“Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will”
George Dvorsky, io9.com, 1/14/13

As the early results of scientific brain experiments are showing, our minds appear to be making decisions before we're actually aware of them — and at times by a significant degree.… 

They had no choice but to conclude that the unconscious mind was initiating a freely voluntary act — a wholly unexpected and counterintuitive observation.

One never knows how accurate reporting is. If this report is true, it is truly shocking, but not for the reasons the reporter thinks. The shocking part is that, according to the reporter, the scientists who noticed this phenomenon—our brains working before we know it—found it a “a wholly unexpected and counterintuitive observation.” Really? What were they expecting? And “counterintuitive”? Whose intuition are we talking about?

Oh, I get it, the researchers were religious; they believe in free will. No wonder. They must have thought that god gave us an extra mental power that he skipped giving the rest of the living things: free will. Gee, what is free will? No one, it will be noted, has ever presented any evidence for free will, much less a definition, although we’re now getting evidence that there isn’t any. Trust me, if you don’t believe in free will, it’s intuitive that researchers will confirm such.

Free Will Versus Instinct

Believing in free will is akin to believing in god, except that I can understand god, while free will eludes me. Where I get lost is at the beginning; I can’t see a difference between free will and any other kind of will. Will meaning “choice,” not, say, the “will to succeed.” But choice. How are there two kinds of choice? Either one has a choice or one doesn’t. If one has a choice, one has the option of making said choice. One is always equally free to choose either of two options. The consequences may be radically different, but one is always free to make the choice. There isn’t, though, room for but one kind of choice; if there’s another, I haven’t run across it yet.

The term “free choice,” though, implies that there are at least two kinds of choice, right? Free and not free. The implication is that there are fundamentally different kinds of choices available, one which one is compelled to make, and another which one is free to choose anyway he or she likes. We tend to think of this latter kind of choice as, if not uniquely human, then confined to the larger animals. Primates, maybe. Don’t know about dolphins. The implication is that this kind of choice appeared somewhere along the evolutionary line; that prior to the appearance of such kind of choice, there was only instinct, which, everyone agrees, is no choice at all. We pride ourselves on not being instinctual, on being able to think for ourselves, to make good and bad decisions.

We are, perhaps, a bit prideful.

The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that it’s unexplained from whence this new manner of thinking comes. And how it works differently from other manners of choice. How there can be two methods of making choices has not been approached by the philosophers, much less by the neuroscientists. It seems mixed up with the notion of consciousness and self-consciousness; the difference between them isn’t clear either.

Fundamentally, the simplest living organism possible has to be able to find food, recognize it as distinct from non-food, and decide to process it. At its most basic level, finding and recognizing food is akin to deciding to process it. Still, the organism has to know how to position its body in order to process the food it has found. It has to have a sense of where its body is and where it isn’t, and it has to have a sense of how to move its body to another place. Conscious or self-conscious? You can call it what you will; regardless, it has to be conscious of itself and its surroundings in order to survive. Every living thing has the same requirement. Every.

So, how does this little, primitive, one-celled critter go about processing the signals it receives from its environment; and how does it communicate within itself? Chemistry and electricity, right? Nothing but. Chemical signals and electric currents transmit all the information the cell needs. What’s more, when two cells decided to get together and become a multi-celled critter, they retained the same methods of communication: chemicals and electricity. In fact, no matter how many cells clump together to make no matter how big a critter—a redwood or a whale—the communication channels never change: chemistry, electricity.

It’s not that these were the best channels available to living things out of which to build communications platforms, it’s that they’re the only channels available. Gravity, for example, doesn’t work well as a communications devise. Yet messages can only be sent using the materials at hand. Chemicals make good triggers; electricity is fast.

But as we noted, once that one-celled critter found something to eat, its triggers said “eat,” and the processing process began. The choice to eat was automatic. But it was a choice; theoretically, the critter could eat or not eat.

How the critter made the choice to eat was because it operated with an algorithm (paradigm/software/criteria) that said when triggers X, Y, and Z fire, swallow that puppy.

As the critters (I call them “critters” to lump together all living things, animal or vegetable) get larger and competition appears and predators appear, the algorithms become more and more complex. They evolve. Yet, the mechanisms of communication between the various cells and the ruling algorithms remain the same: chemistry and electricity. Even when you get to people, the only way the various parts of the body communicate with each other is through chemical signals and electrical charges. There is, fortunately or unfortunately, nothing that Mother Nature can add to the mix.

Needless-to-say, when sex was invented, the algorithms became hopelessly complex. Understandably so, though, given the kinds and complexity of sense and response organs. Choice and decisions, necessarily, must be made virtually instantaneously, especially as mobility and predation increase. The algorithms have to be acted upon sans debate.

In the end, all living things possess the same three things: sensors, output terminals, and CPUs. They can read the environment; they can interact with the environment; and they have a pile of software to work out the details and coordinate things. The bacterium has these. You have these. The bacterium uses those three capacities to find and consume food; we do too. (We also use them to facilitate DNA mixing.) In both the bacterium and us, all the interior communication is done by the same chemical/electrical routes; nothing new has been added to the mix. The signals that make the dog’s mouth move when it barks or our mouths move when we speak, are made and processed the same way. Neither us nor the dog, of course, is aware of the millions of interactions required for every bark, every word. What could awareness of that even be like? (Zen masters and LSD aficionados?)

As you can imagine, this has profound implications as to where another form of choice could come from. So far, we can only envision a mechanical, albeit highly complex, method of functioning. Essentially, we have only instinct at this point in the discussion; there is no place for anything else. Even thought, no matter how complex and self-reflexive it seems, has, at this juncture, only a mechanistic explanation, an instinctual explanation. No other explanation—other than God—has been put forward. Where would thought come from if not from a complex function of our CPUs? How is my song any less instinct that that of the nightingale?

In the end, it appears we don’t even have a definition for “will,” much less “free will.” (We carry this problem with us when we think about computers; we worry about when they’re going to be able to spontaneously write and install their own software without wondering where the computer’s existing software would generate that idea within itself; we think that at some point “will” will arrive as if the computers will be touched by the finger of god and become alive; and that being alive will be a fundamental change for the computer. We speak of the “singularity” as if a magical transformation will appear at a point in the future when machines become “alive.” We have faith that we can create life by software, if not by electro-chemistry.)

Ah, people; we’re so cocksure.

Guilty As Charged

The attacker of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killer of six, Jared Loughner, was sentenced to life imprisonment today. The judge commented that this was only the finalization of the legal proceedings, the emotions would, perhaps, never heal. Juxtapose this alongside the Anders Breivik verdict in Norway where Breivik killed seventy-seven people. He was found guilty, as well. For reasons I find inexplicable, it was important for the Norwegians to find him guilty rather than insane.

Their cases are extreme, but they highlight the problems of dealing with crime; beginning, of course, with the very definition of crime. Suffice it to say that crime is not a fixed commodity unassailable and invariable from society to society, but rather a consensual process of a people or a polity. Crime in a totalitarian state is very different from crime in a tribal society. What one does about crime differs widely depending on where one places the origins of crime and what one wants to accomplish when dealing with crime and criminals.

For sake of argument, let’s define “crime” as an infraction of the Basic Rule, aka the Golden Rule: someone does something to someone that that person didn’t want done to them. Simple enough, if difficult to translate into practicality. A crime is an injury to another person (which, by extension, covers the environment). Despite the complexities of the law, we all have a basic understand of right and wrong within the context of our culture. We are born with an innate sense of right and wrong, which is shaped by our environment.

I’m not here to argue, today, about what constitutes a crime, though; I’m more concerned with how we react to crime as a culture, as a people. The first thing to be decided is what one (or we) wants to accomplish when confronting crime and its perpetrators. The simplest desire and the route we have chosen for the most part is revenge, punishment. Crime is seen as an individual decision and that one should suffer commensurate with one’s offense. Or more or less, depending on one’s station in life. It’s most clearly expressed in the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth philosophy. It’s easy to understand and satisfies that longing for revenge, for getting even. And since one can’t get even with one’s boss or the policeman or the bureaucrat, one can at least send some bastard to the hole for life. Take that, you scoundrel!

If you’ve been wronged, wanting pay-back is easy to fathom.

But one might have other goals. If the crime didn’t happen to you, getting even might not be so important. Revenge might not be as important as protection. “I’m sorry that it happened to you, but I don’t want it to happen to me. In fact, I’m more concerned with it not happening to me than I am with your getting revenge.”

That’s a whole different ball game, focusing on protecting one’s self against crime, rather than on punishing the criminal. If one looks at crime as a problem to be solved, not a behavior to be punished, one will approach it entirely differently.

To be sure, the reigning paradigm for all history has been that people should be punished, not only for their transgressions, but to scare the shit out of them so they won’t do it again. Setting aside whether or not people should be punished for their sins, the question is begged, is the scaring the shit out of people effective? One could ask that in the larger scale; since crime has historically gone down through the centuries, does that mean people are more frightened of punishment now, or did crime go down for other reasons? It doesn’t seem that the punishments of today are particularly worse than the punishments of, say a thousand years ago; and, if what I read of how they did things in those days is true, then things, water-boarding excepted, etc., are better today than the rack or burning by fire, etc. Besides that, I think they’ve done more than enough studies to understand that crime and punishment aren’t as interdependent as one would think. Other than punishment creates crime; this they know. If one wants to create a criminal class, America has written the textbook on how to do it. Punishment is not such a good deterrent but it’s an effective generator of crime.

This is where the dilemma of dealing with criminals comes in: how much crime is one willing to suffer to be able to extract revenge? How important to one is the ability to extract revenge? This is not a trivial question, because every degree of punishment that society metes out is returned ten-fold. Vengeance is very expensive. Punishment has an enormous trickle-down effect.

Ultimately, how one deals with crime revolves around the arcane and oft misunderstood subject of freewill: whether one subscribes to it or not. In simple form, it says that, if there is freewill, punishment is morally acceptable, even if not effective: it satisfies moral indignation. On the other hand, if there’s not freewill, punishment will never be successful in the long run nor effective in the short. Furthermore, it finds punishment immoral. (How can one be punished for something over which they have no control?)

The question of freewill hinges on how one understands the thinking process to take place. One school claims that all thinking is done on a subconscious level not currently available to human understanding. The other school, well, the other school doesn’t know how thinking actually works, but they’re quite sure they do it.

(Sam Harris has an interesting exercise he likes to do with audiences to explain the subconscious nature of thought. He asks everyone to imagine some famous person in their mind. Got one? Good. Then he asks, why that person? Why did you think of that person, rather than someone else? How did you decide which image to draw up from your memory bank?)

The trap people fall into is conflating words with thinking. Because much of thinking is translated into words, we tend to think that the arrival of words in our consciousness is the result of conscious choice, as if we looked at all the synonyms and chose the one closest to our needs, rather than simply grasping the first word to come out of the air. If we had to actually choose the words that make up our sentences by selecting them one-by-one from known vocabulary lists, we’d never be able to talk and thinking would take forever. Thinking, like talking, is done without conscious intervention. When one sits around scratching one’s head waiting for an answer, that’s exactly what one is doing, waiting for an answer; and the answer, when it comes, simply pops into one’s head without warning. Where was the thinking? Deep, deep down where only elves can see it. Not us.

And should you wonder, I’d argue that all creatures think, words or not. I’d also argue that none of us knows how we do it.

Breivik and Loughner, are they guilty? They certainly did what they were accused of. Were they insane? That’s as sticky a wicket as any other, what’s “insane”? Their actions certainly weren’t helpful and they definitely contradicted the Basic Rule and they probably need careful monitoring for the rest of their lives, but I wouldn’t spend a lot of time arguing about definitions. I’d get right on to the practical questions of how to house, feed, and make use of them for the rest of their born days. But vengeance? I’d give that a pass. Too expensive and doesn’t work. And, you know, it doesn’t even feel that good.