Transferring Consciousness

My brother was just in town, and we had our usual argument about Old Man's War, which he loves and about which I'm less enthusiastic (it was a fun read, but...). Perhaps one issue that keeps me from enjoying it fully is that whenever I think about it I think about an early scene, in which a character's consciousness was transferred from an old body to a new body. This is presented in the book as just one more futuristic miracle, but I can't stop thinking about the deeper questions it raises.

What does it mean to transfer consciousness from one body to another? Our current scientific understanding is that there is no consciousness separate from the underlying physical machinery, so such a transfer could not happen. But you might be able to create the illusion of a consciousness transfer, which I explain below. So we can make sense of Old Man's War if we assume that the doctors are deliberately lying about what is going on, covering up the murder that lies at the heart of the procedure.

Here's what might be going on (yes, I realize this is fiction, but good science fiction almost always has a thought experiment at its heart): It should be possible, at least in principle, to create a new body that has identical machinery to an existing body. This is would be new person who is a twin not only physically but mentally, down to having the same memories (by definition, since they have the same brains down to the microcircuitry). From the new person's perspective, he has finds herself suddenly in a "new" body. (This is much like the old philosophical puzzle, what if the world was created yesterday, all of us with artificial memories?)

So now we've got a consciousness that believes itself to have transferred into a new body from an old body. What happened to the consciousness in the old body? The doctors in Old Man's War claim that it is now a vegetable, with no consciousness inside, because that consciousness has transferred. Since that can't happen, they are lying: either the process of creating the new copy of the old brain destroys the old brain, or the doctors deliberately destroy the old brain to preserve the illusion of the transfer (after all, if transfer is impossible, why go through this procedure? It's very nice for your twin to have a new body, but it's not going to do you any good at all!).

Here's the question: does this matter? If John undergoes this procedure happens on a Wednesday, then the world on Thursday is much the same as the world on Tuesday: on both days, there is a consciousness calling itself "John" with roughly the same memories. It only gets tricky when you think too much about Wednesday. You might be tempted to say you have John 1 on Tuesday and John 2 on Thursday, who are duplicates but nonetheless not the same because they have different bodies. But, of course, John had a different body when he was 5yo than when he was 75yo, down even to being made up of different atoms. So if we're willing to call 5yo John and 75yo John the same person, why aren't John 1 and John 2?

This confuses the heck out of me, which is why I have difficulty paying attention to the novel itself.

Don't blink, you'll lose the election!

Sarah Palin has been clear on one subject: You can't blink. While people argue about whether this is a good administrative philosophy, there is no actually scientific evidence that it is good campaign strategy.

The International Journal of Psychophysiology recently published an abstract that claims that from 1960-2004, the US presidential candidate who blinked most during the debates got fewer votes than his opponent in every election. For those counting, that is every election which has featured televised debates.

The point of the abstract, interestingly, is not to predict campaign outcomes. The point was to study eyeblinks. Specifically, there are hypotheses about what elevated rates of blinking might suggest, such as a lack of focus or a negative mental state. The question the researchers were asking was whether observers pick up on eyeblink rates and make judgments or predictions based on them. This *might* suggest that they do.

It's important to note that this is a published abstract, not a full paper, so it is difficult to evaluate the methods used, though presumably they involved counting eyeblinks.

The power of because

To ask for a dime just outside a telephone booth is less than to ask for a dime for no apparent reason in the middle of the street.

-Penelope Brown & Stephen Levinson, Politeness

The opening quote seems to be true. It raises the question of why, though. An economist might say a gift of 10 cents is a gift of 10 cents. You are short 10 cents no matter what the requestee's reason. So why should it matter?

The power of because?
Empirically, in a well-known experiment, Ellen Langer and colleagues showed that 95% of people standing in line to use a copy machine were willing to let another cut in line as long as the cutter offered a reason, even if that reason was inane (e.g. "because I have to make copies.")

The explanation given by Langer and colleagues was that people are primed to do defer to somebody who provides a reason. Thus, the word "because" essentially in and of itself can manipulate others. This not only causes us to give money to people who need it to make a phone call, but to simply give money to anybody who gives a reason.

I haven't been able to find the original research paper -- it seems to have perhaps been reported in a book, not in a published article -- so I don't know for sure exactly what conditions were used. However, none of the media reports I have read (such as this one) mention the perhaps the most important control: a condition in which the cutter gives no excuse and does not use the word "because."

What are other possible explanations?
Other possible explanations are that people are simply reluctant to say 'no,' especially if the request is made in earnest.

There are a couple reasons this could be true. People might be pushovers. They might also simply have been taught to be very polite.

Something that strikes me more likely is that most people avoid unnecessary confrontation. Confrontation is always risky. It can escalate into a situation where somebody gets hurt. Certainly, violent confrontations have been started over less than conflicting desires to use the same copier.

Speculation

None of these speculations, however, explain the opening quote. Perhaps there is an answer out there, and if anybody has come across it, please comment away.

Why the Insanity Defense is Un-scientific

In his class book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman presents a very compelling case for studying individual differences in social and emotional skills. Since people who are less empathic -- less aware of others' thoughts and feelings -- are apparently more likely to commit crime, Goleman argues that this raises the issue of what to do about criminals who are biologically limited in their empathic abilities:

If there are biological patterns at play in some kinds of criminality -- such as a neural defect in empathy -- that does not argue that all criminals are biologically flawed, or that there is some biological marker for crime ... Even if there is a biological basis for a lack of empathy in some cases, that does not mean all who have it will drift to crime; most will not. A lack of empathy should be factored in with all other psychological, economic, and social forces that contribute to a vector toward criminality.

This may seem like a reasonable, middle-of-the road take on the issue, but I would argue that it is actually an extremely radical, non-scientific statement. (Since it is such a common sentiment, I realize this means I may be calling most of the public crazy radicals. So be it. Sometimes, that's the case.)

The Fundamental Axiom of Cognitive Science

It is the scientific consensus that all human behavior is the result activity in the brain. Like gravity and the laws of thermodynamics, this cannot be proven beyond a doubt (in fact, there's a good argument that nothing can be proven beyond a doubt). However, it is the foundation upon which modern psychology and neuroscience is built, and there is no good reason to doubt it.

In fact, many of the world's events cannot be understood otherwise. Classic examples are people who, as a result of brain injury, are unaware of the fact that they can see or that the left half of the world exists or think their leg is a foreign entity not part of their own body. The oddest fact about such syndromes is that such patients sometimes are completely unaware of their problem and cannot understand it when it is explained to them (Oliver Sacks is a great source of such case histories).

The Problem for the Insanity Defense

Back to Goleman. He writes "Even if there is a biological basis for a lack of empathy in some cases..."

I hope that the fundamental problem with the quote is now clear. The consensus of the scientific community is that for any behavior, personality trait or disposition, there is always a biological basis. There are fundamental brain differences between Red Sox fans and Yankees fans, or between those attracted to Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman. There is some brain state such that it is being a Red Sox fan.

So whenever somebody says, "My brain made me do it," they are telling the truth.

The Soft Bigotry of Medical Evidence

As matters currently stand, however, certain brain differences are privileged over others. Say Jane and Sally are both accused of a similar crime, but Jane has a known brain "abnormality" that correlates with criminal behavior, but Sally has no such brain data to point to. They may likely face different sentences.

However, the difference between Jane and Sally may have more to do with the state of our scientific understanding than anything else. If Sally is predisposed to crime in some way, then it must be because of some difference in her brain. At the very least, if you were able to take a snapshot of her brain during the moments leading up the crime, there would be some difference between her brain and the brain of Rebecca, who had the opportunity to commit the crime but chose not to, because the act of choosing is itself a brain state.

The effect is to discriminate between people based, not on their actions or on their persons, but based on current medical knowledge.

A problem without an easy solution

I think that most people prefer that the legal system only punish those who are responsible for wrongdoing. If we exclude from responsibility everybody whose actions are caused by their brains, we must exclude everybody. If we include even those who clearly have little understanding or control of their own actions, that seems grossly unfair.

I don't have any insight into how to solve the problem, but I don't think the current standard is workable. It is an exceptionally complex problem, and many very smart people have thought about it very hard. I hope they come up with something good.

Neuroimaging study does not disprove free will

An excellent new paper in Nature Neuroscience made a big splash last week by purporting to show activity in the brain related to muscle movement starts up to ten seconds before the person is consciously aware of having made a decision to move. This study is in fact a replication and extension of previous research that had suggested that related brain activity starts at least 300 ms before the conscious decision. The big news presumably is that new technology (specifically pattern recognition algorithms) allowed the researchers to push back this time window (which really is big news and an excellent application of this technology).

The reason I am using words like "purported" is that there are some important methodological assumptions buried into this experiment (to be sure the authors did not mention "free will" in the actual paper, though I imagine they were aware of the implications). In this particular version of the experiment

The subjects were asked to relax while fixating on the center of the screen where a stream of letters was presented. At some point, when they felt the urge to do so, they were to freely decide between one of two buttons, operated by the left and right index fingers, and press it immediately. In parallel, they should remember the letter presented when their motor decision was consciously made.

Afterwards, they reported which letter had been on the screen when they made their decision. The assumption is that participants are reporting the letter correctly. We already know that conscious perception is a distortion of reality (in fact, this study is a demonstration of that fact), so this may not be a fair assumption.

This case was made some time ago by the philosopher Daniel Dennett in his excellent Freedom Evolves. The argument is somewhat long, but it goes like this. First, we have to assume that participants weren't deciding to press a particular button as soon as the next letter popped up; if they were doing that, they would have already made the decision before that letter appeared, throwing off the scientists' measurements. But even if we assume that is not the case, there is a bigger confound:

If we monitor your brain with an array of surface electrodes ... we will find that the brain activity leading up to [a hand movement] has a definite and repeatable time course, and a shape. It lasts the better part of a second ... ending when your wrist actually moves.

Dennett points out that we aren't aware that it takes our brains a good second to plan, coordinate and execute a simple motor movement.

When we perform an intentional action, we normally monitor it visually (and by hearing and touch, of course) to make sure it is coming off as intended. Hand-eye coordination is accomplished by a tightly interwoven system of sensory and motor systems. Suppose I am intentionally typing hte words "flick the wrist" and wish to monitor my output for typographical errors. Since the motor commands take some time to execute, my brain should not compare the current motor command with the current visual feedback, since by the time I see the word "flick" on the screen, my brain is already sending the command type "wrist" to my muscles.

The effect, though Dennett doesn't put it this way, of actually being aware of the time it takes for your conscious decision to be converted into muscle movement would create a bewildering sense of out-of-sync-ness, something like being drunk or watching a baseball game at a far distance, where the crack of the bat reaches your ears the same time the image of the runner reaches first base.

Dennett formulated this argument to explain the 300ms difference between conscious decision making and the related brain activity found in previous experiments. However, it certainly can be extended to the new study. If it turns out that it takes 10 seconds from the beginning of a decision to move until the actual movement is carried out, then we most definitely do not want to be aware of it. Much better if our minds trick us into thinking movement follows thought instantaneously.

This argument does require some mental time distortion: just because we think two things are happening simultaneously does not mean that they are. But why should they be? If we have learned anything about the brain in the last couple centuries, it is that perception is useful, not accurate.

Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.J., Haynes, J.D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience

Free will

In “Self is Magic,” a chapter from Psychology and the Free Will, which is unfortunately not yet out, Daniel Wegner presents some fascinating data showing how easy it is to trick ourselves into believing we are in control of events when in fact we are not. Most of us are in some sense familiar with this illusion. Perhaps we believe our favorite team won partly because we were watching the game (or, if we’re pessimists, because we weren’t).

In one of the many experiments he describes, “the participant was attired in a robe and positioned in front of a mirror such that the arms of a second person standing behind the participant could be extended through the robe to look as though they were the arms of the participant.” The helper’s arms moved through a series of positions. If the participant heard through the headphones a description of each movement before it happened, they were reported “enhanced feeling of control over the arm movements” than if they had not heard those commands in advance. (read the paper here.)

Ultimately, he tries to use these data to explain the “illusion” of free will. In the following paragraphs, I am going to try to unpack the claim and see where it is strong and where it may be weak.

First, what exactly is he claiming? He does not argue that free will does not exist – he assumes it does not exist. That’s not a criticism– you can’t fit everything into one article – but it means I won’t be able to evaluate his argument against free will, though I will discuss free will in terms of his data and hypotheses below. Instead, he is interested in why we think we have free will. In all, he claims that (1) we can be mistaken about whether our thoughts cause events in the world, (2) this is because when we think about something happening and then it happens, we’re biased to believe we’ve caused it, and (3) this illusion that our conscious thoughts lead to actions is useful and adaptive – that is, evolution gave it to us for a reason.

That’s what he says. First, he isn’t really arguing that we don’t have a conscious will. Clearly, we will things to happen all the time. Some of the time he seems to be arguing that our will is simply impotent. The rest of the time he appears to think that the contents of our will are actually caused by something else. That is, our arm decides to move and tells our conscious thoughts to decide to want a cookie (more on this later).

Otherwise, I think claim #1 is pretty straightforward. Sometimes we have an illusion of conscious control when in fact we have none. Wegner compares this to visual illusions, of which there are plenty. Just like with visual illusions, just because you know it’s an illusion (watching the ballgame isn’t going to affect the score) you can’t help not feel it anyway. In fact, given that illusions exist in sight, sound and probably many other senses, so it’s not surprising that the sense of conscious will also is subject to illusions.

It’s important to point out that this itself is not an argument against the potency of conscious will. The fact that we are sometimes mistaken does not mean we are always mistaken. Otherwise, we’d have to claim that because vision is sometimes mistaken, we are all blind. Of course, Wegner isn’t actually making this argument. He already assumes that free will is an illusion. He is just interested in this article in showing how that illusion might operate, which is point #2.

Although he describes the illusion of conscious choice as a magic show we put on for ourselves, this does not mean that he thinks conscious thought has no effect on behavior – that’s point #3 above. He simply doesn’t that deciding to pick up a cookie leads to your hand reaching out to pick up a cookie. In fact, it would be a pretty extraordinary claim that conscious thought (and the underlying brain processes) have no purpose, effect or use whatsoever. In that case, why did we evolve them? This question is answerable, but it would be hard to answer. The claim, then, is simply that the conscious decision to perform a behavior does not cause that behavior.

Suppose we agree that picking up a cookie is not caused by the conscious decision to pick up a cookie – which, just to be clear, I don’t – what does cause that conscious decision? Wegner does not get into this question, at least not in this chapter, which is a shame. In these last paragraphs I’ll try to describe what he might mean and what the consequences would be.

What would it mean if the conscious mind did cause cookie-picking-up? That depends on what the conscious mind is. Perhaps it’s an ethereal, non-corporeal presence that makes a decision, then reaches down and pulls a lever and the hand reaches out to grab a cookie. That would be similar to what Descartes argued for many centuries ago, but it’s not something many cognitive scientists take seriously now. The basic assumption – for which there is no proof but plenty of good evidence – is that the mind is the brain. Activity in your brain doesn’t cause your conscious mind to want a cookie, nor does your conscious mind cause brain activity. Your conscious mind is brain activity. If we assume that this is how Wegner thinks about the mind, then his hypothesis can be restated:

The part of the brain that is consciously deciding to pick up a cookie does not give orders to the part of the brain that actually gives the motor commands to your hand to pick up the cookie. The motor cortex gets its marching orders from somewhere else.

This is an interesting hypothesis, and I’m not going to discuss it in too much detail right now. What I am interested in is what does this hypothesis have to say about free will? I would argue: maybe nothing. If your decisions are made in your brain by a non-conscious part of your mind (of which there are many) and the conscious part of your mind turned out to simply be an echo chamber where you tell yourself what you’ve decided to do, would you say that you have no free will?

The real question becomes: what decides to pick up the cookie? Where is the ultimate cause? Lack of free will means that the ultimate cause is external to the person. They picked up the cookie because of events that occurred out there in the world. Free will means that the ultimate cause was internal to the person. Nothing in Wegner’s article is really relevant to distinguishing between these possibilities (again, this is not a criticism. That wasn’t what his article was about. It’s what my article is about).

The loss of a belief in a non-corporeal mind has left us with a dilemma. Nothing we know about physics or chemistry allows for causes to be internal to a person in the sense that we mean when we say “free will”. This makes many people feel that free will can only exist if there is a non-corporeal mind operating outside the constraints of physics. On the other hand, nothing we know about physics or chemistry allows for consciousness to exist, yet essentially all cognitive scientists – including, probably, Wegner – are reasonably comfortable believing in consciousness without believing in a non-corporeal mind.

In the 19th century, physicists said that the sun could not be millions of years old, much less billions of years old, because there was no known mechanism in physics or chemistry that would allow the sun to burn that bright that long. Although entire fields of thought – such as evolution or geology – required an old, old sun in order to make any sense of their own data, the physicists said “Impossible! There must be another explanation for your data.” Later, they discovered the mechanism: fusion.

In the early 20th century, there were chemists who said that the notion of a “gene” was hogwash, because there was no known chemical mechanism for inheritance in the form of a gene. The fact that mountains of experimental data could not be explained without reference to “genes” didn’t bother them. Then Watson and Crick found the mechanism in the structure of DNA.

We may be in the same situation now. We have an incredible amount of data that only makes sense with reference to internal causation – free will. Evolution, Wegner says, built the belief in free will into us. Liz Spelke and others have run fantastic experiments showing that even infants only a few months old believe in something akin to free will. The world makes very little sense if we don’t believe that our friends, colleagues and random people on the street are causing their own behavior. Or maybe we’re not in the same situation, and free will is truly a figment of our imagination.

Physicists were right about one thing: the sun hasn’t been burning for billions of years. It doesn’t burn. It does something else entirely. The real answer to the question of free will may look like rote, dumb physical causation – a snowball rolling down a hill. It may look very similar to Descartes’ non-corporeal soul. Or it may look very different from both.

Note: Wegner is a very engaging writer. If you are interested, most of his articles are available on his website.

Your brain knows when you should be afraid, even if you don't

I just got back to my desk after an excellent talk by Paul Whalen of Dartmouth College. Whalen studies the amygdala, an almond-shaped region buried deep in the brain. Scientists have long known that the amygdala is involved in emotional processing. For instance, when you look at a person whose facial expression is fearful, your amygdala gets activated. People with damage to their amygdalas have difficulty telling if a given facial expression is "fear" as opposed to just "neutral."

It was an action-packed talk, and I recommend that anybody interested in the topic visit his website and read his latest work. What I'm going to write about here are some of his recent results -- some of which I don't think have been published yet -- investigating whether you have to be consciously aware of seeing a fearful face in order for your amygdala to become activated.

The short answer is "no." What Whalen and his colleagues did was use an old trick called "masking." If you present one stimulus (say, a fearful face) very quickly (say, 1/20 of a second) and then immediately present another stimulus (say, a neutral face) immediately afterwards, the viewer typically reports only having seen the second stimulus. Whalen used fMRI to scan the brains of people while they viewed emotional faces (fearful or happy) that were masked by neutral faces. The participants said they only saw neutral faces, but the brain scans showed that their amygdalas knew different.

One question that has been on researcher's minds for a while is what information does the amygdala care about? Is it the whole face? The color of the face? The eyes? Whalen ran a second experiment which was almost exactly the same, but he erased everything from the emotional faces except the eyes. The amygdala could still tell the fearful faces from the happy faces.

You could be wondering, "Does it even matter if the amygdala can recognize happy and fearful eyes or faces that the person doesn't remember seeing? If the person didn't see the face, what effect can it have?"

Quite possibly plenty. In one experiment, the participants were told about the masking and asked to guess whether they were seeing fearful or happy eyes. Note that the participants still claimed to be unable to see the emotional eyes. Still, they were able to guess correctly -- not often, but more often than if they were guessing randomly. So the information must be available on some level.

There are several ways this might be possible. In ongoing research in Whalen's lab, he has found that people who view fearful faces are more alert and more able to remember what they see than people who view happy faces. Experiments in animals show that when you stimulate the amygdala, various things happen to your body such as your eyes dilating. Whalen interprets this in the following way: when you see somebody being fearful, it's probably a clue that there is something dangerous in the area, so you better pay attention and look around. It's possible that subjects who guessed correctly [this is my hypothesis, not his] were tapping into the physiological changes in their bodies in order to make these guesses. "I feel a little fearful. Maybe I just saw a fearful face."

For previous posts about the dissociation between what you are consciously aware of from what your brain is aware of, click here, here and here.

Subliminal messaging

When I was a small child, I thought the idea of subliminal messaging was way cool. Learn languages in your sleep! Control people's minds by inserting inaudible dialogue into the background! Wicked!

To the best of my knowledge, that type of subliminal messaging -- a hidden, language-based message -- doesn't exist (but if you have evidence of one, please comment!). Influencing another's actions turns out to be pretty easy. There are many well-documented ways to manipulate others. I will focus here on getting the answers you want. Basically, response management comes down to how you phrase the question.

In a classic study by Tversky and Kahneman, participants were given two options for combating a plague that was projected to kill 600 people. Plan A was sure to save 200 people. Plan B had a 1/3 probability of saving 600 and a 2/3 probability of saving nobody. 78% of participants took the safe option: A. Rephrasing the question in terms of deaths (400 guaranteed under Plan A; 1/3 probably of 0 and 2/3 probability of 600 under Plan B) reversed the result: 78% of participants chose plan B. This is because humans are risk-prone when dealing with losses ("let's hope for the best") but risk-averse when dealing with gains ("let's keep what we have").

In another study by Tversky and colleagues, they found that if you offer a shopper a "one time only" sale on a piece of merchandice (e.g., a Sony CD player), most (66%) will buy it, happy to avoid further shopping. If you offer them two different products (one by Sony, one by Aiwa), both on sale, nearly half (46%) will continue shopping rather than buy either. The addition of choices makes people less likely to choose.

In a different study (Strack & Mussweiler; pdf) asked one set of participants "Did Gandhi live to the age of 140?" The participants presumably all responded, "No." The second question was to estimate how long Gandhi lived. The average estimate was 67. The second group of participants was first asked "Did Gandhi live past the age of 9." Again, presumably everybody replied correctly. On the second question, they estimated on average that Gandhi lived to 50.

There are many other examples. This is why experts will tell you that polls are next to meaningless unless you know the exact wording of the question. It's not subliminal mind control like in the movies, but manipulating people's decisions (or, at least their answers to surveys) is fairly easy.

(BTW, Gandhi lived to 78.)