FREE WILL RESEARCH

Science and Philosophy on FREE WILL (Purpose – 3)
 

Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.

In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.

"The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real'," says Haynes. "We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before."

The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.

As humans, we like to think that our decisions are under our conscious control — that we have free will. Philosophers have debated that concept for centuries, and now Haynes and other experimental neuroscientists are raising a new challenge. They argue that consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person's actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion. "We feel we choose, but we don't," says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London.

You may have thought you decided whether to have tea or coffee this morning, for example, but the decision may have been made long before you were aware of it.

Philosophers aren't convinced that brain scans can demolish free will so easily. Some have questioned the neuroscientists' results and interpretations, arguing that the researchers have not quite grasped the concept that they are ridiculing. Many more don't engage with scientists at all.

Neuroscientists and philosophers are talking about different subjects, whilst they believe they are talking about the same thing. Such a remark is passed by Walter Glannon, a philosopher at the University of Calgary in Canada, who has interests in neuroscience, ethics and free will.

There are some signs that this is beginning to change. This month, a lot of projects will get under way as part of Big Questions in Free Will, a four-year US$4.4-million program funded by the John Templeton Foundation in, Pennsylvania, which supports research bridging theology, philosophy and natural science. Some say that, with refined experiments, neuroscience could help researchers to identify the physical processes underlying conscious intention and to better understand the brain activity that precedes it. And if unconscious brain activity could be found to predict decisions perfectly, the work really could confuse the notion of free will. A possibility that what are now correlations could at some point become causal connections between brain mechanisms and behaviors is expressed by Glannon (philosopher). In such a situation it would threaten the concept of free will by philosophers, he further feels.

Pointing out that Haynes and his team could predict a left or right button press with only 60% accuracy at best the critics raised their objection. Although better than chance, this isn't enough to claim that you can see the brain making its mind up before conscious awareness, argues Adina Roskies, a neuroscientist and philosopher who works on free will at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Besides, "all it suggests is that there are some physical factors that influence decision-making", which shouldn't be surprising. Philosophers who know about the science, she adds, don't think this sort of study is good evidence for the absence of free will, because the experiments are caricatures (mockery, distortion) of decision-making. Even the seemingly simple decision of whether to have tea or coffee is more complex than deciding whether to push a button with one hand or the other.

Philosophers question the assumptions underlying such interpretations. "Part of what's driving some of these conclusions is the thought that free will has to be spiritual or involve souls or something," says Al Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University. If neuroscientists find unconscious neural activity that drives decision-making, the troublesome concept of mind as separate from body disappears, as doe’s free will. This 'dualist' conception of free will is an easy target for neuroscientists to knock down, says Glannon (philosopher). "Neatly dividing mind and brain makes it easier for neuroscientists to drive a wedge between them," he adds. (Spoil the relationship between two)

The trouble is, most current philosophers don't think about free will like that, says Mele. Many are materialists — believing that everything has a physical basis, and decisions and actions come from brain activity. So scientists are weighing in on a notion that philosophers consider irrelevant.

Nowadays, says Mele (philosopher Alfred Mele, professor at Florida State University, having a long standing research on the concept of FREE WILL); the majority of philosophers are comfortable with the idea that people can make rational decisions in a deterministic universe. They debate the interplay between freedom and determinism — the theory that everything is predestined, either by fate or by physical laws. But Roskies (Adina Roskies, Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, Hanover), says that results from neuroscience can't yet settle that debate.

They may speak to the predictability of actions, but not to the issue of determinism.

Neuroscientists also sometimes have misconceptions about their own field, says Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In particular, scientists tend to see preparatory brain activity as proceeding step wise, one bit at a time, to a final decision. He suggests that researchers should instead think of processes working in parallel, in a complex network with interactions happening continually. The time at which one becomes aware of a decision is thus not as important as some have thought.

There are conceptual issues — and then there is semantics (study of meaning or interpretation). "What would really help is if scientists and philosophers could come to an agreement on what free will means," says Glannon. Even within philosophy, definitions of free will don't always match up. Some philosophers define it as the ability to make rational decisions in the absence of coercion (threatening). Some definitions place it in cosmic (universal) context: at the moment of decision, given everything that's happened in the past, it is possible to reach a different decision. Others stick to the idea that a non-physical 'soul' is directing decisions.

Neuroscience could contribute directly to tidying up (bring order, straighten) definitions, or adding an empirical (experimentally provable) dimension to them. It might lead to a deeper, better understanding of what freely willing something involves, or refine views of what conscious intention is, says Roskies.

Mele is directing the Templeton Foundation project that is beginning to bring philosophers and neuroscientists together. "I think if we do a new generation of studies with better design, we'll get better evidence about what goes on in the brain when people make decisions," he says.

Philosophers are willing to admit that neuroscience could one day trouble the concept of free will. Imagine a situation (philosophers like to do this) in which researchers could always predict what someone would decide from their brain activity, before the subject became aware of their decision. "If that turned out to be true, that would be a threat to free will," says Mele. Still, even those who have perhaps prematurely proclaimed (openly declare) the death of free will agree that such results would have to be replicated on many different levels of decision-making. Pressing a button or playing a game is far removed from (very different from) making a cup of tea, running for president or committing a crime.

The practical effects of demolishing free will are hard to predict. Biological determinism doesn't hold up as a defense in law. Legal scholars aren't ready to ditch (discard) the principle of personal responsibility. "The law has to be based on the idea that people are responsible for their actions, except in exceptional circumstances," says Nicholas Mackintosh, director of a project on neuroscience and the law; run by the Royal Society in London.

Mele is hopeful that other philosophers will become better acquainted with the science of conscious intention. And where philosophy is concerned, he says, scientists would do well to soften their stance. "It's not as though the task of neuroscientists who work on free will has to be to show there isn't any."

It seems that the areas which require immediate attention are:

Even within philosophy, definitions of free will don't always match up

Agreement on what free will means does not exist.

Definition of FREE WILL not spelled.

Neuroscientists also sometimes have misconceptions about their own field

Bringing philosophers and neuroscientists together and developing approach toward each other with softened, positive attitude. (Ego less approach to search the Truth).

The will (desire) of the Templeton foundation to progress the work on FREE WILL thus appears to depends upon the attitude (intent) of the academicians in defining the terms of reference and developing a positive approach towards the problem with the aim for the search of TRUTH and not nurturing the subjective interests.

The ‘desire’, ‘intention’, ‘attitude’, (and also ego), to a layman they are the faculties of Mind. Academicians are not able to define MIND in spite of research of decades. Without defining MIND would it be possible to define free will?

Vijay R. Joshi.

Source: Neuroscience vs. Philosophy http://archive.is/a0QeG