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Free Will?

Yeah right.
 
 
Free Will vs. the Programmed Brain

If our actions are determined by prior events, then do we have a choice about anything—or any responsibility for what we do?

August 19, 2008
New Scientist

Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that free will doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free. This kind of anti-free will stance stretches back to 18th century philosophy, but the idea has recently been getting much more exposure through popular science books and magazine articles. Should we worry? If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility?

In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by giving participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick, a biochemist and Nobel laureate (as co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA double helix). Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage begins as follows: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”
The passage then goes on to talk about the neural basis of decisions and claims that “…although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” The other participants got a passage that was similarly scientific-sounding, but it was about the importance of studying consciousness, with no mention of free will.

After reading the passages, all participants completed a survey on their belief in free will. Then comes the inspired part of the experiment. Participants were told to complete 20 arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that when the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen, too. The participants were told that no one would know whether they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.

The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! (That is, they pressed the space bar less often than the other participants.) Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.

Varieties of Immorality

Philosophers have raised questions about some elements of the study. For one thing, the anti-free will text presents a bleak worldview, and that alone might lead one to cheat more in such a context (“OMG, if I’m just a pack of neurons, I have much bigger things to worry about than behaving on this experiment!”). It might be that one would also find increased cheating if you gave people a passage arguing that all sentient life will ultimately be destroyed in the heat death of the universe.

On the other hand, the results fit with what some philosophers had predicted. The Western conception idea of free will seems bound up with our sense of moral responsibility, guilt for misdeeds and pride in accomplishment. We hold ourselves responsible precisely when we think that our actions come from free will. In this light, it’s not surprising that people behave less morally as they become skeptical of free will. Further, the Vohs and Schooler result fits with the idea that people will behave less responsibly if they regard their actions as beyond their control. If I think that there’s no point in trying to be good, then I’m less likely to try.

Even if giving up on free will does have these deleterious effects, one might wonder how far they go. One question is whether the effects extend across the moral domain. Cheating in a psychology experiment doesn’t seem too terrible. Presumably the experiment didn’t also lead to a rash of criminal activity among those who read the anti-free will passage. Our moral revulsion at killing and hurting others is likely too strong to be dismantled by reflections about determinism. It might well turn out that other kinds of immoral behavior, like cheating in school, would be affected by the rejection of free will, however.

Is the Effect Permanent?

Another question is how long-lived the effect is. The Vohs and Schooler study suggests that immediately after people are made skeptical of free will, they cheat more. But what would happen if those people were brought back to the lab two weeks later? We might find that they would continue to be skeptical of free will but they would no longer cheat more.

There is no direct evidence on this question, but there is recent evidence on a related issue. Philosopher Hagop Sarkissian of the City Univeristy of New York and colleagues had people from Hong Kong, India, Colombia and the U.S. complete a survey on determinism and moral responsibility. Determinism was described in nontechnical terms, and participants were asked (in effect): whether our universe was a deterministic universe and whether people in a deterministic universe are morally responsible for their actions.

Across cultures, they found that most people said that our universe is not deterministic and also that people in the deterministic universe are not responsible for their actions. Although that isn’t particularly surprising—people want to believe they have free will—something pretty interesting emerges when you look at the smaller group of people who say that our universe is deterministic. Across all of the cultures, this substantial minority of free will skeptics were also much more likely to say that people are responsible even if determinism is true. One way to interpret this finding is that if you come to believe in determinism, you won’t drop your moral attitudes. Rather, you’ll simply reverse your view that determinism rules out moral responsibility.

Many philosophers and scientists reject free will and, while there has been no systematic study of the matter, there’s currently little reason to think that the philosophers and scientists who reject free will are generally less morally upright than those who believe in it. But this raises yet another puzzling question about the belief in free will. People who explicitly deny free will often continue to hold themselves responsible for their actions and feel guilty for doing wrong. Have such people managed to accommodate the rest of their attitudes to their rejection of free will? Have they adjusted their notion of guilt and responsibility so that it really doesn’t depend on the existence of free will? Or is it that when they are in the thick of things, trying to decide what to do, trying to do the right thing, they just fall back into the belief that they do have free will after all?
 
Whos Minding the Mind?

In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered peoples judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.

New York Times
July 31, 2007

The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee and asked for a hand with the cup.

That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

Findings like this one, as improbable as they seem, have poured forth in psychological research over the last few years. New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when theres a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if theres a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like dependable and support all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.

Psychologists say that priming people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, its a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.

More fundamentally, the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.

The give and take between these unconscious choices and our rational, conscious aims can help explain some of the more mystifying realities of behavior, like how we can be generous one moment and petty the next, or act rudely at a dinner party when convinced we are emanating charm.

When it comes to our behavior from moment to moment, the big question is, What to do next? said John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale and a co-author, with Lawrence Williams, of the coffee study, which was presented at a recent psychology conference. Well, were finding that we have these unconscious behavioral guidance systems that are continually furnishing suggestions through the day about what to do next, and the brain is considering and often acting on those, all before conscious awareness.

Dr. Bargh added: Sometimes those goals are in line with our conscious intentions and purposes, and sometimes theyre not.

Priming the Unconscious

The idea of subliminal influence has a mixed reputation among scientists because of a history of advertising hype and apparent fraud. In 1957, an ad man named James Vicary claimed to have increased sales of Coca-Cola and popcorn at a movie theater in Fort Lee, N.J., by secretly flashing the words Eat popcorn and Drink Coke during the film, too quickly to be consciously noticed. But advertisers and regulators doubted his story from the beginning, and in a 1962 interview, Mr. Vicary acknowledged that he had trumped up the findings to gain attention for his business.

Later studies of products promising subliminal improvement, for things like memory and self-esteem, found no effect.

Some scientists also caution against overstating the implications of the latest research on priming unconscious goals. The new research doesnt prove that consciousness never does anything, wrote Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, in an e-mail message. Its rather like showing you can hot-wire a car to start the ignition without keys. Thats important and potentially useful information, but it doesnt prove that keys dont exist or that keys are useless.

Yet he and most in the field now agree that the evidence for psychological hot-wiring has become overwhelming. In one 2004 experiment, psychologists led by Aaron Kay, then at Stanford University and now at the University of Waterloo, had students take part in a one-on-one investment game with another, unseen player.

Half the students played while sitting at a large table, at the other end of which was a briefcase and a black leather portfolio. These students were far stingier with their money than the others, who played in an identical room, but with a backpack on the table instead.

The mere presence of the briefcase, noticed but not consciously registered, generated business-related associations and expectations, the authors argue, leading the brain to run the most appropriate goal program: compete. The students had no sense of whether they had acted selfishly or generously.

In another experiment, published in 2005, Dutch psychologists had undergraduates sit in a cubicle and fill out a questionnaire. Hidden in the room was a bucket of water with a splash of citrus-scented cleaning fluid, giving off a faint odor. After completing the questionnaire, the young men and women had a snack, a crumbly biscuit provided by laboratory staff members.

The researchers covertly filmed the snack time and found that these students cleared away crumbs three times more often than a comparison group, who had taken the same questionnaire in a room with no cleaning scent. That is a very big effect, and they really had no idea they were doing it, said Henk Aarts, a psychologist at Utrecht University and the senior author of the study.

The Same Brain Circuits

The real-world evidence for these unconscious effects is clear to anyone who has ever run out to the car to avoid the rain and ended up driving too fast, or rushed off to pick up dry cleaning and returned with wine and cigarettes but no pressed slacks.

The brain appears to use the very same neural circuits to execute an unconscious act as it does a conscious one. In a study that appeared in the journal Science in May, a team of English and French neuroscientists performed brain imaging on 18 men and women who were playing a computer game for money. The players held a handgrip and were told that the tighter they squeezed when an image of money flashed on the screen, the more of the loot they could keep.

As expected, the players squeezed harder when the image of a British pound flashed by than when the image of a penny did regardless of whether they consciously perceived the pictures, many of which flew by subliminally. But the circuits activated in their brains were similar as well: an area called the ventral pallidum was particularly active whenever the participants responded.

This area is located in what used to be called the reptilian brain, well below the conscious areas of the brain, said the studys senior author, Chris Frith, a professor in neuropsychology at University College London who wrote the book Making Up The Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World.

The results suggest a bottom-up decision-making process, in which the ventral pallidum is part of a circuit that first weighs the reward and decides, then interacts with the higher-level, conscious regions later, if at all, Dr. Frith said.

Scientists have spent years trying to pinpoint the exact neural regions that support conscious awareness, so far in vain. But theres little doubt it involves the prefrontal cortex, the thin outer layer of brain tissue behind the forehead, and experiments like this one show that it can be one of the last neural areas to know when a decision is made.

This bottom-up order makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. The subcortical areas of the brain evolved first and would have had to help individuals fight, flee and scavenge well before conscious, distinctly human layers were added later in evolutionary history. In this sense, Dr. Bargh argues, unconscious goals can be seen as open-ended, adaptive agents acting on behalf of the broad, genetically encoded aims automatic survival systems.

In several studies, researchers have also shown that, once covertly activated, an unconscious goal persists with the same determination that is evident in our conscious pursuits. Study participants primed to be cooperative are assiduous in their teamwork, for instance, helping others and sharing resources in games that last 20 minutes or longer. Ditto for those set up to be aggressive.

This may help explain how someone can show up at a party in good spirits and then for some unknown reason the hosts loafers? the family portrait on the wall? some political comment? turn a little sour, without realizing the change until later, when a friend remarks on it. I was rude? Really? When?

Mark Schaller, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, has done research showing that when self-protective instincts are primed simply by turning down the lights in a room, for instance white people who are normally tolerant become unconsciously more likely to detect hostility in the faces of black men with neutral expressions.

Sometimes nonconscious effects can be bigger in sheer magnitude than conscious ones, Dr. Schaller said, because we cant moderate stuff we dont have conscious access to, and the goal stays active.

Until it is satisfied, that is, when the program is subsequently suppressed, research suggests. In one 2006 study, for instance, researchers had Northwestern University undergraduates recall an unethical deed from their past, like betraying a friend, or a virtuous one, like returning lost property. Afterward, the students had their choice of a gift, an antiseptic wipe or a pencil; and those who had recalled bad behavior were twice as likely as the others to take the wipe. They had been primed to psychologically cleanse their consciences.

Once their hands were wiped, the students became less likely to agree to volunteer their time to help with a graduate school project. Their hands were clean: the unconscious goal had been satisfied and now was being suppressed, the findings suggest.

What You Dont Know

Using subtle cues for self-improvement is something like trying to tickle yourself, Dr. Bargh said: priming doesnt work if youre aware of it. Manipulating others, while possible, is dicey. We know that as soon as people feel theyre being manipulated, they do the opposite; it backfires, he said.

And researchers do not yet know how or when, exactly, unconscious drives may suddenly become conscious; or under which circumstances people are able to override hidden urges by force of will. Millions have quit smoking, for instance, and uncounted numbers have resisted darker urges to misbehave that they dont even fully understand.

Yet the new research on priming makes it clear that we are not alone in our own consciousness. We have company, an invisible partner who has strong reactions about the world that dont always agree with our own, but whose instincts, these studies clearly show, are at least as likely to be helpful, and attentive to others, as they are to be disruptive.
 
Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Dont

By DENNIS OVERBYE
New York Times
January 2, 2007

I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my fathers heart attack danced before my glazed eyes. My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face.

The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt, though I often cover my tracks by offering to split my dessert with the table. O.K., I can imagine what youre thinking. There but for the grace of God.

Having just lived through another New Years Eve, many of you have just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years. After all, were free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again. As William James wrote in 1890, the whole sting and excitement of life comes from our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically
making up stories about being in control.

As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.

Is it an illusion? Thats the question, said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.

If people freak at evolution, etc., he wrote in an e-mail message, how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?

Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, Free will does exist, but its a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you dont have it, he said.

That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.

Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals, he said.

How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will. The traditional definition is called libertarian or deep free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined. This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.

At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.

That strikes many people as incoherent, said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. Both are bad news for free will, he said. So if human actions cant be caused and arent random, he said, It must be what some weird magical power?

People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.

But whatever that power is call it soul or the spirit those people have to explain how it could stand independent of the physical universe and yet reach from the immaterial world and meddle in our own, jiggling brain cells that lead us to say the words molten chocolate.

A vote in favor of free will comes from some physicists, who say it is a prerequisite for inventing theories and planning experiments.

That is especially true when it comes to quantum mechanics, the strange paradoxical theory that ascribes a microscopic randomness to the foundation of reality. Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the University of Vienna, said recently that quantum randomness was not a proof, just a hint, telling us we have free will.

Is there any evidence beyond our own intuitions and introspections that humans work that way?

Two Tips of the Iceberg

In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California
,
San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.

Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.

The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.

In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.

Dr. Libets results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions. Patients with tics or certain diseases, like chorea, cannot say whether their movements are voluntary or involuntary, Dr. Hallett said.

In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they are responding to stimuli they couldnt have seen in time to respond to, or into taking credit or blame for things they couldnt have done. Take,for example, the voodoo experiment by Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard and Emily Pronin of Princeton. In the experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor.

One person, the subject, puts a curse on the other by sticking pins into a doll. The second person, however, is in on the experiment, and by prior arrangement with the doctors, acts either obnoxious, so that the pin-sticker dislikes him, or nice.

After a while, the ostensible victim complains of a headache. In cases in which he or she was unlikable, the subject tended to claim responsibility for causing the headache, an example of the magical thinking that makes baseball fans put on their rally caps.

We made it happen in a lab, Dr. Wegner said.

Is a similar sort of magical thinking responsible for the experience of free will?

We see two tips of the iceberg, the thought and the action, Dr. Wegner said, and we draw a connection.

But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot. Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.

Naturally, almost everyone has a slant on such experiments and whether or not the word illusion should be used in describing free will. Dr. Libet said his results left room for a limited version of free will in the form of a veto power over what we sense ourselves doing. In effect, the unconscious brain proposes and the mind disposes.

In a 1999 essay, he wrote that although this might not seem like much, it was enough to satisfy ethical standards. Most of the Ten Commandments are do not orders, he wrote.

But that might seem a pinched and diminished form of free will.

Good Intentions

Dr. Dennett, the Tufts professor, is one of many who have tried to redefine free will in a way that involves no escape from the materialist world while still offering enough autonomy for moral responsibility, which seems to be what everyone cares about.

The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will divorced from causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr. Dennett says reflecting an outdated dualistic view of the world.

Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality and the material world that frees us. Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the future. Free will and determinism can co-exist.

All the varieties of free will worth having, we have, Dr. Dennett said.

We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes, he said. We have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures.

In this regard, causality is not our enemy but our friend, giving us the ability to look ahead and plan. Thats what makes us moral agents, Dr. Dennett said. You dont need a miracle to have responsibility.

Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such freedom. Their arguments partly turn on the extent to which collections of things, whether electrons or people, can transcend their origins and produce novel phenomena.

These so-called emergent phenomena, like brains and stock markets, or the idea of democracy, grow naturally in accordance with the laws of physics, so the story goes. But once they are here, they play by new rules, and can even act on their constituents, as when an artist envisions a teapot and then sculpts it a concept sometimes known as downward causation. A knowledge of quarks is no help in predicting hurricanes

its physics all the way down. But does the same apply to the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because we cant solve the equations or because something fundamentally new happens when we increase numbers and levels of complexity?

Opinions vary about whether it will ultimately prove to be physics all the way down, total independence from physics, or some shade in between, and thus how free we are. Dr. Silberstein, the Elizabethtown College professor, said, Theres nothing in fundamental physics by itself that tells us we cant have such emergent properties when we get to different levels of complexities.

He waxed poetically as he imagined how the universe would evolve, with more and more complicated forms emerging from primordial quantum muck as from an elaborate computer game, in accordance with a few simple rules: If you understand, you ought to be awestruck, you ought to be bowled over.

George R. F. Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, said that freedom could emerge from this framework as well. A nuclear bomb, for example, proceeds to detonate according to the laws of nuclear physics, he explained in an e-mail message. Whether it does indeed detonate is determined by political and ethical considerations, which are of a completely different order.

I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not liberating. But I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic perpetual motion machine. Free wills, ideas, phenomena created by physics but not accountable to it. Do they offer a release from the chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very intricate weave of the links?And so I sought clarity from mathematicians and computer scientists. According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will.

If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology


Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computers operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say I dont know, wait and see, and Ill make decisions and let you know.

Why cant computers say what theyre going to do? In 1930, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gdel proved that in any formal system of logic, which includes mathematics and a kind of idealized computer called a Turing machine, there are statements that cannot be proven either true or false. Among them are self-referential statements like the famous paradox stated by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the truth, then, as a Cretan, he is lying.

One implication is that no system can contain a complete representation of itself, or as Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University
and author of the 2006 novel about Gdel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, said: Gdel says you cant program intelligence as complex as yourself. But you can let it evolve. A complex machine would still suffer from the illusion of free will.

Another implication is there is no algorithm, or recipe for computation, to determine when or if any given computer program will finish some calculation. The only way to find out is to set it computing and see what happens. Any way to find out would be tantamount to doing the calculation itself.

There are no shortcuts in computation, Dr. Lloyd said.

That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more unpredictable you are, at least to yourself, Dr. Lloyd said. Even if your wife knows you will order the chile rellenos, you have to live your life to find out.

To him that sounds like free will of a sort, for machines as well as for us. Our actions are determined, but so what? We still dont know what they will be until the waiter brings the tray.

That works for me, because I am comfortable with so-called physicalist reasoning, and Im always happy to leverage concepts of higher mathematics to cut through philosophical knots.

The Magicians Spell

So what about Hitler

The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets. Anything would go.

Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldnt it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?

He added, A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what theyve done might be a good thing.

Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on peoples lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.

Its an illusion, but its a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back, he said, comparing it to a magicians trick that has been seen again and again. Even though you know its a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just dont go away.

In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.

I could skip the chocolate cake, I really could, but why bother? Waiter!
The joy of giving

Donating to charity rewards the brain

Oct 12th 2006
From The Economist print edition

PROVIDING for relatives comes more naturally than reaching out to strangers. Nevertheless, it may be worth being kind to people outside the family as the favour might be reciprocated in future. But when it comes to anonymous benevolence, directed to causes that, unlike people, can give nothing in return, what could motivate a donor? The answer, according to neuroscience, is that it feels good.

Researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, wanted to find the neural basis for unselfish acts. They decided to peek into the brains of 19 volunteers who were choosing whether to give money to charity, or keep it for themselves. To do so, they used a standard technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, which can map the activity of the various parts of the brain. The results were reported in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The subjects of the study were each given $128 and told that they could donate anonymously to any of a range of potentially controversial charities. These embraced a wide range of causes, including support for abortion, euthanasia and sex equality, and opposition to the death penalty, nuclear power and war. The experiment was set up so that the volunteers could choose to accept or reject choices such as: to give away money that cost them nothing; to give money that was subtracted from their pots; to oppose donation but not be penalised for it; or to oppose donation and have money taken from them. The instances where money was to be taken away were defined as costly. Such occasions set up a conflict between each volunteer's motivation to reward themselves by keeping the money and the desire to donate to or oppose a cause they felt strongly about.

Faced with such dilemmas in the minds of their subjects, the researchers were able to examine what went on inside each person's head as they made decisions based on moral beliefs. They found that the part of the brain that was active when a person donated happened to be the brain's reward centrethe mesolimbic pathway, to give it its proper nameresponsible for doling out the dopamine-mediated euphoria associated with sex, money, food and drugs. Thus the warm glow that accompanies charitable giving has a physiological basis.

But it seems there is more to altruism. Donating also engaged the part of the brain that plays a role in the bonding behaviour between mother and child, and in romantic love. This involves oxytocin, a hormone that increases trust and co-operation. When subjects opposed a cause, the part of the brain right next to it was active. This area is thought to be responsible for decisions involving punishment. And a third part of the brain, an area called the anterior prefrontal cortexwhich lies just behind the forehead, evolved relatively recently and is thought to be unique to humanswas involved in the complex, costly decisions when self-interest and moral beliefs were in conflict. Giving may make all sorts of animals feel good, but grappling with this particular sort of dilemma would appear to rely on a uniquely human part of the brain.
 
A nation's interests? Google tells all

MUMBAI, India - Google lifted the veil this week on one of its best-kept secrets: which nations search for what. Who looks up democracy most avidly? Who seeks out Allah or Christ most faithfully? Who types in "drugs" or "sex" most frequently?

By Anand Giridharadas International Herald Tribune
May 13, 2006

No country's secrets are spared.

Pakistanis look up "Danish cartoons" more avidly than anyone, according to Google. They also lead the rankings for "sex" - with their neighbor and nuclear rival India seldom far behind.

"In Pakistani society, sex is a taboo," said Fatima Idrees, a project manager at the Pakistani affiliate of the Gallup International polling agency, adding that "curiosity and availability of the Internet may cause such behavior."

The site introduced Thursday, Google Trends, measures how often particular phrases are searched for from computers in individual countries and cities. It short-lists the places with the highest absolute number of searches for, say, "cat food." Then it picks the top 10 or so based on which places look up "cat food" much more than they do other things - for instance, "dog food."

The Google Trends site is likely to generate a mix of consternation, embarrassment and laughter around the world. While Google emphasizes that its efforts to protect individuals' privacy, the new site does nothing to protect the collective privacy of nations, if such a thing exists - the right of the British to conceal that they look up "handcuffs" most often, or the right of China's leaders to hide that Mandarin ranks second only to English as the language used to look up "democracy," or the right of other officials to hide that Arabic-speaking users rarely look up "democracy."

"This is a fascinating project, effortlessly offering a glimpse into regional and cultural habits and differences that is otherwise nearly impossible to reproduce," said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University.

"This sort of feature reminds us that the Internet is global, yet not one undifferentiated mass," he added. "Such measurement may help us understand the origin and movement of ideas as they sweep regions and the world."

The Google rankings also generate a new kind of interest-level rating for politicians - as for countries, brands or anything else people look up. Now, the most vain (and most regularly searched) among us can check how many people are looking us up, where they are from - and, most important, whether they search more for us or for our rivals.

In India, suspicions that Sonia Gandhi is the power behind the throne of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appear to be buttressed by search results. As the leader of India's governing Congress Party, Gandhi gets about 50 percent more searches from Indian users than Singh does.

French users, meanwhile, shed light on France's power struggles. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy draws as many searches on his own as his rivals, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, combined.

For politicians with sagging poll numbers, Google's index might be some consolation: it records how often people look you up, not whether they love you. To bring Machiavelli's famous formulation into the age of Web surfing, it may be better for a prince - or president or prime minister - to be searched than loved, if he cannot be both.

President George W. Bush commands at least seven times as many searches in Russia as its own leader, Vladimir Putin. Among the French, Bush generates about 50 percent more look-ups than Chirac; among Iranians, Bush is searched twice as often as the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Not everything on the site is a surprise. People in Boston and Minneapolis and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, lead the search for "mittens." Dubliners top the list in "Guinness" searches. When it comes to looking up "dowry," surfers in Pakistan and India are clear leaders.

Other findings are quirkier, and at times to difficult to explain.

Even though homosexuality is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom ranks No. 2 for searches for "gay sex," behind the Philippines.

And consider the list of cities that most frequently look up "amour," the French word for love. Paris, allegedly a romantic haven, is absent from the top 10. The top three berths went to Rabat, Morocco; Algiers and Tunis.

Other findings suggest the stirrings of a trend. Searchers for "Allah" come overwhelmingly from the Islamic world. But, in a sign of shifting social realities, the word is searched from the Dutch-language version of Google more avidly than from the Arabic-language one. Norwegian, French, Danish, Swedish and German sites also featured in the top 10 for "Allah" inquiries.

"Guns" is a word easy to associate with the United States. But the rising incidence of violent kidnappings and murders in Latin America has perhaps driven searchers to the Web for answers. Buenos Aires leads the cities index for "guns" searches, and Argentina as a whole outranks the United States, with Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru also in the top 10.

The Google system can also be queried one country at a time, to determine, for example, how frequently people in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia are looking up "democracy." The Bush administration is unlikely to be pleased by Google's reply for each of those countries: "Your terms - democracy - do not have enough search volume to show graphs."
 
Cells That Read Minds

On a hot summer day 15 years ago in Parma, Italy, a monkey sat in a special laboratory chair waiting for researchers to return from lunch. Thin wires had been implanted in the region of its brain involved in planning and carrying out movements.

New York Times
10 Jan 2006

Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, some cells in that brain region would fire, and a monitor would register a sound: brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip.

A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his hand. The monkey stared at him. Then, something amazing happened: when the student raised the cone to his lips, the monitor sounded - brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip - even though the monkey had not moved but had simply observed the student grasping the cone and moving it to his mouth.

The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey itself brought a peanut to its mouth.

Later, the scientists found cells that fired when the monkey broke open a peanut or heard someone break a peanut. The same thing happened with bananas, raisins and all kinds of other objects.

"It took us several years to believe what we were seeing," Dr. Rizzolatti said in a recent interview. The monkey brain contains a special class of cells, called mirror neurons, that fire when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same action on its own.

But if the findings, published in 1996, surprised most scientists, recent research has left them flabbergasted. Humans, it turns out, have mirror neurons that are far smarter, more flexible and more highly evolved than any of those found in monkeys, a fact that scientists say reflects the evolution of humans' sophisticated social abilities.

The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions.

"We are exquisitely social creatures," Dr. Rizzolatti said. "Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others."

He continued, "Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking."

The discovery is shaking up numerous scientific disciplines, shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy, language, imitation, autism and psychotherapy.

Everyday experiences are also being viewed in a new light. Mirror neurons reveal how children learn, why people respond to certain types of sports, dance, music and art, why watching media violence may be harmful and why many men like pornography.

How can a single mirror neuron or system of mirror neurons be so incredibly smart?

Most nerve cells in the brain are comparatively pedestrian. Many specialize in detecting ordinary features of the outside world. Some fire when they encounter a horizontal line while others are dedicated to vertical lines. Others detect a single frequency of sound or a direction of movement.

Moving to higher levels of the brain, scientists find groups of neurons that detect far more complex features like faces, hands or expressive body language. Still other neurons help the body plan movements and assume complex postures.

Mirror neurons make these complex cells look like numbskulls. Found in several areas of the brain - including the premotor cortex, the posterior parietal lobe, the superior temporal sulcus and the insula - they fire in response to chains of actions linked to intentions.

Studies show that some mirror neurons fire when a person reaches for a glass or watches someone else reach for a glass; others fire when the person puts the glass down and still others fire when the person reaches for a toothbrush and so on. They respond when someone kicks a ball, sees a ball being kicked, hears a ball being kicked and says or hears the word "kick."

"When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain," said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. "Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate," he said. "But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements.

"When you see me pull my arm back, as if to throw the ball, you also have in your brain a copy of what I am doing and it helps you understand my goal. Because of mirror neurons, you can read my intentions. You know what I am going to do next."

He continued: "And if you see me choke up, in emotional distress from striking out at home plate, mirror neurons in your brain simulate my distress. You automatically have empathy for me. You know how I feel because you literally feel what I am feeling."

Mirror neurons seem to analyzed scenes and to read minds. If you see someone reach toward a bookshelf and his hand is out of sight, you have little doubt that he is going to pick up a book because your mirror neurons tell you so.

In a study published in March 2005 in Public Library of Science, Dr. Iacoboni and his colleagues reported that mirror neurons could discern if another person who was picking up a cup of tea planned to drink from it or clear it from the table. "Mirror neurons provide a powerful biological foundation for the evolution of culture," said Patricia Greenfield, a psychologist at the U.C.L.A. who studies human development.

Until now, scholars have treated culture as fundamentally separate from biology, she said. "But now we see that mirror neurons absorb culture directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation."

Other animals - monkeys, probably apes and possibly elephants, dolphins and dogs - have rudimentary mirror neurons, several mirror neuron experts said. But humans, with their huge working memory, carry out far more sophisticated imitations.

Language is based on mirror neurons, according to Michael Arbib, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. One such system, found in the front of the brain, contains overlapping circuitry for spoken language and sign language.

In an article published in Trends in Neuroscience in March 1998, Dr. Arbib described how complex hand gestures and the complex tongue and lip movements used in making sentences use the same machinery. Autism, some researchers believe, may involve broken mirror neurons. A study published in the Jan. 6 issue of Nature Neuroscience by Mirella Dapretto, a neuroscientist at U.C.L.A., found that while many people with autism can identify an emotional expression, like sadness, on another person's face, or imitate sad looks with their own faces, they do not feel the emotional significance of the imitated emotion. From observing other people, they do not know what it feels like to be sad, angry, disgusted or surprised.

Mirror neurons provide clues to how children learn: they kick in at birth. Dr. Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington has published studies showing that infants a few minutes old will stick out their tongues at adults doing the same thing. More than other primates, human children are hard-wired for imitation, he said, their mirror neurons involved in observing what others do and practicing doing the same things.

Still, there is one caveat, Dr. Iacoboni said. Mirror neurons work best in real life, when people are face to face. Virtual reality and videos are shadowy substitutes.

Nevertheless, a study in the January 2006 issue of Media Psychology found that when children watched violent television programs, mirror neurons, as well as several brain regions involved in aggression were activated, increasing the probability that the children would behave violently.

The ability to share the emotions of others appears to be intimately linked to the functioning of mirror neurons, said Dr. Christian Keysers, who studies the neural basis of empathy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and who has published several recent articles on the topic in Neuron.

When you see someone touched in a painful way, your own pain areas are activated, he said. When you see a spider crawl up someone's leg, you feel a creepy sensation because your mirror neurons are firing.

People who rank high on a scale measuring empathy have particularly active mirror neurons systems, Dr. Keysers said.

Social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, embarrassment, disgust and lust are based on a uniquely human mirror neuron system found in a part of the brain called the insula, Dr. Keysers said. In a study not yet published, he found that when people watched a hand go forward to caress someone and then saw another hand push it away rudely, the insula registered the social pain of rejection. Humiliation appears to be mapped in the brain by the same mechanisms that encode real physical pain, he said.

Psychotherapists are understandably enthralled by the discovery of mirror neurons, said Dr. Daniel Siegel, the director of the Center for Human Development in Los Angeles and the author of "Parenting From the Inside Out," because they provide a possible neurobiological basis for the psychological mechanisms known as transference and countertransference.

In transference, clients "transfer" feelings about important figures in their lives onto a therapist. Similarly, in countertransference, a therapist's reactions to a client are shaped by the therapist's own earlier relationships.

Therapists can use their own mirror system to understand a client's problems and to generate empathy, he said. And they can help clients understand that many of their experiences stem from what other people have said or done to them in the past.

Art exploits mirror neurons, said Dr. Vittorio Gallese, a neuroscientist at Parma University. When you see the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini's hand of divinity grasping marble, you see the hand as if it were grasping flesh, he said. Experiments show that when you read a novel, you memorize positions of objects from the narrator's point of view.

Professional athletes and coaches, who often use mental practice and imagery, have long exploited the brain's mirror properties perhaps without knowing their biological basis, Dr. Iacoboni said. Observation directly improves muscle performance via mirror neurons.

Similarly, millions of fans who watch their favorite sports on television are hooked by mirror neuron activation. In someone who has never played a sport - say tennis - the mirror neurons involved in running, swaying and swinging the arms will be activated, Dr. Iacoboni said.

But in someone who plays tennis, the mirror systems will be highly activated when an overhead smash is observed. Watching a game, that person will be better able to predict what will happen next, he said.

In yet another realm, mirror neurons are powerfully activated by pornography, several scientists said. For example, when a man watches another man have sexual intercourse with a woman, the observer's mirror neurons spring into action. The vicarious thrill of watching sex, it turns out, is not so vicarious after all.
 
Free Will and the Brain

The following points are made by S.S. Obhi and P. Haggard (American Scientist 2004 92:358):

1) In 1983, Benjamin Libet and his colleagues at the University of California San Francisco published a profoundly influential paper on the source of human control. In this study, participants watched a small clock hand that completed one full revolution in 2.56 seconds. While fixated on the clock, a participant
voluntarily flexed his wrist at a time of his choosing. After the movement, the clock hand continued to rotate for a random time and then stopped. Then, a participant reported the position of the clock hand at the time when she first became aware of the will to move. Libet and his colleagues called this subjective judgment W, for "will". In other parts of the experiment, participants judged when they actually moved, and Libet called this judgment M, for "movement". The timing of the W and the M told Libet and his collaborators when -- subjectively speaking -- a participant formulated a will to move and actually moved.

2) In addition, Libet's team measured two objective parameters: the electrical activity over the motor areas of the brain, and the electrical activity of the muscles involved in the wrist movement. Over the motor areas, Libet recorded a well-known psychophysiological correlate of movement preparation called the "readiness potential" (RP), which Hans H. Kornhuber and Lueder Deecke first described in 1965. The RP is measured using electroencephalographic recording electrodes placed on the scalp overlying the motor areas of the frontal lobe, and appears as a ramplike buildup of electrical activity that precedes voluntary action by approximately 1 second. By also recording the electrical activity of the muscles involved in the wrist movement, Libet precisely determined the onset of muscle activity related to the RP.

3) Libet and his colleagues examined the temporal order of conscious experience and neural activity by comparing the subjective W and M judgments with the objective RP and muscular activity. First, the investigators found that, as expected, W came before M. In other words, the subjects consciously perceived the intention to move as occurring before a conscious experience of actually moving. This suggests an appropriate correspondence between the sequence of subjective experiences and the sequence of the underlying events in the brain. But Libet also found a surprising temporal relation between subjective experience and individual neural events. The actual neural preparation to move (RP) preceded conscious awareness of the intention to move (W) by 300 to 500 milliseconds. Put simply, the brain prepared a movement before a subject consciously decided to move. This result suggests that a person's feeling of intention may be an effect of motor preparatory activity in the brain rather than a cause. As Libet himself indicated, this finding ran directly
contrary to the classical conception of free will.

4) Considering all the existing data, the brain is apparently going full speed ahead well before a person experiences the conscious intention of moving. Consequently, no role appears for conscious processes in the control of action -- or so it might seem. Although research casts doubt on whether conscious processes cause actions, the data remain consistent with the idea that conscious processes could still exert some effect over actions by modifying the brain processes already under way. The fact that conscious awareness of intention precedes movement by a few hundred milliseconds means that a person could still inhibit certain actions from being made.(1-5)

References (abridged):

1. Haggard, P. 2001. The psychology of action. British Journal of Psychology 92:113-128.

2. Haggard, P., and S. Clark. 2003. Intentional action: conscious experience and neural prediction. Conscious Cognition 12(4):695- 707.

3. Haggard, P., S. Clark and J. Kalogeras. 2002. Voluntary action and conscious awareness. Nature Neuroscience 5(4):382-385.

4. Haggard, P., M. Taylor-Clarke and S. Kennett. 2003. Tactile perception, cortical representation and the bodily self. Current Biology 13(5):R170-173.

5. Haggard, P., and B. Whitford. 2004. Supplementary motor area provides an efferent signal for sensory suppression. Cognitive Brain Research 19(1):52-58.

American Scientist http://www.americanscientist.org