Are People Responsible for what They Do?

To respond to the clip from Waking Life, I like the conclusion that we need to make room in the world for persons, for embodied agents with individuality, choice, freedom, and responsibility. It’s difficult to reconcile the notion of freedom with the idea we are mechanisms. These questions about whether discoveries in neuroscience threaten the notion of moral responsibility or whether we can have moral responsibility without full consciousness of the significance of our actions seem far from new. I think of some experiments I know very vaguely about that have taken these up.

There’s the classic Benjamin Libet experiment he did in the 80s. He hooked people up to EEG machines so he could record electrical signals from the scalp, and he asked them to periodically raise their fingers when they wanted to. They were also supposed to look at a clock with a rotating spot and remember where the dot was on the clock face when they had the desire to move their finger, to ostensibly time the consciousness of willing.

He found out that an electric signal seems to precede the time people were consciously aware of volition. He concluded our brain was making decisions we experience as freely made and that only after the fact (of brain activity) are we aware a decision has been made. By logical extension, it would appear conscious will does not have much efficacy. Our brains cause our movement, not our conscious will. He and others got excited about this experiment, though it undermined free will.

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But many more considered his conclusions flawed. Even if you’re a physicalist, that is, if you think the mind is really just a function of the brain or that there’s a brain event for every mental event, then it’s not surprising to find the brain is doing something when we make a decision. It would be surprising to find nothing was happening in the brain that either corresponded with or preceded our decisions. Another problem is the analysis of the data was statistical and the signals were noisy. Also, as people have written about, we can’t tell from the experiment whether what he was measuring is a decision to move our finger. It could have been capturing preparations or plans to move a finger. So the instruments may not have measured the actual time of conscious will. What they measured was the time at which one reported being aware of having decided to move or awareness of awareness. It’s a state about a state, a meta-state. So the fact folks noted the time of conscious willingness later in the process isn’t surprising.

I feel like we keep running into the problem of how to tell the difference between intuitive/unconscious thinking and the type of consciousness that is aware it is conscious. I guess we can distinguish the two functionally based on whether we state we are aware of a decision we make. But it gets complicated. For example, I don’t have to decide to move my arm to scratch my head. I just do it and then we can perform a combination of EEG and fMRI to try to map each function to distinct areas of my brain. But what is self-consciousness if it is just the record-keeper of intuitive thinking and behavior? In keeping with this example, if when I move my arm to scratch, I only become aware after the fact my arm is moving, I then craft a story to justify this behavior. To me, it would feel as though I chose to scratch my head to get rid of an itch. In other words, I am combining my experience of an itch with the experience of my arm moving up to scratch it, and connecting those two events in terms of my prior knowledge of how I have to move my arm to scratch an itch. Therefore, my self-conscious experience looks exactly like unconscious processing. So why should we distinguish them at all? That’s the hard problem. To bring in our old man, Freud’s definitions of consciousness as the seat of agency and reason versus the unconscious as the seat of disorganized, instinctive impulses don’t match up. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to accurately say it’s our ego that does the calculations involved in advanced calculus as opposed to the unconscious. All that’s clear is that a small subset of “thinking” is apparent to us in our realm of self-awareness.

To return to neurobiology and free will, experiments with primates are interesting. So with these monkeys, they look at the neural activity and they can predict, given a certain stimulus, when the monkey is going to move. So in theory, we can predict what the monkey is going to do. But this doesn’t necessarily undermine free will because of course neurons govern, in part, what we do. There’s nothing about that information that says we are determined. It just tells us our actions are governed by some subset of neurons in the brain, and those neurons are getting a lot of information from other parts of the brain. It’s not at all clear whether those parts of the brain are determined.

Are people responsible for what they do, when brain abnormalities are found? There’s the guy who started having pedophilic tendencies and eventually acted on them. Just as they were putting him in jail, he complained of a headache, and after scanning him they found a large tumor. They removed the tumor and the behavior disappeared (I don’t know how or if they controlled for many other variables that would have eliminated the behavior, let alone given rise to it). After a year, he began feeling the urges again, and upon performing the scan a second time, they found the tumor had regrown. In that case, there is stronger evidence that the tumor “causes” the behavior, but in many cases, people do things that are seemingly out of character, and the evidence of a link between behavior and organic abnormality is far less clear and compelling. In theory, what neuroscience could tell us is enough to decide whether when someone acts, they are a responsible agent or whether they are impaired in ways that preclude freedom and responsibility. But we would need to know so much more about the organization of the brain and what happens under various circumstances to even begin answering that question about personal responsibility.