The Self Illusion

by Bruce Hood

  My colleague Paul Bloom argues that essentialism is also at the heart of why we value certain objects or experiences: we believe them to have certain essential truths.98 For example, we prefer and admire original works of art until we discover they are forgeries. Fakes are never worth as much as the original, even if you could not tell them apart. Most heterosexuals would enjoy sex with a good-looking member of the opposite sex until they discover that the person is a transsexual. For many heterosexuals, the thought of penetration with a member of the same sex is disgusting, even though they may never be aware of the true biological origins of their partner. Although the physical pleasure could be identical, the discovery that things are not what you believe reveals that our enjoyment depends on an assumption of authenticity. This is because we believe that a deception of identity has taken place. The same can be said for our common-sense notions of the self. The true nature of a person is their essential identity and when they are not true to their self, we call them fakes, cheats and hypocrites, lacking strong core values. All of this language betrays a notion of some internal truth or self that has been violated.

  This core self, wandering down the path of development, enduring things that life throws at it is, however, the illusion. Like every other aspect of human development, the emergence of the self is epigenetic – an interaction of the genes in the environment. The self emerges out of that journey through the epigenetic landscape combining the legacy of our genetic inheritance with the influence of the early environment to produce profound and lasting effects on how we develop socially. These effects, in turn, can shape the way we interact with others and raise our own children. These thoughts and behaviours may seemingly originate from within us but they emerge largely in a social context. In a sense, who we are really comes down to those around us. We may all be born with different biological properties and dispositions but even these emerge in the context of others and in some cases can be triggered or turned off by environmental factors. The extent of these reactions and how they happen, is what scientists are trying to discover. We may feel that we are the self treading down the path of life and making our own decisions at the various junctions and forks, but that would also assume we are free to make our choices. However, the freedom to make choices is another aspect of the self illusion.

  Memory Test

  Were the following words present in the list of words you read?

  a) needle

  b) river

  4

  The Cost of Free Will

  We must believe in free will – we have no choice.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  For ninety-six minutes on a hot summer’s day around noon in 1966, ex-marine Charles Whitman, positioned high up in the tower building of the University of Texas in Austin, fired 150 rounds killing fourteen people and injuring another thirty-two before he was finally shot dead by the police.1 The University of Texas massacre was one of the first examples of a modern-day phenomenon of mass shootings. Dunblane, Columbine and Virginia Tech are just a few of the recent atrocities in a growing list of senseless killing sprees that beggar belief. Every time one of these horrors happens, we are left asking the same question – why? In the case of Charles Whitman, we have an answer. He probably wasn’t his usual self.

  In his prospective suicide note, Whitman wrote about the impulsive violence and the mental turmoil he was experiencing. He had a history of aggressive outbursts and a troubled family life, but in the months leading up to the Austin rampage, Whitman thought things were getting worse. He wrote, ‘After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed to see if there is any visible physical disorder.’ He also asked that after his debts had been paid off, any money left over should go into research to find out if there was some explanation for his actions. He knew that something was not right. And he was unfortunately correct. Deep inside his brain was a sizeable tumour in the region of his amygdala.

  The amygdala is part of the brain circuitry responsible for emotional behaviours: damage to this region can cause excessive swings in rage and anger. Overstimulation of the amygdala will cause both animals and humans to lash out violently. Whitman’s tumour could have been responsible for his impulsive aggression throughout his life. Together with the fact that his family life was troubled, he abused amphetamines and he had been under a lot of stress in the summer of 1966, having a tumour of his amygdala would have impaired his ability to remain calm. But now that we know he had a brain tumour, was Whitman responsible for his actions? Did Whitman murder those innocent people or did his tumour?

  There is also the strange case of the forty-year-old man who developed an interest in child pornography.2 He was aware that his paedophilia was wrong because he went to great lengths to conceal his activities, but eventually he was exposed by his stepdaughter and sent to a rehabilitation centre for treatment instead of prison. However, he could not avoid soliciting sexual favours from staff and other patients at the centre and was eventually expelled. The evening before his prison sentence was due to commence, he was taken into hospital complaining of severe headaches, where it was discovered that he had tumour in his prefrontal cortex – the same region related to suppressing and inhibiting drives and sexual urges. You need your prefrontal cortex in order to overcome the impulse to eat the marshmallows as a toddler, but as an adult you also need it to curtail the urge to fight, flee and fornicate.

  Was the tumour responsible for the paedophile’s behaviour? In a way, it was. When his tumour was removed, his sexual urges declined and, after seven months, he was allowed to go back to his home where his stepdaughter lived. However, a year later he started collecting pornography again whereupon another brain scan revealed that his tumour had grown back, again requiring surgery to remove. But how can a lump of cancerous cells have sexual urges towards young children? There is something very wrong in the way that we tend to think about the link between brain, behaviour and mind.

  My Brain Made Me Do It

  Neuroscientist David Eagleman believes that we are entering a new era in which our understanding of how the brain works will force us to confront the difficulty of establishing when others are responsible for their actions.3 This is the emerging field of neuroethics – the brain basis of morality and how we should behave. He makes the point that there are few among us who would attribute blame to Whitman or the paedophile when there is a clear brain abnormality such as a cancerous tumour. As Eagleman points out, the problem is that, as our understanding of how the brain works improves, we will increasingly encounter arguments that those who commit crimes are not responsible for their actions due to some biological abnormality. As we understand more about the microcircuitry of the brain, we are going to discover more about the different imbalances and predispositions that are linked to criminal acts. Where will society eventually draw the line of culpability?

  In fact, we have now reached a point at which there does not need to be any evidence of a biological abnormality – you just have to act out of character in such a way as to not be regarded as your usual self. This is what the Canadian jury decided in the case of Ken Parks who, in 1988, drove twenty-three kilometres to his in-laws’ house in Ontario, where he stabbed his wife’s parents, killing the mother-in-law. He then presented himself to the local police station where he said, ‘I think I have killed some people.’

  Prior to the attack, Parks was said to have loved his in-laws who described him as a ‘gentle giant’. His defence team argued that as Parks did not remember the attack, he was sleepwalking; they entered a plea of ‘homicide during non-insane automatism as part of a presumed episode of somnambulism’. He had no prior history of such behaviour, but because the attack was so out of character, the jury accepted the defence and acquitted him.4

  But what does it mean to be acting out of character? This statement assumes a sovereignty of self that is usurped by external forces. Where do these external forces exert their influence if not within us? Does it make any more sense to say that my background or
environment is responsible for my actions than to say that my brain made me do it? I once discussed these issues of culpability over dinner with two adults who differed in their political leanings to the left and to the right. As you probably expected, the conservative was inclined to see fault in the individual whereas the liberal saw society to blame. Clearly these are questions that have no clear-cut answers and may reflect our personal belief systems.

  Many legal systems operate on a version of the M’Naghten Rules, a precedent drawn up following the attempted assassination of the British Prime Minister Robert Peel by Daniel M’Naghten in 1843. This is known as the insanity defence and based on the criteria that:

  at the time of committing of the act, the party accused was not labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

  The problem is that many of us do things that we do not regard as wrong. We can always find ways of justifying our actions in retrospect to make sense of senseless acts – a point that is important when discussing decision-making. Also, we have all done things when we do not fully take into consideration the consequences of our actions. Are these exceptions, too? If so, how are we to decide what counts as being out of character? Is the one-off act worse than the repeat offender? After all, if someone repeatedly offends, then maybe they are unable to control their actions or do not think what they are doing is wrong. On the other hand, if an act is only done once, does this not mean that the offender should be punished more severely because they should have known better?

  These are exactly the sorts of arguments that were raised in 2010 when the world was outraged by an impulsive act of cruelty perpetrated by forty-five-year-old British bank worker, Mary Bale, from Coventry. She was walking home one August evening when she encountered a cute four-year-old cat called Lola on a garden wall. She often stopped to stroke the cat on her visits to see her ill father who she would visit every day in hospital. On this occasion, she once again stopped to pet the tabby cat, but then glanced around twice before opening the lid of a nearby recycling bin, grabbing the cat by the scruff of its neck and then neatly dropping it inside before walking off briskly to her home three streets away.

  Unfortunately for Mary, her dastardly deed was captured on the home surveillance system of the cat’s owners who posted the video on their Facebook page. The video went global and soon thousands of people from around the world were calling her ‘worse than Hitler’. When Mary was eventually identified from the video, she was arrested for cruelty but also put under police protection because of all the death threats she had received.

  What possessed such a mundane, normal bank worker to commit such a senseless act of cruelty? Bale at first said she ‘suddenly thought it would be funny’ to put the cat in the bin. Later, she claimed her actions were ‘completely out of character’ and that she had no recollection of the event. Surely this was just a one-off lapse in morality. When she was tried in October 2010, the court accepted that she had been under stress. She had to leave her job at the bank. Her father had also just died, but the court was less understanding than those who judged Ken Parks. Bale was found guilty of animal cruelty, ordered to pay a large fine and banned from keeping animals for five years. Maybe that says more about the way the British feel about their pets than their willingness to absolve a momentary moment of madness.

  The Trouble with Free Will

  Most of us believe that unless we are under duress or suffering from some form of mental disorder, we all have the capacity to freely make decisions and choices. This is the common belief that our decisions are not preordained and that we can choose between alternatives. This is what most people mean by having free will – the belief that human behaviour is an expression of personal choice and is not determined by physical forces, fate or God. In other words, there is a self in control.

  However, neuroscience tells us that we are mistaken and that free will is also part of the self illusion – it is not what it seems. We think we have freedom but, in fact, we do not. As such, we need to start rethinking how we apply the concept of free will or, rather, the lack of it as an excuse for our thoughts and behaviours. For example, I believe that the sentence that I have just typed was my choice. I thought about what I wanted to say and how to say it. Not only did I have the experience of my intention to begin this line of discussion at this point but I had the experience of agency, of actually writing it. I knew I was the one doing it. I felt the authorship of my actions.

  It seems absurd to question my free will here but, as much as I hate to admit it, these experiences are not what they seem. This is because any choices that a person makes must be the culmination of the interaction of a multitude of hidden factors ranging from genetic inheritance, life experiences, current circumstances and planned goals. Some of these influences must also come from external sources, but they all play out as patterns of neuronal activity in the brain. This is the matrix of distributed networks of nerve cells firing across my neuronal architecture. My biases, my memories, my perceptions and my thoughts are the interacting patterns of excitation and inhibition in my brain, and when the checks and balances are finally done, the resulting sums of all of these complex interactions are the decisions and the choices that I make. We are not aware of these influences because they are unconscious and so we feel that the decision has been arrived at independently – a problem that was recognized by the philosopher, Spinoza, when he wrote, ‘Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.’5

  Also, logically, there can be no free will. There is no King Solomon in our head weighing up the evidence. We already discussed why the little person inside our head making decisions, the homunculus, can’t exist because that solution simply creates the problem of an infinite regress – who is inside their head and so on, and so on. Nor are we going to allow for a ‘ghost in the machine’ – which introduces spiritual influences, that scientists have been unable to find – into our explanation.

  If we remove free will from the equation, some have worried that the alternative is one of determinism – that everything is predetermined and that our lives are simply the playing out of a complicated game of set moves in which fate reigns over freedom. Most people find that notion just as scary, because it means we have no control in shaping the future. Surely the future is not already preordained?

  Faced with such an existential crisis, some have sought a way of introducing randomness into the equation. If there are no spirits or gods and only physics governs us and the world we live in, then maybe the physics is less predictable than one would think? One seemingly attractive way of escaping the determinist view is to get rid of predictability at the smallest level of the brain. This is where we enter the mysterious and peculiar world of quantum physics, where the rules that govern the physical world we know no longer apply. And if these rules are gone, then so has the predictability of how our brain works, thereby leaving the door ajar for some freedom of choice.

  Charming Quarks

  The world of quantum physics is weird. It doesn’t obey the laws of the normal world. Elements can pop in and out of existence, be in two places at the same time and basically not conform to the sorts of rules of matter that operate in the Newtonian world. Put simply, quantum physics has revealed that the basic building blocks of matter, the elemental subatomic particles, behave in decidedly unpredictable ways. They are known as ‘indeterminate’ – as opposed to determined. They don’t behave like objects in the Newtonian world. These elementary particles of matter are known as ‘quarks’. Their unpredictability undermines determinism because it indicates that laws of cause and effect do not apply at the quantum level. Advocates of this position argue that if the fabric of the universe is inherently unpredictable, then choices are not determined and multiple potential futures a
re possible. This is why quantum indeterminacy is reassuring to those of us who want to retain the possibility that we are free to decide our own destiny.

  One of the problems of applying quantum indeterminacy to explain free will is that the signalling between neuronal networks in the brain happens at a level much larger in scale than that observed at the subatomic particle level at which indeterminacy happens. It’s like saying the individual grains of sand that make up an individual brick could influence the structure of a cathedral made out of millions of bricks as well as the societies that spawn from such institutions. More importantly, even if randomness at the quantum level somehow translated up to the molecular level of brain activation and the macro-level of societies, then that would equally not be a satisfying account of what most of us experience as free will. Decisions would not be choices but rather the outcome of random events, which is not free will either. As I quipped in my last book, SuperSense, even if there were a ghost in the machine exercising free will, then we don’t want one flipping a coin when it comes to making a decision!

  Our belief in free will not only reflects our personal subjective experience of control over our actions on a daily basis, but also our own ignorance of the mechanisms, both conscious and unconscious, that determine our decisions. Many people find such a conclusion deeply disturbing, as if their life is already predictable. Dan Dennett is quoted as saying, ‘when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.’6

  But why should that be upsetting? Many things in life are not what they seem. Arguably all of our perceptions are illusions because we don’t have any privileged access to reality. Our minds are a matrix simulating reality. Even the physical world is not what it seems. Quantum physics reveals that a solid brick is made up of more space than matter. Does a deeper understanding of the nature of the brick undermine how we should behave when someone throws one at our head? Clearly not.