Thinking Christian

This from Scientific American raises interesting questions regarding knowledge: The Will to Power–Is “Free Will” All in Your Head?

The author, Christof Koch, apparently wants to balance philosophical questions with scientific ones. I appreciate his trying—but he doesn’t succeed. Not even if we ignore the oddly inappropriate allusion to Nietzsche in the title (for which Koch may not be responsible, as titles are often written by editors instead).

His topic is the perceptual effects experience by patients during brain surgery. Neurosurgeons have long used electrical stimulation to test what is going on in regions of the brain near where they are working. Patients, who are under local anesthetic, report various perceptual experiences during these surgeries, or their limbs may move without any intention on their part. The current article touches on both perception and motion. It describes a sensation scientists have termed “intention,” described by patients as “an urge to move a limb,” or the feeling of “a need to move the leg, elbow, or arm.” Or, as stated in one French study,

Patients made comments (in French) such as “It felt like I wanted to move my foot. Not sure how to explain,” “I had a desire to move my right hand,” or “I had a desire to roll my tongue in my mouth.” In none of these cases did they actually carry out the movement to which they referred. But the external stimulation caused an unambiguous conscious feeling of wanting to move. And this feeling arose from within, without any prompting by the examiner and not during sham stimulation.

The question this raises, as indicated in the article’s title, is whether this means intentionality is just a neural process; and if it is, whether that means that deciding to do what we do is just a neural (physical/chemical) process, too, and if our sensation of intentional decision-making is misleading. If so, that implies that human free will is an illusion.

One one level Koch seems quite appropriately cautious. His closing sentence reads,

In the debate concerning the meaning of personal freedom, these discoveries represent true progress, beyond the eternal metaphysical question of free will that will never be answered.

Scientists have made progress, he says, but there never will be an answer. Now, I’m thankful he did not jump to the materialist conclusion that the mind is necessarily a purely physical entity, subject to the same physical necessities as any other physical system. That would be a typical naturalistic/materialistic response. I applaud him for his restraint on that. He was not quite so even-handed, however, near the beginning of his article:

Surely there must have been times in high school or college when you laid in bed, late at night, and wondered where your “free will” came from? What part of the brain—if it is the brain—is responsible for deciding to act one way or another? One traditional answer is that this is not the job of the brain at all but rather of the soul. Hovering above the brain like Casper the Friendly Ghost, the soul freely perturbs the networks of the brain, thereby triggering the neural activity that will ultimately lead to behavior.

Although such dualistic accounts are emotionally reassuring and intuitively satisfying, they break down as soon as one digs a bit deeper. How can this ghost, made out of some kind of metaphysical ectoplasm, influence brain matter without being detected? What sort of laws does Casper follow? Science has abandoned strong dualistic explanations in favor of natural accounts that assign causes and responsibility to specific actors and mechanisms that can be further studied. And so it is with the notion of the will.

The “Casper” caricature is not very “Friendly” to serious discourse on the topic. The language of “emotionally reassuring and intuitively satisfying” is rather patronizing. And “metaphysical ectoplasm“? Really, now.

What’s especially telling, however, is the question, “What sort of laws does Casper follow?” It reminds me of Steven Schafersman’s absurdly stated willingness to accept the spiritual if only we discover the “mechanism” by which it operates. Here’s what Koch is saying: Some people believe Casper provides humans with free will, but science can’t accept that possibility because (among other things) it doesn’t know what laws govern Casper’s action. But what does this mean? Scientists cannot accept the reality of free will unless we can discover the laws that rule it!

It’s an absurd thing to say: free will can only make sense if it’s ruled by law, which in the world of natural science, is fairly well synonymous with necessity. Free will is doing what you must do by necessity.

The confusion appears to be that of the scientistic mindset, that cannot break free of natural-law-rules-all thinking long enough to recognize what an absurdity it is.

What’s also on display here is the assumption that there is no knowledge but that which can be gained by science. Now, it’s perfectly appropriate for science to “abandon” a search for “strong dualistic explanations,” for that’s not the kind of thing that science is competent to search for. Here’s what I mean by that: if there are strong dualistic explanations out there, and if they are true ones, they may or may not be discoverable, but they will certainly not be discoverable by means of science, any more than you could discover a sliver of hay in a needle-stack by searching with a magnet. It’s the wrong way to go about looking for it. You might find all kinds of other things, but not what you’re really after.

Koch might recognize that science isn’t the only way to study matters like free will, but if so, he surely didn’t say so. He apparently assumes the soul can be studied only if its effects can be detected somehow (apparently its interaction with the brain doesn’t count). He assumes the soul can be studied only if the laws governing its action can be sorted out. He knows that neither of these will ever happen. And so he concludes free will is an “eternal metaphysical question … that will never be answered.”

It will never be answered by science; that’s true enough. Does that mean it will never be answered? For my part, I’m quite sure that science isn’t our only way to know true things about the world. And I’m quite sure this “eternal metaphysical question” already has been answered. If you think I’m wrong on that, then please feel free to choose to disagree.

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Neurotheology strikes again, this time in an article that begins,

Jan. 4–Having a spiritual experience may be all in your head — or at least part of it. A group of University of Missouri researchers recently completed a study that claims a particular area of the brain is linked to spirituality.

At the risk of over-simplifying the matter, here’s what’s wrong with studies like this one. First, correlation does not equal causation. Knowing what part of the brain is involved doesn’t mean that you know the whole story of what’s happening. Second, strong evidence some of which I’ll have to post later today (please come back in a few hours) shows that the physical brain is not the whole story.

Dr. Brick Johnstone led the study reported on here. His take on spirituality is rather, well, patronizing. Comically so, actually, if the article has represented him accurately.

Dr. Johnstone said he believes the finding is important because it means people can learn to become selfless by decreasing activity in that part of the brain.

If only we’d known that a long time ago! Instead of pre-frontal lobotomies we could have been practicing right parietal lobotomies. Then, finally, everyone would take care of each other and we would all get along at last! Of course Dr. Johnstone doesn’t recommend that–he says prayer and meditation are the way to decrease that activity. But hey, if the mind/brain is just a machine, why not go ahead and do some serious tinkering with it? Well, maybe that’s not fair to Dr. Johnstone. After all,

he cautioned against reducing spirituality to a mere brain function.

No, its not just a brain function. It’s a brain function and a feeling.

“Just because the brain is shutting down, allowing you to be more selfless, that doesn’t take away from the spiritual experience you feel,” Dr. Johnstone said in several news sources.

As the song goes, “Feelings… nothing more than feelings”-–with some selflessness thrown in, by the neat mechanism of turning off some neural circuits and switches. I wonder if he has considered that there is a spiritual core to reality, and that connecting with that spiritual core is a reality too, not just a feeling?

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Some of you have been watching the exchange between Dr. Steven Novella and Dr. Michael Egnor on neuroscience and mind. The most recent installments are here (Dr. Egnor’s), responding to this from Dr. Novella. Dr. Egnor writes in summary to his post,

I’ll get back to Dr. Novella’s specific arguments in my ensuing posts, but Dr. Novella’s invocation of “neuroscience denialism” leaves me dumbfounded.

He’s right. Dr. Novella is playing rhetorical games. This time it’s almost pathetically transparent. Why, oh why do anti-ID people not engage the real argument?

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There is a lively debate going on regarding two views of the mind: dualist vs. materialist. Last month’s New Scientist article, “Creationists Declare War Over the Brain,” prompted responses from several quarters, including one of my own. Dr. Steven Novella wrote a two-part response (Part One, Part Two), taking the opportunity especially to make swipes at Michael Egnor of the Discovery Institute who has written on the topic more than once.

Drs. Egnor and Novella are both physicians, Egnor a neurosurgeon, Novella a neurologist. Novella’s scathing disdain for Egnor is, shall we say, not well disguised (here, for example). So it may be rather audacious for me to jump in with my own thoughts, but here I go anyway.

The question, to borrow terminology from Dr. Novella, is whether every physical effect has a physical cause. That’s one useful definition of materialism. Alternatively, it’s the view that nothing exists except for matter and energy, and their interactions in space and time. While it is not technically identical with naturalism (the view that nature is all that exists; there is no supernatural), for all practical purposes the two may be treated synonymously. Novella’s position can be summarized thus: we don’t know whether materialism is an adequate description of ultimate reality (philosophical naturalism), but science must proceed on the assumption (methodological naturalism) that it is.

The opposing position holds that materialist/naturalist explanations are insufficient for at least some of what we know about reality; dualism, which allows for nonnatural reality of some sort, provides better explanations of at least some phenomena. In this case, it is the mind and brain that are the realities in question.

It goes without saying that materialism is atheistic in practice at least, if not in ultimate principle. If every physical thing in the world can be traced back to just physical causes, then there is no God, or at least no God who does anything in the world. There are theists who are not dualists in the sense Novella, Egnor, and I understand the matter (there’s more to discuss there than we have time for), but there are no theists who are materialists. So you can easily guess on which side of the question I stand.

Novella uncorks the big guns in his two articles: dualism is anti-science, he says.

It is crystal clear . . . that this is about ideology, not science. ID proponents feel that their spiritual ideological world view is threatened by the findings of modern science, and so have decided to undermine it. They want this to be an ideological and cultural war, because in the arena of science they lose. So they claim that science (at least those sciences with which they feel uncomfortable) is nothing more than the ideology of materialism. They want to frame the conflict as that between the traditional, moral, and god-fearing spiritualism on one side, and cold, amoral, mechanistic materialism on the other. This is an emotional fight they feel they can win.

He later tells us how hopeless the fight is:

Does science require methodological naturalism? Yes. This is the real debate going on between mainstream science and various ideological groups who wish to promote a non-naturalist belief system. But this philosophical fight was fought in centuries past – and the naturalists won. The fight is over. But the anti-materialists (really anti-naturalists) want to resurrect this fight, and since they cannot win it in the arena of science they want to fight it in the arena of public opinion and then the legal and academic realms.

But is it really over already? Not on the strength of Novella’s arguments. He treats cavalierly the relation between philosophical and methodological naturalism:

[M]ethodological naturalism posits that nature is all the we can know, regardless of whether or not it is all that there is (which by definition we cannot know).

What does he mean by that parenthetical clause? Is it that we cannot, by definition, know all that there is? That’s a safe statement? Or is he saying that nature is all that we can know, and if there is anything else, we cannot know it? Clearly he means it in the latter sense. Following an extended quotation from the Dover decision, he writes,

The last paragraph is key – the anti-materialist/naturalist movement is really about changing the ground rules of science (re-fighting the fight they lost in the past) to include supernatural explanations, but this is impossible within the necessary framework of science.

The “necessary framework of science,” to Novella, is obviously two things at once: the framework of naturalism is necessary to science; and science is the necessary framework for all of knowledge. The same attitude dominates the first Novella passage I quoted above. If it is “about ideology, not science,” the reason that’s such an awful thing is because anything that is not of science is of the devil. Ideology is of course a highly loaded term; Novella could have substituted the word philosophy to make the same essential point, though with less of a rhetorical jab. Indeed ID proponents would agree that this is a question of philosophy (also of science). Novella’s implication is that if it isn’t about science, it isn’t about knowledge. If it isn’t science, it isn’t knowledge.

The trap there is as obvious as it could be: If it isn’t science, it isn’t knowledge purports to be a knowledge statement, but it cannot claim to be a statement of science. It is a self-defeating proposition.

Science is not the only route to knowledge, and there is no scientific reason to believe that nature is all there is to reality or causation. But for many, including Judge Jones of Dover fame, that’s the way it must be. I referred earlier to Novella’s quote from his decision. It ends with this:

It is notable that defense experts’ own mission, which mirrors that of the IDM itself, is to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world, which the Supreme Court in Edwards and the court in McLean correctly recognized as an inherently religious concept. Edwards, 482

Apparently the ground rules of science do not allow supernatural causation of the natural world. God has been ground-ruled out of existence. Science came along and made him non-existent. And now the ID movement comes along and (gasp!) argues that science might not have that power after all. (Ironically, even if it did have that power, it would have it by virtue of philosophical argument, not lab work.)

In closing (quickly, before the Michigan State-Penn State football game begins) let’s replay part of the first Novella quote I presented above:

They want to frame the conflict as that between the traditional, moral, and god-fearing spiritualism on one side, and cold, amoral, mechanistic materialism on the other.

Rhetorical dismissiveness aside, what’s wrong with framing the conflict in non-scientific terms? Novella wants to frame the conflict as being between the good guys, the guys who trust only science, and the bad guys who let other thinking into the fray. But we’ve already seen he cannot do that; he cannot play the game as if there were a side that trusts only science. As an ID proponent, I’m perfectly comfortable with letting other ideas enter the discussion. Novella is doing it too, he just doesn’t seem to recognize that he’s doing it. “Science is non-ideological,” he says. Ideally that’s true. He wants us also to believe “Novella is non-ideological.” There are none so blind…

Dualism is not dueling with science. Its gauntlet is laid down strictly with materialist science, especially materialist science that claims it is the only source of knowledge of reality.

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Amanda Gefter wrote in New Scientist on October, 22,

Could the next battleground in the ID movement’s war on science be the brain?

[Link: Creationists declare war over the brain - brain - 22 October 2008 - New Scientist]

Some key excerpts:

The article is riddled with words like “worry,” “attack,” “war,” “threat.” Gefter tried to make it seem such language comes from the non-material side primarily, but the effect of it all on materialist scientists shows clearly.

Clearly, while there is a genuine attempt to appropriate neuroscience, it will not influence US laws or education in the way that anti-evolution campaigns can because neuroscience is not taught as part of the core curriculum in state-funded schools. But as Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, emphasises: “This is real and dangerous and coming our way.”

He and others worry because scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons. “Progress in science is slow on many fronts,” says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. “We don’t yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn’t mean cancer has spiritual causes.”

Gefter’s last word is,

What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain – and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the “God of the gaps”.

What can scientists do? Let’s back that question up a step. What can scientists do for what? What are they so concerned to protect? Just this, it seems: science’s hegemony on knowledge; its ownership of all explanations; its insistence that it is the sole source of information. Other than that, what threat does this pose science?

Well, yes, there’s more. Philosophy of mind “threatens” to show that material explanations are not entirely sufficient. That opens the door another crack for the dreaded Intelligent Design to enter.

Be afraid, materialist science. Be very afraid.

I’ll add this before closing: the Evangelical Philosophical Society has also responded to Gefter’s article on their blog, including several corrections of factual errors, and this from J.P. Moreland:

The simple truth is that in both science and philosophy, strict physicalist analysis of consciousness and the self have been breaking down since the mid-1980s. The problems with physicalism have nothing directly to do with theism; they follow from rigorous treatments of consciousness and the self as we know them to be. The real problem comes in trying to explain its origin and for this problem, naturalism in general and Darwinism in particular, are useless. In my view, the only two serious contenders are theism and panpsychism which, contrary to the musings of some, has throughout the history of philosophy been correctly taken as a rival to and not a specification of naturalism.

Angus Menuge also corrected Patricia Churchland’s assertion that non-material views of mind come from an argument from ignorance:

At any given time, scientists should infer the best current explanation of the available evidence, and right now, the best evidence from both neuroscience and rigorous philosophical analysis is that consciousness is not reducible to the physical. Churchland’s refusal to draw this inference is based not on evidence, but on what Karl Popper called “promissory materialism,” a reliance on the mere speculative possibility of a materialistic explanation. Since this attitude can be maintained indefinitely, it means that even if a non-materialist account is correct (and supported by overwhelming evidence), that inconvenient truth can always be ignored.

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Denyse O’Leary was the co-author (with Dr. Mario Beauregard) of a book I reviewed in the April issue of Touchstone magazine: The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. Beauregard has published research (see links from here) challenging some neuroscientists’ view that spiritual experiences can be explained through physical brain science alone, and this book covers his work while also challenging those other scientists’ conclusions, and even their often-questionable research methods.

A few days ago on her Mindful Hack blog, Denyse raised a good question in response to my review, which, by agreement with Touchstone, I will not be posting on the web for at least three months. I’ll quote this much from near the end of it for context, though:

For my money, philosophical approaches are sufficient to put materialism* away for keeps. But that doesn’t make it any less satisfying to learn the heavily hyped “empirical evidence” for materialist neuroscience is distorted, weak, and contradicted by other research.

Denyse wrote,

On the whole, he seems to have liked the book, though he wonders why we cannot demolish materialism through philosophy alone…. Philosophy alone cannot decide the issue. We must look at evidence from science as well.

Well, of course she is right about this. I will not quote her reasons (they are in the ellipsis) since you ought to read them from the source.

She is right in that philosophy has not, in fact, dec ided the issue. “For my money” (as I said), I think it should have done so by now, because materialist views of mind seem to be utterly self-defeating. They place all causation in the literally mindless machinery of electrochemical activity. There’s no room left for any other causation.

Therefore things like reasons and thoughts, which cannot be identified with that machinery, don’t cause anything. If you disagree with that, your disagreement was not caused by any reasons you might have, but by that mindless machinery firing away inside you. That pretty much eliminates your ability to say you have reasoned your way to your conclusion. Your reasons don’t have any power to cause anything, including the conclusions you erroneously think you came to because of your reasons.

Those who try to disagree usually do so by saying that reasons and thoughts actually can be identified with the machinery; that the brain’s physical activity doesn’t have to be distinct from what feels to us like logical reasoning and free decision making. Others say that reasons and thoughts more or less “ride along” on top of the machinery. The first answer, however, makes an illusion out of our freedom to think and to decide, while the other retains the problem of thoughts and reasoning not causing anything at all.

I’m reminded of a comic strip from years ago in which a tiger (I think) jumped up on an elephant and growled out, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you!” The elephant, quite unperturbed, just continued on its way. Whereupon the tiger on top said, “Okay, now that I’ve got you, where am I taking you?” If thoughts “ride along” on top of the brain’s machinery, they’re as powerless to direct its ways as the tiger is to tell the elephant where to go. Less so, in fact: they don’t even have claws.

Though all this to me seems certainly to be correct, I know others disagree. I suspect that for many of them, it’s because they don’t like where this reasoning heads. If they jump on this elephant, it’s going to carry them (like it or not) toward belief in some kind of spiritual reality.

Therefore, with genuine appreciation I grant Denyse’s point: any support this position receives from science is more than welcome.

*”Materialism” here means a view of reality in which nothing exists except for matter, energy, and their interactions according to deterministic natural law or pure chance. On this view there is no spiritual reality.

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A new study just reported from Germany concludes that “Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain…. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.”

This echoes a previous study by Benjamin Libet, which had similar results though with a shorter time interval. Many interpreted Libet’s study as refuting free will, since in some sense the brain apparently decided before the conscious mind did. The current study’s authors are more cautious:

Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts even up to 7 seconds ahead of time how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: “Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed.”

[From Unconscious decisions in the brain]

Regardless of whether those “prepared” decisions can be reversed, however, free will may still exist. First, there are still massive philosophical absurdities associated with its denial. Bill Dembski just blogged on one of those yesterday. Second, is there any requirement that free choices be entirely conscious choices? Why would that be so? Third, it’s unclear from this report in just what way the unconscious aspects of the decision are fed and influenced by conscious thinking. Fourth, if free will is not operating in the decisions this team studied, just how are decisions made? Do they have any explanation for that at all?

Such an explanation would have to jump a significant hurdle. The one providing it would have to show that he or she believes it not because of deterministic necessity, but because there are good reasons to believe it. The distance between the two is enormous.

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