Put Your Ideas to the Test - #1

          I do not know enough philosophy to know how to label ideas and concepts properly.  I’m much more interested in testing ideas than labeling them.  I love science and I like to learn new things, but I’m not all that excited to discover more knowledge for the sake of knowledge.  I am, at heart, very practical.  Thus I think that if there is any term that describes my way of thinking it is this: “an engineer”.  I don’t suppose “engineering” can be considered a philosophy, but for me, it is about as close to a description of my way of thinking as I can get.  I think things through to decide what I should do today.  I want a practical outcome from my thoughts.  I’ll bet you won’t even find the word “engineer” or “engineering” in any textbook on philosophy.  Well, that’s a shame in my opinion!

          In light of that, I thought that today I would give you what I imagine as the first chapter of a book about “testing the non-material world” that I would love to write.  Someday...  I’m guessing it’ll more likely show up as pieces in this blog over time.  But, without further ado…here is Chapter 1.

Chapter 1 – Open Your Mind to Experimentation[1]

          What if you were standing before those proverbial pearly gates and you find yourself presented with…not one, not two, but three identical pearly gates.  As you contemplate your next move, a voice from above says “Behind one of those gates is everything you could wish for.  Choose it, and it is yours.  But be careful – behind the other two gates is darkness and pain!”

          Well, after some significant consternation, during which time you think to yourself that “this is certainly not how I heard it would be”, you realize you need to make a choice.  Each gate is identical.  There is nothing to give you any further information.  So, you say to yourself “it’s a one in three chance” and you point to the middle gate.

          Now the voice from above says “You have selected the middle gate.  Let me show you what is behind the gate on the right.”  The right gate opens and inside you see that it is, indeed, dark and frightening.  You look away, thankful you didn’t pick that one.

          Then the voice asks you a question you didn’t expect.  “Would you like to change your pick?  Would you like to switch to the left gate instead of the middle gate?” 

          After you think again “this is definitely not how I heard it would be”, you consider whether you can read anything into this option.  Is the voice “good” and trying to get you to change, knowing that you’ve picked the wrong gate?  Or is the voice trying to trick you into changing your pick, knowing you’ve picked the correct gate?  After some consternation, you realize that there is nothing in what the voice has told you to give you any clue.  Fundamentally, you are on your own here, with nothing to aid you in making a decision except the pure odds of the selection.  So now you are kind of back where you were at the start, except that now the odds are a little better.  There are just two gates now.  This is nerve racking.

          So you ponder…what’s the point of switching your choice?  You have no idea which gate is which, so why change?  Your odds are 50:50 either way, so you say “I’ll stick with the middle gate.”

          Not good.  What if I told you that you just make a huge mistake?  What if I told you that your odds were not 50:50?  What if I told you that you were twice as likely to choose the correct gate by switching your choice?

          You may say “Obviously the odds are 50:50, and it makes no difference which gate I pick.  There are two gates – one with the prize and one without – so how can the odds be anything other than 50:50?  Only an idiot would think otherwise!”[2] 

That’s exactly what I said the first time I heard this problem.  I was convinced that it makes no difference whether you change your selection or not.   How could it possibly be any other way?

          At this point in your reading of this Introduction, you can do one of two things.  You can say to yourself “I know statistics – I’m not an idiot.  This is a simple probability problem.  It is what it is.” And you can close this book and not think about it again.

          Alternatively you could, maybe out of a certain amount of indignation or just simple curiosity, say “let’s try it and see.”

          Which group are you in?  This book is written for those who are willing to try it and see, no matter how strongly they are convinced that the odds are 50:50.  When someone who seems to be sincere and reasonable makes the claim that I have made – the claim that you are actually twice as likely to choose the right gate if you change your original selection – you are willing to put it to the test.  You’re convinced that the outcome will show that the odds are 50:50.  You’d put money on it.  But you’re still willing to try it out.  This book is for you.

          Of course, this book is not about selecting the right gate.  It’s not about statistics.  I have no interest in trying to mislead you about my purposes.  Here is what I’m hoping to accomplish with this book:  I’m hoping that some of you – those who have totally rejected the claims of any and all non-materialist viewpoints – will be willing to put your claims to the test.  And I don’t mean a mental exercise.  I don’t mean arguing logic.  I mean really put them to the test.  I’m talking about conducting an experiment.  By the end of this book, here is my goal:  that you will have designed your own experiment to test a variety of spiritual beliefs, and that you will be ready to start conducting that experiment.

          So, if you are in the first group – if you know already that no amount of evidence could ever convince you otherwise regarding any other view of reality than the one you have now – well, you ought to put this down and read another book.  Go read some good fiction!  This book is not for you.

          If you’re still reading, then don’t say I didn’t tell you up front!

          And what about the problem with the gates?  Well – try it.  Do an experiment.  It’s easy enough to do.  Get a friend to help you.  Get three cards – say an ace of spades and the two red deuces.  It would be helpful if you got a piece of wood with a slot in it so that you could set the cards upright.  Then you sit on one side of the cards with the cards facing away from you, and have your friend sit on the other side.  Have him place the three cards in random order in the slots.  You pick one.  Then, have your friend remove one of the two remaining cards – but never removing the ace of spades.  Then, keep your original choice and write down whether you selected the ace of spades or not.  Do this 100 times.  Then, change your strategy and always change your mind after the first card is removed.  Write down whether you selected the ace of spades in this scenario.  Do this one 100 times.  Compare the results.  Do you win about twice as often with the second scenario – when you change your mind – than you do with the first?  If so, you might still be unconvinced.  Too small of a sample you will say.  Well, that is easy to remedy.  Repeat the test, only do it 1,000 times.  Or 10,000.  Whatever it takes.  At some point the evidence will become overwhelming to you.  It is at that point that you might be willing to consider that the odds really are not 50:50.  At that point, you are ready to consider additional logical arguments.

          Why isn’t it 50:50?  If you haven’t tried it, go try it first.  Then you can read this paragraph.  Actually, I will simply talk you through this by describing experiments where the results may be more obvious to you.  Let me start with an extreme example and work backwards.  Let’s use the entire deck of 52 cards this time.  So let’s imagine a scenario where all 52 cards are spread out in front of you, facing away where you can only see the backs.  The goal is to pick the ace of spades.  So, you pick one of the 52 at random.  Then, your friend removes one of the remaining cards (but not the ace of spades) and you decide whether to change your original pick or not.  Now let’s change the game up just a bit.  Let’s say that your friend keeps removing one of the non-ace of spades after each round.  And let’s say that you stay with your original card while the other cards are being removed.  Finally, you get down to the very end where there are only two cards left.  Your friend has removed 50 cards, none of them the ace of spades.  Should you switch?  Consider this.  When you first picked the one card out of 52, what were the odds that it was the ace of spades?  It was 1 in 52.  Not very good at all.  What were the odds that the ace of spades was part of the remaining 51 cards that you didn’t select?  51 in 52.  Very good odds.  Do you see where this leaves you?  Think of it this way:  if, instead of stopping to ask you if you wanted to change your mind after each selection, your friend simply removed 50 of the remaining 51 cards after you made your first pick.  All 50 are known to be non-ace of spades (let’s assume you picked a trustworthy friend).  Now there is just one card remaining of the original 51.  What are the odds that the last remaining card is the ace of spades?  51:52.  And what are the odds that the card you originally picked is the ace of spades  1:52.  In fact, in this case, if you switched cards at the end, you would almost always win, and if you kept your original card, you would almost always lose. 

          If you can see that the situation with all 52 cards clearly and logically shows that you should change your selection at the end, then let’s work backwards from that point.  What if the deck only had 10 cards?  Now there would be a 1:10 chance that your original choice was the ace of spades and a 9:10 chance that the remaining card is the ace of spades.  You’d win 9 times as often if you always changed your choice at the end.  Well, what if there are 4 cards?  Its 3:4 vs. 1:4, so you’re three times as likely.

          And that takes us back to where we started.  Three gates.  You select one.  The odds are 1:3 that you picked the right gate.  On that we can all agree.  And, the odds are 2:3 that the right gate is one of the two remaining.  The wrong gate is removed from those two.  So, the odds are 1:3 that you picked the right gate first, making the odds 2:3 that the remaining gate holds the prize.  And, therefore, you find that you are twice as likely to win if you change your mind.

          By the way, when people are presented with this situation in real life, they almost always keep their original choice.  “Go with your gut.”  “Your first inclination is often the best.”  Or, simply “it doesn’t matter – it’s 50:50 either way – so I’ll stick with my original choice.”  Isn’t that interesting?  I find it to be quite fascinating. 

I wonder if Monty Hall knew that? 

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[1] I’m talking about “putting things to the test”, not “experimentation” as you might have used that term in the 60’s!

[2] If you heard this problem before, then you might have already been convinced that you should switch your choice.  But put yourself in the mindset you had the first time you heard this problem presented.

Free will #9 – Being Honest: Problems I have Created for Myself

          When it comes to the beginning of the universe, some will say that God created the little ball that started the big bang.  They say that there has to be an uncaused cause to start it all, and God is that uncaused cause.  And then the materialists will say “then who caused God?”  It’s a valid question.  What we spiritualists are doing is pushing off the problem of an uncaused cause into the spiritual, or non-material, realm.  I know that those who delve into quantum mechanics might like to say that the material world can somehow achieve something equivalent to an uncaused cause, but I personally can’t accept that mathematics can trump reality to that extent.  So, yes, I push off the uncaused cause into the spiritual realm and say “there is God.”  It’s a valid criticism.

          Well, I’m doing the same thing with free will.  I say that people have a will, and that will influences (sometimes very weakly, as I have discussed previously) what we do.  The will, I claim, makes decisions that are independent of, and cannot be totally predicted by, all of the inputs provided to it.  And, further, the decisions of the will are not random.  Thus, that makes decisions of the will a true starting point for something, and therefore it is valid to call them uncaused causes.  From a materialist-only standpoint, the will couldn’t really be an uncaused cause unless the will has existed forever in its original (and current) state.  Actually, in some religious views, including Christianity, there is support for the idea that each person was created before they were born and, to a greater or lesser extent, who they are now is who they were created to be.  But I want to leave those religious concepts out of the conversation for now.  The issue at hand is that, from a purely material perspective, the will has the same problem as the little ball at the beginning of the big bang.  If you keep working backwards, you eventually get to something as far back in time as you can be and you are left asking “who caused that?”  With respect to the will, I’m doing what spiritual people do with the big bang – I’m pushing the uncaused cause into the spiritual realm.  Thus, when I say that the will is an uncaused cause I also say that the will is in the spiritual, not material, realm.

          To simplify it, here is what I am claiming:

1.  Each person has their own independent free will.  They make at least some decisions that are not totally, 100% dependent on all of their combined past inputs, and those decisions are not random.  I’ve decided this point based on my own personal experiences and the described experiences of everyone I know.

2.  In order for a decision to have some component that is not dependent on the past, and is not random, it must be an uncaused cause.

3.  Uncaused causes don’t exist in the material world.

4.  Therefore, free will is non-material, i.e. spiritual.  By extension, then, each person has a spiritual component to them.  If they have free will, then they cannot be purely material.

Further, I have made the following observations in earlier entries:

5.  Human decisions are ultimately encoded in the signals of neurons.

6.  Human decisions also encode free will.  By that I mean that free will can be observed in the decisions that people make.

7.  Therefore, free will is, somehow and some way, encoded (or at least observable) in the signals in neurons.

And finally:

8.  If it were possible to observe every neuron’s activity, you would find at least one neuron exhibiting responses consistent with free will.

9.  It is not possible to do #8.

So…there you have it in summary form.  I can see that almost every statement I make in the list above can be argued against, and some statements are almost naïve in their simplicity.  However, I think my two conclusions (#4 and #7) are valid conclusions if my preceding statements are valid.  I hope, at least, that there are no logical inconsistencies there. 

I will have to delve into each one of these statements in the future.  Some are highly dependent on careful definitions of each term (e.g. “material”, “spiritual”, “free will”, etc.).  I suppose statement #1 is the most controversial, yet it is the one I feel most strongly about.  I think most people – even hard determinists – would agree with #2 (but they would use it to say “and uncaused causes don’t exist, so therefore free will doesn’t exist”).  Personally, I feel that statement #3 is my weakest, although again, I think the hard determinist would agree with that one.  But sometimes I wonder – are there really any hard determinists left?  They’ve all gotten soft in their old age!

The one thing I’ve tried to do in my line of thinking is not stoop to what I believe the soft determinists do.  Soft determinists get to avoid the problem of uncaused causes and yet somehow retain personal responsibility and human freedom.  I don’t think they are playing fair – they are cheating.  When faced with a true/false question, the soft determinist gets to answer “yes” and the rest of their soft determinist buddies all applaud and say “good answer”!  Hah!  More topics for future discussion.

Well, although I am a non-materialist – spiritualist – at heart, I don’t like the fact that someone can argue that all I’ve done is push everything I can’t explain off into some vague spiritual realm where the normal rules don’t apply.  I wish I had a more satisfying answer.  I wish, actually, that I had a more scientific answer.  But I don’t.  However, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to discard it all.  No, there is much much more to the spiritual realm that I also need to address, and will address, in the future.  Much of it is intimately wrapped up with the #1 Crazy Thing that I discussed in a previous entry.  We’ll get to all that in time…

Free Will #8 – Free will and fool’s gold

          The topic of free will is something I bring up frequently in this blog because I see it as an important topic for discussion.  I also think the rejection of free will is: 1) tragic/dangerous and 2) foolish.  I’ve heard many scientists state things such as “it is only an illusion that we have free will” and “free will is a delusion”.  Worse yet, I think a few of those scientists actually believe what they are saying.  There is also a sentiment among a few scientists that the experimental evidence already published is sufficient to confirm the “no free will” hypothesis.  Over time, that kind of thinking slowly bleeds into the popular press and the common psyche, so that the average person begins to have a vague notion that science has proven that there is no free will.  This is where we are at today, and I worry that this fallacy will continue to spread.  If you have any belief in the supernatural in any way, you should expend much more brainpower on this issue than on other so-called issues of science vs. religion.  To me, the fight against “effective determinism” will be one of the most important battlegrounds of the 21^st century.

          I would like to discuss here why I consider “effective determinism” to be foolish, but first a brief word (for now) on why I think it is tragic/dangerous.  The ultimate consequence of effective determinism is the loss of responsibility.  Ultimately, each individual is no longer responsible for his or her own actions.  I believe such thinking spells the end of humanity and the descent to chaos.  I know that there are a number of effective determinists who try to say that human responsibility is compatible with determinism.  I don’t buy it.  But that is a topic for the future.  Suffice it to say that I consider this issue more important to the ultimate future of mankind than nuclear war.

          Before I go further, I probably should explain why I refer to the opposing view as “effective determinism”.  I recognize that there are varying degrees of belief in this issue, such as “hard determinism” and “soft determinism” and so on.  There are also those who have a vague notion of determinism, but probably haven’t thought through it very clearly.  So, I’m making a sweeping generalization that everyone who rejects the idea that there is anything beyond the material world is an “effective determinist”.  I’m not sure that’s always fair, but we need a starting point, so that’s where I’m starting.  I may need to come back and clean that generalization up a bit, but you’ll have to humor me for now.

          Why do I call effective determinism “foolishness”?  For me it is simple:  there is nothing else that I sense and experience more completely than my own free will.  It is fully rational.  To deny free will is to deny what every fiber of my being tells me is true at every moment of the day.  Why would you deny the obvious?  The only reason to deny such a strong sense and experience and rationality would be because of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  But that evidence would have to be based on my senses and experience and rationality…all of which I would be denying by denying free will. 

          I don’t exclude the possibility of effective determinism as a logical impossibility, though.  I just think that if such a concept as free will is going to be rejected, it must be rejected on the basis of overwhelming evidence.  As I have discussed in my previous entries on free will, I think there is zero evidence in contemporary science for effective determinism.  I will continue to review and evaluate scientific studies related to this issue and I hope to offer more critiques of the papers that are out there in the future.  But even those of you who are hard determinists have to at least admit that the evidence is weak at best.  That field of scientific inquiry into determinism and free will is, admittedly, in its infancy and I expect there will be much better experimental designs, using much better tools of analysis in the future.  But, as I discussed elsewhere, I’m skeptical that it will ever be possible to design an experiment that produces the type of overwhelming evidence that this situation requires.  Actually, of course, my prediction would be that if an experiment could be set up that truly tests free will, it will be shown to exist.

          We are in a situation that often happens in this general field of the material vs. the spiritual realms.  If you start, as I have, with the assumption that there is, or could be, something beyond the material, then you probably conclude there is free will[1].  If you start with the assumption that there is only the material world, as science always does and many scientists frequently do, then you will probably settle on some sort of effective determinism.  The initial conditions determine the outcome, leaving us with a complete impasse.  You can’t argue the “givens.”  But…I have the overwhelming evidence on “my” side.  If you are an effective determinist, it is because of the assumptions you are starting with (materialism), not because of the overwhelming evidence.  My belief in free will is a result of my non-materialist assumptions as well…I am in same boat as the effective determinists in that regard…but I have the overwhelming evidence of free will.  And I don’t have to do anything special to get that evidence – I just have to wake up and be human.  Even the staunch effective determinisms find the evidence for free will hitting them in the face at every moment of every day.

          I don’t think that most effective determinists really believe what they say they believe anyway.  I think it is just too hard for them to deny their own overwhelming personal experience, despite their strong materialist beliefs.  For example, effective determinists still use words like “chose” or “decide” when talking about what humans do.  They still act as if most humans are responsible for their own actions.  They certainly act as if they are responsible for their own actions (and they are!).  They can’t escape their own sense of free will, and it keeps seeping out in their conversation.  Let me give you a perfect example.  Michael Gazzaniga is one of the authors who writes about this topic from a scientific point of view, and is clearly on the side of “no free will”, someone I would classify as an effective determinist (although I don’t think he would accept that term[2]).  His book “Who’s in Charge” is a reasonable read if you are interested in this topic.  But look at what he says in the first line of his acknowledgement at the end:  “My debt to colleagues…”  Also “…Over the years I have been inspired by many…”  What does it mean to be indebted to other humans if they don’t have free will?  Would you ever say “I’m indebted to a few cows[3]…?”  After all, since I eat hamburgers, they are responsible for what I “am” today!  Or could you be inspired by a cow?  At least inspired by a cow in the sense that you would want to run up and thank that cow?  Those words all lose a lot of their meaning when you throw out free will.  I challenge any effective determinist to carry on a meaningful human conversation without using terms that should be expressly forbidden from human language if there is no free will.

          I know that human beings can be deluded or tricked by their own senses.  Optical illusions are a common example of this.  But I can take a ruler and measure the two lines and convince myself that they are the same length because my experience also tells me that a wooden ruler doesn’t shrink or expand between the time it takes to measure one line and then the next.  However, just because I know that there are optical illusions doesn’t mean that I stop believing everything I see.  In fact, I can’t know about optical illusions without at least believing that what I see is generally reliable.  When I understand the principles of optical illusions, I simply incorporate that into my understanding of what I see – but I don’t throw out vision entirely.  So, yes, maybe there are times where we have the illusion of free will when we don’t.  We are certainly subject to subliminal messages and addictions and phobias and so on that affect the decisions we make.  But these should only serve to modify our understanding of free will and responsibility, not make us throw it out.

          For me, calling the view of effective determinism “foolish” feels a bit harsh.  I tried to think of another term.  But ultimately, it just seems foolish for me to deny the one thing I know is true by my own personal experience, without any solid evidence to the contrary.  I just can’t do it.

Well, like I have said before:  there is more to come.  It is not an easy topic, but it is well-worth the effort spent in thinking it through.

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[1] There is a major issue here that I’m ignoring for the moment, which is the whole discussion of human will and God’s will that is a central theme in Christianity over the last 2000, e.g. Calvinism, Arminianism, etc.  But I see that issue as almost completely separate from what I am talking about here.  I’ll have to circle back to that at some point.  The difference between natural and supernatural determinism is a vast chasm!

[2] In fact, to be fair, Gazzaniga is trying to argue that you can have moral responsibility without free will.  It’s a noble attempt that will fail.  It’s like trying to argue that nuclear fission will only be used for generating power and not for creating warheads.  It would have been great if that could have been true, but it was not.

[3] Yes, I use cows here instead of dogs because people often treat dogs as if they were human, but hardly ever treat cows that way, and my arguments would get lost in that rabbit trail.

Book Reviews and Recommendations - Entry #4

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

by Sheri Fink

          This is the story of one of the hospitals in New Orleans that flooded during the Katrina disaster.  Ultimately a number of patients died in the hospital before everyone could be rescued and, in fact, one doctor and two nurses were charged in the deaths of some of the patients, but ultimately not convicted of any crime.  The first half of the story details what happened in the hospital during and after Katrina, and the second half of the story deals with the legal process afterward.  Personally, I found this story very fascinating and I could understand the difficult decisions that everyone faced.  I feel that the author was very even-handed in reporting the story and it makes you ask yourself “what would I have done in that situation?”  I highly recommend it.

          Though I am not a medical professional, I work in a hospital and interact with patients.  I can see how all of the problems that happened at the flooded hospital can develop.  So much of a hospital’s (or any organization’s) operational strategy is dependent on the existing infrastructure, and when that infrastructure fails, there really is chaos.  I remember working in my office at the hospital once when the power went out.  Since my office had no windows, it was suddenly pitch black.  But when I opened my office door into the hallway, I could easily see where I was going because there was emergency lighting all over.  If anything needed to remain powered up, it just needed to be plugged into the plentiful red outlets which are connected to backup power.  There was no panic – in fact there are regular tests of the process where the power is briefly switched off to verify that the backup power is working.  In the operating rooms and on the floors, business can really go on pretty much as usual.  That operational strategy works great.

          But what happens when the emergency power fails?  At Memorial hospital in New Orleans, the main power was, of course, knocked out by the storm.  No problem really – that was expected.  But when the floods came…well, it shouldn’t have been a problem.  The generator was above the flood level, so it should have been fine.  Unfortunately, the switching system was apparently below the flood level, so it failed.  There was no backup power.  That situation alone is hard to imagine.  Suddenly, everything that you totally rely on is gone.  How many things in a hospital do not require power?  The consequences are far-reaching.  Starting at that point, every patient on a ventilator had to be hand-ventilated 24 hours a day by someone.  That alone is just awful to consider.  Further, do you know of any big hospital buildings that have windows that open?  There is no air-conditioning, no ventilation at all.  The temperature soared inside.

          The problem was really complicated by the loss of communication.  First, of course, the hospital was flooded and no one could get in or out through the flooding.  Whatever staff was in the hospital at the time was suddenly on a 24 hour a day shift that was going to continue until they could be rescued.  How do you send an overhead code?  You can’t – you just have to take care of it yourself.  Communication was cut-off with the outside to a great extent (there was some communication – I can’t remember all of the details).  The hospital did have a helicopter pad, but it hadn’t been used in decades and no one knew if it could still be used.  And how do you get patients on beds up to the helicopter pad when the elevators don’t work.  There are no easy decisions and everything is difficult.  The more you think through the situation, the more you realize just how bad it is for the patients and staff.  Just awful.

          I believe the book is written clearly enough that anyone can put themselves in the situations that the staff, patients, and families faced and can think about what they would do in a similar situation.  Of course, the natural tendency is to say that this should never have happened – steps should have been taken long before to prevent the worst aspects of the disaster (like moving the generator controls above the flood level) – but that is not the situation people found themselves in.  This book is worth reading, whether you work in a hospital or are a medical professional or not.

The #1 Crazy Thing that Christians Believe

          I wrote in an earlier entry about the top five crazy things that Christians believe.  My point there was to show that the fundamental issues of Christianity are still the most important topics for discussion today (relative to Christian beliefs).  These are the issues that have been discussed through the ages, from Paul to Augustine to modern day thinkers.  I am concerned that those foundational concepts are no longer considered or discussed, and yet there is heated debate about issues that are only relevant when they are grounded to those foundations. It’s analogous to arguing about advanced details of calculus when we haven’t agreed on the associative and commutative properties of mathematics.  Such an argument is a waste of time until the basic foundational principles have been agreed to.  My goal is to endeavor to focus on fundamental issues in this blog and not get caught up in issues that are irrelevant when they are untethered from their foundations.

          In my earlier entry, I left out the #1 Crazy Thing that Christians Believe.  I figured that issue deserved its own entry.  So, without further ado, what is the #1 Crazy Thing that Christians Believe?  Well, according to me, it is:

#1 - Jesus is alive today, and He is active and involved in people’s lives on a moment by moment basis.

          This idea follows directly from Crazy Thing #3 – that Jesus rose from the dead – and is made important by Crazy Thing #2 – that Jesus is God.  And no, He didn’t die again in 1882 or 1966 or any other time before or since.  So, therefore, He is alive today and, according to Christians, still just as present as He was in first century Palestine.

          Think about it.  Christians pray to God and expect that He hears them and actually responds to their requests.  Christians believe He cures diseases and fixes problems.  They believe He changes the course of history.  And, most importantly, they claim He has changed each one of them personally from the inside.  People all over the world report “supernatural” experiences with God.  We are not talking about experiences that happened 2000 years ago – we are talking about experiences that happened yesterday.  We are talking about experiences that are happening right now!

          I don’t see how any conversation of Christian beliefs can look too far past this key point.  I mean, it is either evidence of total delusion by a reasonably significant segment of the population or it is critically important to all of us on a moment by moment basis (because of its immediacy).  Is there a middle ground here?  Personally I don’t see it.  This #1 Crazy Thing is either utterly false and ridiculous or it is shockingly true and spectacular.  Is there a third choice???

          OK.  Before I stop for now, I’d like to try out an analogy – a story – and see if it helps to illustrate the situation.

Example conversation…

Let’s say I come in the door and say to you “there’s a lion roaming the streets.”  You say “we live in the middle of the city – that’s ridiculous – there’s no lion.”  And I might begin to try to convince you.  “No – I really saw it – it was walking around on the sidewalk downtown.” 

“Oh that’s ridiculous – it would be all over the news if there was a lion walking around downtown.”

“But I saw it clear as day.”

“It was probably just someone wearing a lion costume for some reason.  I heard there was some kind of parade downtown today.”

“No – it was really a lion.  I went over and saw the footprints in the grass.”

“Footprints could be anything.”

“I took a picture of the footprints – look – here it is.”

“That doesn’t look like anything to me – that could be someone’s shoe that made that.  Besides, how do I know that you didn’t just take a picture at the zoo?”

“Other people saw it.  I’m not the only one.  Don’t you want to talk to them?”

“No.  I don’t want to talk to them.  It’s all foolishness.  There was no lion walking around downtown.  Let’s change the subject.”

Compare that to the following conversation…

Let’s say I come through the door and say to you “there’s a lion roaming the streets. And…”

“What are you talking about – that’s ridiculous – we live in the middle of the city – there’s no lion.”

“…and – don’t move too quickly – he’s standing right behind you!”

What makes this the #1 Crazy Thing?  Well, if you can establish this one as fact, don’t all the others kind of fall away?  For example, why try to prove or disprove that Jesus rose from the dead if He is still around today?

There will be more to come on this particular issue because I really do feel that it should be at the top of the list for discussion relative to Christian beliefs.  For now, I will leave you to ponder whether you agree with my list of crazy things!

Free Will #7 - Why is it so difficult to experimentally prove or disprove free will?

          I’ve heard and read a lot about the “evidence” that free will is just an illusion.  Sometimes that evidence comes from experiments such as the one I addressed in my previous post on this topic.  Sometimes that evidence comes from observations.  For example, I just listened to something from Sam Harris (one of my least favorite authors!) where he tried to make the point that our thoughts just come to us and it’s not like we freely decided to have those thoughts.  So, therefore, free will is just an illusion that we make up after the fact.

          As you may imagine if you’ve read other posts from me, I don’t agree that such evidence proves the case against free will.  The problem I see with all of these arguments is that the people making these arguments, or the people doing the experiments, pick the wrong kind of tasks.  They do not pick tasks that require free will; rather, they pick tasks that require decisions.  To me, a decision is not the same as exercising free will.  I will try to explain that here.

          I would describe a decision as something that happens to us constantly because we are alive.  Decisions can be fairly complex, can be incredibly simple, or can even be subconscious.  Do I get up or lay back down?  Do I go left or right?  Do I hold my breath until I turn blue?  Do I spell “tomorrow” with one “m” or two?  Should I super-size it?  Should I keep thinking up examples or should I stop?  What card should I pick from the magician’s deck?  Etc. etc. etc.

          In my view, free will is not a critical component of the vast majority of the kind of daily decisions we are constantly bombarded with.  That’s what makes it so hard to test. 

          Recall that I’ve defined free will with respect to human beings being responsible for their own actions.  This is critical.  We do not hold dogs or monkeys or even cows[1] to be morally responsible for the decisions they make.  Therefore, I say, those animals do not have free will.  Despite their lack of free will, it certainly seems that those animals have to constantly make decisions as well.  Do I get up or lay back down?  Do I go left or right?  Do I chew on this bone or chew on the couch?  Do I drink water from this bowl or from the toilet?  Dogs do not make moral decisions involving free will, but, as living things, they have to make decisions all the time.  Constantly.

          As a first pass, I would suggest that free will is only involved in those decisions that have a moral outcome.  If the result of the decision could be called morally wrong or morally right, then it is at least a candidate for free will.  I’m not sure every moral decision involves the free will either, but it’s a good starting point.  Someone with a Christian view would say these types of decisions result in either a “virtue” or a “sin”.  I don’t even know if there is always a clear demarcation between a decision that is just done as part of life, versus a decision that has moral implications.  For example, speeding down the highway may be illegal but not necessarily immoral, and the act of speeding can become so rote that it does not involve a moral decision at all (and maybe never did for most of us[2]).  To be honest, I don’t know where to draw the line between what I would call a “rote decision” and what I would call a “moral decision”, and that could be a problem with my line of thinking here.  But I also don’t think that free will comes into play as an “all or none” proposition.  I can imagine that there is a continuum of moral decisions where free will is more or less active in the decision-making process.

          Is free will testable?  Well, going back to the design of experiments, I think it is very difficult to come up with a decision that, without question, requires an exertion of the will.  I do not consider a contrived “moral dilemma” to necessarily require the use of free will, because it is contrived.  Sometimes people are tricked into what they think is a real moral dilemma – like that TV show “What Would You Do?” – but it would be pretty hard to get human studies approval to put people in those situations!  Plus, a lot of those types of situations involve requiring the person to make a quick response, and I’m not sure a “reaction” typically requires free will either.  Or, think of it this way:  is there any kind of moral decision you could make “on command” in an MRI machine for which you could be later convicted of and jailed? 

          Even if you could figure out a good moral dilemma for testing, what would you measure?  As I’ve stated before, the will is a “weak force”.  The overwhelming activity in your brain for any given decision, even a moral decision, would still be the rote learned reactions.  To pick out the bit of neural activity influenced by free will from this torrent of ongoing rote activity would be nearly, if not completely, impossible.  If there really was only one neuron in the whole brain that was influenced by the will in a given moral decision, how would you possibly find it?  And if you did find it, how would you know you found it?  How would you be able to identify the response of that neuron as being distinct from just a random signal?  I don’t think it can ever be done – either now or in the future.

          My main point in this entry is just this:  whether free will is real or not is still very much an open issue.  It has not been debunked as some might claim, and it’s not going to be debunked any time soon.  We may someday have flying cars and cloaks of invisibility, but I don’t believe we’ll ever have a definitive materialistic explanation of free will.  It will remain elusive…and utterly fascinating!

---

[1] Well, maybe Gary Larsen does, but not anyone else!

[2] Unless you read Jerry Bridges’ book “The Pursuit of Holiness”, in which case speeding suddenly became a moral issue…for a while.

Book Reviews and Recommendations - Entry #3

Miracles by CS Lewis

If I listed all of the books I would recommend that someone read, there would be more books by CS Lewis on that list than by any other author.  He is best-known for the Narnia tales, a series of seven books that I read as a kid and really enjoyed.  But he also wrote a number of non-fiction books that are really excellent.  His best-known non-fiction work is probably “Mere Christianity”, which grew out of a series of radio broadcasts he gave in the 1940s.  He also wrote “The Screwtape Letters”, “Surprised by Joy” and “The Great Divorce”, all of which I would recommend.  But, in my opinion, the most impressive of his books, from an intellectual standpoint, is called “Miracles.”  If you are interested in the kinds of things I write about in this blog, then I highly recommend that you find an old copy of CS Lewis’ “Miracles” and read it.

The book “Miracles” is an intellectual exploration regarding whether it is reasonable that miracles could happen.  It is not about whether miracles ever have happened or whether any miracle in particular has happened.  At first pass, you might think that it must be a very short book, since the answer to that first question is either yes or no, and then what else is there to say about it?  But I think you will find that the points that Lewis makes are very good, even if your foregone conclusion before reading the book is that miracles cannot happen.  The primary point that Lewis makes is that it doesn’t make any sense to evaluate whether a particular miracle has happened unless the question of whether miracles could happen has been addressed.  It seems like a simple point in retrospect, but I find that it is something constantly ignored in many discussions about the material and the non-material.  The thoughts in this book have greatly influenced my thinking, and I am certain that you will find many entries in this blog that have a direct or indirect link to some of the thoughts Lewis presents in that book.

I am not going to give a complete review of the book here, as many of the points in the book will come up in significant detail elsewhere.  I’d rather you read the book yourself.  It will require some brainpower to read – it is not a light read.  But I think a brief story at the beginning of the book serves to illustrate the point of the book.  Lewis mentioned that he only personally knows of one person who has seen a ghost.  Yet, he says, that person didn’t believe in ghosts before she saw the ghost, and still doesn’t believe in ghosts even after seeing one.  That might not make sense at first, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense.  If you have decided that there are no such thing as ghosts, then no amount of ghostly apparitions and visions will, or even should, change that view.  My personal analogy would be with respect to aliens from outer space.  I don’t believe there are living beings from other planets visiting our planet.  That’s a decision I made long ago.  So, if I ever saw a UFO, I would believe that it must have some reasonable explanation that did not include being a spaceship from another planet, even if the object moved in ways that seemed to disobey the laws of physics.  If a little Martian came up to me, I would believe it was someone in a Martian costume, or a robot, or something else.  I would believe that someone was playing a trick on me.  The thing is, I’m not open to belief in aliens from outer space and I don’t even care to be open to such a belief.  Given that, it would be a waste of someone’s time to try to convince me that they really did have a close encounter with aliens.  I might listen politely, but their evidence will not change my view.  The point CS Lewis makes at the beginning of the book is that we have to acknowledge our a priori views.  The rest of the book is CS Lewis’ argument about why it is reasonable to take the view that miracles could happen, regardless of whether they ever have happened or ever will happen.  If you have already decided that miracles cannot happen, and you don’t want to have that view challenged, then you should not read the book, as it will be a waste of time.

I will bring up one more discussion from the book because it is sure to come up again in future entries and I want to give credit here where credit is due.  Lewis has an extended discussion about the difference between cause-effect (physics) vs. ground-consequent (reason) activity.  I bring this up because it is very relevant to my ideas on free will and neuroscience.  The general point he makes is that it is hard to figure out how physical reactions in the brain (I will say “between neurons”), which are (presumably) purely based on a cause and effect relationship, can result in the logical reasoning process that occurs when we are thinking through an argument (I will add “because all thought is the result of neurons firing in the brain”).  I will not restate things here, because Lewis does a much better job of it than I would.  It’s in one of the earlier chapters of the book.  Even if you don’t want to read the rest of the book, I’d really be interested in your thoughts on that particular chapter.  I don’t know why the concept isn’t discussed more frequently.  It might be because those who would argue against Lewis would have to claim that rational arguments are only made rational because that is the way our brains happened to fire, which would, of course, empty their arguments of any real substance.  Or…maybe it’s just that the whole topic requires more than 30 seconds to explain, so the average person tunes it out and goes onto something easier to understand.  If there is no sound bite, is there any sound?  Not today, I don’t think.

I hope I gave you enough of a taste to get you interested in reading the book “Miracles.”  It’s a fairly short book, but it will take a while to read.  Fortunately, Lewis is a very readable writer who always includes practical illustrations whenever he can.  Anyone can understand the book – it will just require some brain power!

My Favorite Quotes - Entry #4

“There but for the grace of God go I”

John Bradford ~1550

          According to tradition, this phrase (or something like it) was first spoken by John Bradford (circa 1510–1555) when he was watching criminals being led to the scaffold.  John Bradford was an English preacher who was martyred in 1555.  It’s not clear that he really said these words, but that doesn’t really matter to me.  The point being made is that God’s providence puts us in the situations we are in.  Or, to put it another way, we all have the capability to really mess up our own lives, and we shouldn’t feel so superior to anyone else.  We could be in their situation.

          I try to live with this kind of thinking in mind.  Specifically, when I hear about someone who did something really awful, or made a really bad mistake, I try not to think with the judgmental attitude that “well, I would never do anything like that.”  I think we all have our struggles, and none of us is perfect.  I struggle with some things that others don’t, and they struggle with things that I don’t.  That doesn’t make either one of us better than the other – we are all equal.

          Personally, I think you will be a better, kinder, more understanding person if you understand the depth of the meaning of the Bradford quote.  Too many people in this world are harsh toward other people.  They are too judgmental.  The world can benefit from a little more graciousness.  

I’m not saying that we should excuse the wrongs of others.  And we certainly shouldn’t excuse our own wrongs.  But we are all in the same boat:  guilty and helpless.  To be helpless is to be helpless.  Does it really matter whether some are more helpless than others?  I don’t believe it does.  

          Christians are sometimes the most judgmental people around.  I think that is wrong and tragic and sickening.  Of all people, Christians should be the most compassionate and kind.  Why isn’t that always the case?  I don’t know, but I wish it weren’t so.

          This does not mean that we should relax our moral standards to accommodate our failures.  This does not mean that we should reward everyone equally or that we should stop punishing those who make bad moral decisions.  Evil people should be punished for the evil they do – but that includes those of us who just haven’t been found out yet!  The problem is, when we recognize our general human tendency to fail, particularly in moral situations, it often results in a bit of compassion on our part.  But it’s kind of a false compassion:  we want to forgive others because we know that we do, or might do, the same wrong thing and we don’t want to be harshly punished for it.  Eventually, as we follow that path in its downward spiral, we start pushing the boundaries of what is morally acceptable because, deep down, we want to feel acceptable when we stray a bit.  Although it’s nice to be forgiven, it’s even better to be told that what you thought was wrong is actually ok.  Eventually, if nothing is wrong, then we can all feel good about ourselves.  That’s a tragic end, in my opinion.  But that’s a topic for another conversation.

          Jesus is reported as saying “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” as a crowd gathered around a woman caught in adultery.  In Jesus’ day, no one cast a stone – they all walked away.  Today I feel that there would be those who would still pick up a stone and start throwing with all the anger they could muster.  But there would also be those who would look Jesus in the eye and say “how dare you call her a sinner.”  I don’t want to be part of either group.  I don’t feel I’m perfect enough to put others down, but I also don’t feel I’m smart enough to redefine what is right and wrong.

          I think we all have moral blind spots and need help.  But when the morally-blind lead the morally-blind, we are all in trouble.  And, in my personal sampling of the human race, none (0%) have been found to have 20/20 moral vision.  Therefore, in my opinion, our only hope is to gain help from outside the human race.

          Well, I’m sure this quote will spark a few more discussions down the road.  But, for now, consider what it really means:  “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Free Will #6 – Free Will Experiments – Soon et al., 2013

Note:  subsequent to my writing of this post, an excellent scientific paper has been published that makes many of the same arguments, but does it much better.  The paper is by Brass et al., 2019, and I highly recommend reading it if you are interested in this topic.  You can find it [here].  They also present a very interesting model of decision-making that I'm sure will be the topic of some future posts!

         As I discussed in my previous post on this topic, it seems that free will should be observable in the neuron and therefore should be testable.  I’m not the only one to think that way, and in the last few years a few researchers have attempted to design experiments that would test this concept.  I find the experiments to be very interesting and creative, but, unfortunately they fall short of the goal.  I think it is worth discussing here what some of the difficulties are in some detail.  This post is going to have to be longer than most.

          The most commonly referenced paper on this topic is Libet et al. from 1983, but I would rather review in detail a more recent paper:  Soon et al., 2013 “Predicting free choices for abstract intentions.”  It’s an interesting experiment and illustrates many of the basic principles and basic difficulties with this type of experiment.

          The basic principle that is put forth in these papers is that there is activity in the brain that precedes the conscious awareness of “free will” decisions that we make.  The implication is that freely made decisions are not really free – rather, they are the result of earlier unconscious processes in the brain that determined the decision.  Ultimately, what these researchers would like to say is that our decisions are made unconsciously and therefore determined by other brain processes, thus supporting the idea that free will is only an illusion.[1]  Of course the popular press loves that, and is quick to jump to conclusions about the meaning of the research.  Well, I don’t think it means what they think it means!

          First, I’m going to have to explain the methods used in the paper in a bit of detail so that my comments make sense.  The paper itself is freely available at Pubmed, and if you have interest in this topic, it is worth reading the original paper.

          The attempt in this research was to try to get subjects to make a “freely made decision” involving abstract thought.  Previous published experiments of this nature usually involved a task that required physical movement.  Movements involve a certain amount of pre-planning in the brain and the investigators wanted to separate the abstract decision from the brain activity involved in movement.

          In the experiment, subjects were shown a screen with a few numbers on it and one letter in the center.  The screen changed once every second to a new set of numbers and a new letter.  As the screens would move past, the subject was to randomly decide at some point that, in the subsequent screen, they were going to either add or subtract in the screen that followed.  They had to remember the letter that was on the screen when they consciously decided they were going to add or subtract.  The next screen gave them the first number (a single digit) and then the third screen gave them the second number along with four answers and they had to pick the correct one that corresponded to either the addition or subtraction problem.  Then, a fourth screen appeared that had four letters to choose from and they had to pick the letter that was on the screen when they decided to either add or subtract.  That completed one test, and then the process started over again.  One annoying thing for me is that I could not find anywhere in the paper that described how many trials each subject did.  Knowing the number of samples is critical in trying to understand the detailed results and the statistics presented.  Maybe I missed it somewhere in the paper – otherwise it seems like a pretty glaring omission that peer-review would have caught.

          There was a screening process for subjects to make sure they met certain criteria (more on that later) and then 22 subjects completed the real test.  They were positioned in an MRI machine that could scan their brain activity every two seconds.  I won’t go into the details, but there is a method of brain scanning developed a few years ago that shows the areas of the brain with the highest relative activity.  So, the researchers searched across the entire brain to see if there were regions of the brain that had activity related to the decision to add/subtract and the timing of that decision.  Then, since they knew when the subjects were conscious of their decision (based on the design of the test), they looked at brain activity up to eight seconds prior to the conscious decision point. 

          It’s a fairly complicated procedure to determine whether activity is correlated with the decision made, but in the end they found two areas of the brain that had activity that predicted the impending decision with around 59% accuracy.  Practically, this means that you could query this area of the brain and ask “is the person going to make a decision to add/subtract?” and the activity of the area could be analyzed to predict yes or no with respect to an upcoming decision in 59% of the cases.  Note that if you knew nothing you should be able to predict decision or no decision with 50% accuracy.  Nonetheless, 59% is statistically significant, meaning that it is highly probable that the predicted activity really was correlated with the decision and didn’t just happen by chance.  This predictive activity occurred 2-4 seconds before the person was conscious of their decision.  The implication is that some area of your brain knew of the decision before “you” did, thus showing that the decision was not really “free” but was determined by unconscious brain activity.

          I will quote their conclusion here just for completeness before diving into my review of this paper:  “To summarize, we directly investigated the formation of spontaneous abstract intentions and showed that the brain may already start preparing for a voluntary action up to a few seconds before the decision enters into conscious awareness. Importantly, these results cannot be explained by motor preparation or general attentional mechanisms. We found that frontopolar and precuneus/ posterior cingulate encoded the content of the upcoming decision, but not the timing. In contrast, the pre-supplementary motor area predicted the timing of the decision, but not the content.”

          First, I’m going to make three general statements and explain their impact on the understanding of the results of this experiment and similar experiments, then I have a few specific comments that would be more like comments I would have made if I had been a reviewer of this paper.

          1.  It’s not clear to me that “consciousness” and “will” are the same things.  The key assumption in these types of experiments is that we are conscious of the will’s decision at the moment it is made.  I’m not certain that such an assumption is valid.  I don’t have any data to prove the correlation one way or the other, but since free will and consciousness are both somewhat nebulous and hard to define, it seems like a bit of a leap to think that they must be perfectly correlated in time.  Isn’t it possible that your will begins to act on your brain before you are conscious of it?

          About the only example I can bring up here is to consider the common phrase “go with your gut.”  What do people mean when they say that?  Physiologically it doesn’t make a lot of sense, yet we all know what is meant by that phrase because we experience it.  Sometimes we know what we need to do right away – almost unconsciously it seems – and yet sometimes we are hesitant.  So people say “go with your gut” because there are times where it almost seems like working through a conscious calculated decision is just not warranted or can even lead us to make the wrong decision.  To me, this indicates that sometimes our will is active before we are conscious of it.  Of course, for those of you who are determinists, you’ll say that this common phrase is as close as we usually come to realizing that every decision we make is pre-determined by our ongoing brain activity.  Possibly.  The point is – who knows?  And until we know, I find it hard to draw firm conclusions from these types of experiments about free will.  To be fair, I don’t think the authors of these papers make this direct connection in their papers – I think it is usually the things written later about the article that make this claim because such a claim is a bit more sensational.

          Along with this issue is that it seems to me that it is particularly difficult to pinpoint when you are conscious of a decision.  Subjects in these studies have to have some way of marking the time point when they are conscious they are making a decision.  I find that conceptually difficult.  How do you really know?  How accurate can you really be?  Seems to me that an error of a few seconds is certainly possible.

          2.  The tasks in these experiments are basically random, not necessarily decisions of the will.  To be honest, I’m not sure how else they could do these experiments.  But I would say that the influence of free will in the human mind and brain is fundamentally different than making random decisions.  I tried to illustrate that a bit with my entry on the “Turing Test with Numbers”.  The difference between a random number series and a series determined by the “will” is hard to identify.  Further, how do human beings make random decisions anyway?  My hypothesis is that the process for picking random numbers is different than the normal process for making decisions.  I would not expect our free will to be involved in the selection of truly “random” decisions or actions.  I kind of figure that we must pick random numbers in a manner similar to the way computers pick random numbers – they have to find some kind of electronically noisy process that has apparent randomness in it.  If so, then we would use some neurons who are tuned to fire or not fire based on small differences in the random fluctuation of ions at the nerve membrane.  I don’t know if this is true or not, but I really don’t see why we need our free will to make a random decision.  If our random decisions are really pre-determined by various brain circuits, that would not bother me at all.  And it has no impact on what I consider free will.

          3.  The will is a weak force.  When determinists argue against free will being a separate influence on the brain, they seem to imply that the will takes over all of the brain’s activity and is the overwhelming influence over what happens.  I don’t see it that way.  I think most of what we do, and most of what the brain does, is essentially composed of physical, material reactions and responses to various sensory inputs.  Essentially, I would say that we are primarily acting on complex reflexes that are fine-tuned by the will.  I think we can go through our day pretty mindlessly doing the things we need to do without involving the will much.  In many cases, I would say that the will’s influence is very subtle.  Frequently I think our will is entirely masked by these reflexes.  Why do we do things that we say we don’t want to do?  We intend to do good things, but then we make bad decisions.  Sometimes in these cases I would say we are driven by our habits and passions, and the will is completely pushed aside.[2] 

          The implication of the will being a weak force is that when we try to experimentally identify it, it is very difficult.  We end up trying to measure a very small signal riding on top of a huge signal, and that is very hard to do.  We are trying to pick out subtle neural activity in the midst of huge networks of coordinated neurons being driving by prior neural inputs.  Fundamentally, this is why I think an experiment demonstrating whether or not we really have free will is extremely difficult to conduct.

          Related to this issue is the method used to identify brain activity.  fMRI is used to identify this activity based on a parameter called BOLD.  This parameter correlates to the use of energy within the neurons.  When neurons are more active, they use more energy than they usually do, and that can be measured.  But this type of measurement requires that there are a large number of neurons in a specific region of the brain that become highly active during any specific time period.  You can’t pick out the activity of a few neurons with this method.  Subtle changes would be lost.  Also, unique activity in broad regions of the brain would not show up here either.  An analogy might be trying to determine where I work by observing the rush hour traffic patterns in Cleveland.  That might predict where a lot of people work, but I happen to work south of downtown (usually).  Others might not even go to work during rush hour times.  The BOLD parameter only picks up major activity and if, as I suggest, the will is a subtle force, it won’t appear in the tests being done using that method.  There are other testing methods used by other investigators, and I may get into those in the future.

Now for some more detailed considerations of this particular paper.

4.  It’s really hard to design an experiment that involves human behavior when you want to give them complete freedom to make a decision.  Experiments need to be well-controlled in order to draw conclusions, while free will decision-making is anything but well-controlled!  So, in this experiment they had to create some artificial constraints on people’s decision-making.  The primary way they did this was to have a screening test in which subjects performed the test (without the MRI) and their spontaneous performance had to meet certain criteria.  This means that the subject population that was studied was a selectively biased population.  Specifically, subjects had to “spontaneously” select about the same amount of addition and subtraction tasks.  The researchers needed reasonable numbers of both types of activity, but how do you guarantee that kind of distribution and still allow people to be “free”?  I don’t think the paper ever said whether the selected subjects continued to pick similar numbers of addition and subtraction tasks when they were in the MRI, but I assume that in general they did.  They do mention that they threw out the data for one subject who never selected a subtraction task in one run.  Obviously, they weren’t really free to choose!

The other thing that I think is even more problematic is that they only selected subjects who averaged at least 10 or more screens before they made a choice.  Thus, subjects who were naturally highly decisive were excluded from this study.  Thus, only subjects who pondered things a bit before “freely deciding” were selected.  Is it possible that “ponderers” have to mull things over before making a decision, thus partially explaining why they had brain activity before they were conscious of their decision?  The bottom line is that they had to evaluate a biased population.

          5.  The best prediction accuracy was about 59%, which is fairly weak and barely above statistical significance, given that by chance the accuracy should be 50%.  But, for an experiment such as this, 59% isn’t terrible.  But there’s some missing information that makes it difficult to judge this predictive ability.  Specifically, the average time for subjects to make a spontaneous decision was 17.8 sec with a standard error of 1.8 sec.  Thus, it seems to me that as time drags on, you can kind of predict about when a decision is going to be made.  Is it really spontaneous in that case?  It seems to me that I made be able to make a 59% prediction just by knowing which screen number the subject was on.  If my brain can predict it, then so can the subject’s!

6.  The activity predicts that a decision is going to be made (fairly poorly), but does not predict what the decision is actually going to be – add or subtract.  The individual is not really free to decide whether to make a decision – the rules of the experiment require that they eventually decide and the rules of practicality essentially require that the decision is made somewhere around 10-20 seconds after the start of each series of screens.  What seems much closer to spontaneous is add or subtract, but that wasn’t predicted by the brain activity.  Again, to be fair, you’d think this would be a pretty subtle activity in the brain and hard to pick out with fMRI methodology.

7.  The subjects had to remember the letter on the screen when they made a decision.  In my opinion (as one who has a bad memory) the anticipation of having to remember something requires brain activity.  In other words, you have to know before you see (or hear) something that it is something you’re going to have to remember.  Otherwise, you immediately forget it (at least that’s how my brain works).  Therefore, I think subjects would have had to do some preparatory brain work prior to seeing the screen where they made a decision, so that their brain was ready to store that letter in memory for about 3 seconds.  So, one hypothesis might be that the regions of the brain they identified were involved in preparatory memory activities, not necessarily in decision-making.  I know they compared the focused activity to general attention mechanisms, but it’s not clear to me that preparation for specific memory is the same as general attention.

8.  One thing this paper does show is that the decision itself and the timing of the decision appeared in separate parts of the brain.  If the will acts at the level of neurons as I propose, this may suggest that the will acts in different areas in the brain and then those areas ultimately need to come together elsewhere in order for a decision to actually be made.  I relate these things to my personal experience (where, in these cases, I’m assuming that I experience what everyone else in the human race experiences).  Sometimes I’ve made up my mind about something, but I’m not ready to actually decide, so nothing happens “until I’m ready.”  The results of this paper might lend some weak credence to that…maybe.

Well, there’s a lot more to be discussed in the various papers in the literature.  The point is, disproving free will and proving determinism is going to be pretty difficult because the experimental design is conceptually very difficult.  I try hard not to be someone who critiques the work of others without offering an acceptable alternative.  I will have to present those ideas in a future entry.  But I hope, at the very least, that this helps you not get carried away by the headlines that say “scientists prove that free will is an illusion.”  They haven’t – and they never will![3]

References

Libet B, Gleason CA, Wright EW, Pearl DK (1983) Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain 106(Pt 3):623–642.

Soon CS, He AH, Bode S, Haynes JD. Predicting free choices for abstract intentions. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Apr 9;110(15):6217-22. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212218110. Epub 2013 Mar 18.

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[1] I know:  researchers are supposed to be unbiased on not have anything they “would like to say.”  So far, every researcher I’ve met is a human being and, therefore, biased.  That includes me.

[2] Who “pushes the will aside?”  The will – what else could it be?  It’s not that weak of a force!

[3] Although it’s a little hard for me to prove that something will never happen!