Faith & Science: How you emerge from your brain

Unfortunately, Sternberg misses his own point, and falls prey to the very line of thinking that he criticises. He offers "reflective introspection" as an alternative for addressing moral problems instead of what he calls the algorithmic approach, in which rules are computed to yield firm answers in decision-making situations.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Staff | Book Review | My Brain Made Me Do It
Source & Credit: New Scientist | 26 March 2010
By Holly Anderson, contributor | New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/03/how-you-emerge-from-your-brain.php

IT IS common to feel uncomfortable when reading about new neuroscience techniques that seem to encroach on the sacrosanct realm of our hidden inner lives. And it is understandable to feel even more uncomfortable about the notion that our actions are dictated by processes in our brains, calling into question a place for moral responsibility. This discomfort pervades Eliezer Sternberg's new book.


In My Brain Made Me Do It, Sternberg dips into philosophy, psychology and neuroscience research as he considers the various evidence that suggests we lack free will and thus a foundation for moral responsibility. Strange cases from psychology and neuroscience pose problems for a naive view of human agency. What if your hand started grabbing things of its own accord? Or if you were compelled to use every tool you found in front of you?

Keep some grains of salt handy as you are reading. The tone Sternberg takes to the possibility of widespread acceptance of neurobiological determinism is of the sky-is-falling variety. With over 40,000 practising neuroscientists, it isn't hard to find juicy quotes dismissing the existence of free will, but it is inaccurate to characterise this as the general attitude of the field.

Sternberg addresses two related problems throughout the book. The first concerns the wide range of influences on our actions that we are unaware of at any given moment. If an action I take is triggered by unconscious sensory input, am I employing free will?

The second, known as the "causal exclusion problem" in philosophy, is the one that really disturbs Sternberg. You, in the grand sense of "you" - your thoughts, emotions, volition and moral reasoning - depend on neuronal processing in your brain. If the firings of any neuron are enough to cause the next neuron to fire, your brain runs all on its own. There is no extra place in which you, as a higher-level, conscious being, can direct proceedings and assert free will. This clockwork determinism undermines any causal role we could have in our own actions - and, by implication, our responsibility for those actions.

So what is Sternberg's answer to the problem of free will? Emergence. This concept can be roughly summed up as "the whole is more than the sum of the parts". Just as temperature emerges from a collection of molecules even though it does not exist at the level of individual molecules, free will, Sternberg argues, emerges from otherwise deterministic processes at the level of neurons.

Philosophers and scientists have been debating the merits of emergence in solving the free will problem since the 1920s. Rather than providing an account of exactly how free will could emerge from deterministic processes, Sternberg offers an analogy with the theory of continental drift. When it was first proposed, scientists dismissed it because it lacked a mechanism to account for how such massive objects could move over huge distances. Sternberg's moral is that even though we don't know how free will emerges, we will some day, so we shouldn't throw moral responsibility out the window just yet.

Unfortunately, Sternberg misses his own point, and falls prey to the very line of thinking that he criticises. He offers "reflective introspection" as an alternative for addressing moral problems instead of what he calls the algorithmic approach, in which rules are computed to yield firm answers in decision-making situations.

But at the end of the day, whether we reason with rules or by transcending rules, we still can't escape the fact that we reason using our brains. The problem comes in thinking that we are somehow sufficiently separate from our brains that those brains can tell us what to do or vice versa. Your brain, for better or for worse, is just the mechanism for being you.

Holly Andersen is a philosopher of science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada


Read the original post here: How you emerge from your brain


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The following immediate comments on the story deserves recognition:

olographic representational emergentism  on March 26, 2010 12:45 PM

I'm sorry to say but this article is badly written.
"This clockwork determinism undermines any causal role we could have in our own actions" - it does not undermine any causal role of the self, exactly because the self emerges from brain activity. We are the conscious brain. To say that "we" are not responsible for our behaviour because our brain is doesn't make sense. There is no "us", separate from the brain.

"Unfortunately, Sternberg misses his own point, and falls prey to the very line of thinking that he criticises. He offers "reflective introspection" as an alternative for addressing moral problems instead of what he calls the algorithmic approach, in which rules are computed to yield firm answers in decision-making situations."

This is just an unfair commentary and only shows how the book was misunderstood. The point here is that by "reflective introspection" the brain gets more information about its own inner working, information that is fed back into the system, which leads to self-knowledge, understanding, and ultimately to the understanding of others. One who understands others is not only less likely to judge them, but also more likely to behave morally than one who just uses utilitarian calculus to figure out what would be the right thing to do.

Daniel on March 26, 2010 12:59 PM

The dualism is the problem.
For all I care, my brain is me, I am it. The question becomes, do I work in a completely deterministic fashion, or is there some non-deterministic, non-causal effects working in there that allow e.g. a signal from a neuron to "choose" between different branches of the network. It doesn't have to happen all the time, just as long as it happens sometimes.

If there isn't, then free will is not. If there is, then free will is.

The objection against this sort of free will is, that it's not you that is choosing but some weird random quantum effect akin to tossing a coin - but that line of reasoning again falls victim to the artifical mind-body dualism. The coin that is being tossed is still You, so in effect it is you that makes the choise even though it might be random. It's your properties that determine whereabout the decision lands and what are the possible outcomes, so it is your choise.

I imagine that the brain works by harnessing this chaotic random noise for new patterns and ideas, and then uses more rigid deterministic networks to make sense of them. Kinda like a musician jamming with a guitar and playing random notes until he stumbles across nice progressions or rythms, and then combines them into a song.

Rob on March 26, 2010 1:10 PM

The question I've often asked myself isn't "How did I emerge from my brain", rather "Why did I emerge from this brain"

With something in the region of 6 billion mushy pink brain things on this planet, why was it I became aware of being this particular one? That's not to say there's anything special about me as a person/mushy-pink-brain-thing, but rather more a ponderment about the mechanism by which I/my brain became aware of being me/my brain and why I/my brain didn't end up becoming me/someone else's brain.

These sorts of arguments tend to go round and round in circles anyway. Better just to accept that it's all academic and go out enjoy the sunshine. (Whether your brain makes you do it or not)

Catch-42 on March 26, 2010 1:48 PM

At what point in the last 13.7 billion years did Eliezer Sternberg decide to become Eliezer Sternberg and not say Dr Radovan Karadzic of Kosovo fame ?
Will we have to wait another 13.7 billion years to find out ?
Never has so much been said about so little to so many.

Richard on March 26, 2010 2:53 PM

This article presupposes that that we have an answer to the famous "mind/body" problem. Namely that the mind exists purely as a function of the body (brain). This assumption is prevalent throughout science, and for good scientific reasons, but a philosopher must surely recognise the possiblilty that reductionist arguments do not necessarily apply to the human mind. The brain may be merely a conduit through which the (non-physical?) mind experiences and influences the world.

jacques on March 26, 2010 3:00 PM

@rob the usual answer for your question is the anthropic principle. Assuming "you" have to be linked to a single brain, whichever one "you" are linked to will be asking that question. That's not a brilliant explanation but if you search for it you can find a description by someone much more intelligent than me.

On determinism vs free will, the brain works on the borders of chaos, so the element of free will causing a large change could conceivably be so small in terms of immediate effect that it could be undetectable.

jacques on March 26, 2010 3:01 PM

@rob the usual answer for your question is the anthropic principle. Assuming "you" have to be linked to a single brain, whichever one "you" are linked to will be asking that question. That's not a brilliant explanation but if you search for it you can find a description by someone much more intelligent than me.

On determinism vs free will, the brain works on the borders of chaos, so the element of free will causing a large change could conceivably be so small in terms of immediate effect that it could be undetectable.