Notes on Time and Choice: Daniel Dennett, Benjamin Libet, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler, and Advaita

Home______Notes on Time & Choice: Daniel Dennett, Benjamin Libet, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler, & Advaita
Everything humanity thinks and believes about itself is predicated upon two concepts. One is free will; the other is self. Look wherever you will, whatever society you find, and all cultures contain a belief in some kind of will, and self. Civilizations, economies, legal systems, art, religion, all arise from them. But what if they are illusory? Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) said that life is a dream. Nobody wants to believe that; such belief seems to threaten entire human edifices, our history and struggle to arrive at these Twenty First Century shores.

Still, both concepts are based more on belief than on indisputable evidence. They are similar to St. Augustine's description of time, of which he said, " When you don't ask, I know; when you ask, I know not." Look within, show me your self. No, not that. That is only a name, an occupation, a physical description, a life history, or a relationship to others. Your self. Where is it? You see my point.

Declarations about choice are time-bound, whether they be fatalist, determinist, or free volitional.

Calm, sustained introspection reveals that "choice" arises after the fact. This occurs for jnanis, enlightened Hindu masters, as taught by advaita. Benjamin Libet's experiments also demonstrate as much. An event, either thought or muscle response, precedes volitional sense. The analytical approach of advaita espouses that through such introspection freedom eventually occurs. The self disappears, seen for an illusion, a shackle. Nobody chooses because nobody exists to choose. Does choice get done? Ramana Maharshi, a revered modern master, dismissed the question with this remark: "There is neither freedom nor destiny. This is the final truth." He meant that any analysis, any attempt to explain, plunges the sage back into objects of consciousness, things perceived, when actually only the Perceiver is.

The realization is liberating, but is the explanation deceptive?

Daniel Dennett would argue that it is deceptive. Essentially, he says that we must develop a new paradigm about volition. Our ways of thinking are faulty. In his book Freedom Evolves, he considers free will as morally important, and of course, he is right. Our entire legal system is predicated upon the belief that people can avoid wrong doing. He holds that free will does exist but not in the way people normally think about it. This may seem contradictory because he also says that conscious will is an illusion. He means that it does not exist in the traditional sense. We have no conscious voluntary volition. Nothing we choose is decided upon consciously. Yet, we remain morally responsible. How is this possible? How can we be morally responsible if free will is not conscious?

Dennett would say, Not so fast. The problem here is with words. We accept that an atom can be split, although we cannot sense it as an event. Still, the concept serves thinking about quantum events. We cannot experience free will, but we can gain understanding if we accept that words have limits and we think about them in new ways. They can yield different meanings. Like many current thinkers and researchers, he acknowledges that the old view of free will is gone forever, but he asserts that another kind is available. We can still value free will. In order to survive, we can value life with an artificial heart rather than one that no longer pumps. What is this new heart, this new free will?

Today, discussion of volition must account for Benjamin Libet's pioneering experiments. (This brief article cannot do them justice, but they are explained elsewhere in this blog.) To discuss free will, a key element of Benjamin Libet's experiments must first be explained.* Subjects were told by Libet to flick their wrists whenever they chose to do so. When Libet's subjects indicated they had "chosen," they revealed a 300 millisecond lapse between the unconscious behavior trigger and the brain's sense of a "decision." This gap is termed the moral void, a time indicating the lag between the actual trigger and the awareness of choice. The conscious sense provided the illusion of control, of decision-making, but the "decision" had already been made. *(For a fuller explanation, see the references to Libet at the bottom of this article.)

Since they were first conducted in the early 1980s, Benjamin Libet's experiments have had researchers and thinkers debating the issue of free will, as on the face of it the experiments suggest that the sense of decision occurs after the action, not before it.

Dennett is one of the thinkers in the debates, and to explain his view of free will, he takes Libet's experiments as his starting point. The problem, he says, has to do with understanding of the self. We must develop new understandings for the word, self. Dennett illustrates self in relation to these locations in the brain: in the rear, at the vision center; in the middle at the classic Cartesian theater; in front at practical reasoning. He then offers three scenarios.

The sense of self sits in practical reasoning, awaiting the contents from the vision center. Perhaps visual content is late by the time it arrives. The self thus gets dated information.

The sense of self sits in the vision center, and also experiences, say, a 300 millisecond time delay.

The sense of self sits at the classic command headquarters, in the Cartesian theater, where all supposedly comes together and consciousness happens. Contents arrive at the same time, but one message, the decision to flick the wrist, left 300 milliseconds ago, while another, the readiness potential, or planning stage, left 550 milliseconds ago. Even though they happened differently, they are sensed as happening simultaneously.

Dennett observes that each of these scenarios prescribes a locus for the self, but what if the self doesn't preside in a single place? One explanation he offers is that the self could have been at practical reasoning, the vision center, and the command headquarters--at all of them. The self simply misjudged the clock when reporting the moment of decision. Why? Because the self had to return to command HQ to pick up the new information, and by that time the clock hand had moved past the point of actual decision. This is one explanation. He offers various hypotheses, but his essential point is that the self must be distributed by space and time within the brain.

The self, he maintains, is not a point within the neural loop, but is the loop. That is how it exists within space. But it must also be spread in time. It cannot be measured in instants. Dennett construes the self as a decisional entity presiding over longer durations.

Dennett debunks Descartes' self, the self of I think, therefore I am fame. For Dennett, we do not exist as a self, a little man or woman, inside the mind who pulls levers and pushes switches in the conduct of our daily affairs. Most of what we do is unconscious and automated. That is why he says the old view of free will is dead. He instead argues that we should not discard volition, but should see it in a new light, as he tries to explain. His new free will is neither centralized nor immediate in its volition. In this, he is similar to Francisco Varela's Emergent Self. * ( See Dennett in Shakey, Beavers, & Cartesian Theater, 12 February 2004, & Cartesian Anxiety: Francisco Varela: The Emergent Self & Its Implications for Eastern No-self, 6 January 2004.)

Think about sports in this regard. Nobody has time to make decisions. Inside a tennis player, nobody pulls levers, nor pushes any buttons. The player does not decide how to return a serve. He acts as a result of pre-conditioning. His intention is prepared by mind-set and a plan to defeat the opponent. Attention always allows response faster than any effort at decision. With attention, intention can advantageously occur. Without attention, the best of intentions may go astray.

My comments on Dennett: He has tricked self out in new clothes, but he offers a different concept, not any pioneering new theory, or further evidence. Nothing is new here--just the usual clever, ingenious Dennett. Although I don't buy his concept, I also understand his concern for the sense of moral responsibility. He regards people as self-monitoring, which provides a feedback loop for future behavior.

Somewhere in his discussions, he speaks of Dumbo The Flying Elephant, who cannot fly until crows give Dumbo a "magic" feather. Holding the feather in his trunk, the little elephant believes that he can and with it he does fly. In Dennett's book, Freedom Evolves, the author offers our feedback loops a new feather, a different understanding of self. Still, it remains a feather. Would Dennett deny the fact? I don't think so, but he would insist that people are enabled by understanding its function and believing in its potential. Feedback loops reinforce belief systems. He realizes that belief systems have powerful effects. They condition both individuals and entire societies. For a discussion of this, see My comments, in the article The Illusion of Free Will: Physicist Amit Goswami, Sage Ramesh Balsekar, & Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, 28 December 2003.

Dennett premises his argument on cause and effect and this assumption is time-bound. From the point of view of advaita, however, cause and effect, time itself, may be regarded as illusory. (This is indeed how advaita holds causality in its other teachings, many of which derive not from dogma but from empirical introspection.)

Quantum consciousness. Does the issue of self and choice involve a form of wave function collapse in which a state becomes determinate in accordance with the observer? * That is, does the reported time sequence (choice after the fact) fall into place only when observed? (This would explain why advaita posits non-causality on the one hand and causality on the other. One is apprehended in "higher" consciousness while the other is seen in a normal state.) * (See Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January below.)

Of Roger Penrose, Bernard Baars says that " The really daring idea in contemporary science is that consciousness may be understandable without miracles, just as Darwin's revolutionary idea was that biological variation could be understood as a purely natural phenomenon. We are beginning to see human conscious experience as a major biological adaptation, with multiple functions. It seems as if a conscious event becomes available throughout the brain to the neural mechanisms of memory, skill control, decision-makings, anomaly detection, and the like, allowing us to match our experiences with related memories, use them as a cue for skilled actions or decisions, and detect anomalies in them. By comparison, unconscious events seem to be relatively isolated. Thus consciousness is not just any kind of knowledge: It is knowledge that is widely distributed, that triggers off widespread unconscious processing, has multiple integrative and coordinating functions, aids in decision-making, problem-solving and action control, and provides information to a self-system." (Bernard J. Baars, "Can Physics Provide a Theory of Consciousness?: A Review of Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose," in Psyche: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research of Consciousness, May 1995)

Baars refers to Penrose's efforts to find a consciousness counterpart to wave function collapse in physics, the central modern mystery, and the one that has caused "new-agers" to invoke Eastern mysticism as an explanation, although in some ways apples are being compared to oranges.

The problem lies with observations that cause wave function collapse. The observation itself seems to cause the collapse. By the act of perceiving, the observer changes that which is observed. In double slit experiments, somehow waves become particles in specific places, despite abstract probability that they should be distributed across a target. Physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose has argued that wave-function collapse within brain microtubules alters consciousness so that we observe events at the quantum level that we can't explain. Microtubules are tiny enough to fit at the quantum level while neurons belong at the level of classical physics. Within neurons, cytoskeletons form the structures that are the "glue" for cells. Inside them are microtubules, only 25 nanometers in diameter, which control synapse function. This suggests that our time-bound perception distorts whatever the case might be.

The brain does not seem to be wholly alienated from quanta. Evidence indicates that it is capable of consciousness at the quantum level. Adjusted to darkness, an eye can detect a photon. These single photons, though, do not involve wave function collapse.

The full article can be found at Borderland: The Last Frontier of Science, 23 January 2004.

For quantum observations, John A. Wheeler proposed a delayed choice experiment with profound implications. Assume a galaxy many light years away with light emitted billions of years ago. In brief, it implies that as we observe the light we alter its path. The paradox is that our observation changes the path of light that billions of years ago had already reached the point of our observation. How can the light have been emitted before observation, if the observer can alter what happened before it was observed? At the quantum level, the experiment has yielded results largely as Wheeler expected them.

A detailed article is at John Archibald Wheeler, Delayed Choice, & Time, 11 January 2004.

We are indeed time-bound, and time appears to be necessary for the way we apprehend "reality." All theories of volition include time, cause and effect, in their explanations as this is how the classical world is experienced. But is it a final truth to say one thing follows another? Or is it descriptive of a perception mechanism? (See 20 November on Peter Lynds and time.) Julian Barbour: "Most physicists have a deeply rooted notion of causality: explanations for the present must be sought in the past. . . This instinctive approach will be flawed if the very concept of the past is suspect." (The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics) For more of Barbour on time, see Déjà Vu & Physicist Julian Barbour, 13 January 2004.

For Articles on Libet see Benjamin Libet & Free Won't, 15 March 2004, and 28 December 2003, Balsekar, Goswami, Libet as well as Looking For Self: Yogi Berra, Forks in The Road, & Free Will, 8 November 2003.

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Descartes' Error: Antonio Damasio, and Decision-Making

Descartes' Error:  Antonio Damasio, Somatic Markers, As-If Loops, and Moral Decision-Making

In my 12 March 2004 article, Evolutionary Psychology and Moral Dilemmas, 12 March 2004 I discussed the relationship of morality to emotions. I presented evidence of evolutionary psychology and brain research, which suggest that morality is often based on what feels good rather than on what is right. Moral judgments tend to be emotional rather than rational. I cited Eighteenth Century Scotsman, David Hume, who said people call an act good if it makes them feel good, not necessarily because it is rationally good. In that article I explained the findings with Magnetic Resonance Imaging of brains, which indicate that people turn away from difficult moral issues, and turn to moral choices that they are emotionally hard wired to handle. For example, when surfing TV channels, they might see an African child, belly swollen, and starving from hunger. They change stations rather than consider the moral implications of the scene, which might arouse troubling emotions and guilt if dwelt upon.

The disjuncture between morality and emotions has been studied by Antonio Damasio, a University of Iowa neuroscientist. Taking a different approach, he has examined the relationship of emotion to reasoning. He puts the lie to Rene Descartes' famous axiom, I think therefore I am (Cogito ergo sum) and demonstrates that logic is not independent of emotion, contrary to how Descartes would have it. Instead, in Descartes' Error, The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio asserts that rational decision-making cannot be done without emotions.

He cites instances of people who have dysfunctional emotional response. These are people who experience a stroke, or brain tumor that somehow affects emotion-processing brain areas such as the amygdala, involved in emotional response. They speak well, and score high on logical problem-solving, but have trouble choosing. In Descartes' Error he describes a patient who tried to select one of two dates for the next appointment--"For the better part of a half-hour, the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates . . . . He was walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences."

Because such patients scored well on logical aptitude tests, only two conclusions were possible. Either the tests were wrong, or something more than pure logic is needed for rational decisions.

Enter: somatic markers. This is Damasio's term for bodily responses that arise unbidden. They emerge in forms such as tears, smiles, or a knot in the stomach because of fear. These markers help people make decisions. Without them, decisions are difficult, if not impossible.

Damasio developed the concept of as-if body loops, which he posits as helping speed up the processing of somatic markers. Because the body's response can be slow, these loops allow quicker action by residing largely in the frontal lobe or basal fore-brain. They provide associations based on past body experience. The brain responds to them as if it were receiving emotional signals from the body, and more quickly. As an example, as-if loops omit the need for hormones to find their way to muscle tissue. They also allow us to sample possible decisions. A man can "try out" the feeling of asking a woman for a date without actually doing it, and thereby summon, then weigh, somatic-marker associations with previous embarrassment or success.

Modern life has created problems for somatic markers. The brain registers events and emotions, but emotions take much longer, sometimes more than a second. Meaning, especially moral meaning, depends on both event perception and emotion.

Somatic markers provide it, as they involve past emotional experiences that serve to explain current cognition. The problem is that although parts of the brain can keep pace with observations, the emotional part cannot. As-if loops build up though emotional responses from the body, but if events happen too quickly then they disappear before emotions can be associated with them.

As an example, think again of TV images of the starving African child, or, consider a Marine wounded in combat in Iraq. The nature of modern media (and of general information overload) is such that, no matter how awful, images are so brief that we have no time to react emotionally to them. Damasio puts it this way: "The image of an event or a person can appear in a flash, but it takes seconds to make an emotional marking so it stands to reason that we're going to have fewer and fewer chances to have appropriate somatic markers. . . ."

This has important consequences for children, who risk becoming deprived of somatic markers that promote both moral intelligence and general decision-making. As Damasio puts it, this means that "we're going to have more and more events--particularly in our early years--that go by without emotional grounding. Which means that you could potentially become ethically less grounded. You'd be in an emotionally neutral world."

Some years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote a book, Future Shock, in which he described human societies as affected by increasingly rapid rates of technology change. Information and concepts have exploded so that many experts can no longer communicate with others in different areas of their field. As recently as two hundred years ago, some highly intelligent individuals took all knowledge as their province and set out to learn it, which they did. Today, achievement of this ambition is impossible.

Apart from knowledge, though, the real issue lies with humanity's ability to emotionally cope with the rate of change. Damasio fears that acceleration will produce people who have responses similar to the brain damaged individuals he has studied. Like those with brain damage, they would have diminished ability to make moral or ethical decisions. The only difference would be that such a situation involves no neurological dysfunction, but instead becomes part of a new normalcy. People would cognize the difference between good and evil, but without somatic markers or the as-if loops that depend on the markers. Only time will tell the moral distance between these people and current or past generations who munched popcorn while watching movies such as Natural Born Killers.

For another Mind Shadows post on Antonio Damasio, see Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio, 9 November 2005.

Free Will & The Sense Of Control

When you ride a bicycle, do you decide to balance? Or, so to speak, does balancing balance? When you drive a car, do you decide to drive, or does the act of driving take over? When you come to a fork in the road, do you decide to take the right fork as distinct from the left? Or do you find yourself having gone one direction rather than the other?

British psychologist Guy Claxton has a different view of self control. He has said that what we assume as self control is often a successful attempt at prediction. We say we did this or we meant to do that, and by this means we mask our inability at control. It is masked because we can infer from patterns of our behavior what we can expect to happen next. When things don't go our way, we don't question our lack of self control. Instead, we explain away the failure.

Claxton provides examples such as these: "I meant to keep my cool but I just couldn't. I'm supposed not to eat pork but I forgot. I'd decided on an early night but somehow here we are in Piccadilly Circus at four a.m. with silly hats and a bottle of wine. . . . If all else fails--and this is a truly audacious slight of hand--we can reinterpret our failure of control as an actual success! ' I changed my mind,' we say." *

Claxton maintains that consciousness is "a mechanism for constructing dubious stories whose purpose is to defend a superfluous and inaccurate sense of self." ** Claxton calls self control an illusion and he describes the effect on people of thinking about giving up the illusion. "The thing that doesn't happen, but of which people are quite reasonably scared, is that I get worse. A common elaboration of the belief that control is real . . . is that I can, and must control 'myself,' and that unless I do, base urges will spill out and I will run amok." He says this is an erroneous view. "So the dreaded mayhem does not happen. I do not take up wholsale rape and pillage and knocking down old ladies just for fun." *

Zen roshis attempt to get students to lose this sense of control. They know that it is rigorously defended, although unconsciously so. To nudge students over the edge and into discovery, roshis pose koans such as this one:

What was your face before your parents were born?

Today, consciousness research reveals various interpretations of the sense of self. This blog has addressed some of them. For other articles on the issue, see Free Will in the right hand sidebar. Among these are Daniel Dennett & Compatibilist Volition, 15 December 2003; some of my thoughts on the matter can be found at My Comments in the article The Illusion of Free Will, 28 December 2003. On the religious aspect, another article is located at Losing Control, 9 December 2003. Related issues are listed under Ethics & Morality in the sidebar. For partial insight into my perspective, see In Memory of Carlie Brucia, 7 February 2004.

* (Claxton, Guy, ed. Beyond Therapy: The Impact of Eastern Religions on Psychological Theory and Practice. London: Wisdom, 1996.)
** (-----------------------, Noises From The Darkroom. London: Aquarius, 1994.

Learned Helplessness

In Learned Optimism, cognitive psychologist Martin Seligman recounts an experience he had as a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania. When he first entered the lab of Richard Solomon, he met a fellow graduate student who explained that a behavioral study was in trouble.

"It's the dogs," Seligman was told. "The dogs won't do anything. Something's wrong with them. So nobody can do experiments."

Over the past several weeks the dogs had been subjected to Pavlovian conditioning, daily exposed to two kinds of stimulus, high-pitched tones and brief shocks, which "weren't too painful . . . [like] a minor jolt . . . on a dry winter day." The experimenters wanted the dogs to associate the neutral tone and the shock, so that when the animals later heard the tone, they would react as if shocked instead--they would register fear and avoidance.

That part of the experiment concluded, the dogs were taken to a "two-compartment shuttlebox," each compartment separated by a low wall, which the dogs could jump over. The intent was to see if the dogs would react to the tone by leaping the wall to get away from it. If they did, they would provide evidence that emotional learning transferred to different situations. The dogs needed only to jump the low barrier, easy for them to do.

The fellow graduate student told Seligman that they did not. Instead, they lay on the box floor, whimpering. They had given up. They had learned helplessness.

In the first stage of the experiment, they found they could do nothing to escape the shock, so that in the second stage, the box, they did nothing.

Later, in his own experiments with canines, Seligman let some dogs escape the shocks. Not surprisingly, when these animals were individually subjected to stage two, they leaped over the wall to avoid the jolt. They had learned control of their environment, unlike the other group of dogs, which, predictably, lay on the floor and whimpered.

Yes, the experiment was cruel, even with a slight shock akin to static electricity upon touching a door handle, but the findings also have far-reaching implications for individuals, society groups, and entire nations.

I refer to explanatory methods, the ways in which people interpret what has happened to them. Take, as an example, the classic distinctions between pessimist and optimist. If anything bad happens, the pessimist thinks it will last long. He accepts that the event extends into the nooks and crannies of his life to undermine everything. He thinks that somehow he is at fault. On the other hand, the optimist regards it as temporary setback or defeat. She regards it as having only local application, not universal. She may accept some of the blame, if that be the case, but also realizes that there is plenty of blame to go around.

These explanatory styles determine life courses--success, failure, happiness, misery--and one can see them in population segments.* For example, a segment may have been victimized and exploited and, just like the dog, they have learned helplessness, inability to rise above circumstances. One could extend this perspective to cultures with fatalism as a deep heritage-belief or with endemic poverty as a cause of fatalism. He then could note differences between them and societies with more emphasis on personal responsibility and choice. As a concept, learned helplessness would help yield greater understanding of such peoples. *(In contradistinction to the individual pessimist blaming himself, an accounting must be made for victim mentality in groups of people--the tendency to totally blame other groups, not one's own.)

The findings have been developed in terms of applications for individuals and as for extension to cultures and nations, to my knowledge that remains to be done, although existing evidence points the way.