The following musing is based on a mail dialogue with a Suebian theologian whom I met on the occasion of my mother's death. He sent me recently a particular (English) sentence describing instructions in the Libet experiment with the request for help in interpreting and translating it to see if it could have a second or hidden meaning. This as part of his preparations for a talk about freedom, will and religion. At the same time I had received Sam Harris' book "Free Will" as a present. So, the topic was clearly on the table.
Please allow that I write in English today in regards to your
preparations for a talk about freedom and free will in conjunction with the
Libet experiment. The Libet conundrum has moved ethicists, philosophers and
neurologists for some time and you reminded me of something I had been dimly
aware of and brought it back to light just after my wife gave me the little
book Free Will (by Sam Harris. I have not read it yet). For that I want to
thank you.
Like you I feel that the mechanistic causality conclusion (that
there is no free will if the brain “knows” about our decision before we do) is
unsatisfactory. It may interest you that Neuroscience seems to have confirmed
the Libet experiment as far as the time sequence. I found a nice little video on this. But even
this much larger time span between neural firings and awareness of a decision
or the act does not prove anything, I think. Namely the separation between
neurons, awareness and physical action (pressing a button) is suspect since all
of it is part of one and the same system, a human.
For one thing, I am not very unsettled by this as physics has
already told me that time is relative and that causation isn’t always what it
appears to be. Quantum physics, for example has the nice little “Entanglement”
problem from which the concept of Quantum Computers is not only derived but
even already realized on a very small scale. The puzzle of cause and
effect also reminds me of Schroedinger’s cat which is alive and dead at the
same time, a thought experiment with this astonishing conclusion. In short,
mechanistic logic (Newtonian logic) is by far not able to describe the physical
world on the very small scale nor on the very large scale (of Black Holes, for
example). So why should the brain be an exception?
But maybe one doesn’t have to go as far as quantum mechanics to
question the simple cause and effect conclusion that seems to be inevitable
from the experiments. One could put this into the realm of the dualisms that
have governed thinking for eons, namely idealism and materialism (Hegel/Marx).
Or the popular term of nature and nurture. Whether Hegel or Marx, we should
have learned about dialectic relationships. The relations of the material
brain, external factors that made the brain the way it is (genetics and
experience) and awareness of what the brain does could be described as
dialectic. And that even before one introduces the terms free and will. The
issue, then, is where will resides in this dialectic relation or in the time
sequence. The problem with the Libet experiment or with the brain scans is that
it doesn’t measure will but the lag between neural firings and the awareness of
them.
This lag isn’t unknown. Similarly we may already see ourselves
running from the tiger before our brain is finished reporting what it just saw
and that it was, in fact, a tiger. This would introduce the spheres of the
conscious and the subconscious. It is well known from recent neuroscience that
there is a lag between those spheres as well and that the conscious mind is
terribly slow and often unreliable.
I can’t put any of this into the context of Erasmus and Luther
but I think that this is generally just another case of the search for the
Prima Causa where science and religion find each other in a pseudo conflict
that goes away upon further thought, just as you suggest. Going back to
physics, the prima causa question reminds me of the creation versus Big Bang
debate. Was there a creator that made the Big Bang happen, or did it happen on
its own or in a multiverse (Hawkins) where Big bangs happen regularly in
a kind of cyclic pattern. The classic chicken and egg question. Anytime we
expand our thought model we can internalize what was previously an external
factor. This has been the history of physics but it never answered the question
of god or the prima causa. It just moved it to a different sphere much in the
same way as the Libet test moves “free will” to another level.
Not sure that any of this contributes to your talks about
freedom. But I think the question cannot be “are we free” but can we wrestle
any degree of freedom from the materiality of our existence. That, indeed, is a
matter of degree and the kind of work we put into it. I see religion or ethics
as imperatives for us to try and free ourselves from determinism as much as
possible, a herculean effort but one that is worth it, for it makes us human.
It was the bite in the apple that expelled us from paradise,
created awareness and began the struggle away from the determinism of the rest
of creation for the apple came from the tree of knowledge and knowledge allowed
humans to follow the dictum Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and
subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the
heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Freedom and
knowledge come from the same tree in my opinion.
Klaus
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