**4. Gazzaniga's "The Ethical Brain".**

Michael S. Gazzaniga is a renowned cognitive neuroscientist. He was
Editor-in-Chief of the 1447 page book *The Cognitive Neurosciences,*
which, for the past decade, has been the fattest book in my library,
apart from the 'unabridged'. His recent book *The Ethical Brain* has a
Part III entitled "Free Will, Personal Responsibility, and the Law".
This Part addresses, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience,
some of the moral issues that have been dealt with in the present book.
The aim of this Part III is to reconcile the materialist idea that brain
activity is *determined* with the notion of *moral responsibility*,
which normally depends upon the idea that we human agents possess *free
will*.

Gazzaniga asserts: "Based on the modern understanding of neuroscience
and on the assumptions of legal concepts, I believe the following
axioms: Brains are automatic, rule-governed, determined devices, while
people are personally responsible agents, free to make their own
decisions."

One possible interpretation of these words\-\--the quantum-theoretic
interpretation\-\--would be that a person has both a mind (his stream of
conscious thoughts, ideas, and feelings) and a brain (made of neurons,
glia, etc), and that his decisions (his conscious moral choices) are
free (not determined by any known law), and that, moreover, the rules
that govern his brain *determine* the activity of his brain *jointly*
from the physically described properties of the brain *combined* with
these conscious decisions. That interpretation is essentially what
orthodox (von Neumann) quantum mechanics\-\--and also common sense
intuition\-\--asserts.

If this interpretation is what Gazzaniga means, then there is no
problem. But I believe that this is [not]{.underline} what Gazzaniga
means. Earlier on he said: "

> The brain determines the mind, and the brain is a physical entity
> subject to all the rules of the physical world. The physical world is
> determined, so our brains must also be determined.

This seems to be suggesting that by "determined" he means determined
solely by physically described properties, as would be the case if the
concepts of classical physics were applicable. However, what he actually
said was that "the brain is a physical entity subject to all the rules
of the physical world." The rules of the physical world, as specified by
contemporary (orthodox quantum) theory, explain how the brain is
governed in part by the brain and in part by our conscious choices,
which themselves are not governed by any known laws. If this
physics-based understanding of "determined" is what Gazzaniga means then
there is no difficulty in reconciling the fact that an agent's brain is
"determined" with the fact that this agent's person is "free": the
agent's *brain* is determined partly by his brain and partly by his
conscious free choices, and hence the *person* whose actions this brain
controls is likewise jointly controlled by these two factors, neither of
which alone suffices.

If this contemporary-physics-based interpretation is what Gazzaniga
meant, then he could have stopped his book right there: that
interpretation is in complete accord with common sense, and with normal
ethical theory. Thus the fact that he did not stop, but went on to write
his book, including Part III, suggests that he is using not the quantum
mechanical meaning of "determined"; but rather the meaning that would
hold in the classical approximation, which exorcizes all the physical
effects of our conscious choices. Indeed, he goes on to say:

> If our brains are determined ,,, then ... Is the free will we seem to
> experience just an illusion? And if free will is an illusion, must we
> revise our concepts of what it means to be personally responsible for
> our actions?

I am assuming in this appendix that Gazzaniga is adhering essentially to
nineteenth century physics, so that "determined" means
automatically/mechanically determined by physically described properties
alone, like a clock, and that he is thus endeavouring to address the
question: How can one consider a person with an essentially clocklike
body-brain to be morally responsible for his actions? How can we uphold
the concept of ethical behaviour within the confines of an understanding
of nature that reduces each human being to a mechanical automaton?

Gazzaniga's answer is built upon a proposed restructuring (redefining)
the meanings of both "free will" and "moral responsibility". Following
an idea of David Hume, and more recently of A. J. Ayer, the word "free"
is effectively defined to mean "unconstrained by external bonds". Thus a
clock is "free" if the movements of its hands and cogs are not
restricted by external bonds or forces. However, the "Free Will" of
traditional ethical theory refers to a type of freedom that a
mechanically controlled clock would [not]{.underline} enjoy, even if it
had no *external* bonds. This latter\-\--morally pertinent\-\--kind of
free will is specifically associated with consciousness. Thus a
physically determined clock *that has no consciousness* [is not
subject]{.underline} to moral evaluation, even if it is not constrained
by external bonds, whereas a person possessing a conscious "will" that
is physically efficacious, yet not physically determined, [is
subject]{.underline} to moral evaluation when he is not constrained by
external bonds. Thus the morally pertinent idea of "possessing free
will" is not the same as "unconstrained by external bonds or forces."
The Hume/Ayer move obscures the morally pertinent idea of freedom, which
is intimately linked to consciousness, by confounding it with different
idea that does not specifically involve consciousness. This move throws
rational analysis off track by suppressing (on the basis of an
inapplicable approximation) the involvement of consciousness in the
morally relevant conception of "free will".

Ethical and moral values traditionally reside in the ability of a person
to make discerning conscious judgments pertaining to moral issues,
coupled with the capacity of the person's conscious effort to willfully
force his body to act in accordance with the standards he has
consciously judged to be higher, in the face of strong natural
tendencies to do otherwise. The whole moral battle is fought in the
realm of conscious thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Where there is no
consciousness there is no moral dimension. *Moreover*, if consciousness
exists but is permitted by general rules to make no physical
difference\-\--that is, if consciousness is constrained by the general
laws to be an impotent witness to mechanically determined
process\-\--then the seeming struggle of will becomes a meaningless
charade, and the moral dimension again disappears.

It is the imposition, by virtue of the classical approximation, of this
law-based kind of impotency that eliminates the moral dimension within
that approximation. The morally pertinent free will is eradicated by the
classical approximation even if there are no external bounds. Calling a
system "free" just because it is *not constrained by external bonds*
does not suffice to give that system the kind of free will that
undergirds normal ethical ideas.

Gazzaniga's attack on the problem has also a second prong. He avers that
"Personal responsibility is a public concept." He says of things such as
personal responsibility that:

"Those aspects of our personhood are\-\--oddly\-\--not in our brains.
They exist *only* in the relationships that exist when our automatic
brains interact with other automatic brains. They are in the ether."

This idea that these pertinent things "are in the ether" and "exist only
in the relationships" is indeed an *odd* thing for a
materialistically-oriented neuroscientist to say. It seems mystical.
Although ideas about personal responsibility may indeed arise only in
social contexts, one would normally say that the resulting *ideas* about
personal responsibility *exist in the streams of consciousness of the
interacting persons,* and a materialist would be expected to say that
these ideas are "in" or are "some part of" the brains of those socially
interacting persons. Yet if the causes of self-controlled behaviour are
wholly in the brains and bodies of the agents, and these brains and
bodies are automatically determined by the physically described
body-brain alone, then it is hard to see how these agents, as persons,
can have the kind of free will upon which our moral and ethical theories
are based. Some sort of odd or weird move is needed to endow a person
with morally relevant free will if his body and brain are mechanically
determined.

But if some sort of weirdness is needed to rescue the social concept of
personal responsibility, then why not use "quantum weirdness". The
quantum concepts may seem weird to the uninitiated, but they are based
on science, and they resolves the problem of moral responsibility by
endowing our conscious choices with causal influence in the selection of
our physical actions.

It is hard to see the advantage of introducing the changes described by
Gazzaniga compared to the option of simply going beyond the
in-principle-inadequate classical approximation. Why do thinkers
dedicated to rationality resist so tenaciously the option of accepting
(contemporary orthodox quantum) physics, which says that our conscious
choices intervene, in a very special and restricted kind of way, in the
mechanically determined time development of the physically described
aspects of a system\-\--during the process by means of which the
conscious agent acquires new knowledge about that system? Because
acquiring new knowledge about a system normally involves a probing of
the system, it is not at all weird that the system being examined should
be affected by the extraction of knowledge from it, and hence come to
depend upon how it was probed.

The advantages of accepting quantum mechanics in cognitive neuroscience,
and ultimately in our lives, are:

1.  It is compatible with basic physical theory, and thus will continue
    to work in increasingly complex and miniaturized empirical
    situations.

2.  It ties, in a prescribed manner, physically described data to the
    psychologically described data contained in the reports of human
    subjects.

3.  It removes the incoherency of an ontological element that contains
    the empirical data, yet resides in a realm that has no law-based
    connection to the flow of physical events.

4.  It allows the co-evolution of mind and brain to be understood,
    because each of these two parts contributes to the dynamics in a way
    that is linked to the other by specified laws.

5.  It provides for a free will of the kind needed to undergird ethical
    theory.

6.  It produces a science-based image of oneself, not as a
    freak-accident out-cropping, riding unnoticed like a piece of froth
    on an ocean, but rather as an active integral component of an
    incredibly intricate and deeply interconnected world process that is
    responsive *by known laws* to every person's mind-based inputs of
    meaning and value.