In a related study, researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili found that when Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray, their brain scans indicate strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a region of the brain the authors have dubbed the orientation association area (OAA), which orients the body in physical space (people with damage to this area have a difficult time negotiating their way around a house). When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly there is a sharp distinction between self and nonself. When OAA is in sleep mode—as in deep meditation and prayer—that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy, between feeling in body and out of body. Perhaps this is what happens to monks who experience a sense of oneness with the universe, or with nuns who feel the presence of God, or with alien abductees floating out of their beds up to the mother ship.23
Since our normal experience is of stimuli coming into the brain from the outside, when a part of the brain abnormally generates these illusions, another part of the brain interprets them as external events. Hence, the abnormal is thought to be the paranormal. What these studies show is that mind and spirit are not separate from brain and body. In reality, all experience is mediated by the brain. Further, and more to the point of our discussion on free will and the brain, we now know from recent research in the neurosciences that every brain is wired, and continues to be rewired throughout life, in response to unique genetic, environmental, and historical conditions. Evolutionary psychologists Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham, for example, in their book The Origin of Minds, argue that our ancestral inheritance is not a set of fixed cognitive tools, but a living “brain/mind-construction system” that exploits pliable brain tissue, changing it with new experiences. The Swiss Army knife, it seems, can design new blades for cutting through new environments.24 How does it do this?
The mind is an emergent property of billions of individual neurons, each of which is connected to thousands of other neurons that together produce trillions of potential neuronal states. As the individual grows and develops into adulthood the interconnections grow and develop according to individual life experiences. Although we share a common evolutionary ancestry that generated a universal neural architecture, since no life paths are the same, and with trillions of possible permutations of neuronal connections in each brain, the result is that every human mind is unique. There are literally six billion different minds. The foundation of this neural system is what La Cerra and Bingham call the adaptive representational network (ARN), “a network of neurons that memorializes a brief scene in the ongoing movie of your life, linking together your physical and emotional state, the environment you are in, the behavior or thought you generate, and the problem-solving outcome.” What they are describing is an autocatalytic (self-generating) feedback loop. New experiences stimulate neurons to grow new synaptic connections. Those new connections are distinctive to every individual mind, which then responds to the environment in an idiosyncratic way, producing a behavioral repertoire of responses. The ARN evolved as an adaptation to help organisms survive in an ever-changing environment. No brain module can do what the ARN does, because modules evolved to solve specific problems, whereas the ARN evolved to solve a range of problems, even those never encountered.
How does this apply to real-world choices? La Cerra and Bingham reinterpret clinical depression in terms of its adaptive response consequences. The symptoms of depression—restlessness, agitation, disturbed sleeping and eating, impaired concentration, and loss of motivation—are not signs of an illness; rather, they represent an adaptive response to do something different in your life. “Because behavior is so enormously expensive energetically, the best thing a person in this situation can do is to stop what he has been doing, reconfigure his life, and try to formulate a more viable trajectory into the future.” Why would this intelligence system have evolved? “If you were an ancestral human who was being exploited by another individual or group of individuals, a complete behavior shutdown could abruptly force a renegotiation of the inequitable social relationship.” Even in the modern world, depression “serves as a wake-up call, prodding people to abandon dead-end jobs and relationships.”25
What does all this neuroscience tell us about free will and determinism? Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, for one, argues that the brain is wired to “feel” like it is making choices, so we should listen to what our brains are telling us. “The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works,” he explains. “It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences.” That is, making choices that lead to behaviors that result in actual consequences for survival and reproduction in our evolutionary history would have led to the evolution of brain mechanisms that give the illusion of free will. “You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you.” Even “if the most ironclad form of determinism is real,” Pinker concludes, “you could not do anything about it anyway, because your anxiety about determinism, and how you would deal with it, would also be determined.” 26 Thus, with such convoluted and complex brains as we possess and living in a world with so many options, our brains evolved a choice-making module that, whether truly free or truly determined, nonetheless makes us feel free.
Free Will and Genetics
In 1985, while racing a bicycle along a lonely rural highway in Arkansas in the 3,000-mile nonstop transcontinental Race Across America, I was asked by ABC television commentator Diana Nyad how it felt to be too far behind the leader of the race to win. I told her that while I would prefer winning I had done everything I could in training, nutrition, equipment, and preparation, and that the only thing I could have done to improve my performance was to pick better parents. When that comment aired months later on Wide World of Sports, I called my parents to assure them I only meant that genetics plays a powerful role in athletics. I acquired the comment from renowned sports physiologist Per-Olof Astrand, who told an exercise symposium, “I am convinced that anyone interested in winning Olympic gold medals must select his or her parents very carefully.”27
From an evolutionary perspective, our parents have been very carefully selected for us—by natural selection. But we are also the products of our parental upbringing, family dynamics, peer groups, community values, teachers and education, preachers and religion, culture and politics, and much more. The science of assigning some portion of our lives to genetics and the remaining portion to the environment has a long and controversial history. The process strikes me as an exercise in futility because of the interactive nature of genes and memes, evolutionary history and cultural history. Such binary thinking, particularly since the completion of the mapping of the human genome, for example, has led to oversimplified claims for a “math gene,” a “risk-taking gene,” a “promiscuity gene,” a “rape gene,” or a “smoking gene.”28
In reality, the story is much more complex, and claims for genetic determinism are greatly exaggerated. Consider as one example among many a gene called D4DR, located on the short arm of the eleventh chromosome. D4DR codes for dopamine receptors, a neurotransmitter released by neurons that, when received by other neurons receptive to its chemical makeup, sets up dopamine pathways throughout the brain that stimulate the organism to be active (or not, if a shortage exists). A complete lack of dopamine, for example, causes patients (or rats) to slip into a virtual catatonic state. High levels of dopamine turn humans schizophrenic and rats frenetic. Dopamine stimulation, in fact, is the basis of the famous experiment where rats pressed a bar to stimulate their so-called pleasure center, which they did until collapsing in exhaustion. This is the fascinating work of geneticist Dean Hamer who, in his quest to find genes for smoking and homosexuality, discovered the gene (or, more precisely, the gene-complex) for a thrill-seeking personality. It turns out that the D4DR gene sequence repeats on chromosome eleven, and while most of us have four to seven copies, some people have two or three
, and others have eight, nine, ten, or eleven copies. More copies of D4DR sequence means lower levels of dopamine, which translates into higher novelty-seeking behavior that artificially produces more dopamine (jumping off buildings and out of planes will do the trick). Hamer took 124 people who scored high on a survey that measured their desire to seek novelty and thrills (bungee jumpers and sky divers knock the roof off these tests), then looked at their DNA—specifically, chromosome eleven. He found that people who like to jump off buildings and out of planes had more copies of D4DR sequence than those who prefer knitting and watching grass grow.
When Hamer’s research was picked up in the media, headlines declared that scientists had discovered the novelty-seeking gene, implying that perhaps all of our personality traits are genetically coded at a single point on a single chromosome arm. Alas, if only it were that simple—whenever you get that urge to jump off the top of Yosemite’s Half Dome, just take a dopamine tablet and you’ll prefer to stay on the marked trails. But there is another side to this story. When you actually read the original research, it turns out that Hamer claims to explain no more than 4 percent of novelty-seeking behavior by D4DR sequences. That is, if we say that humans vary by 100 percent in their novelty-seeking behavior—catatonics on one end and X-Game skateboarders careening down hills at 50 mph two inches off the ground on the other—only 4 percent of that variance can be accounted for by D4DR. That’s it! As the science writer Matt Ridley explains in his analysis of the research:
Do you see now how unthreatening it is to talk of genetic influences over behaviour? How ridiculous to get carried away by one “personality gene” among 500? How absurd to think that, even in a future brave new world, somebody might abort a foetus because one of its personality genes is not up to scratch—and take the risk that on the next conception she would produce a foetus in which two or three other genes were a kind she does not desire? Do you see now how futile it would be to practise eugenic selection for certain genetic personalities, even if somebody had the power to do so? You would have to check each of 500 genes one by one, deciding in each case to reject those with the “wrong” gene. At the end you would be left with nobody, not even if you started with a million candidates. We are all of us mutants. The best defence against designer babies is to find more genes and swamp people in too much knowledge.29
Nature is so intertwined with nurture that to say that a complex human characteristic like personality or intelligence or—to the point of this book—morality is, say, 40 percent genetics and 60 percent environment (to arbitrarily pick two figures) misses something very important: inheritability of talent does not mean inevitability of success, and vice versa. We are free to select the optimal environmental conditions that will allow us to rise to the height of our biological potentials. In this sense, athletic success, like any other type of success, may be measured not just against others’ performances, but also against the upper ceiling of our own ability. To succeed is to have done one’s absolute best. To win is not just to have crossed the finish line first, but also to cross the finish line in the fastest time possible within one’s own limits. The closer one comes to reaching the personal upper limit of potential, the greater the achievement, as depicted in the Genetic Range of Potential model in figure 19. Individual “A” may have more absolute talent potential than individual “B,” but this does not guarantee relative success. If “B” prepares to the height of his or her upper limit of potential, but “A” slacks off below that mark, inherited talent becomes meaningless. There is not much we can do about selecting our parents, but we can select our environmental conditions to push us to the top of our range of potential.
Free Will and Evolution
Free will, Dennett says, emerges out of our deterministic world from the fact that we evolved a large cortex that allows us to weigh the consequences of the many courses of action available to us, that we are aware that we (and others) make these choices, and that we hold ourselves and them accountable.30
Figure 19: Genetic Range of Potential Model
Human behavior is a function of both genetics and environment, arrayed in a complex and interactive feedback loop. Behaviors are never “fixed” in some absolute sense by genetics; instead, genes code for a range of potential behaviors, which environments then affect. Genetically predisposed behaviors may be affected by environments to be expressed at the low end of the range or the high end of the range, or in between. Individuals may be determined to fall within a given range of potential, but where within that range they end up is a function of environmental determiners as well as self-determination, or free will.
In Freedom Evolves, Dennett expands on his arguments in Elbow Room, adding an evolutionary component to his deduction of free will. Dennett’s thesis can be summarized as follows: (1) humans are evolved animals without a soul but with free will; (2) we are the only species with free will because we have a “self,” a sense of being self-aware, and are even aware that others are self-aware, because (3) we have symbolic language that allows us to communicate the fact that we are aware and self-aware; and (4) we have extremely complex neural circuitry and many degrees of behavioral freedom (a jellyfish, like a hot-air balloon, for example, has one degree of freedom: up and down; we have many more); and (5) we have a theory of mind about other selves who are also (6) moral animals in the sense of having evolved moral sentiments or feelings of making right or wrong choices as members of a social species, and with symbolic language, we have the representational power to reason with each other about what we ought to do; therefore (7) free will emerges out of our deterministic world from the fact that we can weigh the consequences of the many courses of action available to us, that we are aware that we (and others) make these choices, and that we hold ourselves and them accountable.
In Dennett’s evolutionary theory, free will is located in the “self,” a metaphor for an adaptation our brains evolved for monitoring what is happening in our own and others’ brains. But where is the self located? The answer is not clear, but wherever it is, it is not in one location. Reaction-time experiments that monitor different parts of the brain indicate that there is no “Self-contained You.” Instead, “all the work done by the imagined homunculus in the Cartesian Theater has to be broken up and distributed in space and time in the brain.”31 We have a functional “layer” of decision-making power that no other species has (this is not a brain layer, but what Dennett calls “a virtual layer” found “in the micro-details of the brain’s anatomy”). For example, “a male baboon can ‘ask’ a nearby female for some grooming, but neither of them can discuss the likely outcome of compliance with this request, which might have serious consequences for both of them, especially if the male is not the alpha male of the troop. We human beings not only can do things when requested to do them; we can answer inquiries about what we are doing and why. It is this kind of asking, which we can also direct to ourselves, that creates the special category of voluntary actions that sets us apart.”32
This argument for freedom from evolution brings a fresh perspective to an ancient problem. But is it true? I have my doubts. Although I accept the first six of Dennett’s points listed above and agree that he has thoroughly debunked the indeterminism argument, I remain unconvinced that free will can ultimately be derived from determinism in any consistent logical way. The terms are incompatible. What we are left with is a type of free will from ignorance, ignorance of all the determining causes in our lives, such that we are, de facto, free because when we make choices we cannot know all the causal variables. This theory of free will derives from chaos and complexity theory.
Free Will and Chaos and Complexity Theory
There is one more way to get free will, and that is through the complex world of human and social systems. The causal-net theory of determinism means that human behavior is no less caused than other physical or biological phenomena, just more difficult to understand and predict because of the number of elements in the system and the complexity of th
eir interactions. Since no cause or set of causes we select to examine as the determiners of human action can be complete, in terms of human freedom they may be pragmatically considered as conditioning causes, not determining ones. That is, our thoughts and actions are shaped by a myriad of causes—genetic, environmental, and historical. Every individual set of genes is unique (with the exception of identical twins), each environmental setting is matchless, and every historical pathway that each of us has gone down in our individual lives is distinctive. We are, each and every one of us, unique and different from every other of the six billion members of our species. And those conditions are so complex, so interwoven, that no one could possibly know all of the causal variables for themselves or anyone else. Human freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes.
I derived this solution out of a model I developed called the model of contingent-necessity.33 Its primary function is as a tool for the historical sciences, but it can generate another solution to the paradox of moral determinism. By contingency I mean a conjuncture of events occurring without perceptible design, and by necessity I mean constraining circumstances compelling a certain course of action. Contingencies are the sometimes small, apparently insignificant, and usually unexpected events of life—the kingdom hangs in the balance awaiting the horseshoe nail. Necessities are the large and powerful laws of nature and trends of history—once the kingdom has collapsed, 100,000 horseshoe nails will not save the realm. Leaving either contingency or necessity out of the historical formula, however, is to ignore an important component in the development of historical sequences. The past is constructed by both contingencies and necessities, and therefore it is useful to combine the two into one term that expresses this interrelationship. I call this contingent-necessity, taken to mean a conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions.
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