God - A topic so hackneyed on the internet that 50% of my potential readership just closed the tab. In short, science has explained so much about the universe we live in in a totally satisfactory way (despite the objections of Bill O'Reilly), that there is not any rational basis for belief in any sort of actively intervening deity. Any level of scientific literacy begins to marginalize the relevance of dogmatic religion. Personal belief systems like those held (or not!) by Spinoza or Einstein have effectively zero impact on actual day-to-day life; they behaved as if they were atheist/agnostic.With a nod to Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced spiritual beliefs are indistinguishable from atheism."
Fucking thing sucks.
Free Will - Every philosophically-inclined person is no doubt familiar with determinism - the concept that if physical laws are fixed, given one set of initial conditions, the outcome is inevitable. Obviously, in such a world, how can you will anything freely? Those clever enough to know a thing or two about quantum mechanics may seek some probabilistic "wiggle room" in the random true nature of the electron. (Note: further discussion on the implications and shortcomings of the Bell inequality would be out of place here. All in due time.).
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| This beat out an angel with a steering wheel jammed in the back of a cartoon man's head for your token "dualism" picture |
Oftentimes, "quantum mystics" pontificate mightily about an ephemeral soul affecting the wavefunction of electrons in the brain as if there is a homunculus sitting at the very top of the chain of causality leading to intentioned action. The electron guides the conformation of a neuron's GPCR, perhaps, in turn concatenating an electrochemical storm... culminating in the decision to check your e-mail for the 15th time today.
However, there is a problem. In the vein of asking "who created God?", "How does a soul make decisions?". A dualistic model of free will is, as Daniel Dennett says, "not worth wanting". You already have been blessed with a fantastic device, perhaps the most informationally complex 1.5kg lump of matter in the galaxy: the human brain. The brain is a machine built for decision making: it instantly integrates perceptual data, learned memories, emotional state, and logically reasoned needs. It then weighs them all, and produces decisions that are more or less always aimed at maximizing the genetic fitness of its owner. In short, you make all the decisions you'd want to make, anyway. You have the type of free will worth wanting.
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| This guy doesn't have the type of free will worth wanting, and he still isn't upset about it. |
The subjective feeling of volition, however, is almost certainly a post hoc rationalization - brain imaging studies confirm that decisions are made significantly before the subject can self-report reaching a decision. subjects undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation that forces a physical movement report feeling as if they themselves willed a movement.
Doing away with dualism, however, leads us to a far deeper issue simply known as The Hard Problem. In short - why consciousness? Surely, a sufficiently advanced computer could replicate all of our functions, our speech, even some of our art and science. There is no evidence that any human has performed a feat outside Turing computability, ever. However, each of us (or, at least I) lives a rich internal life - we have sensations. This subjective experience (typically referred to as qualia) cannot even be proven outside of one's own existence - it's a fundamentally solipsistic state (excepting the common evolution bit, which is the only reason I can trust it isn't exclusively zombies reading this). I believe that understanding why we have subjective experience is the most important problem facing man today - it's a topic intimately tied to philosophy, the design of artificial general intelligence, and the search for a "theory of everything".
Additional reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Evolves
http://thesciencenetwork.org/media/videos/34/Transcript.pdf (Page 9.5 to 11.5)
> subjects undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation that forces a physical movement report feeling as if they themselves willed a movement.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds fascinating, but I've spent the last half hour searching google scholar and related databases and I can't seem to find a paper about this with TMS specifically. Could you post the reference? Alternately, do you know of any direct electrical stimulation experiments with this effect?
http://thesciencenetwork.org/media/videos/34/Transcript.pdf
DeleteIt's on page 10. There's a video of this interview as well.
Thanks. I found this blog by searching for ["Rodolfo R Llinas" "Douglas Hofstadter"] so it was nice to see Llinas was the source. The specific phase of yours I was so excited about, "forced a physical movement" seems to be a little unclear or exaggerated, though. He seems to be describing biasing between a choice of motor options which are initiated by the person, not forcing the initiation of a movement which later seems self initiated.
DeleteI really recommend watching the video - my recollection is he is talking about this around 34 minutes in. If you're concerned about the implications for free will, I recommend "Freedom Evolves" by Dennett, which I reference, but it's a hard thing to give up.
Deletehttp://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/the-science-studio/enter-the-i-of-the-vortex
I think that at the lowest level you can describe it as biasing, but that's not the important bit, really. The idea is that true free will that is "initiated by volition" is a post facto rationalization constructed by higher (read: more abstracted) levels of consciousness. I think this is probably an evolutionarily advantaged illusion - the idea of agency must be present for the mind to consider simulations of possible futures, which is the fundamentally exceptional (and infinitely extensible!) part of human cognition.
You're making me feel kind of bad about never getting into the really interesting hierarchical stuff that Ben Goertzel writes about. The ideas set forth by Hofstadter in GEB and Strange Loop (I haven't read the Mind's I but I assume it's more of the same) are instructive on the recursive aspect of consciousness, and why this seems to result in complex and provably ineffable constructions. I think some neuroscience is definitely warranted to apply those conclusions to the brain and consciousness - Edelman's 'Wider than the Sky' is good, though not on nearly the same technical level as Llinas' "I of the Vortex" which I presume you've read.
I have not seen any TCDS type studies replicating this type of effect, though fMRI or PET studies tend to show similar take-home-messages in that decisions appear to be made on a physical level in the brain before one's consciousness registers that a decision has been made. See below (warning: I just googled it up so it's nonscientific)
http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-your-decisions-7-seconds-before-you-decide