In 2012 I met with John Markoff for coffee in New York. John is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the New York Times with a strong interest in technology. We discussed robotics, but at the time I had fresh ideas about consciousness and free will, so we got into that too.
I’ve started reading a book called “Determined” by Robert M. Sapolsky. Many of my friends know of him but I had to find out who he is. To me he is a scary looking fellow and his book is scary too. Not because of the premise, which I agree with, but because it is in my view challenging to read. That is a surprise because Robert’s reputation is for science communication. Only two chapters in, I am persevering with it because scanning ahead I see he refers to neural nets and Benjamin Libet and has already discussed Phineas Gage. All topics dear to my heart. Markoff does not get a mention.
I believe there is no free-will. Or at least very little and certainly not in the sense we tend to think of it: a faculty for which we are accountable for our actions and behaviours. My main reason is from the work of Libet, who shows that before the decision to make what we would think of as a conscious choice to do something, is made, in other words before we think we decide through our free-will to do something, neurological evidence indicates parts of our brain have already made that decision for us, subconsciously. Thinking we made the decision is a cruel illusion.
Sapolsky goes into enormous detail about that research and the 40 years of subsequent, and increasingly more and more detailed, work supporting Libet and at times contradicting his conclusions, introducing confusion.
Part of the reason for the book being challenging is what I see as his tendency to be too colloquial, too conversational and chatty. I think of Dawkins by contrast and his struggle to engage his intended audience, and this book is perhaps too much in the opposite direction. The other reason is that Sapolsky is a quintessential scientist who tries too hard to be complete and fair, to the point where I lose track of what he believes, agrees with, is trying to say or prove. And his examples at times are esoteric.
His discussion in Chapter 2 about “The Final Three Minutes of a Movie” prompted this blog.
Sapolsky depends on the premise that there is no single neuron that initiates a decision, which would be necessary for free-will. All the evidence is that the neurons that trigger a decision and an action are a cascade of previous neuronal, hormonal and other factors.
In experiments where subjects were pushing buttons, Libet showed in 1983 that research subjects decided about a fifth of a second before their fingers started moving. That is the conscious, supposed free-will, part. Libet discovered that another part of the brain called the Supplemental Motor Area generates what is termed a “readiness potential” that sends signals down the spine to drive the muscles. This readiness potential occurs even before the subject decides (or believes they decided) to press the button. Sapolsky suggests that “the sense of freely choosing is just … a false sense of agency”.
Forty years of subsequent research is provided in the book, with increasingly more sophisticated and fine technology. Libet used EEGs which are very broad indicators, but it has been duplicated and found in small parts of the brain with fRMIs and even to single neurons monitored during brain surgery. As I said, with just enough conflict to leave the matter undecided. 60% to 80% for no free-will according to Sapolsky.
What came next was interesting to me. Sapolsky then goes on to show that once a decision has been made to perform an action or behaviour, there is a window of opportunity to cancel the decision. Some follow up research triggered by Libet’s work has studied the vetoing effect, and whether that indicates there is free-will after all. People can generally stop themselves from doing something, right up to a point of no return. Or can they? Does it mean that that readiness potential was not the be all and end all of the decision making process? And is the readiness potential the same whether the eventual outcome is the action or the vetoing of the action? It turns out that there is yet another brain area in the frontal cortex activated before the Supplementary Motor Area. If the decision is vetoed, the readiness potential is different from when there is no veto, it eases off. The frontal cortex was that part of the brain damaged in Phineas Gage causing him to lose control of performing actions that could be harmful. In other words his supposed free-will decision making. So something other than he is affecting decisions. In fact experiments show that there are easy ways to actually control what a person decides. Meaning they are not the decision makers at all.
Free-won’t, whether it is under the individual’s control or not has surprising implications. When a gambler on a losing streak manages to stop gambling, parts of the brain relating to subjective pain, anxiety and conflict are activated, whereas continuing to gamble activates brain regions dealing with incentives and reward. In the words of Sapolsky, “This is amazing – continuing to gamble with the possibility of losing is less neurobiologically averse than quitting and contemplating the possibility that you would have won if you hadn’t stopped. We’re really a screwed-up species.”
So again, what are thought of and experienced as free-will, in this case “free-won’t” are triggered ahead of our supposed decision making. To me it suggests that neural computations based on genetics, hormones, life experience, cultural background and so on, make decisions for us and a different process we call consciousness makes us think we did the deciding.
About free will, a short lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCVWhwfy3lk
If you understand this at once, you may call yourself a Professor.
I profess to need one or even two more sessions to get it.
Btw. He is an Egyptian engineer with a family tree going back many centuries. He specialises in bio-geometry and related..
Hi Jacob, I’ll check that out and let you know whether I am a professor or not!
Well I’m definitely not a professor!
It’s been awhile since I thought about mind/body questions. Timely post as I was listening to Neil Diamonds Red Red Wine song when I started reading your post. How memories get triggered and what our subconscious, and conscious processes do with them to affect our active decision making is one of the questions my uncle Bob use to explore when he volunteered at prisons years ago.
Mark
Oh yes! Red Red Wine. Great song. I sing and play at times in a country music club and this gets done by others a lot.
It seems to me that you were lucky, as were the prisoners, to have had an Uncle Bob. I did not think of this post as a mind/body thing, but of course that is exactly what it is.
Thanks for your comment.
A Buddhist nun whose talk on this subject I attended once was adamant that we had freedom of choice, but no free will. How she could be so certain I did not dare ask. She was quite a formidable lady in the way she put-down anyone, ah, myself actually, voicing an opinion on the matter. I was not overly impressed by her talk (that’s your ego, squire).
Latterly, I have given it more thought. Modern science doesn’t know the half of it, I think; but that could be my lack of scientific knowledge. For a start, how does modern science measure quantum superpositions in an individual, singly, or even just the mental quantum moment when a chain of superpositions collapses and the mental body of the person in question activates the body or brain accordingly? As an arch-procrastinator, I hold superpositions most of the time, sometimes I juggle a handful, not knowing what to decide or do.
The physical brain does the calculations, according to modern science, and, after making up its brain-mind, tells the body to act upon it, or it archives whatever it decided.
But have we never heard of martial arts/sports people reacting, or fools opening their mouths, without thinking about it? This would be a good test for science, if one could be devised, to find out exactly where the decision to initiate physical action originates. Is there a way to test intuition? Does modern science even recognise intuition. There is much about human abilities that is not understood in a scientific way. There are likely even phenomena which have been observed and testified to by honest, sober adults which science simply puts in the airy-fairy bin. Modern science does not know all the answers to what’s happening as a matter of observable fact. Will it ever?
Ah, maybe it’s heart thing. The heart feels, and could be thinking.
Hi Jacob, again thanks as always for your thought-provoking comments. I don’t know how many times so called experts have announced that now we know all thee is to know. Then either something never previously encountered arises, or something dismissed like you say is opened up with new insights. As much as we now know about the physical universe, I’d like to think it is a smidgeon of what is yet to be learned. I’d hate to think that there is not much more to discover. Same with biological sciences and our minds. Reading your comment, my “INTUITION” did wonder if that Buddhist nun may have been in the wrong game. I’m in Thailand, surrounded by monks and Buddhists and nuns and see them almost universally as kind and easy going, not dogmatic like your experience. You mention the heart thing. The interesting thing of late is how not the heart but the gut has such a huge influence on the brain and behaviour.
Theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson noticed something interesting about scale: how seeing a mechanism is a feature of a certain scale of vision. ‘For the biologist’ he wrote, ‘every step down was a step towards increasingly simple and mechanical behaviour’:
A bacterium is more mechanical than a frog, and a DNA molecule is more mechanical than a bacterium. But twentieth-century physics has shown that further reductions in size have an opposite effect. If we divide a DNA molecule into its component atoms, the atoms behave less mechanically than the molecule. If we divide an atom into nucleus and electrons, the electrons are less mechanical than the atom.
cited in Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, London, 2022, p. 1058-9
That’s interesting Wayne, because the opening chapter, first paragraphs in fact, of the Determined book this post is about, starts with an anecdote about the world sitting on top of a turtle, which is sitting on top of another turtle, and so on, “all the way down”. Sapolsky does not say they get more simple or mechanical in behaviour, but that there is no bottom one, the turtles go all the way down. All the way; the last one is not floating in the air.
Not quite the same analogy, but some similarities that are striking I thought.
Sapolsky uses his story to show a decision (the earth) is based in something prior (a turtle) which is based on something earlier (the next turtle) and so on. His argument is that the decision is not made freely but is dependent on everything that happened to that individual previously.
Okay, I’ve just finished the book. It was a tough read, and my original comments after just 2 chapters stand. IN places it is all over the place, underexplaining key concepts for a novice and over explaining some things I thought would be trivial. Like philosophical things versus high school biology.
Nevertheless in my view, it is interesting, informative, convincing and worth the effort. I learned some stuff.
Sapolsky does struggle I feel. He tries too hard with too may examples that are at times repetitive, probably deliberately to home the point, but would have been better with few really good examples. One great example sometimes is enough to prove a point.
My comment is supported by the extent of Sapolsky’s failure to convince those most needing his expertise, like juries in a court room. His involvement in crime matters and being American is evident in the significant number of examples that involve violence. For instance making a decision about robbing a store instead of an example say about what movie to see.
Basically I feel that there are 2 books in this one, and would have been better released as two shorter more focussed books.