Schrödinger’s equation is to quantum mechanics what Newton’s second law of motion is to classical mechanics. It describes the evolution of a physical system made up of fundamental particles subject to certain forces over time. Schrödinger's equation grew out of the idea that particles such as electrons behave like particles in some situations and like waves in others. In experiments it was found that the electron "chooses" to be in one of these states, when an observation is made, based on the probabilities given by the equation. This led some to propose a free-will theorem of quantum mechanics. If we raise one level above, we can see that quantum mechanics presupposes these three entities: (1) observer, (2) nature that has consciousness and (3) quantum state. With some thought experiment we can infer that an electron has no absolute free will because it is dealt a set of quantum states a priori by the nature, much like a deck of cards, and all it did was choose one when an observation was made. While an electron may not have free will, one can say the observer is free to set up the experiment in any which way and interpret the result based on subjective experience that presupposes the existence of a self and that is free will. However, physicist Henry Stapp says the subjective experience at a neuronal level is made possible by the ions passing through channels (microtubules) in the neuronal cells and giving raise to quantum effects that eventually map into actions in the physical world based on their probabilities. The inference that can be drawn, therefore, is that free will is an illusion and a mathematical puzzle the nature plays on us.
Determinism
John Searle makes the distinction between physical determinism and psychological determinism. We can all agree that objects in the world follow physical laws we have no control over. You can't change the way planets revolve around the sun or sun sets (even though the latter is just an illusion created by the rotation of the earth). This Searle calls bottom-up in contrast to the top-down way the mind and body work. That is, if you would like to lift your finger, the mind issues a command to the appropriate neural structures to carry on the task. Searle sets aside the issue of how neuro-transmitters, at a low level, affect the mind itself. If we accept that mind is part of the nature that is deterministic by the physical laws, then it follows that mind is deterministic and should obey the physical laws. Searle says, "the form of determinism that is ultimately worrisome is not psychological determinism. The idea that the states of our mind are sufficient to determine everything we do is false".
Another kind of determinism is causality. Let us look at what physicist David Bohm, who believes that free-will is part of a causal chain in sync with the physical world, had to say. Suppose A → B → C → D... where A, B, C, D....are some events separated in time that are causally connected. If we were to say D is one of the many possible outcomes after C, like a decision tree that expands to multiple child nodes, even if A were to be an independent cause that is going back to the beginning of the universe, we would explain that D is the most probable outcome out of a set of D1,D2,D3...Dn outcomes. One can say D1...Dn are internal mental states that are weighed by the brain/mind resulting in the choice of the most probable one as the outcome. It is not clear to anyone in the neuroscience if our brains are capable of computing all of the D1....Dn and their probabilities.
To illustrate, suppose A=Hungry, B=walk to fridge, C=grab food. Now the probable states D1...Dn could be warm in microwave (D1), feed the dog(D2), go find a homeless person to feed(D3), put it back considering the fact that the food is unhealthy(D4), etc. For each of these D1...Dn, there are further outcomes. For example, D1 might manifest as E1=food is burnt which results in F1 that it is okay to eat or F2 it is better to trash it. And so on. If we substitute ourselves with a robot capable of computing all of these outcomes and their probabilities, then we would all agree that the robot has no free will. However, left to our devices, when we choose D2 over all the others, it would be apparent that we had made a choice with as much information as possible. Otherwise, we would be standing at the fridge with food held in our hands for a very long time....
What is moral responsibility?
Daniel Dennett defines moral responsibility as sticking to rules that were created by the peers with some punishment for violating the rules. We all belong to organizations where the rules and punishment differ, but essentially fit the definition by Dennett. Suppose you work at an American company where there is a dress code and you choose to wear a traditional Indian dress, then you had better prepare to be told by the boss that you violated the company rule. If you want to continue to work there, which is your free will (that is not really so, but for the moment accept that it is), you would take the necessary corrective action. The free will here is an illusion. Because if you tried this experiment at various companies in the US, you could probably succeed in finding a company that accepts your dress. But that comes with multiple trials and movement all over the US much against your comfort. However, suppose you wanted to fix it once and for all by organizing a petition drive to make a legislation that traditional Indian dress should be acceptable at all American workspaces. You might succeed in getting what you want, but when you are working, one day, with machinery and your sari or dhoti got pulled by the machinery or got stuck in the elevator door, causing you harm, it would serve as a lesson for violating the workspace rule that was enforced in the first company you worked for. So what did your free-will achieve? If anything, it made you morally responsible for all of those workspace accidents that resulted from wearing an Indian dress by the workers.
So who has moral responsibility? Bennett defines a Moral Agent Club where anyone who fulfills the following requirements is a member:
- well informed: awareness of societal rules, laws, etc.
- well-ordered desires not expecting miracles and wind-falls
- moved by reasons: being open for discussion
- not controlled by another agent: capable of thinking and reasoning independently; this is not always the case as we are being persuaded by the people we interact with and the advertisements in the media including social media, to be in a certain way (e.g. dress brand names, lose weight, support a democrat/republican, etc.)
- punishable: if found violating rules and laws; Hume thinks determinism is what enables us to punish or reward a person. You punish a person to change their behavior or reward them to reinforce their behavior.
We can extend Bennett's theories to games like chess and basketball that have rules and the players are constrained to play by the rules. However, there are nearly infinite variety of moves within each of the games and the outcome is unpredictable. So it seems the players of these games have infinite choices within the framework of rules. Consider a skill like playing a piano. It starts out as a right brain hemisphere activity and with practice it shifts to left hemisphere of the brain and eventually to the posterior part of the brain. What this means is, at the beginning of acquiring a skill the brain is dealing with non-determinism and as it progresses to mastering the skill it tends to move towards determinism. This can be easily explained with an artificial neural net (ANN). At the very beginning the ANN is initialized with random weights that one can choose at will. As the supervised training takes over, the weights are adjusted by gradient descent. Once the supervised learning completes, the weights are frozen and the ANN is ready for prediction in the unsupervised mode.
Relevance of free will for reward or punishment
There are some who argue that all corporal punishment should be replaced by medication because our actions are deterministic or causally linked to the universe. But Dennett argues that all social contracts should contain the provision for punishment. The example he gives is: suppose you sign a contract and renege on the promise. Then you are told that you are being prosecuted and sent a subpoena. And you don't respond to the subpoena. What can be done by a judge other than pass a jail sentence for the contempt? If the judge didn't do that there is no reason to have contracts and feeling guilty is not enough (even though in some religions repentance is considered to be a virtue).
The application of punishment doesn't apply to humans only. Sam Harris quoted instances when people had punished animals by lynching and other means as an act of retribution for violating human laws. He gave an example of a case where a lawyer had defended a pack of rats that had eaten away a farmer's crop. The lawyer would tell the magistrate that his clients, i.e. rats, could not be present because they were scared away by cats. As late as in 1916 a circus elephant that had gone amok was hanged from a rail road crane. This kind of moral retribution is different from the law of karma that is applicable to all beings based on the sum total of their actions in this life and in previous births. The law of karma would say those who hanged the elephant would be brought to divine justice for an act of retribution because the errant elephant was possibly tortured by the human crew of the circus. Rightfully, we no longer accept torture as a valid means to punish an animal whether it is a circus animal or not.
Traditionally Abrahamic religions' blamed immoral behavior on free will. Sam Harris argues that when it is established that brain chemistry is the cause, it is immoral not to provide appropriate cure such as a nutritional supplement or surgery that would reverse the condition. This paves way for a better justice system even after accounting for the side-effects of medical procedures and pharmacological agents. Why would a benevolent god allow humans to wreak havoc with free will in a particular case (e.g. colonialism) and take personal charge in other cases (e.g. tsunami, earthquakes, etc.)? If scientists could show that natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes are caused by our choices like burning fossil fuels, releasing flouro-chloro-carbons that deplete the ozone layer of the atmosphere, would that change anything? He argued that pride and shame ought to be replaced with compassion and love as we are intrinsically linked to our past and present by causality, leaving no room for religion to castigate the followers with sin.
Budhist Perspective
Gautama Budha is a well known preacher who said desires and wants are the root cause of sadness and renunciation is the key to happiness. On the other extreme we have advertisements and conditioning of mind to want more and more things. Let me illustrate with the story told by an Australian monk called Ajahn Brahm. A man dreamt of an angel who gave him 5 pots of gold. After he woke up, at the time of breakfast, his wife served him 5 pieces of bread with 5 eggs. It turned out it was the 5th day of 5th month (May). On television he saw the horse#5 had won the race. So he figured 5 was his lucky number. He, then, went to bank, withdrew $5000 and bet on the horse#5. Soon after his horse had finished 5th in the race. Such is the power of suggestion. Our brains are not well equipped to reason with numbers and probabilities -- save a few scientists and engineers--and make accurate predictions in the world.
The functional MRI experiments done by neuroscientists led by Haynes show that the outcome of an event was predicted or chosen by the brain 10 seconds before the person had consciously acted on it. Haynes updated a classic experiment by the late Benjamin Libet, who showed that a brain region involved in coordinating motor activity fired a fraction of a second before test subjects chose to push a button. This means an average person has at least 5 seconds at disposal to decide to not act on a whim. This leads to the notion of "free won't" where we can curtail our whim much before we act on it. Whether Gautama Budha was aware of this experimental evidence based on intuition, his teachings have been vindicated and the world he envisioned would be based on free won't.
Interestingly Swami Sarvapriyananda quotes Bhagavad Gita-- Chapter 3 Verse 27, Chapter 13 Verse 29 and Chapter 14 Verse 19--that confirms the experiment's outcome, i.e. we don't will the action but merely execute it following prakriti's (nature) command. It is not clear how nature implants the intent into the mind. But Lord Krishna, the author of Gita, calls it maya or illusion. By extension, free will is an illusion and the wise, according to Lord Krishna, know that they cannot see through maya.
Role of Consciousness
John Searle draws an example from psychological experiments involving hypnosis. Suppose you are made to roll on the floor under hypnosis. This would be treated as a compulsion by others because you are in trance under hypnosis. After some time, when you are in a cafeteria, you announce that you want to check out the carpet by rolling on it as you are interested in investing on carpets, and you have free will. Would that be considered normal? For most people believing in post-hypnotic suggestion it seems normal. That is you are constrained to behave in a certain way. Whereas from your perspective you are acting out in complete freedom. This argument can be extended to movies and people that play movie characters. We don't call a real person a cannibal just because he played such a role in a movie. In fact, most people are forgiving towards the transgressions of real-life actors who play difficult roles in the movies that take a toll on their rational thinking.
More recent study by Thalia Wheatley shows that conscious awareness is not necessary for decision making. A subject is hypnotized and asked to make some decisions. These were compared with the decisions made after the subject woke up and fully conscious. There is virtually no difference. But these are simple motor actions involving muscle movement. It is not clear if this study is applicable to higher cognitive functions like planning, deliberation and future activity where free will is supposedly playing a role.
Split Brain Experiments
A split brain condition arises when in epileptic patients the corpus callossum that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is cut off. This procedure called commissurotomy is done so that seizures, which is an abnormal electrical activity in the brain, occurring in one hemisphere won't affect the other. Thus the patient is left with one functioning hemisphere at all times. Commissurotomy was shown to be effective in making the patients as normal seizure-free people. However, cognitive experiments performed on them showed that they confabulate. When the experimenter flashed "Key Ring" on a screen with the fixation cross in the middle, and asked what they saw, they said "Ring" because the speech center is in the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere read "Key" and the left hemisphere read "Ring" but neither read both. The scientist further gave a random mix of objects, and asked the patients to pick the one they saw, they picked a key with left hand and a ring with right hand. When asked why they picked different objects, they gave lengthy explanations to show that they are rational which the scientists call confabulation. Similar experiments were conducted with flashing dots that alternated between white and black colors. Donald Hoffman, a neuroscientist, posits their consciousness has been split which seems plausible. How about their free will? Given that one hand buttons the shirt and the other unbuttons the shirt, he predicts their free-will has also been taken away by the surgery. And most people when their free-will has been constrained, such as by a perceived threat, confabulate and give rambling explanations to prove their rationality. However, there is no cognitive experiment done to prove this assertion with regard to free will. Thus free will remains as an illusion.
Are physical laws always the same?
Determinism is often associated with immutable physical laws that were handed down to us from the time universe was created. Feynmann, a Nobel laureate physicist, wondered if these laws could have evolved just as the life has evolved on the earth. This is a worrisome prospect. We can accept that the earth is round and revolves around the sun (helio-centric) as Copernicus had explained. However, are we willing to accept that the law of gravitation had evolved as earth was separated from the sun as a flat or some other non-spherical structure that eventually evolved into a spherical structure? Can we say the early earth was flat and as it rotated, the mass got distributed evenly around the center just as a dough making machine agglomerates from spinning flour particles mixed with water? Everything is probable, but only one thing can be real in the physical world. The way Feynmann could break loose from determinism of physical laws and how Einstein could conceptualize quantum mechanical theories that questioned the validity of Newtonian laws for fundamental particles is something only an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent god could explain.
Some Arguments for Free Will
Besides compatibilism, the following arguments are extant for free will:
- Libertarianism:Free will comes from introspection and self-observation; just as we can feel pleasure or pain, we feel free-will; also the creative freedom felt by the artistes and writers must presuppose free will; if we feel it to some degree in a sliding scale, then it is frequentist or probablistic
- Ethical Appraisal: This applies to the affirmation of good and condemnation of evil and the legal system in general
- Pragmatic Self Refutation: just as proceedings in the legal system appeal to the free will while asking to be persuaded in one way because the evidence says so; the same logic is applied to arguments for or against free will
No where but in medicine has free will been studied and debated intensely. In 2002, a 40 year old man had expressed his desire for pedophilia until his doctors determined that it was caused by an egg-sized brain tumor. And once the tumor had been removed, his sex-obsession disappeared.The cancer was located in the right lobe of the orbifrontal cortex, which is known to be tied to judgment, impulse control and social behavior. If there was no diagnosis made about the tumor, one would attribute the desire to free will.
We also attribute substance abuse addiction, such as with street drugs and prescription pills alike, as one of the manifestations of free will. While medical doctors might believe the brain chemistry may have something to do with addiction, the society at large relegates the issue to free will.
Other manifestations include Parkinson's where involuntary movements occur without the appearance of any free will, just as many of the bodily functions happen. It was well known that red blood cells regenerate after 3 months and many of the skin cells are replaced in a few weeks without any conscious process behind them. It has been said in Bhagavad Gita that all involuntary activities are carried out by prakriti. Until science can prove otherwise, we are free to choose that there is no free will in any of these activities.
In summary, free will is what is left when we filter compulsion, causality and irresponsible behavior. That is to say, we shouldn't be forced to comply; we can't escape from causality; we can't have a free will without moral responsibility for our actions as we cannot function in a society that is by definition based on an order.
Online References
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThfJtP9w3fI Budhist perspective on free will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfbOWKyfwzA Jordan Peterson's clip on free will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KvqkRHG77w Searle's free-will talk with hyponsis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FanhvXO9Pk Sam Harris' talk on free will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v73S4BkItrc Quantum Theory and Free Will - Chris Fields, Henry Stapp & Donald Hoffman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uRTjfhIf4M Closer To Truth - Big Questions in Free Will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzbyeU3dK4g Swami Sarvapriyananda's lecture
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2943-brain-tumour-causes-uncontrollable-paedophilia/
No comments:
Post a Comment