[Metacomment: The article I'm about to link to here sort of suggests that even by giving you a narrative of events leading to this new topic, I am merely constructing a back narrative to an action that a whole slew of unconscious forces set in action, but so be it....So...]
So far as I am consciously aware, this thread was inspired, most immediately, by this portion of a discussion in "Books" about Cormac McCarthy, reading patterns and "free will". Matt's Cinna Buns' comment that I seemed to believe there was no free will led me to say, and I'll quote for those of you too lazy to link:
I don't think we have nearly as much free will as we've been trained to believe, and, as this (restricted) New York Times article suggests, many scientists suspect this is true as well.
Here's a longish couple of snippets since that link prolly won't work for you:
A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.
As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place. . . .
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, ''Free will does exist, but it's a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.
''The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don't have it,'' he said....
and
In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.
Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.
The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.
In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.
Dr. Libet's results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions. . . .
But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot. Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.
and, in conclusion,
So what about Hitler?
The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that ''people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets.'' Anything would go.
Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: ''We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn't it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?''
He added, ''A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they've done might be a good thing.''
Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people's lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.
''It's an illusion, but it's a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,'' he said, comparing it to a magician's trick that has been seen again and again. ''Even though you know it's a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don't go away.''
In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, ''The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.''
Which is pretty much where I fall: of course you and I have some limited choices. But don't exaggerate your freedom, be aware of your limitations, and then Make Your Actions fucking count! And when someone suggests that maybe you're not in as much control over your own decisions as you'd like to believe, pause and think: they're probably right. And if they're saying sexism and racism might be at work behind your actions, don't look at them like they're being ridiculous. Of course you're not going to be fully consciously aware of sexism and racism in your unconscious, shaping your decisions. None of us are aware of our unconscious. But we can become more aware, and we can be more skeptical of ourselves and the stories we tell ourselves about our selves.
One snippet from the article I didn't quote over in books that seems more relevant here:
Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such ''freedom.'' Their arguments partly turn on the extent to which collections of things, whether electrons or people, can transcend their origins and produce novel phenomena.
These so-called emergent phenomena, like brains and stock markets, or the idea of democracy, grow naturally in accordance with the laws of physics, so the story goes. But once they are here, they play by new rules, and can even act on their constituents, as when an artist envisions a teapot and then sculpts it -- a concept sometimes known as ''downward causation.'' A knowledge of quarks is no help in predicting hurricanes -- it's physics all the way down. But does the same apply to the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because we can't solve the equations or because something fundamentally new happens when we increase numbers and levels of complexity?
Opinions vary about whether it will ultimately prove to be physics all the way down, total independence from physics, or some shade in between, and thus how free we are. Dr. Silberstein, the Elizabethtown College professor, said, ''There's nothing in fundamental physics by itself that tells us we can't have such emergent properties when we get to different levels of complexities.''
He waxed poetically as he imagined how the universe would evolve, with more and more complicated forms emerging from primordial quantum muck as from an elaborate computer game, in accordance with a few simple rules: ''If you understand, you ought to be awestruck, you ought to be bowled over.''
George R. F. Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, said that freedom could emerge from this framework as well. ''A nuclear bomb, for example, proceeds to detonate according to the laws of nuclear physics,'' he explained in an e-mail message. ''Whether it does indeed detonate is determined by political and ethical considerations, which are of a completely different order.''
I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not liberating. But I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic perpetual motion machine. Free wills, ideas, phenomena created by physics but not accountable to it. Do they offer a release from the chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very intricate weave of the links?And so I sought clarity from mathematicians and computer scientists. According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will.
If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer's operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, ''If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say 'I don't know, wait and see, and I'll make decisions and let you know.' ''
Why can't computers say what they're going to do? In 1930, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that in any formal system of logic, which includes mathematics and a kind of idealized computer called a Turing machine, there are statements that cannot be proven either true or false. Among them are self-referential statements like the famous paradox stated by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the truth, then, as a Cretan, he is lying.
One implication is that no system can contain a complete representation of itself, or as Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University and author of the 2006 novel about Gödel, ''A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,'' said: ''Gödel says you can't program intelligence as complex as yourself. But you can let it evolve. A complex machine would still suffer from the illusion of free will.''
...and there's more on this issue.
I'd like to hear what lab. readers, have to say about the reporting of this science stuff, because I found the reporting pretty compelling, which makes me, as usual, wonder if I'm asking the right questions of it...
[As usual, I'm happy to PM to anyone who asks for it a copy of the article, which was first published in the NY Times Magazine on January 2, 2007.] |
