Who Am I and If So How Many? (14 page)

‘So?’

‘That means he still has the option of breaking off his action.’

‘So?’

‘That means that although there is no free will, there is something we might want to call a “free won’t,” which I can use to prevent bad things from happening.’

‘A “free won’t”? You have some weird ideas.’

‘Maybe that sounds strange, but I think that’s how it is. The will may not be free, but the “free won’t” is! Whatever drives us to do something, we still have the option of saying “Stop!”’

‘And you think you proved that with the clock? That there is an unconscious non-freedom and a conscious freedom?’

‘Well, “proved” may be overstating it. But that is what I believe.’

‘All on the basis of those simple experiments?’

‘Now, Mr Schopenhauer, I freely admit that my experiments were quite simple. But I believe they were significant. Also, it is good to believe that there is something that controls our will, which is, I argue, the “free won’t.” Have you ever thought what it would mean for society if we were to accept the idea that no one is responsible for his will and cannot be called to account for his actions? What do I do with a murderer, if all he has to do is to say: “I didn’t know what I was doing; my unconscious will made me do it, and I had no control over it. Just take a look at the writings of Schopenhauer and Libet!”’

‘Mankind is in a devilish mess either way, with criminal trials or without them, with or without prisons.’

‘That is your opinion, Mr Schopenhauer, but it won’t get us anywhere.’

We had better leave the conversation at this somewhat unpleasant juncture. Not much more is likely to come of it anyway. The positions are clear, and no compromise appears imminent. Benjamin Libet is surely right not to dispose of man’s responsibility for his actions. And isn’t Arthur Schopenhauer right to doubt that Libet’s measurements are really all we need to propose grand theories about the will, the ‘won’t,’ and consciousness?
Neuroscience
is still far from a full understanding of the complex interaction that constitutes human consciousness, including feelings of
spirituality
, creativity, conscious will, and imagination, let alone able to measure them. And every neuroscientist still seems to have his or her own theory about the relationship of the material to the intellectual. The actual problem in Libet’s measurements is that he had to translate the measurements of electrodes attached at the brain into language. For example, he had to assign his measurements to the ‘subconsciousness’ or ‘preconsciousness’ while using the terms ‘consciousness’ or ‘unconsciousness’ for marking the dot on the clock. But what is ‘preconsciousness’? It seems reasonable enough to call a will that makes a wrist flex ‘preconscious,’ but what about the will that uses a series of varying impulses to solve a complex mathematical problem or design a philosophical argument? As revealing as Libet’s measurements appear to be, they do not yield simple answers but instead raise new questions. The major issue of the freedom of the will cannot be addressed simply by ascertaining how much or how little time elapses between an impulse from the brain and the awareness of this impulse. Moreover, there are many different kinds of forces driving the will. Some are simple and intense, such as hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and sex drive; others are more intricate. The will to pass your final exams, study law, or throw a big birthday bash is more multifaceted than feeling hunger and the consequent will to eat.

What does all this mean for morality? Today, tens of thousands of brain researchers at hundreds of institutes around the world are
hard at work exploring the brain, many of them also bent on learning about the instincts and driving forces behind moral actions. If all moral prescriptions ultimately spring from moral desires, there must be something in the human brain that triggers this will to be good. But what might that be?

September 13, 1848, was a lovely day. The afternoon sun shone bright and hot, and Phineas Gage had been at work since the morning hours. Gage was an explosives expert, ‘the most efficient and capable man’ in the employ of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, as his bosses later noted. His job was to level a rocky piece of land for the new railroad line. The workers in Vermont were outside the town of Cavendish, and soon the tracks would be laid through the New England states and passengers could look forward to train travel from Rutland to Boston. Gage had just filled a new blast hole with explosive powder and a detonator and asked his assistant to plug the entrance to the hole with sand. He was reaching for the three-foot-seven-inch-long iron rod to tamp down the sand over the explosive when someone spoke to him from behind. He turned around and exchanged a few words while continuing to push the iron rod into the hole, but he failed to notice that his assistant had not filled in the sand. While Gage was talking and laughing, sparks started flying from the rocks. An explosion sent the iron rod hurling through Gage’s left cheek into his brain; it pierced his skull and exited through the top of his head. Some eighty feet away the rod crashed to the ground, covered with
blood and brain tissue. Gage lay there unmoving. The afternoon sun was shimmering over the rocks, and the horror-stricken railroad workers stood rooted to the spot. When a few of them ventured up to him, they were astonished to see that Phineas Gage was alive. Although he had a hole straight through his skull, and blood was gushing out of the open wound, he regained consciousness and was able to explain to his fellow workers what had happened. They lifted him onto an oxcart and took him to a nearby hotel. He sat upright and maintained his composure throughout this mile-long ride. The other railroad workers were flabbergasted to see Gage climb off the cart himself. He sat down on a chair in the hotel and waited for the doctor, whom he greeted with the jaunty remark, ‘Doctor, here is business enough for you.’

Today, Gage’s skull is housed at Harvard Medical School’s Warren Anatomical Museum, and his case has proved to be quite the head-scratcher for the scientific establishment. Phineas Gage, who was twenty-five years old at the time of his accident, lived another thirteen years with his terrible head injury. The injured foreman could feel, hear, and see. He had no trace of paralysis in his limbs or his tongue. He lost vision in his left eye, but everything else was fully functional. He was steady on his feet, his hands were as dexterous as ever, and his speech was unimpaired. But he was no longer the same. His bosses were alarmed at the radical change in his personality and felt they could not keep him on the job. Gage found work on a series of horse farms, but after a short time at each job he either quit or was let go. He finally resorted to appearing as a circus attraction and as a museum curiosity, where he was put on display along with his iron rod. Eventually he emigrated to Chile, where he remained until shortly before his death. There, too, he worked on horse farms and as a stagecoach driver. In 1860, he returned to the United States, but he languished in dark alleys in San Francisco with hopeless drunks, suffering a series of epileptic attacks until he died at the age of thirty-eight. Gage was buried with his iron rod, which he had carried by his side until the end of
his life. The newspapers that had once given headline coverage to his accident made no mention of his death.

Why had Gage’s life gone so terribly awry? According to neuroscientists Hanna and Antonio Damasio, who studied his case, Gage learned and spoke normally for the rest of his life, with one notable exception: several witnesses reported that Gage had lost all regard for the rules of social conduct. He lied and cheated shamelessly, was prone to angry outbursts and brawls, and no longer showed any sense of responsibility. What had happened? Was it possible that the injury to his brain had introduced serious character flaws into this formerly upstanding citizen? De Waal remarks that in injuries of this sort, ‘it is as if the moral compass of these people has been demagnetized, causing it to spin out of control.’ But wouldn’t that imply that there is a biological center for morality in the human brain?

Hanna Damasio and her team made a thorough examination of Gage’s skull and concluded that parts of his brain responsible for key human traits, such as those involved in honoring his commitments to others, had been destroyed. They believe that Gage had lost his sense of responsibility and was no longer able to structure his life on his own. One specific region in the brain, the ventromedial region of the frontal lobe, appeared to have ceased functioning, while all other parts of the brain continued to work normally. If the Damasios were correct, Gage’s consciousness was compromised after the accident. The relationship between
thinking
and feeling, decision making and perception, was no longer intact.

It should be noted that not everyone who studies Gage’s story shares this interpretation. Some have cast doubt on Gage’s medical evaluation and conclude that Gage’s character had not changed as much as the Damasios were assuming. After all, Gage did lose the job he had been trained for, and thus his professional standing, as well as his basic physical appearance. People react quite differently to a dapper foreman than to someone with a grossly disfigured face. Might some of his odd behavior be attributable quite simply to his
deformity? Couldn’t we just say that the accident may have traumatized Gage, and leave it at that?

Justified as these doubts may be, they do little to alter the neurobiological findings. The Damasios confirmed their results in many experiments with animals, and established that the ventrome dial region is a key part of the brain where feelings are processed and plans and decisions are made. But while it might be nice to picture the ventromedial region as a little computer center that prints our moral judgments on command, in actuality it is much more complicated.

In the
Finn Family Moomintroll
, a Finnish children’s book by Tove Jansson that I often read to my son Oskar before bed, the Hobgoblin grants the Snork a wish, and the Snork asks for ‘a machine that tells you whether things are right or wrong, good or bad.’ The Hobgoblin replies ruefully that he is unable to produce a machine of that kind. Likewise, there is no single mechanism in the brain that governs morality. It is not a self-contained system in one particular region of the brain, but rather a highly complex network involving several different regions. Thus, while there are certainly places in the brain responsible for morality, no one specific part of the brain is the seat of moral feelings and decision making.

I made a point of differentiating between feelings and decision making in the last sentence, even though Benjamin Libet had linked the two in claiming that our feelings dictate our decisions. While that is true to some extent, brain research has now established that so many different regions of the brain are involved in our feelings and decision making that it is quite difficult to ascertain how the process of making decisions functions. Feelings, abstract thinking, and all the regions of the brain associated with interpersonal relations work in concert and constantly overlap. The chain of command appears to fluctuate considerably, which can make people display markedly different reactions to a given situation.

Moral
feelings
– for example, sympathy for the needy, as when I see a beggar on the street and automatically feel sorry for him –
arise unintentionally. Moral
assessments
are altogether different. Tempted as I am to hand the man money, I think about whether that is the right thing to do, whether he’ll look for work if he gets a constant stream of handouts, or whether he’ll spend the money on alcohol instead of food. Or I might decide that the decision is his own business, as long as he gets the money he obviously needs. It is often hard to differentiate feelings from assessments, but there is a clear distinction between
why
we act and
how
we judge an action morally. Feelings – as well as intentions, thoughts, and force of habit – have a major role in actions, but when we pass moral judgment, their influence seems to recede. Before we take a look at moral intuition – the next big peak in our mountain range of morality – let us peer one last time into the workshop of brain research.

For some of us, it’s the scene where Ruth dies in
Fried Green
Tomatoes
, and for others, it’s when Dumbledore is murdered in
Harry Potter.
We cry when watching sad movies or reading sad books because we identify with the feelings of the characters and feel their pain as if it were our own. We laugh along with them, and we get scared when we watch horror movies as though we’re in immediate danger ourselves. All of us have experienced this emotional pull. But why is it that we understand other people’s feelings? Why do we get goose bumps at the movies even though we’re watching from a safe distance? Why do other people’s feelings transfer to us?

The answer is simple: we empathize because the feelings of others (whether genuine or simulated in a movie) give rise to the same feelings in us. And that is most likely the case for other animals as well. The sister of Fawn, the rhesus monkey Frans de Waal observed in the research center in Madison, clearly felt Fawn’s pain and fear. But as natural as empathy and understanding others’ feelings may be, scientists were baffled by this phenomenon until just a few years ago.

The person who provided the first persuasive scientific reason
for why we feel empathy remains astonishingly unknown to the general public. Giacomo Rizzolatti’s appearance is often compared to Albert Einstein’s: white hair sticking out every which way, a bushy white mustache, and an impish grin. But the similarities go beyond the surface. For many neuroscientists, the sprightly Italian is one of the greatest in his field, a man who ventured into new dimensions even as many colleagues considered his field of research relatively unappealing. For more than twenty years, Rizzolatti has been examining the function of neurons that control our actions. It seemed like a rather dry subject when he started out because the motor cortex, which initiates voluntary motor functions, was considered a fairly dull region of the brain. Why bother with simple motions, people thought, when we could research the complex areas of language, intelligence, and the emotional world?

This perception changed drastically in the wake of a startling development in 1992. Rizzolatti was working in Parma, at one of Europe’s oldest universities, but in its snow-white ultramodern medical complex. In the early 1990s, Rizzolatti’s team was engaged in an unusual project. The group knew that some types of behavior can be ‘contagious.’ If someone laughs or yawns, or even assumes a particular posture, others tend to simulate that behavior. The same is true in some species of apes, who are indeed known for ‘aping’ what they see. But the researchers chose to work with
Macaca nemestrina
, a species of monkey that normally does not imitate the behavior of its fellow monkeys. Rizzolatti and his younger colleagues Vittorio Gallese, Leonardo Fogassi, and Giuseppe di Pellegrino placed electrodes on the brain of a
Macaca
nemestrina
. Then they placed a peanut on the floor and watched a neuron fire as the monkey snatched up the peanut, as they had anticipated. The big surprise came when the research team put the same monkey behind a pane of glass, where it could not grab the peanut but instead watched one of Rizzolatti’s colleagues grab it. Remarkably, the same neuron fired as when the monkey itself had grabbed the peanut. Although the monkey’s paw did not move, it performed the action in its head. The scientists were amazed to
realize that the neurons reacted in exactly the same way whether the monkey carried out certain movements on its own or simply reenacted the movements of its trainers mentally.

Never before had scientists observed the brain simulating movements that the body did not perform. Leonardo Fogassi was the first to grasp the significance of what had happened, but the whole team deserved the credit. Rizzolatti coined the term ‘mirror neurons’ to designate the neurons that trigger the same reactions in the brain by passive reenactment of actual actions. The term caught on right away, and neuroscientists in Italy, and then at universities and research institutes around the globe, delved into research on this phenomenon. Might the fact that the human brain does not differentiate between what we experience ourselves and what we merely observe closely and empathize with be the key to understanding social behavior?

While mirror neurons, which are located in the prefrontal cortex of the frontal lobe, in an area known as the insula, are an important component, this insula is separate from the ‘social center,’ the ventromedial region we discussed earlier. Although mirror neurons are associated with unconscious empathy, they are not involved in more comprehensive planning, decision making, or volition. It is still largely unknown how those regions in the brain interact. The experts were stunned when Rizzolatti produced images that clearly indicated that mirror neurons are located in Broca’s area in humans, one of the two regions responsible for speech. And neuroscientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands recently discovered an intriguing link between hearing and mirror neuron firing. The sound of a soda can popping open in the distance causes the brain to react as if a person were opening the can himself. The mere sound evokes the entire experience. Test subjects whose brains were particularly active in this process also claimed to be unusually adept at seeing others’ points of view. Several American researchers have examined children with limited interactive skills and found that in autistic children, mirror neurons are activated weakly or not at all.

It remains to be seen whether experiments will confirm that mirror neurons are the directors of our feelings. This research is still in its infancy. But the hope is that mirror neurons will provide the key to understanding the nature of empathy, language, social behavior, and morality. If mirror neurons fire both when we act and when we observe the actions of others, we may conclude that the ability to share the feelings of other people depends on our own sensitivity. People who are in touch with their own feelings are more sensitive to those of others. Whether an individual puts this advantage to good use is, of course, an entirely different matter. Mirror neurons explain the ‘technical’ side of our overall moral capability, and they might reveal a great deal about how empathy functions – a process Kant had regarded as indescribable. But we still need to figure out why empathy is so rewarding as to result in general behavioral guidelines or even binding rules of conduct.

As we saw earlier, morality has regulated the social life of groups during the course of evolution. In order for this regulation to function, the members of a group have to be able to imagine what others are experiencing and share their feelings and even their thoughts. Mirror neurons clearly foster altruism. The roots of altruistic behavior run so deep that people not only want to help others but also find this behavior rewarding. It fills us with delight when we hug, cuddle, and soothe a crying child and maybe even coax out a smile. Empathy is an instinct in every healthy person. It would seem that moral sensations of this kind preceded moral principles.

But where does that rewarding feeling come from? What is it about making others happy that makes us happy? And what is so satisfying about acting morally? Most neuroscientists will say it is the amygdala, the small but significant region we described in the chapter about our feelings. It is the seat of emotions in the brain, and it has been the subject of far more research than have mirror neurons. Research groups have established that friendly faces evoke stronger reactions in the left amygdala and generate a good mood and pleasure. Grim or threatening expressions activate primarily
the right amygdala and produce fear and displeasure. These results, which are visible on MRI scans, are quite informative. Of course, MRIs produce only snapshots, not films. But it is plain to see that giving pleasure to others brightens our mood. Smiles and beaming faces reward us for our good deeds, especially when we see – or think we see – the results of our actions on the faces of others.

Altruistic behavior is thus based in large part on self-reward. It is rewarding for me to be good, and it is rewarding for the community when it is rewarding for the individual. Perhaps that is the point that Kant underestimated. He felt that kindness based on a feeling of duty has greater moral value than kindness that stems from affection or temperament. Kant’s idea that one cannot rely on feelings of pleasure is not entirely false, but can we rely on a sense of duty? Merely fulfilling one’s duty engenders a relatively weak feeling of pleasure compared to the pleasure of spreading happiness.

Before Kant, many philosophers had explained morality as an obligation to God. Those who led a pious life and acted accordingly were moral. But Kant had liberated morality from man’s obligation to God and redirected this obligation to man himself. That was the point of his idea of the ‘moral law within me.’ Kant was undoubtedly right on this point. While I may find the pleasure in doing good more natural than the duty to do good, my conduct rises to the level of morality only when I make these experiences of pleasure the basis for general rules for friendly conduct. Of course, the degree to which an individual benefits from being good has a strong environmental component. The categorical imperative won’t get you very far if you’re in prison or in a similarly hostile situation. But as a general rule, the ability to act morally goes to the core of what it means to be human. A society that has no concept of right or wrong is about the worst thing we could imagine – if it is imaginable at all.

The notion of ‘humanity’ is a Judeo-Christian legacy that persuades us to see morality as the essential trait of our species. By nature, it seems, man is neither fundamentally brutal nor fundamentally noble – but rather both. The hole in Phineas Gage’s
skull reveals something about the control centers of morality in the brain. And mirror neurons show how empathy seems to work on the neuronal level. But no chemical process produces affection, love, and responsibility of its own accord. We do that ourselves – in large part because we reap the rewards. But now we need to address the big question of whether we attain the knowledge that being good is rewarding by way of practical experience or whether this knowledge is innate. Do we come into this world with a kind of ‘moral law,’ as Kant thought? Most of us can probably tell whether an action is good or bad without much thought. We feel it intuitively. But what is ‘intuitive morality’?