[Avodah] Free Will vs. Physics

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, September 24, 2008 4:33 pm, Yitzhak Grossman wrote:
: On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:20:10 EDT T613K at aol.com wrote:
:> I believe that most of the decisions we make are  actually forced
:> decisions and not the product of free will. Hakol b'yedei Shomayim chutz
:> miyiras Shomayim.

: Rambam (Shemonah Perakim 8) explains that statement to mean that *all*
: human actions are within the scope of man's will, and what Hazal meant
: by hakol bidei shamayim are those things that are not within man's
: control, such as his physical stature and the climate.

C.f.: Hakol biydei Shamayim chutz mitzinim upachim

Tosafos there (Kesuvos 30a) say that "hakol" has different meanings in
each. One is discussing human nature, which all flows from what G-d gave
us and subjects us to, as shaped by our decisions WRT yir'as Shamayim. The
other is discussing what happens to a person, and again saying that
while Hashem sets everything up, we can avert consequences by our choices.

It is very much (somewhat made more obvious in the way I worded my summary
of the Tosafos' position, so you should open Kesuvos and look for yourself
-- it's too long not to summarize) like my earlier post about mice in
mazes, who can only make choices where they exist and only the among
the options they are handed.

RET is right that too much of the topic is over our heads. But when has
that ever stopped us before?

The first problem is just defining Free Will. What is something that is
neither deterministic, reducing people to robots, and not random like
a set of dice? We're claiming some middle ground. RMKoppel proves that
there are things that are neither describable in algorithms nor random,
but what kind of such "middle ground" do we mean in this case? Can we
narrow it down enough to know what it is we're trying to prove?

RET also mentions "various experiments that ask questions about free
will." The only ones I know of are by Benjamin Libet. I first saw
the discussion in a blog called Conscious Entities (on the nature of
intelligence, is AI possible, etc...), but Wikipedia's description
is shorter:

> Researchers carrying out Libet's procedure would ask each participant to
> sit at a desk in front of the oscilloscope timer. They would affix the
> EEG electrodes to the participant's scalp, and would then instruct the
> subject to carry out some small, simple motor activity, such as pressing
> a button, or flexing a finger or wrist, within a certain time frame. No
> limits were placed on the number of times the subject could perform the
> action within this period.

> During the experiment, the subject would be asked to note the position
> of the dot on the oscilloscope timer when "he/she was first aware of the
> wish or urge to act" (control tests with Libet's equipment demonstrated
> a comfortable margin of error of only -- 50 milliseconds). Pressing
> the button also recorded the position of the dot on the oscillator,
> this time electronically. By comparing the marked time of the button's
> pushing and the subject's conscious decision to act, researchers were
> able to calculate the total time of the trial from the subject's initial
> volition through to the resultant action. On average, approximately two
> hundred milliseconds elapsed between the first appearance of conscious
> will to press the button and the act of pressing it. As of 2008, the
> upcoming outcome of a decision could be found in study of the brain
> activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 seconds before
> the subject was aware of their decision.[4]

> Researchers also analyzed EEG recordings for each trial with respect to
> the timing of the action. It was noted that brain activity involved in
> the initiation of the action, primarily centered in the secondary motor
> cortex, occurred, on average, approximately five hundred milliseconds
> before the trial ended with the pushing of the button. That is to say,
> researchers recorded mounting brain activity related to the resultant
> action as many as three hundred milliseconds before subjects reported
> the first awareness of conscious will to act. In other words, apparently
> conscious decisions to act were preceded by an unconscious buildup of
> electrical charge within the brain -- this buildup came to be called
> Bereitschaftspotential or readiness potential.

> Libet's experiments suggest unconscious processes in the brain are the
> true initiator of volitional acts, therefore, little room remains for
> the operations of free will. If the brain has already taken steps to
> initiate an action before we are aware of any desire to perform it,
> the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated.

> Libet finds room for free will in the interpretation of his results only
> in the form of 'the power of veto'...

IOW, that there is no free will, only free won't.

The blog <http://www.consciousentities.com/libet.htm> I saw this on
suggested other explanations:
> There are several avenues of attack against Libet's other conclusions,
> of course. Is the RP really a signal that a decision has been made? If I
> make a decision about my insurance policy, does an RP appear, or is it
> just wrist movements that cause RPs? The circumstances of both Libet's
> experiments and the earlier ones by Kornhuber and Deecke are rather
> strange: they require the subject to get into a frame of mind where they
> are ready to make a decision any moment. Might not the RP merely signal
> a quickening of attention, rather than a moment of decision?

> Libet believes that by timing the moment of awareness through his
> oscilloscope arrangement, he eliminated the need for the subject to spend
> any time on reporting the moment of awareness: but isn't it possible that
> we need a certain amount of time just in order to report the awareness
> to ourselves? Awareness of the decision you have made is one thing,
> being aware of that awareness is another - which might well be thought
> to require some further time to develop.

> Personally I also doubt whether it is necessary to reduce free will to a
> veto system - 'free won't' as it has been described. Libet often seems
> to take it for granted that every free act is preceded by a specific
> act of will: but that isn't really the case. Often the conscious mind
> sets a general plan, on which we then act more or less automatically. A
> tennis player has thought in general terms about how to play the next
> stroke long before the need for actual action: drivers have a kind of
> running rule in the back of their mind to the effect that if something
> suddenly appears in front of them, they hit the brake. Free will operates
> at this higher level, with all our actions being managed in detail by
> unconscious processes. I don't have to think about where I want to hit
> the ball at the very moment of decision in order to control my game
> of tennis any more than I have to think separately about each of the
> individual muscles I am implicitly proposing to contract.

So, then in April 17th (since I last checked Conscious Entities blog) he
reported "new research (published in a 'Brief Communication' in Nature
Neuroscience by Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze and
John-Dylan Haynes) goes beyond it. Whereas the delay between decision
and awareness detected by Libet lasted 500 milliseconds, the new
research seems to show that decisions can be predicted up to ten seconds
before the deciders are aware of having made up their minds."

Returning to the blog <http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=64>:
> The experimenters also ran a series of experiments where the subject
> chose left or right at a pre-determined time: this does not seem to
> have shortened the delays, but it showed up a difference between the
> activation in the frontopolar cortex and the precuneus: briefly, it
> looks as if the former peaks at the earliest stage, with the precuneus
> 'storing' the decision through more continuous activation.

> What is the significance of these new findings? The researchers suggest
> the results do three things: they show that the delay is not confined
> to areas which are closely associated with motor activity, but begins
> in 'higher' areas; they demonstrate clearly that the activity relates
> to identifiable decisions, not just general preparation; and they rule
> out one of the main lines of attack on Libet's findings, namely that the
> small delay observed is a result of mistiming, error, or misunderstanding
> of the chronology. That seems correct -- a variety of arguments of
> differing degrees of subtlety have been launched against the timings
> of Libet's original work. Although Libet himself was scrupulous about
> demonstrating solid reasons for his conclusions, it always seemed that a
> delay of a few hundred milliseconds might perhaps be attributable to some
> sort of error in the book-keeping, especially since timing a decision
> is obviously a tricky business. A delay of ten seconds is altogether
> harder to explain away.

> However, it seems to me that while the new results close off one line
> of attack, they reinforce another -- the claim that these experiments
> do not represent normal decision making. We do not typically make random
> decisions at a random moment of our choosing, and it can therefore fairly
> be argued that the research has narrower implications than might appear,
> or even that they are merely a strange by-product of the peculiar mental
> processes the subjects were asked to undertake. While the delay was
> restricted to half a second, it was intuitively believable that all
> our normal decisions were subject to a similar time-lag -- surprising,
> but believable. A delay of ten seconds in normal conscious thought is
> not credible at all; it's easy to think of cases where an unexpected
> contingency arises and we act on it thoughtfully and consciously within
> much shorter periods than that.

> The researchers might well bite the bullet so far as that goes,
> accepting that their results show only that the delay can be as long
> as ten seconds, not that it invariably is. Libet himself, had he lived
> to see these results might perhaps have been tempted to elaborate his
> idea of 'free won't' -- that while decisions build up in our brains for
> a period before we are aware of them, the conscious mind retains a kind
> of veto at the last moment.

> What would be best of all, of course, is further research into decisions
> made in more real-life circumstances, though devising a way in which
> decisions can be identified and timed accurately in such circumstances
> is something of a challenge.

> In the meantime, is this another blow to the idea of free will
> generally? The research will certainly hearten hard determinists,
> but personally I remain a compatibilist. I think making a decision and
> becoming aware of having made that decision are two different things,
> and I have no deep problem with the idea that they may occur at different
> times. The delay between decision and awareness does not mean the decision
> wasn't ours, any more than the short delay before we hear our own voice
> means we didn't intend what we said. Others, I know, will feel that this
> relegates consciousness to the status of an epiphenomenon.

SheTir'u baTov!
-micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "Man wants to achieve greatness overnight, micha at aishdas.org        and he wants to sleep well that night too." http://www.aishdas.org     - Rav Yosef Yozel Horwitz, Alter of
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