Free will and imagination

Free will is the expression of values created by imagining possible outcomes way before we are presented with choices. And much of this creation may occur while we sleep.

While reading an essay written back in the 1960′s by philosopher and author Iris Murdoch I came to a bit of an epiphany about imagination.
I think imagination is (currently) one of the most ignored and mysterious aspects of the cosmos. If we are just an accumulation of natural causal interactions how can we imagine things which are not real, things like infinity and zero and goblins, and Father Christmas (sorry kids) and God which can only exist in our own mind.

It seems imagination has been discussed widely by existential philosophers in relation to free will, existentialist’s generally hold that we do have free will, whereas determinist’s say we don’t.

Iris Murdoch who was influenced by, and is considered by some an existentialist was not privy to the fMRI experiments on brain activity and decision making we now have and even Benjamin Libet’s ground braking experiments were first published in 1964 so she may not have been aware of them either. But her theories and that of contemporaries influencing her pre-empt and clarify the scientific facts that followed.

“Without asking why we could never imagine, what if. The most obvious expression of freewill is the asking of questions, in particular why? In that one question we ask from childhood is the whole of humanities wonder.”

Libet while looking at consciousness and dualism did an experiment that showed there was electrical activity in the brain before a decision was made, but more importantly it existed before the person making the decision was aware of the decision or even contemplation of the choices. Later experiments in fMRI scanners have shown that observers can predict the decisions to be made by people by watching the activity in their brain. They know what you will decide before you do.

This has been used as an argument against freewill because your conscious mind is directed by your baser instincts and drives and these are purely reactions to your environment and your learnt values (some actually exclude learnt values completely and say you are just driven by external stimuli). Learnt values in this context are just the memory of previous actions reduced to simple universal concepts. They are not the process of free will but the result of a rational computing brain and memory. Libet himself does not abandon freewill but says instead we have free-veto. We can reject decisions made by our brain but we may not will it to action. He however is less concerned with freewill than consciousness and whether consciousness (our self) is separate from deterministic matter and energy, and whether this conscious mind can influence matter and energy – but that’s another story (but related).

So back in 1964 Iris Murdoch wrote the following and it got me thinking that perhaps we do have freewill, we have just done the conscious decision making beforehand.

“ When moments of decision arrive we see and are attracted by the world we have already (partly) made. That is why ‘attempts and tryings recorded in ordinary language’ (public language) may be inadequate to explain the mysteries of motivation. This too is why (as the existentialists point out but leave unintelligible) deliberation at the moment of choice often seems ineffectual. We are obscure to ourselves because the world we see already contains our values and we may not be aware of the slow delicate processes of imagination and will which have put those values there.”
What she is saying is we have already imagined making decisions and possible outcomes, including how we would feel about those outcomes. We do a great deal of hypothesising either consciously or unconsciously and have reactions, choices ready to go for most situations. We call these values.

The experiments Libet conducted couldn’t really be seen to involve value choices, his subjects just had to pick a random number on a clock. But the latter fMRI experiments were about choosing whether or not to buy something so would be based upon values. But whether or not we want to buy a Harry Potter book does not really need contemplation by our consciousness because we have already pondered this option. An instant no or yes is the response, but still this choice is filtered through the conscious mind so it can reject it if the choice doesn’t suit the current situation.

But of course you may suggest that all we are really doing in this so called imagining it reductive computation. Reducing many actions and results into a coverall value which can be used in all similar circumstances. I don’t read children’s books because I did once and found it boring, therefore I won’t buy Harry Potter. This would not be freewill but rational reductionism. And anything new could be put down to errors made in the computational reduction, or perception of the stimuli. This however does beg the question why is our input warped by perception? Is not perception based upon memory and values? And values on imagination? A loop.

I have posited in other articles ( http://www.jesaurai.net/philosophy/consciousness-and-ai-creating-a-mind/) errors (or randomness) may be a very fundamental form of freewill, but without imagination they cannot form new values, I am willing to suggest errors may form part of the puzzle but they are the Joker to the King of imagination.

But such a theory ignores most of the imagining we actually do, we don’t just reduce stimuli to its core processes we imagine processes that we have never seen, and in reality could never or at least have never occurred, and then we throw them into our theorising. I can imagine living on Mars, I can imagine aliens that exist in an ether, I can imagine quarks and dark matter, I can imagine a flat Earth, in inverted world, a world without time, a world of many dimensions, a singularity. I can imagine living in a translucent platinum bubble in Botswana with two brains and a hoverboard for transport. I can also imagine the reaction of my fellow villagers and whether I would be happy living there. I can imagine whether they would be happy with me living there. This is not reduction but projection with the aid of imagination, the creation of something new from non causally connected data, and from this we create values, because we can imagine events which may never come about but we are ready for them none-the-less.

Everything we have created on this earth, from the pyramids, to money was first imagined.

Sleep and Dreams

This made me take a bit of a further leap. We don’t really know why we need sleep and dreams. We know that if we don’t sleep we will go mad and then die, and we know that our brain is more active during REM (dreaming) sleep than most of our waking hours. There is speculation that our brain needs this downtime to configure itself like a computer shutting down to update new software. But it is really just speculation. Jung thought we might actually join with the collective unconscious during dreaming which is an interesting thought – and might I say a great imagining. I am thinking we might sleep to imagine.

Dreams to me seem to be the most absurdly otherworldly imaginings we have, we go through the most fanciful prognostications, putting voices we know with faces we don’t in places that are familiar but look nothing like what we have seen. A walled off London who’s only entry is through an art gallery, and a building with tunnels and dust combined with a Spanish child on a trampoline in the hot apricot sky. Perhaps it is during this time that we do our free-willing. We go through the days events imagining the myriad of possible outcomes of different choices then coming to some decision of how we would like to see the outcomes. We shuffle the cards of determinism and throw them in the air making new pictures from the scattered events before us. From this we imagine outcomes, feedback the new imaginings and add plot and narrative and yet more shuffling until we have created a whole new world. A world in which we can test all our questions. Ah questions, if errors are the Jokers of the pack questions are the wild deuces. Without asking why we could never imagine, what if. The most obvious expression of freewill is the asking of questions, in particular why? In that one question we ask from childhood is the whole of humanities wonder.

We imagine so that when we are presented with choices in the real world we can make them quickly for we have done the time consuming dreaming of possibilities already, while we slept.

To me this would explain why sleep deprivation creates a compliant prisoner, they have lost their own free will because they haven’t had the chance to imagine in the absence of stimuli. Of course to much time alone in isolation can also send one mad. This makes sense, we need imagining in peace to make values, but we need to test these choices in the real world to see if they are right, and then revise again with the new data and more imaginings. Its a bit like science really. Science after all is just a process to find truth. Intuit a hypothesis (imagined) then test the hypothesis and revise based upon findings. Retest, and amend the hypothesis.

We need both the dreamy imaginings in a stimuli free (or at least greatly reduced, we can never be absolutely free of external stimuli) environment (sleep) and connected interaction in a data rich environment to make values and thus decisions.

You could even imagine that this would be a very handy evolutionary trait, the ability to make quick decisions without extended contemplation at the time the decision is to be made, because if a car is hurtling toward you, or the share price of BHP is plummeting or your workers declare a strike or a thunderstorm breaks and your washing is on the line any hesitation could be very costly. So sleep and imagination is necessary for good decision making. And these good decisions are based on free will via imagination which creates our values. And these values set up an automatic decision making network so we can make quick decisions.

David J Campbell