 Oh, hey, hello. Good afternoon. Let's start. So let's start. So I've talked a few times about the revenge of functionalism or the revenge of physicalism. And what I mean is we've looked at all these arguments that try to show that there is more to the mind. There's more to the subjective life than physicalism explains. And the revenge of the scientific approach to the mind is to say, well, if there is anything we're missing out, it's something that doesn't matter. It's something that makes no difference to what goes on. And there's a line of argument for ethiphenomenalism. I'll say quite a bit more in a second about what that is. That really writes up that revenge. And so today we're looking at Huxley's article on the hypothesis that animals are automata and its history. For next week, there isn't any specific reading. Next week is meant as a review week. So what I'll try and do in lectures next week is give a quite different angle on the topics we've been looking at. But it is meant from the point of view of reading to give you a chance to catch your breath. We'll give out essay topics for the next essay on Tuesday. That will be due sometime in the citizen early November. I can't remember the exact date. Early November is when the next essay is due. So you will have plenty of time, I hope. And in between now and the start of November, we'll be doing a whole block on personal identity, which is a fresh start. This is a different part of the forest that we'll be looking at. So we really wave in goodbye to many of the subjects we've looked at already when we take up with personal identity. And so the next reading will be locks of identity and diversity, which is in the Perry collection, the small blue book. Austin Jackson, do you want to comment on the essays? Oh, yeah. OK, great. OK, any questions? Just about where we are and where we're going? OK, onwards. So today I want to start out with by looking at what functionalism is and what epiphenomenalism is and Huxley's frog argument for epiphenomenalism. Then we'll look at more recent developments. So we've had this before, I think. This is the basic epiphenomenalist picture. This up here at the top, the monkey holding the wheel. This is you in your subjective life, holding a wheel that isn't connected to anything, facing in the wrong direction, shouting, I'm in charge. I'm making all this happen. The tiger here is the biology of the human that is driving you onwards, whether you like it or not. The conscious life is there. It's not that we're saying there is no conscious life here, but it just isn't connected to anything. It isn't in charge of anything, although it has this persistent illusion that it isn't in charge of what's going on. There is this illusion of freedom that we're in charge of what we decide to do. And even for very simple things like, will I move my hand to the right or to the left? The epiphenomenalist is saying, that's just a mistake. You in your subjective life are not what's in charge here. So Huxley sets out the basic case here, and he starts out by making a basic point about humans and animals, that even without the benefit of consciousness, humans and animals are both capable of actions that are complex, co-ordinated, and purposive. So you can have very complex action in the absence of consciousness, and that can be demonstrated. That's Huxley's basic point. Descartes had said animals don't have consciousness at all. Descartes thought that animals were literally thoughtless, brutes. They didn't have feeling or sensation. So Descartes would have had no qualms about animal experimentation. That is just fine. There is no feeling or sensation here. You can do what you like to them, just as you can mess about with any piece of clockwork to do what you like with. Huxley says, that's not right. Animals surely are conscious. Many animals surely are conscious. But Descartes was right in saying that the consciousness that animals have does no work in generating their actions. So that's the abstract structure of the epiphenomenalist picture. Huxley says, though we may say reason to disagree with Descartes' hypothesis that brutes are unconscious machines, it does not follow that he was wrong in regarding them as automata. So the animal is basically a piece of clockwork. It is basically a piece of biological engineering. It has a mind associated with it, but the mind does no work in generating its actions. The mind does no work in making a difference to the behavior of the animal. The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working. Simply as a collateral product of the body working. So the consciousness of brutes is as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam whistle which accompanies the work of the locomotive engine is without influence on its machinery. So if you think of the lonesome whistle of the train going through the night, then here you have all this powerful machinery. The whistle is just about a steam given off by the working of the machinery. The whistle itself is not a functioning part of the cogs and pistons that are making the thing go. That's your mind, the steam blast given off by the body when it's going full throttle. The lonesome whistle of your body motoring through the night. That's all consciousness is. A kind of exhalation of the machinery. The volition of animals, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes. Is there a cause of such changes? The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works. So there's a clock work inside the tower making the hands go round. The soul is like the bell is not part of the working machinery. The bell itself is not part of what's dictating where the hands are and where the movement is. The soul is like the bell, a mere appendage of all the working physical machinery. And consciousness is the analog of the sound which the bell gives out when it's struck. And Huxley has an argument that frogs in particular are like that. So this is one of these cases where as with the bat, I mean, I would love to have been able to introduce a bat into the room so you could see what Nagle meant. It would be nice to actually have a frog, but meantime we just have to look at pictures of the frog. So Huxley's point was back when he was writing, it was known that if you cut, if the spinal cord of a human is cut, then there's no consciousness of what's controlled below the cut in the spinal cord. You're not going to have any feeling in your body below the point at which the spinal cord's been cut. Still, there can be behavior, complex behavior, in that numbed part of the body. And he says if that works for humans, it should work for frogs. Suppose you can, I mean, we feel freer to experiment with making incisions in the spinal cords of frogs, than we do with making incisions in the spinal cords of humans. So if the spinal cord of a frog is cut across, so as to provide us with a segment separated from the brain, so what's going on below the cut is separated from the brain, then you will have a subject, a frog subject, parallel to the injured man on which experiments can be performed without remorse. There's nothing delicious about that. Anyway, as we have a right to conclude that a frog's spinal cord is not likely to be conscious when a man's is not. So if a human doesn't have any consciousness below the incision in the spinal cord, it's hardly likely that there will be enough complexity when the spinal cord below the incision in the frog to sustain consciousness. So if a man's spinal cord is divided, the part of the central nervous system which lies beyond the injury is cut off from consciousness. So similarly, you cut off the frog's spinal cord, but then you find that the frog can perform quite complex behaviors. If you pour without remorse, as I would say, folic acid onto one of the frog's feet, the other one will rub and try to get the folic acid off. A frog with the foremost two thirds of his brain removed will still swim when you put it into water. So that complex swimming movement is being coordinated without the benefit of consciousness. A frog, if you remove the anterior divination, this is just a huge chunk of the frog's brain. If you remove so much of the frog's brain as lies in front of the optic lobed, you've got this hapless frog with its brain mostly removed, placed on your hand. Okay, cut, picture if you will, this hapless frog on the hand. And suppose the hand be very gently inclined so that the frog would naturally tend to slip off. The creature's fore paws are shifted onto the edge of the hand until he can just prevent himself from falling. And if the turning of the hand is continued, he goes through the needful set of muscular operations until he comes to be seated in security on the back of the hand. The doing of all this requires a delicacy of coordination and a precision of adjustment of the muscular apparatus of the body which are only comparable to those of a rope dancer. It may be assumed then that molecular changes in the brain are the causes of all the states of consciousness of brutes and presumably everything that's going on in the consciousness of an animal is a product of his biology. But is there any evidence that those states of consciousness are causing the molecular changes that give rise to muscular motion? Suppose animals do feel, suppose animals do have sensation, is there any evidence that that sensation is controlling their movements? Huxley says, I see no such evidence. If the frog walks, walks, hops, swims and goes through his gymnastic performances quite as well without consciousness and consequently without volition. It doesn't make any difference to the complexity of the behavior that the frog's capable of. This is goal-directed behavior that is exhibiting without consciousness. Nonetheless, Huxley says, the frog is free. The frog is not constrained. If you think, well, I'm a free agent. I'm a free person. Well, Huxley says, you're free in the sense that the frog is free. The sense is there's nothing preventing you doing what you want to do. I mean, the frog has no obstacles preventing it from doing what it wants. It is true though that what it wants, the subjective life of the frog up here on the back of the tiger is making no difference to what happens. But nonetheless, Huxley has given you this consolation. There may actually be no external impediments. It's not as if you're in jail. It's not as if you're bound and gagged. There's no impediment to you doing what you want. It's just that what you want is not making any difference to anything that happens. But Huxley is saying, that's all you require for freedom. Okay, so that's epiphenomenalism and Huxley's basic case for being an epiphenomenalist about animals. Did you have a question? Yes? That's round the wrong way. What Huxley is saying is, when the cord is severed, you can't, that's the datum, you can't feel anything below that. But there will nonetheless be complex co-ordinated purpose of behavior without the benefit of consciousness. You see what I mean? That's right. You will rub the folic acid off, yeah. Okay, is that playing enough? Playing is day. Okay, so what about humans? How does it go for humans? How does it go for you and me? Is that, yeah? That's not what Huxley is saying. I don't, I haven't tried it myself. So I don't actually know what kind of damage is actually being suffered by a quadriplegic or paraplegic. I really don't know. But I'll show you in a way, in a moment, that you can get the same effect as Huxley is talking about with human experimentation without having to do this as a tryout, if you see what I mean. What if I remember? The decision, yeah. And they can't. Right, that's exactly right. The one foot will rub the folic acid off, yeah. But the datum that Huxley needs is that there is no consciousness below the cut. Right. Yeah. Though, as you say, there can be complex, coordinated, purposive behavior. It has an objective, this behavior, yeah. Like the frog or whatever. I was once talking about this to a physiologist and he said to me, cheerfully, if we put you in a treadmill and set you walking and we cut your head off, you will continue walking just fine. It really wouldn't be a problem. I don't know quite why he was so authoritative about this. They kind of have done it very often. But this is a very distinguished guy, I'm sure it's true, that the control of your coordination as you're walking is not being done by the brain, it's distributed through the body, the control. Well, you might say that's all right for rubbing acid off one foot with another, but what about things that seem more likely to be under conscious control? Like if I think I'm gonna pick up that bit of paper, could I do that in the absence of consciousness? I mean, surely, if you take things like reaching to something you can see, picking up the cup, catching a ball, don't you need consciousness for that? Isn't your conscious life what makes all that go? Well, the thing about that is we already talked about blind sight, blind sight being this condition where, actually Jackson talked about this too, right? You get a damage to your visual cortex, to one half of your visual cortex, and you don't have any visual experience of what's going on in the blind field. But patients who don't have any visual experience of what's going on in the blind field, if you say, reach out and pick up the thing in your blind field, they can do that, they can do that just fine, to their own surprise. If you give them a particular shape to pick up, they will at first say, well, how can I pick it up? I can't see a thing over there. But they will reach and pick it up with their hand shaped just right to fit the shape of the object they're picking up. That's possible without consciousness. There's a condition, motion blindness, where people can't see motion. The world seems frozen. If you're watching water being poured from a kettle, it will seem like there's just a frozen stream of water there, and then suddenly it's stopped, the scene has moved on. You're kind of getting a strobe effect on ordinary vision, where you're getting long freeze frames, and then things suddenly change. So you can't visually experience motion. So somewhere like this is in very bad shape, right? I mean, you can't drive, for example, right? You don't have that continuous experience of movement. Peter McLeod, an experimental psychologist in Oxford, had one patient, a keen cricket player, had one motion blind subject sitting in his lab. He had a cricket ball, and he just tossed it to her spontaneously in the course of the interview, and she just reached out and caught it. So if you think about something like reaching for a cricket ball, you might think, look, of course, you've got to have conscious experience. That's part of the point of having conscious experience that'll let you reach out and grab things, pick things up. But what you find is that, and this is a lesson of experimental psychology over and over again, that when it goes, that conscious experience is perfectly possible for the behavioral abilities to stay intact. So consciousness is not doing the work it seemed to do. And really, the thunderbolt finding on this kind of thing came from LeBet, an experimental psychologist working in the 1990s. The basic finding is motor readiness potentials in the brain come before your awareness of your intention to act. So in general, when you make a movement, it's not a conscious decision that is causing it. So here's LeBet's basic setup. Did we talk about this before? This hasn't come up before, okay. This is so basic to so much work now. But the basic setup back then was you have the subject holding a clicker and the subjects got EG apparatus monitoring signals from the premotor cortex. So it can tell when cells in the premotor cortex are starting to fire. Now, follow me very closely here. This is a little bit subtle, but when you think about what he's saying, it is really a bombshell. The subject's watching the hand in a clock sweeping round and round. And the subject's told, sometime in the next couple of minutes, here's your task, sometime in the next couple of minutes, do this, just push the clicker. When you like, add your whim, push the clicker. And all we ask that you do is notice where the hand in the clock is when you push the clicker, when you make that conscious decision. So not actually when you push it, but when you make the conscious decision to push the clicker. So does that make sense? Yeah, that's your task. Push the clicker, but we'll be watching the clock. So when you've decided I'm going to do it now, note when you made that conscious decision. Meanwhile, the cells in the premotor cortex are being monitored. And the basic finding is that the firing up of the cells in the premotor cortex to mobilize the action, that was happening hundreds of milliseconds before the conscious decision to push the clicker. So what's happening is your brain is firing up saying, do it now, your brain's saying that, you have conscious awareness of the decision, I'm going to do it now a little bit later. Yeah, so your conscious decision was not the source of the movement. The source of the movement was the firing up of the cells in the premotor cortex that came first. So it looks like the picture is something like this. There are these cell firings that cause the action. These are what the EEG is monitoring. They're causing the action. Your conscious intention is coming hundreds of milliseconds later. Your conscious decision happens later. So right now, if you put up your hand, if you wave, you could try this right now. What is going on is that the cell firings are causing the waving. Your conscious decision is not what made it happen. Now, Libet's finding caused a lot of follow-ups and in 2008, there was a paper published showing this, Libet's finding was about hundreds of milliseconds. These guys were doing a different task. They were saying, don't just push a clicker, push this lever to the left or the right, okay? Whatever you like, do it at whim, left or right. And just let us know when you made the conscious decision, I'm going to push it to the left or I'm going to push it to the right. So at the back of the room, there are the guys monitoring your brain and then you're thinking, well, what shall I do? It all lies before me. Shall I push it to the left or to the right? Everything's to play for. What do I care? That's your frame of mind. The guys at the back of the room are monitoring your brain. Two specific regions in the frontal and parietal cortex of the human brain had considerable information that predicted the outcome of a motor decision the subject had not yet consciously made. It suggests that when the subject's decision reached awareness, it had been influenced by unconscious brain activity for up to 10 seconds. So what's going on is, you're saying, what shall I do to the left or to the right? The guys at the back of the room reading the EEG know 10 seconds before you make that conscious decision. You're going to push it to the right or you're going to push it to the left. You think I'm in charge. I've got the steering wheel here. I'm going to decide is it to the left or to the right. That decision, is it to the left or the right, was made up to 10 seconds predicted by the people sitting at the back of the room before you reached that conscious decision. Well, it was presumably those brain areas. The decision was made in those brain areas. Decision you usually associate with conscious subjective experience. In that sense, the point is, insofar as there was a conscious decision, that wasn't what was having any effect on what went on. It was the brain firings that determined what happened, not the conscious decision. It would certainly be reflected in the EEG, but let's just think, yes, it would be reflected. Just the answer to the question is yes, it would be reflected in the EEG. You can be making a decision and then decide to stop yourself. That's true. I don't think there's anything parallel to this kind of timing on deciding to stop yourself, if you decide to stop an action once started. But it's very, very difficult to get this kind of setup in place in the first place. This is a much more fancier thing you're describing. I'm always being surprised by what happens in current science, but to my knowledge, the fine-grained timing of that kind of corrective thing is probably being explored. Yes? That's certainly correct. When you think about it with... the way you start to get conscious of what you're doing is usually like you're tying your shoelaces and then something goes wrong, if they're not tying properly, and you think, wait a minute, that's when you back off. That's when an image of your action, a conscious image of your action that you see for explicit reflection and control comes in. Yeah? So that picture is certainly Le Betzo in picture, I think, that you have a veto on what goes on. But usually you don't veto what goes on, if you see what I mean. Yeah? Life would be pretty much impossible if you... I mean, you couldn't drive. If you're constantly thinking, I'm going to accelerate now. Oh, no, no. You see what I mean? So life requires... ordinary practical life requires seamless actions. Yep? Yes. Yes. Well, I think in the Le Bet, in the original experiment, that's certainly a... Oh, where's it going? Oh, sorry. That's too often, I'm going the wrong way. Okay. I think in this initial experiment, with his hands kind of whizzing round, yeah, that's certainly a real concern. But when it comes to a time period of 10 seconds, and you think about that scenario, what are you just thinking, well, if I'll do it now, I'll do it now. Yeah? It really seems like the temporal resolution there can be pretty coarse. But it can still be quite clear that the brain signal was coming before the conscious decision. Yeah? So here's Patrick Haggard, scientist Patrick Haggard. Yeah, well, as soon as I'll say it, this prior activity, this prior brain activity, is not an unspecific preparation of a response. It's not that the back of the brain is just kind of gearing up and saying, okay, let's do something, and then the conscious decision takes over. It's that the activity is specifically coding. Is it left or right? I don't know where my Haggard quote's going. I'm sorry. I'll tell you what Haggard was saying in a second. Aha. Here we are. Here's Haggard. A general trend in the neuroscience of volition. This is what many different results are pointing to. The idea that although we may experience there are conscious decisions and thoughts cause our actions, these experiences are in fact based on readouts of activity in our network of brain areas that control voluntary action. So the general picture that is emerging is that there's a kind of ongoing cascade of neural activity heading towards the action and that conscious intention comes somewhere along the way. So I suggested, blessed it, I suggested that this is the natural reading and Patrick Haggard's remark there, conscious intention is a readout of all this neural activity. That suggested something like this, that all the self-hiring, this cascade of self-hiring is going on generating the action and you've got a readout of what's happening at some point and you say, that is me doing it. I just made that conscious decision. Another way of thinking of it would be like this. You've got this cascade of neural activity going on and the conscious activity is actually a part of the thing that's happening but still and all, the decision right or left, I mean, what determined is going to be right or left, that happened way back here and the conscious intention is coming late to the game. Yes. That I have no idea about. I very much doubt. I mean, pushing something to the left or the right, my impression is, as I say, I'm always surprised by how much is happening in the labs around the world but my impression is that pushing the thing to the left or the right is a state of the art. Something fancier like deciding right after this class I'm going to go for lunch or whatever or deciding to write something, these are harder to pinpoint is my impression. Harder to get the neural correlates of. Okay, so that seems to imply that Huxley was completely correct. What we've got here is a complete vindication of Huxley. We think that our conscious life is affecting what goes on around us but actually there is no evidence for that at all. All the evidence from the neuroscience is suggesting that your conscious decisions are not determining what you do. Fair enough? Yes? Yes. That's right. This goes back to the last question that what you would expect what is predicted by these kind of findings is that deciding to write something down the conscious decision is going to come after the brain activity that determined exactly what you would write. As I said I don't know of anything that works specifically on writing but the prediction is if it works for to the right or to the left like that then it's going to work like that for writing too. The brain activity determining from which someone sitting at the back of the room could determine exactly what you're going to write. That's happened before you made the conscious decision to write that down. That's right. Something else that your brain is doing that. It feels like you're doing it. It feels like you're in complete charge of this but that is an illusion. Maybe it's a necessary illusion. Maybe there are good reasons why we have this illusion of being in charge but it is an illusion. That's what these results seem to show. Yes? Very good. That's very good. Notoriously with thinking your neighbour was asking about correcting yourself. Notoriously with speaking out loud and thinking about that you can decide to correct yourself just too late. You say the thing and you think oh my god. How did I say that? I can't believe I just said that. You see what I mean? I agree with thinking the idea of a conscious decision to say whatever you're going to say being in charge of that. That's very unintuitive but with something like flipping a lever to the right or to the left sometime in the next couple of minutes that's a case where it really feels like you make the conscious decision like if I pick up the sheet of paper and you decide whether to take it from me you're free choice I'm going to take it from you or not you got a moment to think about it there it really feels like there is something going on in your mind prior to the action that made that action happen and that's what it's turning out to be an illusion. The feeling of anticipation Yes right? Yes I'm going to go left I agree There can be that thing where you say sometime this morning I'm going to write to Jen so you make that decision and then a bit later I better do that now that's the kind of thing where there are lots of aspects to whether to write when exactly to do it that can be decided at different points but what I find so arresting about this finding that specific encoding what they're specifically being asked about is when did you consciously decide right or left there's that specific aspect of the action the time of deciding right or left of the decision they're being asked about the time of deciding right or left and the brain it's telling you right or left well in advance of that is that specificity about this that is really so astonishing because I agree that it's kind of common sense what you say that all these different aspects to the action can be planned at different times I've got to write to Jen oh god what am I going to say I better do it now these are all staged they happen at different stages but this is not like that this has been set up in that kind of problem yeah do it at 27 seconds so you can look at that even before I get to 27 saying that she's made the decision to do that before yes that's a good example but that wasn't the structure it wasn't that I do the action at 27 seconds it was make the free decision just do it now you see what I mean note when you made the decision so the action might come a bit later yeah if you're slow and clumsy it might take you a while to get your hand down to push the clicker what you were noting was the time where the hand of the clock was when you thought what the hell I'll do it now before your hand lumbered into action I don't mean your hand before one hand lumbered into action yeah what you're describing is fair enough but that would be a different situation what LeBet was asking about was the situation where you just think the thought just make the decision do it now and note when you did that when you made that decision and that's the thing that the cells and premotor cortex are firing up before you made that conscious decision you're trying to describe an example where there isn't that moment of truth when you make the conscious decision yeah that's right that's just a different example yeah but the prediction would be that the cell firings are happening before the conscious decision even then yeah it's just not what LeBet's thing was testing yeah okay are we happy with that I mean it's not a matter it's not a matter of what goes on in your conscious life after all but but anyway does that make sense that almost makes perfect sense okay so the next question is if that's all right is there any sense in which we are free I mean ordinary human life is built around notions of freedom and responsibility yeah there's some things you freely choose to do and you make them happen if you and I are in the elevator and you stand on my toe then it makes a such a lot of difference if I think or you're pushed you accidentally got onto my toe then if you saw my toe juicily there and thought boy look at that how vulnerable yeah that makes a big difference to my reaction to you socially whether I think you did this because of a free decision look at that toe or if I think it was just you were pushed but what this seems to be telling you is that that really basic kind of distinction doesn't exist is always a matter of being pushed around and Huxley says the frog's free in that there's nothing to prevent it doing what it desires to do and you know that's right that the frog is not bound and gagged right I mean nobody is picking up the frog and pushing it about and that's not what's going on in Huxley says well there you are that's freedom what do you want freedom is literally freedom from chains the frog is not in chains so it's free but it's not much freedom it seems to me that that gives you the thing is that there's nothing physically obstructing it from doing what it wants but it's desires aren't connected to anything it's desires aren't making anything happen and suppose you have a child that you just for the purposes of experiment wired up so that it's completely under the control of someone with a joystick right the child's limbs move at your control you've really got this child wired so you can make it move exactly how you want it to suppose that's what's happening well is that child free well suppose that what goes on is that I mean we all can fabulate a bit right you know you drop something and you say oh I meant to drop that children actually that's one basic finding about children that I heard a while ago that children start lying almost as soon as they can talk and the real surprise though is what they lie about many of their lies are really to preserve their dignity as in I wanted that to happen you know or I meant to drop that or I meant to walk into that wall or whatever yeah so the and we all know that right you can fabulate things you make things up when you don't really quite know what's going on so suppose what's going on is you have a child that is completely under the control of someone with a joystick limbs are made to move however the person with the joystick wants but however its limbs move the child says oh I wanted to pick that up I wanted to walk over there I wanted to trip over here right well is the child free in that situation if it just conforms its desires to whatever it's being made to do and says yes you know it's got kind of a zen approach to the thing rather than going through this disagreeable business of trying to make it the world conform to its desires it has its desires conform to whatever it's actually doing you see what I mean yeah is that an example of the child being free and in charge and responsible for what's happening that child stands on your toe are you going to say ah well you wanted that to happen because after all what happens is the guy with the joystick gets the child to stand in your toe and then the child says yes I wanted that to happen and you say you scoundrel you rogue you rascal right is that a fair reaction to that situation um yes sorry what's the space of hesitation what lies in it well if you elaborate this picture here um suppose you have this picture here what a conscious intention is just a kind of readout coming after the neural activity yeah there might after all be glitches in the neural activity here I mean any account of the neural activity is going to have some kind of error correction or error anticipation built into it um if there's later some error correction going on here then at the level of the conscious life you will get a readout of that too and you will say oh yeah no that was a bad idea yeah we'll feel like you're thinking that was a bad idea but that's not to say that feeling like I was thinking that's a bad idea that isn't what made me stop what made me stop was the stuff going on down here at the brain level fair enough yes yes you see the bear you run yeah it's an interesting question but the line of reasoning suggested I mean we are only talking here about the experiments involving one-off decisions um to do this or that yeah um not something like torturing for weeks over what essay I'm going to do yeah uh but the basic picture would be that the neural firing is down here are what are making everything happen and that the consciousness is just this readout you're getting of what's going on at the level of neural activity now the thing is the neural stuff down here could be taking a very long time I mean when you're deciding what essay to do there is going to be your brain is at work right there just are cell assemblies involved in deciding what essay to write and it's their work that is determining where your hand moves in the end to write one essay rather than another yeah um so it's not as if the brain activity is always instantaneous the brain activity could take a very long time and your readouts will be coming over a similarly long time yeah that's exactly what we're coming what I'm trying starting to address now so if the mechanical park is doing all the work what does that tell you about free will yeah that's the question and um Huxley has got this very cheerful attitude if you're not actually in chains then your freedom of will because nothing is physically stopping you doing what you want to do but this is what I mean about the child if the child is conforming his desires to what his body is doing anyway then I don't see that the child is free um the child is not in chains if the child says I didn't want that to happen it is not being physically restrained um but um the child seems to be intuitively the child is not in charge his desires are tracking what's going on physically yeah now the thing is that um that the child's desires are all being formed after the fact that all the child's desires are confabulations you do the thing and then you rationalizing you say now why did I want to do that of course I wanted to do it because of this and you tell yourself a story about why you did that if I pick up the paper I wave it about I say hey I've got the paper up I'm waving it about now why would I have wanted to do that of course I wanted to make some point right um now there are plenty of cases like that where it's you put your hand on a hot radiator and you jerk it away and someone says why did you do that I did that all because it hurt because it was painful but actually when you time people moving their hand away from a hot radiator they do it very very fast they do it faster than it could take for signals to travel up to the brain to generate pain and then back down to move the hand the movement of the hand is coming very very fast but what happens is people say people jerk their hand back and they say oh that really hurt that was really hot that's why I did it so your body does the thing and then you tell yourself a story as to why you wanted that to happen how what was going on in your subjective life was really the key thing but there are just more and more cases where you can see quite clearly that is not what was going on exactly exactly if you remember that example to clean up I chose the shovel to clean up the chicken coop you remember that that's exactly that kind of confabulation and it's not a deliberate attempt to deceive that kind of thing is that you're doing your best to make sense of what is going on and that is what is going on in ordinary so-called free action that's what's going on with this child I was describing that is doing his best to make sense of what is going on it doesn't occur to it that some individual has got a wired up to a computer and is controlling it so it says well the best sense I can make of all this is I wanted this to happen and the Libet picture is that's what goes on in everyday life that's what we all do the whole time that's what life is that constant confabulation that illusion or free will I once was giving a talk to a psychology department and I said laughingly but of course if you thought that then you'd have to think that all our ordinary desires and how we felt about what we were doing we'd have to think that that was all just tabulation and I looked out to the people and their faces were stony that was what they all thought people just take it for granted that this is what experimental psychology has demonstrated so this is not just one or two striking experiments this is a whole body of what's going on here the thing is okay I thought that's right the interesting thing about the reflex is of course we don't always have control over what our body does and everybody knows that anyhow but what is striking about these cases like the radiator is that you think you were in control you think your conscious life was involved in a way in which you look at it objectively it quite clearly wasn't the key thing is that in that kind of case you can fabulate you tell yourself the story that really hot that felt really hot and the diagnosis is that's the general story so it seems to me that in the case of the child if that's what's going on you don't actually have any real freedom I think if you knew that was what was happening when the child stood on your toe and then to say you rascal and go after the child would be unfair it wasn't a result of free agency on the part of the child but what the psychology seems to be telling you is that that is the general fact for all of us in ordinary adult life you might say well look I know that it's not like that in ordinary adult life because if I wanted something different something different would have happened right surely that makes sense and you might say look general freedom is that my actions are responsive to my conscious intentions in this sense if I want it it happens if I didn't want it it wouldn't have happened what more do you want than that but the thing is that really is not enough I mean remember this picture there are these cell fireings causing your action and a conscious intention is the readout that if you'd had a different conscious intention something different would have happened but that's because the only way you'd have had a different conscious intention would have been if those cell fireings were different and if those cell fireings were different then you've had a different action but what you want is for your conscious intention to be affecting the action directly the situation is kind of like a barometer and a storm suppose you're watching the needle on a barometer over a while and you say look at that but if it points to stormy by God there's a storm what's going on? is that thing controlling what happens well it's true that if the needle hadn't pointed to stormy there wouldn't have been a storm but that's because if the needle hadn't pointed to stormy that could only have been because the atmospheric pressure was different and if the atmospheric pressure had been different there wouldn't have been a storm but that doesn't show that the needle is causing the storm and you can show that by just reaching in and grasping the pointer and switching it round that doesn't make any difference to whether there's a storm when you do that but it's still true that ordinarily if it hadn't been so your conscious intentions here are like the pointer on the barometer they're good indicators as to what's going to happen but not because they are making it happen what's making it happen are those background cell firings just as with the barometer you really might make a mistake you really might think God that thing controls the weather wouldn't be great to be in charge of that but that is just a mistake it's a reader of what's going to happen so similarly with your conscious intentions you think by God they're controlling my actions what I decide look I want to pick my arm up whoa there we go my conscious intention just made my arm go up but that is just a mistake so you could say if I wanted something different something different would have happened but if you'd wanted something different that would have been because the earlier cell firings were different and then you would indeed have acted differently but that's not showing that your conscious intention was the cause of the action and actually it's still pretty disturbing even if you think about this picture where you get all the background cell firings and then the conscious intention is generated as a kind of way station if you think of it like that then the conscious intention will still be one of the causes of the action but the trouble is it won't be the conscious intention that's determining which way your action goes to the right or the left to right this or that that was all determined much earlier and the conscious intention is just something that happens along the way I mean you tend one tends to assume that if I just sit here in splendid isolation and then I decide out of nowhere I'm going to pick the pen up I'm going to write a novel I'm going to write to Jane or whatever then my conscious intention sparked out of nowhere and generated the thing my conscious intention was what started it to happen that I wrote this rather than that but on this picture that's not what's going on at all the cell firings are specifically encoding what you're going to do and your conscious intention comes up later so that picture already shows that it's not enough for freedom that your conscious intentions should be causing your actions your conscious intentions might be causing your actions but if they're merely the product of some earlier non-conscious process that determines what you are going to do then you're still not in charge of what's happening I'm okay with them having that first yeah on this picture they don't have desires they're just dumb cell firings but they're what's making everything happen the way you put it they have desires that fits with what I was saying about the guy with the joystick in charge of the child like there's somebody else here that your brain is driving you about it has its wants it has its agenda and you're having to just fall in with it but I think the picture that something to have is that this stuff down here the cell firings that's not a matter of desire or a subjective life at all that is just patterns of cell firing and then the conscious decisions and anything you want to talk about in those terms that comes later you see what I mean if you're characterizing this how should I say getting a strict and literal truth about cell firing electrical activity you wouldn't be talking about beliefs and wants and desires yeah sorry perceive the signal go right and I decided to turn right it feels like that doesn't it but look if you just think about what has to be going on here suppose you think over in terms of blessed it yeah when you hear from me go right if that's what's happening then that's got an impact on your brain so you hear go right your brain does it stuff and you switch the handlebars to the left I mean to the right so you're now going right and a split second later you say to yourself oh yeah he said go right that's why I'm going right yeah I'm going right because I heard him say that but your subjective life is coming along after the fact your subjective life is just confabulating this I'm in charge story you just heard go right and it's like the hand in the radiator you heard go right and your brain did this thing go right a moment later up in your conscious life you said oh yeah he said go right yeah that's why I'm going right if we did a very precise timing of it and you'd see that that was what was happening that's a prediction now getting the signal is not necessarily part of being conscious your brain gets signals the whole time that are not necessarily conscious Jackson in the yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly you've got to be right there's got to be a difference between top down processing and bottom up processing well let me just check I'm getting you there's got to be a distinction between a simple reflex action yeah and something like going to a restaurant where you've learned patiently all that you have to negotiate and go to a restaurant what you do with a snooty waiter how you handle a terrible meal you've learned all that stuff so it's by no means that you're just picking your hand off the radiator you've got this whole background of history of stuff to negotiate is that the kind of thing you mean by top down let's just call them tohain and akash to give them a name right that's really good so you might say if I've got control processes in charge here that's the conscious life but if you think about pushing it to the left or to the right is that a controlled process I mean that seems like a controlled process and certainly it should be tohain and akash's account because consciousness is implicated but the same point is true I mean I hadn't thought of tohain and akash in this context but of course it applies directly to the to those 2008 findings that I was showing that move to the right or to the left is going to be a controlled process tohain and akash's picture but the conscious experience is still coming 10 seconds after the specific right or left has been encoded so what does that tell you it tells you that either you've got to either the global workspace is coming in after all the work has been done to encode right or left or else it tells you that the global workspace is leading consciousness and consciousness is coming after the global workspace has done its thing but it's a really interesting exercise to think maybe we should set that as an essay question how to interpret the lebet finding the 2008 findings in terms of tohain and akash I don't think we'll do that as an essay that's a really good question you had a question yes that's right that's exactly what I was saying when I say right well perceive there's got to be something going on in my ear there's got to be something going on in my auditory cortex when the sound waves hit my ear that's what I didn't mean by perceive at first more than that they've got to be causally responsive to what's going on these cells are going to be reacting to the sound when I say right but carry on there is really an interesting take but let me play that back to you it feels like when you hear somebody saying right that goes to the conscious mind and then it gets to the brain but not a brain system you might be right but it's a really radical idea that anyone working on hearing has got this picture where you've got the inner ear you've got all this stuff connecting up to these nerve systems and if you're asking what's the causation here for the word right it starts out with all these processes you can just track it from the ear back into the brain yeah so that would be a radically different picture okay quickly yeah I'm suggesting that what I was suggesting was that it's like the radiator case you hear right you turn to the right and then you say oh I heard that turn to the right so language shows up consciousness eventually but after all the work has been done that's right that's exactly right that's exactly the picture that's right that's correct I don't see why not you can use subconscious like that but it's got nothing to do with Freud's subconscious in that sense I mean what's going to be subconscious in that sense is going to be stuff like the ratios of light of different wavelengths being reflected from different parts of the room that's not part of the Freudian subconscious that's something that your visual system uses that you didn't know about that a vision scientist tells you hey that's what your visual system is doing it's sampling light of different wavelengths different ratios of light reflectances from different parts of the room but okay you can call that subconscious if you like but just don't run away with the idea that this is some deep psychoanalysis I mean okay so do we have freedom at this point if this picture is right if I've explained it correctly can you put your hand up if your feeling is yes just say this picture is right then we are free we are in charge of what we're doing it is up to us what we do can you put your hand up if you think that's correct on this picture higher everyone's being very shy so well I've been stating this picture on which your conscious life is tracking along behind the cell firings that are specifically determining specifically what happens yeah and say suppose that's a general picture yeah that's to say suppose epiphenomenalism is true your conscious life makes no difference to anything if that's right are you in charge of what's happening yes put up your hand if the answer is yes you're still in charge okay put up your hand if you think the answer is no you're not in charge if that picture is right okay so I would say that's about two to one so so significant but not by no means overwhelming okay what about this picture on which your conscious life tracks behind the specific determinants of what you do can you put your hand up if you think that's persuasive yes I believe that the picture where your conscious life is coming afterwards is that a question that's a vote okay yes that's what I'm asking okay so is epiphenomenalism true is that picture of the monkey on top of the tiger facing in the wrong direction with a wheel not connected to anything is that correct I mean put your hand up if you think the answer is yes okay okay and if you think the answer is no and if you have no idea of what I'm talking about and if you just don't know if you understand the question perfectly well don't know okay okay that's very enough that's very interesting okay so there's the voice of reason and reconciliation that's about ten percent there's something going on conscious comes later that's right yeah the EEG is happening before the EEG readings are happening before the conscious decision before the conscious decision yeah the EEG readings are reporting cell activity happening before the conscious decision you know about the time of the conscious decision because of the subject's report the subject tells you where was the hand and the clock when you made that decision and the EEG is telling you those cell fireings were happening before that conscious decision that's what I've been suggesting in the review sessions we can come back to this because frankly if we have to agree with this then civilization is at an end I mean that thing I said about someone steps in your toe that's like a straw in the wind but that's the general situation of everyday social life not law courts just anything that goes on you think it makes such a big difference was this the result the consequence of what someone wanted or did it just happen yeah we think that's a really big decision and civilization really depends on that distinction so it is really a huge thing if this is correct yeah so in the one hand the experimental arguments are very powerful on the other hand the conclusion is cataclysmic one and two that's right I mean in a way this happens all the time anyway in the law courts I once talked to a police officer who was extremely sore about this this is a young guy who just had his first few appearances in court and he said every time I've got someone some damn social psychologist Bob's up and says do you think the ground made him do it or the brain made him do it and he says my attitude is you did that you're nicked but that's not the way it works you know we just accept that if someone's got a brain tumour or something and that is causing aberrations in their behaviour that is really an excuse you know that really lets you off but if this kind of picture is right then that kind of case could be made overwhelmingly I mean across the board last one and then we've got to stop yes it's an interesting idea that and I hadn't thought of it before that why does it take so long if it's not conscious but ok I would just like to reflect on that my first thought is some physical processes just do take a long time and the biology here might be one of them but it's an interesting question ok we have to stop we're out of time but I hope we can come back to this in review sessions