Thoughts on the Consequences of Certain Neurological Experiments

There is a set of experiments that show that, when asked to do a simple task, the brain certainly seems to show that it has made its decision to do it quite a long time (several hundred milliseconds), not only before the action is carried out, but also before the person is even aware of the decision. The question that is being raised is whether this overturns the concept of free will. I have written elsewhere about free will in sermons, so I won't write it out now (though it might become the topic for a future note). Suffice it to say that I am neither a radical predestinarian nor a radical libertarian.

The key issue at stake seems to be, if our brains make decisions even before we know we have made a decision, can we really have any kind of freedom, as it would seem that all our decisions were made before we even made them. Yes, it is true that we do eventually come to make them in time, but that is no different than certain brands of philosophical and theological predestination where people end up making decisions freely, but only make the decisions that were made ahead of time for them, whether by the nature of the universe or by God.

And yet, I don't think of this as being a real threat. First, I want to discuss, briefly, some concrete issues that may bear on the situation (they may not, as I am neither a neuroscientist, or am I in particularly close dialogue with neuroscientists), then by attempting to put the whole question in a larger philosophical and scientific context.

First, and perhaps least significantly, I question whether such experiments really show the relationship between the mind and brain (which I am not attempting to posit a dualism between). For example, the textbooks for my biology and psychology classes (which, I admit, might be mistaken, as any textbook might be, in light of subsequent research) taught me that the nervous system functions in a multi-form way. Sometimes, we make conscious, voluntary decisions and sometimes, our body makes decisions for us (this was even demonstrated in Mel Brooks' film, Young Frankenstein). There are other distinctions, such as between sympathetic nervous response and parasympathetic, but we will not go into them here (not least because I do not trust my memory to speak accurately about them).

The question I would raise is whether or not simple tasks such as lifting a finger, pushing a button, and the like, might be handled in a different way than difficult reasoning and weighing of arguments. After all, where do our spontaneous reactions come from? Surely they are not innate, but are the result of multiple experiences that have taught us to respond in certain ways when certain things happen. As the father of a two year old, I can tell you that reflexes and reactions are not nearly so developed in my son as they are in myself.

The point is, it certainly seems as though we kind of "wear tracks" in our nervous system, where we make similar decisions and movements over and over again, making our reactions quicker and more confident. This is something that we can see as adults any time we learn a new skill. As a guitar player, there are chords and scales and other skills that took painful practicing to even contort my hand to do what I wanted it to do that have become second nature to me. Surely we can all recall learning to drive a car and we know that we can drive with a confidence and skill that was not only not done our first time, but was not possible until we had practiced, like any other skill. My argument is to raise the possibility that the kinds of experiments being done are too simple to really test the relation between consciousness and decision beyond simple, commonplace motions.

This is not to say that I blame the experiments for this or that this critique makes them any less useful. After all, before they were conducted, there was no evidence that there would be such a difference in time. My critique is simply pointing out where there is room and need for further research before we can make confident statements about the absence of free-will in anything worthy of that name.

Related to this, I am interested to see if there is a similar correlation when the action is not simply of the kind where we do one of two simple options "whenever you feel like it," but when the subject has to actually think through things before they make a decision. However, even if it were to show that the decision is made nearly a second before the person is aware of it, that could merely show that the body was aware of the ultimate conclusion before the person was aware of it, not that the reasoning process was independent of conscious effort. I would be interested to see if the beginning of the wrestling with a complicated issue has the same kind of "delay" in the consciousness, and whether the same "delay" applies throughout the whole process. That is, I am interested whether the entire argument and decision making process could be said to already be "contained" in the brain independently of any consciousness.

The philosophical issue at stake here, as I see it, is that of radical reductionism. Granted, nobody (or almost nobody) would say that merely looking at a reading of brainwaves is the best, or most efficient way to find out what is going on in someone's head. The real question is not whether it is desirable (in the sense that we would actually make widespread use of it) to predict behavior and thought in this way, but whether it is possible in principle. If it can be done, even if we never fully do it, it has significant philosophical implications.

This is a step back into the old, in my opinion, false ideal of Pierre Simon de LaPlace, who argued that there was no reason to have any external "hypotheses" (or theoretical constructions) to explain the behavior of anything in the universe, and especially had no need of that hypothesis, God (this is a reference to Newton, who said that he "framed no hypotheses" in his explanation of classical physics. LaPlace's statement affirmed that Newton actually did have hypotheses that he may or may not have been aware of). Ultimately, the claim was made that, if we were to know every piece of relevant information throughout the whole universe, we could not only predict the events of the universe forward to infinity, but also backward to infinity. The fact that this was in practice impossible did not hinder the claiming that it was possible in principle. This LaPlacean ideal has been largely abandoned by scientists but is still held on to by some though I only seem to hear about it in neuroscience. It is as if reductionist determinism is on its last legs and is holding out in this one last discipline, hoping that it will vindicate their claims, even if it has to take the form that the universe is not deterministic but our knowing of it is (This bears a remarkable resemblance to Kant's taking of absolute time and space, as well as other concepts, from being objective in the external world, to being a priori constructs of the human mind).

(It should be noted that LaPlace lived in a time before the Big Bang theory. He believed in an infinite, eternal universe that has always existed and always will exist. To apply the LaPlacean ideal to the modern understanding of a "finite but unbounded universe" (to use an Einsteinian term) would have to be able to predict backwards to the Big Bang, and, given only the initial conditions of the universe, should be able to predict, to the millisecond, when the Big Bang would have occurred. It seems to me, though I am not competent to judge with any authority, that this would not be possible in principle, but if it was, it would be the most darling discovery of such reductionistic deterministic scientists.)

It seems to me that this whole endeavor (much like the LaPlacean ideal), aims to make the relation between our neurological processes (or natural processes) effectively isomorphic to axiomatic mathematics, such as Euclidean Geometry, to give a familiar example. Just as the whole apparatus of Euclidean Geometry is effectively "contained" within the first five postulates, such a view of the brain or nature is "contained" in the initial conditions of the brain (or nature). At this point, the connections are not merely ontological (that they are what they are, simply because they are), but are logical, connected in an unbroken system of cause and effect (the only difference between such a system and a rigid system of mathematical logic is there is a time element that cannot be discarded in the former which can in the latter).

If this were the case, it would actually destroy empirical science as we know it, for nature (or the processes of the brain) would not actually need to be investigated anew in new situations, but simply analyzed on paper. The moment we really understand a single moment in the life of the brain, we could calculate both forwards and backwards, every thought, every decision, every action made by the individual, with such accuracy that it could be used in a court of law to flawlessly determine whether someone had actually committed a crime, or even whether they would commit one in the future. This is the case because volition no longer plays a role, but only internal and external conditions, all of which can be made with calculations as precise as you which (within ε of an arbitrarily chosen value, to use a concept from analysis). Such a move would ultimately remove natural science from being an investigatory discipline to being nothing more than mathematical manipulation. It is precisely because science does not actually believe that it is possible, and certainly not practical, that we do not engage in scientific inquiry in this way.