The Case Against Free Will by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-12-23T13:16:01+00:00

Part II

But . . . ?

5

The Feeling of Freedom:

Unconscious Associations

You may have been persuaded by the material in Chapter 4 that our

brains play a major role in generating our thoughts and feelings,

perhaps more than you had realized, but you may still be reluctant

to accept the claim that all behaviour is determined. If so, one rea-

son could be that this conclusion is so profoundly counterintuitive.

If you decided to have pancakes for breakfast one morning rather

than cereal, you wouldn’t have any sense of compulsion; quite the

contrary, you would feel free to choose whichever one you wanted.

How can our behaviour be determined if every decision we make feels

so free?

The explanation, according to determinists, is that conscious

thought is the end-product of a massive amount of processing at an

unconscious level, and it is this unconscious processing that deter-

mines what ideas will rise into consciousness. So, yes, our thoughts

feel free, but only because we are not aware of the unconscious

processes that produced them, and thus, in the end, determined

our actions. Or, as the philosopher Baruch Spinoza put it several

centuries ago,

Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are con-

scious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby

those actions are determined.

(Spinoza, 1677/1951, p. 134)

In this chapter we will look at some of the research that underpins

this analysis.

107

108

But . . . ?

Some basic concepts

Before beginning our survey, we’ll introduce a few concepts that will

prove useful.

Grandmother cells

Research has suggested that when we think about a concept, a neu-

ron or a small set of neurons will become active. In effect, that set

of neurons represents the concept, becoming active whenever we

think about it. We’ve already encountered one example in our dis-

cussion of Tom Cruise cells, but the most striking evidence has come

from research by the neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga.1 He and

his colleagues recorded activity in individual neurons in the brains

of epileptics, and found that when his patients were shown pho-

tographs of celebrities, some neurons fired when shown photographs

of one individual and only that individual. One cell, for example,

responded almost exclusively to pictures of Halle Berry: it fired when

shown each of seven different photographs of her face, but not when

shown photos of other celebrities. In another experiment, he and his

colleagues identified an Oprah Winfrey neuron, which increased its

normal rate of firing a thousand-fold when a picture of her was vis-

ible, but not when pictures of other famous actresses were present.

And this cell also fired when the patient saw or heard Oprah’s name.

Cortical cells such as these are sometimes called grandmother cells, on the assumption that they would become active only in response to

a particular person, such as your grandmother. A group of cells such

as these, which appear to represent a single concept—grandmother,

apple, London—is also called a node.

Priming

As we saw in discussing the brain earlier, neurons in the brain exist in

vast interconnected networks, with a single neuron connected to as

many as 10,000 others. When a Tom Cruise or other node becomes

active, therefore, this activity will be transmitted to the nodes con-

nected to it. When you think of your grandmother, you may also

think of her face, what food she likes, where she lives and so on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.