How you emerge from your brain

by Holly Anderson, contributor
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

Klip House

[Image: The Klip House system by Interloop architects].

The Klip House by Texan architects Interloop is a project dating back to 1997-2001. The architects describe it as 'a delivery system that provides the physical and operational infrastructure for trade corporations to participate in the production, delivery, and servicing of housing.'

Not limited only to housing, however, the Klip system was seen as being just as easy to use for hospitals, police stations, and more—even, why not, a pink auto-detailing shop.

[Image: A pink auto-detailing shop in the Klip system by Interloop].

At the time, Interloop had become 'frustrated,' they explain, by 'Federal and State initiatives that provide financial assistance to qualified families and individuals by awarding housing 'vouchers' to serve as the down payment on a house. In its current format, the voucher system distributes a mass of capital such that one voucher equals one house.' However:

We were, and are, frustrated with a design system that is constricted by insurance companies, loan officers, municipalities, and contractors, etc. and decided to look at the overall economic impact that these vouchers might have if they were bundled, rather than distributed. Instead of designing a single house that has very little impact to the housing industry, we worked with the idea of consolidating the vouchers to pay for a housing platform, or infrastructure. We needed to work outside of the home mortgage process in order to gain some ground.

In other words, producing new housing also means producing new (non-predatory) ways to finance those housing options—architects have to rethink systems of payment as much as they have to rethink the design parameters of prefab componentry.

[Images: The Klip system by Interloop].

Klip House, seen here, 'is essentially engaging financing systems that exist in automotive and product industries'—a statement which comes with a slight twinge of nostalgia for those heady, Greg Lynn-inspired days of the late 1990s when automobile assembly was the reigning model for cutting-edge architectural thesis projects. If your BMW could be assembled offsite and to your every specification, down to heated seats, aerodynamic rear spoilers, and the perfect JBL sound system, why couldn't the architecture you live in follow suit?

Seamless, robotic, and delivered perfectly on schedule, the modular assembly of housing—borrowing assembly line techniques taken from Ford, Saturn, or Lexus—was to lead the way to our architectural future.

In any case, the Klip house itself was at least partially inspired by the boot clips of skis and snowboards. That is, its foundation would operate through a terrestrial 'binder,' or 'adjustable footing system,' onto which new rooms or components could be clipped (thus the house's name).

The binders thus allow for 'an open array of housing components [to] be added, released, interchanged, upgraded and rearranged' at will. 'The architectural contribution,' Interloop points out, 'is simply to introduce a single enabling technology, i.e. the binder, to generate or illicit response.'

[Images: Inspired by the boot clips of snowboards: the Klip's binder system by Interloop architects].

Further, the Klip's 'components are available in three and six foot widths, each made with a variety of options and upgrades,' and they can be either purchased or leased. This adds a Smart Car/iPod-like personalization to the housing design and procurement process.

Your house, hospital, police station, nightclub, field kitchen, mobile writing lab, counterfeit university space, or auto-body shop can thus be expanded (or shrunken)—let alone recolored, retextured, and resurfaced—based on immediate personal and economic needs.

[Image: The Klip House by Interloop architects].

Read more at the architects' website.