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Freewill 4Further papers, articles and books relevant to freewill 1.) Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will - Eds. Baer, J., Kaufman, J. & Baumeister, R. - General review of book containing a number of useful chapters. 2.) Self-Theories: The Construction of Free Will - Carol Dweck & Daniel Molden - Studies superior performance of students who think that their will can influence their academic performance. 3.) Reconstrual "Free Will" from the agentic perspective of social cognitive theory - Albert Bandura - Criticises the methodology of classic studies forming the basis of mainstream rejection of the concept of goodwill. 4.) Free Will is Un-Natural - John Bargh - Tends to ignore consciousness in discussing freewill and tends towards a revival of behaviorism 5.) Making up the Mind - Chris Frith - Argues that freewill is adaptive but also an illusion 6.) Some observations on the psychology of thinking about freewill - Daniel Dennett 7.) The reason I chose that one is - Lars Hall & Petter Johnansson - Oblique attack on freewill via study of confabulation 8.) Mental causation after Libet and Soon: Reclaiming conscious agency - Alexander Batthyany - Argues against the claim that Libet and Soon experiments refute freewill. 1.) Are We Free? Psychology and Freewill Eds. Baer, J., Kaufman, J. & Baumeister, R. Oxford UNiversity Press ISBN 978-0-19-518963-6 This book provides an excellent juxtaposition of the mainstream view of a deterministic brain function meaning that freewill is an illusion, as expounded here by leading figures in the field such as Dennett, Wegner, Bargh and Pinker, and various dissident views. The mainstream pieces have all the familiar arguments, but it is useful to hear the other voices, which are seldom heard in serious academic writing. Roy Baumeister argues that determinists do not just have to prove that some actions are determined, but that all actions are determined. He also claims evidence that both the suppression of initial impulses and logical choices between options are energy-consuming processes, and therefore able to have an influence on the rest of the world. Shaun Nichols puts forward evidence that non-deterministic assumptions are hard-wired into the brain. Albert Bandura criticises the methodology/limited scope of studies by Nisbett & Wilson, Libet and Wegner that are central to the determinist argument. Carol Dweck reports on studies showing the superior academic performance of students, who beleive they can improve their performance, compared to those who believe that their ability at the beginning of the course is a fixed constraint. Overall, this book allows the reader a balanced view of an important argument that is central to the nature of human consciousness and behaviour, the outcome of which may have an important influence on the long-term development of society. 2.) Self-Theories: The Construction of Free Will Carol Dweck & Daniel Molden In: Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will Eds. Baer, J., Kaufman, J. & Baumeister, R. The authors divide peoples’ attitudes to their control over their affairs and ability to control their environment into two categories. People with an ‘entity theory’ have the view that personal attributes, such as personality and intelligence, are fixed and not subject to personal development. People with an ‘incremental theory’ think that their abilities can be developed through their own efforts (1. Dweck, 1999, 2. Dweck & Leggett, 1988). Studies suggest that incremental theorist do better than entity theorists in their personal development (3. Dweck & Molden, 2005, 4. Molden & Dweck). Entity theorists tend to withdraw effort and avoid tasks once they have failed. Incremental theorists attempt an improved approach to the problem task. In a study (5. Blackwell et al, 2007) entity and incremental theorists who started a high school maths course with the same standards soon showed a situation where the incrementalists pulled ahead, with the gap continuing to widen over the duration of the course. This distinction was related to the incrementalists willingness to renew efforts after a setback. A further study (6. Robins and Pals, 2002) showed that during their college years, entity theorists had a steady decline in their feeling of self-worth, relative to incremental theorists. A further study (7. Baer, Grant & Dweck, 2005) linked some cases of depression to self-critical rumination on supposedly fixed traits by entity theorists. Further studies suggest that incremental theorists had greater resilience to obstacles, were more conscientious in their work, and more willing to attempt challenging tasks. While both sets of behaviour could still be explained by deterministic algorithms, the studies are certainly consistent with the existence of free will and are supportive of the idea that it is adaptive. References:- 1.) Dweck, C. (1999) - Self-Theories - Psychology Press 2.) Dweck, C. & Leggett, E. (1988) - A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality - Psychological Review, 95, pp. 256-73 3.) Dweck, C. & Molden, D. (2005) - Self-Theories - In: Handbook of Competence and Motivation, Eds. Elliot, A. & Dweck, C. - Guildford Press 4.) Molden, D. & Dweck, C. (2006) - Finding meaning in psychology - American Psychologist, 61, pp. 192-203 5.) Blackwell et al (2007) - Implicit theories of intelligence - Child Development, 78, pp. 246-63 6.) Robins, R. & Pals, J. (2002) - Implicit self-theories - Self and Identity, 1, pp. 313-36 7.) Baer, Grant & Dweck (2005) - Personal goals 3.) Reconstrual of “Free Will” from the Agentic Perspective of Social Cognitive Theory Albert Bandura In: Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will Agency involves not only the ability to deliberate, make choices and construct action plans, but also the capacity to carry out the action plans. Agents also reflect on their actions, and make adjustments to their future plans and actions. Humans are not just machines that use a negative feedback to guide themselves back to a state desired by their designers. Instead of concentrating on discrepancy reduction in this way, they aim at discrepancy production, desired states that involve the expenditure of energy or the creation of thermal disequilibrium. A paper by (1. Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) which tries to show that people’s actions are governed by unconscious cognitive processes is criticised by Bandura for its methodology. In Nisbett and Wilson’s study, subjects were either asked to explain why they had performed certain actions, or where asked to judge how they were influenced by certain factors. Bandura asserts that to test whether cognition effects actions, it is necessary to study thoughts before the action, not after it. Afterwards, subjects are merely speculating, and it is claimed that some of the questioning was biased, diverting attention from relevant factors and towards irrelevant factors (2. Adair & Spinner, 3. Loftus, 2005). Bandura also criticises the attempt to disprove freewill on the basis of the Libet experiments. He argues that there is no comparison between long-term planning, for example the plans for a summer holiday, and flicking a wrist in a highly constrained experiment, where the only freedom is a limited choice in timing, the action and the approximate time-slot having already been decided in advance. Bandura further attacks Wegner. In Wegner’s view, environmental inputs alone activate neural mechanisms that produce actions. However, they also activate a specialised interpretative module that has no connection to the action production system. Bandura thinks that this idea is improbable, given the dense connections within most of the brain. Wegner’s ‘interpretative module’ goes on to create the illusion that free will caused the action. Why should evolution leave energy tied up in such a module? Surprisingly, the view that one’s free will caused an action, can in the event of say a bad action, cause feelings of guilt that influence future actions. The whole argument appears contradictory since at the beginning it was stated that only environmental factors influenced action, whereas now feelings of guilt etc are supposed to influence actions as well. Bandura seems to be suggesting that Wegner is trying to have his cake and eat it, with a deterministic theory of the mind, but sellotaped onto it a mechanism which prevents people from saying they do not have to bother about their actions because these are pre-determined. References:- 1.) Nisbett, R. & Wilson, T. (1977) - Verbal reports on mental processes - Psychological Review, 84, pp. 231-59 2.) Adair, J. & Spinner, B. (1981) - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 11, pp. 31-52 3.) Loftus, E. (2005) - Investigation of the malleability of memory - Learning and Memory, 12, pp. 361-6 4.) Free Will is Un-Natural John Bargh In: Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will Bargh admits to the existence of preferences, motivations, desires and goals as things that influence people. He asks whether actions are the result of free choices influenced by preferences etc., or whether our actions are determined by the preferences. without any coordinating element of free choice. At the start of his chapter, Bargh seems to be creating more problems than he resolves. Preferences, motivations, desires and goals are part of conscious subjective experience. If they influence actions, even without central coordination, consciousness and therefore some form of free will seems to be pulled into the fray. Of course, it could be argued that the subjective experience of the preferences is epiphenomenal, or an illusion, but this leaves open, the further question of why evolution would allow energy to be tied up in producing something useless. Bargh discusses the fact that while we view our own actions in the light of our thoughts prior to action, we view the actions of third parties and elements in the environment retrospectively. He seems to be trying to argue that because the viewing of third parties action is retrospective, the retrospective account must be more scientific, because science operates on a third party basis. However, science has no choice in most cases, and the first person experience is a brute fact, which it is part of the scientific mission to describe. An experiment by Pronin and Kugler is supposed to show that individuals attribute free will only to themselves. It may be that when asked people ascribe rational motives to third parties, but the whole experience of life says that people do in fact think that others have choice, and indeed blame them for making bad choices. Regarding third parties as not having free choice, while one has it oneself would seem to verge on autism, where others can be regarded as ‘wind-up toys’. Bargh’s view of the past or what he thinks our view of the past is, appears strange. It is claimed that once things have receded into the past, they are fixed and determined, as if nothing else could have happened. While it is true that experts, such as historians and economists, called onto explain why an event happened, can gives things a rather determinist spin, it is, nevertheless, ridiculous to suggest that people always think that past actions are determined, and that they couldn’t of caught the train, got the job etc., if their past actions had been slightly different. Bargh argues from the existence of innate conservatism in preferring things as they are, but this is different from seeing them as absolutely inevitable. Bargh also has a tendency to try and stand things on their head. Studies have shown that people feel better when they have a degree of control over their affairs rather than feeling helpless. The reasonable explanation of this is that the brain evolved to contain something that needed to be in control. Bargh, without offering any particular explanation as to why, deems the better feeling of being in control to be a ‘positive illusion’, but again why does nature expend energy on an illusion. It would seem much more economical for humans to have evolved to not be bothered about not being in control. Barghs tends to avoid the issue of consciousness in his discussion of freewill. He has a long section on how preferences are rooted in the unconscious. What he does not mention is that preferences are consciously experienced, with the implication that actions driven by preferences are also driven by the conscious will. Of course, Bargh would probably argue that the conscious experience of the preferences is epiphenomenal, but that only brings us back to the question of why evolution selected to consume energy in conscious experience. For his part, by ignoring considerations such as this, Bargh has been able to resurrect the ghost of behaviourism. He admits that Skinner was wrong in not allowing for internal cognitive mechanisms in the brain, but concludes that these mechanisms are after all driven only by the environment, so behaviourism is right in principle. What one should note here, is that Bargh and many others like him are in fact unconscious Cartesians, as is indicated by his reference to there being no need for a ‘ghost in the machine’. The assumption here is that whatever consciousness and conscious will is, it must be some sort of non-physical ghost thing, incapable of influencing the physical world. This is despite modern experiments that imply that conscious processing is energy consuming (1.Baumeister, Heatherton & Tice, 1994 2. Baumeister et al, 1998, 3. Vohs et al, 2006 4. Schmeichel, Vohs & Baumeister, 2003 5. Amir et al, 2005). References:- 1.) Baumeister, Heatherton & Tice (1994) - How and why people fail at self-regulation - Academic Press 2.) Baumeister et al (1998) - Is the active self a limited resource? - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, pp. 1252-65 3.) Vohs et al (2006) - Decision fatigue exhausts self regulatory resources 4.) Schmeichel, Vohs & Baumeister (2003) - Role of the self in logical reasoning - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, pp. 33-46 5.) Amir et al (2005) - The fatigued decision maker 5.) Making up the Mind Chris Frith Chris Frith starts by saying that he will show that the distinction between mental and physical is false. The distinction is claimed to be an illusion created by the brain. Everything we know comes via the brain, but there is no direct connection with the physical world of objects. The first part of the book goes over sometimes familiar ground to show that the brain works on limited and imperfect signals to create a model or picture of the world, and although it is adaptive for the brain to get it right, the picture can, nevertheless, sometimes be wrong. Frith does touch on the fact of how hard perception is for computers. The perception of the view of the garden from the house may seem to be a simple matter, but for a computer there is a considerable problem in distinguishing the brown of the tree trunk from the brown of the fence, and this problem increases if objects move around. It is not mentioned in this book, but these difficulties with computer perception have been seen as an argument for quantum computing in the brain. Frith wants to show that much of what we experience is an illusion. He draws on the rather artificial psychological experiments that show that people sometimes think they have performed actions they have or vice versa. He rather by passes the fact that outside the laboratory in the real world, it is adaptive to get these perceptions right most of the time. Instead in discussing freewill, he says that it is adaptive for a social species such as humans to punish 'freeriders' who try to benefit from being part of the group without making an adequate contribution. For this to work people have to see themselves and the 'freeriders' as agents who could have acted otherwise. There seems no reason to disagree with this, but Frith's assumption that the freewill involved is an illusion does not appear to be justified by the artificial experiments quoted. 6.) Some observations on the psychology of thinking about freewill Daniel Dennett In: Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will Eds. Baer, J. Kaufman, J. & Baumeister, R. This chapter is remarkable for Dennett's style. There can be little doubt that Dennett's dominance over much of modern consciousness studies is due in part to the beguiling quality of his style of writing. However, his approach in this chapter is markedly different from his seminal work 'Consciousness Explained'. In that, he came over as the rather domineering professor hectoring first-year students newly arrived from low quality high schools. The students are periodically slapped down, when their ideas betray a lingering believe in the existence of a 'Cartesian theatre' in the brain. Gradually the student/reader comes to watch what they are thinking, and to wait for approval from Dennett. Then over 200 pages into the book, Dennett springs his trap. He runs through a description of the existing knowledge of brain function and then, without any actual supporting argument, simply issues a ditact that this is the same thing as consciousness. By now, resistance seems futile, and much of the consciousness studies community is ready to accept him as their guru. The approach in this recent chapter is different. The readers are no longer under-performing students. Now they have been accepted into the inner circle that is fully aware of the non-existence of freewill, with believe in freewill seen as a concept only held by ignorant outsiders. We can almost feel ourselves easing into a comfortable leather chair, a heavy cut glass tumbler generously charged with whisky at our side, as we settle down to the privilege of a private chat with the great man. Dennett knows that he is among friends, and need not bother with the rigours of evidence or logical debate. It is sufficient to belittle his opponents for writing 'ill considered stuff', sensing things in 'an inchoate way', and worst of all, 'finding wishful thinking and other distortions of reason almost irrestible.' More of this kind follows as the whisky finds its deterministic route to our brains. Dennett touches on the problem, raised elsewhere in this volume, of what will happen to public behaviour and morality, if the view that our will cannot influence our actions seeps from the laboratory and hard to read to academic papers into the general consciousness. He reminds us of his belief in the convenient miracle by which 'a variety of freewill' underwrites moral responsibility, despite the fact that freewill does not exist. Anyone dissenting from this idea, or even wanting to debate it, is referred to as 'muddying the waters' or even 'throwing tantrums'. Dennett airily declines to enter into direct debate on the topic, because he has 'already dealt with them at great length'. It sounds as if time is limited, and we become uncomfortably aware that our privileged chat may not last as long as we had hoped. The only place in this chapter at which Dennett descends to grappling with research studies and their interpretation is in discussing a disturbing experiment by Vohs & Schooler (1) showing that subjects in a study, who had read a paper by Francis Crick decrying the idea of freewill, were more likely to take an opportunity to cheat in a subsequent Maths test than were subjects who had not read the paper. Dennett tries to evade the implications of this by suggesting a test in which subjects read a paper suggesting that although brain activity is determined, there is some special, but hard to comprehend philosophical way, you still have freewill despite all outcomes being determined. This special freewill involves an indefinite amount of deliberation and consideration of what sort of person one wants to be. It's hard to see how this works. The amount of deliberation might have an influence, but in a deterministic mind, the amount of deliberation has also been determined. Similarly in reflecting on what sort of person one wants to be, the ideal persona will also be determined if the mechanism of the mind is deterministic. Dennett's idea is superficially plausible, but that is only because of an underling an assumption in most people's minds that the conscious will influences deliberations and reflections, the very thing that Dennett seeks to deny. Moreover, if the no freewill view spreads to the wider popular level, it seems unlikley that this rather complex idea will catch on, in contrast to the more straight forward notion that there is no point in trying to be responsible or moral. Reference:- 1.) Vohs, K. & Schooler, J. - The value of believing in free will 7.) The reason I chose that one is ... Based on Lars Hall & Petter Johansson New Scientist: 18 April 2009 This is really another in a long line of studies aimed at using the human propensity for confabulation to create an argument against the existence in freewill. This is not as clearly spelt out as usual in this article, but the refrain here about 'driving a wedge between intentionality and actions' is moving in the same direction. It does not require academic studies to tell us that confabulation is an annoying human trait. In ordinary life, we will come across plenty of stories and reasons being fabricated to justify strange or inappropriate actions or seemingly hard to justify positions. Some might think that a good part of consciousness studies was a confabulation designed to shoe horn consciousess into the pre-1900 Newtonian universe. Hall & Johansson's work goes beyond the well known studies of change blindness to the idea of choice blindness. In these studies, subjects are asked to choose their preferences of pictures of faces or of supermarket products. A high percentage of subjects do not notice when what they originally chose is switched for something they had not chosen, and they may also provide reasons for choosing what they did not in fact choose. The problem with all these types of studies is that it appears to look through the wrong end of the telescope. The interesting thing from the point of view of freewill and the operation of the brain in general is how the original choice was made, before the whole process of switching and confabulation started up. The switching of faces or products of the kind described in these psychological studies would rather seldom arise in the hunter-gatherer conditions that we evolved to cope with, whereas the important thing would be to get the initial choice right. On this basis, it does not seem justified to say that these studies have driven any significant wedge between actions and intentionality. At most, it may be telling us that we evolved to economise in terms of the amount of energy devoted to paying attention to the rather unlikley possibility that our mundane choice of forest plant, or in latter days supermarket product, will have been switched. 8.) Mental causation after Libet and Soon: Reclaiming conscious agency Alexander Batthyany philpapers: Online research in philosophy http://philpapers.org/rec/BATMCA INTRODUCTION: The author distinguishes between, on the one hand, actions and intentions that appear to arise from the conscious will, and on the other, urges or desires, such as hunger, that arise spontaneously, and are passive in the sense of being without any feeling that they derive from conscious will. The author argues that the actions required of subjects in the Libet experiments and also the more recent study by Soon, C.S. depend on passive-type urges, and are therefore invalid as a basis for the refutation of the existence of freewill. Folk psychology tells us that our conscious intentions cause our movements, but within mainstream consciousness studies, the critics of folk psychology claim that neuronal activity determines both the intention to act and the action. This position appears to contain an unspoken assumption that consciousness is not a physical part of the activity of neurons. Libet's subjects were asked to make voluntary finger movements in their own time. The experiments showed that a readiness potential was detected in the brain 350 ms before an actual movement, while the subjects were aware of their conscious intention to act only 200 ms before the movement. Therefore, neuronal activity preparatory to movement happened 150 ms before conscious awareness of the intention to act. Libet himself did not support the view that his experiments showed that there was no such thing as conscious will. He found that some subjects reported an urge to act, which they nevertheless decided not to act on. On this basis, Libet took the view that conscious will could operate a veto function. The impulse from the readiness potential could, in his view, be vetoed in the 200 ms interval between conscious awareness and action. While this is not the same thing as a fully fledged freewill initiating action, it does allow consciousness to have causal efficacy, and thus very definitely places itself outside of mainstream consciousness thinking. Researchers and commentators in the freewill area are not always aware of Libet's personal interpretation. Thus, Roth, G., writing a popular science article in 2002, wrongly claimed that Libet had exposed freewill as an illusion. With Soon's experiment, it was claimed that there was no evidence for the veto function suggested by Libet. However, Batthyany argues that the Soon experiment was set up in such a way as to make it unlikely that the veto function could become apparent. In the Libet experiment, subjects had been allowed to ignore their initial urge, whereas in the Soon experiment, they were instructed to act immediately in repsonse to the first urge. Soon's study closely follows Libet's protocols, with the additional feature of the subjects having to press a button with their left or right index finger. P. Activity relative to this decision was found to precede the action by up to ten seconds, in contrast to the 350 ms needed for Libet's finger movement. In 60% of cases, the researchers were able to predict from this which finger the subjects would choose. Although there is a 40% error here, the 10% margin over chance is statistically significant. The author has a variety of arguments against the view that the Libet/Soon experiments constitute a refutation of the existence of freewill. The first problem is that the conventional view of consciousness/freewill adopts a metaphysical position, to the effect that consciousness is not a real physical thing. It is not clear how, within a conventional view of physics, something non-physical can exist, but this is nevertheless the mainstream view. A closet Cartesianism seems to be apparent at this point. However, once this view has been adopted as a premise, it follows that consciousness cannot be efficacious within a universe governed by the physical law, and therefore freewill cannot exist. The author goes on to distinguish between urges or experiences, of which we are merely passively aware, on the one hand, and actively created intentions and actions, on the other. Instances of the passive kind of experience are desires, such as hunger, or preferences for particular types of food. Such things are consciously experienced, but are not felt as being consciously caused. The conscious awareness of such things does not depend on any conscious decision. In other cases, however, the conscious awareness of an intention does appear to arise from conscious will. The author argues that even conventional thinking accepts that such intentions and actions appear to be actively willed, although of course this appearance is regarded as an illusion. It is the author's contention that both the Libet and Soon experiments study the passive, rather than the active type of experience, and that these experiments are therefore irrelevant to the contention that conscious freewill does not exist. The author gives an example of the type of problem that arises, if we do not accept a real difference between active willing and passive experience. For instance, somebody's eye can blink because of a startle reflex, but it can also blink as an intentional signal to another person. The physical actions involved are identical. If we pursue the conventional view to its logical conclusion, it means that although the experience of the two events is wholly different, there is actually no difference. This is a logical conclusion from the non-efficacy of consciousness, although it looks to stretch the believability of the theory. The ability of the Libet/Soon experiments to refute the efficacy of conscious will is said to be agreed by both sides of the argument to depend on two conditions. The first condition is that the actions taken by subjects in these experiments were a result of actively willed intentions. That is that they appear to the subjects to be the results of their conscious will. The second condition is that although actions appeared to be the result of conscious will, this was an illusion. Batthyany disputes whether the subjects of the Libet experiments were involved in actively willed intentions. The instruction given by Libet was to wait for an 'urge', which is argued by the author to fall into the category of a passive desire, rather than a willed intention. On this basis, Libet's experiments are claimed to merely confirm that spontaneously arising passive desires are not consciously willed, but presumably come about because of a prior readiness potential. In merely referring to such passive examples, the Libet/Soon experiments are claimed by the author to tell us nothing at all about whether or not conscious will has an impact on our apparently willed intentions and actions, or whether this is in fact an illusion. The need for subjects to choose between pressing with a left or right index finger is seen as the most important difference between the Libet and Soon experiments. Much has been made of the fact that experimenters could predict the choice of finger in a statistically significant 60% of cases. However, the author argues that because there is no apparent reason to choose one option over the other, this choice will also arise from a passive urge, and is therefore also not relevant to the question of how actively willed intentions arise. Batthyany's criticism of Libet type experiments, to the effect that they do not deal with apparently actively willed actions, but only with passive urges overlaps with the criticism that that the experiments only deal with the type of trivial actions that are very often performed on autopilot, and not with the more deliberative or strategic decisions that might be thought to be relevant to the question of freewill. One problem suggested by the author is that the metaphysical assumption that consciousness cannot be efficacious means that any result from the Libet/Soon experiments would have been argued to support the position that freewill could not exist. The actual outcome of the experiments was interpreted in this way. But if the readiness potential and the conscious awareness had been simultaneous, consciousness could have been interpreted as a mere correlate of the physically efficacious readiness potential. Even if conscious awareness had been found to occur before the readiness potential, the author auggests that it would have been argued that the experiment was not refined enough to pick up all the physical signals. This approach has in fact been used as an argument against the Libet veto. It is argued by the author that the conventional view is insulated against refutation because it presupposes what it sets out to prove. References:- 1.) Libet, B. (2003) - Can conscious experience effect brain activity? - Journal of Consciousness Studies 10: 12, 24-28 2.) Soon, C. S. et al (2008a) - Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain - Nature Neuroscience 11: 543 |
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