Determined, page 62
*Which I’m viewing as synonymous with “hard determinism”; all sorts of philosophers, however, make fine distinctions between the two.
*Compatibilists make that clear. For example, one paper in the field is entitled “Free Will and Substance Dualism: The Real Scientific Threat to Free Will?” For the author, there’s actually no threat to free will; there’s a threat, though, of irksome scientists thinking they’ve scored points against compatibilists by labeling them as substance dualists. Because, to paraphrase a number of compatibilist philosophers, saying that free will doesn’t exist because substance dualism is mythical is like saying that love doesn’t exist because Cupid is mythical.
*Revisionism suggests that rather than at the inauguration, he caught his pneumonia a few weeks later when, again coatless, he went out to buy a cow. But then even more radical revisionism suggests that he didn’t die of pneumonia at all but instead from typhoid fever, contracted from the vile, contaminated water available in the White House. This was concluded by writer Jane McHugh and physician Philip Mackowiak, based on the symptoms detailed by Harrison’s doctor and the fact that the White House’s water supply was just downstream from where “night soil” was dumped. At the time, Washington, DC, was a malarial swamp, its selection having been advocated by powerful Virginians who wanted the capital close to home; this was decided in behind-closed-doors horse-trading between Alexander Hamilton and Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. “No one really knows how the game is played, the art of the trade, how the sausage gets made,” writes noted historian Lin-Manuel Miranda, referring to the mystery of what transpired in those negotiations.
*As a point applying to virtually every scientific finding that I’ll discuss in the rest of the book, when I say, “work done by John/Jane Doe,” it actually means work done by that lead scientist along with a team of collaborators. As an equally important point (that I’ll reiterate in various places, because it can’t be mentioned too often), when I say, “Scientists showed that when they’d do this or that, people would do X,” I mean that on average, people responded this way. There are always exceptions, who are often the most interesting.
*In the Libet literature, this point where people thought that they had decided came to be called “W,” for the point where they first consciously wished to do something. I’m avoiding using that term, to minimize jargon.
*One paper analyzes the reporting of Libet in the lay press. Eleven percent of the headlines said free will had been disproved; 11 percent said the opposite; many articles were wildly inaccurate in describing how the experiment was done (e.g., saying that it was the researcher who would push the button). And on other fronts, there’s even a piece of music called “Libet’s Delay.” It’s moody and so repetitive that I felt a conscious sense of wishing to scream; I can only conclude that it was composed by a deeply depressed AI.
*I’m using “the conclusion from Libet” rather than “Libet’s conclusion,” in that the latter suggests what Libet himself was thinking about his finding. We’ll get to what he thought.
*One neuroscientist aptly describes the SMA as the “gateway” by which the PFC talks to your muscles.
*Haynes and colleagues have since identified the exact subregion of the PFC involved. They also implicated an additional brain region, the parietal cortex, as part of the decision-making process.
*The parietal cortex, mentioned a few footnotes back.
*As a technical detail completely unrelated to any of this, the right half (hemisphere) of the brain regulates movements in the left half of the body; the left hemisphere the reverse.
*Anarchic hand syndrome, and the closely related “alien hand syndrome,” is sometimes called “Dr. Strangelove syndrome”—for the titular character in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie. Strangelove was mostly modeled after rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who went from faithfully serving his Nazi masters during World War II to serving his American ones after; turns out he was a patriotic American all along, that whole Nazi thing just a misunderstanding. Strangelove, wheelchair bound after a stroke, has anarchic hand syndrome, his hand constantly trying to give a Nazi salute to his American overlords. Stanley Kubrick, the famed director of the movie, also incorporated elements of John von Neumann, Herman Kahn, and Edward Teller into Strangelove (but not, despite urban legends, Henry Kissinger).
*Interestingly, people with depression are resistant to being tricked into this sense of “illusory will.” This will be returned to in the final chapter.
*In TMS, an electromagnetic coil is placed on the scalp and used to activate or inactivate the patch of cortex just beneath (I had that done to me once, with the colleague controlling when I bent my index finger; it felt beyond creepy). How’s this for a finding whose implications resonate through this book? TMS can be used to alter people’s judgments of the moral appropriateness of a behavior.
*Although, in response to this, philosopher Peter Tse of Dartmouth writes, “Just as the existence of visual illusions does not prove that all vision is illusory, the existence of illusions of conscious agency does not prove that conscious operations cannot be causal of action in certain cases.”
*While usually classified as a philosopher, Roskies leaves the rest of us pikers in the dust by having a PhD in neuroscience, in addition to her philosophy PhD.
*Naturally, it turns out that the neurological distinction between consciousness and unconscious is not boring, simple, or dichotomous, but that’s another can of worms.
*Note that while related, this is subtly different from the issue of whether the sense of conscious decision-making always occurs with the same time lag after the readiness potential; as we saw, the timing of that sense of agency can be manipulated by other factors.
*The study was a collaboration not just between philosophers and neuroscientists but also between people with decidedly incompatibilist stances (Wheatley) and the notable compatibilists Roskies, Tse, and Duke philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. This is the process of questing for knowledge at its objective best.
*As a fascinating finding in these studies, failing to stop in time activates the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region associated with subjective feelings of pain; in other words, a few dozen milliseconds is enough time for you to feel like a loser because a computer has gotten a faster draw on you.
*Depending on the study, the “pre-SMA,” anterior frontomedial cortex, and/or right inferior frontal gyrus. Note that the last two places, logically, implicate the frontal cortex in executive vetoing.
*The original Libet publication didn’t mention anything about flattening out; it was only in a later review that he decided that it occurred. And to be a bit of a killjoy, after looking at the original paper, which had only four subjects, I just don’t see it in the shapes of the readiness potentials displayed, and there’s no real way to rigorously analyze the shape of each curve, given the data available in the paper; this study happened during a less quantitative, more innocent time for analyzing data.
*Continuing to gamble activated brain regions associated with incentives and reward; in contrast, quitting activated regions related to subjective pain, anxiety, and conflict. This is amazing—continuing to gamble with the possibility of losing is less neurobiologically aversive than quitting and contemplating the possibility that you would have won if you hadn’t stopped. We’re a really screwed-up species.
*It seems intuitive that someone should be punished if they thought they had willingly chosen to do something illegal without knowing that they actually didn’t have a choice. The late Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt has taken the implications of this intuition in a particular compatibilist direction. Step 1: Incompatibilists say that if the world is deterministic, there shouldn’t be moral responsibility. Step 2: Consider someone choosing to do something, not knowing that they would have been coerced if they hadn’t. Step 3: Therefore, this would be a deterministic world, in that the person didn’t actually have the option of doing otherwise . . . yet our intuitions are to hold him morally responsible, perceiving him as having had free will. Huzzah, we’ve thus just proven that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. I feel bad saying this because Frankfurt looks cherubic in his pictures, but this seems like more than a bit of sophistry and sure doesn’t represent the Demise of Incompatibilism. Moreover, I get the sense from friends in the know that while Frankfurt is enormously influential in some corners of legal philosophy, millennia go by without these “Frankfurt counterexamples” being relevant in an actual courtroom; it is unlikely for there to be scenarios where “the defendant chose to slap the Oscar host across the face, not aware that if he had not chosen to do so, he would nevertheless have been forced to.”
*Aha!
*The Dalai Lama was once asked what he would do in the “runaway trolley” problem (a trolley whose brakes have failed is hurtling down the tracks, about to kill five people; is it okay to push someone in front of the trolley, intentionally killing them but preventing the deaths of five?); he said he would throw himself in front of the trolley.
*This contrast between proximal versus distal explanations of behavior (i.e., causes in proximity to a behavior versus those at a distance) is caught perfectly by neurosurgeon Rickard Sjöberg of Umeå University, Sweden. He imagines walking down a hall of his hospital and someone asking him why he just put his left foot in front of his right foot. Yes, one type of reply plunges us into the world of readiness potentials and milliseconds. But equally valid replies would be “Because when I woke up this morning, I decided not to call in sick” or “Because I decided to pursue a neurosurgery residency despite knowing about the long on-call hours.” Sjöberg has done important work on the effects of removing the SMA on issues of volition, and in an extremely judicious review concludes that whatever resolution there is to free will debates, it isn’t going to be found in the milliseconds of SMA activity.
*A point elegantly argued by philosopher Gregg Caruso in some stirring debates with Dennett.
*If you have read my book Behave, you’ll recognize that the rest of this chapter is a summary of its first four hundred or so pages. Good luck . . .
*I’m being diplomatic. Many readers will know of the “replication crisis” in psychology, where an alarming percentage of published findings, even some in textbooks, turn out to be hard or impossible for other scientists to independently replicate (including some findings, I admit ruefully, that wound up being cited in my 2017 book, where I should have been more discerning). Thus, this section considers only findings whose broad conclusions have been independently replicated.
*For DIYers, the paper contained the imitation vomit recipe: cream of mushroom soup, cream of chicken soup, black beans, pieces of fried gluten; quantities were unspecified, suggesting that you just have to get a feel for this sort of thing—a pinch of this, a smidgen of that. The study also noted that this recipe was partially based on one in a prior study—i.e., plucky innovation is advancing imitation-vomit science.
*The region was the dorsomedial PFC, as shown with transcranial magnetic stimulation. As a control, no effect was seen when inhibiting the more “cerebral” dorsolateral PFC. Lots more on these brain regions in the next chapter.
*And don’t forget Pontius Pilate being reported to “wash his hands” of that crucifixion bother.
*Psychology fans will recognize how this study supports the James-Lange theory of emotion (yes, William James!). In its modern incarnation, it posits that our brain “decides” how strongly we feel about something, in part, by canvassing interoceptive info from the body; for example, if your heart is racing (thanks to unknowingly being given an adrenaline-like drug), you perceive your feelings as being more intense.
*With at least one paper inevitably making reference in its title to “hunger games.” By the way, in chapter 11, we’ll be looking at a really key circumstance where there is a major discrepancy between how charitable people say they are and how much they actually are.
*Regardless of your sex, since both secrete T (albeit in differing amounts) and have T receptors in the brain. The hormone has broadly similar effects in both sexes, just typically more strongly in males.
*These are almost always “double-blind” studies, in which half the subjects get the hormone, the rest get saline, and neither the subjects nor the researchers testing them know who got which.
*What do I mean by T “strengthening” a projection from the amygdala to another part of the brain (the basal ganglia, in this case)? The amygdala is particularly sensitive to T, has lots of receptors for it; T lowers the threshold for amygdaloid neurons to have action potentials, making it more likely—“strengthening”—that a signal would propagate from one neuron to the next, down the line. Meanwhile, T is having the opposite effect when “weakening” projections. Dotting i’s and crossing t’s—T receptors are technically called androgen receptors, reflecting there being an array of “androgenic” hormones, with T as the most powerful. We’re going to ignore that for all-around sanity.
*Just as an important complication, testosterone can make people more prosocial under circumstances where doing so gains them status (for example, in an economic game where status is gained by making more generous offers). In other words, testosterone is about aggression only under circumstances where the right type of aggression gets you high status.
*Note before how testosterone can have opposite effects on neurons in two different parts of the brain. Here we have oxytocin having opposite effects on behavior in two different social contexts.
*Minor detail: Glucocorticoids, coming from the adrenal gland during stress, are different from adrenaline, also coming from the adrenal during stress. Different hormone classes but broadly similar effects. The major glucocorticoid in humans and other primates is cortisol, aka hydrocortisone.
*For what it’s worth, and as a demonstration of how narrow the focus of science can be, I spent more than three decades of my life obsessing over issues related to the last four paragraphs.
*Time to step into a minefield. Since humans first learned to make fire, introductory neuroscience classes taught that the adult brain doesn’t make new neurons. Then, starting in the 1960s, doughty pioneers found hints that there actually is “adult neurogenesis” after all. They were ignored for decades until the evidence became incontrovertible, and adult neurogenesis became the sexiest, most revolutionary topic in neuroscience. There have been reams of findings about how/when/why it occurs in animals, what sort of things promote it (e.g., voluntary exercise, estrogen, an enriched environment), and what inhibits it (e.g., stress, inflammation). What are the new neurons good for? Various rodent studies indicate that they contribute to stress resilience, anticipating a new reward, and something called pattern separation—once you’ve learned the general features of something, the new neurons help you learn distinctions among different examples of it—say, once you’ve learned to recognize a performance of Next to Normal, you rely on pattern separation in the hippocampus to teach you the difference between a performance of it on Broadway and one in a high school (the distinctions can be minimal and subtle, if the latter is in the hands of a superb director). ♥
As this neurogenesis literature matured, there was evidence that the adult human brain could make new neurons also. Then an extremely thorough 2018 paper in Nature, using the largest number of human brains studied to date, suggested that maybe there wasn’t much/any neurogenesis in the adult human brain after all (amid there being plenty in other species). Massive controversy ensued, still raging. I find that study to be convincing (but, full disclosure, I’m not really objective, since the lead author on the paper, Shawn Sorrells, now of the University of Pittsburgh, was one of my star grad students).
*Meaning, among other things, that if someone centrifuged you and then extracted your DNA, if they were not careful, they’d mostly be inadvertently studying the DNA of your gut bacteria.
*There is a neuron type called the von Economo neuron (VEN) that is found pretty much only in two brain regions tightly linked to the frontal cortex—the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. For a while, there was massive excitement in that it appeared to be a neuron type unique to humans, a first. But things were actually even more interesting—VENs also occur in the brains of some of the most socially complex species on earth, such as other apes, cetaceans, and elephants. No one is quite sure what they are for, but there’s been some progress. But despite VENs’ existence, the similarities between the building blocks of the frontal cortex and the rest of the cortex are much greater than the differences.
