Image via WikipediaYesterday I went to a meeting of my book club, where one of the topics we discussed was the old question: when people are in terrible situations, why don't they leave? I should explain that two members of this book club are career prosecutors, one is a judge, and one (me) is a former prosecutor, a former defense lawyer, and a forensic psychologist. The person who raised the "why don't they leave?" question was a prosecutor, and a good friend of mine (we were colleagues at one time, trial lawyers in the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office). What I noticed was that prosecutors tend to have a firm attachment to a model of human mental and behavioral functioning in which it is held that all humans are fully free to make rational decisions about their actions; and that, accordingly, decisions and behaviors that appear to be unreasonable are motivated by factors such as courage (or the lack of courage), stupidity, greed, lust, or just plain evil-ness. Most psychologists would disagree with that model; we know that human decision-making is influenced by many factors that operate outside our awareness, and that much of our behavior is simply automatic, not truly a product of any kind of "deciding." We also know that, even in cases in which the subjective experience is that we have freely decided to engage in a certain action, our brains have begun preparing for that specific action for as long as 6 seconds before we experience the conscious intention to engage in or choose that action. Benjamin Libet did the initial work that confirmed this phenomenon back in the 1980's; more recently, there's an fMRI study that has just been published that confirms and extends Libet's work (the abstract for that new study is here). Libet (and others) gave considerable thought to the implications of their work. One way to interpret the findings is that we may not genuinely have what we think of as "free will"; what we might be said to enjoy, instead, might be called "free won't." In other words, it may be that we have the mental capacity to, in effect, "veto" the actions that our brains automatically prepare to engage in. This would be a version of human freedom that would prevent us from the need to view ourselves as no better than organic robots with a fancy, but essentially superfluous, consciousness about our own activities. One blog writer had this to say:
Libet’s study sparked a great deal of controversy, as some saw it as a denunciation of free will. And rightly so, as Libet himself suggested the only evidence in support of free will is our own assertion that it exists... [But this work] doesn’t exclude the existence of free will. Even Libet maintained that there was a role for consciousness in decision-making, not in initiating an act, but in the ability to suppress it... the capacity to reverse a decision made by the unconscious brain would support a type of free will.And another one of my favorite blogs, MindHacks, brought up the issue in the context of possible future development and implementation of what might be called "neuroweapons" that could use brain signals to trigger firing (see this discussion). What might it be like if a weapon could be developed that would fire, based not on a conscious decision made by a human who pulls a trigger or pushes a button, but on the activities going on in his (or her) brain that are outside of, and previous to, conscious awareness? Could a person who operates such technology even be considered responsible for his or her actions? Here is part of their discussion:
This concept [of legal and moral responsibility] is based on the theory that the conscious mind forms an intention, and an actions follows... [But now] we know that this idea is outdated... [Yet it is still] assumed that, at least for healthy individuals, we have as much control over stopping our own actions as starting them. [But] the US government's defence research agency, DARPA, is currently developing new military technologies, dubbed 'neuroweapons', that may throw these assumptions into disarray.The webpage of DARPA's Human Assisted Neural Devices Program only mentions the use of brain-machine interfaces in terms of helping injured veterans, but p11 of the US Dept of Defense budget justification [pdf] explicitly states that "This program will develop the scientific foundation for novel concepts that will improve warfighter performance on the battlefield as well as technologies for enhancing the quality of life of paralyzed veterans".
In other words, the same technology that allows humans to control computer cursors, robot arms or wheelchairs by thought alone, could be used to target and trigger weapons.
Even if only part of the process, such as selecting possible targets, is delegated to technology that reads the unconscious orienting response from the brain, that still means that part of the thought process has automatically become part of the action.
So, it may be true that we are not robots... but (only?!) that we can, in a sense, turn ourselves into something that is at least somewhat like a robot... All this is fairly mind-boggling, is it not?
And so there are major questions about the genuine nature of human freedom, and I think that's a very big deal, something that causes most of us to sit up and take notice.
And (as if this were not enough!) there's another issue being discussed in science news that has caught my interest: Scientific American is reporting that "One of the biggest scientific findings in recent years is the discovery that the universe is not only expanding, but it is also accelerating in its expansion. Under the influence of a mysterious dark energy, the universe will eventually thin out to nothingness and die a cold death" (here's the online discussion and interview). This is truly incomprehensible (and even frightening) to me. I (sort of) understand that, many ages from now, inevitably, the earth and sun that we know will die. And that would seem to mean that humans, if such creatures exist at such a time, will need to have found some other way to live, some other place (planet?) to inhabit. Science fiction writing is full of ideas about how this might happen; the assumption always is that humanity will somehow endure and persist. But how about the larger picture that these astronomers and cosmologists are revealing to us? A picture that is literally empty? A vision of nothing-ness... That's extremely unsettling; and it raises terrible questions for those of us who are inclined to think in terms of meaning and significance. The transitoriness of human life is an eternal truth that is nevertheless difficult to comprehend, but mere transitoriness seems tame compared to an awareness of the passing away, into nothingness, of all that any of us has ever thought or felt or accomplished... The emptiness that these scientists are describing seems very different, to me, from the infinite potentiality and becoming-ness of what the Buddhists call "emptiness."
And in the face of all this, my own human mind seems compelled to ask: what is the significance (if any) of these phenomena and experiences that we hold so dear: our compellingly convincing subjective experience of freedom, of the making decisions and choices? And our sense that human life is not only precious to us, but also deeply meaningful? Is there a genuine moral significance to the decisions that make up our lives? And is there any ultimate "meaning" in our lives, in our very existence? Of course, these are the questions that the religions of humankind have tried to address, with limited degrees of success and/or persuasiveness. In Christianity, for example, we hear that the purpose of our creation and existence is "for" the "glory of God," and that this God can be accurately described as our "Heavenly Father," meaning (I think) that the universe is ultimately friendly to humankind... In what sense, I wonder, might these ideas be true?
The human mind has been described as an entity that endlessly engages in meaning-making... When we are around 3 years old, our minds begin to ask the "why" questions, and we never let go of them. Some of us are so preoccupied with these questions that we become philosophers or theologians... In an earlier post, I reflected a bit on this and concluded that asking "why" is a waste of time... And yet I am no better than anyone else at letting go of the deep yearning and existential "need" to seek the experience of what we call meaning... although (and maybe because) it is so very elusive.
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