A previous post described my joint replacement surgery (left knee in March 2022 and right hip in August 2022) and my initial training in the following months. At the end of September 2023, 18 months after the knee replacement and 12 months after hip replacement, I participated in a national powerlifting competition. I competed in the M70-74 age and 90- 100 kg weight class and was the oldest competitor at the Swiss Single Lift Championships 2023 (SDFPF) in Yverdon-les-Bains on 30 September. I set three new Swiss records: 105 kg squat, 100 kg bench press and 180 kg deadlift. I’m pleased that I achieved a better squat than in any previous SDFPF competition and was only 5 kg and 10 kg off my best bench press and deadlift in competition. Here are the three record lifts.
My younger son Felix Strong competed at the World Drug Free Single Lift Championship in Sardinia on 2-4 June this year. My previous post included videos of his three lifts for squat, bench press and deadlift. He competed in the 16-17 year age category (T2) and the <82.5 kg weight category and set a new world record of 260 kg for the deadlift, and two Swiss records for the squat (180 kg) and bench press (115 kg).
We also purchased some photos taken by a professional photographer, Luca Antonio Piga, and I’ve posted some of them below.
After setting three Swiss records and a world record at the Swiss Full Powerlifting Championship in March this year (see earlier post), my younger son Felix Strong was invited by the Swiss Drug Free Powerlifting Federation to compete at the World Single Lift Championship in Sardinia on 2-4 June. This WDFPF competition was held in Alghero on the northwest coast of Sardinia. Felix, accompanied by his father (me) and mother, flew to Olbia on the northeast coast on 30 May. We spent a couple of days exploring the Olbia region before driving across to Alghero on 1 June.
Felix did extremely well, setting a new world record for the deadlift in his age-weight class, and new Swiss records for the squat and bench press. He competed in the T2 (16-17 year) age category having turned 17 earlier in 2023 and in the 75-82.5 kg weight class. As each lift was a separate competition on a different day, he had to weigh in each morning. His weight ranged from 81.5 to 82.2 kg.
The video below shows his world record deadlift of 260 kg. This exceeded the previous record of 255 kg for his age-weight class by 5 kg. Apart from coming first in his age-weight category, he also came third overall in the weight category (75-82.5 kg), which included around 30 men of all ages. As the Italian commentator said, “È straordinario!”
I discovered I had osteoarthritis in both knees in early 2015. I found strength training very helpful and I took up powerlifting, competing at national level from 2017 to 2021 in the 60-64 then 65-69 year age category. I had a total knee replacement (TKR) of the left knee in March 2022.
Before doing the TKR, I spoke to my surgeon about what I would still be able to do with a TKR and also searched the web for information. My surgeon echoed the standard advice that high impact activities such as running and jumping should be avoided completely, as should activities that involve aggressive pivoting (tennis, basketball, most martial arts). A few specifically mention Olympic weightlifting as involving high impact and should be avoided (for example here). Even so, I have come across people who have continued to run or do martial arts after joint replacement.
My younger son Felix Strong trained hard this year for the Swiss Full Powerlifting Championship in Lausanne on 25 March. He competed in the T2 (16-17 year) age category having turned 17 a month earlier, and in the 75-82.5 kg weight class.
Felix sets a new world record of 245 kg for the unequipped deadlift during a full powerlifting competition
He did extremely well, setting new Swiss records for all three lifts and for the total: squat 172.5 kg, bench press 110 kg, deadlift 245 kg and total 520 kg (1146 lb). His deadlift was almost 15 kg higher than the current world record of 230.5 kg and the Swiss Drug Free Powerlifting Federation has submitted it to the world body (WDFPF) for approval as the new world record. Short videos of his three lifts are below.
I equipped a garage gym during the Covid-19 lock-downs at the urging of my older son and my younger son has now also caught the strength training bug. My older son is focusing on Olympic weightlifting, which involves explosive lifts to chest or overhead. The competition lifts are the snatch and the clean and jerk. My younger son has shown an aptitude for powerlifting with its three competition lifts: the squat, the bench press and the deadlift.
I suggested he compete in the Swiss Drug Free Single Lift and Powerlifting Championships 2022 on 25 September. He set new Swiss single lift records for bench press (95 kg) and dead lift (210 kg) in the 16-17 year age category and the under 82.5 kg weight category. The short video below shows his 210 kg deadlift.
“Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe we don’t have it.” Jerry A. Coyne (Professor of Evolution and Ecology) commenting on Sam Harris’s book Free Will. An Australian Professor Daniel Stojar is an example of the many people who simply refuse to believe we don’t have free will, saying “It seems as obvious as anything that we have free will. ….. We are free to move our finger. That is neither determined nor random — it’s a choice we can feel in our bones.”
How universal is this belief that we have free will in the ordinary sense, not in the philosopher’s compatibilist sense?
The general public
Surveys of lay public views on free will have been difficult to interpret because of differences and limitations in how the researchers conceptualized and thought about free will. For example, Nahmias and co-authors (2005) carried out a study in which they presented what they saw as a deterministic scenario and asked respondents if the person acted of their own free will. Most say yes, and they interpret this to mean people think free will is compatible with determinism. I think the simpler explanation is that they think people act with free will (in the ordinary sense) even when they are told to consider a scenario in which a computer can predict the act. In fact, some people explicitly rejected that the computer could predict and had to be told to assume it would. But many probably thought that and didn’t make an explicit objection.
Recent research provides clear cross-cultural evidence that a majority of the lay public believe in free will in the ordinary sense – that we are the conscious authors of our own choices. Sarkassian et al (2010) found that subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia exhibited a surprising degree of cross-cultural convergence in belief in free will. An online survey of adults in the USA and Singapore found that 82% of US respondents believed in free will and 85% in Singapore. Other studies have found that few lay people appear to conceptualize free will in the compatibilist sense.
The fact that the Christian religion explicitly requires free will to justify the concepts of sin and eternal punishment, and that the majority of people in Western countries have this Christian cultural background at minimum, means that almost certainly the term free will is not interpreted in a compatibilist way by most people in countries with a Christian history and probably those with predominantly Muslim culture.
Philosophers
David Bourget and David Chalmers surveyed 1,972 philosophy faculty members at 99 institutions and received results from 931 of them. Most of the universities were in English-speaking countries and in other countries were chosen for strength in analytic philosophy. Before getting to free will, I note that they found 73% of philosophers were atheists and 56.5% were physicalists re the mind.
The survey found that 59% of philosophers were compatibilists, 14% libertarians, 12% thought there was no free will, and 15% had other views. As libertarians believe in free will in the normal sense, and compatibilists do not, this means that 71% of philosophers do not believe in free will (in the ordinary sense) and only 14% do. For the sake of figures that add to 100%, I will assume that the 15% “other views” split in the same proportions between free will and no free will, so that overall 84% of philosophers do not believe in free will in the ordinary sense, and 16% do.
Scientists
Following publication of an article on free will, Scientific American conducted a reader poll and found that 59% of the 4,672 respondents endorsed the idea that free will existed and 41% thought that it didn’t. This is clearly a self-selecting sample of readers of Scientific American, who I would assume to be more determinist than the average person and so have a lower percentage believing in free will. From the respondent comments, it seemed clear to me that most people were interpreting free will in the normal sense not the compatibilist sense.
As noted in my previous post, Einstein did not believe in free will. Other scientists, eminent and not eminent, who have concluded that we do not have free will include evolutionary biologists Charles Darwin and Jerry Coyne, physicist Stephen Hawking, the psychologists Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, and neuroscientists Wolf Singer, Chris Frith, Anil Seth and Sam Harris. Indeed, a number of philosophers have publicly complained about all these upstart scientists who pontificate on free will without any understanding of the lengthy debates that philosophers have had.
However, its probably not the case that scientists in general do not think we have free will. Some look for chinks in the determinist view in the unpredictability of complex chaotic systems or the unpredictability of quantum events. Roger Penrose is a prominent example of the latter. And many, not given to introspection or meditation simply do not question their felt experience.
Graffin and Provine (2007) carried out a survey of 149 eminent evolutionary biologists on their beliefs about free will and religion. Their questionnaire offered evolutionary scientists only two choices on the question about human free will: A, all organisms are locally determined by heredity and environment, but humans still possess free will; B, all organisms are locally determined by heredity and environment, and humans have no free will. To the authors’ surprise, 79 percent of the respondents chose option A for this question, indicating their belief that people have free will despite being determined by heredity and environment. Only 14 percent chose no free will, and 7 percent did not answer the question.
They considered whether the respondents who chose option A were thinking of free will as choice in the compatibilist sense, but noted that this view was not mentioned in the interviews with selected respondents or in the many comments generated by the free will question.
One of the authors had been polling his undergraduate evolution class each year on belief in free will. He found that year after year, 90% or more favoured the idea of human free will for a very specific reason: They think that if people make choices, they have free will. The professional debate about free will has moved far from this position, because what counts is whether the choice is free or determined, not whether human beings make choices. People and animals both certainly choose constantly. Comments from the eminent biologists suggest that they were equating human choice and human free will. In other words, although eminent, the respondents had not thought about free will much beyond the students in introductory evolution classes.
Free will and moral responsibility
Sam Harris discusses in some detail the issue of how belief or lack of belief in free will affects people’s judgements of moral responsibility and impacts decisions about penalties and punishments by society. He makes the point that a person remains responsible for their acts whether or not they have free will, and that society should impose appropriate consequences for a number of reasons: to deter such acts in future, to protect society from dangerous people, to compensate others for harm incurred. What would be different is that there would no longer be a justification for punishment as retribution for making a wrong choice. All of this struck me as sensible and, like Harris, I think that we would be better off as a society in eliminating retributive punishment for the sake of retribution alone.
Last week I was discussing free will with a friend who said that he had also come to the conclusion that free will was an illusion. He had explained this to his teenage children who responded that in that case they no longer had to do their homework. I was quite puzzled about this reaction, it made no sense to me at all except as a typical teenage response of seeking to use anything they could think of to try to avoid unpleasant activities. But logically, I could not see why ceasing to believe in free will would lead you to stop doing things you had been doing up till then.
In do a review of the empirical literature on free will belief, I discovered a large body of research which has shown that changing a person’s belief in free will does result in behavioural change. Studies using deterministic arguments to undermine people’s belief in free will have led to a number of negative outcomes including increased cheating and aggression. It has also been linked to worse job performance, a reduction in helping behaviours and lowered feelings of gratitude. As with my anecdote about children and homework, I have trouble understanding why this would happen.
One strand of explanation looks at belief in free will as necessary to supply the requisite motivation to maintain a strong sense of ethical duty and responsibility ( an argument made by Smilansky here). Others assume that people decide if there is no free will “they cannot be held accountable, no one’s to blame, and everything’s permitted, right?” Which of course, does not follow at all.
Both these proposed explanations would apply only to people for whom the threat of punishment or the promise of reward are primary determining factors for actions. These are people at stage 1 of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. People at stage 2 and stage 3 of moral development would not change their behaviour if they ceased to believe they had free will.
A third interpretation of people changing behaviour when they cease to think they have free will is that they are confusing determinism with fatalism. That what will happen will happen and their choice of action will make no difference to the result. Again, this is a completely incoherent reaction.
A number of philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Saul Smilansky have concluded that, in Smilansky’s words “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will”. Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this. He argues that the fact that free will is an illusion is something that should be kept within the ivory tower.
Nietzsche called free will “a theologians’ artifice” that permits us to “judge and punish.” And many thinkers have believed, as Smilansky does, that institutions of judgment and punishment are necessary if we are to avoid a fall into barbarism. Like Harris, I think that relinquishing a belief in free will in the ordinary way could allow society should move away from barbaric and ineffective punishments based on retribution, in favour of evidence-based penalties and other responses which protect society, deter bad behaviour and maximise rehabilitation.
Its difficult not to conclude that free will is a concept with religious roots that should have been discarded ages ago. Accepting this would also free us from hatred. Blaming people makes us angry and vengeful, and that clouds our judgment. Harris’s book makes this argument in more detail as does a 2016 article in The Atlantic.
The philosophers however are probably right in thinking that the illusion of free will is so strong that there is really not much need to worry about possible negative consequences of people seeing that it is an illusion. The general population in most countries has a long way to go before most adults are beyond Kohlberg Level 1 or 2 morality.
Like most people, it seemed obvious to me that we have free will and up until about three years ago, I had not thought about it much or questioned it. Then I read Sam Harris’ small book Free Will (2012, Free Press) which made the case that we do not have free will. In my previous posts on consciousness, I noted that Annaka Harris, David Chalmers and Anil Seth all had some discussion of free will in their books. So I re-read Sam Harris’s book, now with a much deeper understanding of its relationship to consciousness, and came away largely convinced that he is right in seeing free will as an illusion.
Free Will is a very short book, 66 pages of main text amounting to around 15,000 words. It is very well written and jargon-free and makes a very strong case that free will is an illusion. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. Well worth reading, whatever your views on free will.
For most people, consciousness not only involves a sense of self but also the feeling of being in control of your actions, of being the author of your thoughts. In other words, you have free will, the ability to consciously choose among potential decisions or actions. I refer to this as free will in the ordinary sense. This idea of free will emerges from a felt experience, and most people do not question it. That included me until relatively recently.
Three main positions on free will
Harris notes that in the philosophical literature we find three main approaches to the problem: determinism, compatibilism and libertarianism. Determinists believe that our thoughts and actions are fully determined by internal and external background causes and free will is an illusion. Compatibilists accept determinism and redefine “free will” as being free from any outer or inner coercions that would prevent the person from acting on his actual desires and intentions.
Libertarians (no relation to the political philosophy) believe that free will occurs outside of physical causation, whether as the causal action of consciousness on the physical brain or perhaps via metaphysical entities such as a soul. While both determinists and libertarians believe determinism and free will are incompatible, I will refer to libertarians in this review as incompatibilists to avoid confusion with the extreme right-wing political libertarians. Harris notes that our modern understanding of brain and behaviour strongly supports a determinist view and that “today, the only philosophically respectable way to endorse free will is to be a compatibilist”.
David Bourget and David Chalmers surveyed 931 philosophy faculty members at 99 institutions in many countries and found that 12% of philosophers were determinists, 59% compatibilists, 14% incompatibilists, and 15% had other views. Leaving other views aside, this means that 71% of philosophers do not believe in free will in the ordinary sense and only 14% do. This means that almost three quarters of philosophers agree with Sam Harris’ case that (ordinary) free will is an illusion, except that some are quite angry with him for not accepting their redefinition of free will as the freedom from coercion (more of this later).
Objective evidence
Harris’s case rests on objective, scientific observations on the one hand, and subjective evidence from introspection and meditation on the other hand. The scientific evidence includes:
Observations that brain activity occurs a significant time interval before conscious awareness of the intention to do something.
Given the right experimental manipulations, people can be led to believe that they consciously intended an action, when they neither chose it nor had control over their movements.
Hypnotized people who are asked why they have done things that were suggested by the hypnotist will confabulate reasons for their actions that have nothing to do with the actual reason.
To this I would add the experiments done with split brain patients, where an action is requested to one side only of the split brain. When the patient is asked via the other side of the split brain why they did that action, the other side will invent a plausible reason that it believes.
Subjective evidence
Sam Harris devotes more of his book to discussion of our subjective experience, arguing that free will is not only an illusion, but it doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us. Introspection soon shows us that thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds. As an experienced meditator, I am well aware that my thoughts appear spontaneously in my mind, and I can no more decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises in my mind. To directly observe this is to understand that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. You might respond that you can think connected chains of thought, but meditators know that these arise and cease for reasons outside our conscious control.
Part of the felt experience of free will is to feel that you could have chosen to do something other than what you did, to think the thought “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever you did do. But it is not possible to go back and make a different decision. This is an untestable belief. The perception that you could have, is actually an understanding that you could make a different decision if similar circumstance arose in the future. And that is likely true, particularly if what you did do last time had undesirable consequences. Read Harris for a fuller discussion of this.
What do the authors of the other books on consciousness that I have been reading think about free will? Anneka Harris agrees with Sam Harris and summarizes the same case, probably just as well since she is married to him. I briefly discuss the views of the other authors below.
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennet is a compatibilist who agrees with Sam that we do not have free will and our choices are determined, not free. But he redefines free will as the freedom to do what is determined and is very aggressive about attacking Harris for claiming there is no free will (even though Harris is talking about the type of free will he agrees is an illusion). Einstein expressed this compatibilist view very clearly as follows: In a 1929 interview in The Saturday Evening Post, he said: ‘I do not believe in free will. I believe with Schopenhauer: we can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.’
Dennett has written a book Freedom Evolves (2003) in which he defends his compatibilist view that that the concept of free will should be redefined so that it no longer involves a free choice among alternatives but rather refers to our freedom to do that one thing that we must wish to do, in other words our freedom from coercion. I think even this definition is incoherent, since if there is external coercion, it is just one of the external determining factors in the determination of our choice (either to change it because we are coerced, or to not change it and suffer the consequence of the coercion). As Eyal Moses’ 2010 review of his book stated:
“For Dennett, the significance of free will is that it is the basis of morality and moral responsibility, of engaging in moral judgment and holding people responsible for their actions. His thesis is that while free will in the ordinary sense is an illusion, these consequences of free will are real and compatible with his deterministic model of the universe, so free will should be redefined to refer to these consequences. Dennett suggests that calling an action “freely chosen” should not mean that the person had some other possible alternative action (which Dennett claims is never true), but rather should mean that we are justified in holding the person morally responsible for that action.”
Dennett has written a long, condescending and incoherent review of Sam Harris’ book. Harris has responded to this here, and Daniel Miessner has written a devastating critique of Dennett’s arguments and examples in his review of Harris’s book. Miessner summarizes Dennett’s position as (1) We have free will because we feel like we do and (2) It’s useful to hold people responsible for their actions, so we must tell people that free will is real.
If you want to dig a little deeper into the issues around understanding the true nature of free will, I can recommend reading Dennett’s review, Sam Harris’ response and Miessner’s detailed critique.
David Chalmers
Chalmers made a fairly strong case in his book that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of mental functioning and itself has no causal role. But he resisted drawing this conclusion, saying he is agnostic and hopes to find some subtle role for consciousness in causing behaviour. Annaka Harris identifies such a potential causal role for the behaviour of someone who is reporting on their experience of meditating on their empty consciousness (formless awareness). Its hard to imagine how a zombie could exhibit such behaviour.
Chalmers examines a number of potential strategies for avoiding epiphenomenalism but concludes that none of them justify rejecting the conclusion that consciousness is mostly epiphenomenal, perhaps with some subtle exceptions. This clearly is fundamental to the issue of whether or not we have free will, and I find it odd that Chalmers does not discuss free will directly. He is on record as saying he does not have strong feelings about free will. For some reason, he appears to act coy around expressing a view on free will, though he is clearly sceptical and tending towards compatibilism, saying in the Scientific American interview that “If it just means you can do what you want to do, then, well, that seems pretty straightforward. If it’s the ability to do something completely non-deterministic, well, I don’t know if we have that.”
Anil Seth
Anil Seth also comes down very clearly on the side of no “spooky free will” (free will where consciousness causally intervenes in the flow of physical events). He discusses in some detail how intentions are formed in the brain before we become aware of making a decision and the very strong feeling that our “self” has made the decision and is causing the action. He is also a compatibilist, also quoting Schopenhauer in slightly different words “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
But Seth, somewhat like Dennett, is clearly unwilling to state that free will is an illusion. Indeed, he says that the conscious experience of volition is as real as any other conscious perception, such as a visual experience of colour. I find it somewhat difficult to take him seriously after he has just reviewed at length all the neurological experiments showing brain activity a significant time before a conscious volition is experienced and that people will experience volition if they are fooled into thinking they are controlling a series of events or the real cause is hidden from them.
What Seth actually means by saying the experience of volition is “real” is that it is indeed an experience we have, even though it does not reflect a reality in which our “self” makes choices from a range of options, any of which the self could have chosen. Seth argues that the reason we have this experience of volition is that it is indispensable to our survival and assists us to realize that we can learn from our previous “voluntary” actions, to possibly make a different choice next time. He may well be right.
In conclusion
The objective evidence, well discussed in some detail by Anil Seth, and the subjective evidence, well laid out by Sam Harris, and which I have also examined in some depth, together make a strong case that free will in the ordinary sense, is an illusion, or as Sam Harris puts it more strongly, even the illusion of free will is an illusion. It seems to me very likely that not only are free will and the sense of a conscious self illusions, but that consciousness is largely along for the ride, and plays at most only a limited causal role in behaviour and thought.
I have not touched on the implications of this for moral responsibility. Sam Harris spends quite a bit of time discussing this in his book, and Daniel Dennett sees moral responsibility as necessary and that it justifies redefining free will so people can be told they have it. There is quite a body of empirical evidence around this issue and I will examine it, as well as evidence on the free will beliefs of the general population and specific groups, in Part 2 of this post on free will.
In my fifth post in this series, I review Anil Seth’s 2021 book Being You. See here, here, here, and here for the previous posts. I read a Guardian review of this book in August 2021 which raved about it, as did various other reviewers. So, I went out and bought it, and when it came, I started to read it. It annoyed me so much (see below) that I put the book aside until recently. Seth is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Surrey, highly cited for his publications, and also a prolific popularizer of his views on consciousness (New Scientist, Scientific American, TED talks etc).
Seth starts well in the Prologue, with the comment that “consciousness is a mystery that matters. For each of us, our conscious experience is all there is. Without it there is nothing at all: no world, no self, no interior and no exterior.” But he continues with “For me, a source of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. The goal of consciousness science should not be ‑‑ at least not primarily ‑‑ to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place.”
The book is divided into four parts. In the first, Seth describes his approach to the study of consciousness. He also deals with attempts to measure the presence and level of consciousness. The second examines how the brain produces the contents of consciousness, and the third examines the sense of self and conscious selfhood. The fourth and final part, examines what his approach to the study of consciousness has to say about animal consciousness and the possibility of sentient machines.
The hard problem of consciousness
Seth defines consciousness as “any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. …. Whenever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness.” He quotes Chalmers’ description of “the hard problem” before going on to say that his preferred philosophical position, and the default assumption of many neuroscientists is physicalism (synonymous with materialism, the view that consciousness is an emergent property of arrangements of physical stuff). At the other extreme to physicalism is idealism, the idea that consciousness or mind is the ultimate source of reality and matter emerges from mind. Seth then notes that various forms of dualism “sit awkwardly in the middle” and few philosophers or scientists now sign up for dualistic views. He doesn’t explicitly mention Chalmers’ naturalistic dualism, though he does describe functionalism as an influential form of physicalism. Functionalism is the idea that consciousness does not depend on what a system is made of, but only on what the system does, on the functions it performs. Chalmers is actually a functionalist, though not a physicalist.
Seth also mentions panpsychism and mysterianism. Panpsychism is summarily dismissed as not leading to any testable hypotheses, and mysterianism as unjustly pessimistic.
He then defends physicalism through an attack on so-called `zombie’ thought experiments. He argues, in my view fairly correctly, that the ability to imagine a philosophical zombie is an extremely weak argument that may have no bearing on the actual possibility of such a creature. However, he does not mention any of Chalmers’ other four arguments for the non-supervention of consciousness on the physical. To my simple mind, Seth just assumes that consciousness is an emergent property of physical brains without argument and ignores completely the mystery of how a first-person subjective experience can emerge from an arrangement of physical things, by their nature objective and third-person. How can an interior emerge from exteriors: the hard problem.
The `real’ problem of consciousness
Seth then explains that his aim is to address the “real” problem of consciousness, not the hard problem. According to the “real problem”, the main aims of consciousness science are to explain why a particular conscious experience is the way it is, in terms of physical mechanisms and processes in the brain and body. Why does a particular pattern of brain activity map to a particular kind of conscious experience?
This is of course an interesting question, but for me Seth is essentially avoiding the hard problem. He recognizes it exists (unlike Dennett) but simply decides that science should be about what seems tractable to him, and that is mapping and understanding the correlations between the brain activity and the conscious experience. As Chalmers also recognized, of course consciousness is systematically associated with physical structures and functions (see previous post). Seth is dismissive of the hard problem, saying: “the real problem is distinct from the hard problem, because it is not, at least in the first instance, about explaining why and how consciousness is part of the universe in the first place. It does not hunt for a special sauce that can magic consciousness from mere mechanism.”
In the rest of this first part of the book, Seth sets out to identify various neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). He first examines the search for NCC to identify how conscious someone is, on a scale from complete absence of conscious experience (eg. in a coma or under anaesthesia) all the way to “vivid states of awareness that accompany normal waking life”. No mention of altered or non-ordinary states. A chapter follows in which Seth describes various advances in using EEG, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyse brain function and identify levels of consciousness in terms of a measure of the “algorithmic complexity” of certain brain waves./i
Seth describes meeting the psychedelics research Robin Carhart-Harris and applying his “algorithmic complexity” measure of consciousness level to the brain scans of people who had taken psychedelics. He found that the level was increased relative to the baseline level of waking rest. Seth describes several similar measures of brain order-disorder and says none of them work very well. I’m not surprised, the theory itself is misguided and probably has little or nothing to do with consciousness.
In the next Chapter, Seth reviews an even more elaborate information-based measure Φ (phi), which is supposed to be the additional amount of information generated by the system as a whole, over and above the information generated by its parts. Apart from the fact that Φ cannot be calculated or measured for a brain (which Seth admits), its proponents make the claim that Φ (or integrated information) is identical to consciousness. This claim is completely unbased in any evidence, theory or argument and strikes me as typical of people who want their science to be “physics-like” and simply borrow concepts such as entropy and claim they explain something else.
This is the point I got to in my first attempt to read the book where I got so annoyed that I put it down for over a year. This sort of idiocy could only be dreamed up by the one third of people who simply don’t think the hard problem really exists, and that of course includes most neuroscientists.
Creating the contents of consciousness
On my second reading, I pushed past the Φ nonsense into the second part of the book, which how the brain creates the contents of consciousness. In brief, Seth argues (correctly) that the contents of consciousness are essentially controlled hallucinations, in which the brain generates predicted perceptions about the causes of sensory inputs, and continually corrects and updates these perceptions as new or clearer sensory inputs become available. What we perceive is tied to, controlled by, causes in the world, but is not just a reflection of “things out there”.
Seth examines how this occurs for various senses, including a few beyond the traditional “five senses” such as proprioception. I found these chapters very interesting.
A brief aside now. He discusses our sense of time and states categorically that we have no internal pacemaker, our time perception comes from a “best guess” about the rate of change of sensory signals, without any need for an inner clock. He quotes a number of experiments that he thinks confirms this. But my direct experience contradicts this.
My first example is a time when I was had a fairly large garden project and used self-hypnosis to give myself a command to wake at 5 am each morning to do a couple of hours work on it. I did not want to use an alarm clock so as not to disturb my wife. I actually woke within a minute or two of five o’clock almost every day for over two months. My second example is an experience I have often had when using an alarm clock to wake each morning for work. Every now and then I experience a period of several days, sometimes more, where I wake each morning one minute before the alarm goes off. I either have an accurate internal clock or while asleep my brain is able to tap into sensory signals of some sort and very accurately predict how much time is passing, to the minute. I mention this because it seems to me a typical example where neurologists extrapolate unjustified conclusions from fairly primitive experiments on limited samples and do not think to review the broader experiences of large numbers of people or identify individuals who may have outlier abilities.
This second part is well worth reading, and I agree with most of it, but it has little to do with the hard problem, though Seth thinks it makes the hard problem a non-problem. I am guessing that like the philosophers Seth has no experience with meditation, or of consciousness when its contents drop away. As I described in my previous post, it is possible to eventually turn your conscious attention away from other sensory contents and thought and back on itself. To sit simply aware of awareness. That is the fundamental essence of the hard problem: how does that awareness arise. It simply cannot be an emergent property arising from the brain and its production of perceptions because the awareness that experiences those perceptions is not those perceptions and remains when perceptions of everything except first-person awareness drop away.
The illusion of the self
In the third part of the book, Seth examines the sense of a “self” that we usually feel is what is experiencing consciousness. He notes that Buddhists have “long argued that there is no such thing as a permanent self and through meditation have attempted to reach entirely selfless states of consciousness” though he does not seem to understand that many meditators do reach such selfless states, albeit usually only for a short period of time. It’s the selfless stage of consciousness that is rarely reached. The experience of selfless states is empirical evidence, albeit first-person data not the outside observer data that Seth is more comfortable with as a scientist. Seth also notes that psychedelics can result in experiences of no-self (and in my experience, also in drastically altered senses of self).
Seth identifies several types of selfhood that we experience: the embodied self (our experience of our body) the perspectival self (our first-person perspective), the volitional self (our perception that we have free will), the social self (how I perceive that others perceive me) and the narrative self (our remembered past and anticipated future). Seth argues (convincingly to me) that these diverse elements of selfhood are normally bound together in a unified experience, together with a perception (not really accurate) that our selfhood is enduring and little changing. He argues that the brain has evolved to produce this sense of selfhood in a similar way to how it produces predicted perceptions as a tool to enhance the survival of the individual. The self is another controlled hallucination that operates to support the fundamental biological drive to survive and reproduce.
Seth appears to think that losing the sense of the reality of the self is bodily regulation gone deeply awry, a severe psychiatric problem. That may be the case in some specific psychiatric conditions but is certainly not the experience of meditators who taste the no-self state, quite the opposite.
This part of the book finishes with yet another chapter on a pretend-physics theory of living organisms and a chapter on free will. The free will chapter is excellent and thought-provoking but I will leave that topic for a later post.
Animal and machine consciousness
The last part of the book examines the issue of whether other animals are conscious and whether machines can be conscious. The animal chapter is a fascinating read. Other than mammals which Seth argues likely mostly have some form of consciousness as their brains are so similar to ours, Seth explores the very alien consciousness of the octopus and this is indeed a fascinating read. Highly recommended.
The chapter on machine consciousness makes the very valid point that intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing and many make the assumption that achieving artificial general intelligence will automatically bring consciousness. Seth is sceptical and also is agnostic on the requirement of functionalism, the idea that consciousness depends only on function not on the material from which a system is made. Another excellent discussion, which I mainly leave for a separate post on machine consciousness.
In summary
Anil Seth is one of the one-third of people who simply don’t “get” the hard problem of consciousness. He thinks progress on his “real” problems will not solve but dissolve the hard problem. The parts of the book where he delves into pretend physics theories of consciousness are annoying and silly. But the rest of the book where he addresses the way that the brain produces perceptions via “controlled hallucinations” and that the sense of self is one of these controlled hallucinations is an excellent and enjoyable read. I learnt a lot about how visual and other illusions provide evidence of how the brain produces perceptions adjusted for its best guesses of the errors in the sensory inputs.
Seth has looked at some aspects of psychedelic experiences, though he largely ignores the very large body of subjective first-person evidence of non-ordinary states of consciousness and the theoretical work to develop maps of states and stages of consciousness. He also completely ignores first-person evidence from meditative experiences, and indeed seems to see the Buddhist insight that the self is an illusion as a belief not as a result of empirical observations.
A book well worth reading but try not to let the sections on pretend-physics grand theories put you off completely. Take them lightly or skip them; the rest of the book is full of fascinating information and arguments.
In my fourth post in this series, I review David Chalmer’s 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. See here, here and here for the previous posts. This is a long and often technical book (about 395 pages) though Chalmers has kindly flagged the Chapters and Sections that he recommends non-philosophers read and has asterisked the headings of Sections that he considers technical details likely of interest only to philosophers. I read some but not all asterisked sections, and I have to say that it is indeed the most technical and “academic” work of philosophy I have read in decades. But let’s dive into it.
The hard problem of consciousness
It was like a breath of fresh air to read the introductory chapter. Instead of dismissing consciousness as an illusion, Chalmers sees it as the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe. He coined the phrase “the hard problem” around 1994 and it caught on. In contrast to the hard problem of why we have first-person experience, issues such as how the brain processes environmental stimuli, or how it integrates information into a coherent whole, might be called “easy” problems, and many books about consciousness, such as Dennett’s, are largely about the easy problems. Consciousness remains a big, deep mystery about which science has almost nothing to say, and where there is no agreement even in the broad about how consciousness occurs.
Chalmers says he has found that around one-third of people think that solving the easy problems explains everything that needs to be explained about consciousness, and around two thirds hold that there is a further “hard” problem. This ratio is fairly constant across academics and students in a variety of fields. He sets out explicitly to address the hard problem and to develop at least a basis for a scientific theory of consciousness though he recognizes that it is not open to investigation by the usual scientific methods.
He outlines a set of constraints within which attempts to obey in this quest. First, to take consciousness seriously and not redefine it as something else (as per Dennett). Second, to take science seriously in the domains where it has authority. Third, to take consciousness to be a natural phenomenon.
Two fundamental questions about consciousness
In the Introduction and Chapter 1, Chalmers clarifies what he means by consciousness. It’s the way we experience the world, the way it feels to us subjectively. Using the phrase Nagel made famous in 1974, Chalmers says “We can say that a being is consciousness if there is something it is like to be that being …”
Chalmers identifies two fundamental questions about consciousness that we currently cannot answer. (1) Why does conscious experience exist and how does it arise in physical systems, and (2) why do conscious experiences have their particular nature? Why does the experience of red differ from the experience of blue?
First, Chalmers draws our attention to the range of conscious experiences by presenting a set of examples ranging from visual experiences, through mental imagery, to emotions, and to our sense of self. It seems odd that he completely ignores non-ordinary states of consciousness though he touches on changes in consciousness with a discussion of how his visual experience dramatically changed as a child when he was fitted with glasses.
This leads into an important distinction that he makes between the psychological concept of mind and the phenomenal concept of mind. The phenomenal aspect of mind is conscious experience. The psychological aspect of mind refers to the mental states construed as the (ultimately physical) states relevant to the causation and explanation of behavior. It matters little or not at all whether these mental states are conscious or not. The materialist hopes that the phenomenal and psychological minds turn out to be the same thing, Chalmers argues that they are different things, a form of dualism.
Chalmers approaches the study of consciousness from a completely nonspiritual, nonreligious perspective. The dualism he advocates is governed by natural laws, it is just that these natural laws extend beyond the laws of our current sciences. He is not a mysterian, someone who throws their hands up and say that consciousness is a fundamental mystery outside the reach of human understanding. Rather he wants to understand and explain consciousness as a natural phenomenon.
Zombies and other arguments against a reductive materialist explanation
Chalmers argument against a materialist explanation of consciousness relies heavily on two things: supervenience and logically possible worlds. The definition of logical supervenience is as follows: B facts/properties logically supervene on A facts if no two logically possible worlds are identical with respect to their A facts while differing in their B facts. A phenomenon is reductively explainable in terms of low level physical facts if and only if it logically supervenes on those properties.
These issues are dealt with in detail in a long and philosophically technical chapter 2. Its worth reading to get a grasp of Chalmers’ arguments in following chapters, but it is a heavy read with technical terms such as “intension” and “instantiation” much used.
Chalmers then argues that everything in our world logically supervenes on the low-level physical facts except for consciousness. He actually gives five arguments in Chapter 3 for this conclusion. The first and third, which I find the most compelling, are the zombie argument and the epistemic asymmetry argument.
The zombie argument is that it is logically possible to imagine zombies who are just like us, fuctionally, psychologically and behaviourally, but yet have no phenomenal mind, no experiences, nothing that it is like to be them. These are often referred to as philosophical zombies, as opposed to the Hollywood zombies who are functionally impaired. It is logically possible to imagine a world physically identical to ours inhabited by philosophical zombies. Therefore consciousness does not supervene on the physical facts. So consciousness cannot be reductively explained in terms of the physical and materialism is false.
The epistemic asymmetry argument stems from the fact that we know about it only through our own experience. Even if we had a completed theory of cognition (and biochemistry, chemistry, and physics) that information would not lead us to postulate consciousness. There is also the problem of other minds. Even if we know everything physical about other creatures, we do not know for certain if they are conscious. There is no problem with physical things like “other lives”, or other “economies” or “other heights”. Chalmers argues there is no epistemic asymmetry in these cases precisely because they are logically supervenient on the physical.
Chalmers concludes that consciousness cannot be logically supervenient “because a logically supervenient property can be detected straightforwardly on the basis of external evidence, and there is no special role for the first-person case.” This is as close as Chalmers comes in the whole book to saying in straightforward jargon-free terms why consciousness cannot be reduced to the physical. The physical is objective, third-person, the “outside”. Consciousness is subjective, first-person, the “inside”. It seems quite obvious to me that the subjective cannot derive from the objective, the first-person from the third-person, the inside from the outside.
Chalmers’ five arguments are all “intuition” pumps to help the skeptical see that consciousness does not logically supervene. Briefly, his other three arguments are:
2. The inverted spectrum. Imagine someone physically identical to you, but with different conscious experiences. For example, their experience of the colour spectrum is inverted relative to yours.
4. Someone raised in a black and white room could have complete knowledge of neuroscience but still have no idea what it is like to see green or any other colour.
5. The lack of any remotely plausible analysis of consciousness that can explain even in outline how it arises from non-conscious processes.
In the rest of Chapter 3, Chalmers examines in detail and refutes all the various objections that he thinks might be raised against his arguments and conclusion. As Dennett, caustically but wittily has said, “Chalmers never leaps to conclusions; he oozes to conclusions, checking off all the caveats and pitfalls and possible sources of error along the way with exemplary caution.” Dennett has concluded that nothing can shake Chalmers intuition that consciousness is not reductive to the physical, because he has presented excellent versions himself of every one of Dennett’s objections and failed to convince himself. Dennett in quite an entertaining attack then suggests a number of reasons Chalmers may “cling like a limpet” to dualism. These include that it is a parody of academic philosophic scholarship, or that it is a philosopher performing (I am a philosopher and this is what philosophers do). See Dennett’s 2012 article “The mystery of David Chalmers” for these and other entertaining observations.
I am quite sure that Chalmers is largely correct in his conclusions, but rather than writing in clear language for a general intelligent reader as Anaka Harris does, Chalmers is indeed “doing what philosophers do” and doing it in excruciating detail.
Naturalistic dualism
In Chapter 4, Chalmers examines the implications of his conclusion that consciousness is a feature of the world over and above the physical, and not reducible to it. However, consciousness is systematically associated with physical structures and functions. Chalmers develops this into the concept of “natural supervenience”, that there is an as yet unknown lawful association between the phenomenal mind and the psychological mind, between consciousness and physical processes. Again, a very technical and jargon-filled set of arguments. To my mind, its completely obvious that the inside (the first-person) is systematically associated with the outside (the third person).
Chalmers then suggests that a theory of consciousness could go one of two ways. First, that consciousness is a fundamental property alongside things such as charge, spin, etc. Second, that consciousness derives from some other class of more fundamental properties, which cannot be physical properties since consciousness is not supervenient on the physical.
Chalmers calls this position “naturalistic dualism” because it posits that everything is a result of basic properties and laws and is compatible with existing “physical” science. There need be nothing transcendental about consciousness, it is just another natural phenomenon. He then examines a range of possible objections to naturalistic dualism, particularly the concept of emergence of consciousness from complex systems, probably the dominant view among neuroscientists. Like Annaka Harris, Chalmers rejects emergence on the grounds that consciousness is not supervenient on the physical and so cannot be emergent from it. The first-person subjective cannot emerge from sufficiently complex arrangements of third-person objective things.
Annaka Harris says this much more clearly than Chalmers does: “when scientists assume they have bypassed the hard problem by describing consciousness as an emergent property — that is, a complex phenomenon not predicted by the constituent parts — they are changing the subject. All emergent phenomena — like ant colonies, snowflakes, and waves — are still descriptions of matter and how it behaves as witnessed from the outside. What a collection of matter is like from the inside and whether or not there is an experience associated with it is something the term “emergence” doesn’t cover. Calling consciousness an emergent phenomenon doesn’t actually explain anything, because to the observer, matter is behaving as it always does.”
Can consciousness play a causal role in events?
Next, Chalmers tackles the issue of whether consciousness is epiphenomenal. If all physical events are caused by physical causes, then consciousness cannot play a causal role in physical events, it is an epiphenomenon. Chalmers examines a number of potential strategies for avoiding epiphenomenalism but concludes that none of them justify rejecting the conclusion that consciousness is mostly epiphenomenal, perhaps with some subtle exceptions. This clearly is fundamental to the issue of whether or not we have free will, and I find it odd that Chalmers does not discuss free will directly. He is on record as saying he does not have strong feelings about free will. In any case, I will leave the issue of free will for a following post to examine.
In Chapter 7, Chalmers examines the issue of phenomenological judgements. This refers to when we use our cognition (thinking functions) to make judgements about the experience of consciousness. Chalmers argues that phenomenal judgements are themselves cognitive acts, and so fall within the domain of psychology and thus are not mysterious, potentially explicable scientifically, unlike consciousness. This leads to a paradox since our claims about consciousness should be reductively explicable in terms of cognitive science whereas consciousness is not.
Chalmers then argues that our judgements (and the things we say about the experience of consciousness) would be the same whether or not we actually experience consciousness. In other words, the zombie will describe experiences of consciousness exactly in the way that we do, although he does not experience consciousness. This simply makes no sense at all to me and seems like a convincing argument that the complete philosophical zombie is actually not a logical possibility. A zombie cannot report his experiences of consciousness in the same way that I do. In other words, there is an area where consciousness plays a causal role in behaviour.
Annaka Harris makes exactly the same point: “consciousness seems to play a role in behaviour when we think and talk about the mystery of consciousness. When I contemplate “what it’s like” to be something, that experience of consciousness presumably affects the subsequent processing taking place in my brain. And almost nothing I think or say when contemplating consciousness would make any sense coming from a system without it. How could an unconscious robot (or a philosophical zombie) contemplate conscious experience itself without having it in the first place?”
Why does Chalmers ignore the evidence from meditation?
Most people who have had sufficient training in meditation realize that an experience of consciousness needn’t be accompanied by thoughts—or any input to the senses, for that matter. I have experienced what it is like to be acutely aware of my subjective awareness in the absence of any content such as thought, sights, sounds, or other perceptions. I have practiced for many hours to become aware of my awareness as an observer of thoughts and sensory perception, that is separate from them. And then to take that awareness and turn it back on itself, letting thoughts and sensory perceptions fall away. While I might have difficulty finding words that can convey a sense of that experience, there are many such descriptions in the Zen literature, for example. I really don’t see how a zombie could carry out such a program, or report the experiences that result, let alone in similar terms to what I might report.
Chalmers’ explanation for how a zombie is still conceivable in theory is that the language and concepts of consciousness could be built into the program of a zombie. The unstated implication is that we could also have the same language and concepts of consciousness built into us. And the implication of that is that we also are not actually conscious, but our sense of the inexplicable wonder of consciousness is actually an illusion built into us somehow by evolutionary processes. This totally destroys Chalmers claim that consciousness is not reducible. The idea that its logically possible for zombies to replicate the outcomes of a long-term meditation practice seems nonsensical to me.
Chalmers would seem to have no real experience of meditation. In a 2017 interview with Chalmers, John Horgan reported that Chalmers has “never had the patience” for meditation, and he has doubts about basic Buddhist claims, such as anatta, the doctrine that the self does not really exist.
I find this astonishing. Chalmers has made the nature of consciousness his life’s work and understands intellectually that consciousness cannot be investigated using the third-person objective methods of science. But he apparently does not have the patience to investigate the very sophisticated first-person methods that have been developed over thousands of years to exactly investigate the nature of consciousness. While Chalmers is of course entirely free to doubt that the self does not really exist, it seems enormously arrogant to do this while dismissing the no-self experiences of many people, including myself, through meditation or through exploration with psychedelics.
Does functional organization fully determine conscious experience?
In chapters 6 and 7, Chalmers starts to outline a possible approach to developing a naturalistic dualist theory of consciousness. He argues for a general principle that consciousness is an organizational invariant, i.e., that “functional organization fully determines conscious experience. In other words, if a silicon brain is organized identically to a human brain, it will also be conscious. He did not present any evidence for this claim that I could see, and I don’t find it plausible. In another review, Eric Dietrich comments that this principle is unintuitive and not widely believed among philosophers.
Chalmers gives some thought experiments to argue for this principle: his examples show that, without it, humans could be massively mistaken about their experience of qualia (whether absent, fading or dancing). I found all these thought experiments unconvincing, not least because once Chalmers has decided that zombies can be programmed to think they are conscious even when they are not, then humans can also be massively mistaken about their actual experiences and his arguments self-implode.
Panpsychism: maybe not as silly as people tend to assume
Chapter 8 is even more speculative. Chalmers proposes that the basic stuff of the universe is information and that has two aspects: a phenomenal and a physical aspect. He largely lost me here. I did not find it at all compelling. But this leads him to consider panpsychism, since even simple systems containing information must then have associated experience. Of course, the experience of a simple system will not be associated with a mental life, a sense of self, or memory.
I discussed panpsychism in my previous post about Annaka Harris’s book, and that it is largely dismissed as ridiculous by scientists, who imagine it implies rocks must have human-like consciousness. Chalmers makes all the same points, very clearly, and also notes that panpsychism avoids the need to have consciousness wink-in or switch-on at some particular level of complexity. Rather it may be a universal property, with very simple systems having very simple phenomenology and very complex systems having very complex phenomenology.
Chalmers also discusses the possibility that we have various information-processing systems in the brain with associated consciousness, to which we do not have access. This indeed is what has been found in some split-brain patients. Chalmers concludes that his theory results in a variant of “outrageous” panpsychism, but it is a view that can grow surprisingly satisfying with reflection. I am inclined to agree with him.
In conclusion
The two final chapters deal with conscious machines and strong artificial intelligence (chapter 9) and quantum mechanics and consciousness (chapter 10). I will leave these subjects for later discussion.
While Chalmers does indeed take consciousness seriously and recognize that it is fundamentally different to physical functions and cannot be reductively explained, most of his philosophic machinery and some of the principles he argued for in the second half of the books I found unconvincing. Consciousness exists in the real world, it is our primary experience and in fact ALL our experiences of physical systems are mediated through consciousness. So consciousness must be explored using evidence, not by using thought experiments of what is guessed to be logically possible. And the primary evidence is direct personal exploration of consciousness through tools like meditation, breathwork, psychedelics. None of which Chalmers appears to have any interest in or experience with. Sure, these first-person experiences are much more difficult to work with than the objective observational tools of current science, but philosophical thought experiments about “logically possible” worlds are even less adequate for understanding such an important aspect of our reality.
Mountains and rivers 