I have written earlier about Sam Harris’ book Free Will, particularly a passage on page 8 where he cites the work of Benjamin Libet. To recap, in the 1970’s, Libet used EEG scans to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex region can be detected approximately 300 milliseconds before a person is consciously aware of having taken a simple decision to move his or her finger or wrist.

This work has been used as an argument against the notion of free will, and Harris doesn’t hesitate to press it into service:

These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. 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 “decision”, and believe you are in the process of making it. (Free Will, pg. 9)

It strikes me as curious that Harris should lean so heavily on an experiment that tests such a simple aspect of conscious human decision making. It is a big leap from trivial finger movements to more decisive or contemplative situations in life, where really significant issues of free will come into play.

A recent re-reading of Antonio Damasio’s 2012 brilliant discussion on human consciousness, Self Comes to Mind helped me to put this issue into perspective. In a sub-section towards the end of the book, entitled Self and the Issue of Control, Damasio talks about unconscious processes. Although clearly many of these processes are indeed unconscious for our entire lives — think of involuntary or instinctive actions like breathing, or recoiling from a sudden loud noise — others are first acquired as consciously performed and practised activities which subsequently become unconscious in their execution.

Colloquially, this is of course called learning. Indeed, to a certain extent, learning can simply be defined as that process by which we become capable of doing things unconsciously. Damasio writes:

When we walk home thinking about the solution of a problem rather than about the route we take, but still do get home safe and sound, we have accepted the benefits of a nonconscious skill that was acquired in many previous conscious exercises, following a learning curve. While we were walking home, all that our consciousness needed to monitor was the general goal of the trip. The rest of our conscious processes were free for creative use. (Self Comes to Mind, pg. 270)

It hardly needs to be said that this capacity for turning consciously learned activities into unconsciously executed ones is extremely beneficial, and from an evolutionary point of view surely helps with the survival of any species that masters it.

Nietzsche is reported to have written, “Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious.” (Annoyingly, I have not been able to find a reference to this quote, and so have to flag it as apocryphal. Can anyone help me to source this?)

This is an important point: The whole process of mastering complex tasks is founded on the strategy of gradually turning conscious actions into unconscious ones. This is what the notion of “mastering” something is all about. When you first learn to play an instrument such as the piano, you have to think consciously of everything from where the keys are, to the pressure you exert on them, to your posture on the piano stool. But gradually, your awareness of these things gives way, freeing you up to concentrate on more complex aspects of the music like interpretation of the score.

This conscious-to-unconscious process is ubiquitous, it is hierarchical, and it is extremely useful. It is the process by which we free ourselves from the mundane to concentrate on the important.

Given this, it is hardly surprising that when some neurological researcher asks you to “move your right index finger some time during the next 20 seconds”, it becomes a quasi-unconscious action, one you are perfectly happy to hand over to some dark cranny of your brain. Taken this way, using Libet’s research in an attempt to deny free will is truly ill-placed, and could be used to support the reverse argument. An extended passage by Damasio makes a much better point:

Last, the conscious-unconscious cooperative interplay also applies in full to moral behaviors. Moral behaviors are a skill set, acquired over repeated practice sessions and over a long time, informed by consciously articulated principles and reasons but otherwise ‘second-natured’ into the cognitive consciousness.
In conclusion, what is meant by conscious deliberation has little to do with the ability to control actions in the moment and everything to do with the ability to plan ahead and decide which actions we want or do not want to carry out. Conscious deliberation is largely about decisions taken over extended periods of time, as much as days or weeks in the case of some decisions, and rarely less than minutes or seconds. It is not about split-second decisions. Common knowledge regards lightning-speed choices as ‘thoughtless’ and ‘automatic’. (Self Comes to Mind, pg. 271)

There is a rich vein of material here, and I hope to write about it in future posts. But to close, I would add an aside.

Free will is a big issue, and it is somewhat surprising that Harris thought he could do justice to it in such a skimpy book. (The whole text including notes is just 76 small, sparsely filled pages.) Daniel Dennett wrote a review of the book shortly after it was published, that was, as Harris himself pointed out is a subsequent response, nearly as long as the book itself. It is not clear whether Harris was being sarcastic in making this point, but if he was, I would take issue with him. Free will is a complex issue of enormous importance, with a long history. Harris seems to think he can dispatch it in a breathtakingly dismissive fashion. It is hard not to see the book Free Will as more than a tad arrogant in this sense. Dennett’s review may be nearly as long as the book, but it only really goes to the length necessary to deal adequately with some of the issues involved. Brief: Dennett exercises due diligence. But Harris is a man in a hurry, as his overly simplistic discussion of Libet’s work demonstrates.

It is a great shame he couldn’t find the time to do a proper job.

©2016 Brad Varey