Free-will in a Deterministic World
Image credits belong to: mohamed_hassan | Pixabay
Introduction
"Don’t you realize that grace frees you to choose your own master? But choose carefully, for you surrender yourself to become a servant—bound to the one you choose to obey. If you choose to love sin, it will become your master, and it will own you and reward you with death. But if you choose to love and obey God, he will lead you into perfect righteousness." ~Romans 6:16
This article is intended to defend compatibilism, which says that free-will and determinism do not necessarily have to logically contradict each other. This article will discuss the scientific study of the human brain and nervous system in defense of compatibilism that agrees with Romans 6:16.
As I see it, the act of choosing your Master, whether it be God or sin, implies a reciprocal influence between your conscious, willful self and the one that rules over you. That is a compatibilist middle ground between free-will and determinism.
Wikipedia defines free-will as “the notional capacity or ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.”
Christianity.com makes this simple and succinct point:
“When you look at what the Bible says about free will, you discover that we have the right and the ability to choose the direction we will go and what we will do.”
Determinism is the view that all events are totally guided by prior causes. Physicists may understand the term as simply cause-and-effect. However, in casual conversation, the term seems to be more akin to the word ‘fate.’
In spite of whatever connotations you accept, I think it is important to ask this: how do we reconcile freedom of choice and expression with the various worldviews saying that chemistry, physics, and biology underlie everything we think, say, and do?
From the Perspective of ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactive disorder)
I was diagnosed with ADHD in 3rd grade, which was re-confirmed at 18. This puts an interesting twist on my perspective.
I suppose that I fall in the category of neurodivergence, a juicy term that seems to be popular nowadays. You may often hear it applied to people diagnosed with learning disabilities or autism, but more broadly, it applies to someone whose neurological functions underlie a unique set of behaviors and traits not typically experienced by others.
I have always felt different from everyone else, and I trace those feelings to a history of social gaffes, social awkwardness, dry and incomprehensible humor, criticisms against my behavior and lifestyle choices, daily forgetfulness, hyper-fixations, addiction to pleasure and excitement, rocky relationships, and more. Psycho-stimulants make a profound difference in my daily experiences.
Many people throughout the years have remarked to me that I may be on the autism spectrum or may have a touch of bipolar disorder. As I get older, that is becoming less farfetched to me.
Due to the nature of ADHD and neurodivergence, it can be tempting to use it as an excuse for particular choices and behaviors. It is easy to say that my thoughts and emotions rule me, instead of saying I rule over them. I suspect that perhaps these assumptions make the philosophy of determinism very enthralling for someone who feels victimized by their neurological circumstances.
Today, my claims about the power of choice are not intended to stigmatize anyone nor trivialize anyone’s challenging neurological circumstances. Instead, I want to empathetically paint a picture for a large portion of our population that I think feels foredoomed to an absence of self-control and self-forgiveness.
Sensation and Perception
How does each event within and around you transition to the next?
Our conscious experience of the world is affected by how sensory information is processed in the nervous system.
We need to discuss the differences between sensation and perception. Sensation takes place when highly differentiated nerve endings, called sensory receptors, are triggered by an event from your outside surrounding environment or an event within yourself, translating energy into electrical signals that are interpreted by the brain. The process of going from an energy to a signal is called transduction. The specific location in the central nervous system where the nerve fibers expire will determine how you perceive the stimulus.
We all have a specific level or threshold of responsiveness to the things bombarding us with messages and vying to make chemical changes in our cells. A stimulus must reach a particular threshold of intensity before it can stir up your sensory receptors and dispatch nerve signals to the brain. There is something called the absolute threshold, which is the least amount of stimulus energy that can be presentable to your awareness at least 50% of the time. Any message beneath that awareness is said to be subliminal.
In a different blog post, perhaps I will discuss the concerns and conjectures about subliminal messages in advertising, rock music, and other controversial things. In passing, I recently read that there is lab-based, empirical evidence that humans can perform mechanical and chemical operations on messages beneath their awareness and respond to those messages beneath their awareness.
But back to what I was saying earlier…
Interpretation Does the Trick
Our interactions with the world, that involve a lot of give-and-take, are determined by our interpretations of the information gathered by our sensory receptors. This is the important difference I see between sensation and perception. How we interpret the world also involves how we consciously experience and arrange the information given to us. Here, I think the compatibility between freewill and determinism enters the conversation.
Top-down and Bottom-up Processing
What do you think or feel when a loud noise suddenly makes itself known to you? Maybe you were hyperfocusing on something very important to you, such as a deadline for your college paper, your television show, or a nice warm meal in your kitchen. The sudden loud noise would not politely remain on the boundaries of your awareness. It will make a forced entry and break up that tunnel vision you have. As your nervous system processes that information, your system uses a bottom-up processing. It has to be automatic, instinctual, and essentially out of your control, as you must quickly adapt to an environment that is quickly changing.
We can think of top-down processing as being the impetus behind your calculated behaviors that are focused on achieving your goals. Top-down signals are said to originate in the prefrontal cortex which is also simply understood as the driver’s seat for reasoning and executing plans. The sense of employing effort in a willful, volitional, deliberate fashion is attributable to top-down processing.
Imagine what happens when you encounter a putrid or vile odor. Your scent receptors detect the odor against your will, but your responsive thoughts may be under your control more than you want to admit. Your initial thought when encountering the odor may be, “Wow! This is horrible and unacceptable. I do not want to be in this place. I want to leave.”
You may continue dwelling on this thought, if you prefer, or you can adapt to the event with different thoughts that can take your fixation away from the odor until you can leave the location. Maybe we can refer to those thoughts as distractions. The outcome is determined by your adaptations to the situation which is achieved by various thoughts that you choose from your repertoire of past learning experiences.
I think our toolkit of choices is best tested when we are put in execrable or distasteful situations.
What will we say or do to impact those around us, as a consequence of our unwanted feelings and experiences?
Have you ever worked a job that you hated?
Maybe your coworkers or boss were nasty and uncharitable while doing overbearing tasks with you. They tempted you to be uncharitable in return, even though you knew that would fan the flames. Thankfully, you chose to exercise impulse-control, putting aside your acrimonious desires. I think many of us have endured this, but we all have made different choices that led to different outcomes. Right?
I think this may be connected to predictive coding theories that are discussed in the field of neuroscience.
Predictive coding
The following paragraphs are heavily based on a May 2013 hypothesis and theory article written by Karsten Rauss and Gilles Pourtois in the journal called Frontiers in Psychology.
The principal assumption of predictive coding theories is that the brain is unceasingly producing new internal symbols to match with how things work in the real world. Various levels of neural processing seem to reveal that predictive-coding is widespread throughout “spatial and temporal scales.”
The next important assumption is that the brain’s predictions about the world are organized and ranked. These predictions transfer from highest to lowest levels, while prediction errors are converted into coded form by signals moving in the opposite direction. Predictive-signaling is top-down while prediction-error signaling is bottom-up.
In 1979, R.A. Kinchla and J.M. Wolfe performed a test, using large letters that consisted of smaller letters to measure people’s response times in visual processing. The researchers concluded that processing does not rigidly choose between top-down or bottom-up. Instead, a visual angle of 2 degrees reflecting the distance between the stimulus and the observer is important, allowing the observer to most quickly recognize the letter shapes. Kinchla and Wolfe concluded that visual processing can “middle-out” by first processing the elements of the most favorable size.
Lucia Melloni was involved in a 2012 study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging to test saliency maps (i.e., images highlighting the pixels most important to human focus) on important visual areas in the brain. Researchers were curious about how our current inner goals are affected by bottom-up saliency, which is an object’s attention-grabbing power in terms of how it differs from other neighboring objects.
They found evidence showing that several important visual areas of the brain organize saliency maps in ranks. The primary visual cortex (V1) responded to bottom-up signals which are signals sent to the brain by sensory receptors. The secondary visual cortex (V2) responded to top-down modulations, which is the intensification of neural activity connected to stimuli that are relevant to our goals. Bottom-up saliency was found to be conspiring with current inner goals at the visual area V4, said to be a “midtier cortical area in the ventral visual pathway” that is vital for recognizing objects, though scientists find V4 to still be “elusive.”
The left intraparietal sulcus and lateral occipital cortex were the two cerebral networks found working together to accomplish what we would expect cerebral stuff to do, which is to quell distractions, plan movements, form intentions, and take control of integrated maps for getting topographic information necessary for nailing down the target.
Is Top-Down, Bottom-up Wrong?
In their May 2013 article, Karsten Rauss and Gilles Pourtois noted that top-down and bottom-up processing has been ill-defined, in spite of our three decades (1979 - 2013) of scientific progress on sensory processing and the visual system.
Drawing from electrophysiological analysis, R.A. Kinchla remarked that:
“…the order of visual processing is best described as a top-down process, with higher-order forms processed first, followed by lower-order forms.”
Top-down and bottom-up processing has been boiled down to the following:
There is a hierarchy of information processing.
The detailed triggers for physical change exist in the lower ranks, while integrated information exists in the higher ranks.
The exchange of information functions in two directions.
Researchers Daniel J. Felleman and Jay Hegde seemed to have doubts that visual processing and brain anatomy are hierarchical.
“Hegde and Felleman (2007) state that the anatomical hierarchy itself is clear-cut only up to the level of areas V4 and MT, with the sender-receiver distinction becoming less evident at higher levels.”
Among several of the “flavors” of top-down processes, Andreas K. Engel and others discussed a “dynamicist” flavor that involves neuronal populations locking to other activity described as rhythmic, synchronized, and oscillatory in regions that are both distant and distributed. Such a dynamicist approach does not entail a predetermined, unchangeable hierarchy in the brain. Different brain regions can be recruited for different tasks without compromising the specializations belonging to these brain regions. Our systems may be so adaptable that they cannot be understood as literal hierarchies. The dynamicist view does not prove these hierarchies to be outdated. Instead, the hierarchies just serve as analogies so that we can imagine brain regions more vividly.
What one author defines as top-down, another author will define it as bottom-up, leaving us with a “fuzzy dichotomy.”
You have no control over how a visual stimulus is initially processed in your brain, because the bottom-up factors are responsible for that. Jan Theeuwes investigated this issue of what it means to have “intention”, “volition”, “expectation”, and “emotion”. The conclusion is that such a “simply binary classification” of top-down and bottom-up does not suffice for explaining what mentally occurs within those boundaries.
When studying ferrets, Per E. Roland and others found a feedback wave of activity moving from the higher-order extrastriate visual areas to the lower-order V1 area, prompting them to see this as "direct evidence" of top-down influences on early visual cortex.
B. Kuhn and others tested on mice and thought they found “long range cortical and thalamic input exerting top-down control over sensory processing during wakefulness.”
“Top-down” may be useless in reference to neural activity during both wakefulness and anesthesia. However, any activity running along the descending fibers can represent top-down processes, if its source is a region from a higher level in the hierarchy.
But Horace B. Barlow in 1997 was apparently not buying it. He believed that the visual system was bound by genetic determinism. There are different patterns of neural activity producing the same outcome in all visual images, he argued. Such things explain what we often ascribe to town-down factors. He stated:
“To avoid the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy blinding us to more important questions, the term ‘top-down’ should perhaps be challenged whenever it is used.”
The 2013 Frontiers in Psychology article by Karsten Rauss and Gilles Pourtois makes the following statement, which leaves me uncertain:
“While we fully agree with Barlow’s (1997) conclusion, it seems what his argument essentially highlights is the vagueness of what is meant by a top-down process. His critique rests on the assumption that bottom-up processing consists of the interplay between the system’s genetically predetermined structure and the organism’s current environment. However, since the structure of the system also defines how it stores and retrieves previously encoded information, his understanding of bottom-up processes seems to leave hardly any room for top-down processes.”
If top-down processes are non-existent, with no substitutes, are we left with the genetically deterministic bottom-up factors to always guide the way? To me, something seems to be missing, especially when I carefully ponder the nature of the prefrontal cortex and the executive functions of planning, focusing attention, remembering, and juggling tasks.
From a phenomenological, first-person point of view, everything within me does not feel predetermined outside of my control. As long as I have a working prefrontal cortex, I have the power of choice and a free-will interacting with deterministic forces.
I choose whether to become a slave to God or to sin.
I intend to revisit this topic multiple times in the future. If you feel the battle between freewill and determinism has not been finished here, then I must leave you with saying… to be continued!
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.
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