I want to speak to the issue of free will. It is something that a lot of philosophers, theologians, psychologists and others who like to think “deep thoughts” deal with. Though I don’t personally like to be regarded in this group of people there is something about the issue that is very practical and pertinent to what I do in my job. It’s also pretty central to our experience and existence as human beings so, I make myself bold enough to venture.
In one of my favorite cancelled TV shows (the more I find out, the more I realize that this is the fate of almost all truly good television) called American Gothic the main antagonist, some kind of evil mystic named Lucas Buck speaks at times of “the illusion of free will.” Whether or not he actually believes this claim, it impacts people around him in ways that make them more susceptible to his social manipulation.
These days there’s a lot of research being done in the way of behavioral genetics that may seem to support this position and it may fearfully effect people in the same way. A great concern is the possibility that people hearing that there is a gene out there that determines things such as relationship infidelity, over-eating, or aggressive driving may come to believe they have the gene and thereby create a personal excuse for engaging in any sort of licentious inclination that occurs to them. As they do so they might say to them selves “It’s in my genes. I can’t help it.”
This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. I think a lot of psychology has already created this sort of excuse for any kind of behavior you can think of. Though instead of referring to genes, people talk about having “a trauma history” or “a negative upbringing.” Before this was the saying that became a joke: “the devil made me do it.” There was a whole concept of Temptation with a capital ‘T’. But either way it goes, it results in human beings denying culpability for their actions by denying the existence of free will.
Now, I don’t necessarily mean to diminish the way that our genes or our experiences affect us. Nor do I want to deny the existence of powerful temptations on a spiritual realm. I think this is all real stuff but, I think that if we come to “believe” in it too much then we are pretty much screwed and screwing everyone around us. I think it is absolutely essential that we believe in our wills and certain things I’ve been learning from my studies of neuroscience have encouraged this point of view.
The brain is often compared to a computer. The problem with this model is that where a computer’s wiring is pretty hard and fast the brain’s wiring is not. It is a living changing thing. Just as your middle-school teachers used to say, “it’s like a muscle and if you don’t use it you lose it.” This may seem a bit trite but, it’s fascinating to me to think about the mechanism by which it comes about. One theorist compared it to the process of natural selection in that neural connections exist or cease to according to a use-based selection process. Connections that never get used get cut. It becomes biochemically inefficient for them to continue to exist. At the same time connections that are fired on a regular basis are altered to make them faster and more efficient. They also become locations when new ones are made to help carry the data processing load. This stuff is all pretty common knowledge I think but it tells us something about how free will works. We as conscious beings have the power and opportunity to make determinations regarding what neurons get fired, perhaps not by finding and firing some exact cell that we label in our heads, but by choosing the functions to which we put our brain.
To get a grip on this it helps to know something about what the different parts of the brain are and how they work. On the top of the brain, somewhat towards the front is a little strip running across brain known to be the part that processes all the sensory information gained through touching with the skin. There have been several studies involving people who’ve lost body parts that experience sensations in their minds where the lost appendage should have been. What frequently happens is that adjacent sensation processors start to take over using the now-unallocated computing tissue for it’s own uses. The result can be that when still active parts of the skin surface are stimulated the brain will interpret those sensations as being in the missing appendage. This sort of thing has been seen with stroke patients as well. When one part of the brain is damaged the adjacent parts can start to take up the function of the missing part. This happens as long as signals are being sent that demand the connections be formed.
I think this is interesting when considering free will because it says something about the magnitude of neuron change we can induce through use. This then tells us something about how much we can change fundamentally about our demons and trauma induced damages through an exercise of our will to use neuronal pathways we want to and neglect the ones we don’t.
So, how do we exert this kind of will? It is largely dependent on another part of the brain, that which is in the very foremost front, thus called the prefrontal cortex. Curiously the organ that provides us the most in terms of freedom of will has as its primary function suppressing freedom in the brain. The brain stem at the base of the spine and the limbic system in the middle of the brain create lots of feelings, urges, emotions, and other “gut” reactions that serve us well as human beings in many ways. But frequently they contradict greater goals or perspectives that are available to our prefrontal cortex. So, when you are sitting in that meeting at work just before lunch and your brain stem is telling you you're hungry and your amygdala is making it more urgent, your prefrontal cortex is telling them both to shut up and let you concentrate on that super important presentation your coworker is giving. Or maybe not but, I’m sure you get the picture.
A few studies have been done on the function of this part of the brain in Buddhist monks. Why? Because one of the main things Buddhists do is meditate. A big part of meditating is exercising the frontal lobes by monitoring your own internal thinking and telling lots of stuff in your brain to shut up. What they have found about this type of exercise is that it physically changes the inside of your brain to do whatever it is you want. Your prefrontal cortex can tell the part of your brain that likes to think mean thoughts to shut up and the part of your brain that likes to think nice thoughts to turn up the music. Consequently your mean bits eventually get hijacked by your nice bits. (Alas, there’s a bit of a kwixote joke in there.) The same kind of thing goes on all the time dysfunctionally when people wallow in self-pity. The more I indulge in thinking “I hate my life and nobody loves me” the more wired my brain becomes to think that and only that. Every time you add voice to it you increase the number of parts of your brain contributing to processing and working with that idea. Instead of just your emotion bits and your thinking bits going at it, your motor bits, language bits, auditory bits, etc. all join in the party. Increased signal load => increased neuron development.
Now, considering all of this I’m left with some big, vexing, and perhaps amorphous questions. One of the questions has to do with deficiencies in the matter of the prefrontal cortex itself. This is the case in some people who are diagnosed as ADHD. When they’re in that meeting there’s not much to say “shut up” with. So, what does this mean in terms of free will? Is it limited? Does there need to be deliberate work to increase the frontal lobe by hijacking other parts of the brain to do the work? Inasmuch as a person is in this state, how culpable do we hold them for impulsive behavior? It’s a big nasty mess. It’s also a nasty mess for me to think about in the context of my students. If we were to conclude that one ought to work to exercise to increase prefrontal function, do we do this with other problems, like meanness for example? Do we try and get students to buy into this stuff? They would have to for them to exert the effort to do it. How much treading then do we do onto other people’s free will even if its meaning and intent is to increase the amount of will they have?
Now there’s a glaring hole in my discussion here and it’s the one I don’t really want to think about right now because I’m not qualified but maybe someone else will, that is the issue of medicine in terms of chemical prosthesis and even surgery. Ugh, a sticky mess but one that is going to be highly relevant. A major example is the recent discovery of a little patch of brain that when damaged cured someone of their nicotine addiction. Anyway, I’ll leave stuff to someone who’s smarter and more in touch with it than I am.
If anyone would like to have an open discussion with me on these topics I would appreciate it. You can of course publish it here for all to read (something I encourage) but if you’d rather I’m open to just e-mailing or telephoning on the subject. Phew.
Here’s a link to a relevant article out of Time that some might be interested to read.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580438,00.html
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4 comments:
This is a topic on which I spent many angst filled hours of teenage thought. Mine was more of a spiritual nature, or the desire to avoid my spiritual nature, but that is really neither here nor there. Your blog reminds me of the story of Phineus Gage(may be mis-spelled). I cannot recall with certainty the dates involved, but, it was eitiher in the 1800s or early 1900s. He worked on the railroad and was a decent an honest, hard working very likeable person. He had an accident one day that damaged his frontal cortex(I believe he hit a spike which detonated some tnt which propelled ths spike through his skull). He lived, but he was not the same man. After the accident, he spent many hours drinking and engaging in lascivious and crude behavior. He would show up late for work and was unable to hold a steady job from that time forward. He became the exact opposite of what he once was. I pondered as I learned of him how much he would be accountable for his actions, as it seemed to be caused by his injury. I have not come to any concrete conclusions, but my gut reaction is that he cannot be held accoutable for the change in his behavior, as it was a result of the part of his brain that should have told the other parts to shut up being damaged, but that, like many other morale questions is debatable. I bring it up, because of the question of genetics affecting free will. Will we be held accountable for our Genetic pre-dispositions? Our wiring that tells us to do things contrary to what is considered moral. Though our genetics can definately affect the way we want to respond to certain stimuli, I don't think it can be blamed for the response, thus removing the responsibility for the action. Just because I have a pre-dispostion and often a great desire to help my fellow motorists return to their heavanly home as soon as possible, doesn't mean that I am not accountable for my behavior towards them. I am still capable of going against my wiring by making a choice to do so. It sounds much easier theory than it is in practice, but I think all people have some experience of choosing not to do something that they felt a strong desire to do or vice versa. I think free will is there regardless of genetic pre-disposition (obviously I recognize that there are exceptions to this, as I have spent a good deal of time caring for mentally disabled people, which are that way because of either nature or nuture or both). My feeling on the relationship between free will and genetics is that many of our trials that we are here to overcome are hardwired. Our will was given to us so we could overcome our genetic predipositions if we so choose and are willing to put forth the effort to harnesse them. These are not all my thoughts on the issue, but I think it's a good start.
The story of Phineas Gage is a pretty important one. It's part of how they figured out what the frontal lobe does. But it also reminds me of an important point I left out in my little spiel. I hesitated to detract from the effects of genes and so forth. I failed to include physical damages. And I also failed to resolve what at the moment I'm thinking of as 'free will over time.' I think that there are lots of things that people do in a sort of uncontrolled fashion that does not express free will because of either a lack of awareness of the mechanism resulting in the behavior or simply insufficient time to train the desired (willed) cognitive effect or ability. In the case of Gage he suffered some major trauma that ruined his ability to self regulate and one would have to admit that he would not have been able to train the major amount of rewiring that would have been necessary for him to approximate his previous moral function. Furthermore, he would not have understood that it was even possible. So... as for his culpability I think it's kind of a moot question.
I agree. Your question brought a lot of things to mind, and I was trying to address far too many of them. I mentioned Gage because that is who came to mind, even though it wasn't directly related to your topic. I suppose that I was trying to give an introduction to my point and failed to tie it in effectively. Obviously genetic influences and brain damage are not the same thing.
Genes determine a range of responses to certain behavior. An example of this (although it may not a very stellar one) two men doing the exact same physical training and one becomes expert while the other is not quite as good. I would imaging the same is true of behavioral genetics, but just because Ithere may be a pre-disposition to respond in a specific way to stimuli, does not pre-determine the range of our response.
Regardless of that, genetic urges can be changed if we are able to focus our will enough to do so. Once again, easier said than done.
I also think that using medication or surgery to change behavior is not a suppression of free will, but our exercise of the same. If I choose to take medication designed to alleviate depression, am I not the one who instigated that change? One could argue this is true only when the person is not coerced or ordered to do so, but even in those cases will can be exercised, but not without negative consequenses.
I guess when people say that "my genes made me do it" what is meant is that the consequences of following the genetic pull are more appealing, or less difficult to obtain than the consequences of denying that pull.
I hope I have clarified somewhat on what I was trying to say, but right now it is late and if I haven't done so now, I won't be able to do so tonight. I must be getting old.
I guess I have a little to contribute to this subject. I have identical twin girls. From observing them I would say that there is something far stronger at work than just genetics and chemical and electrical reactions in a brain contributing to who they are. It has become completely obvious that they have individual spirits. There is no telling what effect our spirits have on our physical tabernacles. We, of course, have no way of investigating ectoplasm. Leave it to me to lead this to the supernatural.
Also, maybe I told you already, but I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder last summer. I went to some therapy sessions initially to help me sort out some of the confusion I was in. The therapist asked me if the diagnosis changed how I felt about some of the mistakes I may have made in my life. She seemed surprised when I told her that I didn't. I still felt that I was responsible for my choices both good and bad. But I can also understand why people who are suffering with depression and related disorders do such morally questionable things. They are just trying to survive. Think about it...shall I stab myself with a knife, which will kill me, or should I go rob a bank where I'll get an adrenaline and seratonin rush that will keep me alive a little longer. They may be serving the most basic part of their brain and not even realise it. Survival. However, I think some of it is about what you said earlier. People don't know what their choices are so sometimes it's as if they have no free will.
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