What Am I? What Are You?

I am an agent, one who does things like think, feel, believe, choose, plan, and does things. But what is it about me that makes me an agent? Obviously, my agency arises from my brain, as does yours—but where and how?

The starting point for an answer has to be based on how the brain does everything else it does besides create my “I.” The principle is that the currency of brain function is the nerve impulse. More specifically, the brain models my inner and outer worlds by creating representations of sensation, memory, and thought in the form of patterns of nerve impulses flowing in specific neural networks. I call these Circuit Impulse Patterns (CIPs). For detection of a specific visual image, for example, the image is represented by one set of CIPS in the visual cortex. A different image will generate a different set of CIPS in the visual cortex to represent it. Documentary basis for this conclusion was provided in the Nobel Prize work of Hubel and Weisel. The same principle applies to all other mental forms of representation. That is, for example, one set of CIPS carries out the command of my “I” to type this sentence. Another set of CIPs carries out the command of my “I” to get up out of my chair and take a break. In short, everything my “I” chooses to think, feel, and do is implemented by a specific set of CIPs.

The circuit nature of the nervous system is fundamental. I have, for example, a circuit of neurons that begins in my foot, projects into a specific spinal cord segment of neurons, and these in turn project back to leg muscles that make me lift my leg if I step on a tack. Nerve impulses carry the sensory and motor information in this circuit. Additionally, this spinal circuit has reciprocal connections with various circuits in the brain that collectively inform me of pain and may also modulate my behavioral response to the pain. This information is likewise carried by nerve impulses.

So now we must examine my “I.” What is its nature? How does it get created? How is it that I know I have stepped on a tack, have generated a stream of cursing, and am aware of any other associated behaviors? Is it not likely that this “agent” of selfhood inside my brain is itself a set of CIPs? This set may operate unconsciously or consciously. I likely am not aware of what is happening in my spinal cord. I most certainly will be aware that my foot hurts and that “I” am responding to the pain. This “I” serves as an avatar that mediates my interaction with the world my brain is representing via CIPs.

Now, this brings us to the issue of conscious awareness. That too may be implemented as a set of CIPs. The CIPs of consciousness are equivalent to an avatar that the brain has instantiated to act consciously on behalf of its perceived interests. My avatar can reflect on the meaning of various sets of CIPs circulating within the global workspace of brain. The avatar can access and influence these various CIPs sets, because it too is a CIP set that connects physically to the other circuits and communicates in the shared language of nerve impulses.

This means that the conscious avatar can do things via its integral connections with other circuits. This capacity for agency refutes the contention of many scholars who have the unfounded belief that consciousness is just an “observer” that cannot do anything. Because the CIPS of my conscious avatar can do things, it means that it can implement choices and decisions that it makes.

This brings us to the issue of free will. The CIPs of my conscious avatar most certainly are affected in automatic ways by its connections to other CIPs. Thus, much of what my avatar does is not caused by free choice. Such actions result from inherent circuit connectivity and the programming of prior learning. On the other hand, because my avatar CIPs have their own existence, they can create representations for many alternative actions, including creative options that it had not been taught by prior experience. The avatar CIPs can reason about the pros and cons, and make a choice that is neither pre-determined nor inevitable. In short, my “I” avatar has the capacity for some free will.

The CIPs of my avatar allow me to be conscious, to think, feel, and choose with some degree of freedom. To reframe the dictum of Descartes:

I am, therefore I think.

References

1.       Klemm, W. R. 2016. Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will. New    

York: Elsevier.

2.       Klemm, W. R. 2014. Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate, New York: Prometheus/Random House.

3.       Klemm, W. R. 2011. Atoms of Mind. The “Ghost in the Machine” Materializes. New York: Springer.

4.       Klemm, W. R. (2015). Neurobiology Perspectives on Agency: 10 Axioms and 10 Proposition, Chapter 4. Constraints of Agency. Explorations of Theory in Everyday Life. edited  by Graig W. Gruber et al. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, Vol. 12, p.51-88.

5.     Klemm, W.  R. 2012. Sense of Self and Consciousness: Nature, Origins, Mechanisms, and Implications, p. 111-138, in Consciousness: States, Mechanisms and Disorders. Edited by A. E. Cavanna and A. Nani.  Hauppauge, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers. Open access available at https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=38801

6.        Klemm, W. R. 2011. Neural representations of the sense of self. Archives Cognitive Psychology. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 7: 16-30. DOI 10.2478/v10053-008-0084-2.

Learning and Memory Bias Choices But Don't Preclude Free Will

One common definition of "free will" is that a person can decide or choose among multiple alternatives without being forced by physical laws, luck, fate, or divine will. Most of us feel that there are situations where we are in charge of our choices and no outside force compels us to make a particular choice. But it is fashionable these days for scientists to insist that free will is an illusion. In fact, they claim, without evidence, that consciousness cannot do anything. It just observes a little of what the magnificent unconscious mind does. The possibility that conscious thought programs neural circuitry escapes their biased thinking.

People who believe that humans have no free will are hard-pressed to explain why no one is responsible for their choices and actions. What is it that compels foolish or deviant behavior? Who or what compels us to accept one moral code over any other? Who or what compels us to believe in God or to be an atheist? Who or what compels us to become a certain kind of person, with no option to "improve" itself in any self-determined way? Learning experiences may bias our choices, but we are free to reject learning that does not serve us well. Wise people do that.

Human brains make choices consciously and unconsciously by real-time evaluation of alternatives in terms of the anticipated usefulness of previous learning from other situations. This learning occurs in the context of the learned sense of self, which begins unconsciously in the womb, as neural connections construct a map of body parts. The conscious brain is aware that it is aware of choice processing and makes decisions in light of such understanding. When a given alternative choice is not forced, the conscious mind is aware that it is not obliged to accept any one choice but is "free" to select any one of the available options. We may be creative by consciously constructing other alternatives than the ones presented. Such realization might even guide many decisions at the subconscious level. In any case, neural networks weigh the probable value of each alternative and collectively reach a "decision" by inhibiting networks that lead to less-favored alternatives. Thus, network activity underlying the preferred choice prevails and leads to a selective willed action. What governs the network activity causing the final choice is the activity in other networks, which in turn is governed by stored memories and real-time processing of the current choice contingencies.

What usually gets left out of free-will discussions is the question of how a brain establishes stored-memory preferences and how it evaluates current contingencies. These functions surely cause things to happen, but what is the cause of the cause? Any given brain can choose within certain limits of its learning experiences and stored memory. We govern those choices by what a brain has learned about the self-interest value associated with given contingencies. Brain circuitry assigns value, and values chosen are largely optional choices. The conscious brain directs the choices that govern value formation, reinforcement, and preservation in memory.

Now we are confronted with explaining how neural circuit impulse patterns (CIPs) representing the sense of self can have a free will. First, I reason that each person's brain has a conscious Avatar that acts as an active agent to act in the world on embodied brain's behalf, as explained more completely in my recent book. This is reminiscent of the 3rd Century idea of a homunculus, a "little person" inside the brain. A modern view is that this homunculus exists in the form of mapped circuitry within a more global workspace.

Certain maps are created under genetic control. These include the topographic map of the body in the sensory and motor cortices. Then there is the capacity for real-time construction of maps of the body location in space that resides in circuitry of the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. Other maps are created from learning experience from the near-infinite circuit capacity of association cortex. What these maps learn is stored in memory as facilitated circuit synapses and deployed "on-line" in the form of CIP representations of what was originally learned. New learning likewise exists as CIP representations in network populations. Thus, what has been learned is stored as memories that can be accessed later in decision- and choice-making.

The conscious Avatar itself is a constellation of certain CIPs representing the conscious-agent sense of self. Certainly, by definition, the Avatar can make choices and decisions. Avatar choices can be implemented unconsciously, because Avatar circuitry is embedded in the global workspace of unconscious mind. Wakefulness releases consciousness to make its own choices and decisions. Avatar processing is neither random nor inevitable, and presumably can occur with more degrees of freedom than found in unconscious mind. Avatar processing more likely progresses via non-linear chaotic dynamics than by linear deterministic processing.

If the conscious Avatar exists as a set of CIPs, how can something as "impersonal" and physiological as that have any kind of "will," much less free will? Consider that the "virtual you" is your Avatar. Let us recall that "will" is little more than an intent that couples bodily actions to achieve the intent. This kind of thinking does also occur in the circuitry that controls unconscious minds. These circuits automatically generate actions in response to conditions that call for a response. Such actions are stereotyped and inflexible, but not when there is conscious regulation.

Each choice alternative is represented as circuit impulse patterns (CIPs) within a group of neurons. Each group's activity interacts with the others―and with the CIP representation of the conscious Avatar. The Avatar CIP is poised to influence activity in the alternative sub-populations and thus can help direct the final processing result.

The Avatar must have some criteria to bias a given option. Those criteria have been learned and remembered. The Avatar CIP activity can modulate the alternative-choice representations in the context of self-awareness according to past learning and value assessments of current contingencies. The existence of bias does argue for determinism at this stage of choice making, but the bias could have been created earlier by conscious free-will reasoning and value assessments.

While it is true that genetics and experience help program the Avatar circuitry, the Avatar does its own non-linear processing and makes choices about who to interact with and what experiences to value, promote, and allow. The Avatar can insist that it has a need to remember some lessons of experience and makes it a point to remember them. In short, the Avatar gets to help shape what it becomes.

It seems to this Avatar that current debates about determinism and free will tend to obscure the important matters of our humanness. Free will debates distract us from a proper framing of the issues about human choices and personal responsibility.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (2014). Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate. New York: Prometheus.

Klemm, W. R. (2016). Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will. New York: Academic Press.

The Practical Meaning of Free Will

Philosophers and scientists have debated the issue of free will for centuries. In general, the consensus among seems to be that there is no such thing as free will. The problem is the premise of the debate. Those who have already decided against free will frame the issue so that no other conclusion can be drawn. Proper definition of terms is crucial to stay out of rhetorical weeds and traps.

For example, people will say that every action or event has a cause. Therefore, the event was determined and did not occur “freely.” To occur freely, an action or event would have to occur randomly. I have had professional statisticians tell me that in the real world almost nothing is truly random. Too many things are inter-dependent; that is, what happens to one thing creates a bias of action on something else.

Another argument is that every action or event has a certain probability of occurrence, ranging from zero to 100% chance that it will occur. Thus, the argument is that anything that can occur will occur, eventually. It if has a low probability, happening may just take a long time. It does not require being willed into existence.

Before we can go much further in this examination, we have to understand the word, “will.” This word implies an intent from an active, living agent that chooses to do a certain thing or avoid doing it. So, I suppose you could say that an ant has a will to go search for food, for example. But no one would suggest that an ant can freely do that. It is compelled by a biological need for food and sensory detection of odor cues that propel the ant to move in the direction of the food. This technicality aside, common use of the word “will” is that this is a goal or intent that higher animals have, and they may be constrained from complete freedom. In fact, a key part of the common definitions of will is that it requires consciousness. But free will opponents promote their foreordained conclusion that people can’t have free will by claiming that  consciousness itself has no agency. It is just an observer. Space prevents me for challenging this specious argument here, but I have defended conscious agency in other publications.

The most obvious constraint is lack of freedom of action. I cannot will to fly by flapping my arms, because that is not within my biological repertoire. I am not free to crack a safe, because I do not know how. So let us not confuse freedom of action with free will. Free will can only exercised if there is freedom of action for what one wills.

As for “free” will or “free” won’t, the premise is that one has two or more available choices and that nothing compels selection of one over the other. You may well have different probabilities for a given choice, each biased by certain contingencies associated with each choice. For example, the probability that I will have a breakfast tomorrow morning is highly likely, assuming I have the freedom of action by still being alive and that there are things in my kitchen to eat.  But, the probability is not 100%. I may get nauseous and not want to eat. I may have to fast because I am getting a medical blood test. But I can over-rule the forbidding factors. I can choose to eat, knowing that it may cause me to vomit (but maybe it won’t and in fact might settle my stomach if I pick something really digestible). I can choose to risk creating bad test numbers or skip the blood test to do it on another day that seems more convenient.

Here is how a free-will argument might proceed:

Determinist: “Whatever choice is made, it will be influenced by some factor that your reasoning develops. You used reasoning to change the probabilities and thus biased your choice. You simply redefine free will in a way that allows us to have it.”

Free-will Believer: “Well, you defined free will in a way that does not allow us to have it. It is specious logic to define things out of existence. The problem is that you have tried to foreordain your conclusion by saying that reason is not an acceptable basis for freely making a choice. This is a rhetorical trick. I am free to think this out, whatever way my knowledge and thinking skills allow. Remember, the reasoning only affects the probabilities. Reason does not compel a given choice. It merely alters the probabilities. People do make illogical or dumb choices from time to time.”

Determinist: “But you are constrained by the limits of your knowledge and brain. People make dumb choices when they are being dumb.”

Free-will Believer: “Yes, but within those limits, I have free choice. I may even make a choice that my reasoning concludes to be a bad choice, just for the hell of it—or just to counter your argument.”

Determinist: “Do you not see that just for the hell of it is an emotion that has biased your decision. Thus it is not free?”

Free-will Believer: “Note that I said may, not I will. I still reserve the possibility to choose. Do you not seen we have fallen into an infinite regress trap? Your line of argument cannot be pursued to a definitive conclusion.”

Thus, it seems to me that philosophical logic is not useful for this kind of debate. Here is a case where common sense makes more sense. In any choice that is not forced, we are free to change the probabilities or to confound them—for whatever reason or emotion.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. 2016. Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will. 

New York: Elsevier.

Klemm, W. R. (2018). Reason and Creativity May Require Free Will, Chapter 2, In  . Hauppauge, New York: Nova.

Klemm, W. R. (2015). Neurobiology Perspectives on Agency: 10 Axioms and 10 Proposition, Chapter 4. Constraints of Agency. Explorations of Theory in Everyday Life. edited  by Graig W. Gruber et al. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, Vol. 12, p.51-88.

Klemm, W. R. 2010. Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 6: (6) 47-65.

Do We See the World Like a Movie?

We have the feeling that we experience the world like a continuously sampled data stream. If we perceive multiple objects of events seemingly at the same time, we may actually be multiplexing the several data streams; that is, we take a sample from one data stream, switch to take a sample from the next stream and so on—all on a millisecond time scale.

But another possibility is that we perceive objects and events like a movie frame, where the brain takes working-memory snapshots and plays them in succession. Like still frames in a movie, if played at a high-enough speed, the frames will blend in our mind to give the illusion of continuous monitoring.

In either case, we have to account for working memory. That is, we can only hold a small amount of information in our working memory at any one instant, as in being able to dial a seven-digit phone number you just looked up. In the phone number case, does our brain accumulate and buffer the representation of each integer until reaching the working memory holding capacity and then report it to consciousness as a set? Or is each integer transferred to consciousness and concantenated until the working memory capacity is filled?

A profound recent model of perception addresses the issue of continuous or movie-like perception, but unfortunately, it did not take working memory into consideration.  The model did address the issue of how consciousness integrates the static and dynamic aspects of the object of attention. For example, when viewing a white and moving baseball, consciousness apparently tracks both the static white color and shape of the ball and its movement at the same time. Are these two visual features bundled together and made available to consciousness on a continual basis or as a batch frame?

A related issue is the so-called flash-lag illusion. Displaying a moving object and a stationary light flash at the same time and location creates the illusion that the flash is lagging. There is some debate over why this happens, but it does argue against continuous monitoring of linked objects.

Another phenomenon that argues against continuous monitoring is the “color phi” phenomenon. Here, if two differently colored disks are shown at two locations in rapid succession, a viewer perceives just one disk that moves from the first location to the second, and the color of the first disk changes along the illusory path of movement. But the viewer cannot know in advance what the color and location of the second disk is. The brain must construct that perception after the fact.

Another way of studying fusion phenomenon is to show two different colored disks in rapid succession at the same location. In this case, an initial red disk followed by a green disk will be perceived as only one yellow disk. A viewer cannot consciously recognize the individual properties if there is not enough time between the two disks. This suggests that information is batched processed unconsciously and later made available to conscious awareness. Transcranial magnetic stimulation can disrupt the fusion, but only for about 400 milliseconds after the first stimulus when presumably the processing is unconscious. Since the presentation of the two disks only takes about 60 msecs, it means that unconscious processing of the fusion takes some 340 milliseconds before the results become available for conscious recognition.

Similar fusion can occur with other sense modalities. For example, the “cutaneous rabbit” effect is a somatosensory fusion illusion in which touch stimulation of first the wrist followed quickly by stimulation near the elbow produces the feeling of touch along the nerve pathway between the two points, as if a rabbit was hopping along the nerve. There is no way for conscious mind to know the pathway without the second touch near the elbow actually occurring. Perception of that pathway information is delayed until the information has been processed unconsciously.

So while these examples argue against continuous conscious monitoring of sensation, they don’t really fit well with the movie-frame idea either. We can distinguish two visual stimuli only 3 msecs apart, but a snapshot model that samples stimuli say every 40 msecs would miss the second stimulus. So to reconcile these conflicting possibilities, the authors advance a two-step model in which sensations are processed unconsciously at high speed, but the conscious percept is reported periodically or is read out when unconscious activity reaches a certain threshold or when there is top-down demand.. This fits the data from others that conscious awareness is delayed after the actual sensory event. For visual stimuli, this delay can be as long as 400 msecs.

Here the question of interest is why sensory awareness might require a mixture of continuous monitoring and periodic reporting of immediately prior data segments. Continuous monitoring and processing permits high-temporal resolution. Snapshot reporting conserves neural resources because information accumulates as a batch (a few bytes) before becoming available to consciousness. The really interesting question is what, if anything, happens to that string of movie-like snapshots that are captured in consciousness. How do these frames affect subsequent unconscious processing in the absence of further sensory input? Can unconscious processes capture and operate on the frames of conscious data? Or can successive frames of conscious data be processed batch wise in consciousness? A useful analogy might be whole-word reading. A beginning reader must sound out each letter in a word, which is comparable to the high-resolution time tracking of sensory input. However, whole word reading allows the more efficient capture of meaning because meaning has been batch pre-processed.

How do these ideas fit with the claim of other scholars that consciousness is just an observer witnessing the movie of life as it occurs? However, this assumption ignores the role that consciousness might have in reasoning, making decisions, and issuing commands. I argue this point elsewhere in my books, Mental Biology, and Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will.

Research claimed as showing that free will is illusory needs reinterpretation in light of this two-step model of perception. Those experiments typically involved asking a subject to make a simple movement, like press a button, whenever they “freely” want to do so. They are to note when they made the decision by looking at a large, high-resolution clock. At the same time, their brain activity is monitored before, during, and after the chain of events.

The first event is the intention to button press. Intention is a conscious event. Was it preceded by unconscious high-resolution processing? If so, what was the need for high resolution? Or maybe this is just the way the brain is built to operate. The button press decision-making is a slow, deliberative process, which perhaps could be handled consciously as a slow progression of successive frames of conscious thought. Critics may say that there is no such thing as conscious processing, but there is no evidence for such conjecture. Once an intent is consciously realized, the subject is now thinking about when to make the press. This decision may well be determined unconsciously, but again there is no need for high temporal resolution. Moreover, there are intervening conscious steps, where the subject may think to himself, “I just did a press. Shouldn’t I wait? Is there any point in making many presses with short intervals? Or with long intervals? Or with some random mixture? Are each of these questions answered by the two-step model of sensory processing?” However the decision developed, corresponding brain electrical activity is available to be measured.

Then, there is the actual button press, the conscious realization that it has occurred, and the conscious registration of the time on the clock when the subject thought the decision to button press was made. Does the two-step model apply here? If so, there has to be a great deal of timing delays between what actually happened consciously in the brain and what the subject eventually realized the conscious thoughts.

The point is that the two-stage model of perception may have profound implications beyond sensation that involve ideation, reasoning, decision-making, and voluntary behavior. I have corresponded with the lead author to verify that I have a correct understanding of the publication. He said that his group does plan to study the implications for working memory and for free will.

Source:

Herzog, M. H., Kammer, Thomas, and Scharnowski, F. (2017). Time slices: What is the duration of a pecept? PLOS. April 12. Hrp://de.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio/1002433

Who is Responsible? You or Your Neurons?

Do you deserve credit for your honest achievements and blame for your failures? No, say an increasing number of philosophers and scientists. They say that everything you do is commanded from your unconscious mind, which you can't consciously control. The conscious "you" is just a superfluous observer. Free will is thus regarded as an illusion (Fig. 1). My new book, "Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will" (Academic Press), challenges the science used to justify these counter-intuitive ideas.

Figure 1. Illustration of the concept that free will is an illusion. In this view, the actions that your brain commands come from the mechanical gears of an unconscious mind. Conscious mind is informed after the fact, creating the illusion that one's conscious mind commanded the act.

How free will is defined affects the conclusion about whether humans have any free will. As defined here, free will exists when a person generates thinking and behaviors that are neither stereotyped nor predetermined, and yet not random. My book identifies and explains many actions of brain that are unlikely to be performed solely by unconscious thinking. Reason and creativity are obvious exemplars of such free will.

More fundamental is the issue of just who the conscious you is. My book presents the argument that consciousness is not just a state of observation, like a movie fan passively watching a film in which participation is not possible. Rather, consciousness may be a distinct being.

I argue that consciousness can do things because the neurons that create consciousness are part of the over-all global brain workspace. The outputs of their firing cannot be isolated from the command centers of brain. Indeed, we should realize that these neurons are part of the neocortical executive control centers. When those firing patterns enable consciousness, they enable capability for explicit observation and executive action at the same time.

Our human beingness exists as the firing patterns in the neural networks of brain. The patterns are obviously different when we are unconscious, as in sleep or anesthesia. When those patterns change in certain measurable ways, they create consciousness. Compared to the unconscious state, our beingness during consciousness is more amenable to change and more able to initiate thought and action. In that sense, we are a different being when conscious, one that can influence its own nature through explicit thought. Explicit awareness can be attributed to a being acting like an avatar on behalf of brain and body that can command action in the present, facilitate formation of memories, and program circuitry for the future.

Freedom of action in these firing patterns comes from several sources. One is the enormous amount of statistical degrees of freedom in neural networks. Every possible choice has a certain probability that it will be made, and no one option is inevitable at any given moment of choice. A more direct kind of freedom comes from the inherent self-organizing capacity of neuronal networks. The book explores the mechanisms by which neural circuits make choices and decisions and proposes chaos dynamics as one way the brain can generate free will.

Conscious choices are indeed influenced by unconscious biases, but we can be aware of predilections and countermand them. Choices are not necessarily pre-ordained, and thus they manifest the kind of free will that is most relevant to everyday life. The issue of free will is not so much whether we have any, but how able we are to develop and use the free will capacity we have.

What Does Memorization Say about Free Will?

Scientific and philosophical fashion these days is to claim that humans have no free will. That is, we are basically biological robots, driven to our thoughts, beliefs, and actions by unconscious forces in our brain. Our genes and our experiential programming control everything we do. Free will is an illusion.

So goes the assertions of a clutch of activist scientists, such as Richard, Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Wegner, who have probably gotten rich off their best-seller books arguing the case against free will.

Religion is also nailed to the cross, so to speak. Ideas of moral responsibility originate in views of right and wrong, and every religion expects that followers have the capacity to make the correct choices. Their free-will capacity makes them morally responsible. I think it is no accident that most of the illusory free-will activists I have read are also activists for atheism. Otherwise, their position would be cognitively dissonant.

Legal issues arise, as stated by the legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen, who wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “Since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all behavior could potentially be excused? … The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.”

There are serious social consequences attached to accepting the premise of illusory free will. One is the obvious conclusion one should draw that consciously willed effort to improve oneself or lot in life is futile.

Another consequence of such thinking is the need to proclaim, as many scientists now do, that consciousness cannot do anything. Freely chosen actions would have to come from a conscious brain. Therefore, the conscious brain must not be the source of actions that occur during consciousness. Consciousness is thus seen as audience watching a movie of what is happening.

Of course, the futility argument is not evidence for free will. It is however, a practical reason to believe in it, for otherwise people would not make much effort to change and improve themselves. They would otherwise become intellectually and emotionally paralyzed by such nihilism.

This is not the place to elaborate the research that neuroscientists claim provides the basis for asserting illusory free will. I do that in my just-released book, Mental Biology: The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. I point out the uncontrolled variables in the experiments conducted in the 1980s that purported to show there is no free will. Subsequent reports that confirmed those findings had the same poorly controlled variables. Moreover, there are some new studies using better designs that show that the original findings do not withstand scrutiny.

So, is there a reasoned counter-argument? Eddy Nahmias points out that "the sciences of the mind do give us good reasons to think that our minds are made of matter. But to conclude that consciousness or free will is thereby an illusion is too quick. It is like inferring from discoveries in organic chemistry that life is an illusion just because living organisms are made up of non-living stuff."

In my new book, I have a large section defending the position that consciousness IS able to do things, among them exerting at least a significant modicum of freely chosen thoughts and actions. One line of argument, which is in line with the learning and memory theme of this blog site, is memorization. It is true that the brain is forming memories of a day's events while you sleep and obviously unconscious. But the initial encoding and working memory are performed while you are conscious. Moreover, conscious use of mnemonic devices profoundly enhances the formation of memory, as I will demonstrate in future posts about how "memory athletes" do such astonishing working-memory feats as learning the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards in a minute and a half or memorizing 80-digit number strings. Conscious use of mnemonics is required. Using these mnemonics is challenging, requiring intense selective attention and strongly will executive functions. You obviously cannot do such things when you are unconscious.

Skeptics will say that such feats are all driven and performed by the unconscious mind and that consciousness is just around to realize it has happened. But consciousness is also around to recite what was memorized. Try that in your sleep.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (2014). Mental Biology. The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. New York: Prometheus.

Nahmias, Eddy (2011). Is neuroscience the death of free will? New York Times. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/is-neuroscience-the-death-of-free-will/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

The Role of Learning and Memory in "Free Will"

One common definition of “free will” is that a person can decide or choose among multiple alternatives without being forced by physical laws, luck, fate, or divine will. Most of us feel we are in charge of our choices when no outside force requires us to make a particular choice. But it is fashionable these days for scholars to insist that free will is an illusion, a trick the brain plays on us. I will spare you the philosophical knots of specious assumptions and convoluted logic that that scholars tie themselves into.

Why do I bring this up? What has the “free will” issue have to do with learning and memory? Everything.

Human brains make choices consciously and unconsciously by real-time evaluation of alternatives in terms of what has been learned previously from other situations and of their anticipated usefulness. This learning occurs in the context of the learned sense of self, which begins unconsciously in the womb. The conscious brain is aware that it is aware of choice processing and makes decisions in light of such understanding. When a given alternative choice is not forced, the conscious mind is aware that it is not obliged to accept any one choice but is "free" to select any one of the available options. Such realization might even guide many decisions at the subconscious level. In either case, the probable value of each alternative is weighed in neural networks, which collectively reach a "decision" by inhibiting networks that lead to less-favored alternatives. Thus, network activity underlying the preferred choice prevails and leads to a selective willed action. What governs the  network activity causing the final choice is the activity in other networks, which in turn is governed by stored memories and real-time processing of the current environmental choice contingencies. 

What usually gets left out of free-will discussions is the question of how a brain establishes stored-memory preferences and how it evaluates current contingencies. These functions surely cause things to happen, but what is the cause of the cause? Any given brain can choose within certain limits its learning experiences and what it will store as lasting memory. Those choices in turn are often governed by what a brain has learned about the self-interest value associated with given contingencies. So, it is learned values that underlie much of choice behavior.

Brain circuitry assigns value, and values chosen are largely optional choices. The conscious brain directs the choices that govern value formation, reinforcement, and preservation in memory.

Now we are confronted with explaining how neural circuit impulse patterns (CIP) representing the sense of self can have a free will. First, I reason that each person has a conscious Avatar that is created by brain as an active agent to act in the world on embodied brain’s behalf, as explained more completely in my recent book.[1] This is reminiscent of the 3^rd Century idea of a homunculus, a “little person” inside the brain. The modern view is that this homunculus exists in the form of mapped circuitry.

Certain maps are created under genetic control. These include the topographic map of the body in the sensory and motor cortices. Then there is the capacity for real-time construction of maps of the body in space that resides in circuitry of the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. Other maps are created from learning experience from the near-infinite circuit capacity of association cortex. What is learned in these maps is stored in memory as facilitated circuit synapses and deployed “on-line” in the form of CIP representations of what was originally learned. New learning likewise exists as CIP representations in sub-network populations.

The Avatar itself is a constellation of CIPs representing the conscious sense of self. Certainly, by definition, the Avatar can make choices and decisions. The Avatar is released in wakefulness from its stored representation to make its own choices and decisions. Avatar processing is certainly not random, and presumably can occur with more degrees of freedom than found in unconscious mind.

If the Avatar exists as CIPs, how can something as “impersonal” and physiological as that have any kind of “will,” much less free will. Let us recall that “will” is little more than an intent that is often coupled with bodily actions to achieve the intent. This kind of thing occurs even in the circuitry that controls unconscious minds. These circuits automatically generate actions in response to conditions that call for a response. Such actions are stereotyped and inflexible whenever they are controlled without conscious oversight (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 llustration of how alternative ideas or choices may be processed in the brain. Each alternative is represented as circuit impulse patterns (CIPs) within a subpopulation of brain, which be considered as constituting part of the sub- or non-conscious mind. Each population’s activity interacts with the others — and with the CIP representation of the Conscious Avatar. When activity level in any one subpopulation reaches a threshold, it suppresses activity in the alternative representation populations, leading to selection of that population’s activity as the choice result. The Avatar CIP is poised to influence activity in the alternative sub-populations and thus can help direct the final processing result.

The Avatar must have some criteria which its circuits use to make a given decision. Those criteria have been learned and remembered. When CIP processes operate in Avatar circuitry, the Avatar population activity can modulate the alternative-choice representations in the context of self-awareness according to the informational representations of past learning and value assessments of current contingencies. You might say that when the brain generated the CIPs to represent the sense of self, those CIPs were endowed with a certain autonomy and freedom of action not available to the other CIPs in the brain that constituted unconscious mind.

People who believe that humans have no free will are hard-pressed to explain why no one is responsible for their choices and actions. What is it that compels foolish or deviant behavior? Is our Avatar compelled to believe in God or to be an atheist? Is our Avatar compelled to accept one moral code over any other? Is it compelled to become a certain kind of person, with no option to “improve” itself in any self-determined way? Are we compelled in our choices of learning experiences? If so, what or who does the compelling? Are we inevitable victims of genetics and experience?

It seems to this Avatar that current debates about determinism and free will tend to obscure the important matters of our humanness. The door to understanding what is really going on is slammed shut by assertions that value choices and the decisions that flow from them cannot be free because they are caused by neural circuit impulse patterns. Free will debates distract us from a proper framing of the issues about human choices and personal responsibility.

While it is true that Avatar circuitry is programmed by genetics and experience, the Avatar makes choices about who to interact with and what experiences to value, promote, and allow. The Avatar can insist that some lessons of experience need to be remembered. In short, the Avatar gets to help shape what it becomes.

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[1] Klemm, W. R. 2011. Atoms of Mind. New York: Springer. http://www.springer.com/biomed/neuroscience/book/978-94-007-1096-2