Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 4

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Day 4 - Are Plants Automatons? What about Me?

Because components of the flows of our lives get channeled from outside us by the life paths laid down by our social milieu, and we must question to what extent our choices are automatic behaviors from a kind of channeling from inside as well. The more I read of the results from cognitive science and neuroscience, the more I feel like a kind of neurobiological robot. The situation is serious enough that perhaps books for the general public from the most prominent researchers of the mind should come pasted with warning labels: Consumption might be dangerous to your mental equilibrium.

In the earliest morning light I walked south along the lone paved road as the sun perked up above cliffs to the east. The shadows the low sun cast upon a cliff alongside me outlined the complex beauty of a wild walnut tree, each large frond a compound of smaller leaflets in bilateral symmetry.

The leaves grow according to a nested hierarchy of organizational principles that span all the way down in size from the tree to the molecular DNA within each cell. Inside each cell, enzymes and structural molecules are orchestrated by intricate arrays of biochemical feedback loops, forming a baseline network of metabolic mechanics that serves as the foundation for the higher scales I now see, all the way up to the green leaves that gulp air for the tree’s carbon dioxide and that lasso solar energy.

To be clear: I love communing with trees as beings within our shared biosphere. But here I want to explore a certain line of thinking about trees as biochemical automatons. And what about me?

For starters, there is no materially-separable life force within a tree. Life derives from the coordination of physical parts. Yes, this coordination is mind-boggling. Biochemists now understand that a typical complex cell, like that within the walnut leaf or the human brain, contains many tens of thousands of different kinds of proteins, which catalyze reactions, create structures, and regulate the on-off pathways of control from the interactions of the proteins and the genes. A cell is like a city of many tens of thousands of types of workers (and numerous within each type!) with different skills and occupations. The apparent life force in the walnut tree comes about because the whole is a new level of order, created from the dynamic interactions of the parts.

(I would say the order itself is not physical, in itself, if we think of it as a pattern of the physical, but “what is a pattern” is a complex issue not for this essay, but one that will be visited as we proceed along all the essays.)

Back to the line at hand: the human brain consists of a hundred billion cells called neurons (and many glia cells, too). The neurons branch like trees and connect with each other in a hundred trillion synapses or so, the handshake zones between neurons where their branches touch like the fingers of lovers. There does not appear to be any physically-separable “soul force” inside my thinking brain any more than there is a life force inside a living cell.

That absence doesn’t make my brain any less wondrous. Indeed, the wonder can increase with this knowledge. Wow—me, neurons! But the situation can lead to an epistemological quicksand: my sense of “me” might be a result of these complex interactions of the hundred trillion pulsing synapses.

One of the most prominent theorists of consciousness, Christof Koch, speaks about “zombie agents” inside our brains. For example, consider riding a bicycle. The minute calibrations of balance that you need, distributed among hands, arms, body, and legs while riding, are far too numerous and are adjusted and readjusted far too quickly to be under conscious control. We rely on our inner bicycle-balancing zombie agent to do all that for us. We probably have thousands of zombie agents that help us in all kinds of ways, and that perhaps includes composing these sentences. There might be initial draft agents, editing agents, and so forth.

Personally, I’m not fond of the term zombie agent. It makes me sound like I house characters in a grade-B horror film. And maybe I am such a character. I’ll stick with the term neurobiological robot, or simply neuro-robot, with a large capacity for automatic routines. Of course, those terms don’t feel that much better.

About inner robot-agents: I welcome them when riding a bike. But does that applause lead me downward to contemplate a possibly scary personal reality? The routines of neuro-robots might be active in balancing a bicycle and in forming sentences unconsciously during rapid conversation with friends. But certainly they can’t explain my decision to ride a bicycle, or to stop and look at walnut leaves. Or can they?

Harvard psychologist William Wegner was one of the foremost researchers on the topic of will. (I had a memorable 1-1 talk with him once at a conference; he passed way recently in 2024). In his book, The Illusion of Conscious Will, he showed in experiments that in many cases it’s not clear that our sense of willing an action actually causes the action. We certainly have at least an attribution of will, of course, because our thought—the intent to perform an action, in standard experiences of will—precedes the action itself. But it is possible that the association between conscious intent and action might be a correlation, not a causal relationship in which intent makes action. In fact, Wegner submits that people can be fooled in the experiments both ways: into thinking they are willing an action when they aren’t and into thinking they aren’t when they are.

Other famous experiments by neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet, though controversial, have been taken by many scientists to show that a fraction of a second before a person consciously wills an action (such as deliberately lifting a finger at a moment “freely” chosen), the brain shows specific kinds of wave patterns. It seems that the brain initiates at least certain kinds of activity associated with the sense of willing an action prior to the sensed willing itself.

Furthermore, psychologist John Bargh of Yale, which hosts his Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation Laboratory, and occasional collaborator with Wegner has investigated how pictures and words not consciously reportable (because they are either flashed too quickly or masked by subsequent stimuli) can influence people’s actions. Bargh’s summary paper that summarizes a vast body of such studies eerily says it all right in the title, “The unbearable automaticity of being.”

To more fully describe a person’s behaviors, we must invoke longer-range influences, such as upbringing with parents, teachers, television, and peers. It all becomes incredibly complex to contemplate. There is no doubt the human psyche is complicated, perhaps as complicated when compared to a walnut leaf as the walnut leaf is when compared to a rock. But complexity alone does not mean we have to retreat to a simplistic explanation of a life force, or soul, or any other option that would allow us to invoke a stand-alone self that is free from mechanistic dynamics of the neuronal interactions that comprise it.

What is all this going to mean? Where are the experiments and discoveries leading us? They are indeed shaking up the people who are closest to them. I have heard more than one cognitive scientist say that they have realized from their studies and experiments that “there’s no one home.” New terms such as “neuroethics” and “neuromorality” are starting to appear in professional interpretations and discussions. Adina Roskies, a philosopher and neuroscientist at Dartmouth College, claims the findings of neuroscience will likely cause us to revise our common sense, traditional notions of control. But she also submits that the concept of responsibility will remain crucial to human existence. Three cheers.

Perhaps the healthiest, certainly most humorous, response I’ve heard on the overall matter came from famed philosopher of mind and language, Jerry Fodor (1935-2017). He wrote, “The question is: who is this I? . . . If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.”

References & Notes

Bargh, John A., and Chartrand, Tanya L. (1999). The Unbearable Automaticity of Being, American Psychologist, 54, 7, 462-479.

Fodor, Jerry (1998, January 22). The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism, London Review of Books, 20, 2, pp.11-13 . I’ve taken Fodor a bit out of context, because his remarks were in a review of two books about the modularity of mind. Fodor says these theories don’t deal with integration. I am comfortable using his words here, because once saw Fodor speak at the philosophy department of NYU and recall well his general elevation of the “me” that came through in the discussion.

Koch, Christof. (2004). The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. New York: W. H. Freeman. Online, you can find a lot of reviews of this book (newspapers, etc.) and most highlight the prominence of his “zombie agents” concept. I once saw Koch speak in the philosophy department of NYU.

Libet: I’ve been down this rabbit hole many times, which meant diving into Libet’s papers, and the slew of papers questioning the experiments and their interpretations (as well as confirmations). Libet’s papers and follow-ups had influence (several of his works have been cited thousands of times). Look up Benjamin Libet (or “Libet’s experiments”) in Google Scholar and dive in yourself. For example, I note here a paper just published (2024) that looks relevant: “Neurophenomenology in Action: Integrating the First‐Person Perspective into the Libet Experiment” (journal: Mindfulness, authors Stefan Schmidt and two others). The last sentence of the abstract reads, “On the basis of our approach, meditation can be seen as a method for enhancing self-regulation and self-determination, which allows for more deliberate decisions and thus more ethical behavior.” This harmonizes with where I am going in many of these short essays, that more freedom seems to relate to paying attention to the thinker of the thoughts, as a way to go beyond the automaticity of the thoughts themselves.

Roskies, Adina (2006). Neuroscientific challenges to free will and responsibility. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 9, 419-423.

Wegner, Daniel M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books (imprint of The MIT Press). A new edition was issued by The MIT Press in 2017.

© 2024 Tyler Voik

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