The Psych Student

"A Plenitude of Paths" by FeatheredTar postd on Flickr with a Creative Commons use license.

According to biologist Anthony Cashmore’s theory on human behavior, there was no way I wasn’t going to write this blog post. Taking his work to its logical conclusion, it was environmentally and biologically predetermined that I was going to write this sentence and choose these words to do it. When I pause here and there to think about which word expression to use, I’m actually experiencing the illusion of free will. Really?

I came across Cashmore’s findings at Physorg, and if you want to read more about it, that’s a good place to wade in. Lisa Zyga writes that according to Cashmore’s theory we’re essentially being tricked by the fact that we’re conscious into thinking that we also have free will;  “The human brain acts at both the conscious level as well as the unconscious. It’s our consciousness that makes us aware of our actions, giving us the sense that we control them, as well. But even without this awareness, our brains can still induce our bodies to act, and studies have indicated that consciousness is something that follows unconscious neural activity.

Just because we are often aware of multiple paths to take, that doesn’t mean we actually get to choose one of them based on our own free will.”

Film plot lines rubbished

So long multiverse, at least as described by the guy in the opening of Richard Linklater’s Slacker. Without free will, we don’t have different decisions that can lead to alternate realities. In the world of physics, Cashmore’s theory doesn’t alter the fact that Stephen Hawking lost his bet with Leonard Susskind. If true, one popular topic of many pot heads may be squashed. The Butterfly Effect,  Back to the Future triology and nearly any parodox-centric time travel movie is similarly dead. When Ashton Kutcher goes back to being a kid again, he’s doomed to do what he did in the first place regardless of how many alternate realities the brain can supposedly absorb.

The number of multiverses the human brain could distinguish. Credit: Linde and Vanchurin via universetoday.com

The Sweve of the Atomic Cascade

In “The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system” ( Doi:10.1073/pnas.0915161107) Cashmore wants to eliminate “the illogical concept that individuals are in control of their behavior in a manner that is something other than a reflection of their genetic makeup and their environmental history.”

“Progress in understanding the chemical basis of behavior will make it increasingly untenable to retain a belief in the concept of free will. To retain any degree of reality, the criminal justice system will need to adjust accordingly. However, to retain a degree of orderliness in society it will still be necessary to incarcerate individuals found guilty of certain criminal acts. This is rationalized in various ways including the following: To a), protect society; b), protect the offending individuals from society; c), provide such individuals with appropriate psychiatric help; d), act as a deterrent (the act of incarceration and the presence of a criminal code forming part of the environment); and e), alleviate the pain of the victim. The proposal is a pragmatic one, based on the belief that the welfare of society at large is more important than the welfare of the individual offender.” — Anthony Cashmore

Cashmore is talking about this in light of the criminal justice system. He aregues that since human behavior is nothing more than “a reflection of their genetic makeup and their environmental history” that “psychiatrists and other experts on human behavior should be eliminated from the initial judicial proceedings” and “the role of the jury would be to simply determine whether or not the defendant was guilty of committing the crime.” The mental state of the defendent simply doesn’t matter, Cashmore says.

As interesting as it would be to imagine a court system based around the idea that free will is a myth (a variation on Minority Report springs to mind), that will have to be a post for another day. More than likely the school teacher Peter Harvey is thankful that this is not presently the case. Though, if it were all down to biology, it could be argued that Cashmore’s argument is actually in favor of a different type of of mental consideration, one that it entirely based on a biological/situationist perspective.

The goal of this post is to challenge the assertion that free will has actually ever been disproven, or more to the point, that determinism (in the way Cashmore considers it) has been proven. I would argue that there is evidence of deterministic factors in behavior, but that’s far different than proving it’s all-encompassing and that free will does not exist.

It’s a curious title he’s given to this article given Cashmore’s actual theory. First off, anything that puts Titus Lucretius Carus‘ poetic Epicurean masterpiece De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) back into the public consciousness should be applauded. Lucretius was attempting to remind his fellow Romans of the wisdom espoused by his Greek muse about the follies of paying homage to gods, of going to war, banking on the afterlife and a lot more as he also tried to describe the atomic nature of the world. And he did it over six books in in dactylic hexameter.

Epicurianism was at once an attempt at scientific/philisocphical explanation for natural events and a liberation movement as Greece (and later on Rome) slid into empire and later decline, and there’s a lot to be said for people looking at it today. Embarking on a good picnic is always preferable to embarking on endless wars and occupations. Enjoy the senses. Your soul may exist, but as it’s made of the same atoms as everything else (though thinner), it is going to fall apart with the rest of your corpse when you die and the gods are too busy with other things to pay attention.

But Lucretius, and Epicurious before him, believed in free will in spite of this determinist explanation of the universe in the form of cascading atoms. Lucretius was trying to describe what makes use using the Epicurian method in order to convince his Roman benefactor against a career in politics (he failed). While the flow of atoms puts everything in motion, the tendency for atoms to swerve randomly gives people the ability to choose whether they’ll have red or white wine.

The Epicurian “determinist” explanation for the universe may seem on the face of it incompatible with the idea of free will, but the philosophy doesn’t suggest people lack it at all. Tim O’Keefe writes in Epicurus on Freedom that “But the Epicurean poet Lucretius writes that if all atomic motion were the deterministic result of past motions and weight, we would not have the ‘free volition’ (libera voluntas) which allows each of us to move ourselves as we wish. Since we evidently do have the power to move ourselves as we wish, there must be a third, indeterministic cause of atomic motion, in addition to weight and past motions–a ‘swerving’ of the atoms to the side at uncertain times and places, which saves us from fate.”

Cashmore’s theory says we really have no choice in our choice of wine, or anywhere. Biological, environmental and evolutionary influences are in firm control. We’re just along for the ride. He’s making this case with regards to the use of psychiatrists in the courtroom: Judging the sanity of the defendant isn’t necessary as none of us are “responsible” for our actions. Implementing this into practice might expedite a number of courtroom dramas, but as a a psych student currently siding toward humanistic psychology, I haven’t found that there’s enough convincing evidence to put the idea of situated freedom to rest.

Obviously our choices of action are limited by physical/biological and social/environmental factors. The genetic traits we receive, the culture we’re born in, the lexicon we inherit with our first language, the economic opportunities we start life with and so forth present enormous shaping factors for the rest of our lives. But the shaping never stops, and at each point, we choose which way to go and are subjected to further experiences that shape us. Not everyone agrees with that, though. Cashmore isn’t suggesting something new here; he just that we embrace something similar to the assumption put forth by psychoanalysis, which says we are ruled by psychic determinism. Cashmore’s determinism is biological.

The Case for Determinism

I’m not going to argue for the existence of conditional free will because of the Wouldn’t It Suck If We Didn’t Have It argument. Things don’t exist just because they would be neat if they did, otherwise we’d all have flying cars by now. I would postulate conditional free will is the most likely explanation for a number of behaviors that require complex decision making abilities (managing your hedge fund, deciding which bits of a genome an artificially created bacteria can do without, etc.) because the psychoanalysis/biologic/cognition junta hasen’t made the case for all-deciding psychic determinism. Free will is observable, and Cashmore’s theory that what we’re observing isn’t real is not testable, though as we’ll see it’s been tried. Even if we fashioned some way of observing what he says, according to his own theory, it would be an illusion. For a guy who says the belief in free will is like religion, his own idea seems to rank as blind faith as well.

Interestingly, Cashmore’s theory presents a paradox. Even without free will (if criminals are all predestined to be criminals) punishment is necessary for protecting society, he says. Punishment helps set the environment which limits the number of people likely to commit crimes. He also says that consciousness is an evolutionary selective advantage because it provides us with (what Zyga summarizes as) “the illusion of responsibility, which is beneficial for society.”

Page from a choose-your-own adventure game about free will

But people set laws and punishment, indicating that people are altering the environment in which society functions in new, innovative ways. If the environment and biology set the decision, we’d have a loop of people punishing people in similar ways. But people in fact come up with novel ways of punishment all the time. And if the idea of “responsibility” is beneficial, to what end?

Most likely it would be the decisions we make based on our sense of responsibility. Our sense of responsibility may be inherited from parents and influenced by religion and other factors, but how individuals make decisions based on that responsibility has numerous variation, including rebellion against it. Conditional free will allows for all of this.

Humanistic psychology employs a much better term than “free will”: personal autonomy. I would postulate that it comes into play during reflection, analysis and states of awareness. There’s a concept in psychology that I don’t think gets nearly enough attention, and that’s the idea that immunity to a process can arise when one studies and understands that process. It’s why psychologists often ask test subjects how much psychology they’ve taken, because they don’t want the subject to know exactly what’s being tested for and alter their results. If I recognize the pattern of environment and biology in determining something I do, I could over ride it simply by purposefully choose something else.

The Conway-Kochen proof of the Freewill Theorem

The physics of free will

Whether behavior is the result of free will or deterministic processes (or the more likely combination of the two in this blog’s editorial stance) Much of the mind is at present an impenetrable black box. Cashmore is a biologist, and studies into biology would weigh heavily in favor of determinism. But biology can’t yet answer this question either, and what is important is to remember what the claim is: That determinism exists.

There is a lot of evidence suggesting determinism exists, but none of it is observable. The theory of the presence of all-encompassing determinists promoted by Cashmore relies on the non-existence of free will. Free will is observable, though hard-core determinists such as Cashmore argue this is all an illusion. But if so, it’s an illusion that studies into biological and evolutionary impacts on behavior haven’t killed off. That it’s an illusion is the theory that must be argued, not the theory of free will. The null hypothesis is still in the lead on determinism theory, and Occam’s Razor mandates that the most simple solution is most likely the correct one.

In point of fact, though, Cashmore is, in many ways, raising an argument that physics can address much more effectively, which leads us back to early Epicurean philosophy, which held its basis for a deterministic universe and paradoxical human free will in Democritus’ atomic theory. Princeton mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen’s Free Will Theorem argues that “a particle is free to zip one way or another as he (Conway) is equally unbound in deciding whether or not to drop a cup he is clasping.” And because one works, so must the other.

In the Free Will Theorem, free will defies both determinism and randomness. In this sense David Hogson writes, “determinism is the doctrine that everything that happens is fixed (‘determined’) in advance.  Broadly, there are two versions of determinism, which can be asserted either independently or in combination.  One has it that earlier circumstances and the laws of nature uniquely determine later circumstances, and the other has it that past present and future all exist tenselessly in a ‘block universe,’ so that the passage of time and associated changes in the world are illusions or at best merely apparent.” The theorem shows that there are other plausible ways things could be, giving the assumption to free will as opposed to deterministic or chaos-centered perspectives.

In an argument against Philosopher David Hume’s case for determinism, David R. Schneider lays out this cunundrum: “All empirical evidence can be considered as either supporting determinism, or as a counter-example to determinism, at the complete discretion of each individual observer. Unless you and I agree as to the boundary or definition of what we have observed, our conclusion as to the objective existence of empirical evidence supporting determinism is merely relative.” This is because the observers did not witness the the original cause that have led to current effects. Had they done so, we could argue that they would have “no choice” but to agree. Being that information is never complete, we are left to our own devices. Free will, in this case, emerges in the gaps.

This post has not set out to refute the existence of determinism, or the utter totality of free will. It set out to show that determinism is the theory which must be proven, and trump all others. Cashmore’s determinism isn’t and doesn’t. But does this prove Cashmore wrong?

Neuroscience offers two routes of thought, one of which rules out the free will to choose: Now Choose one

If his determinism were down to habits, idiosyncratic behavior, culturally accepted customs and other routines, there’s a strong case to be made for deterministic influences. Wired reported that a 2008 study by the Max Planck Institute showed that brain scanners could predict people’s decisions seconds before the test subjects knew they were making them. Even here, though, study co-author John-Dylan Haynes said “It’s not like you’re a machine. Your brain activity is the physiological substance in which your personality and wishes and desires operate.” The study didn’t measure complex decisions such as buying a home, and was not entirely accurate in predicting the simple decisions it measured for.

This schematic shows the brain regions (green) from which the outcome of a participant's decision can be predicted before it is made. Courtesy John-Dylan Haynes via Wired

The tepid results don’t stop others from taking it further. The Wired reporter Brandon Keim later talked about the test with Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

“I don’t think ‘free will’ is a very sensible concept, and you don’t need neuroscience to reject it — any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality — that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system — After all, computers are rational physical systems!” — Martha Farah

Biologists like Cashmore, along with a number of neuroscientists, have argued that our perception of free will is an illusion, but don’t offer much on from where the illusion originates. What process makes the illusion? Why is it necessary? Up until recently, it’s also been said that there’s no place in the brain where free will is recorded as taking place, but this argument may be eroding. In 2009 New Scientist reported on research indicating that the parietal cortex is place where the decision to act is carried out. It’s been isolated, tested and tested again. Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London, says the experiment breaks ground because it pinpoints volition to a specific part of the brain, allowing scientists to experimentally control it.”

“That’s extremely interesting, because up to now it has been very difficult for neuroscientists to deal with the idea of intentions or wishes or will.” — Patrick Haggard

Only human?

I find it strange that the neuroscience community should be as put out as it is over something like free will. There’s more evidence that we are agents acting in the environment than simply being acted upon. A number of scientific disciplines seem populated with people eager to prove determinism while the humanistic perspectivs in psychology tend to rely on an exclusivist approach; that conditional free will is limited to humans. This too seems radically limited in scope and too grandiose a statement.

Martin Heisenberg (son of Werner, which I guess makes him a sibling to the Uncertainty Principle ), chair of the University of Wurzburg’s genetics and neurobiology section of their BioCenter, postulates that there is evidence of free will in non-human animals as well.

“The activation of behavioural modules is based on the interplay between chance and lawfulness in the brain. Insufficiently equipped, insufficiently informed and short of time, animals have to find a module that is adaptive. Their brains, in a kind of random walk, continuously preactivate, discard and reconfigure their options, and evaluate their possible short-term and long-term consequences.

“The physiology of how this happens has been little investigated. But there is plenty of evidence that an animal’s behaviour cannot be reduced to responses. For example, my lab has demonstrated that fruit flies, in situations they have never encountered, can modify their expectations about the consequences of their actions. They can solve problems that no individual fly in the evolutionary history of the species has solved before. Our experiments show that they actively initiate behaviour.” — Martin Heisenberg

An op-ed piece on the BBC website today discusses newly found evidence of higher intelligence, decision making and cultural practices of whales and dolphins, causing some to consider whether they should be afforded similar rights to humans.

Margi Prideaux, strategic policy director for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) International, writes “We now understand that dolphins and whales, in various different ways, have distinct personalities and identities; that they can think about the future, and have the innate ability to learn language. … Much of whale and dolphin behaviour is cultural, learned and passed down through generations. … They have complex decision-making and communications structures, and an independent evolution of social learning and cultural transmission appropriate to the radically different environment they live in.”

Instead of free will not existing or being entirely rare, perhaps a simpler answer is that it’s actually a common phenomenon, or byproduct of other phenomena, and we’re just learning how to recognize it.

Cashmore, A. (2010). Inaugural Article: The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (10), 4499-4504 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0915161107