[Vision2020] Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga: "Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain."

[Ted Moffett]

I listened to an interview recently with neuroscientist Michael
S. Gazzaniga, author of the new book, "Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and
the Science of the Brain."  Publish Date: November 15, 2011:
http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/michael-s-gazzaniga/who-s-in-charge/_/R-400000000000000529963

Given the recent return to Vision2020 of a local scholar who has
considerable expertise on this subject, perhaps he can expound on
whether he thinks Gazzaniga has added anything new to the discussion
of this subject.

The interview was fascinating, though as I noted before on Vision2020
regarding "free will," I find the concept confounding, do not claim to
know how to define it; and Gazzaniga has not resolved this lack of
clarity.

I started this post several days ago.  But today I discovered that at
6 PM PST tonight, on BookTV C-Span2, Gazzaniga will be interviewed
regarding the very book referenced in this post:
http://www.booktv.org/Program/13035/After+Words+Michael+Gazzaniga+Whos+in+Charge+Free+Will+and+the+Science+of+the+Brain+hosted+by+Sally+Satel.aspx

What is especially amazing, it seems to me, is that so many
people are confident they know what free will is and that most everybody
definately possesses this capacity, most every moment of our waking, at least,
lives, thus justifying revenge and retribution of various cruel kinds
for misconduct.  For most everyone to understand the complexities
involved in the concept of "free will" is perhaps like saying most
everyone has PhD. level understanding in nuclear physics!

Note I am not suggesting abandoning assigning responsibility and
mitigation for misconduct, regardless of any deficiencies in the
understanding of free will.  How many people think dogs possess "free
will?" But if a dog is inclinded to bite or has bitten humans, the dog
is often held "responsible," and either trained not to bite (domestic
violence counseling, as a human parallel), be muzzled or sequestered
(jail, prison), or executed, often without an intention to take
revenge for a canine moral failing based on "free will."

The following article by Gazzaniga explores some of these issues:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/11/neuroscientist_michael_s_gazzaniga_explains_why_some_people_may_be_born_criminals_.single.html

Not Guilty by Reason of Neuroscience: Some people’s brains may doom them to
a life of crime.

By Michael S. Gazzaniga

http://www.slate.com/authors.michael_s_gazzaniga.html

Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011, at 11:17 AM ET

>From the book "Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the
Brain", by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Copyright © 2011 by Michael S.
Gazzaniga.
Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

On Feb. 19, 1997, a house painter called 911 in Tampa, Fla. He had returned
unannounced to a client’s house and through a window saw what appeared to
be a naked man throttling a naked woman. When the police arrived, they
learned the man hadn’t just strangled Roxanne Hayes; he had stabbed the
mother-of-three multiple times, killing her.

The murderer’s name was Lawrence Singleton; he was 69 years old, and he was
notorious in California, where 19 years before, he had raped a 15-year-old
hitchhiker, Mary Vincent; hacked off her forearms; and left her in a canyon
to die. Two vacationers came across her the next morning, walking naked
toward the interstate, the stumps of her severed arms raised to prevent
further blood loss. Vincent’s description of her attacker was so vivid that
it resulted in a police artist’s drawing that his neighbor recognized.

Singleton was tried, found guilty, and given what was the maximum sentence
at the time in California of 14 years. He was released on parole, however,
after eight years of “good behavior,” even though shortly before his
release a prison psychiatric evaluation read, “Because he is so out of
touch with his hostility and anger, he remains an elevated threat to
others’ safety inside and outside prison.” Mary’s mother, Lucy Vincent,
said that Mary’s father would carry a .45-caliber pistol and often
contemplated killing Singleton.

Because Singleton had written letters to her lawyer threatening her while
he was in prison, Mary was terrified after his parole. So were
Californians. Residents of every California town that prison authorities
tried to settle him in staged angry protests. He was finally settled in a
mobile home on the grounds of San Quentin prison until his parole was up
and he moved to Florida.

In 2001 Singleton died of cancer while on death row in Florida. Mary
Vincent told a reporter that his arrest and death had given her a
“tremendous feeling of freedom,” but that she still had such vivid
nightmares (during which she had actually dislocated her shoulder, cracked
ribs, and smashed her nose) that she was afraid to go to sleep. Divorced,
with prostheses that she has modified with spare parts from broken
refrigerators and stereo systems, she is now an artist struggling to
support two sons.

While you read this, what were your gut feelings and thoughts about Larry
Singleton? Did you want him to be locked up and never released
(incapacitation)? If you had been Mary’s father, would you, too, have
wanted to kill him (retribution)? Or did you want to forgive him, to tell
him that it is too bad his brain was unable to inhibit his naturally
aggressive tendencies and that perhaps with some treatment he could be more
prosocial (rehabilitation)?

Incapacitation, retribution, or rehabilitation are the three choices
society has for dealing with criminal behavior. When society considers
public safety, it is faced with the decision about which perspective those
making and enforcing the laws should take: retribution, an approach focused
on punishment of the individual and just desserts; or consequentialism, a
utilitarian approach that what is right is what has the best consequences
for society.

Neuroscience is beginning to challenge some people’s notions about criminal
behavior and what we should do about it. Determinism—the belief that all
current and future events, actions, decisions, and behavior are caused by
preceding events combined with the laws of nature—disputes long-standing
beliefs about what it means to be responsible for one’s actions; some
scholars assert the extreme view that humans are never responsible for any
of their actions. These ideas challenge the very foundational rules
regulating how we live together in social groups. Should people be held
accountable for their behavior? If they aren’t, it seems that it would
change behavior for the worse, just as studies show that merely reading
about determinism results in increased cheating on tests. Is accountability
what keeps us civilized? Neuroscience has more and more to say about these
questions and is already slowly oozing into the courtroom—prematurely, to
the view of most neuroscientists.

Californians thought that Singleton should not have been paroled, and they
didn’t want him in their communities. They also thought that certain
behavior warranted longer incarceration. They were right, and the parole
board was wrong. More recently, the legal system has been looking to
neuroscience to provide answers in several different arenas: predicting a
person’s future threat (recidivism), determining for whom treatment is
possible, and deciding what level of certainty about these determinations
is acceptable. Are some crimes just too horrendous to contemplate release?
Neuroscience is also illuminating why we have the emotional reactions that
we do to antisocial or criminal behavior.

This leads us to the question that if we understand our reactions that have
been honed by evolution, can or should we amend them? Are these emotions
the sculptors of a civilized society? We have our work cut out for us!

The philosopher Gary Watson has pointed out the simple fact that as we come
to think about ourselves, we shape the rules that we decide to live by.
Primatologists Michael Tomasello and Brian Hare have argued that we have
been domesticating ourselves over thousands of years through ostracizing
and killing those who were too aggressive, in essence removing them from
the gene pool and modifying our social environment. If they’re right, then
we have been making rules for groups to live by and enforcing them
throughout our evolutionary history. If neuroscientific findings lead us to
think differently about ourselves, our behaviors, and motivations, about
the nature of man, about what we are, and about how we should interact;
then we *may *decide to reconstruct our social framework—and our legal
structure.

Is our natural inclination for retribution necessary, or is utilitarian
accountability sufficient? Is punishment justified? These are questions
that haven’t in any way been answered, but they are brought to the fore by
research on the brain and what it tells us about who we are. We are going
to see that our current legal system has emerged from innate intuitions,
honed by evolution, just as our moral systems have been.

Who Done It: Me or My Brain?

Legal systems serve as a social mediator of dealings between people. We
should keep in mind the niche construction dynamic when attempting to
characterize the law and our concepts of justice and punishment, formed, as
they were, by the human brain, mind, and cultural interactions. Legal
systems elaborate rights and responsibilities in a variety of ways. In most
modern-day societies, the laws made by these systems are enforced through a
set of institutions as are the consequences of breaking those laws. When
one breaks a law, it is considered to be an offense against the entire
society, the state, not an individual. Currently, American law holds one
responsible for one’s criminal actions unless one acted under severe duress
(a gun pointed at your child’s head, for instance) or one suffers a serious
defect in rationality (such as not being able to tell right from wrong). In
the United States, the consequences for breaking those laws are based on a
system of retributive justice, where a person is held accountable for his
crime and is meted out punishment in the form of his “just desserts.” But
new research raises the question: Who do we blame in a crime, the person or
the brain? Do we want to hold the person accountable or do we want to
forgive him because of this determinist dimension of brain function?

>From today’s vantage point: It is all about the brain—what it does and does
not do. We are born with an intricate brain slowly developing under genetic
control, with refinements being made under the influence of epigenetic
factors and activity-dependent learning. It displays structured—not
random—complexity, with automatic processing, with particular skill sets,
with constraints, and with a capacity to generalize. All of these traits
evolved through natural selection and provide the foundation for a myriad
of cognitive abilities that are separated and represented in different
parts of the brain. These parts feature distinct but interrelated neural
networks and systems. In short, the brain has distributed systems running
simultaneously and in parallel. It has multiple control systems, not just
one. It appears to be a determined, finely tuned biological machine.**

Neuroscience Oozing Into the Courtroom

The law is complicated and takes into consideration more than just the
actual crime. For example, the intention of the perpetrator is also part of
the equation. Was the act intentional or accidental? In 1963, Lee Harvey
Oswald had the intention of killing President Kennedy when he took his
concealed rifle to the building along the parade route, waited there until
the president’s motorcade was passing, and shot him. In an Australian case
the following year, however, Robert Ryan was judged not to have had the
intention to murder when he killed the cashier of a store he had just
successfully robbed. While leaving the store, he tripped, accidentally
pulled the trigger of his gun, and shot the cashier.

While movies, books, and television portray crimes ending up in a courtroom
where intention and many other circumstances are examined, very few
criminal cases actually go to trial, only about 3 percent; most are plea
bargained out. Once we step into the courtroom, the laboratory of judicial
proceedings, neuroscience has an enormous amount to say about the
goings-on. It can provide evidence that there is unconscious bias in the
judge, jury, prosecutors, and defense attorneys; tell us about the
reliability of memory and perception with implications for eyewitness
testimony; and inform us about the reliability of lie detecting. Now it’s
being asked to determine the presence of diminished responsibility in a
defendant, predict future behavior, and determine who will respond to what
type of treatment. It can even tell us about our motivations for punishment.

Robert Sapolsky, professor of psychology at Stanford, makes the extremely
strong statement: “It’s boggling that the legal system’s gold standard for
an insanity defense—M’Naghten—is based on 166-year-old science. Our growing
knowledge about the brain makes notions of volition, culpability, and,
ultimately, the very premise of a criminal justice system, deeply suspect.”
The M’Naghten rules arose after the attempted assassination of British
Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1843 and have been used to determine (with a
few adjustments) criminal liability in regard to the insanity defense in
most common law jurisdictions ever since. The British Supreme Court of
Judicature, in answer to one of the questions posed to it by the House of
Lords about the insanity law, responded:

“the jurors ought to be told in all cases that every man is presumed to be
sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for
his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfaction; and that to
establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved
that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was
labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not
to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know
it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”

The question that Sapolsky raises is: Given determinism, given that we are
beginning to understand mental states, given we can track down which part
of the brain is involved in volitional activity and that it may be
impaired, and our growing knowledge that we can be specific about the
existence of an impairment and what is causing it, will we view the
defendant differently?

At stake in the arguments is the very foundation of our legal system, which
holds a person responsible and accountable for his actions. The question is
this: Does modern neuroscience deepen our ideas about determinism, and,
with more determinism, is there less reason for retribution and punishment?
Put differently, with determinism there is no blame, and, with no blame,
there should be no retribution and punishment. This is the simmering idea
that people are worried about. If we change our mind about these things as
a culture, then we are going to change how we deal with this unfortunate
aspect of human behavior involving crime and punishment.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett