On 3/9/07, Doyle Saylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Greetings Economists,
On Mar 8, 2007, at 8:50 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Marx and Marxists have often thought that religion is basically either
> a ruling-class ideology to facilitate exploitation or a sigh of the
> oppressed substituting heaven for an earthly kingdom or both. There
> are both aspects in religion, and those aspects may disappear if
> exploitation and oppression can be done away with (which doesn't seem
> possible any time soon), but in all likelihood religion predates the
> rise of class society and will probably outlive it, how to face death
> -- one's own or others' -- being one of the questions that religion
> may be better equipped to address than science.
Doyle;
I think religion is more threatened than ever by not so much the
Marxist thought as by erosion of the boundary between mind and body.
It is the dominant liberal accounts of human agency, not religion and
historical materialism, that are most at odds with natural science's
explanations of it.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/science/02free.html>
January 2, 2007
Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Correction Appended
I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was
one of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged
into a vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward
the edge of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my father's heart
attack danced before my glazed eyes. My wife, Nancy, had a resigned
look on her face.
The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt,
though I often cover my tracks by offering to split my dessert with
the table. O.K., I can imagine what you're thinking. There but for the
grace of God.
Having just lived through another New Year's Eve, many of you have
just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming
months and years. After all, we're free humans, not slaves, robots or
animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again.
As William James wrote in 1890, the whole "sting and excitement" of
life comes from "our sense that in it things are really being decided
from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off
of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago." Get over it, Dr.
James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of
experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a
monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in
progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.
As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have
joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free
will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in
the first place.
"Is it an illusion? That's the question," said Michael Silberstein, a
science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Another
question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan
the culture wars.
"If people freak at evolution, etc.," he wrote in an e-mail message,
"how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell
them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is
that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?"
Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts
University who has written extensively about free will, said that
"when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are
looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into
nihilism and despair."
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological
Disorders and Stroke, said, "Free will does exist, but it's a
perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free
will. They have the sense they are free.
"The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don't have it," he said.
That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that "a human can very
well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants."
Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. "This knowledge
of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor
and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting
and judging individuals," he said.
How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you
mean by free will. The traditional definition is called "libertarian"
or "deep" free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose
actions are not predetermined. This school of thought says in effect
that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the
universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.
At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is
unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are
responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.
"That strikes many people as incoherent," said Dr. Silberstein, who
noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned
out to be either deterministic or random. "Both are bad news for free
will," he said. So if human actions can't be caused and aren't random,
he said, "It must be — what — some weird magical power?"
People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.
But whatever that power is — call it soul or the spirit — those people
have to explain how it could stand independent of the physical
universe and yet reach from the immaterial world and meddle in our
own, jiggling brain cells that lead us to say the words "molten
chocolate."
A vote in favor of free will comes from some physicists, who say it is
a prerequisite for inventing theories and planning experiments.
That is especially true when it comes to quantum mechanics, the
strange paradoxical theory that ascribes a microscopic randomness to
the foundation of reality. Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the
University of Vienna, said recently that quantum randomness was "not a
proof, just a hint, telling us we have free will."
Is there any evidence beyond our own intuitions and introspections
that humans work that way?
Two Tips of the Iceberg
In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of
California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an
electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions,
like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time
on a clock.
Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions
occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to
make them.
The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and
then decision, rather than the other way around.
In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the
unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an
illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had
already done.
Dr. Libet's results have been reproduced again and again over the
years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be
easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions.
Patients with tics or certain diseases, like chorea, cannot say
whether their movements are voluntary or involuntary, Dr. Hallett
said.
In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they
are responding to stimuli they couldn't have seen in time to respond
to, or into taking credit or blame for things they couldn't have done.
Take, for example, the "voodoo experiment" by Dan Wegner, a
psychologist at Harvard, and Emily Pronin of Princeton. In the
experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor.
One person, the subject, puts a curse on the other by sticking pins
into a doll. The second person, however, is in on the experiment, and
by prior arrangement with the doctors, acts either obnoxious, so that
the pin-sticker dislikes him, or nice.
After a while, the ostensible victim complains of a headache. In cases
in which he or she was unlikable, the subject tended to claim
responsibility for causing the headache, an example of the "magical
thinking" that makes baseball fans put on their rally caps.
"We made it happen in a lab," Dr. Wegner said.
Is a similar sort of magical thinking responsible for the experience
of free will?
"We see two tips of the iceberg, the thought and the action," Dr.
Wegner said, "and we draw a connection."
But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the
conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking
can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot.
Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they
simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a
grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.
Naturally, almost everyone has a slant on such experiments and whether
or not the word "illusion" should be used in describing free will. Dr.
Libet said his results left room for a limited version of free will in
the form of a veto power over what we sense ourselves doing. In
effect, the unconscious brain proposes and the mind disposes.
In a 1999 essay, he wrote that although this might not seem like much,
it was enough to satisfy ethical standards. "Most of the Ten
Commandments are 'do not' orders," he wrote.
But that might seem a pinched and diminished form of free will.
Good Intentions
Dr. Dennett, the Tufts professor, is one of many who have tried to
redefine free will in a way that involves no escape from the
materialist world while still offering enough autonomy for moral
responsibility, which seems to be what everyone cares about.
The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will
divorced from causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr.
Dennett says reflecting an outdated dualistic view of the world.
Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality
and the material world that frees us. Evolution, history and culture,
he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the
unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the
future. Free will and determinism can co-exist.
"All the varieties of free will worth having, we have," Dr. Dennett said.
"We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes," he
said. "We have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures."
In this regard, causality is not our enemy but our friend, giving us
the ability to look ahead and plan. "That's what makes us moral
agents," Dr. Dennett said. "You don't need a miracle to have
responsibility."
Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such
"freedom." Their arguments partly turn on the extent to which
collections of things, whether electrons or people, can transcend
their origins and produce novel phenomena.
These so-called emergent phenomena, like brains and stock markets, or
the idea of democracy, grow naturally in accordance with the laws of
physics, so the story goes. But once they are here, they play by new
rules, and can even act on their constituents, as when an artist
envisions a teapot and then sculpts it — a concept sometimes known as
"downward causation." A knowledge of quarks is no help in predicting
hurricanes — it's physics all the way down. But does the same apply to
the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because
we can't solve the equations or because something fundamentally new
happens when we increase numbers and levels of complexity?
Opinions vary about whether it will ultimately prove to be physics all
the way down, total independence from physics, or some shade in
between, and thus how free we are. Dr. Silberstein, the Elizabethtown
College professor, said, "There's nothing in fundamental physics by
itself that tells us we can't have such emergent properties when we
get to different levels of complexities."
He waxed poetically as he imagined how the universe would evolve, with
more and more complicated forms emerging from primordial quantum muck
as from an elaborate computer game, in accordance with a few simple
rules: "If you understand, you ought to be awestruck, you ought to be
bowled over."
George R. F. Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, said
that freedom could emerge from this framework as well. "A nuclear
bomb, for example, proceeds to detonate according to the laws of
nuclear physics," he explained in an e-mail message. "Whether it does
indeed detonate is determined by political and ethical considerations,
which are of a completely different order."
I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not
liberating. But I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic
perpetual motion machine. Free wills, ideas, phenomena created by
physics but not accountable to it. Do they offer a release from the
chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very intricate
weave of the links? And so I sought clarity from mathematicians and
computer scientists. According to deep mathematical principles, they
say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own
behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will.
If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop
computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on
quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer's
operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some
deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, "If I ask how long
will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system
will say 'I don't know, wait and see, and I'll make decisions and let
you know.' "
Why can't computers say what they're going to do? In 1930, the
Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that in any formal system of
logic, which includes mathematics and a kind of idealized computer
called a Turing machine, there are statements that cannot be proven
either true or false. Among them are self-referential statements like
the famous paradox stated by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who
said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the truth, then, as
a Cretan, he is lying.
One implication is that no system can contain a complete
representation of itself, or as Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard
College of Columbia University and author of the 2006 novel about
Gödel, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines," said: "Gödel says you
can't program intelligence as complex as yourself. But you can let it
evolve. A complex machine would still suffer from the illusion of free
will."
Another implication is there is no algorithm, or recipe for
computation, to determine when or if any given computer program will
finish some calculation. The only way to find out is to set it
computing and see what happens. Any way to find out would be
tantamount to doing the calculation itself.
"There are no shortcuts in computation," Dr. Lloyd said.
That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more
unpredictable you are, at least to yourself, Dr. Lloyd said. Even if
your wife knows you will order the chile rellenos, you have to live
your life to find out.
To him that sounds like free will of a sort, for machines as well as
for us. Our actions are determined, but so what? We still don't know
what they will be until the waiter brings the tray.
That works for me, because I am comfortable with so-called physicalist
reasoning, and I'm always happy to leverage concepts of higher
mathematics to cut through philosophical knots.
The Magician's Spell
So what about Hitler?
The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some
worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal
responsibility. According to those who believe that free will and
determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail
message, it would mean that "people are no more responsible for their
actions than asteroids or planets." Anything would go.
Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: "We worry that explaining evil condones
it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn't it be nice
to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to
power?"
He added, "A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather
than paying them back for what they've done might be a good thing."
Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion
would have little effect on people's lives or on their feelings of
self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.
"It's an illusion, but it's a very persistent illusion; it keeps
coming back," he said, comparing it to a magician's trick that has
been seen again and again. "Even though you know it's a trick, you get
fooled every time. The feelings just don't go away."
In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the
writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the
Paris Review, "The greatest gift which humanity has received is free
choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But
the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially
worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living."
I could skip the chocolate cake, I really could, but why bother? Waiter!
Correction: January 4, 2007
An article in Science Times on Tuesday about the debate over free will
misstated the location of Elizabethtown College, where Michael
Silberstein, who commented on free will and popular culture, is a
science philosopher. It is in Pennsylvania, not Maryland.
--
Yoshie
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