So there is no free will. Now what?: Robert Speth at TEDxNSU

thank you very much Lian that's the first time I've ever heard anyone else recited and I really appreciate that that felt good okay so I'm here today both as a neuroscientist and as a fellow human being to talk to you about the paradox of being ourselves whilst knowing there is no free will this paradox dates back thousands of years and can be seen in Greek mythology which was imbued with a sense of fatalism does anyone remember King Oedipus Edgar Allan Poe told us of the conflict between science and our fantasies and tried to warn us not to go there however Poe's warning was ignored and science continued forward on its wings of dull realities so here we have yes here we have Pandora at the Society for Neuroscience meeting reporting on the contents of her box of lab notebooks and the jist of Pandora's message is yet another assault on our self-concept it's bad enough for you biologists to be telling us that were animals now you want to take away our free will and and and make us biological robots well as our knowledge of physiology biochemistry and neuroscience has progressed there's been a continual erosion to the argument that our decision-making processes arise from free will so let's look at the data first of all we are the product of our genes these determine our species our sex our eye color and other traits indeed in the future we may have designer genes to give us desirable traits some of which may not even be human so where is the free will there we now know that epigenetics changes in the expression of genes caused by the environment perhaps starting even before we are conceived or before we are born and continuing throughout life can affect our behavior dr. Lattimer worries about environmental estrogens causing breast cancer I worry about mercury and lead impairing mental function next we need to examine our inner workings there are all kinds of things going on inside of us about which we are blissfully unaware how many of us tell our hearts to beat our stomach to digest food our well I think you get the picture better yet or worse depending on your perspective all of the cells and all of these organs have intricate inner workings this is but a small part of the inner workings of the 86 billion neurons and 37 trillion mammalian cells in our bodies good luck taking inventory better yet worse our cells are dwarfed by the number of bacterial cells and bacterial DNA in our bodies and these little guys also have a say in who we are further constraining our behavior there's always been lots of debate about nature versus nurture in determining who we are I'm here today to say it is both not only do we inherit our parents genes we inherit their language and if we are born into poverty we have to devote a whole lot of more brainpower to survival mechanisms and then there are the laws that society imposes upon us how many of us obey the speed limit simply because we don't want to pay a traffic ticket okay so our organs and cells and resident microbes are designed to work automatically but isn't our mind different from the rest of us bad news the brain is the physiological substrate of the mind neurons operate under the exact same principles as all the other cells in our body it is now more than 70 years since the Nobel prize-winning physicist first laid out this principle and that was Irwin Schrodinger and yes he's the guy with the cat and I think by now we can all assume that the cat is dead without having to open the box I have chosen just two of many examples to demonstrate how our decisions are not under conscious control in an experiment carried out last year an electric current on a surface electrode that activated or inhibited the right lateral prefrontal cortex caused a person to make either a more Machiavellian choice or a more altruistic choice with no awareness whatsoever of this influenced by the subject moreover analysis of changes in cerebral blood flow which is an indication of brain energy usage by fMRI as well as single neuron recording in the medial frontal cortex can predict a person's decision with more than eighty percent accuracy before the person makes the conscious decision I could continue to beat this drum and drown out every possible argument in favor of free will but I want to move on to the now what part of the talk the paradox is best described by the legal ramifications of the absence of free will simply stated if we don't have free will doesn't that mean we're not responsible for our actions can we no longer hold criminals responsible for their behavior the law looks at accountability not responsibility if you do the crime you pay the time our laws constrain our behavior with the threat of punishment as a deterrent thereby imposing society's will upon us the other major aspect of the paradox can also be solved but it requires a departure from reality having the opinion that one's fate is already determined is incompatible with making decisions so the solution to this problem is to deliberately ignore the matter and behave as if one has free will thus the now what punchline of this talk is that we must hold on to the illusion of free will just because we are theoretically predictable doesn't mean that there won't be a whole lot of surprises along the way based on the practical inability to predict our behavior as recently stated by Gregory bon the human brain has such a rich intellectual capacity it simulates free will by virtue of its uniqueness and I might add it does it all on 20 watts of power and we have precedent on our side I suspect there's a lot of you in the audience today who are saying to yourselves no way he could be correct we do have free will to my disappointment as a scientist but delight as a human being is that whenever reality comes into conflict with perception perception always wins this is why I believe that religion is so important in people's lives because it codifies the illusion of free will by overriding the physicality of the brain with a spirituality of mind as a scientist however I cannot be true to my discipline and embrace illusion as a solution so my fallback position is that I might a journey on a train and have no control over the destination or the route however I'm equipped with eyes to look out the window and enjoy the view speech and hearing and hands to communicate with my fellow travelers and enjoy the company and enjoy their company and simultaneously provide an improvement to their journey I have a voice to contribute to this chorus of society and the cognitive resources to pursue my own personal happiness no matter what that might be that happiness could arise from an altruism trait that is genetically hardwired into us perhaps through the processes of evolutionary psychology which you'll hear about later this afternoon we have been successful as a species because we are intrinsically social beings this social fulfillment could be mediated by oxytocin and our amygdala or dopamine in our nucleus accumbens do we really need to know and this brings me full circle back to our human side as expressed by Carl Sandburg I asked professors who teach the meaning of life what is happiness they all shook their heads and looked at me as so I was trying to fool with em and then once Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Des Plaines River and I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion so I hope that the information I have shared with you today helps you to lead happy and meaningful lives based upon both your real and perceived abilities to do so thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 28,830

Rating: 4.1826925 out of 5

Keywords: biology, TEDx, Nova Southeastern University (Organization), Philosophy Of Science (Idea), TEDxNSU, ted talk, tedx talks, ted talks, free will, Neuroscience (School/tradition), tedx talk, Determinism (Idea), tedx, research, ted, ted x

Id: UH_VG_aqwoc

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Tue May 06 2014