IT IS common to feel uncomfortable when reading about new neuroscience techniques that seem to encroach on the sacrosanct realm of our hidden inner lives. And it is understandable to feel even more uncomfortable about the notion that our actions are dictated by processes in our brains, calling into question a place for moral responsibility. This discomfort pervades Eliezer Sternberg's new book.
In My Brain Made Me Do It, Sternberg dips into philosophy, psychology and neuroscience research as he considers the various evidence that suggests we lack free will and thus a foundation for moral responsibility. Strange cases from psychology and neuroscience pose problems for a naive view of human agency. What if your hand started grabbing things of its own accord? Or if you were compelled to use every tool you found in front of you?
Keep some grains of salt handy as you are reading. The tone Sternberg
takes to the possibility of widespread acceptance of neurobiological
determinism is of the sky-is-falling variety. With over 40,000
practising neuroscientists, it isn't hard to find juicy quotes
dismissing the existence of free will, but it is inaccurate to
characterise this as the general attitude of the field.
Sternberg
addresses two related problems throughout the book. The first concerns
the wide range of influences on our actions that we are unaware of at
any given moment. If an action I take is triggered by unconscious
sensory input, am I employing free will?
The second, known
as the 'causal exclusion problem' in philosophy, is the one that really
disturbs Sternberg. You, in the grand sense of 'you' - your thoughts,
emotions, volition and moral reasoning - depend on neuronal processing
in your brain. If the firings of any neuron are enough to cause the next
neuron to fire, your brain runs all on its own. There is no extra place
in which you, as a higher-level, conscious being, can direct
proceedings and assert free will. This clockwork determinism undermines
any causal role we could have in our own actions - and, by implication,
our responsibility for those actions.
So what is Sternberg's answer to the problem of free will? Emergence.
This concept can be roughly summed up as 'the whole is more than the
sum of the parts'. Just as temperature emerges from a collection of
molecules even though it does not exist at the level of individual
molecules, free will, Sternberg argues, emerges from otherwise
deterministic processes at the level of neurons.
Philosophers
and scientists have been debating the merits of emergence in solving
the free will problem since the 1920s. Rather than providing an account
of exactly how free will could emerge from deterministic processes,
Sternberg offers an analogy with the theory of continental drift. When
it was first proposed, scientists dismissed it because it lacked a
mechanism to account for how such massive objects could move over huge
distances. Sternberg's moral is that even though we don't know how free
will emerges, we will some day, so we shouldn't throw moral
responsibility out the window just yet.
Unfortunately,
Sternberg misses his own point, and falls prey to the very line of
thinking that he criticises. He offers 'reflective introspection' as an
alternative for addressing moral problems instead of what he calls the
algorithmic approach, in which rules are computed to yield firm answers
in decision-making situations.
But at the end of the day,
whether we reason with rules or by transcending rules, we still can't
escape the fact that we reason using our brains. The problem
comes in thinking that we are somehow sufficiently separate from our
brains that those brains can tell us what to do or vice versa. Your
brain, for better or for worse, is just the mechanism for being you.
Holly Andersen is a philosopher of science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada
Book
information
My Brain Made Me Do It: The rise of neuroscience
and the threat to moral responsibility by Eliezer Sternberg
Published
by Prometheus Books
$21
