“There was a young man who said ‘Damn!’
I perceive with regret that I am
But a puppet that moves
In predestinate grooves
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram.”
—Maurice E. Hare (1905)
The human brain is without doubt the most complex object in the known universe. How can the ‘material’ brain, essentially billions of unconscious atoms, give rise to the rich subjective experience of our every day lives; tastes, smells, colours, sounds, feelings, emotions? Given enough LEGO, could you ever build a structure that feels pain, or is able to read and understand the content of this blog?
How the ‘immaterial’ mind can emerge from the ‘material’ brain is as much a problem for philosophy as it is for science. However, in recent decades, the sophisticated tools required to study the brain – the methods and techniques needed to measure certain aspects of brain activity have began to flourish, with surprising results.
Arguably the most interesting area of research (but seldom discussed) concerns that of free will. Many of us believe that we have choice. We believe that we are morally responsible for our actions, and that for any choice we make, we could have chosen otherwise.
Suppose I tell you a joke, and you laugh because you find it funny, did you have a choice to find it funny? Could you have perhaps chosen to find it offensive instead?
Suppose I suggest that black people are less intelligent than white people, or tell you that your partner has an ugly face, do you think you have a choice in how those statements make you feel? Could you choose to agree with me, despite your immediate and automatic feelings of anger or revulsion?
If I offer you a new type of beer, you taste it and declare “I do not like this beer”, what choice did you have in this? Does it even make sense to suggest you could have chosen otherwise?
I fail to see the difference between these questions, and other questions which are of much more significance to society, particularly to our criminal justice system. For example, If a person is sexually attracted to members of their own sex, could they have chosen otherwise? We can ask the same question of Paedophiles. If you are not attracted to children, could you wake up one morning and decide that you are? If you are disturbed enough to want to act on these desires, if your moral compass is not refined enough to prevent you from acting, is it really your fault that you do?
Experiements performed by Benjamin Libet in 1983 suggest that unconscious electrical processes in the brain precede conscious decisions to perform spontaneous acts. In other words, you can raise your arm and state “I’ve just chosen to raise my arm, therefore I have free will”, but that decision to raise your arm had started in the brain many seconds before you became consciously aware that you wanted to raise your arm. More, by looking at your brain, it would have been possible for somebody else to predict you were going to raise your arm, long before you ‘chose’ to do it.
This should not really come as a surprise, since our brains are physical things, and like all physical things, they obeys physical laws. If I throw a tennis ball at a wall, and I know something about the trajectory and velocity of the ball, I can confidently predict where the ball will land. The same can be said (in theory) about the atoms in your brain. The only thing that can influence the physical brain is the external world. Inputs come in (a funny joke for example), and outputs arise in consciousness (the experience of finding something funny) through no fault of our own. Somebody runs at you with a knife, and you immediately react, accidentally killing that person in the process. Given your brain at that moment in time, and the specific input, there could only ever be one output.
Our minds (our thoughts, beliefs and feelings) are intricately linked to the physical brain. For proof of this, just think what happens when you drink alcohol. The alcohol affects the chemistry of your brain, which directly influences the mind. How the current physical state of your brain correlates with your actual state of mind is still beyond our understanding. However, humans have walked the earth for approximately 200,000 years. We discovered the scientific method about 400 years ago (look at the progress we have made since), and anything resembling modern neuroscience started less than 50 years ago. It will take a brave man to suggest this correlation will never be understood.
Free will is an illusion, our choices are the result of the brains we are born with, and the experiences we are subject to throughout our lives.
Needless to say, this does not mean that there is no right and wrong, or that we should all start misbehaving. All it means is that there should be increased emphasis to teach and understand what is right and wrong. A brain that understands why something is wrong, that appreciates compassion, is much less likely to behave immorally.
If anything, our criminal justice system should focus less on punishment, and more on rehabilitation. Brains can learn – it’s what they do best.
Science in our lives 