Choosing Not To Be A Determinist

These posts examine modern psychiatry from a critical point of view. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists usually react badly to any sort of critical analysis of their activities, labelling critics as “anti-psychiatry,” whatever that is. Regardless, criticism is an integral part of any scientific field and psychiatry is no different. As it emerges, there is a lot to be critical about.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

An acquaintance sent a commentary on free will, with the comment: “This gives me a headache.” He’s not the first. The notion that we humans are responsible for our actions is absolutely fundamental to all known societies. People are rewarded or punished according to their actions and I can’t imagine society otherwise. Even if a society were designed where everybody followed rules all the time (and no, we’re not there yet although they’re working on it), that would still be the result of somebody’s free choice. There are two conflicting definitions involved:

Free will says: Regardless of how I acted one minute ago, I could have acted differently.

Determinism says: Everything that happens now was determined by the state of affairs one minute ago.

While the idea of free will seems consistent with everything we know about ourselves, it runs into enough problems to make people look elsewhere. The problem is the ancient curse of minds, they can’t be pinned down in any scientific way. Whatever I say about my mind may seem completely wrong to you, and crazy to somebody else. As a guide, introspection is totally unreliable which is why people have looked for certainty elsewhere. Determinism is based on the idea either that minds don’t exist or they do but don’t count. For a determinist, everything that exists is the outcome of matter-energy interactions in the time-space universe as governed by physical laws and nothing else, just because there is nothing else. Essentially, what happens today anywhere in the universe was set in motion by the events of the Big Bang, or very shortly thereafter. All events within the universe can occur only in one possible way. If we had a complete knowledge of the physical state of the universe right now and of all the physical laws, we could correctly predict the future. There are no exceptions: even our sense of being in control of our lives is an illusion, governed by events billions of years ago. Determinism has been around for a long time but has always required adjustment to make space for an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent deity. Gods are a bit out of fashion these days so people talk about something called compatibilism, which says that this is a determinist universe but we also have free will. If you want a headache, tracing that tangled history is a good place to start. The reason it’s popular today is just because the idea of minds is so unfashionable, as philosopher Daniel Stoljar said: “We live in an overwhelmingly physicalist age...”

Even though it seems counter-intuitive, determinism’s appeal is that people don’t have to talk about the mind. They can sound terribly scientific and rational and not be led astray by sentiment and other squishy stuff. They talk sternly of humans as marionettes dangling from their strings which, in turn, are connected to some bigger cosmic machinery that hums along blindly. The mind as we experience it reduces to the physical brain with no loose ends and it’s only a matter of time until we clever scientists sort out the last few details. Theirs is a humdrum world with no souls, spirits, ghosts or divine forces floating around that we can’t account for. That’s the idea behind determinism; making sense of it has been a major headache for millennia. Even though physics and neurosciences have made gigantic advances over recent years, I don’t think we are any closer to a remotely plausible account of physical determinism. There are other versions, of course, there always are. Psychiatrists like genetic determination, that we’re simply the products of our genes. Prof. Ian Hickie, of Sydney Brain and Mind Centre, announced a while ago that our genes don’t just control our emotions, they control what we experience in life [1].

That has never made any sense to me. Years ago, I studied 250 military veterans, 200 from World War II who fought in New Guinea, and 50 from Vietnam. The fighting in New Guinea in 1944-45 was generally regarded as among the worst of the entire war, equal to Stalingrad and other horrors, so there were many casualties. The only question that needed an answer was: Does this veteran have a mental disorder or not? (Alzheimer’s disease was excluded, they went elsewhere). I had access to their full service records and verified they were all healthy when they enlisted. The study looked at five factors: Family background; pre-service adjustment (school, work, contact with police, fighting, drinking etc); duration of exposure to combat; perceived stress of combat; and presence of debilitating physical illnesses (malaria, dysentery, hepatitis etc.). A police record of any sort excluded them from service in infantry. The WWII veterans were eighteen when they enlisted (drinking age was 21) and they couldn’t afford to drink anyway. Drugs were not a problem before the Vietnam War.

It was immediately clear that family background and pre-service adjustment were irrelevant to the outcome. There was no difference between those who were given a psychiatric diagnosis and those who weren’t. When it came to psychiatric diagnoses, the other factors were highly significant. The outcome depended on how long the troops had been involved in actual combat, how bad it was for them, and their physical health at the time. The physical conditions in northern New Guinea were appalling. The troops had to crawl through mountains covered with dense jungle, soaking wet and bitten by every imaginable insect, but the Japanese were cut off by the island-hopping US Navy and could not retreat. They were not getting any supplies and were also indoctrinated to die for the emperor, preferably taking an enemy soldier with them. It was known that they were resorting to cannibalism to survive long enough to keep fighting, because surrender was unthinkable.

The veterans I saw had been selected from the available pool of recruits and were highly motivated to get in an infantry unit and stay there. Mostly they were from rural areas, areas I knew well. Needless to say, they had no idea what was going to happen to them. Most of them could put their finger on a particular day when they said everything changed, they “lost it” as people now say, and this was confirmed by their service records. Within a few days of a particularly bad incident, they began getting disciplinary charges which were recorded in red ink. A clear record suddenly started to show patches of red, mostly for trivial incidents but always getting worse. Their outcome had nothing to do with their genetic status and everything to do with what they had experienced. That is, their later mental state was determined by choices and events they experienced as adults, not by physics or genetics or early life experiences, which is what determinist theories claim.

So what has this to do with free will? It says: daily experience tells us that what we choose and what happens to us are major factors in life, so why would anybody think otherwise? The answer is that nobody has been able to devise a theory of psychology that allows free will that isn’t either (a) indistinguishable from magic or (b) doesn’t break the laws of physics. It has always seemed that if we try to escape the clutches of the physicists, we end up mired in magic but any non-magical theory will be pummeled by physics. Impasse: you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The biocognitive model offers a path out of this trap. It says: the mind is real, unlocalised, insubstantial and therefore not subject to the laws of physics. However, it is causally effective in that it can organise to do things in the real world like open the window. On the face of it, that’s a recipe for a magical soul or spirit but it isn’t magical. The mind is a natural phenomenon that arises from brain function in a predictable way. That seems contradictory, how can something be both real and natural but have no substance? In his Consciousness Explained from 1991, the late Daniel Dennett said that the final account of consciousness or mind will be counter-intuitive, just because we’ve tried all the obvious ones. That’s a reasonable comment but I don’t believe Dennett explained anything with that work or with his later output [2, Chap. 8 for details]. After endless twists and turns trying to avoid an insubstantial mind, he invoked something called a “virtual machine” to complete his program, even though he didn’t give any clues as to how it would arise. Sadly for him, a virtual machine just is unlocalised, insubstantial and not subject to the laws of physics, i.e. it meets the “design criteria” of the very thing he was trying to avoid.

This means the biocognitive model is still in the race: the idea of a natural (non-magical) but immaterial mind is sufficiently counter-intuitive to pass his test because those features seem incompatible. In fact, they’re not. The world today is full of natural, insubstantial but effective machines, but we don’t call them that, we call them information. Using its prodigious computational capacity, the brain generates an informational state (aka virtual machine) which does all the things we want a mind to do. That’s why the biocognitive model says the mind is natural: it is utterly dependent on the integrated function of the healthy brain. There is no more magic involved in the emergence of the mind than the emergence of something like an online bank or a service like eBay.

Information is the medium of mind and answers the question of free will: Yes, we have free will but No, determinism is wrong. It is wrong because it is based on the wrong argument. People are only attracted to it because the idea of a functioning, insubstantial mind is so difficult to grasp, so they give up. They say something like: “If a rock or a tree had free will, that would breach the laws of thermodynamics. Therefore if a physical brain has free will, that also breaks those laws.” The error lies in how they look at brains. They just look at the physical thing: if a brain in a pathologist’s bottle had free will, that would clearly break lots of laws. However, only a living brain is in the race to have free will, and living brains are very active things, consuming lots of oxygen and other nutrients to do a job.

If all the neurons in the brain are discharging at their normal leisurely rate but completely randomly, then obviously there would be no coherent mental activity. The owner of the brain would be in a coma, completely inert and unresponsive to the world. When he woke, he would have no memory of that time. On the other hand, if all those neurons were active in the coordinated manner dictated by the brain’s data-processing calculus, he would be awake and going about his daily life normally. That is, there is zero difference in the energy consumption of a non-functioning brain with no free will and one which is fully compos mentis, of sound mind making choices every second. This is crucial: in thermodynamic terms, free will is a free ride. A person in a vegetative state is still alive, that’s not in doubt, and so are trees. A tree consumes energy but, same as our peacefully sleeping subject, it has no data-processing capacity and therefore no free will. Converting our comatose subject to an alert person making decisions requires no further energy. The standard argument against free will, that it breaches the laws of thermodynamics, is wrong. Therefore the most powerful case for determinism falls in a heap, quickly followed by the whole physicalist program.

We live in a dualist universe, one where a material universe governed by the laws of physics exists simultaneously with a universe of information, which is not governed by physics. There is no magic involved at any stage. The mind is not supernatural, i.e. free of any sort of rules, it is very strictly rule-governed, they just are the rules of the brain’s codes or calculus, and nothing to do with gravity. I can think of Uluru, the largest rock in this country, and my head doesn’t get any heavier. In an instant, I can think of some of the spectacular photos of deep space from Hubble, and then flick straight to an image of atoms from an electron microscope, all without jarring my neck. The mind exists, it is real, it is insubstantial, unlocalised and we can choose our paths in life. I believe this argument applies to all creatures with minds, even tiny minds like jumping spiders (fascinating video if you have half an hour), but that would take a bit of elaboration.

I think we can settle the debate now and solve my colleague’s headache: Free will exists with no magic involved. Daniel Dennett could have reached this conclusion but he couldn’t free himself of his physicalist and determinist view of the world: by believing in determinism, he became trapped by it. However, the real counter-intuitive blast comes from trying to grasp the vertiginous idea that we ourselves are just an informational state. Yes, we have a physical body with all that that entails but the big change is to see ourselves as floating in a sea of information, a node that moves around sucking in information, manipulating it and putting it into practice in our movements. Today, one eye is looking at the far reaches of the universe while the other is focussed on subatomic particles. It’s been said we’re positioned halfway between the macro and micro universes, able to conceive of both, which is an interesting way to look at it.

For ourselves, for my Self, as they say, it is just streams of information flowing in from the world to interact with layers upon layers of information, some that I don’t even know exist, to generate our knowledge state including freedom of action. It also generates the vivid, multimodal sensory experience of being a living being, although that may be a mystery too far for us. The emergence of the conscious, aware mind depends on some very, very sophisticated data processing, not on raw computing power. I think it’s likely that we may never know exactly how it’s done. We can easily duplicate decision-making in our information processors but creating the conscious experience as we and many other animals have it may be forever beyond us. Hope this solves your headache.

PS. I’m saying all the physicalist philosophers and determinist psychologists and so on in history got it wrong. American science fiction writer David Brin said:

If an outsider perceives ‘something wrong’ with a core scientific model, the humble and justified response of that curious outsider should be to ask ‘what mistake am I making?’ before assuming 100% of the experts are wrong.

The question now goes to the voting public (that’s you) for a decision. We have free will, we can choose how to act and how to conduct ourselves. This is not academic. Many people have said, and I agree, that we have to act as though this planet is the only place in the known universe where the phenomenon of mind exists. At present, we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire biosphere several hundred times over, and complete idiots with their fingers on the big red button. They are exercising their free will to terrorise the planet, if not push it to oblivion, but we need to exercise our free will to get rid of them damned quick before they do some real damage.

References:

1. Crouse J et al (2024). Patterns of stressful life events and polygenic scores for five mental disorders and neuroticism among adults with depression. Molecular Psychiatry (2024) 29:2765–2773; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02492-x2

2. McLaren N (2024). Dennett’s dysfunctional Functionalism. Chapter 8 in Theories in Psychiatry (see below).

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.