Free Agents (III): Consciousness and free will
Unconvincing arguments for the existence of the self and free will.
The title of Kevin J Mitchell's book, which I have been reviewing here and here, is made up by two words, free and agents. Indeed, for much of the text, the author's efforts have been directed towards describing the evolution of agency, dealing also with the physical and biological determinants of neural activity and mental states. But it is not until the last chapters that he really deals with consciousness and free will.
Consciousness, the author points out, is a multifaceted phenomenon. The word can be used to refer to the capacity for self-perception, for being awake and perceiving the world at a given moment, or for experiencing specific sensations or perceptions. According to Mitchell, we are constructed in such a way that most cognitive processes operate unconsciously, so that only some types of information surface to conscious experience[1].
One question that arises in discussing the phenomena of consciousness is its function, its usefulness. Why do we need it? Why is it good?
One possible answer is that it provides us with the ability to imagine. Although we are not aware of all the activation processes of each brain region, we are aware of the meaning of some subsets of those patterns: we mentally experience sensations, perceptions, beliefs, goals, intentions, emotions, feelings, moods, thoughts and ideas. We can operate on them as cognitive objects and thereby manipulate ideas by transforming them in our mind, test them in mental simulations; and explore new avenues of thought disconnected from the immediate consequences of action.
Other benefits of conscious experience are related to social communication and cognition. If we are able to identify our mental state, we can communicate it to another person. It is even possible that the evolution of consciousness, language and culture are interrelated and mutually reinforcing by virtue of that coincidence. Moreover, the evolution of the ability to shape our thoughts probably paralleled the evolution of the ability to shape the thoughts of others. As we evolved into the ultra-social, ultra-cooperative, and necessarily cultural species that we are, other minds became by far the most important objects in our environment.
Descartes proposed that human beings are made up of two substances, the extended thing (the body) and the thinking thing (the mind), and that the latter governed the former. In other words, that the thinking substance generated the thoughts that were translated into the acts performed by the extended substance. The problem of the interaction between the two –thinking and extended– in the human being was raised already then[2]. The "immaterial" nature of thoughts or mental states raises the question of how they can exert effects on physical matter. The answer, which Rene Descartes was not able to give Elizabeth (see footnote), is that thoughts are not immaterial. As Mitchell rightly explains, they are physically instantiated in certain parts of the encephalon which, for their part, can influence the activity of other regions. There would not, therefore, be a ghost in the machine. The ghost is the machine working. This is how the author proposes it.
The key to understanding the above is that thoughts are not mere patterns of neural activity, they are patterns with meaning. It is by virtue of that meaning that they acquire causal power in the system. Some sets of those meanings are perceived by conscious experience. That is what thinking is all about. And when those cognitive representations are manipulated and resolved consciously, that is what making decisions is all about. These are not illusions, epiphenomena or post-hoc rationalizations.
In order to establish whether or not free will exists, we must consider what we mean by free. As I noted earlier, freedom to make decisions cannot be understood in an absolute sense. The very existence of the self implies constraint. The freedom to be oneself implies preventing the elements that constitute it from leading to its not being so. The conditioning factors of the past, therefore, do not impede the freedom of decision since this is exercised among the set of options that are possible. Deciding requires evaluating, and in order to evaluate, it is necessary to weigh the options precisely on the basis of past experience and the knowledge that we treasure. Therefore, it is not a matter of having total freedom, but of degrees of freedom.
Thus understood, what is required to accept the existence of free will is that we have the capacity to choose what to do, on the one hand, and, on the other, that we are not at the mercy of the parts by which we are constituted. On the contrary, it is we who are in charge. The system acts as a unified whole. Although it depends on subsystems and the functioning of its physical components, its function cannot be deconstructed or reduced to that functioning. It is the agent as a whole that decides what to do. In humans, since we have an additional layer of conscious cognitive control, this has to be considered sufficient to meet any reasonable and realistic criterion for free will.
Mitchell, on the other hand, understands that physical determinism runs counter to most interpretations of quantum physics. He is familiar with the argument that randomness and indeterminacy, characteristic of phenomena at the subatomic scale, do not justify free will either, since if that randomness had consequences at higher levels of organization of matter, what would result are random responses, not free decisions on the part of conscious agents. According to him, it would not be the case that on certain occasions the system responds to possible stimuli in a random way and on others in a predetermined way, without either of these two modalities providing freedom of action. What Mitchell proposes is that a generalized degree of indefiniteness looses the bonds of fate and creates space for agents to decide how to act.
He concludes that free will is not a nebulous or mystical property bestowed upon us, but a biological feature arising by natural selection that depends on the proper functioning of a distributed set of neural resources.
I must confess that I found ‘Free Agents’ a confusing text. On the one hand, it uses a multitude of expressions that I was unfamiliar with; this, evidently, may be a shortcoming of mine, but I found it somewhat strange. On the other hand, I was surprised by his insistence on basing free will on instances located at different levels of organization –subatomic, neuronal, encephalic–, when each of the arguments, if valid, would have been sufficient to defend his thesis. I have perceived a need, not only to leave no room for determinism, but also to overwhelm with arguments of completely different natures. And, finally, he does not resolve, in my opinion, the substance of the problem: the nature of the self.
I have found his defense of agency convincing, but not that of free will, precisely because I have not found any sufficiently solid argument to accept that there is an entity that can be considered as the self and that this self can act without its basic physical, chemical and biological components absolutely determining its actions.
In my view, consciousness ultimately remains a product of the mind; that is, a product of a biological system whose nature and functioning refer us to a prior sequence of causal interactions within the system or with the environment, over which no self exercises, in reality, the slightest control.
I conceive of the self as an actor on a stage, which is the reality in which it unfolds and in which it has to play a role, which is its life. At all times the actor has to act "as if" what he does obeys his will and is the fruit of his freedom. As if things were as they seem to us to be, as our consciousness experiences them. As if we had a mind (or soul) that is in charge of our acts and accounts for them. In my conception of the person and of reality, the self is a creation of the mind or, to hurry a little, of the brain machine. It would be one of many self-deceptions by means of which we grant –the machine grants– meaning to life and purpose to our acts. The machine deceives itself because it cannot bear its essential emptiness.
Note: This the third part of my review. Here are the first and second parts.
Title: Free Agents–How Evolution Gave Us Free Will
Author: Kevin J. Mitchell
Ed. by Princeton University Press, 2023.
[1] Neuroscientist Erik Hoel, in 'The World Behind the World. Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science' (Avid Reader Press, 2023), maintains precisely the opposite view, that we are aware of many more things than we are not.
[2] The first person we are aware of having expressed doubts and objections to the possibility of this interaction taking place was Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and the Palatinate.
El argumento que afirma que los defensores del libre albedrío lo hacen porque no soportan la idea de ser ilusiones o marionetas, es una trivialización psicologista. Además es un comodín, como afirmar que el indeterminismo no es libertad porque las decisiones aleatorias no son libres. Como si no hubiese otras formas de indeterminación además del azar.
No. El problema con el determinismo es que huele a altar. El demonio de Laplace resulta de una inversión teológica (Laplace mintió a Napoleón). Es la omnisciencia de Dios transformada en postulado metafísico. En un universo determinista la historia es destino, ordenado desde el principio, el despliegue de un algoritmo. No es casualidad que huela a mandato divino. Del Dios de Newton al demonio de Laplace solo hay que cambiar el triángulo por la peluca. Es la misma figura epistemológica.
Solo un mundo intederminista permite la contingencia histórica, una naturaleza sin plan ni propósito, que se hace sobre la marcha.
I was delighted with your comments on Mitchell's book. I think Mitchell fervently desires (as do I myself) that free will does exist, and so he tries to make arguments in multiple areas, because he himself realizes that none of them are sufficiently convincing. The reality is that we do not know what either Life nor the Self is. In fact we know practically nothing, not even on why is there something instead of there being nothing. The great questions of centuries ago continue to be asked without our finding any answers.
It is true that the Noise of which Mitchell speaks may have some important role to play in something. We know that the most deterministic (nonlinear) mathematical models cannot predict what is going to happen. In matter and energy there are noises of all sorts, but the most basic one is related to the (not null) zero energy point. It seems that in Physics it is not "to be or not to be", but "to be and not to be". So all in all, this noisy oscillation that exists even at absolute zero implies that we cannot predict anything, but the leap to free will I do not see. From quantum mechanics to Life there is an unbridgeable gap (still).