Hair Triggers in the Brainfield
NYT article on diagnosis, in a review of a book by a Dr. Groupman, who writes for the New Yorker.
I like the summary of the summary of thinkin' trouble.
One and a half-words: neo-con.The doctor instantly and semiconsciously assimilates the relevant data, compares it with past cases and comes to a decision. “The mind acts like a magnet, pulling in the cues from all directions,” Dr. Groopman writes.
Along the way subtle influences can skew the decision. In an emergency room that takes in a large number of alcoholics, a scruffy patient in insulin shock might be misdiagnosed as a drunk. Dr. Groopman, using case studies, illustrates common logical fallacies like “availability” and confirmation bias.
Availability is the tendency to reach for the plausible explanation nearest to hand and ignore competing theories. Confirmation bias occurs when doctors selectively highlight evidence that supports what they expect to find. Then there’s commission bias, the urge to act rather than do nothing, even when nothing is preferable.
Of course, these and many others are common thinkin' problems, and I reflect that now that this quick description of thinkin' problems is at hand, I will indulge my availability bias and apply it my instant theory that the endless assault on the concept of free will, summarized in the recent NYT article on recent psychology and law, indulges this bias, ahem, freely.
There have been lots of popular articles recently on this general subject, in politics and law and of course, in brochures for expensive medications. They tend to go like this: we have demonstrated that (in a famous example) people rationalize their own motivations for simple actions, such as a hand movement, when the brain impulses that control this movement travel faster than conscious decisions could have operated. Another recent study argued the same for politics, essentially, that because we demonstrate here that people are influenced by emotional image manipulation, rational political decision making is meaningless.
Therefore, they argue in some version of the same thing, there is no free will.
Summarizing such a highly complex and at best ephemeral phenomon like free will (or free won't, some scientists say), as a result of pharamaceutical market pressure, this research area is now I think, deeply flawed by market pressure.
There is a lot of money to be made from arguing that the mechanism of thinking - our stew of electrically active goos- is the cause of all action, that the bicycle rides the bicycler. If true, you can sell lots of bicycles.
Why so vehement? If we lose essential cultural concepts of freedom to sloppy, economically convenient arguments, if we lose essential cultural concepts of equality to boutique genetic enhancements for the wealthy, if we lose essential human processes of creativity and productivity to robotic analogues of humans, we have no future at all: no democracy, no brotherhood, no meaningful work, no rational inquiry, no spirituality, no inventive work, not even play. Dogs to our betters, dogs even to our machines, forever. Rights without actions are meaningless. If these trends aren't challenged, the 2500 year struggle for universal empathy and individual human worth will be over, and that sickness of alienation and gnawing irrelevance we know too much now will be all that people ever experience. Like global warming, a little less diffidence from scientists, a lot less casual economic corruption and a more rigor in working on the problems in front of us would be welcome.
The poles of human experience will be bored indulgence and endless menial servitude, propped by a fatalistic ideology based, horribly, in the very scientific processes that worked to liberate us, which will merely replace millenia of hierarchical religious ideologies which served the interests of elites.
Forgive me for the unprompted buckshot, but the BBC reported yesterday in India there was a march of child laborers, opposing -for some reason- the $35 billion a year child-labor/ child slave industry. What have do these relentless attacks on free will in the clothes of science have to offer them? Accept your fate, your choices are illusory? Or, we will get around to helping you when our social pre-conditioning creates favorable conditions for enlighted-self interest quasi- compassionate behavior on our part? In the meantime, wait for robots to work cheaper than you, then you will be free, or um, dismissed and without economic value.
My point is not to arrest the science, but in a culture where we are in real danger of losing the vast bulk of cultural production to marketing and branding, where all our deepest impulses, feelings and experiences are endlessly shoveled into the boilers of the sociopathically greedy at unprecedented levels in history, the culture of democracy must be strongly maintained, strongly defended, sacrificed for. The defense of equality and liberty under law cannot be weak, but this is insufficient. The cultural and social priority of equality and the liberty and dignity of individuals only becomes more urgent in this climate, not less.
And no science can fail to follow cultural drives of its society - if our culture eradicates everything but economic productivity as a social value, our science will only work to support economic productivity.
Samuel Johnson: "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience, for it." One thing we might say is that complex societies which assumed that free will was a universal social condition tended to generally avoid genocidal initiatives. Sort of.
I offer this next anecdote not as a science, or even as evidence of free will, but as an interesting bit of experience. Students in my drawing classes improve remarkably when they respond to "making deliberate, conscious choices" as a drawing strategy. In other words, I don't say "draw the line exactly this way," I saw "choose consciously - at each moment -precisely which type of line you are drawing, and observe carefully it's effect within the drawing. " This is combined with "making sure that you are consciously aware of what the drawing actually is, and what the subject actually looks like."
This extends to all techniques. Asked later about problems and successes in work, almost invariably, the success or failure of the artwork is in its connection to conscious awareness, which can apparently be greatly affected by the student's focus and deliberate choice-making. At the very least, the student's belief that he or she is making conscious choices contributes vastly to the amount of dense visual information in the artwork. What we usually think of as bad or amateurish artwork is the presentation of a very small amount of visual awareness; in a drawing this is exposed, in a digital work, the lack of awareness can be easily hidden by the nature of the application. *
At the very least, belief in free will creates a more powerful, more productive, more meaningful and engaged culture, and belief in fundamental equality leads to both the dissemination of this power and a more compassionate culture. Compared to this pre-conceived future of marketing hegemony, robotic economics, and genetic enhancements for tiny elites, a Skinner box looks like a cozy fire and a cup of hot chocolate.
Count if you will the biases in my thinking. I'm choosing to go back to the studio. Or maybe a movie.
*Which is why, I think, in spite of its extraordinary power and potential, digital technologies have produced only a few impressive artworks - and these usually by traditionally trained artists. I was interested to hear the other day of big video game development school in Washington that doesn't let the students touch a computer for an entire year.
posted by JAB at 10:38 AM
2 Comments:
I read about the research I think you are referring to in the Economist. Here is the excerpt:
That something in the brain really is performing the role of an observing self is suggested by the work of Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr Libet used electroencephalography to look at brain activity during the process of making simple decisions such as when to move a finger. He showed that the process which leads to the act starts about three-tenths of a second before an individual is consciously aware of it. In other words, the observer is just that: an observer, not a decider. This may explain the feeling that most people have experienced at one time or another of having deliberately done something that they had not actually wanted or intended to.
Though Dr Libet's experiment is almost laughably simple, it pokes a stick in a very deep pond. A feeling of freedom to make conscious choices is at the heart of most people's sense of themselves. Even Freud, who popularised the idea of the unconscious, believed that conscious free-willed thought could override unconscious desires. One way of interpreting Dr Libet's work, though, could be that such free will is, like colour vision, simply a powerful illusion. An actor in a film, perhaps. But an actor reading from somebody else's script.
So far, I haven't read anything to support Dr. Libet's research is "deeply flawed by market pressure." The only thing that is deeply flawed is drawing the conclusion from this research that there is no free will.
(By the bye, I sent the above excerpt to my guitar teacher a couple of months ago in support of something he was trying to express about the non-consciousness necessary to play the guitar well: you're consciousness is slower than your fingers.)
In my view, "free will" is a human concept, like destiny, citizenship, community, etc. Men have been arguing for thousands of years as to whether it "exists" or not. I think that this is a pointless argument. I don't think science can prove that it doesn't exist any more than they could prove that love doesn't exist.
Also, the application of the idea of "free will" is not all peaches and cream. Here is a common example: most smokers are addicted to nicotine, but many smokers believe that their decision to smoke is of their own free will. This is an ironic through-the-looking-glass view akin to the slave convincing himself that he is the master.
Will self-interested entities use neuro-physiology for their own benefit? Almost certainly. Do self-interested entities use psychology for their own benefit? Yes, indeed. Should we burn psychology and neuro-physiology textbooks to prevent them from being abused? I don't think so. I, for one, like knowing how brains work, so I can have some insight into my own actions and the actions of others. I'd like to be able to tell when I'm acting out of free will, or simply convincing myself that I am. Or, for that matter, when someone or something is using the concept of "free will" to control me.
The anger behind my criticism of these papers is that beginning to understand how brains work at automatic levels of behavior - instantaneous reactions plus their later rationalization - only begins to explain the automatic qualities of instantaneous actions and reactions themselves, and says only a little about the far more complex interactions of consciousness, impulse and reason where presumably, free will and rational decision making would lie. We obviously do not behave on every biologically or environmentally-determined impulse, yet this article, and many like it, implies that not only do we, but we can never do nothing else.
What I am saying is that many of these studies seem to posit a mechanistic view of consciousness, and then go out and find it through examples of what by the studies' design are simple and impulsive behaviors, ignoring mounds of of human activity that, reactive impulses or not, require conscious decision-making, like, for example, the undertaking of scientific studies.
I am not arguing that I am the decider when the doctor whacks me on the knee and my foot kicks up. But I might decide not to go back to the doctor. And I'm not arguing about the non-conscious element of playing the guitar - far from it, motor control from repetitive practice is essential to art training as well; what's striking is how different it is from the difficult part: deciding WHAT to create.
Which written sentence, building or artwork, for example, is inevitable from it's pre-existing conditions? What mechanistic view of consciousness- in particular, extrapolated from the fact of impulse driven by the sensory limitations of nerves or the introduction of drugs, even comes close to explaining away the extraordinary richness of human cultures?
A perfect example is in that color vision crack- color vision is an illusion? By that standard (presumably because we don't see color directly, our brain, reproduces it from different inputs of our vision biology, a process which involves something like 40% of our brain) all experienced senses - all of which reproduce a somewhat subjective version of reality -are illusions; yet color vision is a powerful, even life-protecting description of our experience of reality, not a instrument measuring the wavelength of light. (That, I might add, would be useless as a sensory organ - the ability to see relative color differences is I suspect the critical sense-association with reality.)
Color projections of objects and our understanding of them through our mind's reproduction of color vision are incomplete and fluid in objectivity, but color vision can only exist - would only have evolved - because our perception of color accurately describes the different relative color-conditions of objects that we might see. This is subtle enough in its measure of reality to detect illness in others, to distinguish toxic berries from edible ones.
To call this essential sense an illusion is both perjorative and meaningless, and dangerous, if it used to argue as a metaphor that humans have no ability to make conscious decisions.
I'm not saying that Libet's research is specifically deeply flawed by market pressure. I'm saying that this mechanistic view of consciousness lends great aid and comfort to the enemies of social equality and political democracy, and that this area of research, like many in medical and biological areas, is distorted by the promise of new markets for drugs and even new forms of security, if you go by the recent NYT article on the implications of this for the justice system.
The picture of the field is of bitter ideological divide and market pressure, not scientific consensus. (I am obviously not arguing we burn textbooks. If you want a fun fight, set a Skinnerian up against a evolutionary behaviorist. But they cannot both be wholly wrong, or wholly right. And besides, it is exactly within the interaction of complex natural or environmental influences on behavior that conscious decision making would seem to originate. Example: cheeseburgers, work for distant reward, or sex? )
That conscious-decision making is complex, not always dominant over behavior and is based on imperfect senses only says that it is complex and imperfect and not always dominant, not non-existent. And almost everything we purport to value in our country, even our world, from human rights to compassionate social policy to creativity, depends on the ability of everyone to engage in conscious-decision making.
I'm not letting that go on light evidence.
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