Does Free-Will Falsify Naturalism?

Allen HainlineReasonable Faith UTD

Oct 2, 2014

Why is this Topic Important?

• Naturalism is dominant view in Academia• Naturalism.org:

– “free will is so often the focus at the Center for Naturalism”

– “assumption [of free will] expresses itself in our concepts of blame, credit, responsibility, self-worth and deservingness, to challenge it has all sorts of ramifications, personal, social and political”

Definitions

• Libertarian free will means that an agent is truly free to have chosen differently– Human actions not dictated

solely by physics• What is naturalism entail?

– Nature is all there is– Could be emergent non-physical

entities but they are solely determined by the physical

Can free will exist under naturalism?

– Naturalism entails that physical laws solely dictate what happens

• There are no if statements in the equations of physics• Physical brain states solely determine mental states

– Libertarian free will entails that physical laws do NOT solely dictate what happens

• There would need to be a non-physical component to humans in order to act on physics

Do you agree that there is a conflict here? Why or why not?

What does Theism claim?

Humans are made in the image of God– God wanted humans to be conscious and to have free

will as moral agents and stewards over creation• We can express creativity• Humans have true libertarian free will

Do we have libertarian free will?

MindBrain

?

Evidence that mental states affect brain states

• First-hand Personal Experience• Placebo Effect• Scientific Studies

“We have literally thousands of years of experiences of human and animal consciousness causing behavior.” John Searles in 2013 PNAS article

Placebo Effect

• A placebo is a “fake” treatment of some type• The Placebo Effect is so powerful that scientific studies are

done as double-blind studies– A placebo is used for the control group– Neither the doctors nor the patients are allowed to know whether or not

they’re part of the control group

Placebo Examples

• Placebos work for more than just pain and depression – “Because the act of performing surgery itself has a profound placebo effect,

a true treatment effect is impossible to distinguish from nonspecific (placebo) effects without a sham comparison group.”

– Sham surgery was just as effective as knee surgery in one test– Parkinson’s patients who thought they had stem cells injected– Retinal surgery, cancer of lymph node, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, …

• Why under naturalism should there even be a placebo effect?– Isn’t this evidence for mental states affecting the physical?

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Evidence that mental states affect brain states:Cognitive Therapy for Neural Disorders

“willful, mindful effort can alter brain function, and...such self-directed brain changes—neuroplasticity—are a genuine reality... In other words, the arrow of causation relating brain and mind must be bidirectional.”--Jeff Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain, 94-95

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Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for OCD using conscious selective attention to relabel and reattribute the disorder (e.g. obsessive hand-washing) and refocus on an alternative behavior (e.g. gardening).

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The mind changed the brain

“PET scans after treatment showed significantly diminished metabolic activity... There was also a significant decrease in the abnormally high, and pathological, correlations among activities in the caudate, the orbital frontal cortex, and the thalamus in the right hemisphere....[T]herapy had altered the metabolism of the OCD circuit. Our patient’s brain lock had been broken.”

Jeff Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain, 89-90

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Systematic neuroscientific study of the power of the mind

“the results of these [neuroimaging] studies strongly supports the view that the subjective nature and intentional content…of mental processes (e.g. thoughts, feelings, beliefs, volition) significantly influence the functioning and plasticity of the brain…mentalistic variables have to be seriously taken into account to reach a correct understanding of the neurophysiological bases of behavior in humans.”

--Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard

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Problems addressed by mind-based therapies, verified by brain-scans.

1) Depression and sadness2) Tourette’s syndrome3) Stroke rehabilitation4) Focal hand dystonia5) Dyslexia6) Panic disorder7) Spider phobia8) Stress reduction9) Follow up care for cancer patients

What if Free Will is an Illusion?

• There is no morality• Nothing is blameworthy or praiseworthy• Naturalism can’t be rationally affirmed for belief in

it based on blind forces & arational material causes• Evolution cannot explain how consciousness arose

– There would be no benefit whatsoever whereby natural selection could have favored consciousness and likely a fitness cost for driving the necessary chemical reactions

Next Week:Are Humans More Than

Just Matter?

Beau BishopReasonable Faith UTD

Oct 9, 2014

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Consciousness also unexpected and unexplained under atheism

“No explanation given wholly on physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience.” David Chalmers

“It is not that we know what would explain consciousness but are having trouble finding the evidence to select one explanation over the others; rather, we have no idea what an explanation of consciousness would even look like.” Colin McGinn

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Objections

1. Maybe consciousness is just a illusion But an illusion is itself a conscious state that needs to be

explained We have more justification that we’re conscious than we

do for any other belief Sensory inputs are obtained through our consciousness We learn about science through conscious activity such as

reading, listening, performing experiments

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Objections2) Maybe consciousness is an emergent property

Under atheism it would still need to emerge from a physical process such as evolution.

Stephen Jay Gould and others have argued that consciousness is just a “fluke” – not necessarily that likely to emerge

Most life gets along just fine without being conscious We can program computers to do lots of things effectively but

don’t know how to make the computer aware of itself Unless we also have free will, it would lack a fitness advantage

Even if it was emergent it’s been so elusive that the set of possible chemicals that you can mix together to become self-aware must be a small subset among possibilities or we would have already discovered it’s physical origins

• No PPT but handout, discussion• After discussing OCD, placebo, revisit analogy

of computer and point to program where scripts can be setup by human– Better design for mind-body interaction

• Key on discussion questions• Look at predictions of theism and atheism

– Image of God vs. accident of nature• Evolution optimizes for survival to reproduction• Show Garrett clip (?)• Show video testimony …

• Naturalism -> entails nothing beyond physics? Agree– Emergent properties, epiphenomenalism -> but causal direction one-way

• Look at objections from Stanford encyc. …

• Now consider evidence from placebo effect (including importance of double-blind studies)• Consider analogy of user interface in computing

– Cannot learn anything about human user by studying computer code• In discussing sham surgeries, there was one where they drilled a hole in people’s skulls just so they would think they had

surgery: how would you like to be a part of that control group?• Belief in free will – the irony that some who doubt it debate telling people because of implications -> acknowledging causal

direction of mental on physical• Libet could at most go against a naïve view that no unconscious intentions could exist + random number gen.• Recent experiments show that the original experiments were flawed. If you ask the subjects to look at a clock and decide not

to perform an action, you get the same readiness potential. As far as we can tell, the readiness potential was produced by watching the clock. Take away the clock and there is no readiness potential (15). (John Searle – PNAS 2013!)

– http://www.pnas.org/content/110/Supplement_2/10343.full– I believe the history of the readiness potential is an unfortunate chapter in recent scientific history and it raises the question: Why were

people so eager to believe these implausible conclusions? The answer I think is that they wanted to discredit consciousness. Consciousness has typically been an embarrassment to the natural sciences, and, in these cases, it looks like we have scientific proof that consciousness does not really matter very much for our behavior.

• Are humans composite?• Are protons composite? Early clues:

– When we smash open atoms, we get other particles that do take up space and have rest mass, the electron, proton, and neutron. When we do deep inelastic scattering, we see that the proton and the neutron have three points of deflection, IE three particles that make them up.

• Are strings fundamental?• Analogy – physical world (inside CPU) is it

deterministic? Yes but then no – answers vary

Free Will/Consciousness• Intro prob that atheism has trouble explaining• Atheists either believe in naturalism -> nothing beyond nature

– Or have to admit that there are non-physical entities (e.g. humans have properties that are not just products of physical processes – no evolutionary explanation possible since it’s a physical process)

– Emergent property (1st free will event incoherent), realm beyond physics – fits with made in image of God

– Consciousness – Gould, life could evolve and get along without this; only plausible benefits are if you actually have free will (else making you aware serves no purpose since you don’t have free will anyway)

• FT because otherwise we would have found it• Be clear that my arg not assuming a physical cause for consc. Found• Am arguing that a physical cause for free will will not be found – not if physics can

be modelled mathematically– A kind of constant intervention; non-physical components to humans

– Libet experiments don’t

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Libet Rebuttal

• AAlso Reference PNAS article too -> http://www.pnas.org/content/109/42/E2904/1

• rebuttal to Libet interpretations (develop a model that replicates results and distribution of timing delays etc. based on stochastic-decision model and implement it using a leaky stochastic accumulator process; made a new prediction and performed an experiment with interrupts that matched expectations under the model! (Aaron Schurger et al)