Free Will, Consciousness and Cultured Animals

Posted by Simon Raggett on 7 August 2009 | 3 Comments

Tags: Consciousness, Psychology

Following on the SciMed blog's account of the interview with John Bargh posted on July 1st, I thought it might be interesting to have a contrary view. I give this as a summary and review of a chapter by Roy Baumeister (mentioned in the Bargh interview) that comes in a book that I would highly recommend, namely 'Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will'. This comprises a series of chapters by researchers in the freewill area including Bargh. Further reviews of chapters from this book can be found on www.quantum-mind.co.uk

Roy Baumeister: In: Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will

Baumeister emphasises that for free will to exist, it does not mean that all human actions need to be free. He agrees that much human activity looks to be automatic or determined. Nevertheless, freewill still exists, if only some proportion of activity is caused or influenced by free choice.
This may seem an unambitious claim, but it should be seen against the background of a near universal rejection of freewill by mainstream psychology and neuroscience. This position is often based on experiments that merely show that free will is not involved in certain trivial actions, such as flexing a finger or wrist, that are themselves performed under particular experimental conditions.

The author also argues that believe in free will does not necessarily require us to think of freewill as something that initiates actions. Unconscious brain activity is always present, and much human behaviour can be accepted as automatic. The question for Baumeister is whether there are some instances in which freewill sometimes alters behaviour.

Free will may possibly be viewed as overriding an automatic response, as in Libet's concept of a 'free won't', which allows the conscious will to inhibit an action that began unconsciously. Alternatively, it can be viewed as choosing amongst a series of options that were all originated in unconscious processing. Baumeister argues that if any free will exists, it is connected to conscious deliberation and decision taking. He thinks that the complex nature of human life involves the flexibility of a Libet-style 'free won't' that is capable of overriding initial responses. He argues for the extension of this initial self-control, to include rationalised choices and deliberations, including reviews of future scenarios, or the likely outcomes of a choice of different potential actions. It seems significant that while the evidence for 'no freewill' is based on experiments involving trivial actions of only short-term significance, the mainstream literature tends to evade discussion of the nature of more strategic and longer-term decisions.

The literature also makes it seem likely that many researchers oppose the idea of free will, because they think that this would mean that some kind of non-physical entity would have an influence on the physical world, contradicting the underlying assumption of the causal closure of the physical world. This, however, presupposes that consciousness is non-physical, a contradiction for most researchers who believe that there is no such thing as the non-physical.
In contrast, Baumeister proposes that the self-control process of 'free won't' is an energy consuming and therefore physical process. Experiments (1. Baumeister et al 1998, 2. Vos et al, 2006) demonstrate that logical reasoning is impaired by having to exercise self-control at the same time. These experiments are taken to show that there is an energy constraint on self-control, meaning that it is a physical process. Baumeister reminds us that brain processes are very energy intensive, consuming a fifth of the body's total energy. His thesis is that evolution has developed a system for channelling energy into overriding some of our initial responses. This is seen as a later stage of evolution, to render the behaviour of some animals more adaptive. Further experiments (3. DeWall, Baumeister & Masicampo, 2006, 4. Lieberman et al, 2006) suggest that while unconscious processing can deal with several things at the same time, conscious processing can only deal with one thing at a time.

In general, the position that consciousness has no efficacy has a problem with evolution. It is not clear why evolution would select for consciousness, if it was not efficacious. Within the scientific paradigm, consciousness has to be physical, and therefore has to tie up energy that could be used elsewhere. For my own part, I would tend to view conscious freewill as a kind of chairman of a number of executives, capable of overriding impetuous responses, balancing between conflicting inputs whether rational or emotional, and deliberating also both rationally and emotionally on longer-term strategies.

References

1.) Baumeister et al, (1998) - Is the active self a limited resource? - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, pp. 1252-65
2.) Vohs et al (2006) - Decision fatigue exhausts self-regulatory resources
3.) DeWall, Baumeister & Masicampo (2006) - Evidence that logical reasoning depends on conscious processing
4.) Lieberman et al (2002) - Reflection and reflexion - Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 34, pp. 199-249
5.) Donald, M. (2002) - A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness

Simon Raggett
www.quantum-mind.co.uk