Freedom isn’t free

I haven’t blogged in a couple weeks, so I thought I’d swing for the fences and go in way above my head. Enjoy!

Free will has been a favourite topic of philosophers since before Socrates, but over the past few decades most of the interesting work on the topic has come from laboratories.

It’s often the case that scientific inquiry doesn’t produce the most comforting answers, and free will is no exception. It might not exist, and in fact consciousness itself might be an illusion cobbled together in the machinery of the brain.

One of the most commonly cited studies on the topic had a subject push a button at a time of their choosing, noting the time when the decision was made. Typically the button was pushed a fraction of a second after the decision was made, but according to an electroencephalograph monitoring the subject’s brain a spike of brain activity took place slightly before the individual was aware they had made a decision.

Some psychologists have interpreted these results to mean that will is simply a feeling that coincides with actions. The decision has been made before the person is conscious of it. For consistency’s sake, the mind retrospectively interprets the action as being caused by a conscious decision.

We all know that absolute free will doesn’t exist. If it did addiction wouldn’t be a problem. I wouldn’t have eaten bacon this morning. I can’t tell you where my thoughts come from. I do as I wish, but my wishes are subject to predispositions that I have no control over.

And yet for most people free will is correlated with moral responsibility. How can we hold people responsible for their actions if they aren’t actually in control of them?

I used to work with a serious born-again Christian. Free will was one of the few things that we agreed about. My friend rejected predestination, because he said he thought it made us into robots. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then what room is there for free will?

I’m confronted with a similar situation. I think that everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is part of a massive, cosmic chain reaction. I’ve done a few mental back flips trying to reconcile my bleeding heart liberal beliefs with my scientific deterministic beliefs. For me the question comes down to how determinism is determined.

For me, Nature vs. Nurture has always been a debate within a deterministic framework. Genetics plays a huge role in determining our predispositions, but I don’t think that it follows that human behaviour can be written off as the result of genetic determinism.

I recently read Microcosm, science writer Carl Zimmer’s wonderful new book . The book is an examination of life itself through the lens of Escherichia coli, one of the most studied and understood organisms on the earth. One of the most significant passages for me was when Zimmer described how E. coli clones will behave differently given identical circumstances.

In the same environment, some E. coli will swim for twice as long as others and some will be better at digesting simple sugars, even given an identical genome.

“Living things are more than just programs run by genetic software,” Zimmer writes, “Even in minuscule microbes, the same genes and the same genetic network can lead to different fates.”

E. coli are merely tiny bags of material with a simple genome. You have about a hundred billion living inside you right now. Humans have 25 times as many genes as E. coli. Our bodies are made of trillions of cells, including 100,000,000,000 neurons connected through 100,000,000,000,000 synapses. Each neuron is hundreds of times larger than an E. coli bacterium.

This exponential difference in complexity, and the essential chaos and randomness and biological systems is important for our understanding of human nature. Given these statistics, I believe that human behaviour is determined about equally between genetics and upbringing. But is a deterministic social system any better than a genetic one?

For me this is important because it underscores the importance of a solid moral framework. We’re most certainly not blank slates, but we are susceptible to the influence of our family and social groups. We aren’t slaves to the brutal process of natural selection that picked the genes that went into our recipe.

In the end, the Earth didn’t fall out of the sky when Copernicus pointed out that it’s not the centre of the universe, and we didn’t retreat to the treetops when Darwin discovered our lowly origin. An urge towards personal responsibility seems built in. We’ll never see criminals as faulty units that need repairing, and so the legal system is not likely to change in a significant way.

No matter what we learn, we’ll always be essentially the same. Sure, we’re robots. Who cares?

Why do people believe crazy things? or How I learned to stop worrying and love the LHC

As I write, people are losing sleep about a scientific experiment in Switzerland that has about as much a chance of destroying the Earth as my toaster does.

When CERN’s recently activated Large Hadron Collider begins high energy collisions later this year, physicists hope that a new chapter in our understanding of the universe will be opened. Inside the massive ring of magniets, in a void colder and emptier than intergalactic space, streams of protons half as thick as a human hair will crash with all the force of two aircraft carriers colliding at 60km/h. The resulting conditions will resemble the fury and chaos of the universe’s infancy, mere trillionths of a second after the big bang. Particle physicists will pore over the massive quantities of data accumulated by the massive, cylindrical detectors stationed at various locations around the ring, hoping to find evidence of as-yet hypothetical particles, extra dimensions, dark matter and more.

The public response to such an endeavour would usually run the gamut from “Wonderful!” to “Who cares,” but the LHC has been dogged by frantic critics who fear that the machine could spawn world-eating black holes. CERN officials have responded that the LHC will not be producing any circumstances that don’t already occur in nature, and that any microscopic black holes that could be formed would evaporate through a process called Hawking Radiation.

These reports have done little to calm the detractors, or the media for that matter. A possible impending apocalypse is a good eye-catcher, after all. When a reporter follows up the black hole story with a statement from CERN that there is “no conceivable threat”, the seeds of doubt have still been sown. A 16-year old girl in India was so distraught after hearing some doom-mongering on a local newscast that she took her own life. Several lawsuits have popped up. One member of CERN’s advisory board received death threats. You can watch people panic in real-time via the comment section for this video:

Why do people believe this stuff?

If people are afraid of something, they will believe it. I think that this is the central truth underlying 9/11 conspiracy theories, alien abductions, the prophecies of Nostradamus and so forth. On the flip side of the coin, people will believe things because they want them to be true. Intelligent design creationism, global warming doubts and - on a darker level - holocaust denial spring to mind. Find a disturbing issue, trot out a fringe expert with a dissenting opinion, and you’re set.

The other problem is that people aren’t built to understand statistical probability on such a massive scale. Scientists have an incredibly difficult time using the word “impossible”. The British Astronomer Royale Martin Rees calculated odds of about 1 in 50 million for the probability that a massive atom smasher like the LHC would one day doom humanity. “Scientists have no right to endanger all of our lives!” the critics say, “They mustn’t go forward with the experiment, no matter how small the risk!” Even if that figure is accurate, 50 million is a huge number. 50 million years ago our ancestors were little shrewish creatures. And yet these odds are comparable to those that motivate people to buy lottery tickets.

What it really comes down to for me is a faith that these people know what they’re doing. The philosopher Daniel Dennett uses the example of e=mc2. Do you know what that means? I mean really understand it. I know what the individual symbols represent, but I don’t understand it on a meaningful level. And yet we have cell phones, the internet, and all the other marvels of modern technology that wouldn’t have been possible without the theory of relativity. I’ll take the scientific consensus over the opinions of shrill protesters any day.

Finally, on a human level, I simply cannot believe that these people would risk their own lives and the lives of their families. Scientists are people too.

Fear of the unknown shouldn’t hamper this experiment either. We don’t know what will happen when the protons reach full speed, and that’s the exciting part.