05/02/2010 by admin.

The question of freewill is an endless philosophical argument. Are our actions completely predetermined or completely free? Each side has painted the other into an impossible corner. I want to forget this argument and just try to understand how we actually act. When we understand how we act then both sides will say, ’see I told you so!’, and their disagreement will continue. This is because it is fairly predictable that we will find that decisions between courses of action actually are made and on the other hand those decisions have non-random causes. Thus the decisions are both freely made and causally determined.

The place to start is to get rid of dualism. We each have one brain and the functioning (perception, cognition, motor control, memory etc.) of that one brain gives us one mind. That brain creates a model of the world and a model of ourselves in that world. An edited version of that model is created for memory storage, sharing and perhaps other functions. The sharing of this version of the model is what we call consciousness. So lets suppose we have one brain, one mind, one model, one consciousness.

Next let us think about different kinds of decisions. There are decisions that are made without any part of the cognition entering consciousness. They ‘pop’ into consciousness fully decided. Then there are decisions where portions of the cognition enter consciousness. Why the difference? The decision may take longer; it may require sharing within the brain of the conscious kind; it may require memory and predictive modeling using the mental apparatus of consciousness; it may require a particular use of working memory or attention; or perhaps something else. Whatever the reason, we are not ‘making a conscious decision’, we are simply conscious of parts of the decision process as they are modeled by the mind for conscious awareness.

To the extent that our brain/mind recognizes action options, it is free to make decisions between them. To the extent that our brain/mind is a material biological system, its actions have causes. Before a decision is made it is impossible to calculate what the decision with be (just too big a calculation to accomplish in this universe). After the decision is made it is impossible to imagine it as outside causality less you want to introduce magic or the supernatural. This is simply how it is with extremely complex but material systems – you have both freedom and determinism.

The question we should ask about our decisions is not whether they are free or not. We should ask whether they are appropriate and relevant to the situation. Whether they are good decisions.

Here is the abstract from a paper by R. Baumeister, Free Will in Scientific Psychology (here):

Some actions are freer than others, and the difference is palpably important in terms of inner process, subjective perception, and social consequences. Psychology can study the difference between freer and less free actions without making dubious metaphysical commitments. Human evolution seems to have created a relatively new, more complex form of action control that corresponds to popular notions of free will. It is marked by self-control and rational choice, both of which are highly adaptive, especially for functioning within culture. The processes that create these forms of free will may be biologically costly and therefore are only used occasionally, so that people are likely to remain only incompletely self-disciplined, virtuous, and rational.

I would use different words and ideas but he is trying to get past the old and sterile argument of freewill vs determinism.

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30/01/2010 by admin.

A report in Science, Movement Intention after Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans, by M. Desnurget and others, has the following summary:

Parietal and premotor cortex regions are serious contenders for bringing motor intentions and motor responses into awareness. We used electrical stimulation in seven patients undergoing awake brain surgery. Stimulating the right inferior parietal regions triggered a strong intention and desire to move the contralateral hand, arm, or foot, whereas stimulating the left inferior parietal region provoked the intention to move the lips and to talk. When stimulation intensity was increased in parietal areas, participants believed they had really performed these movements, although no electromyographic activity was detected. Stimulation of the premotor region triggered overt mouth and contralateral limb movements. Yet, patients firmly denied that they had moved. Conscious intention and motor awareness thus arise from increased parietal activity before movement execution.

So the parietal region is involved in the conscious experience of intention and desire to move (ie the will to move) and the conscious experience of having moved. It is not involved in the movement itself. On the other hand, the premotor region is involved in the movement’s execution but not the the conscious experience of the movement.

The key here may be that the construction of conscious experience is a projection in time of that will be happening later, at the time of the experience. The construction process would therefore need to have access to motor programs that are being created (or even considered) so as to predict and project the sensory effect of the action before it has occurred.

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25/11/2009 by admin.

Anthropology.net has (here) a part of a discussion with Michael Gazzaniga. This bit is about responsibility.

“I did want to come back to the one point on the free will thing because I just think it’s a kind of a red herring. People talk about free will, you should return the question and say free from what, what are you talking about?

I mean what we all are, are information gathering organisms that have learned through a life’s experience what to do, what not to do, what’s good, what’s bad, does this payoff versus that payoff? And when a new situation presents itself we call upon our knowledge of the world from past experience to decide what to do. And that decision goes on through mechanisms of the brain, and once the brain decides, based on all your past experience, to do something, you want it to do it right. It’s not clear to me what free will means in that way of knowing that we have all these automatic processes that are going on in the brain that we’ve trained through time.

I think how you think about it is that personal responsibility, which is a key concept in our culture, is alive and well because it really isn’t in your brain, it’s in the social rules of a group. So think of it this way, if you’re the only person in the world, the concept of personal responsibility means nothing. Who are you responsible to? If there are two people to six billion, all of a sudden the rules develop. If we are going to socially interact, which is crucial for the human condition, we are going to have these rules. Almost everybody—you’d have to be extremely neurologically compromised—almost everybody can follow a rule.”

What excellent good sense!! Stop worrying about whether our decisions are free and start worrying about whether they are appropriate.

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04/11/2009 by admin.

E. Morsella’s theory (here) continued from the last post:

…it is no longer useful to claim that conscious processes are simply more complex, controllable, planned, decision-like, or action-like than unconscious ones. Nor is it useful to propose, as suggested by the integration hypothesis, that unconscious processes are incapable of integrating different kinds of information, for … various kinds of interactions can occur unconsciously. Why can interactions occur unconsciously for the ventriloquism effect, binocular rivalry, the McGurk effect, and the other phenomena … but not for conflicts involving tissue damage, air intake, or consummatory behavior? As explained in the theory presented below, it is because the latter conflicts require information-processing structures having different, high-level concerns, an anthropomorphic term that warrants a precise definition.

…what distinguishes conscious from unconscious concerns reflects not the nature of the sensory afference, predictive capacity, or memory demands involved, but rather the nature of the effectors involved: A common property of the response tendencies presented is that they can all be realized in terms of skeletal muscles plans… supramodular response systems are unique in that their outputs may potentially conflict with each other regarding skeletal muscle plans. …phenomenal states cull simultaneously activated response tendencies to yeild a single, adaptive skeleomotor action… in evolutionary terms, conscious processes served to mediate large-scale skeletomotor conflicts caused by structures in the brain with different agendas, behavioral tendencies and phylogenetic origins… This view is consistent with Lashley’s provocative statement that ‘no activity of mind is ever conscious’ meaning that one is aware only of the products of cognitive processes, not of the processes themselves.

Consciousness in this theory is the way that those ‘products of cognitive processes’ can be melded together into single actions rather than competing ones. Although the predictive nature of consciousness is not mentioned by Morsella, it fits nicely with his theory.

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17/10/2009 by admin.

I have been confused by the way or ways the brain has to make value judgments. Mindblog (here) has pointed to the abstract of a paper by de Brujin and others:

For social beings like humans, detecting one’s own and others’ errors is essential for efficient goal-directed behavior. Although one’s own errors are always negative events, errors from other persons may be negative or positive depending on the social context. We used neuroimaging to disentangle brain activations related to error and reward processing, by manipulating the social context (cooperation or competition). Activation in posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) was increased for all errors, independent of who made the error or the reward outcome. Conversely, activity in striatum was modulated by reward, independent of whether the action was erroneous or not. The results demonstrate a clear distinction between error and reward processing in the human brain. Importantly, the current study indicates that error detection in pMFC is independent of reward and generalizes beyond our own actions, highlighting its role in optimizing performance in both individual and joint action.

That is a lot less confusing.

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08/10/2009 by admin.

ScienceDaily reported (here) on a study by E. Morsella, The Essence of Conscious Conflict: Subjective Effects of Sustaining Incompatible Intentions.

“The results demonstrated that merely preparing to perform an incompatible action, for example preparing to move simultaneously left and right, triggered stronger changes in awareness than preparing to perform a compatible action or experiencing a conflict that does not engage the muscles that move our bodies.”

Projecting our actions into the near future would be a good way to identify impossible combinations of actions. Heightened awareness of these conflicts would highlight the problems. Morsella proposes a theory which predicts that the primary role of consciousness is to bring together competing demands on skeletal muscle.

“If the brain is like a set of computers that control different tasks, consciousness is the Wi-Fi network that allows different parts of the brain to talk to each other and decide which action ‘wins’ and is carried out… The study finds that we are only aware of competing actions that involve skeletal muscles that voluntarily move parts of the body, the bicep for example, rather than the muscles in the digestive tract or the iris of the eye….The results give credence to an interesting idea that ‘thinking is for doing,’ a framework psychologists are using to explore the link among consciousness, perception and action.”

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29/09/2009 by admin.

Hindsight is too late and prediction is not very accurate – such is life. During my life (and I assume most everyone’s) there are times when I would just like to go back in time and do things differently. I have not seen obvious dangers; I have not seen clear advantages; I have misjudged people; I have been thoughtless; I have not lived up to my values and so on. We all know the feeling of regret, chagrin, disappointment in ourselves or even, more seriously, shame or guilt. We rue the day. This does not happen that often for me (and I hope for you), but it does happen.

Once events happen there are only limited things that can be done to correct mistakes. Once these are done, then what? Learning from those regretful events is the thing that most successfully relieves the guilt. After learning, I am after all, not the same person and will not make the same error, at least in the same way. I am an improved version of myself and can feel good about that.

The method I use, I call mind maintenance. It goes like this:

• recognize that something has happened that I don’t want to happen again and figure out exactly what it is about the event that must be avoided,

• go though the things that happened leading up to what needs to be avoided and figure out exactly how to recognize what is coming and when is the last/clearest/easiest point where I could have done something different and escaped ‘the inevitable’,

• figure out how I would have to change my general views in order to make this change in behavior a natural thing rather than an isolated ’strict rule’ by dealing with my assumptions, prejudices, ignorances, and so on.

Today this sounds a bit like do-it-yourself life skills consulting or do-it-yourself cognitive therapy, but when I developed it for myself (in the ’50s before either was around), I thought of it as just being very honest with myself and using my intelligent to do mind maintenance.

I do not feel that I have ‘Free Will’ in the capital letter sense. But I certainly do not feel helpless or unable to make decisions or without any control over how I live my life. In fact, the helplessness is often found in people who do believe in capital letter ‘Free Will’.

So when I hear someone say something like, “I can’t help it, the anger just bubbles up in me when I see x”, I am disturbed. This is usually someone who believes they have Free Will. Because they did not consciously decide to be angry, they don’t feel any responsibility for the anger and they don’t see any way to avoid anger bubbling up – unless something is conscious, they do not feel any control. Good maintenance would be to examine whether they want to be angry when they see x and whether their attitude to x is what they want. They can either take responsibility for their anger and approve of it, or they can get rid of it because it is inappropriate. Furthermore, this does not have to be all done with conscious awareness, as the best revelations often come when asleep. Some conscious awareness is needed in order to remember and learn, but not in order to think about a way out of a problem and make decisions.

It is a fact, that whether they believe they are responsible or not, everyone else is judging them by their actions. Everyone else believes that their anger indicates how they think about x. If having people judge them by their anger is not what they want, then it is time to learn how to do a bit of mind maintenance.

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13/07/2009 by admin.

It seems that we are prone to a particular simplification in analyzing the behavior of others and of ourselves. When someone does something differently than we would, our immediate explanation is of the ’stupid – lazy – or - evil’ type. When we are confronted by having done something differently than others would have, our immediate explanation is almost never ’stupid – lazy – or - evil’ and often the exact opposite – we thought long a hard about it. Now, most of us know that we are not smarter, more conscientious, and more moral than absolutely everyone else we meet. Either we are deluding ourselves or underestimating others or both on a fairly regular basis.

I remember first thinking about this years ago when I read someone talking about anthropology and how it is a good idea to assume that everyone does what they do for perfectly rational reasons. If you don’t make that assumption, you are not going to be able to understand strange cultures. I was really blown away by that thought. And I used it. When someone surprised me with their actions, I just assumed they had a good reason but I usually didn’t think about what the reason might be unless I was very curious. What started to happen was that a third person would be somewhat exasperated by the strange behaviour and say, “Why did they do that?” Quite often a plausible reason would jump into my head and I would supply it. “Oh, they probably did it because of x.” The whole thing would be a little magical.

Then I learned that in experiments with split-brained subjects, the speaking left hemisphere would make up reasons for the (to it) strange behaviour of the non-speaking right hemisphere. The left hemisphere appeared to be unaware that it was guessing the motivation of the right. I also learned that people doing inappropriate things under hypnotic suggestion would give plausible explanations when asked why they had done those things. This seemed essentially the same trick as my ‘everyone is rational’ one.

There also is a trickle of evidence that our knowledge of our own motivation can be faulty and that we are pretty good at fabricating justification when necessary.

So now comes the realization that we treat ourselves like I have learned to treat others. We just assumed that we are rational (and not stupid-lazy-evil) and then went a motivation is needed, we guess. And given that we are pretty good at this guessing, we are usually right enough. It is when this mechanism is used in unusual circumstances (like hypnosis) or applied to another’s mind, that we can see that it is just a mechanism for making guesses. Nice trick!

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20/05/2009 by admin.

More following my posting, Odd result. Mindblog also posted on this research. (here). The picture painted is as follows:

First: We prepare commands for a voluntary action. This is done in the pre-motor cortex for actions that are reactions to external stimuli and the pre-supplementary motor cortex for ‘intentional’ actions. These commands are signaled to the motor cortex.

Second: The motor cortex executes the commands.

Third: Both the pre-supplementary motor cortex and the motor cortex sent signals to the parietal cortex, where the sensory consequences of the motor command is predicted. The pre-supplementary motor cortex signal give the sense of an urge to move. The motor cortex signal is used to create a prediction in the parietal cortex, the very near future projection of the movement in enters consciousness.

Normally, the conscious experience would be of a movement preceded or not by a sense of an urge to move.

However under the experimental conditions. If the movement is produced by direct stimulation of the motor cortex in a way that bypasses the signals to the parietal cortex – the movement happens but there is no consciousness of it as the prediction is not made. If the parietal cortex is stimulated directly than the urge and/or the movement are made conscious without the movement actually happening.

So the result is not so odd after all.

The question of how free is free-will now is a question of the difference between the way that the pre-motor cortex and the pre-supplementary motor cortex initiate the creation of a motor command.

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18/03/2009 by admin.

Let us do a little thought experiment.

I am walking down a street that I do not know and a come to a T where I must go either left or right. I look both ways and see no particular difference in the streets: the same types of buildings, same width of street, same density of traffic and pedestrians. Which way to go?

I decide that this is a good time to examine free will. I will decide which way to go with just an act of will without deliberation – there being nothing I can see to deliberate about. I go left.

A little way down the leftward street, there is a fault in the sidewalk pavement and I trip, fall and hurt myself. What immediately goes through my mind? Why did I turn left? I am no longer interested in the freedom of my decision. I want to know the reasons for choosing left over right so that I may be able to avoid dangerous situations in the future. I now will regret my game of mentally flipping a coin if I can see any way I might have foreseen an advantage to right or a disadvantage to left.

When a decision becomes important rather than trivial, then we suddenly are more interested in finding the appropriate answer rather than the free one. Then cause and effect becomes very important.

When I made that choice to go left, I could also have thought to myself (once the decision was made) that it was not a choice at all but predestined. I was bound to make that decision. But when I fall, I forget my ruminations on my lack of choice. I want knowledge of why I make that decision so that I can do better at the next T in my life.

Neither the idea of predestination or of free will is very useful to us. What we want is to understand, nurture and use our decision making processes so that we make good choices. We actually don’t care whether our actions are pre-determined because we cannot use that idea to bypass actually making the decision to act in some way. We actually have to make the decision in order to know what choice it was that was unavoidable.

We want our decisions to be in our short and long term self-interest plus legal and moral. Where those criteria conflict, we want to best compromise in keeping with our situation and our values. When it matters, we judge ourselves on the quality of our decisions – they give us pride and self-satisfaction or guilt and shame. Even if there is complete pre-destination and no free will, we feel responsibility for our actions and this feeling is not illogical.

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