G’Day World #324 - Dr Susan Blackmore on Free Will
You’ve heard me say I don’t believe in free will. Well tonight I’ve got world famous author, speaker, psychologist and memeticist Dr Susan Blackmore on the show to explain why SHE doesn’t believe in free will either. We discuss the reductionist perspective, what neuroscientists she’s interviewed believe, and how to live your life once you’ve discarded the idea of free will completely.
Buy Sue’s book The Meme Machine
The music on today’s show is “Discipline” from the new Nine Inch Nails album “THE SLIP“, which is licensed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license.
NIN encourage you to
remix it
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc..
ROCK ON TRENT REZNOR!
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:37 pm
I haven’t believed in free will since I was about 16 but I still think there is a paradox somewhere here. I can’t quite put my finger on it but I’ll think about it.
Very interesting interview. Just ordering the Meme machine now.
May 23rd, 2008 at 6:32 am
As I’ve said to Cameron many times (to no avail) he and anyone who takes this stance on free will is simply confusing free will with omnipotence, or “magic” as it was called in the show. An easy mistake to be sure-because of the infinite qualities of imagination or the “mind- but non the less; free will happens when a conscious observer understands it’s own thoughts within the framework of cause and effect and adjusts them accordingly (aware even of these adjustments). Nothing magic about it..just the thinker tinkering with thoughts. It could very well be that once a person decides they have no free will, they in fact don’t, but they did have it, and used it to destroy it! How interesting!
See also: “the chinese room” or Ludwig Wittgensteins second works: philosophical investigations. And last but not least: “I think therefore I am” René Descartes (1596 - 1650) not just the end, but his journey to that most famous end.
He or She which asks the questions, and or creates the definitions, controls the answers. jtb 2008
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:26 pm
I believe that any choice one makes is the only choice one could have made given the chemical, electric and physical properties of the brain, and the available input (knowledge, empirical data, past lessons) at that time.
I still find it relevant to discuss whether or not you could have made a better decision. This is kind of hard to wrap my mind around. However, this doesn’t contradict the concept of not having free will. But I do strive to make as good decisions as possible in life. Its really interesting to see that there is a real scientific debate on this, didn’t think that many believed in the absence of free will.
Does anyone have some literature on the subject that they can recommend outside those mentioned in the podcast?
May 25th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Thanks for the interesting interview.
Look, you guys done your homework. But I wish Dr. Blackmore addressed certain things. Not so much about free will, but about telepathy, psychic ability.
For example:
Where is the acknowledgement of unexplainable things like synchronicity & meaningful coincidence? Psychic flashes? These things happen to me ALL the time, and I find it impossible to dismiss it as random coincidence.
Last week I had an unbelievable experience: I ran into someone I dated 4 years ago after thinking intensely about her for a week. It was as if I manifested her just by thinking about her. The odds of bumping into her were unbelievable, because she lives a half hour away in another town. I hadn’t a shred of doubt that “God” - or whatever you want to call it - law of attraction, spiritual intent, whatever - made the moment happen.
Thoughts?
May 25th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Mark, I deliberately didn’t ask Dr Blackmore about her paranormal research, as she isn’t involved in that any more. There is a good interview with her on that topic over on Point Of Inquiry though.
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/susan_blackmore_in_search_of_the_light
May 26th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Thanks Cam - I’m listening now. She’s really delightful.
What I’m hearing is - she can’t prove these paranormal experiences exist, yet she doesn’t dismiss them either. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Curious to know your thoughts about the example in my previous post. You think of a friend you haven’t heard from in forever, and then bam - they call. Etc.
May 26th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Mark, I think her position is that she wanted the paranormal stuff to be true but found no evidence to support it. As she’s a scientist, I’m pretty sure no evidence = doesn’t exist.
As for your example, I think those sorts of things can be explained easily as co-incidence. We probably think of old friends a lot and they *don’t* call, but we don’t remember those instances, we only remember the times they *do* call and think WOW!
May 26th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Thanks Cam. You raise a good point about selectively choosing those Wow moments - because they certainly don’t happen everyday. However, despite the fact that both you and Dr. Blackmore are infinitely smarter & more well-read than myself, I know what I’ve experienced, and no amount of research or lack of evidence can sway me from believing that my experiences - however occasional - are uncannily, unexplainably, magical.
If there is a God, or Universal Intelligence, perhaps - like Alan Watts suggests - it’s like a wiggly cat that can’t be tamed or grasped. Or like grabbing a fistful of water. You can never get at IT. Maybe it won’t allow itself to be figured out, much the same way, as Watts says - you can’t taste your own tongue.
How do you explain it when you’re humming an old song to yourself as you walk into a store, and that very same song is playing when you get inside?
How do you explain it when you leave a message for a friend you haven’t spoken to in a month, and a minute later they call you back, and you assume they’re returning your call, but after talking for an hour you come to realize they never knew you called - never heard your message - they thought they were calling YOU first.
These are minor examples. I don’t know what meaning to give them. All I know is, when they happen, it feels like, unquestionably, some sort of wink from God, or at least, a telepathic connection beyond mere coincidence.
I guess I’m like Mulder - I want to believe! But no - my experiences cause me TO believe.
Keep up the good work - and thanks for introducing us to Blackwell!
May 27th, 2008 at 12:01 am
Excellent show again Cam.
Many years ago after reading How to Win Friends and Influence People I realised that we are all the way we are due to the events and circumstances of our lives. I then choose to be more compassionate to others and myself as we all can’t help but be who we are at any moment. That includes our ability to change or remain as we are.
This like in your summation in the show has given me great relief in accepting myself and others as we are. I’ve since gleaned a little of Buddhism where to observe the mind and to accept all things as they are in the moment removes the issues of the never present mind.
I see what your saying here to be in harmony with those points. The new concept that I’ve been skirting around all these years but not identifying is that I don’t have any free will.
Mmmmm
May 27th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Mark, as we said in the show, sticky memes! I always am amused when people INSIST on believing in things, even when there is no evidence to support their beliefs. Why such memes are so hard to people to let go of fascinates me.
May 27th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Cam - I understand the sticky memes of religion, bro. I get that.
But the experiences I mention above have nothing to do with memes as I understand them. They are simply experiences I have. I don’t go “looking” for them. They happen, much to my astonishment!
Another example:
I recently went on a cruise to Turkey. On the ship, I met someone I clicked with instantly. We kept bumping into each other on the ship - 3 times in 24 hours in various locations. We finally ate dinner together and realized we had a billion common interests - instant chemistry, like old friends.
Then we didn’t see each other for a few days.
Then one day the ship docked in a Turkish town. I spent the day exploring alone. I stopped for lunch at a busy cafe in a bustling neighborhood with countless shops and dozens of cafes.
5 minutes after I was seated, the waiter brought someone over to share my table since no other tables were available. IT WAS MY NEW FRIEND from the ship. We couldn’t believe it, yet we could, because we’d already acknowledged our “spiritual” connection.
What are the odds that she would choose THAT cafe, at that time, in that section of town, and that the waiter would seat her at MY table?? (and no, she wasn’t stalking me.)
Evidence? That moment was self-evident. No other evidence was needed, or necessary, for me to believe that something pulled us together. I didn’t ask for it to happen. It happened.
May 27th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Mark, sure, these are you experiences, but the idea you have that there is something “spiritual” or “uncanny” going on, something supranatural, THAT is your sticky meme.
When something like that happens to me, I don’t feel the need to create a mystical explanation for it. I grok that out of the millions of thoughts I have every day, and the millions of experiences I have every second of every day, the odds that “weird” things are going to happen every now and again are actually quite high.
Think about it. If you have a thought every second you’re awake - and that’s probably a conservative number - then in a day you have 86,400 thoughts. In a month you have 2,592,000 thoughts. Even if coincidences only happen .01% of the time, that would still be 259 coincidences a month.
May 27th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I hear ya. And it all sounds perfectly right and logical.
I guess I don’t think everything in life is logical. Not everything can be explained. When these moments happen to me, it’s staggering. Yes, I think they’re supernatural - beyond logic or reason or odds. The timing is too precise. The odds too great. Just because the odds of a coincidence happening are good doesn’t make it any less of a “miracle” when they do. (I’m using that word because we use words to label things and experiences, right? Seems appropriate to me.)
One last story:
I once met a girl in a bar in Boston - Aimee. We exchanged phone numbers, and after I called her she blew me off and shredded my number. Not interested. A week later I bumped into her in an art supply store in a town a half hour away from Boston. Unbelievable odds, right? Gets better: We had lunch that day. Fun enough to go out again. But the second date was a disaster. We bickered the whole time and it was clear we weren’t a love-connection. We knew we’d never go out again.
The next day a friend I hadn’t seen in months called asking if I wanted to grab dinner. We went to a restaurant in town, the waitress seats us, and BAM - there’s Aimee walking past me. We locked eyes - disbelieving.
Cam - we kept running into each other. In different towns. Within 1 weeks time. Can you explain that?
We chose to see these coincidences as meaningful.
We’ve been friends now for six years. She’s improved my life in many ways.
May 27th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
You can see them as meaningful if that’s your programming.
But with 2 million thoughts and events happening in your life every month, you should allow for at least 2 “one in a million” chances occurring by pure coincidence.
If you don’t think “everything in life is logical”, then I guess we’re not going to agree on having a rational, scientific approach to understand the world around us.
Everything we’ve learned about how the universe works in the last few thousand years, without fail, shows us that the universe is VERY logical. Whenever we investigate something, we find extremely logical reasons for its occurrence.
Even scientists like Sue, who *wanted* the paranormal to be true, who was inclined, from her personal experiences, to believe in it, couldn’t find any evidence to support it.
How much evidence that the universe is logical do you need before you think you can give up the desire to hold out for magic?
May 28th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Ha ha. This has been fun, bro. And you could be right. I guess the only evidence I need is my direct experience of these events that I describe. I could never reproduce them in a lab.
When this shit happens (to “me”) yes, I consider it beyond the bounds of numbers and logic and reason. I’m talking particularly about “telepathic” or “psychic” moments where the timing of my thought(s) aligns precisely with some physical manifestation of it, despite immense, even impossible odds. I think you’re forgetting the TIMING bro.
A last example: I happened to meet Bruce Springsteen in a coffee shop two weeks ago. The odds of that happening are pretty slim, maybe one in a million since we weren’t in New Jersey. I chose NOT assign meaning to this or see it as a supernatural occurance - after all, Bruce has to be somewhere. I’ve been a fan since I was a kid, but I chocked it up to mere coincidence and good luck.
What DOESN’T seem like a coincidence is when I run into the girl I dated briefly 4 years ago - who I haven’t seen since then - who I spent the previous week thinking about rather intensely for no good reason. Even if there’s some rational explanation for it, like mere coincidence, I think the odds of it happening are so great that, yes, I’m going to call it magic, or…telepethy…or gasp…GOD giving me some sort of sign. What that is, I have no freekin’ idea. But frankly I think it is foolish to NOT assign some sort of meaning to these events.
Logic and reason - I’ve tried applying this to falling in love with someone. “There are a hundred logical reasons why I should love this person!!” Doesn’t work!
May 28th, 2008 at 11:26 am
“I think it is foolish to NOT assign some sort of meaning to these events”… what kind of meaning? Again, all of the evidence points to the universe being 100% mechanistic (and I include QM in that, because QM obeys laws, even though they seem strange to us). What “meaning” do you think these events have and who or what is meaning them?
There is no evidence for God - in fact, the evidence all points to there being NO God, certainly not of the ‘interfering with the universe’ kind of God. If there were, there would be startling exceptions to the laws of physics - and none are found.
So follow your own thought train through - if there is “meaning”, from who or what and meaning what? Where does it lead?
May 28th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Jason - found your comment - Akismet thought it was spam.
Here’s where you are wrong - you say the thinker “adjusts” their thoughts and you are giving them credit for that adjustment. What you fail to see is that the “adjustment” is, itself, a thought, and that this “adjustment” thought arises spontaneously, just like every other thought. You don’t go “Oh I think I’ll think a thought”. It just happens. You are not in control.
May 28th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Stian, just found *your* comment in the Spam folder as well!
Re literature - I’d recommend “I Am That” by Nisargadatta Maharaj or “Pointers” by Ramesh Baksekar. Neither are scientific - both are from the advaita school of hinduism. Also check out The Advaita Show on TPN.
May 28th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Cam, as I’ve told you before, the adjustments are a SERIES of thoughts..so right there you’re argument fails. The fact that free will requires more than one thought may really help you overcome this issue. Secondly, you’re forgetting what thoughts are to us as THINKERS…you keep saying that thoughts are just chemicals and electricty etc..but thay are more than that to the thinker, they are ideas with meanings…this is the dimention where free will exists, it’s beyond the physical, it’s called the “mental”.
Also, most recent studies of brain activity show that conciousness exists within mind “states” literally states of mind…so the science your relying on to make your judgement is not really the right type of experiment to prove or disprove free will.
I Just listened to you rant for an hour about the CIA. You were engaging in a self dialogue, refering to memories, maybe accessing a book, feeling emotions, reacting to those emotions, all while being aware of doing this…then…adjusting accordingly. This is the will being free. Again, it’s not omnipotant, but it is a type of freedom.
I can tell you that I can control my thoughts..can you disprove this? of corse not..so lets get on to more important issues…oh…you are!
Good for you Boy! Keep up the good work.
jasonious
May 28th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I think I was on to something before when I said…and I quote myself (lol) “It could very well be that once a person decides they have no free will, they in fact don’t, but they did have it, and used it to destroy it! How interesting!”
By this I mean to state that by the nature of “free will” or what we mean when we say “free will” one can, by that definition, brings ones own free will into and out of existence…This is the paradox Charlie was looking for. [above]
Wow bloging to myself about my thoughts is fun.
weird.
j
May 28th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
cam…fix my sloppy typo drunken englishes please..thanks.
jason.lol
May 30th, 2008 at 5:28 am
In the mind, we can travel through time….we can look into the past, and we can attempt to predict outcomes far into the future..this is the part of the paradox that allows for free will in the now….
What do you think?
-_-
May 31st, 2008 at 11:55 am
93,
I’m sure you’re aware of this recent study in Nature Neuroscience: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.2112.html
Do you know of other articles that study free will?
IAO131
( ThelemicStudies.com )
June 1st, 2008 at 9:49 pm
IAO131, thanks, that study is a new one on me. Sue mentioned a number of other studies in the podcast.
June 1st, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Jason, you’re still missing the point.
You keep saying that you can “adjust” thoughts. But these “adjustments” are themselves thoughts. Do you decide to think these “adjustment” thoughts?
I’ll try to break it down for you as simply as I can (although I know from our lengthy email conversations that no matter how simply I break it down, you will spin off into other tangents):
Thoughts appear spontaneously in your mind. You don’t think “I’m going to think a thought now” - and then think a thought. They just happen. Even these so-called “adjustments” that you refer to are just thoughts that appear spontaneously in your mind. You don’t have a prior thought to think them. And those prior thoughts don’t have prior thoughts. If you tried to make that argument, you’d end up with turtles on top of turtles.
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Cameron,
Great interview. I’m a Sue Blackmore fan myself, and have read a number of her books, as well as most of the postings on her website. She has a gift for making often complex subject a lot clearer and a lot simpler.
Re IAO131’s post, I’m not sure, but I think he’s referring to recent work by John-Dylan Haynes and his team, which suggests that a decision to do something occurs up to 7 seconds before we’re aware of it. A recent issue of New Scientist mentioned it briefly:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19826525.600-machine-detects-our-decisions-before-we-know-them.html
That, plus Libet’s work plus cause-effect plus the absence of a separate self that have uncaused thoughts, has led me inexorably to believing that we don’t have free will.
Stan
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:28 pm
You’ll find links to a number of interesting articles on free will at:
http://www.naturalism.org/freewill.htm
My favourite is an excellent article by Robert Gulack, titled “Free Will: The Last Great Lie” at:
http://www.ethicalfocus.org/index.php?mpage=34/Free_Will.htm
I know it’s the ‘appeal to authority’ fallacy, but it turns out the Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson were skeptical about free will.
Stan
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:01 am
PS, If you want a REALLY mind-expanding argument against free will that involves Einstein’s spacetime continuum, try “The Land of Now, Or: How Time Goes By” by Robert Gulack:
http://www.ethicalfocus.org/index.php?mpage=33/land_of_now.htm
Stan
June 4th, 2008 at 5:57 am
I can agree that free will has little intellectual basis but like many others still act asif it exists. However, if one rejects free will how can any sort of deterrent to bad behaviour make any sense?
June 4th, 2008 at 5:59 am
If you reject free will (and I don`t dispute that bit) how can any deterrent to bad behaviour be possible?
June 5th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Brian, I think we touched on this during the podcast. Giving up the illusion of free will doesn’t have to mean that we abolish all laws. People who are dangerous to others still need to be removed from society and rehabilitated. We do that today for people who commit crimes but who we don’t think were in control of their actions - people with serious mental illness, for example. This is no different.
And “no free will” also doesn’t mean people don’t learn or can’t be dissuaded from doing something if faced with consequences. The brain still grows new neuronal connections. All we’re saying is that you don’t consciously CONTROL those connections, they happen autonomously.
June 7th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Susan speaks on TED recently about Memes and Temes. It’s worth checking out for the other side of her interests. She skirts around some interesting points about future evolvement of humans http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/269