Peter Watts’s book Blindsight, a novel about a disastrous first contact, has a lot to say about free will and consciousness, with an alarmingly deep and fascinating bibliography and end notes about the science of consciousness. I’ve already ordered the book he based a lot of his work on, Metzinger’s Being No One. One of the biggest shocks in the book is when the main characters discover just how effectively they’ve been played:

“I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you’d raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother’s grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You’d dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that’s just me, that’s just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet.”

And that’s just one of about a dozen nasty shocks the book throws at the reader.

This is the big fear we have about free will: that it itself “manipulable,” that our internal experience of it will be wholly coherent with our ideas about selfhood– and that coherency can be controlled. Dennet, in the seminal work on compatibilism, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, points out that this is cyberneticism: subject A can push subject B into whatever state A wishes. The more we know about brains, the more illusory B’s claims to willfullness can become.

When Dr. Helen frets about Cass Sunstein and dismisses the argument, what she’s also doing is distancing herself from the tools with which to fight back.

In the end, I fear both Helen and Watts are right: we will only have free will by banning the techniques that permit ever more precise circumvention of it. In the process, we will either doom the human species to a static existence in the muck and mire of our short, biologically circumscribed lives, or we will have to leave free will– and possibly even consciousness– behind.

I think the problem is in degrees. His example of the angry man highlighted the broad spectrum of human emotional response to “justice”. Should the man be killed (or possibly tortured – you could argue our current prison system is quite tortuous), or should he be locked away, yet with compassion? Or in the case of positive behaviors, if the goals are ostensibly the same (appealing to him and others), how many riches should the well-behaved, successful man be allowed?

I think these questions go to the core of the schism between modern liberalism & conservatism. Most conservatives will emphasize the man’s role in determining his life, “Who cares how bad his childhood was?!!!” While liberals will emphasize the role of society, “Look at the demographic disparities in life success!!!”

There is still a basic human desire for justice. When we stub our toe on a misplaced chair we will still want to kick it. But was it responsible, or whomever moved it? Certainly not to the degree that we feel momentarily driven to punish it. We must chasten our responses in order to find a justice that promotes both social prosperity and fairness.

So as a matter of degree, we can both be responsible for our actions, and ultimately not responsible. We can live in the micro-, yet structure law and order around the macro-.

HOUSE: I told him to [risk his career for her continued good health] if he loves you.
THIRTEEN: He only ~thinks~ he loves me.
HOUSE: (staring incredulously) …it’s the same thing!

I don’t think that’s what LLinas was describing at all. I think he is claiming that, from the standpoint of his conscious experience, there was *no difference* between choosing to move his leg and having the machine stimulate his motor cortex to move his leg.

He wasn’t rationalizing. After the fact, *he truly believed* that he had changed his mind and moved his leg inwards, because that’s how his brain recorded the event — as a conscious decision to move his leg inwards.

That’s the subtlety of this anecdote. We know he didn’t decide to move his leg a particular way, but he truly does not know it — he remembers “changing his decision”, because the machine genuinely changed his decision for him.

@lw: I’m arguing way out of my depth, but hey, thats what blog comments are for. I disagree with your pain example; I think that there are oodles of assumptions built into your seeing my wince. (And, dealing with chronic pain problems, I’ve discovered just how much the philosophical arguments actually matter. It’s very difficult to convey details about your pain in a way that’s specific and meaningful to the listener.) Three easy counterexamples:

1. If you’re male: Ever see another guy hit in the groin? Did you wince? That wasn’t pain.. what was it, and how would a bystander interpret your wince? What about if someone pretends to punch you, but pulls the punch before it hits?

2. Last week, my physical therapist was working on my hips, and when she did something with my right hip I winced. She naturally assumed that my right hip hurt more; in fact, I was listening to her music player, and wincing at Annie Lennox (who, I was surprised to discover, can be pitchy sometimes.)

3. I have no feeling in my left hip. So when it’s in spasm, it should hurt when I lay on my left side, but it doesn’t. What I feel instead is the sudden VERY IMPORTANT urge to be doing something else right at that moment. It’s so predictable it’s funny. “OK, I’m done stretching my right hip; time for the other oh my god I should go feed the cats.” Very much like what Llinas describes.

Oh, and then there’s neuropathic vs. nociceptive pain, and referred pain… if I have a spinal injury that makes me feel pain in my leg, am I feeling pain in my leg? Or am I feeling pain that I perceive to be coming from my leg? What about phantom limb pain? (And now we’re back to Phantoms in the Brain again.)

So yes, I think that when you see me wince in pain, you see what you (and maybe I) consider a wince, from what you (and maybe I) would assume is pain, based on our lifetime experiences of wincing and pain.

LLINÁS
It was extraordinary really. There is an instrument used in neurology called a transcranial magnetic stimulator. It has a coil that you put next to the top of the head and you pass a current such that a big magnetic field is generated that activates the brain directly, without having to open the thing. So if you get one of these coils and you put it on top of the head, you can generate a movement. You put it in the back, you see a light, so you can stimulate different parts of the brain and have a feeling of to what happens when you activate the brain directly without, in quotes, “you” doing it. This of course is a strange way of talking but that’s how we talk.

So I decide to put it on the top of the head where I consider to be the motor cortex and stimulate it and find a good spot where my foot on the right side would move inwards. It was – pop – no problem. And we did it several times and I tell my colleague: “I know anatomy, I know physiology, I can tell you I’m cheating. When you put the stimulus and then I move, I feel it, I am moving it.” And he said “well, you know, there’s no way to really know.” I said “I’ll tell you how I know. I feel it, but stimulate and I’ll move the foot outwards.” I am now going to do that, so he stimulates and the foot moves inwards again. So what happened? I said “but I changed my mind“. Do it again. So I do it half a dozen times.

BINGHAM
And it always moves inwards?

LLINÁS
Always. So I said, oh my God, I can’t tell the difference between the activity from the outside and what I consider to be a voluntary movement. If I know that it is going to happen, then I think I did it, because I now understand this free will stuff and this volition stuff. Volition is what’s happening somewhere else in the brain, I know about it and therefore I decide that I did it. It happens in science as well. You actually take possession of something that doesn’t belong to you.

BINGHAM
So what was your … so you’re saying because there’s this straightforward linkage between the stimulation and the foot moving inward, right and that’s going to happen every time – even if you will yourself to move it out and it still moves in, are you saying that you nevertheless thought your sensation was of having moved it out?

LLINÁS
No! The sensation is different – it was I who did it!

BINGHAM
Even though I was moving it in.

LLINÁS
It moved it in and the sensation is, well, I moved it in. I could not, my system, I could not have a feeling different to what I would have had had I moved it inwards. So I want to move it outwards, when I feel the stimulus, I move it outwards and move it inwards. Did you feel that there was a problem? No, I didn’t feel there was a problem, I moved it inwards! But you thought, you decided you were going to move it outwards! Yes, but I moved it inwards. And then you think and you realize that you are saying it after the fact that you moved it inwards because it moved it in the inwardly manner and you knew this was going to happen so you take possession of it. In other words, free will is knowing what you are about to do – that’s all.

—

These discussions always remind of my own personal favorite Wittgenstein anecdote, where he and a companion (Anscombe?) are strolling through Cambridge:

“I’ve always wondered why”, W. says, “people have for so long thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth.”

“Why?” said his surprised interlocutor, “I suppose it just looks that way.”

“Well,” retorted W., “and what would it look like if the Earth revolved around the Sun?”

And this concept of “blame” is inherently one meant to appeal to a) YOU, assuming that you are like most human beings in nature: that is, capable of being changed BY the blame/guilt/etc. b) other agents who want to know what sort of being you are. It implicitly assumes that you have at base the same sorts of values that other people do. If you don’t, then we indeed might as well be trying to guilt trip a volcano, or an alien. But we humans are very, almost insanely, social beings: we relate to nearly everything as if it were a rational & emotional person.

People are generally capable of taking, for themselves, moral responsibility: realizing that it was something in themselves that made particular choices, identifying with those choices, and feeling good or bad about their effects. That is what we’re appealing to when we talk about guilt and wrong and blame and so forth.

Your talk about retribution: I agree with this. But this seems to me to be a spandrel: the demand for pointless blood is an over-the-top expression of rage and revenge and anger and hatred that comes about because all the normal channels for have been blocked, yet being human we can’t help but express them anyhow. Even if the person in question, the villain, can’t possibly be changed by the retribution, even if no good can come of it, that impetus to take justice is still there.

And you know what? Human beings DO viciously attack inanimate objects, to “punish” things that can’t possibly be made smarter or wiser or kinder by it. It’s in our nature to see moral beings everywhere, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Finally, I also don’t see what any of the remaining folks that think “Free Will” is a coherent concept think the alternative is. If your nature comes from nowhere at all, who is responsible for the way it is? The whole point of this is to argue that YOU are responsible, right? But FW invalidates the very chain of causality that would allow us to trace the choice you apparently made back to ANYTHING. So in that sense, it’s STILL wrong to “blame” you, because there’s no smoking gun that you had anything to do with it: you acted out the choice, certainly, but how can you in any sense say that you _caused_ the choice to be made? There was nothing identifiably or characteristically “you” at work.

Michael B Sullivan: What I’m saying is that decision-making is ultimately a causal process, and it HAS TO BE in order for it to make any sense. I don’t care whether that causal process works in the realm of spirits or magical invisible jellybeans: it needs to be not only a distinct process, but one that is characteristic of individual agents.

My point with the car/bank, or with the balls posting things on the internet is simply that just because all processes have an underlying substrata doesn’t mean they are all the same sorts of processes. Yes, when a computer does a math problem, it’s still just an arrangement of silicon. But the point is that it’s a very particular arrangement which does some very particular things: things deserving of a particular sort of name (say, “calculating”). I’m arguing that when we talk about choosing, we’re employing the same reasoning in order to say that a person making a decision is in some important way distinct from an avalanche. So therefore, it’s perfectly legitimate to use a different word. Who ever heard of arguing an avalanche out of hitting a particular house, or falling on a particular day?