Words&Dirt

“Probably most professional philosophers in the field would hold that given your body, the state of your brain, and your specific environment, you could not act differently from the way you’re acting now––that your actions are preordained, as it were. Imagine that we could produce a perfect duplicate of you, a functionally identical twin who is an exact copy of your molecular structure. If we were to put your twin in exactly the same situation you’re in right now, with exactly the same sensory stimuli impinging on him or her, then initially the twin could not act differently from the way you’re acting. This is a widely shared view: It is, simply, the scientific worldview. The current state of the physical universe always determines the next state of the universe, and your brain is part of this universe.

The phenomenal Ego, the experiential content of the human self-model, clearly disagrees with the scientific worldview––and with the widely shared opinion that your functionally identical doppelgänger could not have acted otherwise. If we take our own phenomenology seriously, we clearly experience ourselves as beings that can initiate new causal chains out of the blue––as beings that could have acted otherwise given exactly the same situation. The unsettling point about modern philosophy of mind and the cognitive neuroscience of will, already apparent even at this early stage, is that a final theory may contradict the way we have been subjectively experiencing ourselves for millennia. There will likely be a conflict between the scientific view of the acting self and the phenomenal narrative, the subjective story our brains tell us about what happens when we decide to act.

We now have a theory in hand that explains how subpersonal brain events (for instance, those that specify action goals and assemble suitable motor commands) can become the contents of the conscious self. When certain processing stages are elevated to the level of conscious experience and bound into the self-model active in your brain, they become available for all your mental capacities. Now you experience them as your own thoughts, decisions, or urges to act––as properties that belong to you, the person as a whole. It is also clear why these events popping up in the conscious self necessarily appear spontaneous and uncaused. They are the first link in the chain to cross the border from unconscious to conscious brain processes; you have the impression that they appeared in your mind ‘out of the blue,’ so to speak. The unconscious precursor is invisible, but the link exists. (Recently, this has been shown for the conscious veto, as when you interrupt an intentional action at the last instant.) But in fact the conscious experience of intention is just a sliver of a complicated process in the brain. And since this fact does not appear to us, we have the robust experience of being able to spontaneously initiate causal chains from the mental into the physical realm. This is the appearance of an agent. (Here we also gain a deeper understanding of what it means to say that the self-model is transparent. Often the brain is blind to its own workings, as it were.)

The science of the mind is now beginning to reintroduce those hidden facts forcefully into the Ego Tunnel. There will be a conflict between the biological reality tunnel in our heads and the neuroscientific image of humankind, and many people sense that this image might present a danger to our mental health. I think the irritation and deep sense of resentment surrounding public debates on the freedom of the will have little to do with the actual options on the table. These reactions have to do with the (perfectly sensible) intuition that certain types of answers will not only be emotionally disturbing but ultimately impossible to integrate into our conscious self-models. This is the first point.

A note on the phenomenology of will: It is not as well defined as you might think; color experience, for example, is much crisper. Have you ever tried to observe introspectively what happens when you decide to lift your arm and then the arm lifts? What exactly is the deep, fine-grained structure of cause and effect? Can you really observe how the mental event causes the physical event? Look closely! My prediction is that the closer you look and the more thoroughly you introspect your decision processes, the more you’ll realize that conscious intentions are evasive: The harder you look at them, the more they recede into the background. Moreover, we tend to talk about free will as if we all shared a common subjective experience. This is not entirely true: Culture and tradition exert a strong influence on the way we report such experiences. The phenomenology itself may well be shaped by this, because a self-model also is the window connecting our inner lives with the social practice around us. Free will does not exist in our minds alone––it is also a social institution. The assumption that something like free agency exists, and the fact that we treat one another as autonomous agents, are concepts fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing our societies––rules built on the notions of responsibility, accountability, and guilt. These rules are mirrored in the deep structure of our PSM, and this incessant mirroring of rules, this projection of higher-order assumptions about ourselves, created complex social networks. If one day we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is or is not, this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way. For instance, if accountability and responsibility do not really exist, it is meaningless to punish people (as opposed to rehabilitating them) for something they ultimately could not have avoided doing. Retribution would then appear to be a Stone Age concept, something we inherited from animals. When modern neuroscience discovers the sufficient neural correlates for willing, desiring, deliberating, and executing an action, we will be able to cause, amplify, extinguish, and modulate the conscious experience of will by operating on these neural correlates. It will become clear that the actual causes of our actions, desires, and intentions often have very little to do with what the conscious self tells us. From a scientific, third-person perspective, our inner experience of strong autonomy may look increasingly like what it has been all along: an appearance only. At the same time, we will learn to admire the elegance and the robustness with which nature built only those things into the reality tunnel that organisms needed to know, rather than burdening them with a flood of information about the workings of their brains. We will come to see the subjective experience of free will as an ingenious neurocomputational tool. Not only does it create an internal user-interface that allow the organism to control and adapt its behavior, but it is also a necessary condition for social interaction and cultural evolution.

Imagine that we have created a society of robots. They would lack freedom of the will in the traditional sense, because they are causally determined automata. But they would have conscious models of themselves and of other automata in their environment, and these models would let them interact with others and control their own behavior. Imagine that we now add two features to their internal self- and other-person models: first, the erroneous belief that they (and everybody else) are responsible for their own actions; second, an ‘ideal observer’ representing group interests, such as rules of fairness for reciprocal, altruistic interactions. What would this change? Would our robots develop new causal properties just by falsely believing in their own freedom of the will? The answer is yes; moral aggression would become possible, because an entirely new level of competition would emerge––competition about who fulfills the interests of the group best, who gains moral merit, and so on. You could now raise your own social status by accusing others of being immoral or by being an efficient hypocrite. A whole new level of optimizing behavior would emerge. Given the right boundary conditions, the complexity of our experimental robot society would suddenly explode, though its internal coherence would remain. It could now begin to evolve on a new level. The practice of ascribing moral responsibility––even if based on delusional PSMs––would create a decisive, and very real, functional property: Group interests would become more effective in each robot’s behavior. The price for egotism would rise. What would happen to our experimental robot society if we then downgraded its members’ self-models to the previous version––perhaps by bestowing insight?

A passionate public debate recently took place in Germany on freedom of the will––a failed debate, in my view, because it created more confusion than clarity. Here is the first of the two silliest arguments for the freedom of will: ‘But I know that I am free, because I experience myself as free!’ Well, you also experience the world as inhabited by colored objects, and we know that out there in front of your eyes are only wavelength mixtures of various sorts. That something appears to you in conscious experience and in a certain way is not an argument for anything. The second argument goes like this: ‘But this would have terrible consequences! Therefore, it cannot be true.’ I certainly share that worry (think of the robot society thought experiment), but the truth of a claim must be assessed independently of its psychological or political consequences. This is a point of simple logic and intellectual honesty. But neuroscientists have also added to the confusion––and, interestingly, because they often underestimate the radical nature of their positions. This will be my second point in this section.

Neuroscientists like to speak of ‘action goals,’ processes of ‘motor selection,’ and the ‘specification of movements’ in the brain. As a philosopher (and with all due respect), I must say that this, too, is conceptual nonsense. If one takes the scientific worldview seriously, no such things as goals exist, and there is nobody who selects or specifies an action. There is no process of ‘selection’ at all; all we really have is dynamic self-organization. Moreover, the information-processing taking place in the human brain is not even a rule-based kind of processing. Ultimately, it follows the laws of physics. The brain is best described as a complex system continuously trying to settle into a stable state, generating order out of chaos.

According to the purely physical background assumptions of science, nothing in the universe possesses an inherent value or is a goal in itself; physical objects and processes are all there is. That seems to be the point of the rigorous reductionist approach––and exactly what beings with self-models like ours cannot bring themselves to believe. Of course, there can be representations in the brains of biological organisms, but ultimately––if neuroscience is to take its own background assumptions seriously––they refer to nothing. Survival, fitness, well-being, and security as such are not values or goals in the true sense of either word; obviously, only those organisms that internally represented them as goals survived. But the tendency to speak about the ‘goals’ of an organism or a brain makes neuroscientists overlook how strong their very own background assumptions are. We can now begin to see that even hardheaded scientists sometimes underestimate how radical a naturalistic combination of neuroscience and evolutionary theory could be: It could turn us into beings that maximized their overall fitness by beginning to hallucinate goals.

I am not claiming that this is the true story, the whole story, or the final story. I am only pointing out what seems to follow from the discoveries of neuroscience and how these discoveries conflict with our conscious self-model. Subpersonal self-organization in the brain simply has nothing to do with what we mean by ‘selection.’ Of course, complex and flexible behaviors caused by inner images of ‘goals’ still exist, and we may also continue to call these behaviors ‘actions.’ But even if actions, in this sense, continue to be part of the picture, we may learn that agents do not––that is, there is no entity doing the acting.”

––The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, by Thomas Metzinger, pg. 126-31

“To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

––East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, pg. 71