Flickers of Freedom

Farewell and Thanks for a Wonderful Month!

That was my last post as December’s Flickers guest. I want to thank everyone for having me here, especially Thomas. I realize a lot of people were away for the holidays, so I will continue to check for and answer comments on my existing posts in January.

I had hoped to write much more about the scientific aspects of FW, including posts on why Libet and Wegner pose no threat to FW. And I had also hoped to discuss the central role of consciousness in volition, particularly volitional attentional operations. But I followed the flow of questions and got much more into defending LFW than was my original plan. Well, the month got away from me, and I would need another month to unpack the relevance of the science of volitional decision-making, volitional attention and consciousness in a way that philosophers would not find irrelevant.  So I guess I will just have to come back to post here again should a free month open up down the line someday, assuming people here would be interested in having me again.

I wish everyone a productive and healthy 2015, and wish Justin good luck in January, and Alan good luck in February.

The Reenlightenment vs. Institutional Evil

Ideas can drive people to reshape the world. Philosophy has played a crucial role throughout history in shaping the ideas that can reshape the world. This is as true now as it ever was, although it may seem that some philosophers in recent decades have taken refuge in purely academic problems, or worse, pushed for a kind of nihilism that denies moral responsibility or a causal role for consciousness and its deliberations.

I believe the world is heading towards turmoil as it becomes increasingly clear to intellectuals and ordinary people that our governments are being controlled by parasitic institutional entities that serve their interests, rather than those of us, the people. The new tyranny is not King George but Goldman Sachs et al., and will require a new set of ideas to overthrow this new type of tyranny. I also believe that philosophers will come to play a central role in the emerging movement to dislodge these societal parasites, and return human institutions to ones that benefit human well-being based on the traditions and lessons of the age of Reason. I believe we are seeing the first stirrings of a Reenlightenment, as the latest incarnation of the ancient Greek impulse to base life and society on reason rather than arbitrary and self-interested power.

I have argued that information is downwardly causal in the brain. Since brains collectively agree to obey rules, an abstract entity or process such as a corporation, game, or government can be downwardly causal. This means that an institution can realize, via the intermediation of human decisions to act according to institutional rules, an informational causal chain (as an instance of the subset of possible physical causal chains) that follows those rules. This means that human freedom can be constrained to the point of elimination by institutions that themselves do not think and cannot feel. Human freedom is not only about individual choice. It is about individual choice within socially and institutionally constrained rules.

This gives rise to the pressing question of the ‘metahuman morality’ of actions carried out by humans done according to the rules of institutions. Let me give an example of how problematic this has become for our world. Let us say John is the CEO of one of the largest reinsurance companies in the world. After an unusually severe hurricane that would cost shareholders billions, company lawyers find ways to get out of fully indemnifying client corporations, who are themselves trying to get out of fully paying businesses and homeowners. The CEO’s son, who is interning for a year, confronts him with the wrongness of what is happening. After much emotion the CEO explains that he would never do this himself, but if he did not, the trustees would replace him, so he is just doing his job, which is to maximize profits by all means allowed. The son confronts the trustees, who each say the same. In the end nothing stops this immorality because it is all legal, although everyone involved would not act this way as an individual moral agent, and all agree in person that it is immoral. This can be thought of as ‘metaevil’  that leaves individuals feeling helpless as people get hurt by what other people do because they are obeying rules designed to maximize profits and power for their institutions, rather than maximize common human well-being.

Institutions themselves are amoral, but their acts, if done by an individual would count as moral, immoral, good or evil. Institutions such as the military-industrial-financial complex and transnational corporations have given rise to new forms of metaevil that have proven extremely difficult to rein in by individuals. These institutions have taken on a life of their own, and would seem to have a metapsychopathic personality, if we were to anthropomorphize them.

A recurring theme in the history of most complex civilizations is the attempt by the people to dismantle excessive concentrations of wealth and power. When masses of individuals end up with too little, and powers wielded by oligarchs become too tyrannical, people confront power. Sometimes concentrated power is so unyielding that a revolution will begin, as in late 18^th century America and France. Sometimes concentrated power yields short of revolution. The 1911 dismantling of Standard Oil into numerous smaller companies (which later became Exxon, Amoco, Chevron and Mobil etc.) under the 1893 Sherman Antitrust Act was an example of the power that people can have over oligarchical institutions and ultimately over the oligarchical individuals and families that control them.

The supreme law of the United States was constructed in a sweltering room in Philadelphia in the Summer of 1787. It was the peak of the Enlightenment, before the French cataclysm of 1789, whose goals were to rid the world of irrationality, arbitrary authority, and excessive concentrations of power through the application of reason. The movement, with roots in classical Greece and the Renaissance, started with Bacon and Descartes, respectively, founders of modern science and modern philosophy. The movement gained momentum with the ideas of philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Reid, Kant and many scientists, foremost among them, Newton. It took a turn toward social transformation with the ideas of Montesquieu, Voltaire , the philosophs, and eventually Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and many others. The central idea that Adams and Jefferson framed in the Constitution was Montesquieu’s idea of separating governmental powers so that the purse, sword, judge, and lawgiver were divided and could keep each other in check.

What Adams, Jefferson and Montesquieu did not foresee was that external powers could come to control the whole governmental system. These powers could control executive, judicial, legislative, policing, spying and military branches of government, such that the government would no longer serve the people but instead the interests of those external powers.

What has this Enlightenment blind spot led to? A military-industrial-intelligence complex functions as a deep state that does whatever it wants, regardless of the laws obeyed by the people (the NSA spying being a recent example). Wall Street and ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley) have captured our government to serve their interests rather than the people’s. They have instituted a money system that is based on the issuance of debt (fractional reserve banking/lending) that requires increasing debt levels to function. Money, which should be a symbol representing work or something of inherent value, that can be stored as potential work/value, or exchanged for someone else’s work/value, instead represents debt, and can be digitally created out of thin air by a Federal Reserve that serves the interests of the banks who are its primary shareholders. The ability to concoct units of money that people will then work for gives those who get the money first, namely the big banks, incredible and immoral power over our society. As this printed money works its way through the system, it diminishes the value of money, as more money chases the same amount of goods. But if money diminishes in its symbolic value to represent work or production, it will eventually lead to a crisis in the currency as people lose faith in its capacity to exchange for work and things of value. Indeed, the creation of a Federal Reserve that is controlled by private banks guarantees that their interests will be served first, as the recent taxpayer bailouts of the banks prove. In fact, the institutionalization of the Fed in 1913 can be regarded as a ‘soft coup’ that put the power of the financial controllers of the Fed at the heart of our governmental decision-making apparatus, regardless of how the people feel about it. In addition, there is a runaway feedback loop in place now as Wall Street can buy out judges and politicians (through such legalized bribery as lobbying, campaign donations, gifts and job offers) such that laws are created and enforced or not enforced to benefit Wall Street. This manifests itself as increasing concentration of power and wealth for the top few percent of the population, and increasing poverty for the masses. Resentment and prospects of revolution are hindered by controlling  mass media, maintaining programs like foodstamps that feed ~47 million people in the US, and nipping any popular ‘occupy’ movements in the bud.

Where is this all going? The momentum is on the side of the institutions that control governments that now serve those institutions. This means greater concentration of power and wealth in the hands of those who control institutions that have no loyalty to countries or their peoples. Taken to an extreme, this will lead to a deep state run by international financiers, accountable to no one and to no nation,  who control a single world digital currency that only they can produce at will, to get indebted serfs to do their work. We the people will be cut out until we take the government back as the muckrakers and Teddy Roosevelt did over a hundred years ago, and Andrew Jackson did seventy years before that.

What can be done? Corporate rights have been extended in a way that shields individuals from blame for acts done in the name of the corporation. Not a single banker went to jail for the rampant fraud and forgery (remember robosigning?) that led to the financial meltdown. If people don’t get punished for metaevil, not only will moral hazard and metaevil grow, the people will revolt eventually and cut off bankers’ heads. But it lies within our power to dislodge the parasites. It lies within our power to return society to the rule of law that no one, not even top bankers, should be above. A second American revolution can be avoided. There are mechanisms in place that have yet to be tried. Absurd Supreme Court decisions that enshrine corporations as individuals or guarantee secret money donations as free speech can be overridden by the people. Constitutional amendments can force the definition of ‘free speech’ to mean free human speech and writing, and can take away the rights of corporations to count as human individuals before the law. We can break the feedback loop that allows corporations to purchase judges and our representatives. We can begin, for example, by pushing for a new tougher version of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that was repealed at the behest of the big banks in 1999, that allowed banks to become gambling houses, whose profits they privatized and whose bad bets were and will be shoved on us. We can push to dismantle or weaken the Federal Reserve and the say of Goldman Sachs in its decision-making. We can push for money that represents things of inherent value, rather than someone's debts, and that cannot be printed out of thin air.

A Reenlightenment is brewing and the shapers of ideas have a central role to play. Will philosophers and scientists again play a central role in fashioning a better world, or will we succumb to the temptations of purely academic debates, or worse, moral nihilism?

Imagination Gave Birth to Human Evil

What makes a human capable of evil and a tiger not? Imagine that both a man and a tiger intend to kill one sister each. Say they are the uncle and pet, respectively, of identical twins. Let’s assume, after the killings, that both could have done otherwise in a metaphysically open way. What difference between them makes one immoral and the other amoral? The tiger, even though it could have killed this way or that, was not responsible for (first-order) wanting to kill, because it had a killer's nature that it did not choose, which was beyond its control to change in part because it lacks (second-order) desires to change. The uncle, however, we assume, has a nature that he did in part choose, that to reform his nature was under his control in the past, and that he could have and should have had second-order wants to change for the better, having been taught right from wrong. In short, the tiger had a capacity to do otherwise but not be otherwise, whereas the uncle could have and therefore should have been otherwise. We attribute evil and MR to the uncle and not the tiger because of attributions of type 2 LFW to the uncle but only type 1 LFW to the tiger, and a capacity for second-order desires to the uncle but no such capacity to the tiger. Even if the uncle could not have helped but be a killer at the moment he did commit murder, we lay blame on him for becoming a person who could murder, for not having realized his potential to become otherwise when he could have done something about it. The link between a type 2 LFW and type 2 wants/intentions is essential: we will only devise a plan to reform our character if we want to change who we are.

But where do second-order wants about ourselves come from? I believe our second-order wants arise from the same capacities to imagine and reason I wrote about yesterday.

If I run out of firewood and freeze, it is not because of anything I do now, it is because I failed to prepare for Winter months/years ago, when I could still procure wood. Similarly, type 2 volitional control does not apply to our present character. We cannot change ourselves now just by imagining ourselves to be different than we are. But volitional control does apply to our internal imagined model of our present character, which is not identical to our present character (one is a model and the other is real). Having this capacity to imagine, to model ourselves, and therefore symbolize ourselves, where the model refers to us, we can model or imagine future selves, and come up with a plan to make an optimal one happen. A tiger cannot want to change itself because it cannot imagine a different self. But, we can and do. And even if we do not cultivate one of the best selves that lay within our innate potential, that was a choice too, because we could have done otherwise and therefore played a role in our not turning out otherwise. Plans that change character typically depend on binding ourselves to character-changing activities, whether going to the gym, sticking to a vow, or, in extreme cases, having ourselves bound to a mast when we know temptation will be heading our way.

Imagination gave rise to the possibility of morality and immorality, of good and evil. Once acts became symbolized, they could now stand for, and be instances of, abstract classes of action such as good, evil, right, or wrong. Symbolic thought permitted new dimensions of behavior, for example, the expression of territoriality over the ownership of an idea rather than just concrete things like turf or a mate. Thus, while a tiger has affection, social intelligence, likes, dislikes, fear, inhibitions, territoriality, deceit, aggression, vengefulness, and other predispositions that govern behavior, these are not morality. A tiger lacks moral judgment, prohibitions, norms, principles, laws, approval, disapproval, injunctions, the concept of good, the concept of wrong, rights, virtues or vices. A tiger lacks morality because it lacks symbolic imagination. This is why tigers are amoral rather than immoral. They kill but cannot murder. They cannot conceive of doing right or wrong. This is why we do not put tigers in prison or try to reason with them after they eat a girl . Instead we punish them soon after the offending act, to create associations between behaviors and consequences.   

An act becomes immoral for us because it comes to symbolize or stand for other similar acts and thereby becomes a member of the abstract category “bad,” “wrong,” or “evil.” That is, morality is rooted in both our capacities to symbolize and to generalize to a level of categorical abstraction. A person, once symbolized, has done more than stolen a particular piece of, say, meat. He has become a thief. The piece of meat is not just a particular possession, but an instance of the class of things called “property,” which has associated rights. Once taken, it is stolen property that happens to be a piece of meat. Once symbolized, individual acts and things can become instances of classes of events or classes of things that are good or evil, acceptable or unacceptable, sanctioned or not. 

Consider the nonsymbolic mind of a dog. How does he regard the bone that he is gnawing? It is his because he has it, not because it is his property or his in some other abstract or symbolic sense. If a bigger dog comes along and takes the bone, the smaller dog might get angry, but he cannot think “the big dog has my property” or “I own that bone regardless of who has it now.” He can think “the big dog has a bone that I had, and I want that bone back.”  In contrast, I can own an object regardless of who has it now. This is because I and other members of my society can place a representation of me along with a representation of the object in question in a common representation. A dog cannot do this.

Another effect of symbolic processing is that acts can be committed in the symbolic domain. For example, if I hate someone, rather than physically attack him like a chimp, I might slander his corporation or theory. The ancient impulse toward territoriality can now be expressed and triggered over abstract representations such as infringement of perceived national interest or theft of intellectual property. The ancient impulse toward aggression can now be triggered by threats to abstractions such as one’s nation. One can express aggression not only to individuals in the symbolic domain but toward abstractions such as social movements or ideas. One can hate slavery, or a slavish mentality. One can hate a mentality and yet not hate the person who is possessed of that mentality. None of this is possible for nonhuman animals.  

Because human acts and ideas operate over symbolic representations, we are capable of acts and ideas that no other animal could conceive of, let alone enact. No animal could conceive of killing all individuals who believe X or look like Y. We are capable of wanting to destroy all individuals of one group because those individuals are not untokenized individuals for us. They are symbols. They stand for something that we find abhorrent and want to eradicate.

Another symbolic source of human evil lies in sadism. No animal could take sadistic pleasure in generating psychological torment in another mind, because this requires a theory of mind, which even chimpanzees appear to lack. The emergence of a theory of mind only became possible with the emergence of a symbolic imagination capable of modeling invisible minds. The sadist internally models the mental state of his victim and draws pleasure from the power he exerts over that mental state. Whereas a nonhuman animal could conceivably enjoy being in a dominant position, and may even gain pleasure from hurting another animal, it cannot gain pleasure from the psychological torment of its victim, because psychological torment is invisible and cannot be represented by nonsymbolic minds.

It is commonly said that the root of all evil is greed or selfishness. However,other animals are greedy and selfish about things like food, territory, and sex. What is different about human greed/selfishness is that it is symbolic. Rather than merely wanting to maximize our share of territory, sex, and food, we want to maximize things symbolically linked with these things. Whereas an animal might fight for turf, we fight for abstract empires. In general, human symbolic cognition operates on top of numerous desires and emotions that we share in common with nonsymbolic animals. But the human potential for evil, like our potential for freedom, emerges from our capacity to enact reasoned and imagined fulfillments of these nonsymbolic wants.

 I will make my farewell post tomorrow, before handing the January reins to Justin.

The Origins of Imagination

I have argued this month that the ultimate source of LFW is the human capacity to imagine virtually anything and then enact it. But how is this awesome engine of novelty and creativity, rooted in spontaneous and unprecedented recombinations of existing representations and operations, realized in the brain?

Capacities that set humans apart in kind, not just in degree, from other animals include capacities for art, music, analogical reasoning, abstract thought, the spontaneous generation and use of symbols, and the ability to reason abstractly, as well as the ability to manipulate symbols recursively and syntactically. I have developed a theory (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~petertse/TseMoralityChapter.pdf ) that all these modes of cognition share a common root cause. My central claim is that neuronal circuits that were functionally distinct and modularly encapsulated in our chimp-like ancestors came to interact through a new type of attentional binding. Cross-modular binding, where operators previously limited to operands within a given module could now operate over the operands of other modules, is, I argue, the root cause of uniquely human modes of cognition.

Although animals can learn arbitrary associations, they are not using symbols as we do. Beyond lacking syntax, they are not typically able to effortlessly assign or reassign an arbitrary meaning to a given symbol once an association has been learned. It is this arbitrary and flexible relationship between a symbol and its referent(s) that is the hallmark of true symbolic thought, setting it apart from mere association.

A symbol has various aspects. One is the perceived sign, which can stand for one or more referents. A sign’s referent(s) can belong to many different types of mental representations, which themselves need not be signs. If the mental representation is one of an object (or type of object) in the outside world, then the sign symbolizes that thing in the world. When a sign has a referent (i.e., a meaning) for a particular perceiver, it is a symbol for that perceiver. A symbol is assumed to possess two key defining properties: (1) a symbol is a mental representation that can be stored in long-term memory or held in working memory that can stand for one or more arbitrary stored or online representations; (2) a symbol can be flexibly remapped to an existing or new referent without a need for many trials of learning to build up an association. In other words a symbol is arbitrary. Its meaning is not based on the likelihood or degree of co-occurrence between a sign and its referent. It is simply assigned.

Only humans, as far as we know, possess the capacity to process symbols in the sense of (2). A mind capable of (1) but incapable of (2) can learn complex associations between an object or event and some referent, but the association is not truly symbolic. Classical conditioning is an example of an ancient form of associational learning. In contrast, a three-year-old child can pretend that a block is a truck and then, a moment later, pretend that it is a monster. This capacity to instantly remap the referent of a representation maintained and manipulated in working memory (a WMR) is unique to humans and is at the heart of why our cognition is truly symbolic.  Symbols and symbolic thought are inherently attentional in nature, because they involve (now or involved in the past) the binding of a sign with arbitrary referents, whether temporarily in working memory or more durably in long-term memory. With unintentional repetition or intentional practice, arbitrary representations can become bound together in memory. This is the relatively slow process of associative learning that humans share with other animals. With attention, however, arbitrary representations can become bound together in working memory after one instance. Attentionally bound symbols and referents can be “chunked” and stored as a unit  in long-term memory, recalled as a unit, and later processed without the need for further attention. However, at the stage of encoding, one-shot binding of symbol and referent occurs because symbols and referents occupy a common WMR.

Many nonhuman animals appear to have the capacity to monitor, select, ignore, track, and otherwise attend to objects and therefore must have analogs of human WMRs in their cognitive architecture. A dog’s WMR of a tree, for instance, presumably contains color and shape information represented in different neural populations or maps, as well as other information that the dog has learned to associate with this particular tree or trees in general. All types of information, however, are about the tree. A dog’s WMR is encapsulated in the sense that it cannot contain information about irrelevant objects or events. WMR encapsulation presumably helps animals survive, because irrelevant information is not represented, permitting the animal to remain undistracted and unconfused by matters irrelevant to survival and the matter at hand.

Human WMRs, unlike animal WMRs, can contain any information which can be attended or downloaded from memory into the WMR. As such, human WMRs can enact truly cross-modular binding. Because any representation can be downloaded into the WMR of a tree, a tree can be taken to stand for “my friend Bob” if Bob and the tree occupy the same WMR. This requires tagging the tree component of the WMR as real (i.e., pointing to the world) and the Bob component as not real or referential (i.e., pointing to a representation that need not be in the world). In the absence of such a tag, a person might take a tree to really be Bob. Cognitive modularity and encapsulation protect animal minds from cognitive “noise.” That humans are prone to misrepresentation, psychosis, delusion, and hallucination is the price we pay for the cognitive freedom afforded by demodularization.

Whereas animals seem to be capable of internally modeling events that might happen or might have happened, humans go beyond this “literal” capacity to one of imagination that can model events and objects that could never happen and could never exist in the real world. Imagination became possible when arbitrary contents and operators could be downloaded to a common WMR. For example, the representation of wings could be downloaded into the WMR of a tree. The operator that places one object onto another could then be accessed to create a new representation of a tree with wings. A human WMR of a tree can contain everything that a dog’s would, plus information that has nothing to do with this particular tree or any tree. For example, a man looking at a tree can simply volitionally decide that it stands for his wife. This is accomplished by downloading representations of his wife into the WMR holding the tree information.

Analogy emerges because this downloading to the present WMR need not take place in a conscious manner or a manner dictated by the plans or goals of a central executive. Because of automatic cross-modular binding, he may see a tree standing next to a bush, and this may remind him of his wife and son because of their similar size relationships. This happened in a stimulus-driven manner because similarity in one domain automatically triggered activation on other maps encoded in terms of the same relationships, and these new activations, in this case corresponding to representations of his wife and son, were automatically downloaded to the WMR containing the representations of the tree and bush, which then could function as symbols of his wife and son. He might say that the tree and bush remind him of his wife and son, but this fact became available to his conscious report after the link between disparate representations had been made. Thus, symbols and symbolic relationships, although inherently attentional in nature, because initially mediated by the attentional construct of a WMR, are not necessarily volitionally invoked.

A dog cannot be reminded of anything by a tree and a bush other than things that have a direct link in its experience or in the world with a tree and a bush. Animal cognition, lacking any basis for symbolism, reminding, or metaphor, is inherently literal.

A key consequence of the emergence of cross-modular binding was that operators could be bound with new types of operands, such that operators from one module could operate on the operands of previously encapsulated modules. Nestable motoric operators could operate upon symbols rather than just physical actions, giving rise to the possibility of syntax. Another example would be that operators designed to decode the emotional content of vocalizations could now operate over nonvocal sounds, giving rise to the possibility of music. And basic aspects of art and human aesthetics may have emerged as a consequence of operators that became “disencapsulated” or “universalized.” For example, operators that evolved to discern genetic health in a potential mate could now operate over visual scenes, which could then attain the status of eroticism or beauty, although obviously a scene cannot be a mate.

The essence of abstraction is the ability to detect patterns that transcend  immediate sensory input. Pattern extraction is common to the perceptual systems of many animals, but in nonhuman animals, pattern extraction may be modularly isolated from the other contents of cognition and, thus, domain specific. Once modularity broke down because of cross-modular binding, the computations underlying pattern extraction and recognition could be applied to data that were not perceptual in nature. An example of perceptual pattern recognition that became abstract pattern recognition in humans involves the inference of causality. Other animals may be able to detect patterns of cause and effect in the flow of sensory input, because they carry out computations over sensory input that evolved specifically to solve this task. Because animals seem to be limited to causal pattern extraction from the current flow of sensory input, they may be limited to detecting physical causal relations that arise from spatiotemporal contiguity and simultaneity. In the human lineage, however, the computations dedicated to the extraction of patterns of causal relation in the sensory domain came to operate over the contents of other modules, permitting the extraction of patterns of causal relation that transcended spatiotemporal contiguity. For example, once causal relations could be detected in the contents of memory, patterns of cause and effect could be recognized that transcended the here and now. One could become aware of a time before one’s life or after one’s death. One could entertain the fact of one’s impending death. Simply put, whereas other animals can “connect the dots” perceptually, they cannot do so abstractly. Humans, in contrast, came to connect the dots to such an extent that hidden causes such as invisible beings and forces were invoked to explain events. Once patterns could be detected in information that was not perceptual, the human mind gained the capacity to become “unglued” from the here and now, free to connect the dots in novel ways beyond the here and now.

In sum, unconstrained  imagination is the ultimate source of human freedom. It evolved as a consequence of the demodularization of  neural circuitry associated with volitional attentional operations over operands downloadable  into a mental workspace where, virtually, anything is possible.

Automatizing Mid-level Decision-making

Now for the way a Psychologist/Neuroscientist views self-formation. Here I will lay out in broad strokes the empirical view of what is known, and where we need to go from here to nail down the  existence of a human capacity to change human character, and to determine how it might work in the brain. Since the majority of self-forming resolutions that people will start trying to live up to in a few days involve improving self-control and becoming more virtuous, I will focus here on self-control and how it may be learned.

A corporation, government, military, or even an ant colony will express hierarchy, decision-making modularity, and levels of mid-level control. It would be debilitatingly slow and inefficient if a soldier had to continually ask the president where he should shoot his bullets. Rather, higher levels can play a role in training up mid- and lower-level ‘managers,’ place constraints on their permissible decision-making, then allow them to decide appropriately, since they, after all, know local conditions best. Because of the need for efficiency and speed, information processing systems tend to evolve automatized middle levels of control. The mind is likely no exception.

Yet, psychological accounts of mental control emphasize, at one extreme, automatic sensorimotor control, and on the other, effortful attentional control (e.g. Norman & Shallice 1986; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervisory_attentional_system). Modern accounts of self-control focus primarily on the role of the effortful exertion of will (when thought of as a verb) or willpower (when thought of as a noun, or limited resource) in exercising self-control (see, e.g. Baumeister et al. 1998). Relatively few researchers have focused on mid-levels of control or the automatization of self-control (but see Fitzsimons and Bargh (2004), Fujita (2011), Palfai (2006), Shah (2005), Suhler & Churchland 2009).

In contrast, Aristotle emphasized that virtue emerges over time as good habits or automaticities of thought and action develop through the practice of effortful self-control. Can the brain sciences evaluate whether Aristotle's program is possible given how the brain learns?

Volitional, executive control is closely linked with endogenous attentional selection and maintenance on an object of interest, while ignoring distractions, with associated capacities of error detection, task planning/prioritization, and task switching (Chan, Shum, Toulopoulou, & Chen 2008). Executive control takes place in a mental workspace where operations manipulate and maintain operands (Schlegel et al. 2013), and is particularly associated with two dominant frontal control networks, a cingulo-opercular network centrally involved in task maintenance, and a lateral prefrontal-posterior parietal network for executing the operations of a voluntary task. The former network has also been implicated in willpower and error-detection, whereas the latter has also been implicated in voluntary attentional processing, mental imagery and working memory (Dosenbach et al., 2006; Miyake et al. 2000; Miller & Cohen, 2001).

If ‘executive control’ is the volitional governing of one’s mental operations, self-control is the subclass of executive control specifically involved in resisting first-order impulses and desires. ‘Self-control’ refers to the capacity to govern one’s thoughts and actions, particularly toward maximizing the fulfillment of one’s long-term goals, principles and second-order Frankfurtian desires. Thus, self-control is often associated with resisting temptations and impulsive behaviors. But it is also involved in making oneself persist in doing tasks (such as filling out taxes) that one might not (first-order) want to do, and governing the emotions (Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone 2004). A subset of frontal lobe regions appears to govern self-control abilities (Casey et al. 2011), and compromised function in these frontal areas can result in increased impulsivity (Chen et al. 2007; Crews & Boettiger 2009; Spinella 2004) such as difficulty suppressing habitual responses (Perret 1974) or difficulty suppressing the distracting effects of external stimuli in order to stay on task (Lhermitte 1986).

There are substantial individual differences in self-control. Given that self-control is centrally concerned with governing impulsivity, low self-control and impulsivity are regarded by some researchers as essentially equivalent constructs (Duckworth & Kern 2011; Evenden 1999; Kalenscher et al. 2006). However, measures of self-control and impulsivity are not perfectly anti-correlated (Friese & Hofmann 2009; Nebioglu, Konuk, Akbaba, & Eroglu 2012).  High scores on self-control and low scores on impulsivity questionnaires correlate weakly but significantly with performance on many tasks that load on executive function (Duckworth & Kern 2011). In the famous marshmallow test, participants can either opt for a small reward immediately or a larger reward later (Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez 1989). The capacity to defer gratification on this test, and self-control scores from questionnaires (Tangney et al. 2004; Schwarzer, Diehl, & Schmitz 1999), predict success in many domains later in life, including school, income, health, well-being, and relationship quality (Moffitt et al. 2011; Tangney et al. 2004; Crescioni et al. 2011). People low in self-control are typically high on impulsivity (Evenden 1999). High impulsivity is generally associated with negative life outcomes, such as higher substance abuse, lower wealth, poorer health and relationships, and greater levels of aggression and recklessness (Dahlen et al. 2005; Hair and Hampson 2006; Stanford et al. 1996).Factor analysis reveals three main classes of impulsivity (Patton, Stanford, and Barratt 1995): motor impulsivity, associated with acting in the absence of playing out the likely consequences of one’s actions; attentional impulsivity, associated with high distractability and intrusive thoughts; and non-planning impulsivity, which is associated with a relative disregard for the future, being focused on the present, poor planning, and a preference not to be mentally challenged. Less commonly appreciated are potentially positive aspects of impulsivity such as spontaneity and speeded decision-making (Dickman 1990; Gullo & Dawe 2008).

There has been a great deal of work on the automatization of motor sequences (Doyon, 2008; Doyon etal., 2009; Puttemans, Wenderoth & Swinnen, 2005; Winstein, Merians & Sullivan, 1999) and on perceptual learning that effectively automatizes the detection of perceptual features (e.g. Watanabe & Sasaki, 2014) and conjunctions of features (Frank, Reavis, Tse, & Greenlee 2014). There has been much less work on the automatization of cognitive decision-making operations, though it is clear that practice can lead to reduced attentional load in a dual task (Ruthruff, et al., 1993, 2006). The automatization of decision-making may draw more upon medial prefrontal areas and less upon lateral prefrontal areas (Limb & Braun 2008). The automatization of task maintenance may place less load on the anterior cingulate cortical circuits (see Macdonald et al. 2000) known to be very active in tasks like the Stroop task that involve active task maintenance and error detection.

Initially, executive control and self-control in some new domain is likely to prove attentionally demanding, but as these processes become automatized, they likely become less so. As they become automatized to a point that they require virtually no voluntary attention they may begin to seem effortless to a person, at which point we might consider such decision-making and self-control now a veritable part of that person’s character. This may offer a neuroscientific understanding of the cultivation of Aristotelian good habits, particularly those associated with executive and self-control.

Of particular interest are the implications for free will and ethics of automatized mid-level decision-making agents. For example, if a soldier who would never voluntarily choose to kill his comrades at the level of fully voluntary executive decisions, has voluntarily practiced war games that have led to the wiring up of automatic decision-making agents that then decide to fire on enemy-like targets, in what sense is he responsible for, say, a friendly fire incident that resulted in his accidentally killing his comrades? Conversely, could degrees of self-control on such mid-level agentic decisions themselves be automatized with appropriate training?

I believe that if it can be shown that previously voluntary, attentionally demanding and effortful self-control and decision-making operations can be automatized, we can legitimately talk about the mechanisms of character reformation demanded by a type 2 LFW. This might not be the only way of reforming our nervous systems to become the kind of choosers we intend to become. But it is sufficient to prove the existence of one way to show that intentions and programs of training can reform character.

Why Regress Arguments Fail

There is an old regress argument against the possibility of self-forming acts that implies that we are not ultimately responsible for (the consequences of) how we choose to act. This is the regress whereby one would have to choose what kind of chooser to become on some grounds, which would require having to be able to choose those grounds on some metagrounds, and so on, ad infinitum.

In one variant, Strawson (1998) summarizes this ‘basic argument’ as follows: (1) One acts (or reacts to input) in a particular manner because of one’s physical/mental organization (or character or nature). (2) If one is to be ultimately MR for what one does, one must be ultimately MR for one’s physical/mental organization. (3) But one cannot be ultimately responsible for one’s physical/mental organization at the time of making a choice, because, simply put, one is what one is when one makes a choice. To choose the physical/mental organization that leads to that same choice, permitting a different choice to be made, would be a case of causa sui (self-causation), which is logically impossible. (4) So one cannot help but choose as one does at each instant because one cannot choose what one is (the character or nature that one has) at each instant, and one therefore is not ultimately MR for anything that one does.

The impossibility of self-causation is a valid argument against the possibility of an ability to choose the present physical/mental organizational grounds for making a choice at the present instant. But it is not circularly causal for a present choice to alter the physical/mental organizational  grounds of future choices. Criterial causation gets around the impossibility of self-causation by having neurons alter the physical grounds, not of the present mental events they realize, but of potential future mental events. They accomplish this by triggering changes in the physically realized informational/physical criteria for firing that must be met by future neuronal inputs before future neuronal firing occurs that realizes future mental events. In the case of a self-forming choice, one does not choose or alter the physical organizational basis for making a present decision or choice about how to be, one chooses or alters the physical organizational basis for making future decisions.

Choices that follow from such ‘future self’ self-forming acts we will have willed to take place by virtue of having set up those particular criteria in advance. When those criteria are satisfied in the future, leading to some decision, action or choice, those criteria cannot be changed, but because criteria can be changed in advance, we are to an extent free to decide on the parameters defining how we will decide or behave in the future. Criterial causation therefore offers a path toward a degree of self-formation and a degree of ultimate MR, where the brain can determine how it will decide/behave given particular types of future input. Self-formation involves reparameterizing how our future selves will choose to act.

Implicit in such regress arguments is that an infinite stack of decisions would have to be made in an instant. But decisions do not happen in an instant. They are cybernetic processes that come to conclusions over durations. If I want to decide on guests to invite for dinner, I might deliberate, playing out different scenarios in my mental workspace. The process is cybernetic because it involves feedback and comparison with some criteria I am trying to fulfill. If I imagine two guests who I then realize have split up, I will experience an error signal, and replace one or both of them with someone else, and then play things out again.

Self-forming choices are also durational and cybernetic, involving feedback, comparison with optimal fulfillment, and error signals. For example, say I have been fighting with my wife. After deliberating, I conclude that I am in part to blame because of how I react to her comments about, say, me working too much. I decide that, henceforth I will not respond in an angry way. I have set up grounds not for that decision, but for future decisions. Next time she makes a comment I might feel myself getting angry or defensive. But because I have preset new grounds by reparameterizing myself, there can be an error signal that indicates to me that I am heading towards a violation of these reformed grounds for my deciding. I correct myself, suppress my kneejerk anger, and respond in a way consistent with the reformed or reparameterized self I chose. I might say ‘you are right, I will come home earlier.’ I can then reparameterize myself to decide to come home earlier in the future. Days later, stressing out at work at 6PM about some grant deadline, I can feel an error signal or conflict between wanting to stay and my promise to get home. Whether I decide to honor my promise or not, I am beginning to develop a new character because I now feel torn, whereas previously I worked late without even thinking about it or its consequences.

If self-forming decisions about future choosing are not instantaneous, but rather cybernetic processes, then we can, as demanded by type 2 LFW, bootstrap ourselves over time into new characters. We might envision overcoming alcoholism, bind ourselves in various ways (e.g. reparameterize ourselves by swearing not to drink, reparameterize our world by throwing out all alcoholic drinks, joining AA etc.) such that when we feel the urge in the future, we are less likely to succumb. Months later we might have a new non-alcoholic character. The fact that there are millions of recovered alcoholics is testament to the human capacity to reform character.

Such bootstrapping might give rise to ‘Sorites worries.’ These are the ancient Greek heap arguments: A grain of sand is not a heap; Adding another grain does not make it a heap; On that logic, a million grains is also not a heap. But at that stage it patently is a heap. Similarly, a small act of future-self-reparameterization is not an entirely new character, and so on. And yet, after beating alcoholism or workaholism via the cumulative effects of thousands of small self-forming decisions, one patently does have a reformed character. Why do such heap arguments fail? Because the definitions of ‘heap’ or ‘character’ are criterial and therefore fuzzy. They set conditions on amounts or degrees of certain traits, not number.  

Of course we are not utterly free in making our choices because we cannot choose some of the initial bases of our choices. For example, what smells good or disgusting is just dictated to us by the inherited organization of our nervous system. We are not free to determine our initial conditions, since we have to start with some innate criteria at birth.  However, although we cannot choose what smells good, we can choose what we eat, because that decision can be made in light of criteria that we set on the basis of reason, before we smell anything delicious. For example, say a woman love’s the smell of cooked meat, and has a first-order desire for it. But based on her second-order desire not to hurt animals, and her reasoned conclusion that it is immoral to do so, she can set up criteria for deciding what to eat in the future, such that when she smells roasted meat she will decide not to eat it, but something vegetarian instead.  

A person can be responsible both for setting up the kind of criteria that would lead to certain kinds of future actions/choices and also for failing to inhibit criterial satisfaction (i.e., block the passing of the critical threshold) on the basis of higher-order criteria about what counts as right and wrong, through, for example, inhibition from executive centers in the frontal lobe. Consider the blameworthiness of a policeman who shoots and kills an unarmed citizen. On this account, he would not be responsible for pulling the trigger at the moment criteria for firing are passed, leading to a motor command to pull the trigger; instead he is responsible for (a) having certain decision criteria in place that he in part voluntarily placed there or did not voluntarily challenge when he could have, and (b) for failing to inhibit criterial satisfaction on the basis of knowledge of what is right and wrong, in the moments before the criteria were satisfied that led to him pulling the trigger. In a moral sense, the crime was not committed at the instant he pulled the trigger, but moments (or even longer spans of time) before that, by his having made decisions to put criteria in place or having failed to make decisions to train his nervous system to inhibit criterial satisfaction, which then led him to have the kind of nervous system that would lead him to pull the trigger under circumstances like those where he did pull the trigger, killing yet another unarmed citizen in America.

Onward and Upward with Downward Causation

Accounts of free will that require supernatural or contra-causal interventions have given libertarianism a bad name, and violate basic assumptions of physicalism and science. For any naturalistic variant of LFW to exist, several necessary conditions must be met. First, indeterminism must be ontologically real, rather than just a matter of epistemic uncertainty. Under indeterminism, I argued, Kim’s exclusion argument fails to rule out MC, leaving us with an opening to develop a believable account of MC. To get there, the following facts must in turn be true of neural processing: (1) quantum domain randomness must be amplified up to the level of randomness in macroscopic neural information processing, which (2) would have to be able to harness this randomness to fulfill information processing aims, and (3) there would have to be a role for the subclass of information processing that we call ‘mental,’ particularly the subclass of the mental that we regard as consciously volitional, in the specification of the ends to which such harnessing will apply, if conscious willing is to be agentic or causal of the realization of such aims. In my book I laid out a detailed case that these conditions are met, permitting the physical realization of a type 1 LFW. In order to have a type 2 LFW an additional condition would have to be met, namely: (4) the nervous system would have to be able to make decisions about how it would like to change itself, and then have the means to change itself, over time, into the intended type of decider.

LFW requires non-illusory downward MC. ‘Downward’ here means that events at a supervening level can influence outcomes at the rootmost level. In this context it would mean that information can bias which possible particle paths are realized. There is no wiggling out of this. If we want MC, and a FW or MR rooted in mental events that have/cause real consequences, we must defend the position that an informational entity, such as an intention or plan, can bias what possible particle paths open at the rootmost level can and do become real. But an entity at a supervening level cannot, logically, change its own physical basis because there can be no causa sui. This is where criterial causation via reparameterization comes in, because this allows what supervenes now to constrain what can supervene in the future.

How might such constraining work in the brain? The key pattern to which neurons respond is temporal coincidence. A neuron will only fire if it receives a certain number of coincident inputs from other neurons. Criterial causation occurs where physical criteria imposed by synaptic weights on coincident inputs in turn realize informational criteria for firing. This permits information to be downwardly causal regarding which indeterministic events at the rootmost level will be realized; Only those possible rootmost physical causal chains that meet physically realized informational criteria can drive a postsynaptic neuron to fire, and thus become causal at the level of information processing. Typically the only thing that the set of all possible rootmost physical causal chains that meet those criteria have in common is that they meet the informational criteria set. To try to cut information out of the causal picture here is a mistake; The only way to understand why it is that just this subset of possible physical causal chains—namely those that are also informational causal chains—can occur, is to understand what *informational* criteria delimit that class of possible outcomes.

As Eddy Nachmias put it my Oct. 2013 thread here: “the fact that informational state S1 could be realized by a range of physical states P1-PN and that info state S2 counterfactually depends on S1 but *not* any one of the specific physical states, including the one that actually realizes S1 on this occasion (e.g., P3) suggests that S1 is what makes a difference to S2 in a way that P3 does not. If we want to causally manipulate S2, manipulating P3 may not do it (e.g., if we alter it to P1 or P4, or one of the other S1 realizers); rather, we need to manipulate S1 (yes, by altering its realizers in the right way, but the right way will involve considerations of the S-level, not the P-level). S2 *rather than* S7 occurs *because* S1 *rather than* S1' occurred, and not because P1 rather than P4 occurred.”

Information only comes into existence by virtue of a decoder receiving input that matches its conditions (typically placed on the phase relationships or patterns in incoming energy) for the release of some effect, say, an action potential sent to other such decoders. But a decoder also serves as a ‘filter’ on the set of all potentially causal inputs, since it will only change the system of decoders in which it is embedded, namely, by firing, if its physically realized informational criteria are met.

Information cannot be anything like an energy that imposes forces, because it is not material even when it is realized in the material substrate. Information’s causal power consists in ‘filtering’ informational causal chains out of the set of all possible physical causal chains by constraining which sets of possible physical causal chains can occur. Although every informational causal chain is also a physical causal chain, most physical causal chains are not informational causal chains. Information is downwardly causal not as a material force, but as constraints that only allow the realization of sets of possible physical causal chains at the rootmost level that also comprise informational causal chains. Physical laws are not violated by this. Every possible physical causal chain conserves energy and momentum and so on. But only those possibilities allowed by physical laws which also meet informational criteria pass the physically realized informational filter, and become informationally causal, either by reparameterizing the criteria by which other neurons will assess future input, by changing their synaptic weights, or by triggering other neural firing.

Information is multiply realizable because which particular set of spike inputs ̶ and thus what particular information ̶ will make the neuron fire is unforeseeable, so long as the physical/informational criteria for firing are met. If neural causal chains are also informational causal chains, and informationally equivalent informational causal chains are realizable in multiple different neural or particle causal chains, then the parsimonious model is one of information causing information. Yes, there must always be some physical realization of information, but under physical/informational criterial causation, which one it happens to be is irrelevant so long as informational criteria are met. Chains of successive informational criterial satisfactions and criterial resettings afford the physical realization of downward MC.

Derk Pereboom in a previous thread said “if on some proposal, a dualist or a nonreductivist one, M and P are distinct causes of E, the threat posed by exclusionary reasoning will be neutralized by any response on which the number of causes is reduced to just one. There are two ways to achieve this: a first is by eliminating all but one of the causes, and the second is by identifying the causes.” If mental events are a type of information, and information is identical to acts of decoding immaterial (i.e. not made of mass) relationships or patterns among physical inputs, then mental events are identical to some class of acts of decoding. But note, this identity does not make mental events have physical properties like mass or momentum, because the identity is not with physical events at some instant, but with a process that is realized in physical events. Moreover, acts of decoding patterns cannot be reduced to a level where the patterns are not explicit, say the rootmost level, because the decoder only responds to a pattern at a level where it is explicit. Thus the identification is not with events at the microscopic level or even the neuronal level, but at the level of decoding the non-physical patterns to which the decoder is sensitive. Under determinism supervening informational criteria cannot filter out possible but non-informational causal chains at the rootmost level, because there is only one possible causal chain. But if indeterminism is the case, supervening informational criteria can make a difference regarding which possibilities at the rootmost level happen. That is, under indeterminism but not determinism, there is non-redundant causal work for informational criteria to do.

But how does this give the brain the capacity to freely will? It is not enough for neurons to filter out non-informational possible physical causal chains. It must be the case that some neural activity that we associate with volition, can control the parameters that neurons will apply in the future to enact such acts of filtering. Control comes from executive circuits that can plan, imagine, deliberate and make decisions in light of highest level demands and needs, and that can ‘rewire' circuits and reparameterize neurons, by changing synaptic weights, to embody new criteria for firing that will fulfill current executive ends. The downward causation afforded by the informational filtering of possible rootmost causal chains becomes agentic downward causation when executive circuits can rewire lower level circuits to fulfill whatever criteria they demand.

What Is Information? What Is Informational Causation?

It seems most people have gone home for the holidays, which is good! I will continue posting a few things here in hopes of getting feedback from Flickers philosophers once people get back from spending time with family and friends.

My goal in this post is to try to unstick some of the common intuitions that many people tend to have about energy and information, even hard-headed physicalist scientists and philosophers like some of us. This post will be a little longer than usual, because unsticking the metaphors we live by is as hard as getting crazy glue off of fingers (itself perhaps a badly sticky metaphor).

People typically have an intuition of what the physical is, rooted in the idea of a weighty substance. Often people intuit the magnitude of the fundamental substance, presumed to be energy, in terms of amounts, like varying masses of clay. We learn in school that energy is a substance that can neither be created nor destroyed, a fact that we might intuit using a metaphor like the reshaping of clay, which obviously does not and cannot change its amount. More abstract models of the fundamental substance that we learned about in school centered on the concepts of the amplitude and frequency of energy. We learned to picture light as having an amplitude and a frequency, that we modeled as a wave whose height corresponded to light’s amplitude, and whose spatial wavelength corresponded to its temporal frequency or ‘color.’ When I Socratically probe my friends, colleagues and family members concerning their understanding of energy, this is generally about as far as I get before annoyed looks tell me to back off.

Common intuitions based on these kinds of models are wholly inadequate for understanding what information is, and how it can be causal in the universe. Here I will argue that we physicalists need to re-evaluate what we mean by “the physical” to accommodate information and (downward) informational causation, because, I will argue, information is fundamentally realized in and is about *patterns* of energy. Our traditional intuitions of energy rooted in models of the amounts of energy don’t help us understand information or informational causation very well, and in fact may hinder our understanding. Whereas it makes sense to reduce global forces to the sum of local forces, and total amounts to the sum of local parts’ amounts, this does not makes sense at all for patterns. Reductionism to local forces and particle interactions fails because patterns are inherently relational over space, time, and other dimensions (e.g. color relationships, social relationships, etc). That is, patterns and relationships are not localistic. They are globalistic, so reducing them to a level where a decoder can no longer decode the pattern or relationship in question is pointless.

The program of reductionistic physicalism, which conceivably could have worked for energetic amplitude and frequency, is doomed to fail for energetic relationships or patterns. Understanding causation at the level of information will require a holistic understanding of energy, because patterns are holistic or relational, and acts of decoding patterns have to occur at a level where those relationships are explicit, not implicit. That is, patterns cannot be reduced to a level below where the relationships to decode are present, or the pattern of relationships to which a decoder is sensitive will be lost. But if an act of decoding can trigger a change in a physical system, then reductionistic physicalism won’t work at all, because then even non-informational causal chains, say among local particles, become influenced by global energetic relationships. That is, once patterns and information become causal in the universe, because of the evolution of decoders that do things if patterns are present, then reductionistic physicalism fails. It fails for the entire universe even if it fails just here on Earth, should, say, criterial causation be unique to our Earth because life is unique to Earth (let's hope not!).

To make informational causation even more alien to the causation studied by physics and described by our best physical laws, spatiotemporal patterns of energy can be created and destroyed, so conservation laws (of energy, momentum, spin etc.) that apply to amounts of energy are not relevant to understanding  informational causation. Rather informational causation is about successions of pattern-decoding acts, where the occurrence of one act of pattern-decoding plays a role in the occurrence of a subsequent act of pattern-decoding. Ideas that were central for understanding standard physical causation among particles, such as amount, force, frequency and conservation are no longer very relevant or useful, and in fact may hinder us. To understand informational causation means to understand decoding, particularly the decoding of energetic patterns among inputs to the decoder. It requires understanding how decoders trigger other decoders, and also how decoders reparameterize each other for possible future acts of now altered decoding.

The technical word for energetic relationships is phase (e.g., a sine and cosine wave of the same amplitude and frequency have a phase difference of ninety degrees). Spatial phase arises from spatial relationships (i.e. patterns), and is related to the everyday idea of shape. Temporal phase is related to the idea of timing. Physicalists’ intuitions have been centered on the amount or frequency or energy, leading to the misleading intuition that causation must involve the transfer of a conserved quantity of energy. But if we instead focus on energetic phase relationships, which can vary independently of both amplitude and frequency, we can reconceive causation as occurring among patterns that trigger patterns, and among acts of decoding patterns that trigger acts of decoding patterns, none of which are conserved or apply forces or have amounts. When we think of causation among energetic patterns afforded by acts of decoding patterns that then change the system, we enter a new causal world where there are no (informational) forces and nothing (informational) is conserved.

In ordinary language, information is commonly thought of as a noun describing a thing that we locate out there, whether a book in a library or a webpage on a server. But a pattern of energy, whether a book, a webpage, or a compact disc, is only informative for a decoder capable of decoding it. Change the decoder from English to Mandarin, and the energetic pattern “women” goes from referring to ‘female adult humans’ to meaning ‘we.’ So the informational content is not specified by the pattern of input, but by how it is read out. Things like books and webpages and CDs should be thought of as ‘potential information,’ whose potential to become information depends on whether and how they are decoded by decoders that take them as input.

Shannon did not think of information as a thing but as a process. He simplified the idea to include a ‘sender’ that sends an encoding or message along some communication channel to some ‘receiver’ that decodes it. If uncertainty is reduced from two possibilities (0 or 1) to one certainty (say, 1), that comprises one bit of information. So information is a process that involves a reduction in uncertainty for a receiver of inputs. But this conception cannot capture everything about information because a person can decode a pile of rocks that, say, just happen to lie in the shape of a cross, as a message from God. So an encoder or act of intentional encoding is not necessary for information to come into existence through an act of decoding. Neither is a communication channel necessary, because a receiver might decode internally generated phosphenes as messages from God as well, or as ghosts, or whatever. The crucial point is that information arises principally from acts of decoding inputs.

If information just is acts of decoding inputs, such acts set up equivalence classes of outcomes among physical events. If those equivalence classes have to do with criteria that have to be met in order to count as an instance of a certain class, then neither the class nor its members is defined by physical attributes of particles, such as mass, momentum, wavelength or position. An informational class is defined by the meeting of informational criteria, which are in turn realized in the satisfaction of physical criteria for neural firing placed on spatial configurations and temporal patterns (again, ‘phase relationships’) among inputs, and ultimately particles. For example, the class of things that count as a hat has nothing to do with momentum, spin, mass or particle position.

Importantly, neither an informational class, nor an informational configuration or pattern  has an objective or object-like existence in addition to the particles in which the patterns is realized. A pattern or configuration only comes into existence and becomes causal in the universe by virtue of a decoder that decodes its inputs such that if this pattern is present, the decoder does something to the physical system in which it is embedded, perhaps causing the system to change its physical/informational state. Upon such an act of decoding ‘kinetic information’ occurs. Informational causation occurs when kinetic information triggers the occurrence of subsequent kinetic information, and so on. Such a cascade across decoders can be thought of as a kinetic informational causal chain.

In order to understand what allows one act of decoding to trigger subsequent different acts of decoding, we must first understand what counts as an act of decoding for a neuron. Successful decoding of inputs occurs when an instance from the class of all combinations of inputs that could make the neuron fire in fact occurs as input to the neuron, making it fire. (We will ignore the information potentially carried by neural non-responsiveness here). But what defines this class of potential information? A neuron will generally fire only when a certain number of action potentials arrives within an extremely short duration, say 25ms. The inputs must share very particular temporal and spatial (phase) relationships. For example, they have to arrive together, and they have to arrive on very particular parts of the neuron, before the neuron will decode the input as an instance of the class that can drive it. An act of neural decoding therefore typically involves an assessment of energetic phase. Having decoders respond to particular spatial and temporal relationships or patterns in input allowed patterns or phase in energy to become causal in the universe. Whereas prebiological classes of physical causation generally were unresponsive to phase differences in input, being more responsive to other attributes of energy such as its amplitude and frequency, life introduced ‘phase causation’ or ‘pattern causation’ into the universe, as far as we know. Informational causation occurs when there is a succession of pattern decoding events, as when the firing of this neuron, tuned to pattern A, in part drives the firing of another neuron, tuned to pattern B.

But informational causation is more powerful even than that because the criteria that a neuron applies to evaluate its inputs can change or be changed by other neurons’ inputs. This subclass of informational causation is made possible in the human brain via the resetting of the informational parameters that will drive a neuron, realized in resetting synaptic weights so that a neuron now effectively receives and responds to different driving inputs than it did before the act of resetting. Thus informational causation is realized in criterial causation, which is itself an instance of the more general class of energetic phase causation or pattern causation.

 

But are patterns or spatiotemporal relationships themselves material? Well certainly the relationships decoders are sensitive to are relationships among material inputs. But those relationships are not made up of any additional material substance. Relationships are not material. A pattern does not have mass or momentum or spin.  Also those relationships do not even exist in the world. They exist relative to a decoder sensitive to them. For example, it is only certain spatial relationships among material components that will be recognized as the pattern known as ‘the big dipper.’ But the pattern that a decoder is tuned to (say a neuron will only fire if the pattern of the big dipper is present) does not exist in reality. There is no big dipper out there, even though there are suns out there. So information is about pattern decoding that is made possible by whatever relationships the decoder defines as relevant. The relationships are among energetic inputs, not necessarily energy that exists out there independent of any acts of decoding. So information is inherently decoder-specific. Ultimately this is the reason that that subclass of brain information that we call "consciousness" is inherently subjective.

How to Escape Kim’s Logical Headlock

If the logic of the EA (given in the previous post) is valid, then only if either (i) or (ii) is incorrect, is there potentially room to develop a theory of MC. So any theory of MC that attempts to meet “Kim’s challenge” must explicitly state which premise, (i) and/or (ii), is incorrect.

To begin with, note that without the sufficiency of c, Kim cannot apply the “exclusion of over-determination” principle, so cannot rule out mental causation on the basis of the EA. The sufficiency of c is crucial if the EA is to succeed at excluding MC.

 In my book and on this blog last in Oct. 2013 I argued that the EA does not hold under indeterminism. I will repeat the argument again here because I think it is a necessary part of the foundation for everything I later want to say about how MC (including volitional MEs associated with FW) and downward causation work in the brain. If I am wrong about there being an escape from Kim’s logical headlock, the foundation of the house of MC I want to build collapses. That is, if the EA also holds under indeterminism, then MC, FW and MR are ruled out, period, and I would have to become a hard incompatibilist, whether determinism or indeterminism is the case. Is there an escape from such a bleak worldview?

Here goes. Premise (ii) does not hold if indeterminism is the case, because any particular present microphysical state is not necessitated by its antecedent microphysical state or states. In other words the traditional definition of causal closure that “every physical event has an immediately antecedent sufficient physical cause” is not satisfied, because when a cause c can be indeterministically followed by any number of possible effects e_i, then c is not a sufficient cause of any of the possible e_i, because they might not happen if they have not yet happened, and they might not have happened even after they have happened. 

Classical deterministic laws are laws that apply among sufficiently causal actualia, where both c at t1 and e at t2 are actual events. Quantum mechanical laws are instead deterministic at the level of possibilia, but indeterministic at the level of actualia, because which possible outcome will occur upon measurement is only probabilistically specifiable. Nonetheless, under quantum mechanics c is sufficiently causal of its entire set of possible outcomes e_i with their associated probabilities of occurring. It is just that c is not a sufficient cause of any particular one of its many possible effects that happens to happen when measured. Classical deterministic and modern quantum mechanical laws both operate deterministically, and causation is sufficient, but over different types of physical entities. Actualia and possibilia, while both physical, have mutually exclusive properties. Actualia are real and exist now or in some past moment; they have a probability of 1 of happening or having happened. Possibilia are not yet real and may never become real, and exist in the future relative to some c, and have a probability of happening between zero and one. A given event cannot be both actual and possible at the same time.

Closure, therefore, applies to different types of physical events under ontological determinism and indeterminism. “Closure” entails that the set of physical events is closed; Any particular effect will be a member of the same set to which a sufficient cause itself belongs. Determinism is closed at the level of actualia; Any particular cause or effect will be a member of the set of all actual events in the universe across all time. Indeterminism, in contrast, is not closed at the level of actualia because a non-sufficient actual cause and one of its possible outcomes that may never happen are not both members of the set of actualia. Rather, quantum theory is closed (and deterministic) at the level of possibilia: Any particular outcome or event will be a member of the set of all possible outcomes or events in the universe across all time, and any possible cause is sufficient to account for the set of all of its possible effects. Under indeterminism physical explanations are of a different type than under determinism, though both actualia and possibilia are physical, and theories of either are physical explanations.

An indeterministic causal closure thesis could be restated as follows: “(ii*) the set of all possible microphysical states is completely diachronically necessitated by antecedent possible microphysical states.” The realization thesis for the indeterministic case might be: “(i*) all mental states are synchronically determined by underlying sets of possible microphysical states.” But claim (i*) is contrary to the definition of supervenience. Mental events do not supervene on sets of possible physical states, they supervene on specific, actually occurring physical states. Since it is absurd to maintain that mental events synchronically supervene on sets of possibilia, we can rule (i*) out. It remains to be shown whether (i), i.e. supervenience on actualia, can be combined with (ii*), i.e. causal sufficiency and closure among possibilia, to yield (iii).

An actual microphysical state and the set of all possible microphysical states are different kinds with mutually exclusive properties (e.g., real/~real; present/~present). The essentially syllogistic structure of the exclusion argument requires staying within a logical kind. It is logically valid to draw from the major premise (ii) ‘All physical events are caused by preceding sufficient physical causes’ and the minor premise (i) ‘mental events are realized in physical events’ the conclusion (iii) that ‘the physical events that realize mental events have preceding sufficient physical causes’. But now we are splitting ‘physical’ into two types with mutually exclusive properties, possibilia and actualia. The conclusion (iii) of the syllogism holds only if both the major and minor premises hold and are both are about actualia as in (ii) and (i), or both are about possibilia as in (ii*) and (i*). If one premise is about possibilia and the other about actualia, the conclusion does not follow, because the premises are about exclusive entities. For example, (ii) and (i*) would read ‘All actual physical events are caused by preceding sufficient actual physical causes’ and ‘mental events are realized in sets of possible physical events,’ which violates syllogistic logic as much as ‘all men are mortal’ and ‘Socrates is a robot’. Conversely, (ii*) and (i) would read ‘The set of possible physical events are caused by preceding sufficient possible physical causes’ and ‘mental events are realized in actual physical events,’ which similarly violates syllogistic logical form.

In conclusion, if determinism is the case, then the EA holds, and MC, FW and MR are ruled out, as is compatibilism. However, if indeterminism is the case, the EA does not hold and MC and FW and MR are not logically ruled out, at least by the EA.

This still leaves open the hard work of explaining how MC might work in a brain that harnesses indeterministic events to make information downwardly causal, which I will take up in my next post on downward causation.

The Exclusion Argument Excludes Compatibilism Too

First, let me apologize for not answering people’s comments promptly. Now that my grant applications are done, I should be quicker to respond, and promise to respond to the many comments I have not responded to yet.

There is a deeper, logically prior problem than the FW and MR problems, namely, the mind-body problem. Granted, there are really several mind-body problems (among them the neural basis of consciousness, the neural code, the problem of how the mental is physically realized, and physically yet downwardly causal). But regarding FW and MR, the most fundamental issue is whether mental events (MEs) can be causal. If not, then the conscious deliberations we so treasure as the basis of both FW and MR are at best epiphenomenal. In reading the FW debates from recent decades, it seems that the majority of argumentation among philosophers who believe in FW involves compatibilists responding to the consequence argument (CA), and incompatibilists responding to Frankfurt cases. I think this is optimistic in the same way that arguing over how the furniture should be arranged while the house is on fire is optimistic. First we have to put the fire out, because unless we do that, there is simply no point in arguing any further.

What is the logical fire threatening to burn down the house of (free) mental causation (MC)? It is Jaegwon Kim’s exclusion argument (EA). If the EA is true, then there can be no MC. But if MEs cannot be causal, volitional MEs such as willings cannot be causal. If a fundamental component of any definition of FW is that a willing causes events to happen, but willings cannot be causal because MEs cannot be causal, then FW is not possible. Ruling out MC would rule out FW. Similarly, if a fundamental component of any definition of MR is that an act of willing causes consequences to happen for which we are in part blameworthy or praiseworthy, but willings cannot be causal because MEs cannot be causal, then MR is not possible either. No MC, no FW and no MR.

One way to try to skirt this would be to let go of mental causation, and simply try to ground FW and MR solely in the neural basis of mental events. Someone making this move would redefine FW away from mental FW and the conscious deliberations that nearly everyone really hopes to find causal. Mele, for example, hedges his bets when he frames causation disjunctively by saying that a ME such as an intention OR its physical basis causes a decision. If the EA holds, however, a ME cannot be causal, leaving only open the possibility that its physical basis is causal as a physical-on-physical event. That might be a way to save FW from the EA, but would come at the cost of accepting that mental willings cause nothing. But are physical neural events really willings? Neurons have mass. Would willings then have mass? Regardless, this move fails because the EA makes neural causation epiphenomenal as well, assuming determinism, since it also reduces to particle-on-particle causation. If we lose both MC and neural causation to the EA under determinism, we lose FW and MR utterly.

Another way to look at this is that the EA is a more devastating argument against compatibilism than the CA. The CA is problematic, I think, for at least two basic reasons. First it makes no explicit mention of causation, and second it is a modal argument. Being modal it leaves open ambiguities in the definitions of (and referents of) basic terms used in the CA (e.g., are we talking about laws-in-themselves, laws-as-modeled by science, or just conceivable laws?; are the laws in the past laws of causation or something else?; Is causation necessitarian in that it completely specifies what will happen in the future given what is?; Does causation only run forward in time?; are we talking about objectively being able to realize certain possibilities, or only conceivably being able to realize certain possibilities, whether in the past or the future?). This kind of ambiguity in what we are talking about when we talk about the past, the laws or a modal operator like van Inwagen’s ‘N’ leaves a lot of wiggle room for both confusion and talking past one another in the seemingly endless or at least stalemated back and forth over the CA. The EA, in contrast, is explicitly (not implicitly like the CA) about causation, and the EA does not provide any modal or conditional escape routes for compatibilists to take, because the EA is not a modal argument at all.

The EA rests on a premise of the causal closure of the physical. “Causal closure” means that causality at the level of particles is sufficient to account for all outcomes and interactions at the level of particles. Kim (2005, p. 17), applying Occam’s razor, advocates the “exclusion of over-determination” when modeling physical causation. In his words: “If event e has a sufficient cause c at t, no event at t distinct from c can be a cause of e.”  If particle-level causality is sufficient to account for particle behavior, and neurons are made of particles, MEs, assuming that they supervene on neuronal and particle events, can play no causal role in neuronal or particle behavior. In other words, MEs cannot cause fundamental particles to behave differently than they otherwise would have if they had only interacted according to the laws obeyed by particles. And the same goes for neural events.

Put succinctly (Kim, 1993, pp. 206–210): If (i) the “realization thesis” is the case, then each ME is synchronically determined by underlying microphysical states, and if (ii) “the causal or dynamical closure of the physical thesis” is the case, then all microphysical states are completely diachronically necessitated by antecedent microphysical states, then it follows that (iii) there is no causal work left for MEs as such to do.

I believe the EA holds if determinism is the case, ruling out MC and thereby mental FW and mental MR, though I would be delighted if someone could convince me that that is not true. Condition (i) must be true, assuming monism/physicalism, because mental events must be realized in their neural, and ultimately particle-level basis. But if determinism is true, then (ii) is also true because then events are sufficient causes of their subsequent outcomes, at least under a causally necessitarian understanding of determinism, such as held by, say, Newton or Einstein. If determinism is true (iii) follows. Thus if determinism is true, the EA rules out MC, which in turn rules out the kind of mental FW and MR most people want. Therefore FW and MR are not compatible with determinism. Note that this basis for adopting incompatibilism (of FW and MR with determinism) does not depend, like the CA, on any modal arguments with multiply interpretable operators, definitions of basic terms, or referents. The EA is so deadly for compatibilism in its simplicity because it follows from widely held assumptions of reductionistic physicalism about mental realization and physical causation.

My next post (above) will repeat some things I have written about concerning how to escape the EA, before moving on to how MC (and FW as the class of volitional MEs) might actually work in the brain.