Free Will and the Brain: Are we Automata?

1. Free Will and the Brain:Are we Automata? Włodzisław Duch Department of InformaticsNicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, PL Google: W. Duch 3rd European Forumon Ethics & Science for the Environment, Toruń2008

2. Who am I? Quis ego et qualis ego? Who am I and what kind of man am I? St. Augustin (400 AC) What is the self? Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul? Pascal (1670) How can we answer such questions? Your are nothing else but a bunch of neurons (Crick). You are your synapses (LeDoux). Is that a satisfactory answer? Not for all ... If “I” = brain, then “I” do not exist. I am then an automaton!

3. Traditional view “I” decide in a conscious and free way, I am responsible for Popper & Eccles in “The Self and Its Brain” (1977) think that self can’t be just the brain, going back to the idea of souls animating bodies. The illusion of “ghost in the machine”, or homunculus, is very strong. • S. Pinker: Tabula Rasa. The modern denial of human nature (2002). • Tabula Rasa (J. Locke) – only environment matters. • Noble savage (J.J. Rousseau) – nature (including human) is good. • Ghost in the machine (Descartes) – soul controls the body.

4. Ancient view Gilbert Ryle, The concept of mind, Univ. of Chicago Press (1949) Is there a ghost in the machine? Or is mind a product of the brain?Is there a horse inside the steam train? Mind is a process, succession of brain states.Bible: psychosomatic unity of human nature. Soul, spirit: dozens of meanings! Things do not move by themselves, bodies are animated by spirits/souls. Egyptians: 7 immortal souls, including shadow and personal name! Aristotle (De anima) and St Thomas (Summa Theologica): 3 souls: vegetative or plant soul (growth), an animal soul (response), philosopher’s soul (mind) – but these concepts lost their reference. M. Heller: we had Galileo case, now Darwin, and sooner or later neuroscience case, theologians should not abide in ancient times. History of concepts: Duch W, Soul & spirit, or prehistory of cognitive science. Kognitywistyka 1 (1999) pp. 7-38

5. Astronomy and neuroscience Ancient view of the world has been replaced by modern astronomy, infinitely more sophisticated. We do not believe in flat earth in the center of the Universe, although our direct experience favors such beliefs. Our view of the Universe is much more interesting than the ancients had. But the ancient view of a person has still not changed in the folk psychology and in religions. The fight for better understanding of human nature has just started … neuroscience results are at its front.

6. Early development • Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, 1651: For what is the heart but a spring; and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body. • “Will” is just a verbal label we use to describe the attractions and aversions we experience while interacting with the environment. • Descartes, 1637: animals are automata, but men has soul. • David Hartley, „Observations on Man” (1749): brain damage, neurological problems lead to changes in perception and thinking. Sensory experience are caused vibrations in the nerves. reaching the brain and causing vibrations in the “infinitesimal, medullary particles,” which cause sensations and ideas. • Thomas Reid, „Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense” (1764), „Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man” (1785) & „Essays on the Active Powers of Man” (1788): mind has 43 faculties, all different aspects of the same substance.

7. Neurologists Thomas Laycock (1812–1876): Mind and Brain, Or, The Correlations of Consciousness and Organisation (1860), reflexes in the seat of soul! “... the brain, although the organ of consciousness, was subject to the laws of reflex action, and that in this respect it did not differ from the other ganglia of the nervous system. I was led to this opinion by the general principle, that the ganglia within the cranium being a continuation of the spinal cord, must necessarily be regulated as to their reaction on external agencies by laws identical with those governing the functions of the spinal ganglia and their analogues in the lower animals.” Fascinating history leading to acknowledgement that automatisms are not only in the spine, but also in the brain, is described in: J. Miller, Going unconscious. New York Review 42(7), 1995. I.M. Sechenov, Brain reflexes (Refleksy golovnago mozga ,1866): all conscious & unconscious acts are reflexes in terms of their structure. Subversive to public morals and social order, Sechenov was indicted.

8. More history In 1873 Sir John Ericksen, Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria: “The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon”. T.H. Huxley, On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History (1874): “... the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata ... “ William James, Does 'Consciousness' Exist? (1904) Pure monism: ... primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, ... we call that stuff 'pure experience‘. ...the stream of thinking ... consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing.

9. Automatisms Marshall Hall (1832): reflexes only in the spine, not in the brain, the seat of soul, sensory experiences require consciousness, function of soul. Benjamin Carpenter (1874): experiments of James Braidwith hypnosis (he cured everything) shows cerebral automatism. Perceptual system almost completely operates outside of conscious awareness. Mechanism of thought also operates largely outside awareness. These positive unconscious automatismswere forgotten when Freudcame with his id, ego and superego ideas, that may be roughly mapped to the triune brain ofMacLean (brain stem, limbic system, cortex). Reaction: radical behaviorism, no mind, just behavior.B.F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis Of Behavior (1938). Brain => finite automata => behavior. Gap between psychology and brain science, 1st and 3rd person view.

10. Mind the Gap Gap between neuroscience and psychology: cognitive science is at best incoherent mixture of various branches. Is a satisfactory understanding of the mind possible? Many people keep repeating that “we do not understand it”, but is it true? • Roger Shepard, Toward a universal law of generalization for psychological science (Science, Sept. 1987): • “What is required is not more data or more refined data but a different conception of the problem”. • Neuroscience credo: mind is what the brain does, a potentially conscious subset of brain processes. • How can my inner life result from counting impulses by neurons? How to relate brain states to mind states? Approximate the dynamics of the brain to get satisfactory (geometric?) picture of the mind.

11. From brain to mind 10-2 m, mesoscopic networks: self-organization, sensory and motor maps, population coding, continuous activity models, mean field theories, brain imaging, EEG, MEG, fMRI. 10-1 m, transcortical networks, large brain structures: simplified models of cortex, limbic structures, subcortical nuclei, integration of functions, concept formation, sensorimotor integration, neuropsychology, computational psychiatry ... And then a miracle happens … 1m, CNS, brain level: intentional behavior, psychology, thinking, reasoning, language, problem solving, symbolic processing, goal oriented knowledge-based systems, AI. Where is psyche, the inner perspective? Lost in translation: networks => finite state automata => behavior Alternative: mind as a shadow of neurodynamics.

12. Which self? A. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999). Elements of self at different levels: • Proto-self: information about inner environment, mostly from the brain stem and hypothalamus; allows for homeostasis but is not directly conscious. • Core self: awareness of here and now, giving the feeling of presence even in complete anterograde amnesia. • Autobiographical self, based on memory and anticipations. • Other divisions: • Phenomenology: primary and reflective consciousness. • N. Block: access-consciousness = representational, thoughts, beliefs and desires, and phenomenal consciousness = experience.

13. Self-recognition G.G. Gallup, Self-recognition in primates: A comparative approach to the bidirectional properties of consciousness. American Psychologist 32: 329-38 (2002); So far observed in chimps, orangutans, gorillas, elephants and dolphins. The concept of “I” entails understanding of mental states of others, empathy. Other test: if there are to people pointing to food, but one with eyes covered, chips usually follow the advice of the other one. Understanding mental states of others helps to predict their behavior. Possible role of mirror neurons, or multimodal neurons. Is this the basis of self-awareness?

14. How to find self in the brain? Kelleyet al. JCN 14, 785-704, 2002; consider yourself, president Bush, or case of letters used to write the word (neutral condition).

15. Where is the self in the brain? Kelleyet al. 2002, fMRI study Relating adjectives to oneslef rather than to others or paying attention to word form leads to stronger activations of medial pre-frontal cortex (MPFC). and PC

16. Where exactly is self? C.L. Heathertonet al, Medial prefrontal activity differentiates self from close others. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience 1, 18-25, 2006. Social judgements about others activate dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) stronger than self-referential judgments (for which VMPFC is more active) and activate anterior cingulate gyrus(AC). Representation of self in orbital and medial prefrontal cortex (OMPFC): continuous representation of self-referential stimuli. „Self” in relation to others = social self.

17. Various selves Northoffet.al, Self-referential processing in our brain - a meta-analysis of imagingstudies on the self. Neuroimage 31, 440, 2006 CMS, Cortical Midline Structures, are all involved in the verbal, spatial, emotional and face recognition test when self and others are distinguished. These structures are rarely damaged and are in between the rest of the cortex and limbic/brain stem structures.Proto-self: body; autobiographical: memory; social: relations.

18. Who is acting? Farrer & Frith, Experiencing Oneself vs Another Person as Being the Cause of an Action: The Neural Correlates of the Experience of Agency, Neuroimage 15, 596, 2002. Awareness of intentional acting correlates with anterior insular cortex (AIC), and passive acting when other person makes the movements with activity of inferior parietal cortex (IPC). AIC: may be concerned with the integration of all the concordant multimodal sensory signals associated with voluntary movements. IPC: represents movements in an allocentric coding system that can be applied to the actions of others as well as the self.

19. Empathy Jacksonet .al, How do we perceive the pain of others? (2005) ACC plays a role in analysis and behavioral control connected with avoidance of painful situations, combining attention and evaluation of emotional value assigning silence to the even. AICreceives information about pain monitoring physiological state of the body; ACC&AICreact to the pain in self and others.

20. Intentions in the brain Hayenset al, Current Biology 2007: you will see two numbers and you may add or substruct them ... activity of the medial frontal cortex will show what are your intentions even before you begin ...

21. Observer may know first ... B. Libetet al. The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will (2000). Libet experiments: wait for the will to act, press the button, and show the moment when the will arouse. Observation of ERPs shows 300 ms before the feeling “I want to press a button” arises, first movement is planned and then decision and awareness of that decision follows. New experiments (H.C. Lau et al., 2006-08), with TMS in pre-SMA area: “We conclude that the perceived onset of intention depends, at least in part, on neural activity that takes place after the execution of action.”

22. .. even 10 seconds earlier! C.S. Soon, M. Brass, H-J. Heinze & J-D. Haynes, Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, April 2008. ”There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 sec before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.”

23. Will is just another feeling Wegner DM, The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press(2002) We may be acting but do not realize that we are: ex: ouija board, facilitated communication; water divination and hypnotism. We are not acting, but think that we are: subjects may be induced to believe that they have performed some actions, or that their actions are achieving far more than they in fact are. Conscious acts of will are never the direct causes of our actions, instead, both conscious willing and action are the effects of a common unconscious cause. TMS stimulations:even if one side is selected 80% of times the choice is felt as free ... we could be radio controlled! Will is the feeling resulting from attention to the state of the pre-supplementary motor cortex (Pre-SMA).

24. Brain and antisocial behavior Mobbs D, Lau HC, Jones OD, Frith CD, Law, Responsibility, and the Brain. PLoS Biol 5(4): e103 (2007) Prefrontal cortex (PFC) makes us moral and rational. Damage to PFC leads to acquired sociopathy, impulsive affective criminals. Damage to amygdala leads to poor empathy and low fear, typical of psychopathic emotionless criminals. Estimation ~25% of all imprisoned in the USA fall in these two categories, frequently due to birth complication and trauma.

25. Neurolaw In the USA the insanity plea requires that the accused does not know, because of mental illness, that he did wrong. The insanity plea derives from a case from English law. In 1843, a man named Daniel M'Naghten attempted to assassinate the British prime minister; at his trial, he was found to be insane and the trial was abandoned. From that point on, lawyers saw the power of mounting an insanity defense, and many such claims were made. In 1995, the Supreme Court of Georgia heard a lawyer describing violent behavior shared by several generations of men in a Dutch family. A mutated gene shared by all the violent men, predisposed his client to violence; he did not have free will and was innocent of the murder. In another case brain scan evidence showed that he had an overactive amygdala (supposedly suggesting increased aggression) and underactive frontal lobes (supposedly suggesting reduced ability to inhibit aggression). Should the courts take genetic/brain anatomy information as excuses?

26. Michael Gazzaniga • M. Gazzaniga, The Ethical Brain (1998).Law and Neuroscience Project (MacArthur Foundation) The physical world is determined => brains must also be determined. Humans have ego-centric view of the world, with personal selves seemingly directing the show most of the time. Recent research shows this is not true, but simply appears to be true, because of a special device in our left brain called the interpreter, creating the illusion that we are in charge of our actions. Brains are automatic, rule-governed, determined devices, but people are personally responsible agents, free to make their own decisions, because personal responsibility is a public concept. Those aspects of our personhood are – oddly – not in our brains. They exist in the relationships, interactions with other automatic brains. But what kind of brains are able to obey the rules?

27. Personal responsibility • Traditional view breaks down: there is no “self” or ghost in the machine pulling the strings. • Self is one of many processes that brain is implementing, conscious of a small subset of brain processes. • If self is not in control then how can it be responsible? • My brain made me do it, I am not responsible? • To what degree and in what sense can we speak of free choices? • Solutions: even more responsibility? • Whole person is responsible, not just the ego or self. • We are responsible for our actions, good intentions are not enough. • We are responsible for who we become, our own development! • The brain has to educate itself and to “know oneself” better. • We are responsible for the development of our children, setting out examples and model roles. • Spiritual development is our moral obligation.

28. Some questions • The role of chaotic processes (W. Freeman) is still controversial; chaotic automata are determined but unpredictable.How unpredictable? How unstable against external perturbations? • Brain is a physical device, so “I” do not exist? No! Identify with the brain, it is much more than “I”, or ego! • Brain is a substrate of all mental processes. It contains the whole evolutionary history (phylogenesis) as well as personal history. • Brains are responsible for “our” decisions, “I” interprets what the brain experiences or wants (ex. split brain, lesions, neglect, “stronger than me” drives, learning about myself). • Illusion that “I” act is strong, but we can deprogram ourselves. What is left when self is gone? Not only the whole brain, but even bigger self, through strong empathy, interactions with others and environment. Buddhist tradition sees ego as illusion since 2500 years. • We should be able to build brain-like systems; will they still be automata?

29. Thank you for synchronizing your neurons! Google: W. Duch => Papers, Talks