The Mystery of Mind and Matter

This post will expand on some of the ideas I explored in reviewing I am a Strange Loop, and will be the first in a series of posts aimed at systematically explaining my worldview. I believe this is a good subject to build from because ultimately all our ideas about government, society, good and evil, and the right way to live rest upon our conception of the mind. In other words, everything fucked up about this world is a consequence of our collective misunderstanding of what we really are.

Basically all human moral systems, and the civilizations they are built upon, assume a dualist universe that cleanly separates animate and inanimate things. Western or Eastern, Judeo-Christian or Confucian, left-wing or right-wing, pre-agricultural or post-industrial, all humans believe, and have been encouraged by their society to believe, that people are not like objects or animals (at least not the simpler ones). Inanimate things merely obey simple laws of cause and effect, laws that have been discovered and codified in mathematically precise language. There is no choice in the matter. A falling apple does not decide to leap from the tree, it is a passive vessel acted upon by gravity in accordance with its mass and other physical properties. Humans, on the other hand, are different. We have something called free will. We make choices, which in turn have consequences on the physical world and the other humans in it. From this idea comes the concept of morality: if we are free in our actions we must also be responsible in them, and people deserve to be punished or rewarded depending upon the merits of their decisions. Virtually all our cultural norms, our entire legal system, rests upon this notion.

Funny how it can all come crumbling down with the flick of a wrist.

If you take physics seriously (and you should, cuz the computer you're reading this on, and just about everything else in the room you're sitting in is the result of people taking physics seriously) the whole notion of "free will" and the supposed difference between "inanimate objects" and "living beings" should seem a little suspicious. If all matter obeys the same laws of physics and chemistry, and humans are made out of matter, then everything we do basically boils down to physics and chemistry, right? When smart people first started worrying about this a few hundred years ago, they believed the answer was Cartesian Dualism; sure, the body and brain are just ordinary matter like everything else, but the mind is a distinct, non-physical entity that can interact with the physical world through the brain, namely, in Descartes thinking, through the Pineal Gland.

People have updated and refined this idea over the years in light of an increased understanding of neuroscience, but the basic idea remains. Unlike a reflex such as when the doctor taps your knee, people think about what they are doing, decide to act, and then that decision is carried out through the electrochemical processes of the nervous system. Thus, people, being conscious, have agency, and hence moral culpability.

Sounds nice, too bad it's wrong.

In 1985 Benjamin Libet performed a series of experiments to test just where in the process of action conscious decision-making enters the picture. He hooked subjects up to machines to measure the timing of the electrical impulses controlling their movements, then asked them to look at a large, radial stopwatch. Then they were asked to do make some simple physical motion such as flicking their wrist or pressing a button, whenever they felt like, but to remember where the stopwatch reading was when they chose to act. Now, common sense, Cartesian Duality, and basically all traditional understandings of the human condition would predict that the person would become conscious of their choice to move their hand, then some brief moment later the EEG would pick up impulses emanating out of the brain and down the arm. In fact, it was the exact opposite. Between 300 to 500 milliseconds (up to half a second!) before the person has any conscious awareness of moving their hand, electricity is already flowing from the brain to the arm gearing up for the action. This experiment has been replicated dozens of times since and the results hold up for any action you measure or situation you put the subjects in.

I've actually told people about this experiment who just flat-out refused to believe it. Libet himself was horrified with the conclusions and basically denied its implications. Clearly, it is pretty disturbing, and upsets our entire understanding of free will. But upon reflection, it shouldn't really be that surprising. The brain is made up of neurons, which react in a basically predictable way to the surrounding chemicals and electrical charge. They in turn are made up of molecules which behave in an even simpler fashion, and they in turn are made of subatomic particles, the motion of which we can predict better than anything else in the universe. Just as a billiard ball will ricochet and roll around the table precisely in accordance with the laws of force, momentum, friction, etc., so to will the human body move about according to the same laws. The only difference is that the sheer number of interacting objects (trillions of cells each composed of millions of constituent parts) makes predicting the effect of any cause computationally infeasible (at least with current technology). The subject does not choose to flick his wrist any more than the apple chooses to fall from the tree. His awareness of the action is secondary to the action itself, a side-effect.

What does this all mean, and how can we reconcile it with the inescapable feeling that we do control our actions? Certainly the apple doesn't think it actually chose to fall, the apple doesn't think or feel anything at all. If we follow the same rules, why should we be so different?

The consensus building among neuroscientists is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon resulting from the brain's ability to compute models of reality, including models that contain itself. The confusion comes from thinking of consciousness as a thing with definite physical (or even non-physical, spiritual) properties. But this way of thinking is an illusion. When we see a rainbow, it looks as though it actually exists out there along with the clouds and the trees, and if we could reach it we could study just like any other physical object or phenomenon. In fact, the rainbow only exists in our eyes as a side-effect of the bending of light. We can study the different wavelengths of light that compose the rainbow, but we will never catch the rainbow itself. And the rainbow obviously will never effect the light the same as a physical object effects the photons that bounce off it, the rainbow is the effect of the light. Similarly, just as minds (our own and others') seem real, they don't in fact exist anywhere per se; the mind is a side-effect of the bustling of the brain. The mind cannot effect the brain or body like physical phenomena can, thinking it can is getting the causal chain precisely backward.

Does this insight overthrow our entire moral framework? Yes.

Does it mean we cannot hold people responsible for their actions? No. But it does mean we need to reorient our mechanisms of moral enforcement in a way that realistically accounts for the human condition. But now I'm getting ahead of myself. I've only half answered the question of just what the human condition is (the easy half at that). The short (half) answer is this: forget souls, karma, angels and demons, Platonic ideals, astral planes, pineal glands, and all other dualist bullshit. The mind is what the brain does.

Now, to finish getting to the bottom of the human condition we must take the next step and ask, what does the brain do? That's next.