Neuroscience, Freewill, and Moral Responsibility

I took these notes at the Neuroscience, Freewill, and Moral Responsibility Public Forum hosted by UMBC’s Center for Ethics and Values with Adina Roskies and Aaron Schurger moderated by Steve Yalowitz.

What is Libet’s Experiment and what is it supposed to show?

• Is will casually efficacious? Libet wanted to suggest no since the decision wasn’t really made by you consciously.
  • Spontaneous action, conscious awareness of decision making, is your decision made subconsciously before you are consciously aware of it?
• The main finding (which was not technically new) was the Readiness Potential (RP).
  • Preparatory activity for volitional movement
  • This is a bad measure because the brain data is so noisy and individually variable that the RP only really appears in average data over many trials.
• The problem with this experiment was that they only really looked at the data directly before the decision was made, not what was happening when nothing was occurring.
  • That is like trying to learn how to predict rain only on data where it rained that day. It doesn’t rain a lot of days and that has important information as well.

The RP seems to be actually more along the lines of a build up toward a decision, or the brain harnessing random neural fluctuations to bypass a threshold with lower latency.

• Stochastic accumulation decision model
• Drift diffusion to bound decision model
• Is there individual difference in decision boundaries/thresholds?
• Are there other latency-reduction mechanisms in the brain?
  • Is there predictive processing like branch prediction or speculative execution? What does that mean for free will if anything?
• It seems like the RP does not appear in more pre-planned actions.
  • There is probably more time for the threshold to be reached that doesn’t need to harness random fluctuations to reduce latency.

How much does conscious awareness actually matter for free will?

• There are actions like stopping at a red light that happens because you are conscious of the red light, but it seems like the act of stopping wasn’t really done consciously.
  • This is at the very least accessible to your consciousness, which could be all that is necessary for an action to be intentional and free.
  • This might be a consequence of a free choice a long time prior, that you would follow traffic laws, etc.
• The order of neural signals might be different to what we expect, but that is just because we don’t really understand consciousness on a neural basis that much (yet).
• Blindsight or people who have some kind of hemispherectomy are not conscious of some information but nonetheless their brain is processing it and making decisions off of it. Are they not making free actions?

What can neuroscience tell us about free will?

• It could tell us about choice
• It doesn’t really say much about determinism
  • We are very far away if it is even possible to predict thoughts/actions from the brain
    • We still struggle with weather prediction and the brain is most likely a number of times more complex.
  • Predictability is not even a necessary or sufficient condition for determinism
    • There are deterministic chaotic systems that we cannot predict and indeterministic systems that we can predict (like QM).

You must always choose.

• Even if there is an all-knowing prediction machine and it tells you what decision you made in the future, you still have to choose whether or not to take that action. Whether or not that is still all predetermined is beyond the point, that knowledge necessarily cannot absolve you of choice as an agent.

Can people have more free will than others?

• Some people have more capacities than others so their space of potential willable actions is greater
  • Children, animals, etc have some capacities but not other
  • Cognitive control (to inhibit bad responses), chase long term goals, understanding right from wrong, etc.
  • Capacity seems to be at the heart of legal responsibility as well (controlling actions/impulses, understanding the law)
• There may be degrees of freedom where when you are confronted with a new situation that may involve conflicting personal values that you are practicing your most free will in choosing to make a decision where there might not even be good justification to do so.