A Theory of Soul Consistent with Scripture and Neuroscience - Part 13: Heads or Tails

             I'd like to present an illustration that is going to be very foundational for future discussions of my theory of the soul.  I think it is a simple point - at least I hope it is.  The point has to do with the close relationship between a truly random event and a "willed" event.  I've discussed this elsewhere, and it's going to come up again, but I want to put forward an illustration that should offer some insight into why free will is difficult to discern experimentally.

             Imagine that I have given you a long list of my recorded coin flips.  It's just a list:  Heads. Tails. Tails. Heads. Heads. Heads. Tails. Heads. Tails. Etc.  The list contains 1000 entries.

             A couple of givens:  assume that the flip of a coin is truly random and assume that my coin is a fair coin, such that you expect a 50% distribution of heads and 50% distribution of tails. 

             As you look at the table, there is nothing unusual about it.  I ask you to convince yourself that this is a random table of flipping a fair coin.  So, you dutifully collect some statistical measurements on the data.  You find that 50.2% of the entries are heads.  Seems fine.  You even break things down a bit more and look at the distribution of each set of successive groups of 100 values.  Their distributions also seem fine.  As far as you can tell, this is a typical table of random coin flips.

 

             Then I provide you with the following information:  occasionally, at time points known only to me, instead of flipping the coin, I willfully placed the coin down with either a heads or a tails.  You don't know how often I did that, but for the sake of illustration I will let you know that it was less than a dozen times during the 1000 entries you have in front of you.  I tell you that the series of intentional heads or tails spell out a word using an ASCII table.  My contention is this:  you could not tell which of the 1000 flips is intentional (and therefore has some meaning) and which is random.  In fact, looking across the entire distribution, you could not tell whether my claim that some of the coin flips are intentional is true or not.  Since I am telling you that sometimes my intentional coin placements are heads and some are tails, you wouldn't necessarily see a change in the distribution.  And, really, with so few intentional coin placements in the midst of so many random events, how could you really know that the distribution was not totally random even if all of my intentional placements are heads?  Any variations from a 50:50 split would be well-within any expected variation. 

             Could you ever distinguish my proposed "willed" series of events from a truly "random" series of events?  I contend that you will never be able to distinguish these because of the nature of random and willed events in this illustration.  Even in the extreme case - the case where every coin flip was actually not a flip but was, instead, me placing it down according to my own will; and further the case where I was obsessed with heads so I placed the coin heads up 1000 times in a row - even in that case, you can't prove that it wasn't random since there is some finite chance that a truly random series would result in the same distribution.  In such an extreme case, though, I couldn't blame you if you concluded that this was just a determined series of coin placements, and neither random nor willed.  Sometimes I think that when scientists think of free will, they imagine it must happen in the brain in a manner that fits this latter example.  Specifically, that to exercise free will means that every neuron fires under the control of the will.  If there is any "mixing" of events, it is a mix of determined and willed events.  But in my theory, this is not so.  Willed events are rare and are mixed in with a lot of random events.  In this latter case, not only can you not prove that there are no willed events, you might never suspect that there are any willed events.  If I hadn't told you that I sometimes placed the coin down intentionally, you would never have suspected that I was doing that.

              Finally, the whole situation is further complicated by the fact that you can't repeat the experiment and get the same results.  One common experimental method to extract rare events from the midst of random (or assumed to be random) noise is to perform what is called "spike-triggered averaging."  This allows you to find a very weak signal (like I'm proposing free will is) in the midst of a lot of random noise.  But this approach only works if the signal is repeatable and deterministic based on some known trigger.  In the situation I've described, we have none of the necessary conditions.

             Why do I bring this up?  Because the random coin flip is directly analogous to the randomness in the synaptic junction of neurons.  Neurons either fire (heads) or they don't (tails) as a result of sufficient conditions of neurotransmitter release at the synaptic junction.  That process is fundamentally random (I'll have to dive into the evidence in a future entry).  Therefore, we have exactly the same situation as the table of coin flips, but instead we have a table of neuronal firing states.  It's obviously a very complicated table because there are lots of neurons (not just a single coin) and they are all experiencing their random changes again and again as time progresses.  Also, a coin flip has a uniform distribution, whereas the distribution of any neuron's firing states is related to its inputs, is more complicated, and can change over time.  So it is a very complex table!  My point is that if you can't identify willed events in a simple table of random-plus-willed coin flips, then you surely can't identify willed events in the midst of random neuronal firing.  Willed neuronal firing events could occur constantly in the midst of random neuronal firing, and you would never know.  I contend that that is exactly what happens in the brain and you could never prove me wrong.  It doesn't mean I'm right, of course, but you can't dismiss the idea out of hand.

             Can the idea that willed events are hidden in random neuronal firing ever be considered scientific?  If you consider true science as only encompassing concepts that are disprovable and can be subject to repeated observation, then no.  Of course, by that definition, any theory of the past, such as evolution, is also not science.  But with respect to my theory, you could disprove it by showing that every neuronal firing event is predictable with 100% accuracy.  Specifically, if you can show that there are no such things as random events anywhere in the universe, then, I think, there would be no room for free will.  But, ignoring how difficult that would be, it seems pretty clear that the direction physics (and biology) are going is to confidently assert that there are random events in the universe.  Thus, rather than disproving the idea of free will, science seems to be progressing towards demonstrating that the necessary substrate for free will does indeed exist. 

             Of course, demonstrating that true randomness exists does not prove that free will exists.  I think that's where "disprovable science" ends.  The point of this entry was to show that if randomness does exist, it can be the source for free will and, further, that it would be impossible to rule out the possibility of free will if randomness exists.  Thus, given randomness, it is impossible to disprove the existence of free will and therefore, the concept no longer fits into the disprovable science realm.  That may bother some, but it certainly doesn't bother me because I've already accepted that there is truth to be found outside of science (something I've discussed elsewhere).

             In summary, free will requires an apparent fundamental randomness to exist.  Free will can be buried undetectably in that randomness.  Since it seems that fundamental randomness really does exist in the physical world, then neuroscience, if it confines itself to scientific statements, cannot claim to have proven that free will does not exist.  This makes the debate about free will and determinism a philosophical debate rather than a scientific one.  Yet it seems that scientists are the ones fully confident about their deterministic views.  To such scientists I say: l let go of your biological determinism and come live in the free world.  It's an exciting place to be!