 |
|
Dance monkey. Dance. |
About this time of year we all go about making our resolutions for the coming year. I, for example, have resolved to be in the best physical shape of my life and also to have the best year of my life (God willing). The latter includes using my free will to make proper decisions based on the experience gained from bad past ones. Resolutions seem to be an acknowledgement of the hope that we do indeed possess the free will to determine our fate, regardless of what has happened to us in the past or what some “magical power” wishes upon us (but just to be safe some throw in a “God willing” whether or not they are believers). To quote Swami Vivekananda on the subject:
Each one of us is the maker of our own fate. We, and none else are responsible for what we enjoy or suffer. We are the effects, and we are the causes. We are free therefore. If I an unhappy, it is of my own making, and that shows that I can be happy if I will. The human will stands beyond all circumstance. Before it — the strong, gigantic, infinite will and freedom in man — all the powers, even of nature, must bow down, succumb and become its servants. This is the result of the law of Karma. [Link]
<
p>An article in the New York Times, however, throws us a curve ball. Perhaps we have as much free will as a monkey standing backward while riding a tiger with a mind of its own. Perhaps free will is an illusion also:
A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.
As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place. [Link]
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of cause-and-effect type experiments in my own life in order to test out this whole free will thing. I think I may have finally arrived at a point where I am able to make some fairly accurate predictions based on limited data, simply by paying careful attention to my thoughts as I have them. In a few instances last year I was able to predict an answer even before presented with an actual problem. I suppose this was a good thing but as recently as today (before reading this article) I had begun to question my free will. I can’t help but think (or hope) that there should be some randomness thrown in to the system to make in less neat. I also hope that there isn’t a point where you become so enamored with the idea of free will that you keep watching yourself exercise it like a never-ending game, just to prove to yourself that you are still free. Did the last few sentences feel like a confusing abyss?
Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair…”Einstein [said]… “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said. [Link]
I don’t know about you guys but I am going to read this post again just before going to bed. I am somehow convinced that if I dream that I am a monkey riding a tiger I will be able to swivel facing forward by the time I wake up and my life will be different.
In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.
Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.
The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.
In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done. [Link]
I recognize that this Times article might be a bit too deep for the first day back to work but I know that I’m not the only one wondering how free they truly are today.
<
p>
But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot. Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers. [Link]
<
p>
I agree with this. Some of my best writing can be attributed to voices in my head.
I sought clarity from mathematicians and computer scientists. According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will. [Link]
<
p>
<
p>
<
p>This is true too. It is what is happening on Battlestar Galactica so it must be.
Keep dancing you monkeys.
Excellent post. I’m afraid I can’t comment, though. Leave me with the blue pill a little longer, Abhi.
Thanks for a fascinating post! The tiger that is seemingly running with a mind of its own is simply the unconscious (subconscious) mind that we can access and control if we practice and put our attention to it. What you think you create and what you create you become. So the important question is, what are you thinking?
I give it fifteen minutes before we hear about god, atheism and such….
dammit, what have i done!!
Very interesting post. The Economist has an interesting article in the latest issue, which roughly says the same thing. From TFA:
And yeah, I did not care to change the spellings of “tumor” and “pedophilia” though Firefox urged me to do so 😉
There is no free will as we understand the term. It is all God’s Will.
The highest philosophical, spiritual and even scientific truth is that: there exists just one entity. Call it God or Nature or any other of the myriad names. The greatest spiritual masters, the greatest philosophers, and more and more so the greatest scientists, believe in pantheism/monism. Nothing else can stand the scrutiny of logic, science and spiritual experience.
Individual free will is an illusion because individuality itself is an illusion. Ramana Maharshi the advaitin once observed that the illusion of free will is as funny and absurd as the pillars in some temple in India which are sculpted as if some humans are straining very hard to hold up the roof, when in fact its the stone in the pillar thats doing the job.
my take on it as well & the economist article in particular – here.
So I can stop blaming myself for all those bad decisions, because it was really my sub(un?)conscious that made them, and I’m not enlightened enough to control that yet…
Obviously you meant macacas, not monkeys. 😉
Here is another thing to consider. Shantideva, in his The Way of the Bodhisattva, preached a philosophy that said it wasn’t good enough to simply achieve enlightenment and leave the cycle of re-birth. Instead, he said that there existed a path in which you had to act like a member of a SEAL team and leave no man behind. Those who choose that path have to help others and wait until the last soul reaches enlightenment before they are allowed passage. If such a thing were to come to pass then we’d have to live in a time where everyone was super enlightened and aware of their actions. Everyone would be like a monk. Each person would ask themselves why they were doing each action and what it meant. Can you imagine a world like that? It would be freaky.
Maybe the fact that there are so many people out there who are VERY clueless about themselves (as opposed to a little bit clueless) is the reason the tiger runs amok while the monkeys (who think they are wise) are really just along for the chaotic ride despite their best intentions.
Only if you say so.
But aren’t individuals still responsible to tame the subconscious? So in a short timespan we might not have free will but in a longer time span we do have free will.
Doordarshan,
If that is true then what are you? You must be God because there is nothing else for you to be. If you are God then your will is God’s will.
But when we are in the illusion that we are not God but a human body we are deluded into thinking that its this individual body/mind that has the free will. Overcoming this illusion (of body identification) is the goal of all true spiritual endeavour.
why ask why, my sepidermal kin. we do what we do because we must do what we can and if we can do the can can that is even better. In the words we all live by – I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure. pleasure!
Speaking of new year’s resolutions – paging Anna – hope you can do a post encapsulating desi new year’s resolutions. vere’s youze at, dear? i sense a disturbance over the ether.
Individuality is a result of the brain’s tendency to assign things in the discrete categories. Discrete categories do not exist in a world of fuzzy boundries so I guess this is imprecise. But we do not live in an post-entropic universe, there are clumps and clines in our existance and thus individuality is real.
Freewill is a non-issue, Compatibilism rox.
Quite right ofcourse, except that its not the only goal. Its the first goal. Once you’ve overcome the illusion of disunity you get to create your own expression of God individuated into your current body/mind entity. When you can do this consciously you have free will. When you do this unconsciously (like most of us), you are a pawn of the common unconsciousness, or FATE (From All Thoughts Everywhere).
The idea of free will presupposes there is a self that is doing the acting, but no one has ever been able to find or persuausively describe what this enduring entity might be like, though there have been many efforts, like Daniel Dennet’s. This is the search for the Platonic (and then Christian) soul in methodological garb. How exactly would you even objectify what is the subject of all inquiry and the objectifier of all objects? In India, there is the Buddhist philosophical thought that posits that if you look “inside” there is nothing there – anatta – no soul. The British public intellectual Peter Watson believes the modern incoherence in consciousness studies will continue until this possibility is seriously acknowledged.
We are heaps of half-remembered fragments, and everything – where we were born, our race, our swiftness and sharpness – is chance; and, if this article is proved correct, our ‘actions’ are decided before our phantom self excercises agency! Float along, enjoy the scenery. To see is to live – and the Tao is silent.
Once you’ve overcome the illusion of disunity you realise what you always were: God. That is the ultimate goal. There can be nothing more to strive for. Its absurd to think that there is a goal beyond that.
The idea of “individuation” is contradictory to the idea of Godhood. Individuality is a falsehood. Sathya Sai Baba has put it succinctly: if you see more than one, know that Maya is in operation.
The question, that you need to ask is who is this ‘we’. As the Tamil saying goes, ‘Manam oru kurangu’. Manas (mind) is like a drunken monkey. But are you the manas? No, the manas is your tool. It is a good tool in many instances, but it can be a hindrance in peeling the onion to find the actual tiger that you are, to mix metaphors!
Actually you need to get the monkey to be still, to see the tiger in you!
Will you get the monkey off my back?
I came to know about Sepia Mutiny few days ago, and am hooked to it since then. A great effort.
Free will versus determinism (i guess it all started since the enlightenment’s obsession with reason) is a false dichotomy. Almost always the debate ends up in the well-known action-structure duality. If you are an entrepreneur/ optimist you will be more towards action. If you are a sociologist/ economist (who are extremely miser in granting ‘agency’) you will be arguing for structure. It is a bit of both.
Vivekananda is the darling son of India – the greatest optimist of all. Rabindranath said to Romain Rolland – ‘If you have to know India, study Vivekananda. In him everything is positive, and nothing negative.’
Perhaps this discussion between Tagore and Einstein is useful in this context. Tagore wants to understand the universal spirit (the deterministic structure)in his own individual being in his own individual being. Btw, Einstein says he is more religious than Tagore. The determinism isn’t etched in stone. Cause and effect is interdependent – the buddhists said that looong ago in the pratitya-samutpada, and only recently some scholars in this part of the world have started interdependent sampling.
The real battle is between cognition (or reasoning) and emotion (feeling). Unfortunately, as blog commenters, we exchange words resulting in Wittgenstein’s language games, and adding to the already heavy cognitive bias in argumentation. Academicians do that all the time. There are other ways of exchanges too (which do not grant tenure) – songs, dances, paintings, moving images, paintings, sculpture. A Raghu Rai photograph is worth a thousand words, a Rabindrasangeet is for eternity. They don’t offer any reason.
The diaspora cannot jettison its roots because of filial bonds, because of emotion. Free will notwithstanding.
I think Philip K Dick hypothesized about something like this in his short stories.
Jeffrey Schwartz in his book “The mind and the brain: Neuroplasticity and the power of mental force” discusses the evidence for postulating that the mind exists outside the brain therefore …where exactly? Deepak Chopra goes into much the same area in his latest book, “Life after Death, the burden of proof”.
There is free will, you just have to show your homunculus who’s the boss. If Rajnikanth can do it, so can you
wait wait wait wait. let me get this straight.
according to the initial arguement of the tiger and the monkey, if i skip work today. buy a ticket to a small town australia. eat an exotic animal after killing it with my bare hands, despite the fact that i am vegetarian. it is still not random? the tiger’s already decided what i was about to do moments before i was to do it?
Great article and thanks for the excellent links, superbrown and arijit.
I’m just an armchair philosopher, but the problem I see with the concept of “free will” is that most people see it as its own entity. Either we have it, or we don’t. But from experience, I see that life is a combination of our choices and others’ choices. The web of decisions we and others make weaves us into certain paths, but we can also break through the strands of that web with considerable effort. The decisions we can “freely” make are based upon a combination of the effects of decisions we and others have made.
I think createxpress nailed it in comment #2 with what you think you create and what you create you become. So the important question is, what are you thinking? We can train our conscious and subconscious minds to work better together, just as we train any other part of ourselves.
andrea, i was trying to say this:
thinking is analogous to free will, feeling to determinism (because it is historicist, bounded to local conditions). Descartes was partially right. I think, therefore I am needs to be amended to I think and feel, therefore I am.
i guess createexpress was pointing to Escher’s drawing hands.
Then, I’d like you to write me a check for your life savings and send it promptly to my address. Since the pen, the ink, the check, the envelope, and in my case (I’m not sure how you seal your envelopes) the envelope sealing liquid applying thingy is all illusory and maya.
Descartes had it ass-backwards. It should be: I am, therefore I think. (or feel, act or whatever).
I am requires no proof. It is not an object to be studied. It is the studier itself. It is a subjective experience. Ramana Maharshi would have told Descartes to ask himself: who is this “I” that is thinking?
In other places Vivekananda says:
http://www.rkmath.org/guidinglights/vivekananda
“The will is not free – it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect – but there is something behind the will which is free.”
That “something behind the will” is God who is immanent within us all, and who alone exists, and who alone is free.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vivekananda
“This is no world. It is God Himself. In delusion we call it world.”
One cannot logically reconcile belief in an Omniscient God with human free will. And one cannot also logically reconcile the atheist belief that matter-energy is the only reality and that it operates predictably, with belief in human free will.
A Wise Man once said. Man who stands on toilet is high on pot
Whenever these questions come up, I simply turn them over to the wisest being I know:
Spacecat.
He is 17 pounds and 27 inches of jet, not including tail. His green eyes glow with the mysteries of the universe, having come to us from somewhere up there…
Spacecat has a free will that he exercises everytime he chooses to carve into my $1,700 Pella front door. I know this is his free will because he chooses the door only when I haven’t remembered to spray it with bitter apple.
He is so purely in every moment, yet he exercises choice, an extension of free will, all the time. The wet is partitioned away from dry, into an outside-the-dish pile. The water on the roof is preferable to the water in the shower.
Isn’t choice an extension of free will, even when it involves following ones instincts? O, exalted one, share with us your wisdom…;)
We want pics!
Picture of Spacecat, please.
Some fools have argued that animals don’t have “souls”, whatever those are. I say animals have only souls, unlike humans, whose souls are buried and obscured by layers of language, symbols and absctractions. Not that I believe in souls. But I do believe in illusions.
Later with the pics. This is a work computer and I’m monitoring Junior study hall.
Speaking of which, two of my 11th graders (Areola and Bianca) say God has a destiny in mind for us all -but the choices we make with our free will may or may not hurt our swerve if our free will to choose messes with what God has in mind for us.
Trevor says there is no God, destiny, etc. only free will and strength through work.
The rest of my kids either didn’t show up or I gave them passes to go to the library.
Instead of debating free will, should be debating this. And asking such questions like, Why does it exist? and more importantly, does it warrant this? And how many bad jokes can stem from it? (including this one)
To the determinists I’d ask this: If everything is causually determined, by an omniscient uncaused cause, why is it so hard to figure out what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon?
http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/hayekee.html
‘nuf said.
The “I” is the individuation of the Godhead. The Godhead IS all there is and it KNOWS that it is all there is. However, how can it experience itself as All There Is if there is no Is Not? The Godhead individuates in order to experience the All of Everything which it couldn’t possibly do in any other way. It’s quite a brilliant solution really. In this regard its important to remember that being is not the same as knowing and knowing is not the same as experiencing.
I think therefore I am then becomes a circular argument.
Excellent post, Abhi.
The conception of consciousness as being a monkey riding a tiger then harks back to behaviorism; action in response to perception is the only thing worth looking at, and what is perceived to happen in between (mental processes/conscious experience) is a mere byproduct. It may construct itself in the moment and construct a story for itself from moment to moment, but it has nothing to do with determining action or goals, etc. The current conception is more nuanced, in that there is a more clear separation of the idea of a mental process and conscious experience. Conscious experience is the useless byproduct, but mental processes (which are conceptualized as unconscious and machine-like, something which could in theory be programmed in software – the dominant paradigm of cognitive science, which has no truck with the issue of consciousness) are the meaningful machinery between perception and action.
Consciousness may have the property of being a monkey riding a tiger, but that doesn’t mean that it is purely extraneous to intelligent behavior. It could be that conscious experience is a narrative (or a cluster of them), constructed slightly after the fact of perception and decision and maybe even action, in order to quite neatly serve a purpose. Such a purpose might be, for example, to select and construct what details in the massive sensory field should be attended to and/or searched for by default in the next moment. In other words, consciousness is tuning in every moment how we perceive our environment in the next moments. It is an efficient way to construct a reality to react to in every moment – otherwise, our sensory systems would have to take in everything equally, then process it in parallel, as if we were computers, then construct all the objects/sounds/etc., then decide what is salient… Instead, consciousness introduces biases into what will be perceived next, and then tunes the sensory systems accordingly.
Or you could just decide we are living in the Matrix (maya) 🙂 and that our mental processes are chugging along in response to our environments, under the control of that bald guy who played Elrond, or Brahman, or whatever, and our consciousnesses blithely construct a narrative where we are individuals with free will and some control, and in order to become Neo we have to slip under the narrative to observe and control the machinery of the mental processes. 😉
Jeffrey Schwartz in his book “The mind and the brain: Neuroplasticity and the power of mental force” discusses the evidence for postulating that the mind exists outside the brain therefore …where exactly?
America’s favorite atheist, the nueroscientist Sam Harris, is open to the possibility of disembodied consciousness:
I also took considerable heat from Flynn for a few remarks I made about the nature of consciousness. Most atheists appear to be certain that consciousness is entirely dependent upon (and reducible to) the workings of the brain. In the last chapter of the book, I briefly argue that this certainty is unwarranted. I say this as one who is deeply immersed in the neuroscientific and philosophical literature on consciousness: the truth is that scientists still do not know what the relationship between consciousness and matter is.
And like many Buddhists and modern neuroscientists, he avers that the self is an illusion:
It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative … One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. link
Absolutistic Hindus like Prof. Ramakrishna Puligandia claim that consciousness cannot even be studied empirically:
It is a fundamental fact of the phenomenology of our experience that consciousness is never given to us as an object. Therefore, the inescapable conclusion is that consciousness cannot, in principle, be scientifically studied, in the prevailing understanding and practice of “scientific study.”
Not being aware of this fundamental fact of the phenomenology of our experience, many self-proclaimed scientists and philosophers use such absurd phrases as “the phenomenon of consciousness” and “the structure of consciousness.” Consciousness is not a phenomenon, an object, and hence cannot have a structure, properties, and relations. Have you ever perceived your consciousness as an object, in order for you to be able to describe its structure, properties, and relations?
It is not surprising, then, that people who claim to scientifically study consciousness and write books only end up talking about their observations on synapses, neuronal circuits, various perceptual, linguistic, and emotional centers, and so on, all of which are objects of consciousness… link
Cheers!
And yet, it can be studied, and its structure can be considered, in looking at its breakdown in neurological patients.
Long ago it was agreed that introspection is only minimally if at all useful in the scientific study of psychology.
This is a distortion; scientific consciousness researchers are in a different field from those discussing the other topics quoted above. In fact, the mainstream of cognitive scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, and neuroscientists explicitly push consciousness out of the arena (even those who study attention). So those who talk about their observations on synapses, etc. only meant to study at those levels in the first place. (a methodology with I incidentally disagree with)
Yes, if consciousness works as suggested in the post. However, I think it is insufficient to stop there without investigating to see if there is a purpose (something which enhances our ability to survive) in consciousness functioning that way (see #2 in my last comment). If you just stop at “self is an illusion” I think you could be missing out on something very big.
Are you saying that God is insentient? If so that is absurd. God exists, that is being. He is Omniscient, that is all-knowing. And since you agree that God alone exists, then God alone must be the experiencer.
Who do you imagine is “knowing” and “experiencing” if not God?
The Jivatman.
And yet, it can be studied, and its structure can be considered, in looking at its breakdown in neurological patients.
Sure VS Ramachandran does exactly this, and his Absolutistic bias quite evident in his popular writings.
However, I think it is insufficient to stop there without investigating to see if there is a purpose (something which enhances our ability to survive) in consciousness functioning that way (see #2 in my last comment). If you just stop at “self is an illusion” I think you could be missing out on something very big.
I dont think Pugilananda – or any Absolutist – would deny the utility of the (virtual) self, which likely has conferred evolutionary advantages; they are claiming that because it is illusory it can be transcended. In Hindu religious language, the world-view of the virtual self is provisional(vyavaharika)- like the matrix in your #3.
Harris wants to de-sacralize the nature of self-enquiry, which, needless to say, most Absolutists would disagree with.
You miread my post.
The “is” verb connotes “beingness”. I’m not sure I understand you though. Who are you and what are you experiencing if you are not God?
Exactly 🙂
Fine with me, then 🙂 (by the way, his name makes me think he derives joy from boxing 😉 )
Why not let those who want to de-sacralize it, do so? It doesn’t mandate that those who don’t want to do it must also do it.
The Begla tiger this macaca’s riding backwards is severe sleep deprivation…there is neither consciousness nor sub- or semi- or un-conscious going on with me right now – it’s all a blur.
Indeed we could give up the notion of self and become “The Strangers” as depicted in the moive Dark City. Anyone seen this movie here? I think it makes a point with what could happen to us given our quest for power and answers.
Some relevant words from the Bhagavad Gita
Wouldn’t that be a quest to get the monkey to control the tiger?
That is a very good point, I am reminded of that point every time I hear justice being equated to revenge. My guess is that a correction of the system is only possible when we can accept that some of our actions are not (or can not be) controlled by our conscience. A society with rule of law can still decide that it has no obligation to help that person, but at least that decision has to be conscious within the society.
No one ever acts inappropriately given their model of the world. To explain, a person does not do something evil simply because it is evil. They do it because in their own frame of reference it is the right thing to do, however warped or disconnected the frame of reference is. Evil can however be defined as that which does not serve an individual or serve the society. This perception can change depending on your perspective and even after the passage of time. Without perception there is no point to consciousness. I feel I’m going off the thread here so I’ll just crawl away to my meeting…