Un dialogo (come altri) tra Tim e Riccardo (lo scrittore e il filosofo) sul libero arbitrio.
The stumbling block for any materialist vision of consciousness remains the question of free will. A modern, enlightened person tends to feel he or she has rejected a mystical, immaterial conception of the eternal soul, in exchange for a strictly scientific notion of consciousness and selfhood as something created by the billions of neurons in our heads with their trillions of synapses and complex chemical and electrical processes. Nevertheless, the fact of our being entirely material, hence subject to the laws of cause and effect introduces the concern that our lives might be altogether determined. And yet we have the impression of making choices, indeed of having choices to make, sometimes hard choices. Is it possible that this experience of decision-making is entirely illusory, that a chain of physical events in our bodies and brains will anyway cause us to act in the way we do, whatever our experience of the process may be.
In my conversations with the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti, he has shifted the location of conscious away from the brain and its neurons, suggesting that in fact our experience is made up, not of representations in the head, but of the very world we perceive. The self, in this theory, become the accumulation of all the objects, or experiences, that come into being when the body encounters material reality, our perceptive faculties and nervous system carving out from the mass of atoms, neutrons and photons around us, the world that we are. But if this is the case, if subject and object are one in experience, does this not make it all the more difficult to explain our impression of being separate individuals obliged at every moment to decide how we are going to act. Isn’t it precisely this moment by moment awareness of making decisions that proves that we are separate and sovereign subjects moving in a world of objects which remain quite distinct from us and over which we have an obvious mastery?
Tim Parks. Riccardo, you’ve dubbed your ideas The Mind Object Theory, insisting that mind and object are one. But if this is the case, what possible free will can we have. Doesn’t your theory actually fly in the face of the most ordinary experience of all, deciding to do this rather than that, or even, most simply, to look at this rather than that?
Riccardo. When we choose to do something, could have we chosen to do otherwise? Moreover, if we are physicalist, as I am, there are only things in the world, thus we must humbly concede that there is a thing, a physical process, something that chooses what we do? The question of free will is alike to the question as to what we are.
Tim. According to science we are our brain. Didn’t Francis Crick claim that we are nothing but our neurons and what they do? This was his astonishing hypothesis.
Riccardo. Yes, the problem about freedom is the problem of the identity of the one in charge. Who and what is the governor of our actions. Who and what is the boss? Crick and many neuroscientists have repeatedly tried to convince us that we are our neurons, thus neurons are the things that chooses for us. The problem is that we do not feel to be our neurons. We do not have anything in common with our neurons, thus we are not enthusiast to the notion that neurons have taken over our life! If we look at someone’s neurons, it is hardly believable that those cells are the one to be held responsible for our mischiefs, sins, crimes, misdeeds, and occasionally virtuous actions. Or maybe many people might find consolation in putting the blame on neurons, as it happens when one is not held responsible for his or her actions because a tumor invaded the cerebral cortex. But for the issue at hand, such a loss of responsibility is not convincing for the same reason! the tumor is considered to be different from one’s self. Thus are neurons really guilty and worth of praise? Are they the thing we are? The notion seems questionable. By instinct we do not feel to be identical with our cerebral cortex.
Tim. That is why we have the traditional notion of a soul, a person, who is in charge and that exerts its will through the body.
Riccardo. Of course, this is the traditional notion namely that there is a ghost inside the body who is the real governor, the one in charge; a solution that sooths our sense of ownership! We are the puppeteers moving our brains like puppets. Unfortunately, such a solution runs afoul everything we know about nature; it is scientifically untenable. If there were an additional self it would contradict the principle of the conservation of energy. If it were not physical, as Descartes indeed supposed, how would it interact with our neurons? Moreover there is rather convincing evidence from neuroscience that our brains anticipate our conscious experience of willing to do something. A few decades ago, Benjamin Libet discovered that when we are conscious of willing to do something, say pressing a button, our brain had been preparing that motor activation for quite sometime, from 300 msec to a few seconds. Recent more refined findings by Patrick Haggard and independently Thomas Haynes-Dylan have confirmed this state of things. Long before we are aware of our conscious will, our brains have already prepared the stage. When, on a sudden whim, John kisses Johan, John’s brain has been moving in that direction by quite a while!
Tim. I don’t understand. First you claim that we are not our neurons, then you present good reasons for the brain to be in charge of one’s actions. In fact, if the brain prepares one’s actions and there is no immaterial self, what else could be the cause of one’s choices?
Riccardo. That’s the point! The world, the world we are identical with.
Tim. This is one of catchphrase you are so fond of and that nobody gets the meaning of it.
Riccardo. When I see a new flaming new car and then I want to buy it, what is the cause of my actions? Is it not the car itself? Why should I put an intermediate entity halfway between the car and what my body does? The car is both the thing that I am and the cause of my actions. This coincidence is not a simplification, it is the culprit. What else could we be other than the thing that is the cause of our action? After all, this is not different from what neuroscientists claim when they say that neurons are both the thing we are and the cause of our actions. But neurons are not pristine sources of causal chains. Their internal activity is caused by something else, the external world. Each neuron is like a station in which signals gets into as they were trains. If we trace back, hopping backward from dendrites to synapses, sooner or later we will come out of the brain through some sensor organs. We will literally fall out the body in the world.
Tim
Riccardo. Think again. When you think about your goals are they not part of the external world? What do we desires and crave for? Phones, shelter, sex, objects, people, Juliet, Romeo. Are they not things in the external world that came to be part of that unique world that is us? Famously, Steve Jobs claimed that people do not know what they want until you show it to them! This is truer than the though. People do not want something until you show it to them, because they do not want it. Once you show it to them, they are made of it.
Tim. But is it not the brain that has the last action? One can always preempt some action at the last minute. Even according to Libet and the neuroscientist of the will, there is always the possibily of some late minute intervention.
Riccardo. But what would that late minute prempting neural activity be caused by? I would like to kiss Juliet, but some dreadful cautionary tale about what happened to my Montecchi’s relative last time he got in love with a Capuleti’s girls interferes. What is that halts me at the very last minute when I am on the brink of sealing my fate on against Juliet’s lips?
The point is that I always do what I want. We all always do only what we want. If we didn’t want it, we wouldn’t do it! Yes, of course, we can be in chain and we cannot leave our dark prison, but this is like arguing that we would like to fly. Among the thing that our body can do, given the external constraints, the thing our body does is precisely the thing we want to do. We could gnaw our hands and gain our freedom at a terrible price, but we do not. At any moment in our life, we do precisely what we want to do. What we do is the expression of what we are. What are we then? We are the world that is exerting an effect on our body at that precise moment.
Tim. Thus we are really the puppeteer pulling the ropes moving our body, only we are not immaterial.
Riccardo. My body is like a proxy though which a body acts on the world. I quoted Steve Jobs, this reminds me of its most successful product, the IPhone. Our body is like a phone through which a world acts on the world. When you speak with a phone, you do not think that the phone is choosing what to say. We know there is some external cause, somewhere, that is causally effecting the phone in such a way that the phone produces the right sounds (the voice I hear). But the phone, in itself, has no autonomy. Likewise, a body is like a highly sophisticated phone capable not only of emitting sound and displaying a little image, but able to move, … and little else, as a matter of fact. But through movements it can achieve a great deal.
A few years ago, in a dystopic movie with Bruce Willis, people remained home safely protected while sending around very realistic human-shaped robots capable of mimicking real human bodies. They called such replicas, surrogates. Basically a surrogate is a walking mobile phone with hands and legs. A human body is like a surrogate, only that we do not see its controller because such a controller is the collection of objects and things that acts on such a body.
Tim.
Riccardo. As we mentioned in our last dialogue, the body is a fulcrum and the levers are moved by the objects we are identical with. This allows us to solve Libet’s dilemma. It is true that our brains anticipate the stage for our conscious actions but they do that under the influence of the past which is affecting our body now. Why are we conscious of our will only at the last minute just before or while our actions are performed by our body? Because it is only when our body does something that the effect is finally consumed and thus that the relative object is singled out among many possible past combinations of causes. The readiness potential slowly building up in the cortex is like to flood mounting against a precarious dam. Only when the dam tumbles down, the water flows down. Yet, the cause of the flood is not created by the dam, the cause is, say, the terrible thunderstorm and the insistent rain that battered the landscape for days. Our actions shapes the world we live in not only forward but also backward. What we do reveals what we are. And we are not a bunch of cells in a cranium, but a world of things that produce effects by means of a body acting as a phone, an intermediate structure.
Tim
Riccardo. By and large, the issue of free will arises from what I call the fallacy of the intermediate cause or intermediate entity. Consider an analogy. You have a car, a wheel and its wheels. You turn the wheel with your hands and, by means of a complex yet conceivable series of gears, the vehicles wheels turn accordingly. Is there an intermediate entity between wheel and wheels responsible for the direction change? Of course not. As long as we can conceive all the causal links, we feel no need to add any additional entity. Imagine a more complex situation. This time we have a human body, the world acts on the body but, before the body is going to translate that cause into an effect (the cause), a humongous yet finite number of causal hops can take place. Since we cannot easily visualize the whole causal chain, we slip into the habit of inventing an intermediate entity to which we attribute a causal power. Yet, such an intermediate entity is not real, it is nothing but a shortcut, an invention, a narrative self, a center of narrative gravity, the offshoot of our ubiquitous intentional stance. Yet, who has ever seen a self? As David Hume wrote, we never meet selves. We meet ideas. I would rather say, as a physicalist, we never meet selves, we meet objects. We are objects too.
Tim. What about free will? Everything seems to be determinate by the external world? There is no space to do anything different. We are caused by the past.
Riccardo. This is the fundamental observation, yet there is a catch. Usually what you just said is the mortal blow for any theory of free will, since it suggests that we are determined by the external world. This is not the case here though. For two reasons. First. We are not determined by the external world, we are the external world. Thus we are not pulled by something which is not us. On the contrary, we are the very thing, or collection of things, that causes our behavior. We are not determined by something else. We are the thing that causes what our body does. Second. The external object that causes our body to act is not an absolute object, but a relative object. It is what it is relatively to our body. Thus, it does not exist unless our body allows it to take place. Thus, things are a bit more complex. The present is the condition for the existence of a relative object, which is the thing we are and the thing that causes the body to act in a certain way. I believe freedom lies in this ontological cradle where past and present come into existence as a whole.
Tim.
Riccardo. Remember the famous E.M. Foster’s quote “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Is it not tantamount to Jobs’ quote? How do I know what I want until someone show it to me?
Riccardo Manzotti
Photograph 