if you will).

The central thrust of Williamson's argument started with the idea that no one is a pure empiricist, as basing all of one's beliefs on direct empirical evidence is impossible. In this, Williamson is certainly correct. Earning one's education is in many ways an exercise in academic trust, although, as was astutely pointed out in the How To Think About Science series, one of the inherent strengths of science rests not so much with its skeptical roots as with its ability to determine who and what to trust. One of the problems I continually run into in subjects outside of the realm of science (and even within some discourse that claims it is scientific - namely certain branches of psychology) is that the established basis for some discourse is not clearly defined or, in some cases, is clearly defined but erroneous (either in light of later discoveries, in which case it may be excusable, or simply because it was assumed true without empirical evidence, in which case it is less excusable). For example, as those who remember my reviews of a selection of historical treatises on political theory may recall, I was thoroughly disappointed with both Plato and Aristotle. I thought Hobbes did a much better job by specifically and carefully defining his terms and assumptions (some might claim that this was a little overly pedantic on his part, making his text more difficult to digest than one which skips over such dry discourse as careful definitions, but it is important nonetheless). Of course, I think Hobbes' analysis still ends up flawed, but it is much easier to follow his reasoning and in that way determine where I disagree thanks to his methodological approach. I seem to be getting away from myself, however. Getting back to Williamson's talk, I grant that calling for a purely empirical framework for knowledge and belief is not feasible. We do choose to trust knowledge disseminated by other sources, but I think the important point here rests on our determination of the trustworthiness of sources. Basing trust on human charisma, while often the most common method, is unfortunately a highly flawed method as it easily leaves one open to being taken advantage of. The system created around unbiased and rigorous verification of knowledge rooted entirely within the natural world that is modern science is the best that I think we can currently hope for in the department of trust.

Continuing from the fact that everyone accepts knowledge not personally empirically derived, Williamson also brings up the fact that even empirical scientists further process empirical results with a set of mental reasoning tools which Williamson classified as akin to imagination. We are mentally capable of trying out ideas and following avenues of thought which have not explicitly been borne out in the real world. At this point, Williamson went on a slightly odd detour by ruminating on the origins of the human capacity for reasoning given our evolutionary past. He justified its survival advantage by giving an example of a person running from a tiger - the person would be able to gage the appropriate response by running through possible future scenarios in their mind (such as hiding behind a rock, climbing a tree, and so on). Of course, it was a simplistic example, so I won't spend too long quibbling with it, but I do want to point out that any person who stopped to think so carefully while being chased by a tiger was going to be caught and eaten. Our capacity for rational thought serves more to modulate what sorts of behaviours we practice to increase our future survival capacity rather than serving us in speedy split-second survival decisions. Ignoring that nuance for the sake of the argument, however (and it does not particularly change the logic to go from reasoning about what sorts of behaviours are best to practice for future enactment and what sorts of behaviours one should execute in the current moment), it is true that we continually process empirical information (often in ways we are not even immediately aware of - see my series on top-down processing in vision).

Essentially, those two points are what led Williamson to his justification for philosophy. Philosophy is therefore, according to my understanding of Williamson, simply engaging our capacity of hypothetical rational thought as a valid exercise in knowledge derivation. I would contend, however, that Williamson's version of philosophy is continuous with and enveloped by the combined fields of mathematics and science, and the areas of philosophy that remain outside of those fields still have no valid justification as sources of worldly knowledge. As I see it, there are two possible ways in which one can engage the rational faculties that Williamson established to exist. One can ruminate on the purely abstract, such as the field of logic. Philosophy of that sort, however, becomes indistinguishable from the field of mathematics. It can be a valuable avenue of thought, but it does not tell us directly about the world. When philosophy moves beyond the abstract and begins to make statements about reality, then I think it should be held to the same empirical accountability as any theoretical science. Philosophers may not be the ones gathering the empirical data, but that does not excuse them from being aware of the implications of that data. Far too often people entirely ignorant of neurophysiology and even behavioural psychology embark on developing vast treatises of the philosophy of the mind. Of course, philosophers often focus on different questions and aspects of a field, and in that I think they make their most valuable contributions (for example, fields like the philosophy of physics or the philosophy of mathematics, which often draw upon the larger philosophical field of epistemology, are exceedingly important for any scientific field and, in the same way that I think philosophers should make an effort to be aware of at least general trends of empirical results, so too should more scientists be aware of the philosophical underpinnings of their fields). Fundamentally, though, all knowledge of our world is rooted in empirical data, and thus I think the philosophy of philosophy leads us to the same place as the philosophy of science and mathematics.

How to Think About Science

I was listing to the opening segment of an interesting set of broadcasts collectively entitled "How to Think About Science" and I thought it had some very interesting points. The one I thought that was most interesting was when Simon Schaffer pointed out that science, while normally celebrated as promoting skepticism and a reliance upon personal evidence and observation, was in reality a systematic organization of trust. You will have to listen to the broadcast for his full argument, but it is essentially that no one can practically witness evidence for everything one accepts as true, but where science excels is in giving a powerful framework for deciding who and what should be given credence.

I thought that was a very interesting and thought-provoking observation. It is quite simple and seems obvious after hearing it, but in many ways those are the best thoughts to have. I found myself thinking about it this morning as I read the news. So many of our world's problems, especially in the political sphere, are based on issues of trust. It is one of the exceptionally messy aspects of politics that makes me want to practically avoid the field. It is also why pseudoscientific things like creationism/intelligent design and alternative medicine continue to flourish outside of the scientific world (in the realm of the popular and political) where there is not that system of rigorous evaluation to keep them in check.

Free Will

I have been given a request for a topic. Since that is an exciting occurrence that I don't want to discourage, I figure I should try to attend to the request (it has taken me a long time, but hopefully that won't count against me too greatly). The subject I am going to discuss, therefore, is free will. It is a topic that I am not a great fan of, but it is virtually impossible to study the brain and intelligence in any manner without having the question of free will pop up from time to time and leer at you. The reason I am not a fan of it is that I think it is a subject that has been marred over the centuries by association with a great deal of analysis that is not reality based. From Plato's conception of the soul in three parts to Descarte's conclusion that humans have souls and all other animals are simple automatons, there is a huge amount of crap unloaded by people who are largely unchallenged due to their eminent names. I don't actually have a name (hopefully it is appropriate to insert a yet here), nor have I taken any courses in philosophy of the mind or anything like that. I just thought it was appropriate to point that out.

Free will is one of those loaded subjects that everyone seems to have an opinion about. Most people seem to accept that we do have free will based on the fact that they feel like they have free will. However, without invoking a magical or paranormal exception for the mind (like a soul), it is difficult to reconcile the idea of free will with deterministic physical laws. Some people have tried to squirm their way around this by appealing to the craziness that is quantum mechanics, but those are usually fairly shaky and tenuous attempts. The fundamental problem is that people intuitively think in terms of whole entities - it is hard not to visualize functions of the brain as a tiny homunculus moving switches and making decisions. Of course, no such little fellow has been found, as well as that sort of visualization begs the question of how his brain works.

The way I tend to think of the subject of free will is in the context of a dynamical system. The brain as a network of little computational units is a physical entity and therefore must follow physical laws in the same way that everything else does, so in that way it is as deterministic as anything. However, it also an exceptionally complex system that feeds much of its own output back into itself (sometimes in round-about manners), making the analogy to an iterative mathematical function somewhat appropriate. Though most of the dynamics I have studied is based on simple functions (like the quadratic function), even those very simple functions can exhibit chaotic behaviour that is virtually impossible to predict. When systems become even more complex, you can have a deterministic system that still follows all physical laws, but requires a system at least as complicated as itself to predict the exact outcome. An example of such a system is the weather. We can make probabilistic claims about the future weather, but we cannot completely predict its behaviour (and beyond a week, most predictions about the weather are fairly useless other than the very general ones like "as it gets closer to winter, it is going to get colder"). Similarly, we can make probabilistic predictions about a person's behaviour (most people, when presented with a sudden loud noise, will jump and look about in a startled fashion). As we get to know a person better, we get better at our predictions (when my girlfriend and I are out for a walk and we see a person walking a dog, I can very closely predict the degree to which she will get excited about seeing the dog based on its breed and age (puppies have a clear advantage over older dogs)). Likewise, after living in an area for a while, most people get much better at predicting what the weather is going to be like. Exact prediction, however, is still impossible, especially as one moves farther into the future.

In Hobbes' Leviathan, he spends the opening chapters arguing that the thoughts of man are entirely dependent on his previous experiences. Humans cannot come up with anything entirely novel that is not some sort of derivative of earlier sensory perceptions. Even things like mythological creatures (like centaurs) are still a combination of known things (in this case, a man and a horse). While this is not entirely true (many neurons in your brain generate signals on their own, especially before birth and during infancy), it is quite close to the truth, in that our thoughts are linked to our environment and experiences. Some of those factors are beyond our control and also unpredictable (making the complexity of the system even greater).

Putting all of these points together, my basic conclusion about free will is that it is one of those things that largely depends upon definition, but for all practical purposes it does and ought to be treated like it exists. Saying that an absence of free will makes us deterministic automatons is an oversimplification, because determinism does not mean machine-like lack of behavioural options.