Is Intention Really Probabilistic?

 

A friend recently sent a link to an Atlantic article, written by Bahar Gholipour, whose provocative title,  "A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked", prompted me to do some thinking about intention. The article reported on the history of the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential. The readiness potential was discovered in the 1960's by two German scientists, Hans Helmut Kornhuber and his graduate student Lüder Deecke. They collected a group of volunteers and hooked them up to an EEG machine, then asked them to sit in a booth and move one of their fingers at random, whenever they decided to do so. Up until then, cognitive neuroscientists had mostly focused on measuring brain activity related to perception. This experiment was the first to measure brain activity related to an internally generated intention.

What scientists found is that the brain started showing evidence that a movement would occur about 500 ms before it actually did. This was unexpected, as a half second delay between the evidence of an upcoming movement and the moment was a huge gap. The discovery provoked widespread attention and discussion among cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers of science, but nobody really knew what it meant. Benjamin Libet at UC San Francisco seized on the experiment and decided to take it further. Libet wanted to know why it takes almost a half second between the brain "deciding" to move and the actual movement itself. In particular, Libet wanted to determine if a person is actually conscious of the upcoming movement, that is formulates the intention to move, at the half second mark or not. Libet refined the experiment by asking the volunteers to watch a clock and record the time when they consciously decide, or notice the intention to, move their finger. What he found was that the decision only became conscious 150 ms before the movement. Apparently, the brain was actually "deciding" to move before the decision became conscious. Libet interpreted this as evidence that free will is basically an illusion and that the brain unconsciously but deterministically controls movement.

Libet published his work widely, and the results caused a furor,  particularly among philosophers. In the over 2,000 year history of Western philosophy and religion, there has been a continuous debate between those philosophers who maintain that humans, unique among animals, have the ability to control their destiny through free will, and those who maintain that fate determines destiny and that we have very little control over the events in our lives except in a minor way. Humans have an intuitive sense that the choices they make in their lives are not somehow predetermined and therefore they are in control of their own fate. On the other hand, at the macrolevel, the level of human perception and events, the physical universe obeys certain natural laws that have been formulated in a deterministic fashion. Quantum mechanics certainly loosened up determinism at the microlevel, and approaches such as Bayesian networks can extend a probabilistic approach to macrolevel events. Nevertheless, people have the implicit feeling that they can choose and that their choices make a difference in the course of their lives, so their fate is not predetermined but nevertheless is not a matter of random chance.

Free will is central to the Christian notion of sin and redemption. While the standard Christian (basically Catholic) belief is that God gave humans, unique among the animals, the power to choose to behave in a moral and compassionate manner (or, as the Catholic Church would have it, according to Catholic teachings) or not, much of how the universe evolves is determined by God's will. Some Protestant religious thinkers on the other hand, like John Calvin, rejected free will for predestination, the premise that certain people were bound to be saved, and there was nothing anyone could do to change their fate. In Catholicism, a sinner can always experience redemption through God's grace, whereas in Calvinism, there is literally nothing you can do to have your sins forgiven, and neither you nor anyone else will know about whether you will be saved until you die.

In Buddhist philosophy, the tension between free will and destiny is resolved through karma and intention, and the way they interact with dependent origination, the process by which the mind creates suffering. Intentional acts, especially those with moral effects or consequences, result in the generation of karma. Good karma results from acts motivated by good moral intention, neutral karma from acts motivated by neither good nor bad moral intention, and bad karma from acts motivated by bad or evil intention. In the traditional interpretation, karma is built up in kind of Cosmic Blockchain,  where the causes and effects of actions reverberate as the future circumstances in which a person finds themselves, including the circumstances in which they are reborn in their next life.

Dependent arising is the basic process by which the mind generates suffering and karma. Physical contact with sense organs (including the mind) creates painful/pleasant feeling, which then generates craving for more or less of the feeling, which then generates the intention for action, and actions that then result in karma. Dependent arising can be moderated by generating the intention to not act on the experience of craving, mindfully noting the arising of craving without acting on it, and thereby short circuiting the process. Dependent arising can even be completely eliminated by uprooting the root cause, Avijjā, or ignorance of the causes of suffering and their cessation, a process corresponding to the traditional Theravada notion of enlightenment.

Among some Buddhist teachers, Libet's discovery is viewed as a kind of confirmation of the Buddhist philosophical interpretation based on dependent arising. The preconscious part of the readiness potential could be viewed as the arising of contact + feeling, where in the case of finger movement, the "sense organ" is the mind exercising a decision. The conscious generation of the movement can be viewed as the clinging + craving part, carrying through the intention to move at random, installed in place when the volunteer began the experiment. The moral impact of moving a finger is basically neutral - so long as the finger isn't, for example, positioned on the trigger of a gun pointed in someone's direction and the intention to kill is present. So Libet's work was not as surprising, and not as threatening to the intellectual foundation of the Buddhist tradition as it was in Western philosophy.

In the Atlantic article, Gholipour goes on to report some new developments in the history of the readiness potential. In 2010, Aaron Schurger, a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, was studying fluctuations in neuronal activity. Like many natural processes, the activity of neurons rises and falls in recognizable rhythms. Schurger took records of neuronal activity, lined them up by their peaks,and calculated the reverse average, using the same procedure that Kornhuber and Deeke used in their original EEG study, but with far more data. The result was a graph that looked like the readiness potential. Schurger interpreted this result as indication that the readiness potential was not the cause of the movement, but that the movement was generated at a time when the brain's neuronal activity was already primed for motor action, in a similar way to how the brain makes decisions about whether an external perception corresponds to something. The brain gathers evidence, weighs it against past experience, and comes up with a decision, for example that the sensation of red and smell of perfume comes from a rose. In the case of random movements, because their is no sensory input, the brain weighs the evidence and determines whether it is sufficient to fulfill the previously generated intention to randomly move the finger.

Gholipour interprets this as vindicating the notion of free will, but I'm not so sure. Viewed from the Western perspective, I think the situation becomes worse. Like quantum mechanics, whether or not we actually perform some action is now a matter of probability, not our decision to act. When an action becomes probable due to the brain's neuronal activity being in a particular state, it happens. The missing piece here is intention, and intention rarely enters directly into the Western philosophical discourse around free will. But intention and free will are not the same. Intention is more an inclination in the direction of action, sort of a background behind the actual decisions. Actions with intention behind them generate karma, random actions do not.

So the next question for cognitive neuroscience is: what is the brain activity behind intention? Does it establish a kind of overall scope or shape for the neuronal action? Can it be viewed in brain activity? How about an experiment where one group of volunteers is told to generate the intention to randomly move their fingers whenever they want to and the other group is told to suppress the desire for movement should it occur?







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How a Consideration of Bullshit Jobs Leads to a Hypothesis About Karma and the Creation of the Self

Recently I came across a book by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs - A Theory. Graeber published an essay entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" in Strike!, a radical online magazine, in 2013. Graeber asked the provocative question: "Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?" and requested people to send him email about their work situation.  Graeber was referring to jobs like HR consultants, financial consultants, corporate lawyers, and lobbyists, the kind of jobs which Douglas Adams, the science fiction writer, characterized as "telephone sanitizers". These jobs contribute very little to people's overall well being, in contrast with kindergarten teachers, waiters, road workers and nurses where the actual work is connected with a product or service that people genuinely need. Graeber's inbox was flooded with email from people responding to the essay about how unsatisfying the nature of their jobs were. The response was overwhelming. Some people reacted angrily to the question, based on a specific political view (typically libertarian) that jobs which didn't contribute simply wouldn't exist in a capitalist economy. So Graeber decided to write the book.

While Graeber does devote part of the book to discussing bullshit jobs as "spiritual violence", in this post, I'd like to discuss another point that he brings up, which fundamentally underlies his premise but is rather peripheral to his basic argument. This point nevertheless seems to go to the heart of how desire results in the creation of an illusory self-view, and even, ultimately, why a person perceives a job as being bullshit rather than not. From the Buddhist standpoint, karma is cause and effect, the fact that actions have consequences (or more specifically intentional actions have consequences). The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination are based on karma, each link being connected to the following one through a cause and effect relationship. Experience is created through the twelve links.

An important characteristic of a bullshit job is that it has no effect on the world. Graeber sites research by the German psychologist Karl Groos from 1901 in Chapter 3. Groos looked at the response of infants that were allowed to make some predictable effect on the world, versus infants that were prevented from having such an effect. The effect didn't need to have any benefit to them. An example is an infant that discovers it can move a pencil by randomly moving its arms. The infant discovers that they can have the same effect by moving their arms again. The result is expressions of total joy, which Groos coined "the pleasure of being the cause". Groos suggested this reaction was the basis of play, exercising causality simply for the pure joy of exercising it. Subsequent work has confirmed Groos' initial observation and expanded on it. In the footnotes, Graeber cites work by Francis Broucek from 1977 in which Broucek maintains that the sense of causal efficiency is the core of sense of self, and not a property of a predefined self. In other words, the pleasure derived from experiencing one's physical presence as a cause is the fundamental basis upon which the illusion of a sense of self is created.

Now one could argue that a baby accidentally knocking over a pencil once and deriving an obvious sense of pleasure from the action isn't intentional action. Intentional action means action formulated with some aim or plan to accomplish some effect. Because the action is accidental, there is no intention behind it. However, the next step, the baby knocking over the pencil again,  in order to experience that same sense of joy or happiness does involve intention. In fact, it is an example of the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination at work, specifically the link between feeling (pleasure at being the cause) and craving (wanting to have that effect happen again), then doing something about it to make the effect happen. The next step in the Twelve Links is clinging, thinking about getting more of the pleasant sensation, planning how to get it, etc. A baby might be too young to do much planning, and its capacity to move around is not well developed enough to do much about fulfilling such a plan even if it could make one, but ultimately, when the baby gets old enough to crawl, it can find other stuff and knock it over to watch it fall. And when it grows up to be an adult, it will feel a sense of unsatisfactoriness to its life if its put into a job where the actions it has have no consequences at all, basically a bullshit job.

Therefore, undermining the connection between experiencing one's physical presence as a source of causal efficiency seems like a fruitful place to look for practice opportunities.

Image source:  https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/86

Emptiness and the Disappearance of Perception

While most beginning meditation books stress basic mindfulness or being "in the moment", Rob Burbea in his book Seeing That Frees goes beyond that, describing how to develop a view of emptiness around specific aspects of the five skandhas, which is basically the sravaka emptiness of the individual person, and a view of emptiness of phenomenon, which is the Mahayana emptiness of the world. He also describes how to do analytical meditation, something I've encountered in my readings of Tibetan texts but which receives almost no attention at all in the Zen and Theravadan texts I've mostly been exposed to in the past. As I tend to be of an analytical mindset (being an engineer) I've been curious to see just exactly what was involved in analytical meditation on emptiness. 

One of the nonanalytical meditative techniques Burbea recommends is to perform anatta (not-self) meditation on various perceptions. So rather than cognitively noting the sensations as in the Mahasi technique, or noting the three characteristics around them, you instead note how they are empty of any essence or core, because they are dependent on causes and conditions to arise and pass away. While he says you can go into the causes and conditions, he recommends that you not dwell on them, but just briefly note their empty nature.

The exercise is intended to develop the same insight as the Buddha had into dependent origination. After a while, the nature of how the mind fabricates reality by clinging to particular perceptions becomes apparent. This clinging doesn't involve any cognitive labeling (i.e. the thought "this is a flower") but rather is built into the basic mechanism of how we perceive, which is why it is so difficult to tease out. In order for us to perceive a flower in front of us or a sensation in our body, there must be an object, the flower or the body with something going on, and the mind must grab onto it and have a particular view about it.

The intent of this meditation is to reduce craving, or reactivity around perceptions, and thereby loosen up the mind to treat perception in a different way. Burbea notes that after a while, perceptions in meditation should be come lighter, and that they should then fade away. The classical texts speak of this in many places, for example this quote from Nagarjuna:

One who sees the absence of 'mine' and I-making does not see.*

In the classical texts, this is called "the pacification of perception (sarvopalambhopasmah in Sanskrit).

I've been noticing something like this in my daily meditation off and on for the last year and a half or so. Basically, I'll sit down and after I make sure my meditation timer is advancing properly (sometimes, if I don't hit the on button just right, it sticks and doesn't advance so I end up sitting for an hour or more instead of 40 minutes), I'll settle in and take note of what sensations happen to be arising in my body. Like this knee has a particular feeling of twisting, or my body is off center. If I need to actually make any physical changes in my posture, I'll make them. Then I will continue to note the sensations and usually tune into the breath at my abdomen. I use that because my Mahamudra teacher likes to have us start with what he calls the "origin point" at the base of the spine as the meditation object. My mental stance or view towards these objects (body sensations and the breath) is quite neutral, that they are just arising and falling as such things do, so more or less like Burbea's emptiness meditation. After a while, the sensations will fade. As the Heart Sutra says: no sound, no taste, no touch, no objects of mind. Shortly before the 40 minutes is up, hearing comes back on line and I hear the meditation timer chime.

Of course, not every daily meditation goes like that, sometimes I have stuff come up from work or in my life, and then need to notice it and return to the breath. I rarely get extreme papancia in my daily meditations though. About the most extreme is some light planning about what I'll do the next day at work, if it's an evening meditation, or during the day, if it's morning.

The funny thing about this fading of perception is that it is pretty easy to see the difference between sarvopalambhopasmah and when I'm drifting off to sleep. Basically, I am able to hold my posture fine and I don't think I am snoring either. Sometimes I do drift off to sleep and slump forward if it's an evening meditation and I've had a particularly long day, so I can tell the difference.  And finally, perception begins to return just before the meditation timer rings for the end of the session, as would be expected. I don't wake up suddenly with that: "Huh? I've just been sleeping for 40 minutes?" feeling. Since I'm going into the session with an intention to sit for 40 minutes, my mind has formulated some clinging around the end of the session; therefore, when the session is about to end, perception returns. The difference in the quality of mind of sleep and sarvopalambhopasmah is pretty obvious, but until I encountered Burbea's book, I was kind of wondering what was going on.

The other interesting point is that the fading is not like the path or fruit moment. These types of disappearance of perception are (or were for me) quite sudden, and twice the disappearance happened when I was doing something other than meditating. In those cases, perception simply stopped then rebooted a few moments later. In another, which occurred during a meditation retreat, the moment was preceded by a kind of strobing of perception which then ceased quite suddenly. And afterwards when the mind comes back on line after path and fruit moments, there is an enormous amount of energy and a feeling of well-being, as if something profound has occurred. So these experiences are quite intense. With the fading of perception in daily meditation, it's kind of like a feeling of comfort and ease, refreshing, not a great deal of energy, so it is more like the term in the classical texts, a pacification.

Later in the book, Burbea's goes into the relationship between intention, perception, and craving, basically unpacking the relationship between my intention to sit for 40 minutes and the return of hearing just before the meditation timer chimes.  Any kind of perception involves a very subtle clinging (tanha in Sanskrit) beyond the feeling of pleasant/unpleasant (vedana in Sanskrit) associated with the bare sensation, links seven and eight in the chain of dependent origination. He also talks a bit about karma, but spends most of that chapter discussing "purification" and catharsis, which many mediators believe and experience as an important part of their practice, but which he emphasizes is ultimately empty. One needs to approach this emptiness with the right mindset, of course, and he talks about that.

Anyway, I highly recommend Burbea's book if you want to check out some interesting approaches to meditation on emptiness. I would, however, be a bit careful about going around and claiming sarvopalambhopasmah as an "attainment" especially if you are on a Bodhisattva Path. Like the Heart Sutra says: "With no attainment, a Bodhisattva dwells in prajnaparimita (the Perfection of Wisdom)". Prajnaparimita is the understanding and perception of the fundamental emptiness under the phenomenal world.



* Mulamadhyamakakarika
Image source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-03-optical-illusion-insight-world.html