Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Free Will In Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Part 1

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

On this episode of the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast I have a conversation with Matthew Hagele, a soon to be 4th year medical student with a masters in bioethics.  We will talk about the history, the why, and the cultural importance of free will. We will examine the implications of free will on mental health.  This is the first of a three part series. We hope they provide interesting application information for your own practice. By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.5 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Hello and welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. I'm here to talk about getting rid of burnout, increasing job satisfaction, and feeling like an expert in what you do. One thing that created a lot of burnout and angst for me was trying to get continued medical education right at the last minute. So why not join the CME membership and do CMEE while listening to this podcast? Go to Psychiatrypodcast.com. Sign up, sign in, take the test, and the certification is email to you in seconds.

All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined by Matthew Higley. he is a master's or soon to be a master's in ethics, medical ethics. Bioethics. He's a fourth, soon to be fourth year medical student probably would be a fourth year by the time you listen to this. And we have been working on an episode on Free Will for about a year. And this is like, this is a year's worth of work.

So, you know, we meet, we go over articles, we read, we read, read what else is out there. We look at who are the main, you know, people talking about free will. We look at the surveys. We want to look at survey creation. You know, so we're going to talk about the why, the philosophical, cultural importance of this. We're talking about the history of it a little bit. We can go through some of the definitions and hopefully we won't bore you too much.

But I think definitions are important because people, when they say there is no free will, the first thing is like, well, what do you mean by free will, right? The controversy, we're going to talk about Sam Harris. He's written a book against free will. James Miles, belief in free will. He talks about that. We're going to talk about some early neuroimaging and how it's used by some of the proponents against free will and what people have commented about that neuroimaging subsequently.

So it's like, you know, someone publishes a paper and then you get people who argue against the papers, you know, the papers making conclusions that may or may not be scientific. So we can't just say science says there is no free will. We can't just say science says there is free will. We have to say, no, there's actually a debate going on. Let's look at the debate. And sometimes I like to leave it for you guys to decide for yourselves what you believe. You know, I'll tell you what I think, but we'll also put out the science and let you guys make a decision. So models of free will, the evolutionary value of it, common understandings, physiologic basis. We're going to be talking about the importance of belief in free will, how this changes aggression, you know, increased belief in free will decreases aggression, decreases cheating, increases life satisfaction, decreases antisocial behavior.

You know, why are all of these things positive with the belief in free will? And we're going to go through those studies. We're going to talk about how the studies are done. We're going to talk about free will and mental health, schizophrenia, depression, well-being. And I think this is really, really important. So this isn't just like a purely theoretical episode talking about a topic that doesn't apply to your practice as a psychiatrist, as a psychotherapist. Actually, I think assessing this in our clients, what they believe about it, how it informs their decision-making, is really important.

And so we're talking about how we can alter free will, how free will is altered, how there might be a gradient of free will. That's one of my ideas, is there's this gradient. It makes sense of a lot of some of the arguments for determinism

and how some arguments for determinism I think are more talking about the gradient of free will that some people can lose aspects of their free will. Like, for example, if you're in a coma, or if you are intoxicated or if you are very low blood glucose. So tell me about some of the why. Well, I think this is something that you brought up initially,

and I think it's really important to give a context to this whole topic. I think it boils down to the why is that there's a lot of difficult situations in life and in the world in general, especially right now. and the why of free will is an ability to choose how we suffer, an ability to decide, even under some of the most difficult circumstances, how we are going to respond to those circumstances. And there's a great quote by Victor Frankel, who of course went to one of the most terrible circumstances imaginable of the Holocaust, saying that the way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity, even under the most difficult circumstances, to add a deeper meaning to his life. Yeah, he went on to say, it may remain brave, dignified, and unselfish, or in the bitter fight for self-preservation, he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.

And one of my other favorite quotes, Nietzsche said, he who has a why to live for can bear through almost any how. Victor Franco also said, we who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts, comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof

that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's way. Yeah, and you can think about, have you thought about how this might tie into the season we're in right now. There are a number of connections.

I'm sure some that I've missed, but I think that there is an important key element there. They mentioned to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances that is really universalizable to the current situation where people feel like they have very little control in this pandemic

and the most they can choose is their own attitude towards the circumstance. Yeah, and it's interesting when I listen to like some of these people who believe very deterministically. Like we are determined from our environment, from our genes. There is no wiggle room.

Like you are just what exactly would happen from the previous, you know, neurological firings led to other neurological firings. And there's no sort of choice in the midst of that, right? And so it's almost like they take away

any active voice from the person deciding and it's just a very passive voice. So you are not deciding to, you know, resist your inclinations for group affinity. You are either racist or you're not racist based on neural wiring. And you don't have a choice, right? And one of the studies we're going to talk about is actually people believe in free will do less racist things. That was an interesting study. It was.

So we're in a season of COVID. We're in a season of, you know, just looking at ourselves as, you know, as a white person, I'm looking at myself, you know, putting my thoughts on check. Do I have any implicit bias that I can bring out of the unconscious into the conscious realm, right? And so one of the other things we'll talk about is consciousness versus unconscious drives. there are unconscious drives that are outside of our awareness. I think that we can progressively, sometimes through psychotherapy, become more aware of our unconscious drives

and therefore counteract them or decide not to follow them. So I think there's a way of increasing our self-determination, our free will, so to speak, through the process of psychotherapy. So we'll also talk about that. Definitely. And that's been shown in some of the articles we'll get into later,

is that time for deliberation and awareness actually counteracts some of the negative effects of a disbelief and free will. So bringing things to the forefront and having an opportunity to manipulate them in your mind and reason through it, having that time counteracts some of those negative effects. Yeah. And why I think this is so important, because the more I've gotten into podcasting and putting out ideas and listening to other people's ideas,

the more I realize often ideas are not founded in solid science. They're founded in opinions that then led the person to sort of approach the science and try to look at the science through the lens of their opinions. One example of the war of ideas that you may not have heard of is this idea of in-cell. So an in-cell is an involuntary celibate. They believe that because they are not attracted, either physically, there's something wrong with them. Maybe they think that they're in the bottom half of physical appearance or the bottom

quarter, that they will never be able to have and maintain a monogamous relationship with a female, usually in cells are male. And therefore, because of the biologic determinism that is keeping them stuck, and because they believe that there is no option. for that. They take what's called the black pill. And the black pill is basically understanding that they have no hope and therefore to fill their life with other things other than this sort of the meaningful potential for romantic relationship. The problem that I have with that is it leads to a very rigid and dogmatic view of life, which then keeps people from thriving and keeps people from

moving forward, right? And so I like it when people move forward. And it's tragic when people give up that. Which then leads into the importance of some of these major voices in neuroscience and in free will discussions such as Sam Harris, who claim that the absence of free will has been scientifically proven. Others such as James Miles even argue that the absence of free will is good for society because a belief in free will leads to stigmatization and other problems. And so it's then important to really look at these authors and these thinkers, especially in the context, as you mentioned, of in-cells and hope and transitioning progress.

Yeah, Sam Harris will say, well, it's like as soon as you can get over the idea that there's evil in the world and that people are just doing things because of the biological wiring, the upbringing, the biochemistry in their brain, their neurodeficits, if they have a tumor in their head, for example, maybe they don't have frontal lobe function. And because of that, we can't really have any punitive moral hatred towards them. He said, yeah, sure, lock them up if they need to be locked down. up. But as soon as we can, let's figure out how to cure their disease, give them a pill. He says, for psychopathy, let's cure that. This is just an example. He gives like a neurotransmitter deficiency. And I'm listening to him. Talk about it. As a psychiatrist, I know that there is

no simple fix for psychopathy. Like, if anything, it's like, it's a series of ideas, actually, that leads to someone being a psychopath sometimes. And some of those ideas are the very toxic things that need to be changed. There's no deficiency of any neurotransmitter in actually any disease in psychiatry. It's much more complex than that. So we don't believe anymore that there's just not enough serotonin. We believe that we give a serotonin reuptake inhibitor and it, creates epigenetic changes after a couple weeks that causes the decrease in the depression,

maybe increase in brain-derived neurotrophic factor, decreasing receptor density. And it's very complex, right? But it's no longer thought to be so simplistic. And we don't have any good treatments for psychopathy. Like psychotherapy won't work and medications don't work. Sometimes clozapine can decrease aggression a little bit. I talk about that in my episode three. But not very much.

So, you know, I think there's a lot of nuance here. And each of these little things needs to be discussed. And I'm hoping that we can bring some nuance to this discussion. Okay, so there's a series of studies where they primed people to believe deterministically or to believe in free will. So take me through this first one on decreasing racial prejudice. Well, there are multiple studies on racial prejudice. overview of it, of some of them, is measurements of pro-black attitudes that were taken on a survey, and those that were primed to believe in free will were found to have greater levels of pro-black

attitudes and therefore decreases in racial prejudice. And the effect size of this was 0.82, which is big. It's actually a pretty big effect size. priming, you know, having people read content to make them stimulate their belief in free will versus read content stimulating the belief in determinism, you know, and then having them it changes their viewpoint. Okay, let's keep going. Go through some of the other studies quickly and I'll follow along and comment.

All right. Some other headlines then is that an increased belief in free will leads to setting more personal goals and goals on a longer time scale. Right. So goals are often a frontal lobe function, dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, and we know that from other studies that we'll get too soon, that there seems to be a decrease when people don't believe in free will in that area. Keep going.

Now, if we take the inverse and we have people read, as you're mentioning some deterministic statements, they then believe more in a deterministic universe, and that leads to things like a reduced willingness to help others. And when they're exposed to options to help or shown theoretical scenarios of people in need, they can then measure how likely they are to volunteer to help them, and it shows an overall reduction in that. Also leads to increased acts of impulsive selfishness. So if people are given not much time to make a decision, their impulse decision,

if they have a more deterministic outlook at that time will be one of more impulsive decisions and they are less likely to donate in this article to the common good. Yeah, and so they gave 30% less to this public pot if their belief in free will was challenged. The effect size was 0.67, which is pretty big. A decrease in a belief in free will

also leads to an increase in cheating, which they were able to analyze from multiple perspectives. So, like, after reading this essay on, you know, against free will, they cheated more. Yes. That's interesting. It's amazing. That's all it takes is reading just an essay that makes you doubt free will. Doubting free will is also connected to increased social conformity. And the way they found this out, which I thought was interesting, they had a variety of abstract art,

and they had fake scores from previous students, and they found that people were more likely to mimic those fake scores from previous students than to actually give their own opinion on these pieces of art. A decreased belief in free will also leads to, impulsive antisocial tendencies and so they have that when they have a decreased belief in free will they have degraded self-control overall decreased belief in free will also leads to a decreased behavior adjustment after an error so people are less likely to learn from their mistakes moving forward what I found

interesting about this study was this is exactly what someone who's a little but hypofrontal, like ADHD, like low frontal lobe function does, is they don't, they'll make a mistake and then they will not pause to reevaluate to change what they're doing to not make that mistake again. Interesting. So they make the mistake again and again and again. So essentially this is changing the brain state that I would actually put as part of the free will function, like determination, planning, orchestration, all of that.

frontal of function. This is finding that that is decreased by actually making people believe against free will. Okay, keep going. Doubting free will has also led to increased aggressive behavior. And this study was conducted an interesting way where aggression was measured by the amount of hot sauce someone placed on another participant's plate knowing that that participant did not like hot sauce. And it's actually, it goes from a mean of 17 to 9 and the standard deviation of 11,

or 16. So that's about a 0.6 or 0.7 standard deviation change between the two groups, which is pretty significant. You know, these are significant changes. These are not just small. Sometimes you get like an effect size of like 0.2, 0.3, okay, that's not really that big.

These are bigger changes like across the board. Definitely. And it also leads to perceiving life as less meaningful, if you doubt the existence of free will. Yeah. And so meaning and free will are linked. This is a smaller, well, actually, no, this is not a small effect size. This is a 0.82 effect size.

So that's near one. That's near one standard aviation. difference. That's big. They were also then able to find information without manipulating people's belief in free will. So just using a scale to measure their baseline

belief in free will and then find associations based off of that. Positively, a belief in free will was associated with a better job performance. Yeah, that's interesting to me. The correlation is smaller. It's 0.3, but it's

significant and positive social impact as well. 0.35. So they're correlated, not the strongest correlations, but they are correlated together. Static belief in free will was also associated with less prejudice. This was a different part of the study we've referenced earlier. And this was done with a group of Han Chinese measuring their views on Tibetan Chinese by social distance

and found that to be a significant association. Okay, yeah, that's again really interesting. Prejudice, to think that free will and prejudice are linked, it's really interesting to me. Positive belief in free will was also associated with lower social conformance. And though it may seem that some of these headlines are repeating, that's because a lot of these articles had multiple studies in them, some prime, some static,

and so we're reporting them in multiple locations due to the nuance of what they were actually measuring. Yeah. Belief in free will was also associated with life satisfaction and also greater gratitude, lower levels of perceived stress, and higher commitment in relationships. Yeah. So already we've been through almost 30 citations and we're like only 20 or so minutes into this. Okay. Belief in free will is also associated with higher academic performance, as we mentioned previously.

This is a static measurement, though. And a disbelief in free will has been associated with a reduced helping behavior. Well, I think this is just the intro. And it's showing you the importance of the belief in free will. free will and why and why we're curious about this and why we think it's important in how we talk to patients right because sometimes patients may walk away prime to think like oh i am just my environment i am just my genetics like like i guess i'm just the way i am you know i guess i don't have any change you know and we know the importance of internal locus of control shifting someone from like

the world is happening to me to like i can actually make movements and change that lead to changes in the world, like that's really important. So, okay, let's talk about the history a little bit. All right. So this is just a general overview of how free will has been important across a variety of fields, philosophically, religiously, even judicially. So talking about some of the philosophical importance of free will in the past and in our current philosophical thought, starting with Plato and Aristotle, they had concepts of free will built into their ideas of eudaimonia or the good life, which is this goal everyone is striving for.

But to reach that good life required practice and control of the will in order to perfect your character. Plato's concept of free will did not consist of the ability to do otherwise, but did talk about freedom being gained. by allowing your by being able to reason and restrain your own spirit and appetite as you work towards this good life it's interesting that he talks about how it's like it's it's um it's a practice you know it's like a muscle like you practice control of your will right and um i think this goes back to like why it's important to think that you could actually start to move forward in this domain, right? Like, what is the point of lifting weights for me? It's really not aesthetics. I could care very little about aesthetics. For me, it's like Plato. It's like right here. How do I learn through

voluntary hardship and through sequential stresses to basically tell my body that I'm going to tell my body to do something, it's going to do it, right? That gets me excited more than aesthetics or like, you know, anyways. You're jiving with that. I think it's also interesting that the Greeks, you know, in ancient Greece also made a link between the practice of free will and practical results. They didn't have any of the studies we just cited, but they linked the idea of free will with improving your character and improving your life. And you could easily see, you know, contemporary corollaries with the belief in free will having all these positive, uh, aspects that we just talked about. Right. Yeah. So it's, um, it's also thinking about Plato's Republic. You have the

three levels. The highest level is your, the philosopher king, right? The middle is like your warrior. The lowers, you're like merchants where you have the more the base desires, the, the, you know, the libido, which is kind of like similar to Freud's three levels, if you think about it. So maybe Freud would make the superego a little bit more punitive, so it's a little bit different. But in Plato's sort of republic, and I want to do an episode on this in the future, I'm like, I've been thinking about this for a while. Oh, I'm ready. Oh, you want to do that one?

Yeah. Oh, okay. I think philosophy. Okay. So my thought there is, is that look at our society. today. Like, how do we get the philosopher king up at the top? Please, someone tell me how we find that person. Okay, I'm going to keep going. But you get my point, is that like, Plato was saying, like, hey, we have to, we have to, in our own mind, put our libidinal energies,

our desires, our aggression. We have to tame this to our reasons. We have to tame this to our reason, right, so that we can be, and we need to put this into practice and do this as a practice, put these things to a place where we are not run by them. And that's kind of an abnormal saying nowadays. That's not like something a lot of people are saying to do. Exactly. Just a couple other philosophers then to wrap up this section, one of the other very famous ones, Emmanuel Kant, believed that the will should also be aligned and that proper motivation comes from a sense of duty and therefore molding your will to fulfill that duty. He therefore believed that these acts, these moral acts, could only exist if you were motivated by duty and had the proper alignment of your

will. So it didn't matter how good the results were. You had to be motivated by these duties and corraling your will to fit with your duty. Yeah, I kind of think about that especially, like, you can learn how to give empathy and to not feel the empathy. Like, you can learn cognitive empathy without really believing in the importance of it. And I think the residents I've seen who become the type of person that would be a good therapist, do the best work. So it's almost like at a certain point you have to do your own work,

so that your own internal desires, will, drives, are aligned with your mission and what you're providing. So it's like you can't, and I think people will smell hypocrisy when there's that mismatch, right? So he's saying to act morally, your will, your desire, these kind of like these gut impulses

need to align with what you're actually doing. And I think that can happen through kind of a purification of ideas and a practice of what we're talking about, like practicing, like Plato practice, like this, practicing the eudamonia, the good life. Okay. Definitely.

I don't know. Tell me if you think differently about what Kant was trying to say in this, or if you would add anything to that. No, I would agree. I don't know if he focuses as much on the, practicing side of it. I do think that's a component of it, but you're very right that it does work with aligning yourself. I'm trying to make it practical. Yes. I feel like if it's too

theoretical, then people can get lost in that, you know. Makes sense. Okay. Well, we'll move on to the last philosopher. John Stewart Mill, the utilitarian and a consequentialist, did also believe that there is a way to shape and develop one's own character by controlling our desires. Though he's not as strong a proponent of free will as other philosophers, he still did find this concept useful. And so from this brief summary, we've talked about the three main philosophical approaches being Contean duty theory, utilitarianism, and virtue theory, and found free will is echoed throughout all these three schools of philosophical thought. Yeah, it's like by controlling our desires, we develop character. That's a very, when I think about that, I think about what fires together

wires together as well. So, for example, you know, like if you give into maybe a more sort of dysfunctional series of thoughts, you may then after strike out with people you otherwise would be able to win over as friends or romantic relationships. So, for example, with the in-cell mentality that women are, you know, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's very like some of their beliefs about women are so just horrible, right? Where you would hear it and you would say that's just devaluing the person as like a person. Well, if you practice this in your mind, so to speak, over time, people feel that. And so that character is felt through mirror neurons and through other people picking up your

vibe. And so controlling your desires, even when you're alone, even when no one's watching, I think provides an internal sort of character, which otherwise wouldn't be there, which is what we're talking about, training free will, so to speak. Because if you, it's like we have a multiplicity of desires at all times, but we uniquely as humans can subjugate some of them, suppress some of them, choose to, not, even if they're stronger than other ones. For example, you may have a person has landed in the railroad tracks in a subway station, and a train, you can hear a train coming in the distance. Part of you is self-preservation, right?

And that part of you is pretty loud. There's another part of you that is maybe the hurt instinct or help this person out, right? and you don't know this person. You jump down there, throw them out of the subway. But that part of you was not the loudest part of your brain. The loudest part of your brain was actually the selfish part, maybe, the self-preservation part. But you also were able to put a value on which one you valued,

and you were able to intensify one of them and detensify the other one. So this is where I think free will is. I think it's like there's all these places of our brain that are going off. So I kind of think, you know, like as a psychiatrist, we have places of the brain and this is our hard wiring. But then we also are getting to choose which ones we want to pay attention to and which ones we want to decrease the intensity to. And it's through practice that you're able to do that better and better. Definitely. And not to give way too many spoilers.

but I do think that's a definition we're going to use later is that free will is much more about thought manipulation than thought generation. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, you are, oh, man, there's a good act metaphor where in a box, you put all the things that you are.

Okay? I'm a rower. I'm a father. I'm a podcaster. I'm a psychiatrist. I'm a physician. You put all these things inside the box, whatever that is for you.

And then you say to the person, now you are the person that observes what is inside of the box and so it's kind of like you are not these things you are the one that observes what you are going to bring in or bring out of the box okay so some people patients bring in like depression and or anxiety it's like you are the person that observes that you are depressed you're observing that you were anxious okay let's keep going religious yes um now i don't feel perfectly qualified to talk on this subject, but wanted to give a general overview from a couple of religions of how they incorporate the concept of free will. Christianity has multiple forms, but some of its more central

tenets, starting with its early Christian fathers, were viewed free will as essential in the entire process, because free will is what allows you to either choose toward God or choose towards sin. Yeah, Augustine is interesting, and I think I might want to do an episode on him in the future. I want to do like a series on the history of psychiatry, because he's the first author in his book Confessions, who wrote about his own depravity. Before then, most authors would try to make themselves look good. But he's the first person who gives an autobiographical critique of himself with pretty astute psychological, I mean, for the time, psychological insights. And so he really saw the necessity, I think, of grace, and I think it was actually his view of grace and that God had given

him this grace. I think that's what allowed him the psychological room to write down some of his more nefarious thoughts. But it's interesting that in your mind, he really did think free will was important, even in kind of a, I think he was a little bit foundational, more of the Calvinistic thought, which is more of a predetermined line of thinking. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. I don't think I can speak authoritatively. I have not read enough. I know that did view the will as something important.

Might have had a slightly different concept of how free that will was, but did believe that the will was part of humans and important to our relationship. relationship with the divine. Okay. And I think Augustine also was really informed by Plato, and Augustine informed a lot of the Reformation people. I think it's naive to not look at the different lines of thinking and how they kind of grow and expand, and we'll go into that in a future episode. Tell me a little bit about Buddhism and how you see Buddhists interacting with free will. well it's very interesting relationship in general because as far as the contemporary free will debate is concerned um buddhists don't really have a concept of free will but they do believe in free action and they do

believe that individuals are morally responsible for what they will to happen and the moral responsibility then exists within a complex web of cause and effect. But they do have some concept of free action and of therefore a linking of responsibility with that. They also believe that free and mindful agents know what their needs are and what their preferences should be. And on that basis of knowledge, they can separate desires from cravings

and then find moral freedom in the ability to form their desires with their needs and their personal circumstances. So there's some level of shaping there and formation as well as responsibility, even if the typical concept of free will is not explicitly endorsed. Yeah, I mean, if you think about like reincarnation and the idea that what you do on this earth informs your future life as well, there's an aspect of, you know, your will and what your choices are lead to consequences. And so that kind of flies in the face of a deterministic viewpoint that you are who you are and you don't have any choice.

So it's kind of fatalistic. We have an article that we will cite with that if you want to dig more into Buddhism and how they view free will. Let's jump to Islam and you also found an article on Islam and free will that will post as well. Obviously there's many interpretations of Islam like there is Christianity. Tell me a little bit about what you found with Islam. I think I'll just read a quote from the article then. That sums it up pretty well. In Islam, every individual is entitled to freedom of belief, conscience, and worship. While Islam presents itself as the truth, individuals are

given the free will to choose between truth and falsehood, including the freedom to accept or deny the Creator himself. The Quran said, the truth is from your Lord. Let him who will believe and let him who will reject it. End quote. Therefore showing a good amount of exercise of the will, sort of analogous in some ways to how we described Christianity as will giving you the option to choose between truth and falsehood. Yeah. And with Islam, it's, I like this quote that it's like it's the choice that you have. They obviously believe Islam is the truth, and so they're believing that you can choose truth or not truth. But there is that choice to accept or reject, and there's that sort of human freedom in that. Okay, how about how, let's talk about how it relates to the judicial, the legal

system. It's a complex relationship, and some of the articles I found I don't claim to fully understand but at its basis or its most basic level a judicial system can have a couple different relationships to free will one of them being is that if the system judicial system is designed to punish rule breakers it's assuming that the rule breakers are only punished since they had the opportunity not to break the rule another relationship with free will in the law could be that if the goal is to rehabilitate and educate rule breakers the system is then assuming that the individual has some level of free will or can be molded or shaped to avoid future infractions.

The exception to this situation potentially is the insanity defense, which I don't know if that's something you want to talk about more. It's rather complicated legally, and I think you have probably a practical understanding of it maybe a little better. Yeah, so the practical understanding is like, let's say someone commits a crime and they're having a current like schizophrenic, um, acute psychotic episode where let's say they had some delusions that their mother was the devil. Their mother wasn't their mother. The mother was the devil. So they really believed their mother was the devil. And then they were having auditory hallucinations

telling, uh, telling them to murder the devil and save the world. Right. So they had both the delusions and the hallucinations, and they went through with it. Usually this person would not cover up the death afterwards, right? So this person would be found with the body there, you know, and not like in a place where they're covering up things. So they can kind of look at when they're trying to judge, is this person insane, are they claiming to be insane? they're looking at, you know, malingering.

They're looking at, you know, did this person cover up the crime in a way that a sane person would cover it up? Did this person plan the crime months ahead in a way a sane person would plan it? And so if someone is insane when they commit a crime, they don't go to a normal prison. They go to a special prison like Patton State Hospital, which is for the criminally insane, where they get good, psychiatric care and there's good transition programs, but they still have to serve time for their crime. So the idea here is that their mind is in a state where they didn't have the normal moral culpability. And I think this is where someone who's very deterministic, they jump on it and say, see, see, therefore everyone, right? And I would say, oh, no, this is like where we're

we judge, you know, the level of their moral capability. Interestingly, I see a lot of people commit crimes while on drugs. I don't think they would ever commit those crimes when they're not on drugs, okay? Did they have free will to take the drug? Yes, they did. But sometimes, over time of taking drugs, I think the free will decreases. So like, for example, if someone's been drinking for 10 years and they come in and they're in an alcoholic encephalopathy, right? So their liver is so destroyed that they're confused and you talk to them about quitting alcohol and they say, oh yeah, yeah, I'm going to quit. You walk back an hour later and they don't remember that you ever had that discussion. Their free will has been impacted by their disease.

Their free will has been lessened and it's harder for them to make an actual decision. so sometimes when we're stuck in like some sort of addiction or some sort of trend where we can't get out of one of the smallest but most important decisions we can make is to change our environment for example if you're heavy set like myself and you struggle with weight and you have a family history of struggling with weight you know maybe you change your environment by getting a coach and that's something i've done recently it's been helpful so it's like Left to your own devices, you may be kind of stuck in a trend leading to a direction you don't want to go. But there are still options that you can take that are small that lead you out of that.

So, okay, that's my summation of the insanity defense. Interestingly, some other authors take a slightly different approach. One researcher claims that lawyers and forensic practitioners often speak and write as if some of the problems you mentioned are free. will problems as if the lack of free will were a synonym for lack of action, irrationality, or compulsion. Nevertheless, free will is doing no work whatsoever independent of these genuine excusing conditions and it thus threatens to confuse the issues. So I think it's interesting there. Some of the points we're going to make a little bit later. I believe that their free will does not mean that it does not speak to the quality of the decision. I think you're correct in stating.

at least in my opinion that free will can be improved expanded you can make decisions that put you in a better environment but I don't know if free will necessarily means that you're making good decisions just the ability to make those decisions no I would I would agree okay I don't think I think you can have a choice to make bad decisions yeah 100% I think people choose to do bad things I think the worst people have probably the most sober-minded choice to do the bad things, right? So like someone who's stuck in their sort of alcoholism and they're confused, like this is a person who we kind of pity

to some degree because they've hurt their brain. The worst people probably have the most ability to choose and they choose to hurt people and dehumanize people. And they choose to even try to get, other people to do that as well. You know? Okay, let's keep going. All right, well, just running through a quick list of definitions here before we move on,

because these will continue to be useful, and some of these we've already stated, determinism, as we've talked about, is a belief that all actions and decisions follow inevitably from previous events. Now, a relevant subset of determinism is the concept of neuro-essentialism, which I have a concept of neuro-essentialism, which I think is defined well by the author who states that, quote, the definitive way of explaining human psychological experience is by reference to the brain and its activity from chemical, biological, and neuroscientific perspectives, end quote, as a definition of neuroessentialism.

So these neuro, they believe that the neuro, the brain is essential. Like it is all encompassing, like chemicals, biology, brain pathways. That's what's going on. Yes, and it's the best possible definition. is to the brain and it's encapsulation of all those things right okay 10 i think what eight billion neurons some with 40,000 connections you know there's a lot going on up there and i think um it can be reductionistic to see a picture of one nerve and one action potential you know which is very hard to understand by the way just one nerve and like it's not just an action

like there is neurotransmitters and there's this and that there's like there's like tons of things going on like tens of thousands of things going on in one nerve so it's very hard to understand more than that it's very hard to understand that and you take one of those and you feel like you understand it and then it's like okay I understand all of brain science I'm just kidding okay keep going it's interesting perspective other related ideas to determinism is the idea of incompatibilism which I think is common today, what we've talked about before, is that if someone claims that the universe is entirely deterministic, then free will can't exist because there's no room to maneuver in a deterministic universe.

And so whenever there are discoveries of deterministic nature, people then link that to the impossibility of free will. The inverse of that is the concept of compatibilism, which says that free will can exist in a deterministic universe, if you define free will properly. And this is also sort of a controversial term in and of itself. Moving to the opposite now of deterministic would be an indeterministic universe. An indeterministic universe is one in which laws govern many aspects of the physical world,

but human decisions are relatively independent. And under this category is where some of our core concepts lie, such as free will belief or a belief in free will. Now, this can be measured and manipulated, as we've discussed previously. And it's actually going to be the main focus of the podcast because the existence of free will is a much more complex analysis, which we don't believe has really a settled answer. But it is very easy to point to a belief in free will and manipulate it and find papers and data that we can discuss. There's also a similar concept of personal choice or personal control that has a relationship, to free will, but is distinct in its realm of influence.

While neither personal choice or free will have a universal definition, free will is often described as an internal process or regulation where personal choice or control is more commonly linked to influence over external situations and opportunities. So a free will concept or definition that we're going to use moving forward and potentially revise a little bit before the end is that free will is a blanket term composed of self-control rational choice, planning behavior, and active choice. It can be viewed as synonymous with self-regulatory behavior. Yeah, that's good.

That's good. I'm looking at these different definitions, I think, to kind of simplify it for people who may be confused at this point, listening to all those. Deterministic versus indeterministic. So deterministic is that, you know, our biology, And the previous firing of nerves, neurons, pathways are causing later things going on, right? So you're shaped by your environment, by your genes, that's it. And then indeterministic is like where free will belief, personal choice comes in, and this is where you can actually make a decision, a true decision.

and we'll talk about what that all means. I don't know, make a true decision. I like your definition here. Self-control, rational choice, planning behavior, active choice, all of these coming together. Self-regulatory behavior. Now, I think after we've discussed some of those definitions, and thank you for those clarifications,

it's important to discuss how free will is similar but also distinct from other concepts, such as locus of control. or personal choice, as we've talked about. So we have a couple articles here that sort of talk about those distinctions. The first one claims that free will belief is unique from similar alternatives such as personal choice and personal control. And the study initially shows that a free will belief is positively correlated with sense of personal control and both correlate positively with satisfaction in life and negatively with perceived.

stress. That doesn't show a law of distinction in and of itself, but they continue with a second study which measured daily changes in someone's free will belief and showed that they did not predict daily fluctuations of stress and depression better than belief in personal control or choice. That also doesn't sound like that's a significant distinction there, but the authors had an interesting conclusion to their two studies, and they said that, quote, although we show that the predictive utility of free will belief on personal life outcomes is abolished when controlling for personal choice, it remains possible that free will belief does have unique predictive utility in other contexts. Indeed, the modest correlation between free will belief and personal choice

suggests that free will belief and personal control are not precisely the same thing, in quotes. So they used the relationship and said it's not a very strong relationship, therefore we think that they don't exactly overlap, and there is some distinction between these two concepts. They had another study, which was a survey of high school and college students, and that reported that those students found a distinction between free will belief and locus of control in their own minds. That's how they defined it. the summary was that senior high school students did not associate beliefs in free will,

general will, or personal will with locus of control. College students, on the other hand, produced a significant negative correlation between belief in free will and locus of control. Similarly, belief in personal will was also negatively correlated with locus of control. So this sort of shows that, at least in the common realm, the way lay people interpret these definitions, there is not a significant overlap. Yeah, and interestingly, these correlations are like 0.2 to 0.3. So not huge correlations between free will belief and locus of control.

So, you know, when we think about constructs and we think about creating a measure to think about this, is this a unique measure or are we really just seeing the same thing, right? is locus of control and free will basically the same thing. And what this study showed is that they're linked, as we would expect them to be linked, but they're not linked that much. Actually, point two to point three is not a strong correlation. And they had another comparison, which was belief in free will and real world job performance.

And they found that belief in free will has an impact on real world job performance beyond Protestant work ethic, life satisfaction, or overall energy levels. It's just making a distinction between those as well. They conducted a couple different studies here with either people predicting what they think their own success will be in the first study, and the second study having a job supervisor rate their own success. And overall, they found that the belief, and free will was a better predictor

than a Protestant work ethic, life satisfaction, or energy levels, showing a distinction there as well. Protestant work ethic is a questionnaire. It's not. These are all different questionnaires that they're looking at and then predicting performance. Yeah, that was an interesting study when we found that.

And the correlation between free will and work effort, 0.33, and between, free will and life satisfaction 0.32. So not huge correlations, but they're there. Now after we've sort of defined that belief in free will does have some linked concepts, but also has its own importance, we can then talk about some of the different public voices and sort of give context to the public debate right now about free will. We're going to look at a couple, two different examples in particular, the first being Sam Harris. He's a lot of

a public figure in neuroscience, whose work on free will is read by a broad audience. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. All the discussion we're going to have will be focused around his book entitled Free Will, published

in 2012, and all the excerpts we quote will come directly from that book. Yeah, and you know, having read this book recently, it's interesting because I feel like first of all, Sam Harris is one of the great intellectuals in the sphere of intellectuals debating each other.

And he asserts early on that determinism is true based on, you know, neuroscience and him being a neuroscientist expert. And subsequently, he then explains how it's true. So it's, I'm going to enjoy looking at the article that he cites is like the pivotal article that proves free will is is is non-existent and then looking at actually like well there's been a whole fleet of authors who came subsequently who you know wrote about this and so i'm hopefully going to be pulling that all together and if you want once again i will put these all in the resource library for you to digest over hours of hours of reading okay All right. Before we get to sort of his, the scientific basis he provides, I think it's important to look at his definition of free will and how that either fits or differs from some other free will definitions that exist.

Quote, the popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions. One, that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past. And two, that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. end quote. He also goes on to say that consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors. But there is a paradox here that vitiates the very notion of freedom,

for what influences the influences. More influences? None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. you are the storm. In response to that, we'd argue that he's relying on a somewhat implausible definition of free will, which requires individuals to have a complete awareness and control of all potential influencing factors in their life. This definition supports his argument, but it's not a definition that would be broadly accepted.

We believe he's creating a straw man definition of free will that is not reason. and therefore helps him support that point. Yeah. Specifically how he talks about how you need to have like complete awareness of all the factors that are influencing you, there are a lot of factors that influence us, you know, early childhood stuff, attachment with mom and dad, your, you know, sexual drive, your drive for self-preservation, your drive of your herd instinct, you're, you know, of these things are happening simultaneously and they influence us and of course they influence us but like I said before

just because they're there and you may have a different degree you know based on your psychological mindedness the work that you've done in psychotherapy you may have a different degree of knowledge of these things going on but that doesn't mean that you wouldn't be able to take pieces of the knowledge of the knowledge to make a decision or you would be able to listen to one of the voices more than another. So I really think about this psychodynamically to some perspective that of course there's the unconscious and then there's the conscious, pre-conscious. You know, there's parts of us that we don't quite completely grasp and they're influencing us. But that doesn't take away the ability to make a choice.

it's like you're being influenced but but i don't see any studies that say that you could be completely influenced and you know some of my examples i give in my suicide lectures where it's like yeah your environment will increase your risk of committing suicide four times the average person if you have a really bad childhood environment or if you but four times the absolute risk of committing suicide, which is around 1%, is 4%. So it's not like a huge absolute increase, right? So it's not like the environment is predestining you to die. In the same way, if your monozygotic twin commit suicide, you had same genes, exact same genes, you had same environment early on, it will increase your risk of committing suicide four percentage points compared to a dysogotic twin.

But that's 4% higher than the general population. So it increases it. So it influences you, but not completely. So there's this whole room of influence. Well, we can talk more about this as we go on. Agreed. Moving a little bit further into his book, he also makes some broad philosophical claims that I don't believe have sufficient support.

Quote, today the only philosophically received, respectable way to endorse free will is to be a compatibilist because we know that determinism in every sense relevant to human behavior is true. Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware. I want to point out just the language use and I notice that this type of language throughout his book and when he talks, it's like respectable. You know, it's an emotional. It's an emotional. You know, it's an of word, right? Any respectable philosophical way of, you know, any, and then he'll say like, we know or science has shown. It's like, really? Like, it's just like, it's very emphatic.

And then he goes on to explain himself. It's, it's kind of, there's a, there's an argument style called bolverism where you put out that the other person is wrong based on their lack of knowledge of science, right? And then you just, then you educate them on the truth. And it's the most infuriating way to argue with someone, you know? Well, you only believe that because you are a XYZ, you know, and if you really want to make someone upset or be a bigot, you say, you only believe that because you are male or you are a female. And then because I'm a female, I will educate you, you know, or because I'm, well, and sometimes it works like that, but it can be a, it can be like really hard to argue with someone like that, right?

So there's like that, um, that's sort of like, well, this is the only respectable way to view this. And this is how you should view it. Okay. Yeah. And exactly. It's making these assumptions and these big claims up front, um, which rely on determinism and neuroessentialism as unquestioned truths when the literature shows that these are not foregone conclusions. The debate still occurs, and so he's using this then as a basis for his whole argument. And he also makes some philosophical claims, which seem surprisingly based on limited self-reflection. He has an interesting quote here

that I won't read all of them, but this one is worth reading. Quote, however, when I look for the psychological cause of my behavior, I find it utterly mysterious. Why did I stop training 20 years ago? Well, certain things just became more important to me. But why did they become more important to me? And why precisely then, and to that degree, and why did my interest in martial arts suddenly reemerge after decades of hibernation? I can consciously weigh the effects of certain influences. For instance, I recently read Rory Miller's excellent book Meditations on Violence. But why did I read this book? I have no idea, and why did I find it compelling. Probably because he was hanging out with Joe Rogan. I'm guessing. Joe Rogan is really

into martial arts. But go ahead. It seems that he really places a lot of significance on his inability to predict his next mental state or conscious thought, where in that exact quote, he gives a perfectly rational reason for coming back into martial arts. He just read a book about it. And so it seems like a lot of these arguments from his personal. life don't have much self-reflection. Well, I think what he's saying here is I got back into martial arts because I read this book. And why did I read this book? Because of some other cause.

So he's saying, this cause led to this result, led to this result, led to this result, led to this result. And I may not know all of the things that led me down this path, but I'm only here because of these prior things that influenced me. And, you know, and then so I think he's saying that I don't know all the influences that I have on something, but that doesn't mean that they aren't there. And I think I would respond to him saying like, yeah, I think we all could learn more about how we're influenced, especially with big decisions, right? And I can think about big decisions where I was influenced by things that I didn't quite have awareness of at the time. but then later, you know, with later self-analysis I've realized it. But I don't think that this proves or just proves free will just by that we were primarily influenced by things.

It doesn't, it's like you can't prove that you were only, you only made a decision based off of prior influences and events in the environment. And you can't make, you can't prove either side of it. You see what I mean? Like I can't, because you don't have all the inputs, and you can't run this scenario 100% of the time. So it's like if I run the scenario the same way 100% of the time, I will get the same result.

It's kind of what he's saying. I may not know what all those scenarios are. And if I did and I could just pre-program it in a computer, it would always be the same. And therefore I don't have any choice in it because it would always be the same. But he can't really prove that because he doesn't know all of the inputs

and you can't run the scenario. That's how science works, right? is we would have like all the scenarios and we'd run them, run it and run it and run it and run it. And then you would be able to see that this person made the same decision every time. And therefore, it wasn't really a free will decision. It was a determined decision. Right. And I would say like, okay, that's a good science question, but let's look at studies if that's the case, right?

We're about to get to the studies. There's one last section in which I think it's important to look because you sort of rejects these more moderate definitions of free will that would be more reasonable in many ways. Quote, you have not built your mind and in moments in which you seem to build it when you make an effort to change yourself, to acquire knowledge, or to perfect a skill, the only tools at your disposal are those you have inherited from moments past. It goes on to say, there is no question that human beings can imagine and plan for the future,

way competing desires, etc. and that losing these capacities would greatly diminish us. External and internal pressures of various kinds can be present or absent while a person imagines, plans, and acts. And such pressures determine our sense of whether he is morally responsible for his behavior. However, these phenomena have nothing to do with free will. And as we stated previously, I think we would respond that this definition relies on conscious creation of our own thoughts when conscious manipulation

would be a more reasonable and widely accepted definition of free will. He also claims it's impossible to build your own mind as an exercise of free will, since such construction relies upon tools inherited from the past. But this seems to be a description of how learning works, and I'm not sure how that fits into his argument. Yeah, you know, actually, I think what he's saying is that, like, It's kind of like when Obama gave that speech where he said like, you know, you didn't build that. You know, that business you have there.

You didn't build that. Who built the roads? Who built the schools? Who built the environment, you know? So there's this one sort of path where it's like you can see that like all these people contributed to your success, right? Which is probably a good mindset to have with some gratitude towards society and towards the people that influence. to you and gave you gifts that were good that led you to be able to do what you're doing. I definitely have gratitude for all the people in my journey.

And then there's this other sort of mindset where it's like, I built this all on my own. I built this thing, you know, and no one built it but me, right, which is very sort of like, so we have these two sort of monolithic sort of types of ways of thinking about it. I'm probably somewhere in the middle, you know? Like, you, um, you had the gift of a good education. You had a government maybe that paid it. I have some loans.

And so I'm grateful that I was able to take out loans. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to go to medical school. Um, but I'm, I also made the decision at multiple, to forego, you know,

doing things that might have been fun in the moment to study. Right? But he would, he would probably argue like, well, that was, that was something inherent in your upbringing or inherent in your personality. And, well, in a future lecture I'm going to do on conscientiousness, which is part of the big five, you know, people who are highly conscientious are very goal-oriented and driven, motivated. We'll learn that it's not completely predestined by birth, right? It's not purely genetic. There is environmental influences and there's other influences as well.

So personality is more malleable maybe than we would have, then some people would tend to think like, oh, you're that way and you're always going to be that way. And then the other thing is, it's kind of like going back to Aristotle. It's like to perfect your character, to get into the good life, it's like you have to practice and you have to like put in that time. And I think the problem is that if you don't believe that you need to practice,

then you won't make the effort to practice and you won't become who you truly were meant to be. You know, you're like this, you know, Michelangelo looking at this piece of marble and he's saying to himself, I'm just going to take out the pieces of marble that are not, I'm going to scrip this quote, but the idea is like,

this marble is created to be something and I'm just taking away the pieces that weren't what this marble was created to be. And in the same way, you know, like you as a therapist or psychiatrist or, you know, student listening to this, like you were meant to be this person. And through your effort and through your sort of your discipline and your training and using the gifts and abilities and being thankful for those things that have been given to you, you will be able to accomplish what you're able to accomplish. But it's like, it's like this mixture of gratitude for everything that's been given to you and for and continuing to be. put in that effort to practice and train. So I don't know, the mindset of like it's only happening to me is very passive in my mind. But I think in defense of Sam Harris and in defense of his way

of thinking about it internally, I think it makes sense to him the more I listen to him. Like for him, I think it's a compassionate way of living and it makes sense to the world. So I can kind of understand where he's coming from. I would agree. It does have, it, it does have a cohesion to it and has a built-out circular, you know, surrounding thoughts. Specifically along, like, I think it's helped him be compassionate towards people who are malicious or, like, criminals. I don't know how that's played out in his life because I don't know him as a person, but it seems to me that that was one of the big things that it helped him overcome. is kind of like develop a tolerance or love for people who maybe are not successful.

Okay, anything else you want to talk about his arguments or the way he thinks about things? No, I think we should dive into some of the articles he cites. Okay. All right. So neuroscience claims he has a lot of them, and he uses sequences of events and neuroimaging studies to argue against free will. Here's another quote from his book. One fact now seems indisputable.

Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next, a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please, your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this, quote, decision and believe that you are in the process of making it. Yeah, so this is coming from a 1983 study by Benjamin Lebet, which demonstrates neural activity before a conscious decision to move. So basically in this study you're looking at a clock with a hand that's moving very quickly. You make a decision to move and you note what position the clock hand that's moving quickly

is at when you make that decision. And then they map when the brain fired and they find that it's like a teeny teeny bit before you become consciously aware of making the decision. So yeah, break down the study if you want to a little bit more and let's talk about some of the subsequent stuff that's come out afterwards. Yeah, no, you described it really well. I think that some of the important aspects to note about this is that these decisions or these movements, you know, moving your wrist or your finger were very basic decisions.

they didn't have any relevant outcomes or any personal significance to the individuals making that decision. And so it was rather a low-level decision-making. Another thing to come out of this is the brain firing was seen as a readiness potential before they actually made the movements. That's just something important because readiness potentials will appear in other articles later on. and there are a couple of interesting critiques of this article. One of them points out that the link between these readiness potentials and motor activity cannot be assumed. It's also possible that the readiness potential is related to the formation of a conscious will. An additional consideration of the testing methods is also warranted since readiness potential data is only collected.

if a motor activity occurs. If a readiness potential does occur without a motor activity, the causal claim between readiness potential and motor activity would be challenged. However, this study itself did not make that type of information gathering possible. Right. So they didn't collect all of the data on what the brain was doing at all times, just right before the decision. And so it simplifies what actually.

might be going on it does it also really simplifies the decision-making process because the participants were not faced with reasons or motivations in their decision-making other than following researcher instructions yeah so this is not a complex task it's not a moral decision and it's not it's it's it's not like they're weighing different drives that are going on simultaneously in the their in their mind, you know, like my drive to comfort myself from food and my drive to not be fat, right? You know, which one of those am I going to listen to? Correct. Correct. Okay. Very, a very low-level decision. So a recent publication then as 2014 at least tried to reproduce

this original study with a few modifications. And the modifications were the presence or absence of that clock you talked about, that the participants were looking at and then using to sort of track and record when they had made their decision. They also gave a task to the participants to be classifying different tones and have something else that they're working on. and it was interesting that because these experiments support the idea that the readiness potential values before a decision were made could potentially just be artifacts of these participants paying attention to the clock the author themselves summarizes this paper quote data commonly purported to show that the apparent ability of consciousness to cause behavior is nothing more than an illusion while compelling at first suffer from methodological limitations and weaknesses that precludes strong conclusions the notion that conscious causation is an illusion cannot be ruled out however it is not a conclusion to which the data command assent yeah and once again we'll give this citation in the resource library what i think is really interesting

about this in particular is science has not said definitively what we should think about these studies there's there's like there's a back and forth there's like there's there's a camp saying yes this is this is showing this and there's another camp saying yes this is showing this you know and um and that's how science works right science is like this like back and forth of um experiments kind of refining the way that we think about things um but i don't think it's so i don't think lebet's approach is so straightforward that it's like been unquestioned. So, you know, I would be very reluctant to take such statements as science has shown,

you know, LeBett's stuff is shown that there is no free will. All decisions we make are done before in our brain before they light up in our brain, right? That's just not something that's like an accurate statement. Okay, what about this other research? So another more recent study basically tried to improve upon Leibbitt's experiment. So they used

a lot of the same concepts but are actually able to work with epileptic patients who had recently had intracranial electrodes placed for other clinical indications. And so they had a better reading of these patient's responses instead of just simply a cap, they had embedded electrodes beneath the skull. And they then also tried to improve upon the quality of the decision. And so they made the decision and the decisions

that the participants were making have some value. They could either win some money or lose some money from their decisions. They turned it into a game and tried to make it more meaningful when they were making these decisions. And they were actually still found these readiness potentials that Libet found. And so they're able to use a predictive algorithm then that allowed them to win in these games because they were able to have a tone played in the researcher's ear either right or left depending on which hand they should move to win this game they created with the participants. And they actually found for one participant they were able to win 72% of the time with

you know plus or minus 2%. And even after refining their algorithm further, they found with the same people. patient, they were able to increase their win rate up to 81%. And for another patient, they were able to increase their win rate up to 90%. And so basically validating some of the concepts that Libet put forth is in the existence of these readiness potentials, being able to predict these movements. However, it was interesting that the authors didn't go so far as to connect this study in their conclusion with the non-existence of free will. They said, look, we can show this,

but we don't think it has the same implication necessarily. Yeah, that's interesting. So they may have put that in there, and the reviewers said, I don't think that you can say that, so take it out and we'll publish a paper. Or they may have realized that they could say something, but it's like we don't want to leap too far,

into what this actually means. And I think that's actually supported by the fact that two of those same authors ended up writing another paper even more recently in 2019. And though this paper was well over my head in many regards, some of the takeaways from it I think are really interesting in that they created arbitrary and deliberative decisions. So they really tried to improve, okay, how can we really look at these decisions themselves and make them close to real life. And the whole system was, they say, okay, you have some money, you can give to nonprofit organizations.

In the arbitrary situation, it's $500 is going to go to both of these nonprofits no matter what you click on. In the other situation where they had a deliberative decision, they said, okay, you have $1,000. You can only give it all to one of these nonprofits. What are you going to do with this information? And so they found, you know, time differences and reaction times between these two scenarios of deliberative and the arbitrary decisions. And more interestingly, they found that some of the readiness potentials that were present in the arbitrary decision were not present in the deliberative decision. And so the brain actually looked different in a deliberative decision than an arbitrary decision and didn't have some of those ready.

these potentials that they'd been finding for years. Yeah, so if it's an arbitrary hard or arbitrary easy decision, it mapped differently, time-wise than deliberately easy or deliberately hard. And they included the easy hard. They were able to create that based on knowing the participants' preferences and then modifying the nonprofit organization. So an easy decision, all the participants' preferences aligned with one-neutral. nonprofit, hard, their preferences sort of split more evenly between these nonprofits.

And then they're able to show that the readiness potentials weren't related to their reaction times either or the difficulty of the decision. So it doesn't, it's not like these readiness potentials are just there when they're making a quick decision. They're there even when they're making a more difficult decision if it's still arbitrary, but they're absent in both easy and hard deliberative decisions. Which I just thought was a fascinating, fascinating distinction there that when we actually are creating more and more real life decisions, not that arbitrary decisions are not real life, some of those exist in real life, but the deliberative ones, which would actually take reasoning and free will, look different demonstrably than these arbitrary decisions. Other interpretations of the original 1983 article used different models.

One claims that the urge to act in Libet's original experiment occurs when normal random fluctuations and motor activity happen across a threshold, but that the earlier buildup, the readiness potentials, neither reflects an unconscious intention nor a commitment to act. Another reinterpretation of the article uses the concept of forward models, claiming that those readiness potentials are a representation of the motor command that the brain is going to take and is used to predict the sensory consequences of those action. So as you said, this really isn't a settled issue. There's been a lot of reinterpretation of the original article

and a lot of studies since then that have shown some distinctions between different decision-making types and just questioned how the original article functioned. Yeah. And so it's like, you know, part of the problem is like we have very, you know, we're looking at something that's incredibly complex, the brain,

and we're fairly, we have fairly simplistic ways of looking at it at this point. As we talk about in the episode on like Neurrelink and like, you know, the more advanced ways that they're going to do brain integrations in the future, like that's probably going to give us a whole lot more information. They didn't really create these ways of studying the brain for judging these very complex things. And so it's very hard to come to conclusions because, one, the way of looking at the brain is very, very simplistic at this point. And we don't even really know what that means that this part of the brain is lighting up before. And then two, as we look at more simplistic versus complex tasks,

the brain lights up in different ways. So usually when you make a complex task, like who you're going to marry, sure, there will be things that you're attracted to in your partner because of your early life situations. Sure, you'll be influenced by your friends. Sure, you'll have all these different influences. But at the end of the day, you're pondering these things. You're contemplating this.

And you have a choice. And so, you know, I think it's... reductionistic to think that we could come to a conclusion based on these very simplistic neurological tools to make, you know, truth statements about human nature. Agreed. Okay. So in conclusion, what is Sam Harris really looking at? We believe he is asking questions.

about the subconscious, the unconscious. I think he's diving into that there are these things deep in us that may be not completely in our awareness that are influencing us. And I did an episode on the unconscious in which we looked at those things. And just because you're not completely aware of all of the things going on in your life, right?

All of the influences doesn't mean you can't make a decision. But I think as you become more aware, you can make maybe more accurate decisions to what you would truly desire. Because I think sometimes desires are stifled or pushed down or they're competing and it's hard to know which one would be the best. So he says something like, the brain is a physical system entirely beholden to the laws of nature. and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions. But even if the human mind were made of soul stuff, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operations of a soul would grant you no more freedom than the unconscious

physiology of your brain does. What do you think? I think it's a big claim. I think also it harkens back to the idea that he talks about these other things that are in control because there's all these outside influences, the unconscious, and that if we don't know all of this, we are not in control. But I think you're setting up an impossibility because I don't know even you're making possible steps towards greater awareness of your influences.

But even then, I don't think it's possible to have complete awareness of every possible influence that's acting on you. And so he's setting up this impossibility and then using it to claim that free will doesn't exist. Yeah. And so coming back, like, what does he do well? I think he puts together a cohesive argument for determinism. But in his argument, I think he quickly jumps past. the clock studies and how there may be some more nuance that's come up since these studies have been published

and what are the counter arguments. And then coming to it with some thought that, not all scientists are agreeing what this says, what it doesn't say, and that it's likely that as the complexity of the tasks increase and you have multiple brain areas coming together, Right? It's kind of like you, the you are the one that is observing all of these different desires and these unconscious drives, maybe manifesting in dreams, maybe manifesting in bodily sensations. You are the one that's observing those things. And sometimes in psychotherapy, we're helping people come to what they truly desire by observing their micro expressions, which sometimes are like a manifestation of their unconscious emotions that they're not completely aware of.

why are they not completely aware of it for a number of reasons? Sometimes because early on they weren't allowed to have different emotions like anger. But the person is still making decisions. In my mind, and it's reductionistic to take something that's a simple experiment and then basically say that because of this, science has proven, which I think is, it's like, no, that's not how science works, right? Science works like, okay, it's a repeatable experiment that shows you something, you know, and it's like, okay, this is a correlation of blah, blah, blah, right?

Like even in the epilepsy study where they attach those electors to the brain and that guy was competing against the people, he lost. The experimenter lost some of the time. He wasn't predicting 100% of the time perfectly what the person was going to do. So that's something as well, right? Okay, I think we are going to leave it there for today. This is about halfway through, or maybe a little bit more than halfway. If you would like, you're more than welcome to jump in the resource library,

and we'll give you this first half of the notes for your pleasure, digesting it slower. Maybe you were listening to this on a bike ride, maybe while mowing the lawn. Some of the people who listen to do those things. and sometimes it's good to go back to things. So we'll put it up in the resource library. You can give a short message about yourself and I read those. And sometimes I respond.

So have a great day.