The synthesising mind
I needed to borrow this quote. I will attribute it as soon as I can..."The Mind Explains It All
Anna Fels has written a little piece about the mind's abhorrence of an explanatory vacuum. This passage was of interest:
But this drive to come up with the causes of events is hardly limited to therapy patients. Neurophysiologists discovered the same phenomenon in a radically different context. While mapping the brain, they were amazed to find that when the area responsible for an emotion was electronically stimulated, subjects experienced the mechanically induced feeling, then instantly came up with reasons for their responses.
If you activate the area of the brain that generates laughter, for example, the subject may happily "explain" that his hilarity stems from an overly earnest looking doctor or an odd diagram on the wall. "
The point to quoting this is how it meshes with Libet's interpretation of his own "readiness potential" experimental result. Essentially Libet found that people produced detectable changes in brain (scalp) potentials half a second before the seeming conscious decision to act occurred. His view was, broadly, that we are not strictly willful in our actions, rather that we rationalise them, after the event, in such a way that makes us appear willful to ourselves. (The one bit of willfulness his further experiments appeared to allow us was the ability to abort an action before carrying it through.)
Whilst Anna Fels clearly demonstrates the truth of this view I think it is only part of the story. What Fels and Libet show is that for some reason it is crucially important to appear willful to ourselves. Ramachandran, elsewhere in this blog, makes an argument, simply, that the conscious experience of the decision to act is delayed to make it appear more immediately (and therefore, causally) connected with that action. Again, appearing to be fully wilful is all.
And the truth is.... there is no ghost in the machine. There is no humunculus within our complicated brains, looking out. There is no single place where the real sensations of the taste of milk and the colour red are experienced. Nor is there anyplace where, more importantly, a truly spontaneous decision can be taken that is utterly unpredictable from the immediate condition of all neurons, neurotransmitter concentrations etc. etc. But, hold hard, the brain is hugely complicated and it is blessed with a variety of systems that are designed to elicit a response, any response, rather than allow stasis. And more than anything we have evolved through hundreds of thousands of years of social existence to wrong foot our fellow man. We have striven to mask our next move. There is every chance that our actions will appear to outsiders as if we are a unique and unpredictable entities. Somehow, it is important that we appear that way to ourselves.
So, here it is.... I believe Libet is correct. Our decisions to act well-up from the unconscious and are not the direct result of willfulness per se. I believe we explain them away afterwards (to ourselves at least!) as consciously intended acts. Now sometimes these actions are the sudden and (to a great extent) spontaneous welling up of a unconscious desire to act. But sometimes they are the result of protracted planning and rehersal to train the unconscious beast, to improve the chances of it doing what we imagine it doing. In other words, in a sense, wilfulness (of a sort) exists in the arbitrarilly long periods before a planned / rehearsed action or in the aftermath of an unplanned action, but not in the immediate vicinity preceding the action, where we imagine it to be.
PS
My son and I share a similar character trait which I believe is a male trait. This morning he begged the rest of the juicy peach which his mother was enjoying. Under duress she gave him the peach. He took one bite and without thinking threw the rest away. His mother was furious. Immediately, he said that he had asked her if she wanted the rest. He hadn't and was reduced to tears by being disbelieved. The trait? A terror that we actually are thoughtless in our actions. (When we are unfairly accused of thoughtlessness anger follows rather than tears.)
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