The Romantic Moment

I came across this great interview with John Searle while looking for support of my hypothesis of the 'romantic moment', that time when a decision (including the lack of a decision) is yet to be made and all possibilities are open.  The name 'romantic moment' comes from the idea that a romantic gesture is most effective when executed simultaneously with its formulation.  The 'romantic moment' is the quantum grace in which that choice is made.

This hypothesis seems to hold some similarity to the bereitspotential, or 'readiness potential' mentioned in the article.

[Note:  The website containing the transcript has since disappeared.  Click the break for the referenced question and answer.]

Q:  I want to go back to the arm—some days she goes up, some days she doesn’t—and ask you about the work of Libet and Wegner, which seems to suggest that your conscious intention to raise the arm comes after the physical process of raising it has already begun.

JS:  Well, I don’t know if your hearers know about this. It wasn’t Libet, it was two Germans in the 1970’s named Deecke and Kornhuber. They used to send me their articles. I haven’t heard from them in a long time—I don’t know if they’re still alive. But in any case, two Germans made a very important discovery: they discovered something called the bereitspotential (sic), the “readiness potential.” And what they discovered was, if you tell an agent to do some simple act such as punching a button or wiggling your finger, but do it at random, and keep track of when you actually decide to initiate the action, what you discover is that there is an increased activity in the supplementary motor area of their brain a couple of hundred milliseconds before they are aware of having decided to move their finger.

Now what follows from that? Well, I would say, not much. I mean, that’s an interesting result, and until we know how the brain works we don’t know quite how to assimilate it. I mean, we don’t know what to make of it. But some people think, no no, this refutes free will. This shows that you don’t have free will, because your brain was active before you were aware of having made the conscious decision to do something. Two things to notice. First of all, it’s only in the context where you have already made the conscious decision that every so often you will push the button that the readiness potential takes place. It’s only for simple trivial actions where you have already formed a prior intention to perform actions of that type. Nobody says, well, when Winton Churchill decided to keep on fighting in 1940, that was due to the readiness potential 200 milliseconds before he made the decision. It’s just, nobody thinks it works for that kind of thing. So that’s the first important qualification you have to add, is this is already within the context of a pre-existing decision of which the agent is conscious. And secondly, the readiness potential doesn’t give you causally sufficient conditions. As even Libet admits, you can still veto, you can still decide not to carry out the thing that the activity in the supplementary motor area seemed to presage. As Libet puts it, we shouldn’t say it’s free will; it’s “free won’t.” That is, you can always veto and say I’m not going to do the thing that I previously decided to do.

So I would say let’s not…we always tend to overestimate the importance of neurobiological results. I think these are good results, and I like what Libet did, he designed a special experimental device, which is very helpful in seeing the importance of this. But the idea that somehow or other this is how we’re gonna refute free will—no, it’s a much tougher issue than that.