In an essay published today in Nature, Heisenberg examined the issue of “free will”, a popular idea, good for endless arguments, but having little substance. My premise is that all life is creative, adaptive and emergent. Some of the endless arguments depend on misunderstanding the role of consciousness when decisions are made. Consciousness has little or no role to play. When a person claims ”I decided to do that”, the claim implies a conscious process that occurred in real time as events occurred, as if no innate features of the mind, no learning, preparation or rehearsal were required. It should be self evident that decisions are products of innate features of the brain, inflected by learned modifications. Consciousness is a collection of monitor images that lag behind decisions and provide limited insight about how and why decisions were formulated.
Heisenberg appreciates the emergent properties of living creatures which humans share but did not invent. He described: ”Our influence on the future is something we take for granted as much as breathing. We accept that what will be is not yet determined, and that we can steer the course of events in one direction or another. This idea of freedom, and the sense of responsibility it bestows, seems essential to day-to-day existence… Life is an interplay between the deterministic and the random. Evidence of randomly generated action — action that is distinct from reaction because it does not depend upon external stimuli — can be found in unicellular organisms. What of more complex behaviour? With the emergence of multicellularity, individual cells lost their behavioural autonomy and organisms had to reinvent locomotion. Behaviours in complex organisms typically come in modules such as the heartbeat... Some can take place in parallel, like walking and singing; others are mutually exclusive, such as sleeping and playing the piano. Some necessarily follow one another, like flight and landing. From beginning to end, the lives of animals and humans are an ongoing interweaving of these behavioural modules…based on the interplay between chance and lawfulness in the brain. Insufficiently equipped, insufficiently informed and short of time, animals have to find a module that is adaptive. Their brains, in a kind of random walk, continuously pre-activate, discard and reconfigure their options, and evaluate their possible short-term and long-term consequences.”
Martin Heisenberg. Is free will an illusion? Nature 459, 164-165 (14 May 2009) doi:10.1038/459164a; Accessed online 13 May 2009.
See philosophy, psychology books Stephen Gislason
Heisenberg appreciates the emergent properties of living creatures which humans share but did not invent. He described: ”Our influence on the future is something we take for granted as much as breathing. We accept that what will be is not yet determined, and that we can steer the course of events in one direction or another. This idea of freedom, and the sense of responsibility it bestows, seems essential to day-to-day existence… Life is an interplay between the deterministic and the random. Evidence of randomly generated action — action that is distinct from reaction because it does not depend upon external stimuli — can be found in unicellular organisms. What of more complex behaviour? With the emergence of multicellularity, individual cells lost their behavioural autonomy and organisms had to reinvent locomotion. Behaviours in complex organisms typically come in modules such as the heartbeat... Some can take place in parallel, like walking and singing; others are mutually exclusive, such as sleeping and playing the piano. Some necessarily follow one another, like flight and landing. From beginning to end, the lives of animals and humans are an ongoing interweaving of these behavioural modules…based on the interplay between chance and lawfulness in the brain. Insufficiently equipped, insufficiently informed and short of time, animals have to find a module that is adaptive. Their brains, in a kind of random walk, continuously pre-activate, discard and reconfigure their options, and evaluate their possible short-term and long-term consequences.”
Martin Heisenberg. Is free will an illusion? Nature 459, 164-165 (14 May 2009) doi:10.1038/459164a; Accessed online 13 May 2009.
See philosophy, psychology books Stephen Gislason