This new and interesting book focuses on the hormones and neuroeconomics behind market trading and traders. It also has a good passage on the illusion of free will:
In fact our conscious brain has surprisingly little grasp of what makes us decide to do one thing rather than another. A telling example of this ignorance has been provided by Joe LeDoux and Michael Gazzaniga, two neuroscientists who conducted a study of patients with a severed corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, leaving the two sides of the brain unable to communicate with each other. LeDoux and Gazzaniga gave instructions to these patients, via their right hemisphere (hemispheres can be targeted with instructions shown to either the left or right visual field), to giggle or wave a hand, then asked them, via the left hemisphere, why they were laughing or waving. The patients’ left hemisphere had no knowledge of the instructions given to their right hemisphere, but the patients would nonetheless venture an explanation, saying that they were laughing because the doctors looked so funny or waving because they thought they saw a friend. However implausible the answer, the patients were convinced they knew why they were acting in the way they were; but they were deluded in thinking so. Their self-understanding was pure confabulation.
The author is John Coates and you can buy the book here.
There’s a great passage in Anathem where they talk about how the brain is constantly evaluating counterfactuals and developing plausible narratives based on our understanding of the world (e.g. when you see the front of something, you infer the back of it that you cannot see) and that this is probably what we experience as “consciousness.”
Also reminded of the famous case of the guy with the 10-second memory, who has no idea how he got the scar on his head but will obligingly give you a different explanation every time you ask him.
Ignoring what makes one act a certain is not being determined to act in this way.
I don’t know why I fell in love with Pete, yet I was not causally determined to fall in love with him. Bob could have been my hero instead.
You can get some free summaries of neuronomics and the literature by Googling “Colin Camerer” at Caltech for his summary of the neuronomics or neuroeconomics literature. If you are at a university, you might also want to borrow the handbook/textbook on neuroeconomics edited by Camerer et. al entitled “Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain” (Elsevier 2009) for a collection of the major articles in the field
Michael S. Gazzaniga has a bunch of really interesting experiments of a similar sort. e.g. this one is fantastic:
Dr. Gazzaniga, now at Dartmouth, performed more of his signature experiments — this time with an added twist. In one study, for instance, he and Joseph LeDoux, then a graduate student, showed a patient two pictures: The man’s left hemisphere saw a chicken claw; his right saw a snow scene. Afterward, the man chose the most appropriate matches from an array of pictures visible to both hemispheres. He chose a chicken to go with the claw, and a shovel to go with the snow. So far, so good.
But then Dr. Gazzaniga asked him why he chose those items — and struck gold. The man had a ready answer for one choice: The chicken goes with the claw. His left hemisphere had seen the claw, after all. Yet it had not seen the picture of the snow, only the shovel. Looking down at the picture of the shovel, the man said, “And you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”
More <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/science/telling-the-story-of-the-brains-cacophony-of-competing-voices.html?pagewanted=all" here in this NYT interview.
And, of course, Steven Pinker (after recounting an experiment where researchers flashed the word WALK to the right brain and, upon asking where subjects were going, got answers like “to get a drink” instead of “you told me to” or “gee that’s funny, I don’t remember”):
“The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient’s left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind–the self or soul–is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.”
There’s also an interesting literature on how behavior determines attitude, rather than the other way around. Get people to do something, and their brains reduce dissonance by changing who they are.
Maybe once they were told to walk, they decided to get a drink
Regarding your final paragraph: I believe the answer is that maybe “it works both ways”. Why not say that behavior and attitude can each affect the other?
@Cliff and Chris: agreed.
Patients with brain damage show decreased understanding of their situation. This is supposed to show that free will is an illusion?
pour comprendre tout, c’est tout pardonner.
I believe I have free will, I can’t help it. Oddly enough, a Tyleresque result of this is the conclusion that I am less helpless than I think I am. This can be quite annoying.
@RPLong: good one.
The studies don’t seem to speak to free will, but rather the truth-value of a specific type of phenomenal awareness. It is possible for a p-zombie to have free will, so, a fortiori, people who are mistaken about their reasons for doing an action could also have free will.
I Act,
Therefore,
I am.
But,
Don’t Ask Me Why
I Act The Way I Do.
If you cut all the stitches in a baseball, the baseball will fall apart when hit with a bat. Is this an argument against the unified theory of the baseball? I don’t think so. What the severed corpus callosum experiment tells me is that the corpus callosum plays an important role in integrating the human brain — not that the human brain is fundamentally not integrated. (And all of this is completely orthogonal to the issue of free will.)
+1
-1 for a bad metaphor. A baseball is like consciousness?
BTW when did you choose to think the thought you wrote? How did you choose among the billions of other thoughts you could have had at the same moment?
And the the thought before that?
And the the thought before that?
And the the thought before that?
Free will is an illusion. There is a chain of causality the goes back to the moment you were born.
Do studies of twins (with or without severed corpora callosa) conform to this hypothesis?
Isn’t there an implied assumption in this work?
Namely, that the two parts of the brain continue to work correctly when the connection to the other half is cut?
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