Tag: Free Will

Charles Whitman, Brain Damage, Violence and Free Will

The other day I found myself in an interesting discussion on Twitter (IKR) about violent behavior and brain damage. The paradigmatic case is Charles Whitman, who, on August 1, 1966, killed his wife and mother before climbing to the top of a tower at the University of Texas and killing fourteen more people over the course of 96 minutes. Police ultimately shot and killed Whitman.

An autopsy of Whitman’s body was performed the next day, which found a small brain tumor. However, the neuropathologist who performed the autopsy dismissed the idea that the tumor could have affected Whitman’s behavior.

A task force commissioned by the governor of Texas, John Connally, disagreed with that finding. While acknowledging that the state of medical knowledge at the time was not advanced enough to say for certain that the tumor affected Whitman’s actions, they nonetheless found that “[the] tumor conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions.”

It is interesting to see how Whitman himself described his condition before his murderous rampage. On March 29, 1966, Whitman visited a staff psychiatrist at the University of Texas seeking help for what was apparently a newfound difficulty controlling his emotions (emphasis added),

This is a new student referred by one of the general practitioners downstairs. This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility as he initiated the hour with the statement that something was happening to him and he didn’t seem to be himself.

. . .

The real precipitation factor for this initial visit after being on the campus for several years seemed to stem from the separation of his parents some 30 days ago. Although there has been gross disharmony through the years, his mother summoned him to Florida to bring her to Texas, and she is now living in Austin, but not with her son and the daughter-in-law.

The youth says that his father has averaged calling every 48 hours for several weeks petitioning him to persuade his mother to return to him. He alleges to have no intentions of trying to do that and retains his hostility towards his father. Although he identifies with his mother in the matter above, his real concern is with himself at the present time. He readily admits having overwhelming periods of hostility with a very minimum of provocation. Repeated inquiries attempting to analyze his exact experiences were not too successful with the exception of his vivid reference to “thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people.”

The suicide note he wrote the day before the killings also speaks of Whitman not feeling like he was in control of himself anymore.

I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks.

. . .

. . . I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail. After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had some tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.

Determinism, Free Will and Quantum Spin

Science News has a fascinating — if brain splitting — look at research by Princeton mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen who are trying to defend free will in what looks like a completely deterministic universe,

Conway and Kochen say this search [for variables that would determine the outcome of quantum-level events] is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.

. . .

Kochen and Conway say the best way out of this paradox is to accept that the particle’s spin doesn’t exist until it’s measured. But there’s one way to escape their noose: Suppose for a moment that Alice and Bob’s choice of axis to measure is not a free choice. Then Nature could be conspiring to prevent them from choosing the axes that will reveal the violation of the rule. Kochen and Conway can’t rule that possibility out entirely, but Kochen says, “A man on the street would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A natural feeling is, of course, that what we do, we do of our own free will. Not completely, but certainly to the point of knowing we can choose what button to push in an experiment.”

Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft retorts to this that Kochen and Conway are correct, but that they’ve simply come down on the wrong side of the argument — there simply isn’t even a tiny bit of free will in the universe.

“As a determined determinist I would say that yes, you bet, an experimenter’s choice what to measure was fixed from the dawn of time, and so were the properties of the thing he decided to call a photon,” ’t Hooft says. “If you believe in determinism, you have to believe it all the way. No escape possible. Conway and Kochen have shown here in a beautiful way that a half-hearted belief in pseudo-determinism is impossible to sustain.”

It is telling that Kochen ultimately has to appeal to the phenomenology of consciousness and talk about “natural feelings” to attempt to convince us — and perhaps himself — that we really do have free will in deciding whether or not to push that button. That’s not exactly a convincing theoretical framework to base free will on.

One of these days I’m going to write a longer review, but I’d recommend Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves which makes a fairly lucid (though still brain straining) case for a compatibilist approach between determinism and free will and does an especially good job of highlighting how much of the debate over free will vs. determinism is predicated on hidden assumptions in the way we talk about freedom and deciding.

Rethinking Daniel Dennett

Over the past couple years I’ve had some unflattering things to say about the ideas of Daniel Dennett — especially his views on free will. But this interview in Reason with Dennett has me rethinking his ideas.

I’m impressed with his distinction between a deterministic and a fatalist world view,

Reason: Would a deterministic world mean that, say, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was going to happen ever since the Big Bang?

Dennett: “Going to happen” is a very misleading phrase. Say somebody throws a baseball at your head and you see it. That baseball was “going to” hit you until you saw it and ducked, and then it didn’t hit you, even though it was “going to.”

In that sense of “going to,” Kennedy’s assassination was by no means going to happen. There were no trajectories which guaranteed that it was going to happen independently of what people might have done about it. If he had overslept or if somebody else had done this or that, then it wouldn’t have happened the way
it did.

People confuse determinism with fatalism. They’re two completely different notions.

Reason: Would you unpack that a little bit?

Dennett: Fatalism is the idea that something’s going to happen no matter what you do. Determinism is the idea that what you do depends. What happens depends on what you do, what you do depends on what you know, what you know depends on what you’re caused to know, and so forth — but still, what you do matters. There’s a big difference between that and fatalism. Fatalism is determinism with you left out.

If I accomplish one thing in this book, I want to break the bad habit of putting determinism and inevitability together. Inevitability means unavoidability, and if you think about what avoiding means, then you realize that in a deterministic world there’s lots of avoidance. The capacity to avoid has been evolving for billions of years. There are very good avoiders now. There’s no conflict between being an avoider and living in a deterministic world. There’s been a veritable explosion of evitability on this planet, and it’s all independent of determinism.

Dennet goes on to posit that humans are essentially “choice machines” and uses evolutionary psychology to really tie together a neat solution to some vexing moral questions, including the problem of where values initially come from.

I guess now I’m going to have to go out and buy his book, Freedom Evolves.

Robert Nozick Dead at 63

Philosopher Robert Nozick died this morning at the age of 63. An obituary at Harvard University’s Gazette notes that Nozic was one of the most influential philosophers of the late 20th century.

Among other things, Nozick was almost singlehandedly responsible for the rise in academic interest in libertarian-oriented philosophies with his 1974 book, Anarchary, State and Utopia which was a devestating critique of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. And he didn’t stop there. As the Harvard Gazette puts it,

In “Philosophical Explanations,” Nozick took on subjects that many academic philosophers had dismissed as irrelevant or meaningless, such as free will versus determinism and the nature of subjective experience, and why there is something rather than nothing. In dealing with these questions, he rejected the idea of strict philosophical proof, adopting instead a notion of philosophical pluralism.

A truly original thinker who will be missed.

Tibor Machan on the Free Will Question

Philosopher Tibor Machan has an interesting, and readable (which is rare for a philosopher) look at the debate over free will. As important as his thoughts and recommendations for further readings about the free will problem is his view that this sort of issue is appropriate for newspaper columns. Machan writes,

Sure, there is a lot on this topic in The Journal of Consciousness Studies and other publications but much of it is nearly impossible to follow. yet, why should ordinary folks be barred from thinking along with the “experts” when it comes to the question of whether we have minds, whether the mind is anything more than the brain and its parts, whether we have free will and whether thinking is something mechanical or quite different, something unique in nature? I do not believe these are subjects that can only be dealt with via the jargon or often nearly incomprehensible language of those who get paid for discussing it.

Certainly, it is possible to be too hard on philosophers — all disciplines, after all, tend toward jargon-filled language that is almost incomprehensible to those who are outsiders. On the other hand, surely it is a sad state of affairs that while even the most bizarrely complex discoveries of the scientific community filter out rather well into the public consciousness, most of what philosophers do ends up taking shelf space in obscure journals that have almost no impact on the larger world (except, infrequently, in a very negative sense such as the bizarre twists and turns that postmodernism has taken).

Machan thinks that,

It is sad, then, that so many people who write on these topoics seem determined to use language that only the select few can understand. And this is treu of people on various sides of the dispute. . .

No, I do not believe that one can actually settle these matters by crafting a fine column on one or another side of the debate. That would be to belittle the difficulties involved. But neither is it the case that someone who wants to get a handle on the topic need drop everything and become a university professor.

Hear, hear! (Though those opposed to free will might argue they have no choice in the matter.)