Free will and consciousness

I recently listened to:

In Search of Ourselves: A History of Psychology and the Mind - A Problem of Consciousness - @BBCRadio4Extra
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04368f7

Cooincidentally, around the same time, I had a few after dinner discussions about free will. This has prompted me to write down my thoughts on the subject.

The BBC programme repeated the findings of many experimental psychologists (using MRI scanners) that most of the  actions we think of as "conscious" and made by free will are actually not - they can be shown as being made before we were aware of them.

Its quite difficult to convey my conviction about fatalism and our lack of free will without either being missunderstoon or appearing patronising. It is often inferred that to believe in fatalism, you must be some sort of religious nut. I would prefer to use the word "determinism", but it might indeed appear patronising to assume this is not a term familiar to most non-scientists.

If you accept that our thought processes are essentially chemical, then is not much of a case for suggesting that they are anything other than deterministic. This logically leads to the conclusion that everything we do much be a function of our genes (ie our chemistry) and our previous experience. In other words, while we have the illusion of making decisions, we are simply acting out a scenario, that "in principle" could have been predicted. I say "in principle" because, quantum physicists would argue that at the quantum level, things are truely random. Whether this is the case or not is the subject for another post, but even if we are unable to predict the outcome of something, this does not mean that it is intrinsically unpredictable (although physicists would argue that also - but I don't agree). And even if it truly random, then "free will" can, by definition, have no bearing on it.

As you might imagine, bringing quantum physics and MRI scanners into the argument with someone who has not had the benefit of a science education, might be seen as unreasonable and this usually brings an end to the discussion.

Of course, some much greater minds than mine have come to the same conclusion about our lack of free will, and at a time well before even classical (Newtonian) physics had evolved. But those views were pure conjecture and largely philosophical.

Even though I am utterly convinced about the inevitability of it all, it does not mean that I can override the way my brain has been wired by several hundreds of millions of years of evolution. So, much as I would like to be philosophical about some particular sequence of events, unfortunately, it can't override my emotions.

For example, if you follow my logic, you must accept that nobody is responsible for their actions - as indeed I believe. Nevertheless, strong as my logic is, it does not override my evolved emotion to want to lock up murderers or parking wardens. These emotions must be even stronger for those that think they have free will.

If one assumes that free will exists, then an essential pre-requisite is conciousness. The fact that we don't, in my opinion, have free will does not mean we don't have conciousness and ironically, defining consciousness is something that occupies more than its fair share of my thinking time.

I am inclined to agree with Roger Penrose that if we were to construct a computer than faithfully emulated a human brain, while it would react in every way like a human, I don't think it would be aware of its existence. (Of course, if you asked it, it would say it was!) Needless to say, I don't know what the essential ingredient of self-awareness is but I have a gut feeling it is something to do with systems that have evolved as self-referrential - or what is called in computing parlance as recursive. I got this glimpse of enlightenment when reading the preface to Godel, Escher and Bach: the Eternal Gold Band. I hasten to add, that I never got much further than the first chapter, but this was one of the rare occasions I could be bothered to read a preface and actually got something from it.

I shall return to this post when I have something new to add.