I now saw very distinctly that these were little eels or worms… Lying huddled together and wriggling, just as if you saw with your naked eye a whole tubful of very little eels and water, the eels moving about in swarms; and the whole water seemed to be alive with the multitudinous animalcules. For me this was among all the marvels that I have discovered in nature the most marvellous of all, and I must say that, for my part, no more pleasant sight has yet met my eye than this of so many thousands of living creatures in one small drop of water, all huddling and moving, but each creature having its own motion.
— Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
Letter to H. Oldenburg, 9 Oct 1676. In The Collected Letters of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (l957), Vol. 2, 115.
Science quotes on: March 28, 2015
Observing Amoebae or Paramecia animalcules under a microscope they seem to be swimming around as they like. No one can predict whether they will choose to go this way or that ahead of time, which means even one-celled creatures, at least by appearances, seem to be moving around by free will.
If you study everything about these little creatures you could not predict what they will do next. You can’t say whether the next move will be to right or left. They seem to be moving and doing of their own accord. Creatures in the microscopic world will fight each other for survival. The micro-world is as much a tooth and claw scrappy struggle for existence as the macro- world is. There are predator/prey relationships, and once caught, struggles to break free, symbiotic, master and slave social relations. This says to me that every little creature has some of the same character as we big human creatures with brains have, namely the ability and wish to move about and do as we like, something akin to free will. Furthermore you will not find this, wanting to do and survive for yourself, in any non-living object made by man including any of our wise computer devices that our brilliant minds have devised.
As these little creatures, plant and animal, struggle in their little world, and seem to me at least as much as we humans do, to have free will, that tells me, even as a proud neurobiologist, that consciousness and free will are far more characteristics of things we consider to be alive, and not something ascribable to those creatures that happen to have a brain. You don’t need a brain, to give the appearance of doing things by your own wish, to have desire, and forethought and to express these, you only need to be alive. Therefore it seems to me, that free will if such exists, is a matter of the aliveness of something, not whether a living thing possesses a brain. It is present in living things, maybe not all living things, but so far, not a characteristic of any mechanical contrivances, even advanced computer Silicon devices.
Recently we have seen the case of one Andreas Lubitz the Germanwings co-pilot who appears to have deliberately driven his plane directly into a rock in the French Alps tragically killing 150 people. Every news article is talking about his depression and his psychiatrist and whether his behavior could have been predicted. There have been at least 12 instances of deliberate downing of passenger carrying airplanes since the 1980s. Since flying as an airline passenger is by far the safest mode of travel, especially mile for mile, the deliberate act of downing planes has to be among the top causes of airline mortality in recent years. This is what fascinates me: There is no accounting, no matter what, no firm means of prediction, of what a person will do, no matter how great a psychiatrist you claim to be, of what is inside that person’s head. Lubitz or any pilot, need not tell his psychiatric professional, or anybody, what he intends to do. We have no means of searching his mind and he will always carry with him, not only his own free will, but the ability to deceive. He need not disclose to his professional, or to Lufthansa, what is in his head.
In fact, we have no means, no truth sera, no torture, not hypnotism, no EEG or fMRI or PET scan, that will uncover such deception or even detect it. If a person so desires he can deceive anybody and no one can stop him. If you torture someone as with all the fuss over the three persons subjected to water-boarding by our CIA, they will still expose only such contents inside of their head, as they want to expose. Deception turns out to be again, excellent testimony to the primacy of free will. You expose what you wish to expose, nothing more, even under circumstances of duress, influence of chemicals on the brain, or all techniques known to humankind. Deception is the firewall that cannot be breached, of the inside of a biological entity delimiting it from the outside world. As I have described elsewhere it is the same as the bi-lipid cell membrane which I take to be the first device developed by living things on our planet that separated, eons of time ago, a single living organism, from everything else in the outside world.
It’s much more complicated than that as it has been found in many instances, that destructive acts like committing suicide, and homicides, may be less long considered or premeditated than spur of the moment decisions. Some self-hangers and Golden Gate jumping unsuccessful suicides later talk of their second thoughts on their way down. One survivor told me after he tried to hang himself, that he thought better of it, and tried but couldn’t, to text someone on his cell phone. But fortunately he was found anyway before he died, no harm done. The pilot thinking of driving a plane into a mountain, may not know himself for certain that he will commit the act. So not only may you have walled off your inner will from others, but it may be possible, and this is subject to some conjecture, that you fool yourself. This can be debated endlessly. Is there some inner inner will, some secret part in us, some subconscious, demarcated off as Sigmund Freud and others strongly suggest, even from ourselves?
It’s a big problem for those that force others to convert to their religion as during the Spanish Inquisition. No way to distinguish a false converso or Marrano pig, still practicing a crypto-religion. The same holds for criminals who kidnap hostages in the Middle East and convert them to their religion. You can never know what is truly in their heart. There appears to be an inner sanctum of belief, that we need reveal to no others, particularly to those who mean us harm. It is a secret flame of inner life as far as I can see. The same holds for those enslaved who are made to commit acts as child soldiers in Africa or persons made to work out their lives as prostitutes or factory workers, to enrich others. No one can know what inner fire of life, if any, may still survive inside the victim’s breast.
Deception is the one firm piece of evidence of the ultimate privacy of an act, that it is performed by free will and guarded from discovery up until and beyond the time of the act’s being carried out. It is critically important to be able to failsafe personal thoughts from the outside world. But it’s a fact you don’t need a human brain or any brain, you don’t even have to be what is considered an animal to deceive. Deception exists all of biology as can be seen in predator-prey relations when a predator dresses up like its prey, a wolf in sheep’s clothing so to speak, or prey camouflages to fool a predator, which is widely done among plants as well as animals, or a plant dresses up to look like an insect sexual partner to fool a bug into spreading pollen, or a male surreptitiously slips in a secret copulation unbeknownst to cuckolded bird or human, and the hapless paired male ends up investing his hard-earned reproductive potential on someone else’s offspring. Deception is seen in plants and animals, but is not a characteristic of a non-biological machine of any type, unless deliberately engineered into the machine by its human designers. And even there it does not come from the machine itself, but is a false deception, built into the machine, placed there by whatever human motivations the machine is made to serve.
As a neurologist I admit to being obsessed with heads. I am observing them all the time especially the frontal areas of human skulls in the living condition. Two people are discussing in restaurant from opposite sides of the table habitually look at each other. Thoughts are interlocked. They lean in. What they are actually doing, is approximating frontal lobes, the repositories of each of their own voluntary actions, thoughts and wills and thoughts are coming ever closer to each other. But looking a the front of a person’s head, it’s a source of endless fascination to me, that while I judge by appearances all the time, maybe I think a certain woman who is beautiful has more attractive thoughts than a guy or a woman who is not, I will never know, any means at all, what is actually housed behind that frontal bone, inside that person’s head, or even about their abilities or certainly not their inner desires. Each person is an incomprehensible brand unto themselves.
Should deception ever come directly from any of our Silicon devices, to be there as something present in and of itself, that would be convincing evidence we are dealing with a free-will true thought conscious-wielding machine. Deception may amount to a sort of Turing Test. I have yet to see a convincing case of deceit by machine.