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Communication Technology – too much choice or too little freedom?

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Communication Technology –

too much choice or too little freedom?

By Sophia Chawla

In 2007, an acclaimed journalist Walter Kirn wrote an article about the economic, health and social impacts of current communication technology. When describing the current social context in relation to technology, Kirn describes it as “an eara of roaring zeros years of over-enlarged, overextended, technology-driven and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human capacities in the dream of infinite connectivity” (Kirn 157). As implied by Kirn, communication technology has virtually obliterated scarcity and has created a seemingly never-ending flow of information, dumping huge amounts of data, facts, opinions and views over a short period of time, causing people to have not only more knowledge, but to also have more choice on what knowledge to gain. But to what extent can such a large amount of available choice be debilitating? Does communication technology demonstrate a paradox of choice? Should there be less choice? Or, should choices be portrayed differently enough so that the audience can determine what they want? Such is the issue of multi-faceted communication technology. Although communication technology spreads messages through various virtual mediums, giving the audience more choice in what information to gain and how to gain such information, the many choices of virtual mediums available to audiences can overwhelm them and ultimately cause them to be more desensitized and less persuaded. This would change the way how persuaders display choice to the audience. Namely, persuaders must focus on fewer choices for more response.

In order to understand how the many choices of communication technology impact the level of persuasion on an audience, choice in relation to persuading and connecting with audience must be defined and examined. According to Kurk Motensen’s guide book Persuasion IQ, in the world of public communication, choice is commonly perceived as a powerful tool for public communicators to use in order to connect with and persuade the audience. Motensen justifies that people would feel the need for choice because “people would feel the need for freedom and the ability to make their own decisions” (246).  By offering choice, public communicators successfully tap into two important values that most audience members cherish: freedom and liberty.  Therefore, it can be concluded that there exists an absolute, universal definition of choice in relation to persuasion and rhetoric. Barry Schwartz, a writer and philosopher who studied the dilemma and paradox of choice, described this universal definition as the “official dogma” of choice, which states that “to maximize freedom is to maximize choice…the more choice we have, the more freedom we have. The more freedom we have, the more welfare we will have” (1:26). From this reasoning, it can be concluded that choice can be defined as the factor that ultimately yields to the overall benefit and happiness to the people. With more options, people do not feel restrained, and with no restraint, people feel more satisfied.

Today, public communicators try to utilize the power of choice in many different ways. The goal of the many different ways is to deliver messages to the audience in a way that they are able to and wish to receive it. Persuaders take advantage of current communication technology to utilize the tool of choice. But in order to see how communication technology shares a relationship with choice, we first must discuss what entails today’s communication devices. Today’s communication technology usually works in multi-functional ways because they contain multi-functional features. According to Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which discusses the impacts of the internet’s artificial-intelligence technology on human cognitive capacity, a typical device “subsumes most of our other technologies” by becoming many things such as “our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our television, and our radio and TV” (Carr 24).   A  Communication device is like the nesting doll to other devices that used to be separate entities. In this case, Carr examines the internet, an example of today’s communication technology. Technically, the internet is composed of numerous devices within one device. And because this kind of technology exists, people are able to easily access and utilize many kinds of technology within one without having the burden to physically switch from one device to another.

Given that communication devices are multifunctional and that they save the audience the burden from switching from one device to another, the audience can receive practical and intellectual benefits from the many mediums that communication technology offers. Each benefit interconnects to achieve satisfaction on an individual and massive level. Practically, because we would not have the burden of switching devices to view a certain piece of information, we are able to view, absorb and process more kinds of information in less time. Because we have the power to access these mediums at one place and one time through user-friendly features, we have the ability to glide and skim across the surface of various mediums while accumulating fragments of information quicker and processing them quicker than we ever did when relying on and submersing into a single medium.  Intellectually, collecting fragmentary information over a short-span of time causes an individual’s knowledge to expand much more for the long-run because with vast choice comes not only more access, but more connectivity due to more amounts of information that can be absorbed. And such information can come from races, countries, cultures and ethnicities of all kind, giving the audience a richer perspective on issues, ideas and concepts.  When combined, the intellectual and practical impacts of communication technology can be summed up in a process that Kirn calls “autonomy through automation” (Kirn 158).  Autonomy, or control and choice of an individual, is achieved through automation, or the computerization of information mediums. Computerizing information is the practical component, the gathering information in one place, and when information is in one place, we can easily choose the medium to our specific liking. However, since each of us chooses different mediums independently, we end up gaining information and connecting with their counterparts, hence achieving autonomy and intellectual expansion simultaneously. Journalists August E. Grantand and Jennifer H. Meadows describe this as “the nervous system of contemporary society, transmitting and distributing sensory and control information and interconnecting a myriad of independent units” (Grantand & Meadows 1). Therefore, with communication technology, people achieve massive connection with each other by means of isolated, individual actions.

In spite of the practicality and intellectuality that multi-functioning communication technology has to offer, there are drawbacks that the audience suffers from such a large array of choices that they offer. Communicative devices were designed with beneficial intentions to respond to two major trends in media changes. The first thing that their multi-faceted nature responds to an era that is depicted by media information dependency, an era in where communication technology has decreased barriers in between us and people of different ethnicities, cultures, races, and other differences that we constantly must depend on various media outlets to make even more decisions than we ever had (Martinson 159). The second trend that communication technology responds to is the main goal of today’s multimedia, which is to not tell the audience what to think, but what to think about (Martinson 155). Values of freedom and choice have caused a more subjective, non-absolute media world that does not force, but provokes many beliefs and ideas that audience may have never considered. But due to the urgent need of making fast yet thoughtful decisions on thinking about what to believe, we the audience can feel too much pressure to a point where choice-making gradually causes paralysis, or when there are so many options that it becomes difficult for us to perform cost-benefit analyses to make the out right choice (Schwartz). This confusion roots from the fact that communication technology subsumes the forms of many other devices. Having many devices in one basically means having many mediums in one, and having many mediums to choose from can ultimately give us too much information to chose from. The expression of too much information, in turn, can backfire by getting rid of simplicity, a very important factor needed for memorable, attention-catching speeches (Kurck 30) and over-persuading the audience by featuring something that the audience may not understand or not be interested in. (Kurck 30). Excessive persuasion has a direct relationship with excessive information, in that the more information there is, the more perspectives and differences that need to be examined, and the more perspectives there are the more trouble the audience will have in making up their minds. Should an individual ever chose which virtual medium to follow and what information to examine and process, he may gain the facts and knowledge needed to form an opinion, but he may feel less satisfied with the results of the medium he chose because of regretting how he could have chosen a better, more attractive source. Here, it is shown that with high choice to begin with, the decider is completely responsible for his initial decision and must bear the consequences of missing out on another medium that would have provided more valuable information. This regret would subtract from overall satisfaction of the audience and then would lead the audience to be less persuaded and to have greater resistance against any other kind of communication that tries to influence them. (Freedman and Steinburner 680).

Contrary to having a vast amount of virtual mediums to chose from, communication technologies that used to involve a low number of choices can be more liberating than the intentions of high-choice mediums. According to his recent study about the comparisons between old and new communication technology, David L. Martinson believes that prior to mechanized mediums, people mainly gathered around messengers that were word-of-mouth, or networks that passed information from person to person by oral communication (Meadows 158). Since oral communication is much more intimate and direct than non-oral communication, people absorbed from oral mediums more and were persuaded by such a medium, even when having a lack of choice thereof (Meadows 159). Because the audience was more persuaded, they solidified their opinions faster, which helped them develop deeper, interpersonal relationships tighter social ties and easier income of information and hence decision making. (Meadows 159) Because of feeling that there are fewer choices in stake, the chooser would not feel as completely responsible for the decision. Although he may feel that he was forced to make the decision to some extent, which is something seldom done to the audience in public communication, the chooser would not feel as responsible for the choice. And since the chooser would feel less responsible, then he would feel less disappointment and less regret about his choice and thus would have the ability to be more susceptible to any faults that choice would have, making it easier for him to admit his wrong than it would be for high-choice subject and making him more susceptible to having a change in opinion.

Due to the paralysis that the variety of choices that communication technology causes, it is the job of public communicators to determine whether or not they should acknowledge that less might be more to grab his audience’s attention. Numerous models or rules have been devised in order to aid the public communicator in choosing the right virtual medium to gain audience attention and support. Two major theories were devised by sociologist Heeren Elske and others in their experiment. One is the rational choice approach, which states that every medium has fixed characteristics for fixed situations and tasks that are used solely to achieve efficiency in presentation (Elske 4). The other approach is known as the social-influence choice, which emphasizes selecting media in respect to the overall social context (Elske et. al. 4). The former approach is more up to the persuader, whereas the latter is determined by the overall likings of the people. The drawbacks of having the persuader to chose the medium is that he would risk losing the attractiveness of his message because of having members of the audience that may not be acquainted with the medium. In the same breath, choosing a medium in respect to the social context would be troublesome, for it would be hard to track down the many preferences that each member of the audience may have. So when it comes to the role of choice in communication technology devices, choice befuddles the audience and the persuader. It befuddles the audience in that the audience finds difficulty in choosing a medium to gain information from, and it befuddles the persuader in that the persuader would find it burdensome to decide whether to communicate through one, absolute medium of his own liking, or though many mediums of the audience’s liking. In either case, it can be seen that choice is being thrust upon everybody because of the expectation to make more decisions at an ever faster rate.

The many options of virtual medium that the never-ending connectivity of communication technology offers reveal a paradox of in the commonly perceived definition of choice. the paradox is that having many opportunities may cause more limitation and ultimately debilitation. Technology should be simplified in a way where people can make more confident choices about their information, their opinions, and ultimately their beliefs.

 

 

Bibliography

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic Monthly July 2008. Print

Fiedmna, Jonathan, and John B. Steinbecker. “PERCEIVED CHOICE AND RESISTANCE TO PERSUASION”. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Grant, August E., and Jennifer Harman. Meadows. Communication Technology Update and Fundamentals. Amsterdam: Focal/Elsevier, 2008. Print.

Kirn, Walter. “The Autumn of the Multitaskers.” The Atlantic Nov 2007: print

Martinson, David. L. (2004). Media Literacy Education: No Longer a Curriculum Option. Educational Forum, The, 68(2), 154-160

Mortensen, Kurt W. Persuasion IQ: The 10 Skills You Need to Get Exactly What You Want. New York: AMACOM/American Management Association, 2008. Print.

Schwartz, Barry. Paradox of Choice. N.p.: n.p., Web. 2 May 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM>.

Verwijs, Heeren V. “Guidelines for Media Selection.” . Print.

 

 

Fairly Simple Math Could Bridge Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity

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The following article is taken from the email received from Scientific American magazine  {Noor Salik}

Some of the comments are interesting:

<–for example —>

Nonsense.  I suppose you don’t consider the transistor to be practical. The transistor could not have been invented without quantum mechanical solid state physics.

<——>

Actual article:

Fairly Simple Math Could Bridge Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity

A framework that relies on college-level mathematics could describe what happens to particles in so-called space time rips, gravity fluctuations such as those that occur during the birth of a black hole

By Eugenie Samuel Reich and Nature magazine

 

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Image: wylieconlon/Flickr

From Nature magazine.

Could an analysis based on relatively simple calculations point the way to reconciling the two most successful — and stubbornly distinct — branches of modern theoretical physics? Frank Wilczek and his collaborators hope so.

The task of aligning quantum mechanics, which deals with the behaviour of fundamental particles, with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes gravity in terms of curved space-time, has proved an enormous challenge. One of the difficulties is that neither is adequate to describe what happens to particles when the space-time they occupy undergoes drastic changes — such as those thought to occur at the birth of a black hole. But in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server on 15 October (A. D. Shapere et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3545; 2012), three theoretical physicists present a straightforward way for quantum particles to move smoothly from one kind of ‘topological space’ to a very different one.

The analysis does not model gravity explicitly, and so is not an attempt to formulate a theory of ‘quantum gravity’ that brings general relativity and quantum mechanics under one umbrella. Instead, the authors, including Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, suggest that their work might provide a simplified framework for understanding the effects of gravity on quantum particles, as well as describing other situations in which the spaces that quantum particles move in can radically alter, such as in condensed-matter-physics experiments. “I’m pretty excited,” says Wilczek, “We have to see how far we can push it.”

The idea is attracting attention not only because of the scope of its possible applications, but because it is based on undergraduate-level mathematics. “Their paper starts with the most elementary framework,” says Brian Greene, a string theorist at Columbia University in New York. “It’s inspiring how far they can go with no fancy machinery.”

Wilczek and his co-authors set up a hypothetical system with a single quantum particle moving along a wire that abruptly splits into two. The stripped-down scenario is effectively the one-dimensional version of an encounter with ripped space-time, which occurs when the topology of a space changes radically. The theorists concentrate on what happens at the endpoints of the wire — setting the ‘boundary conditions’ for the before and after states of the quantum wave associated with the particle. They then show that the wave can evolve continuously without facing any disruptions as the boundary conditions shift from one geometry to the other, incompatible one. “You can smoothly follow this process,” says Al Shapere at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, a co-author on the paper, adding that, like a magician’s rings, the transformation is impossible to visualize, but does make mathematical sense.

The desire to escape the mathematical headaches caused by such transformations is one motivation for string theory, which allows smooth changes in the topology of space-time, says Greene. He suggests that the approach developed by Wilczek, Shapere and MIT undergraduate student Zhaoxi Xiong could be applied within string theory too.

Although Wilczek originally believed that the result was new, a 1995 paper by Aiyalam Balachandran of Syracuse University in New York proposed a similar strategy for describing changes in topology in quantum mechanics (A. P. Balachandranet al. Nucl. Phys. B 446, 299–314; 1995). Balachandran acknowledges that his work hasn’t hit the mainstream and says that he hopes Wilczek’s paper will prompt others to take a closer look. “Conventional approaches to this problem don’t get very far,” he says. “This opens up a new technique.”

 

A framework that relies on college-level mathematics could describe what happens to particles in so-called spacetime rips, gravity fluctuations such as those that occur during the birth of a black hole

By Eugenie Samuel Reich and Nature magazine

 

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The framework might also provide inspiration for experimentalists working on condensed matter. Rob Myers, a string theorist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, says that he expects it to be relevant to an area called quantum quenches, in which quantum systems evolve in isolation from the environment and are then kicked out of equilibrium by an action of the experimentalist. Condensed-matter physicists have developed several quantum systems — including cold-atom traps and superconducting circuits — that can be used to test this idea.

Although the authors lay out their solution in only one dimension, Myers expects that the approach will readily generalize to describe real experiments in three dimensions. But he cautions that the paper represents only a first step. “To really see the impact of this work, that will take a while,” he says.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article wasfirst published on October 30, 2012.

 

 

14 Comments

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  1. 1.    1. owlafaye08:57 PM 10/30/12

Bridging a 100 year old theory to a theory that has yielded nothing of practical value is a great way to continue wasting resources on roads that lead nowhere.

The protons were upset enough before quantum came along…leave them alone, admit you fell off the path somewhere, go back to a more promising idea and stop making fools of yourselves.

  1. 2.    2. robert schmidtin reply to owlafaye09:52 PM 10/30/12

Never have to wait long before some idiot comes along and says essentially that the world should take his word for it that the scientists are all wrong. Thanks for your contribution. You have made the world a much better place.

  1. 3.    3. slackerkeithin reply to owlafaye10:24 PM 10/30/12

@ owlafaye – You’re claiming quantum mechanics has “yielded nothing of practical value”? Man, you are a tool of the highest order.

  1. 4.    4. owlafayein reply to slackerkeith10:58 PM 10/30/12

Its a matter of your understanding of the word “practical”.

Physicists and their theories are at loggerheads with each other. You might say they always have been but in the past it led to great revelations and progress.

We are going nowhere towards the discovery of free energy solutions and travel amongst the stars.

Most physicists no longer have a “holy grail” relevant to humanity. Directed energy matters lay on the laboratory floor.

Leedskalnin, Tesla and other brilliant men were ignored by the rapaciousness of people like Westinghouse…once their research and goals are claimed and enhanced on by today’s scientists, we might just get somewhere.

Quantum mechanics only leads to answers that needed no question. They chase foolishness.

There is another scientific path to knowledge.

  1. 5.    5. Of NoImportance in reply to owlafaye11:55 PM 10/30/12

You speak as if, at present, every application of quantum mechanics is known – that there will never be a need to further study a certain science that works yet clashes with another.

And it’s not like the world is short on physicists. People can specialize; can pursue seemingly pointless goals for the purpose of finding out why – much like mathematics.

It is foolish to discard knowledge when it exists and no one knows why.

  1. 6.    6. negabladein reply to owlafaye12:13 AM 10/31/12

You haven’t actually said what that path is, other than something about upset protons which I’m assuming isn’t a literal description. If you have a self consistent framework with testable theories you should follow that path yourself and report on where it leads you. Or you could pay others to follow that path on your behalf. Your current approach is unlikely to succeed.

  1. 7.    7. And Then What?07:32 AM 10/31/12

Any theory that appears to constructs a mental bridge that allows us to understand why our current theories seem to be in conflict is worth exploring. To me it is a foregone  conclusion that the information we have at this point in time is just a glimpse of Reality. What lies in wait beneath and teases us with small bits of information about its true nature does not purposely hide from us. It simply is. We are curious, and want to know what drives everything, but unfortunately our vision of everything is not really everything, and so we interpret according to our perceptions. In a strange way we may be trying to go down the road with the cart before the horse. It may be that we will solve the true nature of the riddle by observing how the riddle affects its surroundings, but I suspect that any true understanding of how the riddle is constructed will only come once we understand the riddle itself. Mathematics may well describe the effects but in order for it to describe what produces the effects it must be “proven mathematically” that such a result is unique. This will always be open to attack based on the fact that “sample size” cannot be ignored as a determining factor with regard to the uniqueness of the result. Having said this, at our current stage of development, Mathematics and its underlying Logical framework would appear to be the best tools we have and may in fact lead us to our Eureka moment.

  1. 8.    8. bigbopperin reply to owlafaye09:36 AM 10/31/12

Nonsense.  I suppose you don’t consider the transistor to be practical. The transistor could not have been invented without quantum mechanical solid state physics.

  1. 9.    9. jahtez01:30 PM 10/31/12

owlafaye sez: “We are going nowhere towards the discovery of free energy solutions and travel amongst the stars”.

Think about that before you bother to respond.

  1. 10.  10. M Tuckerin reply to owlafaye05:13 PM 10/31/12

You have no idea of what you are talking about. It would be best for you to attempt to get some sort of basic notion of quantum mechanics before you decide it is a waste of resources. You might start with history. When you mentioned, “Bridging a 100 year old theory to a theory that has yielded nothing of practical value…” I was a bit perplexed but the rest of your rant made it clear that you consider general relativity to be the older theory but you are wrong. When general relativity gets to be 100 years old in a few more years I’m sure SA will have a nice article to commemorate the event. Perhaps you could investigate quantum mechanics to find out just what that theory has contributed to both physics and chemistry.

 

Finding Free Will

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The following article is from the latest issue of Scientific American

How Physics and Neuroscience Dictate Your “Free” Will

Physics and neurobiology can help us understand whether we choose our own destiny

By Christof Koch | April 12, 2012 |11

In Brief

  1. Most of us believe that we are free because, under identical circumstances, we could have acted otherwise. Determinism—the idea that all particles in the universe follow set trajectories—challenges this idea.
  2. Theories to explain the potential origins of free will draw on physics, including Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
  3. Whether or not free will exists, psychology and neuroscience are beginning to explain why we feel as if we can influence our destiny

 

Image: Photoillustration by Aaron Goodman

In a remote corner of the universe, on a small blue planet gravitating around a humdrum sun in the outer districts of the Milky Way, organisms arose from the primordial mud and ooze in an epic struggle for survival that spanned aeons.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, these bipedal creatures thought of themselves as extraordinarily privileged, occupying a unique place in a cosmos of a trillion trillion stars. Conceited as they were, they believed that they, and only they, could escape the iron law
of cause and effect that governs everything. They could do this by virtue of something they called free will, which allowed them to do things without any material reason.

Can you truly act freely? The question of free will is no mere philosophical banter; it engages people in a way that few other metaphysical questions do. It is the bedrock of society’s notions of responsibility, praise and blame. Ultimately it is about the degree of control you exert over your life.

Let’s say you are living with a loving and lovely spouse. A chance meeting with a stranger turns this life utterly upside down. You begin talking for hours on the phone, you share your innermost secrets, you start an affaire de coeur. You realize perfectly well that this is all wrong from an ethical point of view; it will wreak havoc with many lives, with no guarantee of a happy and productive future. Yet something in you yearns for change.

Such gut-churning choices confront you with the question of how much say you really have in the matter. You feel that you could, in principle, break off the affair. Despite many attempts, you somehow never manage to do so.

In my thoughts on these matters of free will, I neglect millennia of learned philosophical debates and focus on what physics, neurobiology and psychology have to say, for they have provided partial answers to this ancient conundrum.

Shades of Freedom
I recently served on a jury in United States District Court in Los Angeles. The defendant was a heavily tattooed member of a street gang that smuggled and sold drugs. He was charged with murdering a fellow gang member with two shots to the head.

As the background to the crime was laid out by law enforcement, relatives, and present and past gang members—some of them testifying while handcuffed, shackled and dressed in bright orange prison jumpsuits—I thought about the individual and societal forces that had shaped the defendant. Did he ever have a choice? Did his violent upbringing make it inevitable that he would kill? Fortunately, the jury was not called on to answer these irresolvable questions or to determine his punishment. We only had to decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether he was guilty as charged, whether he had shot a particular person at a particular place and time. And this we did.

According to what some call the strong definition of free will, articulated by René Descartes in the 17th century, you are free if, under identical circumstances, you could have acted otherwise. Identical circumstances refer to not only the same external conditions but also the same brain states. The soul freely chooses this way or that, making the brain act out its wishes, like a driver who takes a car down this road or that one. This view is the one most regular folks believe in.

Contrast this strong notion of freedom with a more pragmatic conception called compatibilism, the dominant view in biological, psychological, legal and medical circles. You are free if you can follow your own desires and preferences. A long-term smoker who wants to quit but who lights up again and again is not free. His desire is thwarted by his addiction. Under this definition, few of us are completely free.

It is the rare individual—Mahatma Gandhi comes to mind—who can steel himself to withhold sustenance for weeks on end for a higher ethical purpose. Another extreme case of iron self-control is the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in 1963 to protest the repressive regime in South Vietnam. What is so singular about this event, captured in haunting photographs, is the calm and deliberate nature of his heroic act. While burning to death, Duc remained in the meditative lotus position, without moving a muscle or uttering a sound, as the flames consumed him. For the rest of us, who struggle to avoid going for dessert, freedom is always a question of degree rather than an absolute good that we do or do not possess.

Criminal law recognizes instances of diminished responsibility. The husband who beats his wife’s lover to death in a blind rage when he catches them in flagrante delicto is considered less guilty than if he had sought revenge weeks later in a cold, premeditated manner. Norwegian Anders Breivik, who shot more than 60 people in a cold-blooded and calculated manner in July 2011, is a paranoid schizophrenic who was found to be criminally insane and will probably be confined to a psychiatric institution. Contemporary society and the judicial system are built on such a pragmatic, psychological notion of freedom.

But I want to dig deeper. I want to unearth the underlying causes of actions that are traditionally thought of as “free.”

A Clockwork Universe
In 1687 Isaac Newton published his Principia, which enunciated the law of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. Newton’s second law links the force brought on a system—a billiard ball rolling on a green felt table—to its acceleration. This law has profound consequences, for it implies that the positions and velocities of all the components making up an entity at any particular moment, together with the forces between them, unalterably determine that entity’s fate—that is, its future location and speed.

This is the essence of determinism. The mass, location and velocities of the planets as they travel in their orbits around the sun determine where they will be in a thousand, a million or a billion years from today, provided only that all the forces acting on them are properly accounted for. The universe, once set in motion, runs its course inexorably, like a clockwork.

A full-blown setback for the notion that the future can be accurately forecast was revealed in the form of deterministic chaos. The late meteorologist Edward Lorenz came across it while solving three simple mathematical equations characterizing the motion of the atmosphere. The solution predicted by his computer program varied widely when he entered starting values that differed by only tiny amounts. This is the hallmark of chaos: infinitesimally small perturbations in the equations’ starting points lead to radically different outcomes. In 1972 Lorenz coined the term “butterfly effect” to denote this extreme sensitivity to initial conditions: the beating of a butterfly’s wings creates barely perceptible ripples in the atmosphere that ultimately alter the path of a tornado elsewhere.

Remarkably, such a butterfly effect was found in celestial mechanics, the epitome of the clockwork universe. Planets majestically ride gravity’s geodesics, propelled by the initial rotation of the cloud that formed the solar system. It came as a mighty surprise, therefore, when computer modeling in the 1990s demonstrated that Pluto has a chaotic orbit, with a divergence time of millions of years. Astronomers cannot be certain whether Pluto will be on this side of the sun (relative to Earth’s position) or the other side 10 million years from now! If this uncertainty holds for a planet with a comparatively simple internal makeup, moving in the vacuum of space under a sole force, gravitation, what does it portend for the predictability of a person, a tiny insect or an itsy-bitsy nerve cell, all of which are swayed by countless factors?

Chaos does not invalidate the natural law of cause and effect, however. It continues to reign supreme. Planetary physicists aren’t quite sure where Pluto will be aeons from now, but they are confident that its orbit will always be completely in thrall to gravity. What breaks down in chaos is not the chain of action and reaction, but predictability. The universe is still a gigantic clockwork, even though we can’t be sure where the minute and hour hands will point a week hence.

Origins of Uncertainty
The deathblow to the Newtonian dream—or nightmare, in my opinion—was the celebrated quantum-mechanical uncertainty principle, formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. In its most common interpretation, it avers that any particle, say, a photon of light or an electron, cannot have both a definite position and a definite momentum at the same time. If you know its speed accurately, its position is correspondingly ill defined, and vice versa. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a radical departure from classical physics. It replaces dogmatic certainty with ambiguity.

Consider an experiment that ends with a 90 percent chance of an electron being here and a 10 percent chance of it being over there. If the experiment were repeated 1,000 times, on about 900 trials, give or take a few, the electron would be here; otherwise, it would be over there. Yet this statistical outcome does not ordain where the electron will be on the next trial. Albert Einstein could never reconcile himself to this random aspect of nature. It is in this context that he famously pronounced, “Der Alte wu?rfelt nicht” (the Old Man, that is, God, does not play dice).

The universe has an irreducible, random character. If it is a clockwork, its cogs, springs and levers are not Swiss-made; they do not follow a predetermined path. Physical determinism has been replaced by the determinism of probabilities. Nothing is certain anymore.

But wait—I hear a serious objection. There is no question that the macroscopic world of human experience is built on the microscopic, quantum world. Yet that does not imply that everyday objects such as cars inherit all the weird properties of quantum mechanics. When I park my red Mini convertible, it has zero velocity relative to the pavement. Because it is enormously heavy compared with an electron, the fuzziness associated with its position is, to all intents and purposes, zero.

Cars have comparatively simple internal structures. The brains of bees, beagles and boys, by comparison, are vastly more heterogeneous, and the components out of which they are constructed have a noisy character. Randomness is apparent everywhere in their nervous system, from sensory neurons picking up sights and smells to motor neurons controlling the body’s muscles. We cannot rule out the possibility that quantum indeterminacy likewise leads to behavioral indeterminacy.

Such randomness may play a functional role. If a housefly pursued by a predator makes a sudden, abrupt turn midflight, it is more likely to see the light of another day than its more predictable companion. Thus, evolution might favor circuits that exploit quantum randomness for certain acts or decisions. Both quantum mechanics and deterministic chaos lead to unpredictable outcomes.

Afterthought to Action
Let me return to solid ground and tell you about a classical experiment that convinced many people that free will must be an illusion. This experiment was conceived and carried out in the early 1980s by Benjamin Libet, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

The brain and the sea have one thing in common—both are ceaselessly in commotion. One way to visualize this is to record the tiny fluctuations in the electrical potential on the outside of the scalp, a few millionths of a volt in size, using an electroencephalograph (EEG). Like the recording of a seismometer, the EEG trace moves feverishly up and down, registering unseen tremors in the cerebral cortex underneath. Whenever the person being tested is about to move a limb, an electrical potential builds up. Called the readiness potential, it precedes the actual onset of movement by one second or longer.

Intuitively, the sequence of events that leads to a voluntary act must be as follows: You decide to raise your hand; your brain communicates that intention to the neurons responsible for planning and executing hand movements; and those neurons relay the appropriate commands to the motor neurons that contract the arm muscles. But Libet was not convinced. Wasn’t it more likely that the mind and the brain acted simultaneously or even that the brain acted before the mind did?

Libet set out to determine the timing of a mental event, a person’s deliberate decision, and to compare that with the timing of a physical event, the onset of the readiness potential after that decision. He projected onto a screen a point of bright light that went around and around, like the tip of the minute hand on a clock. With EEG electrodes on his or her head, each volunteer had to spontaneously, but deliberately, flex a wrist. They did this while noting the position of the light when they became aware of the urge to act.

The results told an unambiguous story, which was bolstered by later experiments. The beginning of the readiness potential precedes the conscious decision to move by at least half a second and often by much longer. The brain acts before the mind decides! This discovery was a complete reversal of the deeply held intuition of mental causation.

The Conscious Experience of Will
Why don’t you repeat this experiment right now: go ahead and flex your wrist. You experience three allied yet distinct feelings associated with the plan to move (intention), your willing of the movement (a feeling called agency or authorship), and the actual movement. If a friend were to take your hand and bend it, you would experience the movement but neither intention nor agency; that is, you would not feel responsible for the wrist movement. This is a neglected idea in the debate about free will—that the mind-body nexus creates a specific, conscious experience of “I willed this” or “I am the author of this action.”

Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard University, is one of the trailblazers of the modern study of volition. In one experiment, Wegner asked a volunteer to wear gloves and stand in front of a mirror, her arms hanging by her sides. Directly behind her stood a lab member, dressed identically. He extended his arms under her armpits, so that when the woman looked into the mirror, his two gloved hands appeared to be her own. Both participants wore headphones through which Wegner issued instructions, such as “clap your hands” or “snap your left fingers.” The volunteer was supposed to report on the extent to which the actions of the lab member’s hands were her own. When she heard Wegner’s directions prior to the man’s hands carrying them out, she reported an enhanced feeling of having willed the action herself, compared with when Wegner’s instructions came after the man had already moved his hands.

The reality of these feelings of intention has been underscored by neurosurgeons, who must occasionally probe brain tissue with brief pulses of electric current. In the course of such explorations, Itzhak Fried, a surgeon at U.C.L.A., stimulated the presupplementary motor area, which is part of the vast expanse of cerebral cortex lying in front of the primary motor cortex. He found that such stimulation can trigger the urge to move a limb. Michel Desmurget of INSERM and Angela Sirigu of the Institute of Cognitive Science in France discovered something similar when stimulating the posterior parietal cortex, an area responsible for transforming visual information into motor commands. Patients commented, “It felt like I wanted to move my foot. Not sure how to explain,” or “I had a desire to roll my tongue in my mouth.” Their feelings arose from within, without any prompting by the examiner.

Free the Mind
I have taken two lessons from these insights. First, I have adopted a more pragmatic conception of free will. I strive to live as free of constraints as possible. The only exception should be restrictions that I deliberately and consciously impose on myself, chief among them restraints motivated by ethical concerns: do not hurt others and try to leave the planet a better place than you found it. Other considerations include family life, health, financial stability and mindfulness. Second, I try to understand my unconscious motivations, desires and fears better. I reflect deeper about my own actions and emotions than my younger self did.

I am breaking no new ground here—these are lessons wise men from all cultures have taught for millennia. The ancient Greeks had “gnothi seauton” (“know thyself”) inscribed above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The Jesuits have a nearly 500-year-old spiritual tradition that emphasizes a twice-daily examination of conscience. This constant internal interrogation sharpens your sensitivity to your actions, desires and motivations. This will enable you not only to understand yourself better but also to live a life more in harmony with your character and your long-term goals.

This article was published in print as “Finding Free Will.”

Adapted from Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, by Christof Koch, © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. All rights reserved.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Christof Koch is chief scientific officer at the Allen institute for Brain Science in Seattle and Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He serves on Scientific American Mind‘s board of advisers.