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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