S15, E4: The Unconscious Coupling
S15, E4: The Unconscious Coupling
Series 15: How to Remain Blameless while Calling BS on 'No Free-Will'
The prospect of a life with no free-will, doesn’t faze me because even if it were true, it would make no difference - the experience any of us have inside our meat suit is all we know. However, when it’s suggested we should re-engineer society around the idea that nothing can be attributed to anybody, it quickly becomes problematic.
Robert Sapolsky asserts that any good we do in our lives results from deterministic privilege, therefore no credit can be rightfully taken and everything that motivates us, is based on a delusion. He concedes that once we abolish attribution, how people might be moved to do anything constructive, is a wrinkle to be ironed out. So does that mean we are to replace one delusion with another that’s been fabricated? Quite what the Sapolsky-approved substitute would be is anyone’s guess.
Causation-Ignored also has Effects
What would be the consequence of convincing people, en masse, that they can take no credit nor be accorded blame for their actions? It’s odd that this is of such little interest to those whose entire shtick is they have a better and more fearless appreciation of causality than most.
Consider what happens if we successfully abolish attribution. The legal system must be rebuilt ground up around some form of scientifically instrumented neurological justice. Consequences must be removed. In the absence of merit and acclaim motivation must be re-engineered. What of the economic system? Are credits and debits to be eliminated too? Would we owe nothing but never disserve payment for anything either?
You will surely notice the paradox that this absurd extrapolation of causality is to deny how it’s applied in society. It is worthy of a moment to ask why? Why we would go to such lengths merely to avoid cashing the cheques evolution has made out in our favour?
Taken out of context you might think I was talking about a theocracy but what is the difference? It’s dogmatic, is indifferent to human agency and it’s an entirely worthless premise to build a society upon. I appeal to your common sense to be awake to the danger.
Those trying to debunk free-will declare preferences and agendas while flinging active verbs about like confetti. How can anyone ‘re-engineer society’, be interviewed for a podcast or indeed perform conservation work with baboons, without intention?
Sam Harris credits Sapolsky for being a great personal influence and when he interviewed him on his ‘Within Reason’ podcast, they started off by speaking about Sapolsky’s field work and of darting baboons in the wild. These baboons lead peaceful lives with plentiful access to food and no predators, but because their main stress is socially induced, it makes the comparison to humans interesting.
Sapolsky: “… you can’t dart somebody until there’s nobody else around and nobody looking and he is turned the other way. He responds as if he has been stung by a bee or has sat on a thorn … three minutes later he’s unconscious.”
[they discuss what happens when baboons return to their group before becoming unconscious]
Harris: “What are you doing to the reputations of these baboons that walk among their troop and start a fight and then promptly faint from your anaesthesia?”
[Both chuckling]
Sapolsky: “ Well, it’s … gotta cause all kinds of interesting belief systems in these animals … ”
“The Biology of Good and Evil: A Conversation with Robert Sapolsky”, Making Sense, Sam Harris
Which made me wonder if the baboons had been darting him.
I am not getting on Sapolsky’s case in this piece, but from Episode 9, I give what he says plenty of attention in my serialised review his latest book, ‘Determined’. It’s easy to take pot shots at somebody else’s work, so across five episodes before that (including this free one), I want to talk you through some of my thought experiments on the nature of free-will.
I will not be discussing the structure of the brain in this episode, so when I refer to the unconscious and conscious processes, think of them as distributed across various mutually-confounding regions of the brain. The distinction between the conscious and unconscious is therefore a functional delineation rather than physical one.
The following local definition will be needed on our journey.
Local Definition #1: Actionable Output
Here the term ‘actionable output’ refers to anything produced by the brain or nervous system that leads to an action that has an effect on the world.
On Consciousness
So far in this series I have said that agency must be inextricably linked to consciousness, yet experimental results show that decision making (or if you prefer, the illusion of it) appears to occur at the unconscious level, viz.
Neurological experiments have been conducted where it has been shown that decision-making seems to precede our conscious mind’s awareness of those decisions having been made by the subconscious.1
“S15,E3: A Unit of Consciousness”, The Vigne Intervention, Michael Vigne
How do I square this? Actually with very little difficulty.
Even if the unconscious makes real decisions that our conscious mind can only observe, the decision maker would still be us, but I would not rest my case on the adequacy of that. What ‘determinists’2 would find contentious is the idea these are ‘real’ decisions. I accept that none of the above precludes the unconscious process from being one that just responds mechanistically to environmental stimuli.
It was by thinking about the prospect of a deterministic unconscious that led me to conclude agency must be linked to our conscious experience. I got there in a stepwise manner but did not make it easy for myself.
I set out to find aspects of the opposing view that were compatible with free-will to use as constraining assumptions on my thought experiment. My objective was to build my case in the determinists’ territory. Would the search for commonality make me change my mind? I needed to know.
Thought Experiment - Finding Free-Will
I formed four core assumptions and I very much doubt that any determinist would object to them.
Assumption #1
The ability to respond to stimuli in the environment does not require free-will
Within our technology this is very clear, while the behaviours of microbes and the involuntary reflex in humans, are readily accessible biological examples. In the three episodes that follow, I explore the architecture of the nervous system and brain in humans, how information processing evolved and how we eventually overcome the threshold to sentience and agency.
Assumption #2
The unconscious is a deterministic machine that has actionable outputs
Outputs from the unconscious process result from the inputs it receives, the genetically prescribed construction of the neurological substrate and its environmental programming. I concede to the ‘no free-will’ camp their deterministic machine.
Previously I said this:
To me it seems reasonable to suppose that the subconscious (which must be able to take in all the sensory inputs to make a decision), would also factor in the feedback it gets from the conscious experience.
ibid.
In this episode I attempt to append the rationale to that proposition which will eventually take us to what might be a paradigm shift.
Assumption #3
The unconscious has no internal awareness
Unconscious processes are by definition opaque to our conscious experience but I do not allow myself any ghosts in the machine. The assumption that ‘nobody’s home’ is supported by what is known about the brain’s evolution.
The next assumption might be even more surprising but behold the bridges I am building (and despair!).
Assumption #4
The conscious mind has no direct executive powers
Although I claim the explanation for the conscious experience and free-will are closely linked by a common cause in evolution, it was too big a leap to suppose that free-will resides in consciousness, to produce (note the emphasis) direct and deliberate actionable outputs.
Those who would argue for free-will are often forced to assume that consciousness must have direct executive powers. What they are (perfectly reasonably) relying upon is the subjective experience of steering their own actions. I explicitly exclude the possibility that consciousness can produce direct actionable outputs via Assumption #4.
Don’t worry I’ve not abandoned ship.
This self-imposed constraint forced me to consider what function and purpose (not the same thing) consciousness would have if it could not create actionable outputs.
This is where that took me.
Sentience, Surveillance and Survivability
I had already concluded that operationally, the function of consciousness is to integrate our sensory inputs; generate a model of our reality and provide surveillance of our wellbeing. Additionally, in the evolutionary context I claim there can only be one ultimate purpose which is to improve survivability i.e., by maximising our odds of living long enough to reproduce.
Yet with no actionable outputs, how could consciousness possibly have the necessary impact to improve our survival? It would be a blunder to fudge the answer with the assumption that consciousness has an effect on actions without understanding how (hence Assumption #4).
The crux of the determinist argument is that, for unspecified reasons, any sense of free-will we have is simulated. Thus, in a process that lags real-time by microseconds, our observations are retrospectively imbued with a sense of agency. I ask you, if it can have no impact on anything, for what purpose would this elaborate and onerous processing burden serve? Hopefully you are open to a better explanation.3
Consciousness as a Model of Control
Any type of engineered process control requires surveillance (using sensors) to measure operational variables and determine the state of the system. The objective is to establish what adjustments are required to the process in order to align the measured value with what is wanted. This target value for a measured variable is called it’s setpoint.
Perhaps a more readily accessible (although imperfect) example to help you acclimatise to this, is to think of driving a car, where you are looking at your speedometer and adjusting your driving to maintain the desired speed (your preferential setpoint).
Now imagine consciousness as a control system that takes input from sensors to determine the status of the organism. Each sensor is calibrated to measure a particular indicator of biological wellness over a range, for example, between pain and pleasure. This corresponds to the reasonable idea that we tend to move from negative experiences towards positive ones, be they physical, mental or emotional.
A Startling Realisation
An autostereogram (or ‘magic eye’ picture) contains two stereoscopic images whose combined perspectives create the optical illusion of a three-dimensional figure. It is necessary to sort of stare through the paper until the image reveals itself.
Something similar happened to me while thinking about the relationship between the conscious and unconscious processes; free-will just popped out. Figuratively speaking, they combine stereoscopic perspectives on reality - the first being experiential model of reality and the second driven by environmental data.
If you think this is stretching the analogy or that my credibility is circling the drain, get ready, because now I am going to tell you how I think it works.
Agency Awakes
What I propose is that the unconscious takes input signals from the conscious model, compares it with our personalised setpoints and then modulates its actionable output in an attempt to align each variable to its setpoint. Feedback from the conscious state informs the unconscious of what it must do to adjust its experience. Thus the unconscious mind (blindly) monitors and modulates the conscious experience to optimise it.
Not only does this provide a possible mechanism for free-will it can also explain where our intuitive sense of agency comes from.
A Conjecture
Agency is the Conscious Self-Modulation of Stereoscopic Perspectives
The Conscious Mind (CM) provides the Unconscious Decision Maker (UDM) with real time feedback about the organism’s status. That information will enable the UDM to calculate what actionable outputs are required to minimise the setpoint deltas. The resulting changes will be detected and observed as part of the conscious experience and with it comes a sense of control. It places a demand on the UDM and then observes it being fulfilled. The conscious experience is therefore being directed by CM within the limits of the environmental constraints inputted into the UDM. Agency therefore emerges from conscious self-modulation.
This is not an illusion. It’s free-will.
What Determines?
Are we merely spinning around under the action of environmental forces like a weather vane? Can the unconscious possibly be making decisions based on every environmental input with the glaring exception of the conscious experience? I think not.
The model I have devised is the only one that makes sense to me. In its most constrained form it consists of a non-sentient computational unconscious that acts on sensory inputs and conscious feedback. The conscious mind models reality and provides condition monitoring and closes the control loop for the organism. The unconscious modulates the conscious experience, thus consciousness is empowered, which is what we call free-will. It is what we instinctively recognise as our self-determination.
Consciousness indirectly produces actions and that’s what makes it the de facto boss. The notion that the decider is ‘us’ is not so inadequate after all.
Series 15 Paid Content: Four-Episode Lookahead
In the episodes that follow I attempt to map my claims to biology, the structure of brains and the function of nervous systems. This is subject to some changes and is part of my scheduling of free and paid content across multiple series.
June 2024
S15, E5: The Rapacious Reptilian - Informational content and genetics. From, microbes, insects and superorganisms to the primitive brain and it’s untempered determinism. Wednesday 12th
S15, E6: The Hungry Hungry Hippocampi - the acquisition of information content, its buffering and long-term storage, plus the scaling of processing capacity. Thursday 27th
July 2024
S15, E7: Mammal Mia! Here We Grow Again - the mammalian brain, social scaling and the group strategies, the neocortex and the emergence of abstraction. Thursday 11th
S15, E8: The Manufacture of Abstraction - the consciousness as prime mover. The creation of information and abstraction. Thursday 25th
Those who call themselves ‘determinists’ often seem to be harbouring the conceit that other people don’t understand cause and effect. What does free-will mean if not self-determination? Don’t expect me to call myself a cis-determinist.
A ‘determinist’ might say this comes from the sort of trickery a rationalising consciousness would use to maintain its delusion. Yet wouldn’t that be to have an intention and also to act on it? I mean, it’s a little bit free-will-ish, you must admit.