The Mind and the Brain (38 page)

This statement was tremendously gratifying because it stated, from a physicist’s perspective, what seemed to me the essential core of all my OCD work: that effort itself is the key to altering one’s brain function. Stapp’s insight was that quantum theory naturally allows for the direct influence of mental effort on the function of the brain. It thus makes mental effort and its effect on attention a primary causal agent.

In addition to our individual papers for the
JCS
issue, Stapp and I wrote an “appendix” that appeared between them. It became our strongest argument yet of the power of quantum physics to support the causal efficacy of mental force: “The basic principles of physics, as they are now understood, are not the deterministic laws of classical physics,” we wrote. The basic physical laws are, rather, those of quantum physics, which allow mental effort to “keep in focus a stream of consciousness that would otherwise become quickly defocused as a consequence of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and keep it focused in a way that tends to actualize
potentialities that are in accord with consciously selected ends. Mental effort can, within contemporary physical theory, have, via the effects of willful focus of attention, large dynamical consequences that are not automatic consequences of physically describable brain mechanisms acting alone.”

Stapp’s and my contributions stood apart from the rest of the “Volitional Brain” papers in arguing that modern physics provides a basis for volition and mental effort to alter brain function. Other contributions, taken together, constituted a grand tour of what neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century knew about volition. Better known as free will, volition has had a tough time of it lately. The very notion of “willpower” now carries a whiff of the Victorian, like the smell rising from a musty old hatbox. Invoking “a failure of willpower” to explain someone’s succumbing to the temptations of alcohol or illegal drugs or shopping until the credit card maxes out seems—at least to science sophisticates—as outdated and discredited as applying leeches to the sick. “There is no magical stuff inside you called willpower that should somehow override nature,” James Rosen, a professor of psychology at the University of Vermont, told a reporter. “It’s a metaphor.” “Willpower as an independent cause of behavior is a myth,” said Michael Lowe, professor of clinical psychology at M. C.P. Hahnemann University in Philadelphia.

How did we arrive at this pass? The confusion is nothing new. No less an eminence than Kant threw up his hands in the face of the problem, identifying “freedom of the will” as one of three metaphysical mysteries beyond the reach of the human intellect (the other two are immortality and the existence of God). Kant, in fact, succumbed to the same temptation as others who have grappled with free will: in order to reconcile the discoveries of a universe governed by natural law and the felt experience of freedom of action, he concluded that the world simply must have room (albeit a hidden room) for free moral choices—even if physical determinism rules the world of which we have sensory knowledge. For
Kant, the fact that he could not disprove this notion sufficed to sustain it; the fact that he could not prove it did not deter him from believing it. This leitmotif recurs throughout modern attempts to come to grips with free will: free will seems to violate all we know of how the world works, but as long as we cannot construct a logical proof of its nonexistence we cling to it tenaciously, even desperately.

With attempts to find scientific support for free will failing badly, it is no surprise that the twentieth century saw the slow decline of free will as a scientifically tenable concept. In 1931, Einstein had declared it “man’s illusion that he [is] acting according to his own free will.” In 1964 the great humanist Carl Rogers wrote that “modern psychological science, and many other forces in modern life as well, hold the view that man is unfree, that he is controlled, that words such as purpose, choice and commitment have no significant meaning.” In 1971, B. F. Skinner offered what may be the definitive statement of this view, arguing in
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
that our behavior reflects nothing more noble than conditioned responses to stimuli.

The scientific and philosophic basis for this perspective, of course, goes back to Descartes’s clockwork universe and is a primary feature of all radical materialist perspectives. But materialist determinism truly gained ascendancy in biology and psychology more recently. It is hard to date precisely the moment when biological determinism turned free will into a “myth” or a mere “metaphor.” Perhaps it was in 1996, with the discovery of the first gene associated with a common behavior—risk taking. Perhaps it was in 1995, with the discovery of leptin, the hormone associated with a loss of appetite control. Or perhaps it was even earlier, with the avalanche of discoveries in neuroscience linking a serotonin deficit with depression, and dopamine imbalances with addiction. Each connection that neuroscientists forged between a neurochemical and a behavior, or at least a propensity toward a behavior, seemed to deal another blow to the notion of an efficacious will.

Even if historians will never agree on the precise turning point, what is clear is that the cascade of discoveries in neuroscience and genetics has created an image of individuals as automata, slaves to their genes or their neurotransmitters, with no more free will than a child’s windup toy. As Stapp has observed, “The chief philosophies of our time proclaim, in the name of science, that we are mechanical systems governed, fundamentally, entirely by impersonal laws that operate at the level of our microscopic constituents.” This scientific determinism holds that every happenstance has a causally sufficient antecedent in the physical world. Given those antecedents, only the happenstance in question could have occurred. Determinism professes, as James put it, that “the future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb…. Any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible.” That which is not necessary is impossible; though we may conceive of an alternate future as possible, that is an illusion. That which fails to come about was never a real possibility at all. In ancient times, determinism rested on a belief in an omniscient God. Today, it is not old-time religion but, rather, our culture’s newfound faith—science—that challenges the belief in free will. “The self…is not imagined to be ultimately responsible for itself, or its ends and purposes. Rather, the self is entirely a function of environment and genetics,” as one explanation of this view states it. Or, more bluntly, “My genes (or my neurotransmitters) made me do it.” In this view it is never the “I” who acts, but always the neurochemicals, or the genes, or the neuronal circuits that determine our choices and our course of action. Behavior, in this view, “is solely the consequence of the past history of the system, that has brought it to a state where various neuronal populations form an excitatory consortium that organizes and ineluctably triggers the correlated synaptic volleys needed for a particular movement,” as the neuroscientist Robert Doty described it. The sense that one is exercising free will when one orders the cheesecake or moves the cursor on the computer screen to another
game of hearts rather than to the spreadsheet program with your overdue taxes—is an illusion, an artifact of a prescientific era, says the prevailing paradigm. The idea that we might choose cantaloupe over cheesecake is as illusory as the apparent underwater “bending” of an oar dipped into a river.

Before we explore the reality of will, it’s worth noting that, for a quality whose reality most people wish dearly to believe in, will is hardly something most of us go around exercising every waking minute. For instance, most of our movements are nonmindful and occur without direct conscious control; we generally don’t need to will the right foot to lift off the ground and swing forward when the left foot has finished its step. Rather, habitual patterns of action such as those controlled by the basal ganglia and cerebellum, and stimulus-response pairings explain more of our behavior than we perhaps care to admit. The only time volition enters into that walk may be in inspiring us to set out in the first place. But when you reach the last word on the right-hand page of a book, you probably do not (unless reading a mindfulness meditation tract) pause in profound deliberation over turning the page. James called these “effortless volitions,” which “are mechanically determined by the structure of that physical mass, [the] brain.” But it is effort
ful
volitions that concern us here. It is no exaggeration to call the question of the causal efficacy of will the most critical issue that any mature science of human beings must confront.

In contrast to determinism, indeterminism holds that there exist some actions whose antecedents in the material world are causally insufficient to produce them; given those same antecedents, the agent could have acted differently. It holds that the world of possibilities exceeds the number of actualities, in that the existence (or the coming into existence) of one thing does not strictly determine what other things shall be. When we conceive of alternative futures, more than one is indeed truly possible. “Actualities”—James again—“seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out
of which they are chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form part of truth.” It is obvious from this why the question of free will excites our passions: it seems to be the quality of mental life that, more than any other, holds the key to who we are and why we act. To believe in free will, or to deny it, is to imply a position, too, on such profound questions as the reality of fate and the relation of mind to matter, as well as on such practical ones as the locus and source of moral responsibility and the power all of us hold to shape our destiny. To assert a belief in free will is to accept responsibility for our actions and to recognize the mind as “more or less a first cause, an unmoved mover,” as the theorist Thomas Clark says: it is to hold the view that “we could have willed otherwise in the radical sense that the will is not the explicable or predictable result of any set of conditions that held at the moment of choice.”

More often than not, to believe that we have such freedom is also to believe that, without it, the moral order is in danger of collapse. If the human mind is not in some sense an unmoved mover, one cannot reasonably assign personal responsibility, or ground a system of true justice. In this sort of world, the person who kills or robs or steals is in the grip of an inexorable mechanical process, and there is no rational basis for belief in taking responsibility for one’s actions and choices. If consciousness and its handmaiden, will, are “a benign user illusion,” as the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued in 1991 in
Consciousness Explained
, then we come face to face with what he calls “the Spectre of Creeping Exculpation.” This is a world most people find abhorrent, in a way the American justice system reflects. Although the law allows for an insanity defense, “insanity” is understood as an inability to understand that one’s actions were wrong. Insanity, to the courts, is not an inability to choose to act otherwise. True, occasionally a defendant walks on the basis of the so-called Twinkie defense (“The sugary food I ate made me crazy”). But in the vast majority of cases a defense based on a brain abnormality, or a genetic one, fails. Carried to its logical
limits, a system in which no one has a choice about what action to take is unworkable. Despite the messages from genetics and neuroscience, most Americans greatly prefer to believe that we can choose freely—that Adam truly had a choice about whether to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. A Buddhist way of putting this is that you alone are responsible for the motives you choose to act on. In Gotama’s words, you are “the owner” of the state of your will and “heir” to the results of your actions. The essence of the Buddhist perspective is that you are free to choose the way in which you exert effort and strive.

In this atmosphere of skepticism about the existence of free will, the
Journal of Consciousness Studies
brought out its 298-page volume, “The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will,” in the summer of 1999. The
towards
in the title signaled that we were not there yet. But the pairing of
neuroscience
and
free will
signaled a sea change in attitude about whether free will is even a valid subject for scientific, as distinct from philosophical, inquiry. The scientist who, more than any other, put free will on the neurobiology radar screen was Ben Libet. His experiments have incited as much controversy and as many battling interpretations as any in the field of neuroscience.

Libet was inspired by work reported in 1964 by the German neurophysiologists Hans Kornhuber and Luder Deecke. Using an electroencephalograph (EEG), these researchers discovered that the pattern of electrical activity in the cerebral cortex shifts just before you consciously initiate a movement. It’s sort of like the whine of an idling jet engine shifting in pitch just before the plane takes off. The scientists also used a then-new technique that allowed them to analyze stored EEG data and thereby explore the chronological relationship between a voluntary movement (of the hand or foot) and brain activity. What they found was that, between 0.4 and 4 seconds before the initiation of a voluntary movement, there appears a slow, electrically negative brain wave termed the
Bereitschaftpotential
, or “readiness potential.” Detectable at
the surface of the scalp, the electrical activity was interpreted as being related to the process of preparing to make a movement. But no scientist was prepared to take the next step, investigating whether that electrical activity might have anything to do with the will to make a movement. “Their work just sat there for almost twenty years,” Libet said over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in New York in late 2000. “John Eccles, with whom I studied, said to me one day that Kornhuber and Deecke’s experiment made the case that conscious will starts almost a second before you act to express that will. I myself thought that was quite unlikely, and in any case I thought it would be hopeless to try to time things accurately enough to fix the moment when conscious will arose. But finally I got this idea.”