[This article has now been released from the Sage’s Cave and all Labbers should be able to access it.]
There has been this fascinating debate among philosophers and scientists over the years as to whether ‘free will’ exists. Some reject the notion outright and others tout that humans are able to make their own decisions for which they should be accountable.
Designing robots that run on the Xzistor Concept brain model makes it patently clear what the answer is – but I still enjoy nothing more than to drop this questions into conversations:
‘Do humans have a free will or is it just the nerve cells in your brain that process data and kick out your actions an in a way you have no control over?’
So fascinated has the scientific community been with this that comprehensive experiments have been conducted to test people’s notion on this concept.
Over the years I have collected some information on these tests and experiments by scientists and philosophers. I do not plan to delve into this too much, but would like to mention one or two in summary.
I was also interested to see another article reporting that scientists have found the ‘free will’ center in the human brain using CT scans…
As this is a hobbyist site, I am going to offer one example of such an experiment by quoting sections directly from an article in the Scientific American magazine by Shaun Nichols on August 19, 2008 called Free Will versus the Programmed Brain. Shaun Nichols is a philosopher at the University of Arizona. Please feel free to read the complete article here. All the text below in italics means I have quoted it verbatim from his article.
If our actions are determined by prior events, then do we have a choice about anything—or any responsibility for what we do?
Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that free will doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free. This kind of anti-free will stance stretches back to 18th century philosophy, but the idea has recently been getting much more exposure through popular science books and magazine articles. Should we worry? If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility?
In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by giving participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick, a biochemist and Nobel laureate (as co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA double helix). Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage begins as follows: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”
The passage then goes on to talk about the neural basis of decisions and claims that “…although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” The other participants got a passage that was similarly scientific-sounding, but it was about the importance of studying consciousness, with no mention of free will.
After reading the passages, all participants completed a survey on their belief in free will. Then comes the inspired part of the experiment. Participants were told to complete 20 arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that when the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen, too. The participants were told that no one would know whether they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.
The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! (That is, they pressed the space bar less often than the other participants.) Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.
Skipping some text here.
On the other hand, the results fit with what some philosophers had predicted. The Western conception idea of free will seems bound up with our sense of moral responsibility, guilt for misdeeds and pride in accomplishment. We hold ourselves responsible precisely when we think that our actions come from free will. In this light, it’s not surprising that people behave less morally as they become skeptical of free will. Further, the Vohs and Schooler result fits with the idea that people will behave less responsibly if they regard their actions as beyond their control. If I think that there’s no point in trying to be good, then I’m less likely to try.
Skipped some more text here.
Many philosophers and scientists reject free will and, while there has been no systematic study of the matter, there’s currently little reason to think that the philosophers and scientists who reject free will are generally less morally upright than those who believe in it. But this raises yet another puzzling question about the belief in free will. People who explicitly deny free will often continue to hold themselves responsible for their actions and feel guilty for doing wrong. Have such people managed to accommodate the rest of their attitudes to their rejection of free will? Have they adjusted their notion of guilt and responsibility so that it really doesn’t depend on the existence of free will? Or is it that when they are in the thick of things, trying to decide what to do, trying to do the right thing, they just fall back into the belief that they do have free will after all?
I encourage you to read the whole article by Shaun Nichols in Scientific American. I plan to still explain some other interesting concepts at the hand of my brain model, e.g. guilt, pity, remorse, mercy, etc and also talk about the law and the effect of punitive measures? Think about it, why punish a person when they have no control over their actions? We will see that it can still make sense from a retraining the brain perspective, and to ‘deter future criminals from embarking on the same criminal activity’…
So luckily all the doubt has been removed by modern technology whereby some scientists were actually able to locate the ‘free will centre’ in the mind….or was it?
In the online article Neuroscientists just isolated the part of the brain that controls free will by Jessica Hall on July 19, 2016 in ExtremeTech website, writes as follows (all text in italics is quoted verbatim from her article):
Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we’ve cracked the problem with an fMRI. Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins report in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that they were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision — how activity in the brain changes during the deliberation over whether to act.
Skipped some text here.
With regards to connectivity in the brain, the actual process of switching attention from one side to the other was tightly linked with activity in the parietal lobe, which is sort of the top back quadrant of the brain. Activity during the period of deliberation before a choice took place in the frontal cortex, which engages in reasoning and plans movement. Deliberation also lit up the basal ganglia, important parts of the deep brain that handle motor control, including the initiation of motion. The basal ganglia has also been an important target for research on dopaminergic diseases like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s, but the area has also been implicated in OCD, which has a lot to do with attention and volition.
Connectivity isn’t the only important factor here, though. Participants’ frontal-lobe activity began earlier than it would have if participants had been cued to shift attention, which demonstrates that the brain was planning a voluntary action rather than merely following an order. Following commands or running through practiced actions, like the way you can sometimes drive home on autopilot, don’t need the same lead time. Timing is crucial.
It’s worth pointing out, too, that this is an entirely novel research tool. It should be examined and held up to criticism and comparison, because it stands to revolutionize how we study not just the brain but the mind. Now that scientists have a way to follow the execution of free will, they can use the technique to watch what’s happening in the brain as people navigate more complex decisions, such as weighing short-term rewards against long-term rewards — and perhaps even pinpoint the tipping point between them.
Eh, this is all good stuff – except that the Xzistor Concept indicates that there is no such thing as free will – nil, niyet, naught, zero, zip. Having said that, we must all just make sure we know what we mean when we refer to ‘free will’.
Free will can be identified as a capability by a human to override or adapt decisions (including urges and compulsions) made by the brain. Like so many other complex behaviours, once we analyse them using the Xzistor Concept – it in effect becomes a no-brainer (pardon the pun). I mean after all, how is the human going to override the decisions made by the brain? It can only be by using that very same brain? So it is the same brain making the final decision again!
The Xzistor Concept allows us to model and understand the first few seconds of the brain after birth (breathing, rooting, suck, etc. reflexes), followed by the identification of the ‘mother’ and later how to learn words and navigate to other food sources. Every step of the way we can download a digital ‘memory file’ from the robot with the push of a single button. We can scrutinise the robot’s brain line by line as the memory database grows and the robot keeps on learning. The robot will/can only ever make decisions by making use of this stored information. The robot cannot control the way the logic algorithms store or retrieve data, or how they make decisions based on this memory file.
By looking at a simple robot running on the Xzistor Concept, it is really very clear how this learning and decision-making process works. There is nothing involved other than the brain itself.
When we look at humans, we only have our brains to make us do everything we do every second of the day. Even those decisions we think we make on our own account are indeed just the processes (fixed algorithms) that had been running in our brains from day 1 – but using the now expanded memory file of all our life experiences. This has significant implications.
For instance, we can ask: Are people guilty of misdemeanors? Is it unfair to punish someone (the brain owner) for what the brain made them do? Should we stop caring and allow ourselves absolute moral latitude – seeing that we control nothing and hence cannot be held responsible for anything?
The Xzistor Concept has taught me many things about the brain. It made me think about the way people use alcohol to make their brains ‘work differently’. Then their is coffee, adrenaline, cocaine, heroin – etc. that we can inject into the brain to change how it works (and how it makes us feel). But at the end of the day – it is the brain itself that comes to the conclusion that it should put some caffeine, chocolate, cocaine, whisky, etc. in the tank to make it work differently and feel better emotionally.
It is impossible to get away from the fact that we are our brains – and our bodies are just the containers/hosts that provide a protective scull, oxygen and nutrients to the brain. This allows the brain to move around using effectors (arms, legs, hands, etc.) and do exactly what it wants to do – cleverly pretending to be ‘us’ and getting ‘us’ into all kinds of sticky situations.
One can take this even further. One can say that all the nerve cells (neurons) in the brain only consist of molecules formed of atoms which mindlessly follow the rules of physics. Like a colleague said the other day: ‘It’s all dumb stuff down there!’
That need not be a depressing thought as many magical things are built up from basic building blocks that in themselves do not account for much. The magic happens at the integrated level. The physical parts supporting the software that runs the Xzistor Concept in the brains of robots also just comprise silicon chips and printed circuit boards, etc. But it is a little weird to think that even all our deepest thoughts and emotions are merely the result of atoms moving about in the manner physics want them to…and the fact that these mindless motions make up our minds…all we do right and all we do wrong!
You might think one can’t take it any further than this, but I do want to mention something important that is solidly based on all of the above. I hope you have heard of my Ethical Design and Development Code (EDDC) by now. So you will notice that an important rule that comes out of it is: Rule 1: The Responsible Designer retains ultimate responsibility for the actions of the robot he/she designs and the robots that those robots design. This means the designer will remain responsible for both the good and bad done by his/her original creation.
You can still chose to ‘punish’ the created robots (or the robots they have created) for their wrongdoing in the hope that this will retrain their brains to not repeat the bad behaviour and deter other robots form engaging in similar bad behaviours. But the guilty party is the creator of the robots?
Because the creator had a free will. Right?