Agency and Free Will

Chapter 9: Agency and free will

"We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ideal. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances. If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision of at all. We suddenly find that we have got up." (James 1890, ii: 524)
":.. the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in in things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that this is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. This appearance, which makes life and history tingle with such a tragic zest, may not be an illusion." ((James 1890, i:453)
Overview of the free-will problem: three theses

Freedom: The will is free.
Determinism: Everything is causally necessitated by the laws of nature together with antecedent events.
Incompatibility: Freedom and determinism are incompatible.

Three views

Libertarianism: accepts 1 and 3, denies 2.
Hard determinism: accepts 2 and 3, denies 1.
Compatibilism (or "soft determinism"): accepts 1 and 2, denies 3

Discussion

allowing for chance

quantum theory says certain subatomic events are causally undetermined or random
change 2 to "everything in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity" (Democritus)

since choice chance
this doesn't seem to leave room for freedom either

libertarianism & absolute or categorical freedom

free acts must be uncaused (else they're not optional but causally necessitated)

to have acted freely if the agent must have been able to have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances.

compatibilism & hypothetical freedom

uncaused events would be random occurrences ... they'd be due to chance not choice
free acts, then, are distinguished

not by being uncaused
but rather by being caused in the right way -- by the beliefs and desires of the agent
to say an act or choice was free is to say that the agent could have done otherwise if their beliefs & desires had been different.

The Anatomy of Volition

When we carry out any voluntary act, many areas of the brain, especially the frontal lobes, are involved (Spence and Firth, 1999).
In outline,

prefrontal regions are thought to initiate motor acts.
These send connections to premotor regions, which program the actions,

and they in turn project to the primary motor cortices and hence to motor output.

Broca's area produces the motor output for speech and, in most right-handed people, is in the left inferior frontal gyrus.

Some of this is known from the effects of brain damage

Phineas Gage ... the rail worker 1848

had a tamping iron blown through his prefrontal cortex
left him "no longer able to behave responsibly (Damasio, 1994)." (SB: 114)

Damage to the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex

can lead to a lack of spontaneous activity
and stereotypic actions

Lesions in the prefrontal region and corpus collosum

"leads to "'alien hand', in which patients say that their hand is out of control"

"damage to only the corpus collosum can produce 'anarchic hand' syndrome in which the patient's two hands struggle to produce opposite effects" (126)

Evidence from brain probes and images

show "a difference in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)" (126)
show "an increase in activity in the DLPFC when actions [are] being selected and initiated." (126)
Spence and Firth (1999) conclude that ... the DLPFC seems to be uniquely associated with the subjective experience of deciding when and how to act. (126)

The Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action

Libet: "Unconscious initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action" (1985)

Background: voluntary motor actions are preceded by a reaction potential (RP) of (on average) .8 seconds

RP is "a slow negative shift in electric potential that can be recorded from electrodes on the scalp"

To test the common-sense hypothesis "that conscious intention or decision initiates the action" (127)

If so, then the conscious decision should precede the "start of the cerebral process" (127)

If the decision did not precede the cerebral onset, the common-sense hypothesis would be disconfirmed.

Test setup

time of movement (M) measured by electrodes attached to the muscles

onset of RP determined by averaging readings over 40 trials
time of willing (W): subjects watched a clock (in effect) whose one hand (actually a light) would go around once every 2.56 sec. Subjects would then report where on the clock the "hand" was when they first decided to flex their wrist.

Findings

RP: started 400-700 ms before M
W: started 200 ms before M

Diagram
Conclusion: "consciousness comes too late to be the cause of the action." (129)

Two possible conclusions

Consciousness has no causal role (as with epiphenomenalism or eliminativism) in producing action -- conscious control is an illusion

Libet rejects this as "less attractive than a theory that accepts or accommodates the phenomenal fact" (Libet 1999: 56)
Furthermore materialists who identify consciousness with "underlying" physical processes can allow consciousness to have causal physical causal powers without interaction

Consciousness has some other causal role than initiating action.

Libet's proposal: "conscious control can be exerted before the final motor outflow to select or control volitional outcome. The volitional process, initiated unconsciously, can either be consciously permitted to proceed to consummation in the motor act or be consciously 'vetoed': (Libet, 1985: 536-7)

subjects sometimes reported urges to act that they suppressed or aborted

these cases couldn't be measured due to the need to average to determine RPs for the original data

The Libet Debate

Main methodological criticisms

concerning the nature of the task ... especially the fact that the subject was only allowed to choose the timing of the act, not the act itself
concerning the timing of W

Subsequent replications of L's work addressed some of these complaints
Dennett's critique: the timing of W is vexed

It assumes that there's a place in the brain where my visual experience of the clock and my inner experience of deciding come together
there's no such place & we know the brain engages in post-dating and pre-dating to coordinate experiences
so the time-of-W data are worthless

Dennett's compatibilism: "free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought is was"

it isn't "an immaterial soul shooting arrows of decision into your brain" (SB: 132)
it is "an evolved capacity for weighing options and dealing with multiple choices" (SB: 132)

The Experience of Will

Evidence that behavior control can be exerted unconsciously: "we can be in control of actions without feeling that we are"

Faraday's (1853) debunking of table-turning seances

the dupes felt the table moving their hands and denied that their hands moved the table
Faraday's clever measurements & tests proved otherwise

Willliam Grey Walter's experiments with patients with electrodes implanted in their motor cortices

thought they were advancing the slides by pressing the button
actually it was the preparatory excitation of the motor cortices that were changing the slides

Evidence that the feeling we are in control can exist without our being so

magicians tricks -- pick a card, any card
Wegner's ouija board experiments

computer mouse stopping on screen images
the other controller was a stooge -- she was controlling the mouse
she stops on various images at varied intervals after the subject hears the prompt

Daniel Wegner: conscious will is an illusion

we think about doing something
which somehow sets in motion causal mechanisms we know not of
which cause the motion involved in the act
since the thinking is the last thing I know of I mistakenly interpret that as an "act of will" initiating the act
"The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one's thought as the cause of the act." (Wegner & Wheatley, 1999: 480)

[embedding a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy]

"Believing that our conscious experiences cause our actions is an error based on the illusory experience of will."

Guy Claxton (a spiritualist)

Nice examples of how we "fudge the data" or engage in ad hoc reasoning to maintain the illusion

"I meant to keep my cool, but I just couldn't."
"I decided to go home early, but here I am ordering at 'last call'."
"I changed my mind."

"It makes better sense to see the relation between thought and action as a hit-and-miss attempt at prediction rather than control." (SB: 137)