(Image: S.Godere/Plainpicture) How you emerge from your brain by Holly Anderson at New Scientist IT IS common to feel uncomfortable when reading about new neuroscience techniques that seem to encroach on the sacrosanct realm of our hidden inner lives. And it is understandable to feel even more uncomfortable about the notion that our actions are dictated by processes in our brains, calling into question a place for moral responsibility. This discomfort pervades Eliezer Sternberg’s new book. In My Brain Made Me Do It, Sternberg dips into philosophy, psychology and neuroscience research as he considers the various evidence that suggests we lack free will and thus a foundation for moral responsibility. Strange cases from psychology and neuroscience pose problems for a naive view of human agency. What if your hand started grabbing things of its own accord? Or if you were compelled to use every tool you found in front of you? Keep some grains of salt handy as you are reading. The tone Sternberg takes to the possibility of widespread acceptance of neurobiological determinism is of the sky-is-falling variety. With over 40,000 practising neuroscientists, it isn’t hard to find juicy quotes dismissing the existence of free will, but it is inaccurate to characterise this as the general attitude of the field. Sternberg addresses two related problems throughout the book. The first concerns the wide range of influences on our actions that we are unaware of at any given moment. If an action I take is triggered by unconscious sensory input, am I employing free will? The second, known as the “causal exclusion problem” in philosophy, is the one that really disturbs Sternberg. You, in the grand sense of “you” - your thoughts, emotions, volition and moral reasoning - depend on neuronal processing in your brain. If the firings of any neuron are enough to cause the next neuron to fire, your brain runs all on its own. There is no extra place in which you, as a higher-level, conscious being, can direct proceedings and assert free will. This clockwork determinism undermines any causal role we could have in our own actions - and, by implication, our responsibility for those actions. So what is Sternberg’s answer to the problem of free will? Emergence. This concept can be roughly summed up as “the whole is more than the sum of the parts”. Just as temperature emerges from a collection of molecules even though it does not exist at the level of individual molecules, free will, Sternberg argues, emerges from otherwise deterministic processes at the level of neurons. Philosophers and scientists have been debating the merits of emergence in solving the free will problem since the 1920s. Rather than providing an account of exactly how free will could emerge from deterministic processes, Sternberg offers an analogy with the theory of continental drift. When it was first proposed, scientists dismissed it because it lacked a mechanism to account for how such massive objects could move over huge distances. Sternberg’s moral is that even though we don’t know how free will emerges, we will some day, so we shouldn’t throw moral responsibility out the window just yet. Unfortunately, Sternberg misses his own point, and falls prey to the very line of thinking that he criticises. He offers “reflective introspection” as an alternative for addressing moral problems instead of what he calls the algorithmic approach, in which rules are computed to yield firm answers in decision-making situations. But at the end of the day, whether we reason with rules or by transcending rules, we still can’t escape the fact that we reason using our brains. The problem comes in thinking that we are somehow sufficiently separate from our brains that those brains can tell us what to do or vice versa. Your brain, for better or for worse, is just the mechanism for being you.

(Image: S.Godere/Plainpicture)

How you emerge from your brain

by Holly Anderson at New Scientist

IT IS common to feel uncomfortable when reading about new neuroscience techniques that seem to encroach on the sacrosanct realm of our hidden inner lives. And it is understandable to feel even more uncomfortable about the notion that our actions are dictated by processes in our brains, calling into question a place for moral responsibility. This discomfort pervades Eliezer Sternberg’s new book.

In My Brain Made Me Do It, Sternberg dips into philosophy, psychology and neuroscience research as he considers the various evidence that suggests we lack free will and thus a foundation for moral responsibility. Strange cases from psychology and neuroscience pose problems for a naive view of human agency. What if your hand started grabbing things of its own accord? Or if you were compelled to use every tool you found in front of you?

Keep some grains of salt handy as you are reading. The tone Sternberg takes to the possibility of widespread acceptance of neurobiological determinism is of the sky-is-falling variety. With over 40,000 practising neuroscientists, it isn’t hard to find juicy quotes dismissing the existence of free will, but it is inaccurate to characterise this as the general attitude of the field.

Sternberg addresses two related problems throughout the book. The first concerns the wide range of influences on our actions that we are unaware of at any given moment. If an action I take is triggered by unconscious sensory input, am I employing free will?

The second, known as the “causal exclusion problem” in philosophy, is the one that really disturbs Sternberg. You, in the grand sense of “you” - your thoughts, emotions, volition and moral reasoning - depend on neuronal processing in your brain. If the firings of any neuron are enough to cause the next neuron to fire, your brain runs all on its own. There is no extra place in which you, as a higher-level, conscious being, can direct proceedings and assert free will. This clockwork determinism undermines any causal role we could have in our own actions - and, by implication, our responsibility for those actions.

So what is Sternberg’s answer to the problem of free will? Emergence. This concept can be roughly summed up as “the whole is more than the sum of the parts”. Just as temperature emerges from a collection of molecules even though it does not exist at the level of individual molecules, free will, Sternberg argues, emerges from otherwise deterministic processes at the level of neurons.

Philosophers and scientists have been debating the merits of emergence in solving the free will problem since the 1920s. Rather than providing an account of exactly how free will could emerge from deterministic processes, Sternberg offers an analogy with the theory of continental drift. When it was first proposed, scientists dismissed it because it lacked a mechanism to account for how such massive objects could move over huge distances. Sternberg’s moral is that even though we don’t know how free will emerges, we will some day, so we shouldn’t throw moral responsibility out the window just yet.

Unfortunately, Sternberg misses his own point, and falls prey to the very line of thinking that he criticises. He offers “reflective introspection” as an alternative for addressing moral problems instead of what he calls the algorithmic approach, in which rules are computed to yield firm answers in decision-making situations.

But at the end of the day, whether we reason with rules or by transcending rules, we still can’t escape the fact that we reason using our brains. The problem comes in thinking that we are somehow sufficiently separate from our brains that those brains can tell us what to do or vice versa. Your brain, for better or for worse, is just the mechanism for being you.