Is Consciousness an Illusion?

A famous psychological experiment in the 1980s seemed to prove that the brain "decides" to take actions before the conscious mind makes the choice to do so, and the decision we think we're making is only a rationalization after the fact:

Scientists Still Haven't Figured Out Free Will

Many experts in the field have reservations about this "proof" and have pointed out flaws in that interpretation of the results. A Wikipedia article goes into great detail about this experiment and other aspects of the "free will" issue in psychology:

The Neuroscience of Free Will

There's also a psychological theory that the "self" we think we have or are is an illusion, a trick the brain plays on itself. For one thing, our concept of our own identity arises from continuity of memory, an imperfect process riddled with gaps and reconstructions.

Here's one analysis of that issue:

The Illusion of the Self

The author of this article, Sam Wolfe, summarizes cognitive scientist Bruce Hood's thesis that our "selves are generated by our brain in order to make sense of our thoughts and the outside world: both ‘I’ and ‘me’ can be thought of as a narrative or a way to connect our experiences together so that we can behave in an biologically advantageous way in the world." Wolfe endorses this position and cites support for it dating back many centuries, to 18th-century philosopher David Hume and, much further, as a traditional tenet of Buddhism. What we think of as our "self" arises from the brain as a "narrative-creating machine." As Wolfe puts it, "Essentially, our brains are always thinking in terms of stories: what the main character is doing, who they are speaking to, and where the beginning, middle, and end is; and our self is a fabrication which emerges out of the story-telling powers of our brain."

I wholeheartedly agree that the creation of stories is an essential aspect of the human brain, part of what makes us human. I can't agree with people such as Bruce Hood and Sam Wolfe, however, on their insistence that the narrative of a unified self doesn't correspond to reality. We visualize the self as a little cartoon person at a control panel somewhere in our head, directing the subordinate brain functions, or maybe, as in the animated film INSIDE OUT, a small committee of persons in a control center making executive decisions. Only a metaphor, of course, but regarding the singular self as an illusion seems to generate an intractable problem.

Since, as Hood and Wolfe acknowledge, "everyone experiences a sense of self – a feeling that we have an identity," if this sense of self is an illusion, a construct the brain creates to enable us to function in everyday life, who is the "us" believing the illusion? This theory seems to lead to an infinite regress of "selves" being fooled. Also, it seems to me a not-insignificant objection that it's impossible in practice to live as if one believes no actual self exists, or not for long anyway. And, again, who's doing the believing?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Time Travel as a Curse

If you've read Audrey Niffenegger's THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, you know it's a highly unusual approach to time travel. In fact, I haven't come across any other science-fiction or fantasy novel quite like it. Henry, the traveler, bounces through time uncontrollably and at random. Most often, he lands in moments related to his own life, but not always. Visiting points in the past and future in no particular order, he arrives at each destination disoriented, nauseated, and naked, for he doesn't take anything along on the temporal jaunts. Even tooth fillings, since they aren't technically part of his body, don't stay with him. He has multiple encounters with his wife, Clare, in the past (from his viewpoint on his timeline, after they're married) when she's between the ages of six and eighteen. On one visit, he tells her which dates he will appear on, and she writes them down. Later, when the two of them meet earlier in his timeline (for him at that age, the first time), she gives him the written list, which thereby becomes the source of his knowledge of their predicted meetings. So how does this list exist? As Clare says, it's a mysterious "Mobius" loop. Similarly, Henry appears to his younger self when child-Henry makes his first time leap, into a museum. Adult-Henry knows he'll need to teach child-Henry the rules of time travel because he remembers a friendly stranger doing that for him when he experienced his first leap.

HBO is airing a new series based on the book, starting last weekend. Judging from the first episode, it's going to follow the novel closely. The book's chapters have helpful headings that state the year and how old each character is on his or her timeline in that encounter. The TV program, likewise, has captions at the beginning of each scene to indicate the ages of Henry and Clare at that point. Otherwise, viewers could get hopelessly lost.

I've never encountered another story that portrays time travel as a disability rather than a superpower (although TV Tropes mentions a few). Henry has no way of knowing whether he'll bounce back to his point of origin within minutes or remain stranded for days or more. He has to steal to survive. He frequently gets beaten up, in addition to the hazards of bad weather and the risk of landing in the middle of a street or railroad track. Small wonder that, at the age of twenty, the first occasion in his timeline when he meets Clare, he's a bit of a self-centered jerk. It takes her love, reinforced by her knowledge of the man he will become, to transform him. One of the saddest features of the novel consists of the multiple miscarriages Clare suffers because her unborn babies inherit Henry's mutant gene and spontaneously time-leap out of her womb. Another inevitable source of sorrow for Henry is knowing when he'll die and keeping that information a secret from her.

Unlike some fictional chrononauts, Henry has no problem being in the same time slot more than once. He can and often does meet other versions of himself. In Dean Koontz's LIGHTING, the Germans who come forward from World War II into the present can't jump into a moment where they already exist, a restriction that plays a critical part in the novel's climax. Connie Willis's Oxford-based time travelers (in DOOMSDAY BOOK, TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG, etc.) have the same limitation. Whatever force controls the space-time continuum won't allow them to overlap themselves, just as it prevents them from getting too close to any critical historical events they might alter. For Henry, on the other hand, there's no worry about altering the past. Whatever he does in any moment he travels to is simply what he has already done. As in Robert Heinlein's THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, whose protagonist also has the ability to have two of himself in the same spatio-temporal location, anything you "change" in another time period doesn't really change the outcome but causes it to happen the way it was/is supposed to all along. While THE DOOR INTO SUMMER ends happily, with the narrator using a time machine to bring about the optimal conclusion, Heinlein's "All You Zombies—", in which every major character is the same person, whose life endlessly loops upon itself, concludes with a cry of existential despair.

The more one thinks about it, the more this aspect of Henry's time travel seems like a reason for despair. If his life is locked into a preset pattern dependent on events he has already experienced, whether in the past or in the future, what happens to free will? Yet Niffenegger manages to conclude the story on a note of love and fulfillment rather than futility.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Benford's Law

On a Netflix series called CONNECTED, I recently watched an episode about Benford's Law, a theory new to me. Here's the Wikipedia article on this theory. It's dense with equations and mathematical terms, but you can get a general idea of the concept from the explanatory sections:

Benford's Law

In brief, it states that in any large set of numbers, about 30% begin with the digit 1, about 17% with 2, about 12% with 3, and so on, decreasing predictably with each digit. The larger the sample, the more reliably this pattern shows up. "As a rule of thumb, the more orders of magnitude that the data evenly covers, the more accurately Benford's law applies." It doesn't matter what kind of statistics we're examining. Population figures of cities, a list of the sixty tallest structures in the world, death rates, house prices—all follow the pattern. Furthermore, it doesn't matter what units of measurement are used. The data are so predictable that this principle has been used in fraud detection and granted legal status in court cases.

This phenomenon seems downright spooky, especially since nobody knows for sure why numbers work that way. The Wikipedia article explains various hypotheses in detail, with mathematical terminology and symbols that I skipped over because they made my head spin. The host of the Netflix program raised an existential question: What does Benford's Law mean for human free will? If the statistical outcome of such a wide variety of human activities is so predictable, are our individual choices freely made?

I believe the two levels of phenomena don't negate each other. Patterns of large numbers of events in the aggregate follow the "law." Nevertheless, the decisions of any particular person in a given situation can't be reliably predicted. For instance, at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, a half-serious rule was discovered that every couple stationed there eventually got a pet, a baby, or a divorce. My husband and I had our third baby while he attended the school. But that decision wasn't compelled by the "rule." Somehow, by acting freely in their own lives, human beings collectively fulfill demographic "laws." Yet each action is still chosen, not compelled.

Maybe it's as C. S. Lewis proposes in his allegorical novel THE GREAT DIVORCE: From the perspective of eternity, predestination and free will are not incompatible. Likewise, there's no contradiction between predictable statistical probabilities and individuals' conscious choices.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Biology and Free Will

The September issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC features a short piece titled "Why You Like What You Like." It explores the biological basis of likes and dislikes, attraction and repulsion. It cites the discovery that the Toxoplasma organism can make rats unafraid of cats and may possibly cause "increased anxiety" in humans. Other examples of biological influences on tastes and behavior include genetic links to aversion to broccoli, preferences in sexual partners, and conservative or liberal political tendencies.

The author expresses dismay at the realization that he's been wrong all this time in believing "my likes and dislikes were formed through careful deliberation and rational decision-making." The findings detailed in this article don't come as that much of a shock to me. It seems like an obvious truism that most of the time we "can't help" liking or disliking things or people. As for political, philosophical, or religious tendencies, our genes may predispose us to see the world a certain way, but surely they don't totally control our choices. The article itself acknowledges this fact, because "embedded within your genome, there are many potential versions of you." The science of epigenetics has revealed many environmental factors that influence the way genes are expressed; chemicals, protein interactions, and even the microbes living inside us can affect our DNA. Those influences still imply that we don't have the conscious control we think we do, though.

"There are biological gremlins driving every action and personality trait that you assumed were of your own volition." Again, I've never assumed my personality traits were chosen by my "own volition," and I doubt many people think that way. Personality comes as part of the start-up package. Moreover, "driving" doesn't necessarily mean "controlling." After this somewhat pessimistic summary of the evidence, the author acknowledges that very fact and assures us we aren't "destined to be slaves of our DNA." With heightened awareness of how genes and other biological factors shape our minds and behavior, we may develop more efficient ways to change the traits we consider undesirable. So he does allow room for free will. So do the scientists who maintain that consciousness itself is an illusion, by the very act of making that claim. For an illusion to exist, there must be a mind—a consciousness—to embrace that illusion.

Even at the mid-twentieth-century heyday of the "blank slate," radical malleability of human character, environment-is-destiny position, one of the primary fictional exemplars of that belief, BRAVE NEW WORLD, allows for free will. At least one character conditioned from the moment of conception to fit into Huxley's utopia of programmed happiness questions his society and its culture. Our ability as authors to write interesting stories would be severely limited if we and our readers believed our characters couldn't have any freedom of choice.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt