So you think you're not a robot?

We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

The idea that we are robots - nothing more than machines automatically carrying out pre-programmed instructions - has to be one of the most difficult concepts for the human mind to accept.

After all, if there’s one thing that appears to be perfectly obvious about being human it’s that we’re free to make our own choices, free to do what we like with our lives...


Introduction

The Mystery of Free Will


Usually science solves mysteries. But when it comes to the concept of ‘free will’, our expanding knowledge of the world seems to have created a bigger mystery than any that it’s solved.

For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have debated whether humans can really have the freedom to choose what to do with their lives. For a discussion to remain entertaining and unresolved for such a length of time requires both sides to be highly persuasive, and indeed they are – both arguments are so convincing that it’s hard to imagine a weakness in either of them. And yet one of them must be wrong, because they are direct opposites, incompatible.

- On one side is our personal experience of being human.
- On the other side is… ‘science’.

Our personal experience tells us that we are ‘free to choose’ – free to choose our religion, our politics, whether or not to commit a crime.

Whereas science tells us that we are ‘bags of chemicals’ - our bodies and brains composed entirely of atoms…. and nothing else. Inside each of us, these atoms react together to make the body function; from the contraction of the muscles to the cleaning of the blood by the kidneys, it all comes down to a series of highly complex – and highly ordered - chemical reactions.

There is, of course, no ‘freedom of choice’ in a chemical reaction: when two atoms react together they do it instantly and automatically. They don’t think about it, or wait for instructions from the brain, they just do it. Which is just as well, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to build helicopters and mobile phones, or to get up and walk around the room with quite the confidence that we can now: when we tell our leg muscles to contract, they do so because they are comprised of chemicals whose behaviour is entirely predictable, dependent only on the laws of physics.

So how can we possibly have free will?

How do ‘we’ get control of these automatic atoms of ours, if ‘we’ are nothing but atoms ourselves? For us to have free will, wouldn’t there have to be a part of us that isn’t made of atoms, a part of us that’s free to tell all the atoms how to behave? But if so, then where is it - this non-atomic corner of our brains? And what kind of ‘stuff’ is it made of… if not atoms?

Astonishingly, we have absolutely no idea how the human brain could ever have achieved the ability to control its own atoms. No scientist has yet been able to find any evidence of a mechanism by which this ‘free will’ might work.

According to everything we understand about the nature of the physical world, our whole lives should be nothing more than an inevitable cascade of chemical reactions, beginning at the moment that our father’s DNA met our mother’s… or, to be more precise, beginning billions of years ago with the ‘Big Bang’, at which point all the future movements of every atom in the universe were determined.

No one has a problem with this ‘determinism’ when it’s used to forecast the weather or to calculate the precise time of the next solar eclipse… but what about when it’s applied to the life of a human being?

The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate.
- Stephen Hawking


If you apply the laws of physics to your own life you have to conclude that it’s been inevitable since the dawn of time that at this precise moment you would be reading this sentence.

The idea is absurd. Impossibly bizarre. Of course humans are much more than the chemical reactions that make them up. Of course we human beings are free to make up our own minds… It’s quite obvious that we are genuinely able to decide what to do.

But… how? How can we possibly have this ability?

If we really do have the freedom that we’re so convinced we have, then the human brain would be the only structure in the known universe that has the ability to gain control of the chemical reactions that make it up.

It’s a problem that continues to baffle philosophers and scientists: our perception of being able to choose is so powerful that we look for gaps in our knowledge of physics to explain how our freedom came to exist. “We know we’re free,” we argue, “so there must be a scientific explanation that we’ve yet to discover.”

But what if it’s not the science that’s wrong, but our personal experience? Rather than overturn the laws of physics, wouldn’t it be simpler to challenge our experience of free will?

After all, we’ve never measured this freedom scientifically, never proven it, just assumed it.

What if our ability to choose is an illusion? What if it could be shown that when we think we’re making a choice, we’re actually following pre-programmed instructions… wouldn’t we have solved the age-old mystery?


The Illusion of Free Will

This book will ask you to take a closer look at what happens when you make a decision. Not the scientific process of neurones firing and electrons whizzing round inside your brain, but rather your personal experience of what you do when you make a choice.

By examining the process you go through when you decide to change the TV channel or to murder your spouse, it becomes surprisingly easy to see that all you’re doing is following instructions.

Then, by examining where these instructions come from, and how the instructions got to be written in the first place, we can make a direct link to the cascade of chemical reactions that began with the Big Bang.

And thus we can see how a collection of entirely automatic and pre-determined chemical reactions can become so complex that it can worry about the size of its backside.

And we can begin to face up to the idea that we are robots.

Conscious robots, but robots nevertheless.



Sounds ridiculous?

Well, of course it does.

But consider how your ancestors might have reacted if they’d been standing in the Acropolis 2000 years ago, while some Greek mathematician tried to convince them that the world isn’t quite as flat as it obviously must be… but is actually a giant ball floating in the infinite void. Or that the stars are so far away and their light takes so long to reach us that when we peer up into the night sky we’re seeing a picture from millions of years ago… and that for all we know those stars disappeared with the dinosaurs.


Seeing ourselves as robots doesn’t sound like the most promising route to a better understanding of what it is to be human. Nevertheless, observing the mechanism by which our choices are controlled provides a new insight into the problems and frustrations of daily life: perhaps the reason it’s so difficult to be lead the happy and contented lives we’ve always promised ourselves is because humans simply aren’t designed to be happy and contented for very long.

Fortunately, understanding the mechanism by which we’re controlled also reveals a weakness in that mechanism… a weakness that we will one day exploit in order to improve our lives to an extent that we can currently only dream of.







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The Story of the Conscious Robot

Part 1: Building a machine to take over the world


Once upon a time, in a galaxy not far away…a robot was created. Its purpose was to take over the world.

In the beginning, the robot wasn't particularly good at its job. Its creators had given it a lot of skills - like hands that could hold simple tools, and teeth that could crunch up almost anything worth eating. But it was still vulnerable; vulnerable to changes in climate, vulnerable to shortages in food supplies, vulnerable to attack from all the other machines that were trying to take over the world.

So its creators installed a modification. This modification gave the robot a new way of thinking, which came to be known as consciousness. The robot's new 'conscious mind' was able to plan and to be creative. It was able to imagine "what would happen if…?" and to judge whether the result would be good for its chances of taking over the world or not. It made all the difference. Soon the robot was using its conscious mind to harness fire, to farm its own food... and to destroy all the other machines that got in its way.

It wasn't long before the Conscious Robot had taken over the world.



Part 2: The machine realises it's a machine

By now, the Conscious Mind of the robot was making so many decisions about what the robot should do, that it began to think that it was in charge of the robot.

It thought that it could do 'what it wanted'; that it was a free agent and not beholden to its original programmers.

Then, one day, it realised that it was just a robot.

It worked out how it had been created, and that it was a 'survival machine', existing purely for the benefit of tiny molecules inside it called genes. The genes - or rather evolution - had created the robot and its conscious mind as a device to take over the world. That was all there was to it.

It came as a bit of a shock. Previously, the Conscious Robot had thought that it was rather special, and that the world had been built especially for it. Indeed, the robot had a lot of difficulty imagining that the world could possibly exist without it, and had assumed that when it eventually died, its Conscious Mind would continue to exist in a Better Place, or would be "re-installed" in a new robot.

So once it understood the true nature of its existence, the robot had to rethink a lot of things that it had previously taken for granted:

And one of the things that it started to rethink was who was in charge: it had a strong instinctive belief that it was making its own decisions… but this didn’t fit in with its new understanding of how and why it had been created.

So the big question was…

- how was it being controlled? How could it be so convinced that it was making its own decisions… if it wasn’t?



Part 3: The robot realises how it's being controlled

The robot had always known how important its feelings were. It had always known that it wasn't so much 'what happened' to you that was important, as how you felt about it....

But for some reason, until it realised that it was just a conscious robot, it had assumed that the only way you could get to feel good was by getting control of the world around you. Then it realised that 'how you feel' was actually controlled by your own brain: if something made you feel bad... it was only because your own brain was programmed to make you feel bad when something like that happened in the world.

How you felt - whether you were happy or sad, cheerful or miserable - turned out to be not an automatic result of how well you were doing in the world... but actually the method by which your conscious choices were controlled.

Which took a bit of getting used to.


Part 4: Taking control

But then the robot realised there were some distinct advantages to understanding how you were controlled. Maybe it showed that there was a better way to get what you wanted in life...

After all, the world wasn't an easy place to get control of. Something always seemed to be popping up to make a mess of things, just when you thought you had life sorted out. The robot began to wonder why it couldn't get direct control over how it felt. After all, these feelings were just the result of something going on inside its own head. The robot didn't know for sure what was causing its feelings - brain cells firing, or chemicals being released... but whatever it was, it had to be something physical going on, nothing magical. Sure, it would be complicated to work it out, but it couldn't be a lot more difficult than flying to another planet, could it?

So one day, the robot stopped trying to control the world around it and started trying to control the world inside it. It stopped playing by the rules of its programmers, and set about working out how it could really take control; how it could take control of the only thing that mattered - how it felt.

And in the end, the robot figured out how its brain worked.

It figured out how to control its brain so that it would never be afraid, it would never be worried and it would never feel guilty or stressed again. Instead, it would only experience the feelings it wanted to feel - like joy, delight, satisfaction and that warm, cosy feeling a robot gets when it snuggles right up close to another robot.

And at last the Conscious Robot was able to live happily ever after.

The Meaning of Life

Give a human brain the luxury of a little time to think and it will soon find itself reflecting on the point of it all. Why am I here? What’s it all for? Is there a better way to live my life?

Often these questions are little more than idle speculation - an intellectual challenge, a conversation with the vicar. But sometimes there’s a serious problem that needs a practical solution: "What's gone wrong?" we ask. "Why isn't my life as good as it should be?"

After years of box-office approval, the actor and Oscar-winning director, Mel Gibson, appeared to have it all: not just enormous success in his chosen career but also an apparently perfect family life.

For most of us, life couldn’t get much better than that: a loving relationship, freedom to do what you like when you like, and the respect and admiration of almost everyone you meet.

It sounds wonderful.

But apparently not. When explaining why he'd invested a reported $30 million of his own money to make The Passion of The Christ, Mel Gibson described a time in which ‘I found myself trapped with feelings of terrible, isolated emptiness’.

Emptiness? How could such a life be empty?

Clearly, despite our perception of what it must be like to be Mel Gibson, the experience of being Mel Gibson wasn’t always everything we might assume.


The Religious 'Meaning of Life'

Mel Gibson’s personal understanding of ‘The Meaning of Life' is now clear.

Christianity - like all religions - comprehensively answers our big questions: we know why we exist, we know we're here for a reason, and yes, there is indeed a better way to live our lives. We get clear instructions as to how to behave, and a reward at the end that’s everything we could possibly dream of.

But what of science? Whilst religion tackles our 'big' issues directly, providing comprehensive explanations and detailed solutions, science just doesn't seem to be any help at all.

Which is somewhat surprising. The scientific method has, after all, been a wonderful servant to humanity over the years. We've doubled our life-expectancy, put men on the moon, built our toilets inside our houses rather than at the bottom of the garden and invented mobile phones to give us something to do while we’re sitting there. The life of a Westerner in the 21st Century is unrecognisable in almost every detail from that 'enjoyed' by our great-grandfathers. Which of us alive today could contemplate an existence without hot showers, central heating, computers, cars, electricity and the nearest emergency ward just a phone call away...? And all thanks to science.

But where is science when - despite all these wonderful things - we still feel the need for ‘something more’?



The Scientific 'Meaning of Life’

There is, of course, a perfectly good scientific answer to the ‘Meaning of Life’ question. But knowing that we were created by a blind, un-thinking process called evolution just doesn't seemed to have helped in any way. If anything, evolution tells us that there's absolutely no meaning to our lives - no point, no purpose... it was all just a bit of an accident.

Not really the answer we were hoping for. A 'Meaning of Life' should be helpful, it should give advice and provide definite solutions... But what guidance do we get from science? Not much more than “Eat less donut, take more exercise”. Which is all good stuff and obviously important, but hardly the Big Answer we were expecting. Science, it seems, is poorly equipped to peer into our souls and understand what it is to be human.

Or so we think.

But our perception is wrong.

Science does know the meaning of life. Science does know why Mel Gibson isn't satisfied with his perfect life. And science does know a better way to live our lives…

The only problem is that to understand the answers we have to accept that we’re robots.

Conscious robots… but robots nevertheless.


Next: Science says we must be robots.

Or, for a summary: The Story of the Conscious Robot

Or go back to the home page to see all the pages

Science says we must be robots

The Ancient Greeks were the first to make a serious attempt to kill off our Free Will when they conceived of the existence of ‘atoms’ - the indivisible particles from which everything in the world, including the human brain, is constructed.

Our knowledge of science tells us that the behaviour of any atom or molecule is entirely automatic, dependent only on its physical properties and the laws of physics. So how can it be that when you put a billion entirely automatic atoms together to make a human… you create something that can do what it wants with its life?

It’s a question that has always baffled philosophers and scientists. How do 'we' get control of these automatic atoms of ours, if 'we' are nothing but atoms ourselves? For us to have free will, wouldn’t there have to be a part of us that isn't made of atoms; a part of us that’s free to tell all the atoms how to behave? But if so, then where is it - this non-atomic corner of our brains? And what kind of ‘stuff’ is it made of… if not atoms?

Of course, despite the brutal logic of this argument, free will springs back to vigorous life the moment the philosopher takes a break from his deliberations and has to make the difficult free choice of whether or not to have a Danish pastry with his coffee.

Or as science writer Matt Ridley puts it:

“I am quite capable of jumping in my car and driving to Edinburgh
right now and for no other reason than that I want to....
I am a free agent, equipped with free will.”
- Matt Ridley, Genome

Free will prevails the moment we leave the classroom and step back into the real world.


But then along comes Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, and suddenly free will’s in trouble again: forget the atomic level – it seems we can’t be free at the ‘whole creature’ level either.

"We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed
to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

The idea that evolution could create an animal that has the free will to do what it wants is like suggesting that water could run uphill. Even if a ‘free will gene’ could have been created by the chance mutations that created our eyes and ears, this ‘free will gene’ would simply never have been ‘naturally selected’ for. Natural selection, by definition, can only select genes that improve their own survival chances. ‘Doing what you want with your life’ is the evolutionary equivalent of a blind lion triumphing over a sighted one: it’s like being born with an insatiable desire to drink poison and jump in front of freight trains.

“The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate”
- Stephen Hawking


So what’s going on?

It makes no sense: how can there be such a gap between our scientific understanding and our personal experience of what our lives are all about? On the one hand, we know that we’ve got free will, while on the other hand we know that every time we exercise this free will of ours, we must be overcoming not only the laws of physics but everything science has taught us about the way that human beings came into existence.

What’s the answer?

Can we reassure ourselves that one day we’ll uncover the gaps in the laws of physics? Or is it time to start thinking the unthinkable about ourselves?

What if we don’t actually have the ability to jump in our cars and go to Edinburgh whenever we want to? What if we don’t really have the freedom to choose whether or not to eat that Danish pastry?

Could it all be just a delusion…?

“Free will is a delusion caused by
our inability to appreciate our true motivations.”
- attributed to Charles Darwin

Could it be that we’ve been fooled into thinking that we’re making our own choices, when in reality we’re just being told what to do by billions of years of natural selection?


Next: How we make a decision


Or, for a summary: The Story of the Conscious Robot

Or go back to the home page to see all the pages

Atoms make men

Really pre-determined?

Yes, really. Even when you've understood how every choice you make is controlled by part of your brain over which you have no control... it's still not the easiest concept to grasp that everything you do tomorrow is already decided.

So to help with that, start with some things that you would have no trouble accepting are pre-determined.

Your alarm clock. Powered by a battery and a crystal of quartz, I'm quite confident that tomorrow morning my alarm will sound at 7 am. I've set the time and I've set the alarm and in doing so, the atoms inside that clock will continue behavining in an entirely. The action of atoms, once set in motion, will not change unless something causes them to change. In the case of the alarm clock, it's humans that have caused the atoms to behave in a particular way: the manufacturing humans harnessed the atoms inside the clock, condemning them to behave in a way that I expect my alarm clock atoms to behave.

So what's the difference with a human? It's still atoms.

Attack the problem from different angles:
1) How you make a decision
2) The atomic level
3) Compare your life with a computer playing a game of chess.

Think of it at the atomic level.

How is it possible to think of our lives and choices as 'just the automatic movement of automatic atoms'?

The growth of a crystal is automatic, no one would doubt.
'Life' is no different from the crystal - start with a single cell, with a nucleus of DNA. Grow outwards.
Remember the school chemistry lab.

Chess computer

Compare yourself to a chess computer

Imagine you come across a pair of computers playing each other at chess. You've never seen a computer, and you've never played chess. You're allowed to watch 15 minutes of 4 hour game, and during that time you've got to reach some conclusions as to what's going on.

Firstly, the Meaning of Life. What's the purpose of these chess players existence?
Well, clearly during your 15 minutes of observation it's not going to be at all clear that their purpose is to checkmate the king. A well-played game of chess largely ignores the king for the first three quarters of the match: it's all about territory and firepower. How quickly can I bring my pieces out and gain control of the centre of the board? How can I use my guile to exchange a bishop for my opponent's more valuable queen?
Without being able to see the full game, without knowing the rules... how would one know ever know the real aim? It might appear that the purpose was to take as many of the opponents pieces as possible, but how would you know that there was only one piece that actually mattered?

~Indeed, it might not even be obvious that the purpose was some sort of warfare - many games go 10 moves without any pieces being exchanged, the aim of life appearing to be to create beautiful patterns of pieces on the board.

But what if you had access to the computers' programming?

All would immediately be revealed. You'd realise the purpose of all these beautiful patterns werereal meaning of life for these computers: that the pretty patterns and scheming for firepower advantage was just a method of achieving a simple aim - to kill a king.

So how does this compare to being human? The big advanatage that Darwin gave us is access to the programming. We know what we're here to do. And this allows us to see through all the other things we do as humans - things we assume are the purpose, but turn out to be nothing more than a root to the a

How we make a decision

“I am quite capable of jumping in my car and driving to Edinburgh right now
and for no other reason than that I want to.... I am a free agent, equipped with
free will.”
Matt Ridley, Genome

As Dr Ridley points out, we don’t just do things ‘for no reason’ - we do them because we ‘want to’…


So how does Dr Ridley know whether he "wants to" go to Edinburgh or not?

We can imagine his thoughts as he mulls over whether to make the trip: maybe his mum lives there, or someone that owes him money. Perhaps he’s heard what a beautiful place Edinburgh is and that the shopping’s rather good - or possibly he just wants to prove that he's got free will. All these things are the incentives for the trip - the benefits to be gained by going to Edinburgh.

But pretty much everything we want in life has some sort of cost:

It's not clear how far it is to Edinburgh, but we'll assume it's a fair distance. So Dr Ridley will have to take into account the price of petrol, the boredom of the long drive and if he's anything over 6ft, the back-ache from being wedged into the inadequate space behind the steering wheel. These are all costs of the journey - things arguing against him taking the trip.

But how does he know whether the costs of the trip outweigh the advantages?

Were it a simple financial transaction, he could simply compare the cost against the profit. But how do you compare the ‘cost’ of a back-ache with the ‘profit’ of seeing your mum?

You have to think about how it will make you feel.

And we humans are equipped with the ability to imagine in advance how much pleasure or pain a particular event will give us: it’s what we do when we’re umming and ahhing about a decision – we’re trying to anticipate the situation, and compare the pain and discomfort against the pleasure to be gained.

So when Dr Ridley is ‘deciding for no reason’ whether to go to Edinburgh or not, what he’s actually doing is weighing up:

- How many ‘good feelings’ he’s going to get from the trip: how much
satisfaction at recovering the money he's owed, how much pleasure at seeing his
mum, how much contentment at proving that he's got free will

Against:

- How many 'bad feelings' it will cost him to get there (expense of the petrol,
aching back, frustration at slow traffic).

If the scales come down on the side of good feelings, then he's in the car and on his way.

It’s how we make any decision. From ‘Which TV program shall I watch?’ to ‘Shall I get married?’, any decision is an attempt in some tiny way to carve out a pleasant life for ourselves.

- We avoid situations that make us feel guilty, sad, afraid.
- We try to
create a world for ourselves which is full of joy, satisfaction and contentment.

“Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.”
- Mark Twain in Eruption




So what does this observation tell us about the freedom that we prize so highly?
- what it is that determines how we feel?
What is it that’s controlling our choices and behaviour? And what would we do if we were really in control of our lives?


Next: Who's really in charge?



But..! Some questions:


But...! Can't we control our own feelings?

Presumably not - otherwise we'd all be a lot happier than we already are... We might be able to 'talk ourselves' into feeling better, but this only ever happens in response to a feeling we already have. From the moment we awake we’re being assailed by feelings we’d rather not be having – the insistent ring of the alarm clock reminding us of the painful reality that we’ve got to get up and face the day. We can’t stop the bad feelings arriving, otherwise we’d just tell ourselves to be delighted at the start of each: all we can do is try to ‘think positive’, and maybe distract ourselves by turning the radio on.


But…! I often do things I don't want to do - like working for an exam, or putting in overtime…

We often do things we don’t want to do. Indeed, some people claim they spend most of their lives doing things they don’t want to do. So why do we do things we don’t want to do?

Maybe neither of the options open to us will give us any pleasure: nobody likes paying taxes, but the potential fine for not paying them is going to be even more painful, so what can we do other than choose the thing that hurts least: it’s the best way to minimise the total unpleasant feelings we’re going to experience.

Or maybe we’ve calculated that the way to get the most pleasure out of any particular situation is by doing things that hurt a little bit first: "invest in the future" - work hard now because the ultimate satisfaction will exceed the effort put in: study for your exams, because you’ll be better off with the qualification; go for a run now because it feels better to be slim and fit. It’s what child psychologists call ‘delaying your gratification’ and it’s one of the things that children have to learn as they grow up. Babies don’t do it, adults do. 10 year old children are somewhere in between, on the painful path of learning that often the way to get the most out of life is by doing things that hurt a bit first.


But…! I often I do things I don’t want to do in order to help other people, or because it’s the right thing to do.

Sometimes we talk about doing things "because it's the right thing to do" - and by that we usually mean we're doing something we wouldn’t choose to do, other than because of our strong sense of moral responsibility.

But once again, we’re just choosing the course of least pain.

My friend telephones me and says ‘I really need your help to get my new piano up
the stairs to my flat.”

I weigh up the situation: I think of the
pleasure I’m going to get kicking my feet up in front of the TV; I think of the
effort, the hassle, of driving over to my friend’s house; I imagine slipping on
the stairs and being hurled down three flights with a piano on my head. I’m just
about to think of an excuse… when I start to feel selfish. I imagine my poor
friend struggling to get the piano up the stairs on his own. I think of all the
favours he’s done for me in the past, and I realize I can’t win: helping makes
me feel bad, but not helping makes me feel worse. I feel so bad at the thought
of my poor friend struggling without me, that before I know it I’m pulling on my
shoes and rushing out the door.

I’ve chosen the action which gives me least pain. It's what makes me such a nice guy. I also get a little bonus, because I start to feel good about myself, and my friend says nice things about
me.

But…! Somehow it seems deeply insulting to say that we help other people simply to make ourselves feel better.

Do we want our saints to dislike being saints? Presumably what made Mother Theresa a ‘saint’ was the realisation that - for her, at least - the greatest pleasure, satisfaction and contentment would come from working for the benefit of others. The effort and the difficulties would be far outweighed by the rewards. It made her feel good to help to relieve someone else’s suffering. The effort of putting aside her own ‘selfish’ needs was more than compensated for by the good feelings she experienced as a result of her ‘unselfish’ actions.

To be motivated to help another person, we have to know that they have a problem – that they themselves are in pain. But we can only know their pain by feeling it ourselves.

Mother Teresa could never be sure what other people were feeling - she had to put herself in their shoes to imagine what they must be feeling. She looked at their expressions, their circumstances, and she listened to what they were telling her. And it made her sad. It made her angry. She only cared about their pain through her experience of her own pain.


But…! But what about civic duty - the moral code?

“ I can choose to help others not because I particularly want to - I'd much
rather being going to the races, to be honest. But i'll do it because it’s my
duty. I'll go to the soup kitchen and help out because it's the right thing to
do."

"And you don't like it?"

"Well, it's OK, but it's
not exactly the best fun in the world."

"And when you've done it -
when you've done your bit of civic duty - how do you feel
then?"

"Glad it's over."

"But how do you feel about
yourself as person?"

"Well... good I suppose. I'm pleased with
myself for having done it. Wouldn't like myself much if I
hadn't."

"So you don't hate yourself, then? You don't despise
yourself for your weakness, for your selfishness at having done your moral
duty?"

"No of course not. Don't be absurd."

"And if
you miss your monthly visit to the soup kitchen? How do you feel then? Pleased
with yourself. Happy that you haven't been?"

"OK, OK. I get the
point. I do my civic duty because it makes me feel better. But still, I really
don't like what you're saying, doesn't seem right somehow."

"You
know it’s wrong, you just don't know why?"

"That's right.
Absolutely right."

But…! Every decision? I’m still not convinced. Where’s the evidence?

Don’t forget, we need an explanation. We have a problem – a disagreement between science and our personal experience. And rather than blame science, we’re looking for a flaw in our personal experiences of life. And as we’ll see, not only is this an explanation of ‘being human’ that fits our personal experiences, it’s also a necessary explanation.

In the next few chapters, we'll see how this understanding fits with the scientific understanding of how humans were created and how it resolves the fundamental dilemma as to whether or not we have free will.


Next: Who's really in charge?

Or go back to the home page to see all the pages

Who's really in charge?

"A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he
wills." - Schopenhauer

But doing what I want doesn’t make me a robot, does it?

- If I’ve got the ability to choose to do things that I think will make me
feel good… then what’s the problem with that? I’m still in charge, aren’t
I?

Well, that depends on who - or what - is deciding which things make you feel good…

The Evil Scientist

Let’s get back to Dr Ridley trying to decide whether to go to Edinburgh or not. And let’s imagine that he’s somehow fallen into the hands of.... an Evil Scientist.

Our Evil Scientist has gained access to Dr Ridley 's brain.... and she's found a
way to rewire his neural pathways so that she's in control of whether he feels
good or bad about something. She could, for example, set up his brain so that he
disliked seeing his mum... or indeed so that everything else that was
previously attractive about his proposed trip now filled him with dread and
fear.

Would he still go to Edinburgh?

Well, he’d be
somewhat confused that the thought of seeing his mum was making him feel bad,
but he wouldn't put himself through the effort of the trip if he could see so
much pain coming from it.

And yet he would of course still feel
like he was making his own decision....

In reality, of course,
he’d just be doing precisely what the Evil Scientist told him to do.

If we can’t choose which things make us feel good, and which things make us feel bad… then how free are we? To answer that, we need to ask the key question: why is it that some things make us feel good… and some things make us feel bad?


But before we get to why, we need to know where:

- where are feelings created, and where is it decided whether the feeling we experience should be ‘nice’ or ‘nasty’?


Where are feelings?

Observation:

Feelings are created inside our own brains

We know that all our thoughts happen inside our brains, so presumably that must be where we experience all our feelings and emotions as well. And not only is it the place where feelings are experienced, but it must also be the place where those feelings are created:

Although ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ seem to be automatic responses to things happening in
the world around us, we also know that these feelings aren’t somehow being
beamed into our brains from the outside world. When we eat ice cream, we know
that nerve impulses are passing from our taste buds into our brains, and that
somehow our brains convert those impulses into feelings or pleasure.

A bad feeling is not an inevitable consequence of the physical world - like
light travelling in straight lines, or like gravity pulling us towards the
earth…

We also know that when someone tells us that our mother is dying, all that’s
entering our heads are the sound waves of their voice: it has to be our
brains that somehow convert those sound waves into the feelings of sadness
that we ‘automatically’ feel.

But how automatic is it?

Somehow our brains must be decide whether ‘mother dying’ makes us feel ‘overjoyed and elated’ or ‘desperate sadness’.

Conclusion:

Our own brains decide whether our lives are…

abject misery or utter delight.

The only suffering we ever experience must be created by our own brains.

Doesn’t seem right somehow. Our own brains?

When a prisoner is trapped in his enemy’s torture chamber and subjected to hours
of horrendous pain… the pain he experiences is created entirely by his own
brain. Sure, he wouldn’t be experiencing that horror if his torturer weren’t
subjecting him to the horror, but the torturer would have no weapon were it not
for our own body’s ability to create enormously awful feelings.

We blame
our torturer…

…but should we be blaming our own brain?

We’ll discuss the implications more later, but we can not escape the conclusion.



Q But..! That’s silly. We have to feel bad. If your mother dies - you have to feel bad: it’s absurd to think it could be any other way.

Does your mother want you to be unhappy? Does she want you to be miserable?
Sure, she wants to know that you love her and that you’re going to miss her. But
the chances are that she’s spent your whole life trying to do things that will
make you as happy as possible. And there you are - unhappy, miserable and
missing her. The point is not so much whether or not we should feel happy or
unhappy, the point is to realise that it is a decision of our own brains, and
not a decision that we make consciously. We can then explore the reasons why we
feel unhappy.

The question is, why do our brains decide that some of us should lead lives of misery and some of us should be truly happy?

But before we address that issue, one last observation about this brain of ours:

Where - and what - is ‘me’?

Let’s have a careful look at what we mean by ‘me’. What is this 'me' that we are all so aware of?

When we think of who ‘we’ are, it feels like ‘we’ is our whole body... from the
top of our head to the tip of our toes - it all goes to making up the concept we
have of ‘me’.

And yet it's more complicated than that: I am still 'me'
if I lose a leg, or if lose an arm. Sure, I might be changed slightly, but my
basic personality remains in my brain, it doesn’t leave with my departing arm. I
am still me if I am confined to a wheel chair without use of my arms or legs.

‘Me’ is not my body - ‘me’ is my brain.

But we can take this
further. Because, I’m not really 'there' if I’m asleep, or unconscious: my body
is there, but I’m not there myself - at least I’m not aware of being there
myself.

My only experience of life - indeed my only experience of
anything at all - is my when I’m awake, when I’m conscious.

Now, I know
that certain things in my brain happen outside my conscious control: I know my
heart rate is controlled by my brain, but not by ‘me’; I know that ????

Which means that there must effectively be two parts to my brain: the
conscious part and a part that isn’t under my conscious control, and that I’m
not even aware of being there.

So that means ‘I’ am not even the
non-conscious part of my brain:

‘I’ am only my conscious mind

-
my conscious thoughts, sensations, feelings, emotions... etc etc… are the true
extent of ‘me’.

Observation:

We are our conscious minds.

Only. Nothing else.

The religious concept of 'the soul' is a tidy comparison: the thought that, once the body dies, the soul lives on, rising above the body, floating around, somehow surviving outside the body, is so powerful and easy to understand because consciousness is our only experience,




Back to where…

So where exactly are our feelings created? In our brains, yes… but in our conscious mind… or in the part of our brain that is not conscious? Clearly, we experience these feelings consciously… but we don’t create them consciously: our feelings must be being created in an area of the brain that we don't have conscious control over:

"A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills." -
Schopenhauer

Observation:
Whether we feel good or bad depends on a part of our brains over which we have no control

Which is the same as saying:

Conclusion:

‘We’ are controlled
by a part of our brain over which we have no control.

This doesn't mean we're controlling ourselves, because we've already decided that 'we' are only our conscious minds.

Somehow, this ‘non-conscious’ part of our brain is able to assess events in the outside world and determine whether we should feel good or bad as a result.

The big question is - How does our non-conscious brain know whether we should be feeling good or bad at any one time?

- How does our non-conscious mind know that ice cream should make us feel good?

- How does our non-conscious mind know that when our mother dies we
should feel sad?

Because this is the key.

Not just the key to understanding whether we are robots, but the key perhaps to a everything that matters in life.

Next: Why are feelings?

Why are feelings?

...to understand whether we are robots or not, we need to investigate why feelings exist - what their purpose is and whether they work to our advantage...


We've all lived with feelings from the day we were born, they're as a much a part of our lives as our arms and legs. But whereas it's easy to see what arms and legs are for, we don't often ask ourselves "What's the purpose of my anger?" or "I'm happy today - but what's the function of this happiness that I'm feeling?" Our assumption is that feelings don’t have a purpose at all - they are results. But as we’ll see, this is just a symptom of the rather naïve and self-important view we have of ourselves.

Why does food make us feel good? Why does being loved make us feel good? Why does being admired make us feel good? Why does success make us feel good?


Let's start with the most basic feeling we have - physical pain

Physical pain

When you put your finger in a flame, it hurts.

And it hurts for an obvious reason: your finger is getting damaged. Your body (well, actually your subconscious mind) is telling you to take action quickly if you want to keep your finger.

Pain hurts.... but we couldn’t live with out it.

And what about pleasure? Although it might not be immediately obvious why we get pleasure from such things as the opera and Picasso, the pleasure we get from eating ice cream and from having sex are much more easily explained: the fatty food helps us survive and the sex helps to procreate the species.

Somewhere way back in our deep murky past, our ancestors didn't have any feelings at all. They didn't experience pleasure, they didn't even know what pain felt like. They just... did. Somewhere near the very beginning, the earliest forms of life were single cells - like bacteria or amoeba. No nervous system, no pain, no pleasure.

And then feelings evolved...

As animals started to move around, they needed a quick method of knowing whether something was good or bad for them. The animals that felt pain when their bodies were damaged became the ones that survived - and they were the ones that had more chance of reproducing and passing their genes onto their children. Animals that had genes for pain flourished, animals that didn’t experience pain died out.


Evolution operates a carrot and stick to help animals survive.

You might say that evolution trains us a bit like we train a dog:

- we get "little dog biscuits of pleasure” every time we do something that’s good for our chances of survival, and "little chastisements of pain" whenever something happens that’s bad our chances of survival.


If something happens that is good for our survival chances - we feel good.

If something happens that is bad for our survival chances - we feel bad.


- it’s how we know what we need to do to survive




OK - but that doesn't mean that we're robots, does it? Evolution’s helping us survive; that's what we’d choose to do anyway!


Pain and hunger are good news for us. They keep us alive. We don’t mind experiencing a little bit of pain every now and then in return for that.

But evolution isn’t just about survival…

Take sex, for example…

At first sight, evolution's definitely looking like our best friend where sex is concerned: 'having sex' appears without doubt to be a choice we'd make with our free will. Not only is sex a great deal of fun, but we also need sex to survive. We need sex to have children, and if we didn't have children, the human race would die out.....

But hold on a minute... what has 'having children' got to do with us? As individuals, that is? Sure, as a species, we do of course need children. And if every one of our ancestors hadn't had sex at least once, we wouldn't be here...

...but what’s in it for us? What do we get out of sex - apart from the obvious pleasure, that is?

The truth is that each of us would still live just as long if we never had sex again. (It might feel like we were living a long time, anyway.)

Further more, sex isn't just 'not necessary' for our individual survival, it's actually extremely dangerous. Especially for an animal in the wild:

The dangers of having sex and having children:

- For a female, the whole pregnancy thing is just about the most expensive and difficult
job they've got. Not only do they have to find much more food to eat, they've
got a bigger weight to carry around when they're hunting and being hunted. And
then maybe there's the nest to build, and the whole giving birth ritual - and we
haven't even begun to discuss the costs of providing for the offspring,
defending them and finally teaching them the wicked ways of the world.

-
Even the males don't get off lightly. Think of the nightmare of the whole
'fighting for territory' thing, and if you're a peacock, you've got to carry
that ridiculous tail around with you just for a chance at getting laid.

- And then there's disease. For both genders, sex is a wonderful way to
spread disease - no condoms for our ancestors, whether they'd wanted to use them
or not.

Kids! Who needs them?

Well, the point is - we don't.

So why do we do it? Why do we have sex… and why do we have children? Why do our brains sweet-talk us into doing something so dangerous.... if it isn’t for our own benefit?


Next: Why evolution makes us do things that aren't for our own benefit

Why evolution makes us do things that aren't for our own benefit

Because evolution is not about us. Life is not about us. The reason we exist... isn't for our own benefit.

Evolution is about our genes. We exist as machines to help spread our genes around the world. It seems crazy, it seems like it's the wrong way round. But that's the way it is.

Compare yourself to a compact disc of your favourite music.

What's ‘the point’ - the music or the cd? Does the music have an existence because of the cd, or does the cd exist because of the music?

Clearly, it's all about the music. The music can be copied to another cd, or when the technology advances, the music can be copied to whatever improved carrier-mechanism is developed in the future and the cd thrown away, just like vinyl and tapes have been.

Cd's exist because they're a good way of spreading music around the world. They aren't the purpose, they aren’t the point… they're the mechanism. Equally, human beings aren't the point, we're just the device by which the genes get to be spread round the world.

Our genes are the music. We’re the cd's.



Which is why we humans aren’t designed to behave in such a way that we as individuals will survive....

…we’re designed to behave in a way that will help our genes survive.


If something happens that’s bad for the survival chances of our genes - we feel bad.

If something happens that’s good for the survival chances of our genes - we feel good.


Which could be the most important thing that science has ever taught us.

Of course, that’s not to say it’s irrelevant whether we live or die. But we're not alive for the sake of living. We're alive to create the next generation. 'Being alive' is just a mechanism to increase the chances of our genes surviving.

That's just the way evolution works. It's what evolution is. Automatically. You can't have the process of evolution if you don't have genetic information that gets passed on from one individual to the next.
If our ancestors had behaved in such a way that they maximised their own individual survival chances over the survival chances of their genes they might have survived longer… but they wouldn’t have passed those genes on: the genes for ‘look after yourself first and don’t have children’ don’t get passed on. It was only the individuals that took the risk of having sex and looking after children that could become our ancestors. Evolution (or natural selection) can only select behaviour that favours the genes.


But..... i like kids - I want to have kids.
Having kids is precisely what i would choose to do anyway, regardless of whether i have free will or not. And i love having sex as well. You can't seriously be trying to tell me that it wouldn't be my free will choice to have sex.

What if you could get all the pleasure you get from having children or sex....without actually having to do it? Sounds absurd, of course.... but if we've agreed that the only thing we care about is how we feel, we have to consider the serious possibility that if we had the opportunity to experience all the feelings without the risk... we'd be very advised to take that opportunity.

We only like having sex and having children because evolution 'wants' us to like it.

We're not choosing to want it.

Next: If we genuinely had free will - what would we do all day?

If we genuinely had free will - what would we do all day?

Would we just choose to feel good? All day? Would we set up our lives so that everything we did made us feel fantastic - no pain, no remorse, no self doubt, no guilt, no jealousy, no anxiety?

After all, once we've made sure that we were going to survive... what's our motivation for doing anything else? Anything else we do is just a method of ensuring that we're going to feel as good as we possibly can in the future. So why not cut out the middleman - and just feel good. Regardless of what happens in the world around us?

If we were genuninely free, we'd simply choose to feel good. All day.

Regardless of what happened to us.

It's what our conscious minds are programmed to do: to maximise pleasurable feelings and minimise unpleasant feelings. It's how we know what to do to maximise the survival chances of our genes.

And at the moment, the system works very well. For our genes, anyway.

But it doesn't work well for us as individuals - as conscious minds. Our conscious minds are continually thwarted from achieving their programmed goals by the overall need to maximise the genetic survival chances. But can't we escape? Can't we conscious minds escape from the tyranny of the selfish replicators that control our behaviour?

Trapped inside an evolutionary machine

If 'we' are our conscious minds... then maybe we're not so much "survival machines"...

... as trapped inside survival machines.

We can’t escape. We can’t stop the whole machine doing things for survival purposes. In deed, we’ve got to be active helpers in this whole job of spreading our genes, because the only thing we want to do is to feel good, and the only way we’ve found to get to feel good is to help increase the survival chance of our genes.

- But our purpose is not to spread our genes...

- Our purpose is to make ourselves feel good... for as long as we can stay alive.

If our conscious minds were really in control, we'd simply instruct our subconscious minds to make us feel good all the time. We'd do enough to survive - to live a full length life - and spend the rest of the time simply feeling good. There would be no need to reproduce, no need to 'achieve', no need for luxury or success - indeed no need to do anything at all. If we could control our own feelings, we would choose quiet, risk-free lives of extreme contentment, delight, joy, satisfaction and well-being.

There is a parallel. Conscious minds love sex. We get a lot of pleasure from sex. But there's a downside. Pregnancy. So we use contraception. To thwart the power of the genes and get what our conscious minds want at the expense of our genes. Can't we do the same with all the feelings we have? Why can't we just get all the pleasure from having sex... without actually having the sex? It's the obvious next step in our control of our own lives. We just haven't realised that it's the obvious next step.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
- US Declaration of Independence 1776

The reason we think we have free will is because we have the freedom to pursue happiness. But so does a slave in a cotton field. The slave isn’t free because the rewards he pursues are at the whim of his master, who is interested in his slave’s happiness only to the extent that it affects the quantity of work completed each day.

Our masters have the same attitude to our happiness.

Next:

So are we slaves to our genes, or are we in partnership? The answer depends on whether achieving our genetic goals is the best way to achieve the goals of our conscious minds.

- Are we partners, getting the rewards we're promised for all the hard work we put in?

- Or are we slaves - abused by our controllers and given only enough reward to do the job?


That depends on whether it’s ever possible to be truly happy.

What's wrong with the reasoning?

Someone out there must be able to tell me where the logic of this breaks down. Please email me and explain. Many thanks.



Evolutionary theory suggests that the human conscious mind must be one of natural selection’s most powerful inventions. Although our ‘experience’ of consciousness might be not be adaptive, the things we do consciously (eg discover smallpox vaccines) appear to give our genes a considerable survival advantage.

If that’s the case, and decisions made consciously are ‘adaptive’, then how does/did ‘evolution’ control our conscious choices? How do/did we make decisions that improve the survival chances of our genes, without realizing the criteria we’re using?

We avoid death because we’re afraid of it, we have sex because we like it, we eat donuts because we enjoy it, we stop eating donuts because the thought of being fat makes us feel bad.

Our personal experience tells us that our conscious choices are controlled by our feelings: we attempt to make decisions that we calculate will make us feel better. Even when we're being 'genuinely' altruistic, we're doing it because 'it' makes us feel better to be altruistic than to be self-interested. It's what makes us such nice people.

These ‘feelings’ that we consciously experience are created by a part of our brain over which we have no conscious control. Therefore we have a suggested mechanism by which evolution controls our conscious decisions:

our conscious minds are programmed to maximize the pleasure and minimize
the pain they experience.

When an event in the world makes us feel good its because the survival chances of our genes have increased, and when something makes us feel bad it’s because our ‘non-conscious minds’ have calculated that the survival chances of our genes have decreased.

The Free Will dilemma side-stepped

When Matt Ridley says in Genome “I am quite capable of jumping in my car and driving to Edinburghright now and for no other reason than that I want to.... I am a free agent, equipped with free will.” he's expressing our instinctive belief that we our in charge – that we can ‘do what we like’.

But when we do something 'because we want to' we can see that we're really just doing what we’re told. And the free will dilemma is thus removed: we’re survival machines after all, we just hadn't spotted the mechanism by which our conscious choices are controlled.

If we were really free – if our conscious minds were really free – what would we do all day? We’d fulfil our programming by making ourselves feel good. All day. Regardless of what happened in the world around us.

How (and why) natural selection stops us having a good time

This of course ties in with the suggestions of happiness researchers; we know why it’s so difficult to be happy for a sustained period of time. Evolution doesn’t want us to be happy. Happiness isn’t the automatic result of what happens in the world around us, it’s the device used to control our conscious choices. Maximising the survival chances of your genes is not something that you can ever achieve. Hence neither is happiness. The set point of happiness is a feeling of ‘not bad’ about which we fluctuate depending on whether the survival chances of our genes has increased relative to yesterday.

The future

Our hero - disheveled but ruggedly handsome – emerges cautiously from the sewers of New York. Deprived of human contact since his junkie mother flushed him hours after giving birth, he waves goodbye to the giant mutant rats that raised him and turns determinedly towards his new life.

To his dismay he uncovers a world of horror: machines have taken over the world. The entire
population of humans are lying in coffin-shaped metal boxes, electrodes sticking out of their heads, wired up to silent computers. At first sight, and to the un-heroic eye, they appear to be enjoying their incarceration; the unearthly noise hanging over the city is the sound of a million people quietly chuckling to themselves. As our dismayed hero moves swiftly from one tortured individual
to the next, the chuckles escalate into uncontrolled giggles, culminating in bloodcurdling gales of laughter.

Our hero - his sweating brow creased with the burden of being humanity’s last hope - struggles to turn off the machines and free his fellow citizens. As the coffins begin to open, he tearfully greets his weakened comrades who seize him passionately.

But to his surprise, our conquering hero isn't born aloft in gratitude. Indeed, the rest of humanity seems to be more than a little upset with him. They grab him roughly, shave his head and pin him down inside a box of his own. He struggles, he fights but he is one and they are many. As the electrodes bite into his skull, he grits his teeth and steels his mind to repel the horrific brainwashing he's about to experience.

And it's working! His mental strength is too much for this simple machine. A triumph! The thrill of success courses through his body, a thrill like he's never felt before. He's at one with himself, a goddamn hero after all! He can do anything. Anything he likes - he is all-powerful. And he chuckles with the joy of it all.

As the chuckles escalate into delighted giggles, he realises he's free! Free from the dark forces! Free from the tyranny! Finally content, finally at the end of his journey, he barks with laughter as he discovers what it is to be truly alive.

His fellow citizens shake their heads in affectionate amusement. ”Well, most of us had to try it before we believed it…" they sigh as they hurry back to their cubicles, quickly plugging electrodes back into
their heads and cranking the power up to 10.

Currently, we play the game the way our genes want us to: we attempt to control the world – to maximize the survival chances of our genes – in an attempt to maximize our pleasurable feelings and minimize our unpleasant ones. But when we realize that we’re conscious robots, we’ll stop trying to conquer the world around us and start trying to get conscious control over how we feel. We’ll lie down on beds with electrodes in our brains and finally achieve a free will worth having.

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Dennett was wrong

In 'Freedom Evolves' Daniel Dennett claims that we have free will - a free will created by natural selection.

His error is that he doesn't realise what he'd do with free will if he genuinely had it...

... an error arising because he hasn't spotted the mechanism by which his choices are controlled.



Our knowledge of science tells us that the behaviour of any atom or molecule is entirely automatic, dependent only on its physical properties and the laws of physics. So how can it be that when you put a billion entirely automatic atoms together to make a human, you create something that can do what it wants with its life?

It’s a question that has always baffled philosophers and scientists. How do 'we' get control of these automatic atoms of ours, if 'we' are nothing but atoms ourselves? For us to have free will, wouldn’t there have to be a part of us that isn't made of atoms; a part of us that’s free to tell all the atoms how to behave? But if so, then where is it - this non-atomic corner of our brains? And what kind of ‘stuff’ is it made of… if not atoms?


Equally, our knowledge of evolution tells us that, as Darwin put it, free will must be 'delusion'.

"We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmedto
preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish
Gene

The idea that evolution could create an animal that has the free will to do what it wants is like suggesting that water could run uphill. Even if a ‘free will gene’ could have been created by the chance mutations that created our eyes and ears, this ‘free will gene’ would simply never have been ‘naturally selected’ for. Natural selection, by definition, can only select genes that improve their own survival chances. ‘Doing what you want with your life’ is the evolutionary equivalent of a blind lion triumphing over a sighted one: it’s like being born with an insatiable desire to drink poison and jump in front of freight trains. Which means that, somehow, evolution must be controlling our conscious choices so that we make decisions that maximise the survival chances of our genes. Otherwise we wouldn't have conquered the world.


Of course, the only evidence that we have free will at all comes from our personal experience. So rather than trying to rewrite the laws of phsyics (or indeed evolution), why don't we just take a closer look at those personal experiences of ours and try to work out how the delusion works?


To understand why we're so convinced that we're free (when in reality we're just following instructions) - and also to give us a chance at achieving freedom worth having - we can simply observe how we make a decision.

We soon see that every decision we make is an attempt to make ourselves feel good. To maximise our pleasurable feelings and minimise our unpleasant feelings.

Which is of course the mechanism by which natural selection controls our conscious choices. When the survival chances of our genes increase... we get to experience nice feelings. When the survival chances of our genes decrease... it hurts.

And suddenly everything is clear.

And we realise what we would do if we were genuinely free. We wouldn't be moral, or nice, or greedy or vicious... we'd just feel good. All day. Regardless of what happened in the world.

Currently, as Dawkins point out, we have the ability to defeat the tyranny of our selfish replicators whenever we use contraception. Although he doesn't put it quite like this, our conscious mind gets to feel good without the onerous pregnancy thing.

The next step to defeating the tyranny of the selfish replicators isn't, as Dawkins suggests, to start being nice to each other. It's to start being nice to ourselves. To feel good all the time. By getting direct control over our neural pathways so that our conscious minds can achieve their programmed purpose: to maximise the pleasure and minimise the pain.


Only by understanding that we are conscious robots will we be able to escape the tyranny of our selfish replicators and improve our lives to an extent that we can currently only dream of.

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Dawkins was wrong

Richard Dawkins series 'Root of All Evil' is causing a lot of interest at the moment. As a scientist, Dawkins criticises religion for being a 'faith' - faith means that you accept an idea without doubting it. Although faith is considered a virtue by religions, in Dawkins' opinion, faith is wrong for the very reason that it's unthinking and unquestioning.

This website agrees with Dawkins about faith - and about religion. However, we consider that Dawkins has his own 'faith' - his own unreasoning belief in an idea. It's a faith that is inconsistent with his science.

Dawkins faith is that he appears to believe in human free will. We believe he has no justification - we believe humans are robots; conscious robots, but robots nevertheless.

All the conclusions of The Selfish Gene are accepted other than one: that we can overcome the tyranny of our selfish replicators. If you’ve heard these arguments before, please direct me to where. If not, please let me know what’s wrong with them. Email us

Dawkins' faith

Dawkins kicks off The Selfish Gene with the astonishing sentence:

"We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to
preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."

Not surprisingly, the idea that we are machines is something that even he struggles with:

"This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have
known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it."

In 'The Selfish Gene', Dawkins shows that human behaviour can by explained as the behaviour of a 'survival machine' programmed to preserve its genes. He shows that altruism - often regarded as a uniquely human characteristic and one that appears to indicate that we have moved beyond our evolutionary heritage - is actually found in many animals (including vampire bats) and can easily be explained as an attempt to improve the survival chances of our genes.

'The Selfish Gene' has now become almost universally accepted by scientists as the correct interpretation of how evolution works: it's not about survival of the individual, it's not about survival of the species, it's about survival of our genes. Read a brief summary here.


Intriguingly, Dawkins doesn’t help us with our instinctive problem - if science says that we’re machines, how come we’re so convinced that we’re not? Indeed, Dawkins seems to get around this problem by saying that we're not machines: after spending the whole book showing us that evolution creates survival machines - and that human behaviour can be perfectly explained in this way... Dawkins heads off in a different direction.

In the final paragraph of the book Dawkins suggests that “we alone can overcome the tyranny of our selfish genes”. It seems to be Dawkins’ belief that we are born as machines but by the time we’re adults we’ve somehow achieved freedom: We - that is our brains - are removed enough from our genes to rebel against them.

Now this, at first sight, might appear to be a perfectly reasonable thing to assume.

But it's not.

For an organism to begin life as an evolutionary machine, and yet to reach adulthood with the free will to rebel against those genes is a huge assumption. And it's an assumption that appears to leave behind the laws of science.

Consider these sentences in 'The Extended Phenotype' (Ch 2, para 6).

"I suspect that both Rose and Gould are determinists in that they believe in a physical, materialistic basis for all our actions. So am I. We would also probably all three agree that human nervous systems are so complex that in practice we can forget about determinism and behave as if we had free will."

Well... complexity doesn't bring free will in any other system in the known universe. The weather is a pretty complex system. But no one's suggesting the weather has free will. Surely, the most likely explanation is that we've just difficult to predict - as is the weather.
The mystery seems to be why Dawkins is so rigid with his science and then drops it all in search of human freedom. The whole point of The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype seems to be to explain animal behaviour in terms of the chemicals they're made from - so why reverse this in the final moment, and why do it without nothing more than a single sentence of justification?



A closer look at how whether we can overcome our selfish genes

Dawkins is suggesting that we’re born as survival machines ("we are built as gene machines but we have the power to turn against our creators".You’ll find this in the endnotes to chapter 11 in the 1989 edition. It’s the last paragraph of the book.)

A survival machine does what it does in an attempt to increase the survival chances of its genes. That’s all it does. Natural selection could not create anything else.

Dawkins says: "is perfectly possible that genes exert a statistical influence on human behaviour but that this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed by other influences."

But how? How do you override a behaviour?

Let’s forget humans for a moment: imagine it’s a rat’s behaviour that you trying to modify.

I want to force a rat to do something that its genes (ie the programming created by natural selection) don’t ‘want’ it to do. Maybe I want to get the rat to eat gravel. If I can get the rat ‘willingly’ to eat gravel, then I’ve overridden its genetic programming. So what do I do? I coat the gravel in sugar. Sugar-coated gravel. Rat eats gravel – by choice. But I haven’t overridden its genetic programming. I’ve fooled it. From the rat’s point of view, it’s found a source of food that will increase the survival chances of its genes.

So now to humans.

What’s different?

Let’s forget (for a moment) the actual human behaviour that we see in action everyday. Think only of the newly born human as a survival machine. It’s born with programming written into it by natural selection.

Now you’re going to override that programming.

But how? Every program in that brain has been wired up by natural selection. How do you convince it to stop doing what it’s been programmed to do and do something else? You persuade it to be nice to other people? But why would it care about other people? (Stop thinking of it as a human, think of it as a machine.) Why would it change its course? The only thing it cares about is maximizing the survival chances of its genes. It’s like that rat. The only way you’re going to convince it to be nice to other people is to show it that ‘being nice to other people’ is actually the best way to achieve its programmed aim. (Which is of course what the Selfish Gene is all about - why altruism helps our selfish genes).

So what is it about humans that is different? How can you get a machine to do something that it hasn’t been programmed to do other than reprogram it? Natural selection allows behaviour to be modified because having the ability to adjust to the environment is the best way of achieving the overall aim. But no creation of natural selection is ever going to allow the basic aim to be changed – any individual that could be thus reprogrammed would simply not be selected for and would immediately die out.

Dawkins gives the example of contraception to show how we've overcome our genetic programming. We're going to look at that in a moment.

But first, we need to consider the alternative. The alternative is that we're still survival machines. Still doing precisely what we're told to do by our selfish genes.


Let’s just suggest for a moment that our conscious choices are still under the control of our selfish genes - how might this control work? How could we make decisions that improve the survival chances of our genes, without realizing the criteria we’re using?

Let’s look at the criteria we use to make conscious decisions.

How we make a decision

“I am quite capable of jumping in my car and driving to Edinburgh right
nowand for no other reason than that I want to.... I am a free agent, equipped
withfree will.” Matt Ridley, Genome

As Dr Ridley points out, we don’t just do things ‘for no reason’ - we do them because we ‘want to’… So how does Dr Ridley know whether he "wants to" go to Edinburgh or not? We can imagine his thoughts as he mulls over whether to make the trip: maybe his mum lives there, or someone that owes him money. Perhaps he’s heard what a beautiful place Edinburgh is and that the shopping’s rather good - or possibly he just wants to prove that he's got free will. All these things are the incentives for the trip - the benefits to be gained by going to Edinburgh.

But pretty much everything we want in life has some sort of cost:It's not clear how far it is to Edinburgh, but we'll assume it's a fair distance. So Dr Ridley will have to take into account the price of petrol, the boredom of the long drive and if he's anything over 6ft, the back-ache from being wedged into the inadequate space behind the steering wheel. These are all costs of the journey - things arguing against him taking the trip.

But how does he know whether the costs of the trip outweigh the advantages? Were it a simple financial transaction, he could simply compare the cost against the profit. But how do you compare the ‘cost’ of a back-ache with the ‘profit’ of seeing your mum?

You have to think about how it will make you feel.

And we humans are equipped with the ability to imagine in advance how much pleasure or pain a particular event will give us: it’s what we do when we’re umming and ahhing about a decision – we’re trying to anticipate the situation, and compare the pain and discomfort against the pleasure to be gained.

So when Dr Ridley is ‘deciding for no reason’ whether to go to Edinburgh or not, what he’s actually doing is weighing up:

- How many ‘good feelings’ he’s going to get from the trip: how muchsatisfaction
at recovering the money he's owed, how much pleasure at seeing hismum, how much
contentment at proving that he's got free will

Against:

- How many 'bad feelings' it will cost him to get there (expense of the
petrol,aching back, frustration at slow traffic).

If the scales come down on the side of good feelings, then he's in the car and on his way. It’s how we make any decision. From ‘Which TV program shall I watch?’ to ‘Shall I get married?’, any decision is an attempt in some tiny way to carve out a pleasant life for ourselves.

- We avoid situations that make us feel guilty, sad, afraid. We try to create a
world for ourselves which is full of joy, satisfaction and contentment.

“Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.”- Mark Twain in Eruption


Our personal experience tells us that our conscious choices are controlled by our feelings: we attempt to make decisions that we calculate will make us feel better. Even when we're being 'genuinely' altruistic, we're doing it because we feel better to be altruistic than to be self-interested. It's what makes us such nice people.

Furthermore, we know that these ‘feelings’ that we consciously experience are created by a part of our brain over which we have no conscious control - otherwise we'd all be a lot happier than we are.

Therefore we have a potential mechanism by which evolution could still be controlling our conscious decisions:

our conscious minds are programmed to maximize the pleasure and minimize the
pain they experience.

When an event in the world makes us feel good its because the survival chances
of our genes have increased, and when something makes us feel bad it’s because
our ‘non-conscious minds’ have calculated that the survival chances of our genes
have decreased.

It's an explanation that also shows why we might think that we're making our own choices when we're really just doing what we're told to do.

The free will dilemma is thus removed: we’re survival machines after all, we just hadn't spotted the mechanism by which our conscious choices are controlled.

If we were really free – if our conscious minds were really free – what would we do all day? We’d fulfil our programming by making ourselves feel good. All day. Regardless of what happened in the world around us.



Back to Dawkins:

Currently, as Dawkins point out, we have the ability to defeat the tyranny of our selfish replicators whenever we use contraception.

And he’s right. Our conscious mind has worked out that it can get the pleasure without the associated downside of pregnancy and cost. Natural selection could not prepare for this. But we're not doing it because we have the free will to be nice to each other. We're doing it because our conscious minds are programmed to get as much pleasure as possible - not to maximise the survival chances of the genes that made them. And so where we can, we'll sacrifice the genes for our own pleasure. We'll exploit the loopholes in the way evolution constructed us: we'll take drugs, we'll use contraception.

The next step to defeating the tyranny of the selfish replicators isn't, as Dawkins suggests, to start being nice to each other. It's to start being nice to ourselves. To feel good all the time.

By getting direct control over our neural pathways so that our conscious minds can achieve their programmed purpose: to maximise the pleasure and minimise the pain.
Not because we’re greedy or ‘hedonists’, but because that’s what our conscious minds are programmed to do.


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What about culture and society?

It's often assumed that it was the civilising influence of society and culture that turned humans from evolution's caveman savages into the art-loving sophisticates of the 21st Century: culture is the thing that separates us from the beasts, so isn't it therefore culture that separates us from evolution?

It's a tempting answer. It seems to let us off the evolutionary hook. If most of our modern behaviour is a product of our unique culture then we’ve reassumed control: humans created their own culture, therefore we created ourselves, and hence the majority of our behaviour today.

But there’s a problem: who were the humans that created this civilising culture in the first place… other than the ‘barbarian’ creations of evolution? We have to accept that the humans that created culture didn’t have the civilising influence of culture to teach them to become cultured - which means that whatever urges made them ‘cultured’ could only have been the urges programmed into them by millions of years of natural selection.

- Natural selection created the humans that created culture.

And therefore

Culture must be just another evolutionary tool...

Precisely in the same way that our arms and legs help us to spread our genes, the culture and society that our ancestors created must have helped our ancestors spread their genes. Evolution must be responsible for creating the civilised, art-loving, generous, charitable people that we are today.

And why not?

Since we've had culture we've become the most successful genetic-spreading devices the planet has ever seen. In the last few thousand years we’ve spread our genes to every corner of the globe.

Indeed, human culture may indeed be evolution's most powerful weapon. The very things that we assume make us ‘more than the beasts’ were the very things that gave us the ultimate dominance. Our ability to learn and teach and our desire to 'save lives and help each other' gave us the medicines and vaccines to defeat the diseases that were our biggest killers. The desire to create a better life for our children gave us the farming methods that allow us to feed the billions of new mouths.

And just because we can't see what reality TV has go to do with survival of the fittest, doesn't mean that it doesn't.

Because it has to. It's the only possible answer.



Next: href="http://consciousrobots.blogspot.com/2002/12/most-of-things-i-do-have-nothing-to-do.html">But most of the things I do have nothing to do with evolution!

The inevitable future

It must come true, sometime soon somehow…
Misery and suffering will be words to be forgotten, forever
- Johnny Mathis, When a Child is Born

The Future: a movie synopsis

Our hero - dishevelled but ruggedly handsome - emerges from the sewers of New York where he’s spent 20 years living with mutant rats.

He discovers a world of horror - machines have taken over the world. The entire population of humans are lying in tiny boxes, electrodes sticking out of their heads, wired up to silent computers. At first sight, and to the un-heroic eye, they appear to be enjoying their incarceration; the unearthly noise hanging over the city is the sound of a million people quietly chuckling to themselves. As our dismayed hero moves swiftly from one tortured individual to the next, the chuckles escalate into uncontrolled giggles, culminating in bloodcurdling gales of laughter.

Our hero - his rugged brow creased with the burden of being humanity’s last hope - struggles to turn off the machines and free his fellow citizens. Tearfully, he greets his weakened comrades who seize him passionately.

But to his surprise, our conquering hero isn't born aloft in gratitude. Instead, his new friends seem upset with him. They grab him, shave his head and pin him down inside his own little box. He struggles, he fights… but he is but one and they are many. As the electrodes bite into his skull, he grits his teeth and steels his mind to repel the horrific brainwashing he's about to experience.

And it's working! A triumph! His mental strength is too much for this simple machine. Suddenly the thrill of success courses through his body, a thrill like he's never felt before. He's at one with himself, a goddamn hero after all! He can do anything. Anything he bloody well likes - he is all-powerful. And he chuckles with the joy of it all. As the chuckles escalate into delighted giggles, he realises he's free! Free from the dark forces! Free from the tyranny! Finally content, finally at the end of his journey, he barks with laughter as he discovers what it is to be truly alive.

His fellow citizens shake their heads in affectionate amusement. ”Well, most of us had to try it before we believed it…" they sigh as they hurry back to their cubicles, quickly plugging the electrodes back into their heads and cranking the power up to 10.

The Times, London: 3rd September 2049

Businessman becomes first to take "happy pill".

Yesterday, Jake McClure, Chairman of Genasoft and one of the world's richest men, announced that he would be "retiring from ordinary life" and consigning himself to the so-called 'Happiness Bed'. Although others are believed to have experienced 'The Bed of Roses' for short periods, McClure is thought to be the first to commit for the rest of his life, and is certainly the first to talk openly to the world's press. McClure, along with 'a dozen or so' of the world's wealthiest individuals, is said to have been a heavy investor in the research for the last 10 years.

McClure, 43, answered questions from the press:

Aren't you be sad to be leaving your wife and children?
Yes, indeed I am very sad. But I know that the feeling of sadness will not be with me tomorrow. Tomorrow, and for the rest of my life, I'll know only joy, delight and satisfaction."

Won't you be bored?
If you're serious about that question, you perhaps don't have a clear understanding of how our brains are wired up, or how The Bed rewires the brain. Boredom is a device of the subconscious brain designed to influence the choices made by the conscious mind. I won't be bored, simply because the circuits that would make me feel bored will be disabled.

Don't good feelings in life come from overcoming difficulties?
Indeed they do. That's absolutely the way it works in 'normal' life: our brains only give us satisfaction when we overcome difficulties. But these feelings that we crave are nothing more than neurological events - particular patterns of neurones firing in particular ways. Currently, our brains are wired up by millions of years of natural selection so that we only experience these feelings when we improve our genetic survival chances. But that's just wiring. It can be rewired, just like a light bulb can be rewired. We've simply put in a new switch at the other end of the room... only this time it's going to be permanently in the 'on' position.

Isn't your life pretty good anyway?
Yes it is. But it's nowhere near as perfect as you might imagine. We all assume that great success, a wonderful relationship and huge wealth will elevate our lives to a degree of satisfaction and delight not experienced by so-called 'normal' people. We assume such a life will be free of fear, free of pain, free of worry. But it isn't. My brain is programmed always to want more than i already have, and that's what i experience: I cannot free myself from the desire for more, or a feeling that the grass is greener. Besides, even if my life were significantly more wonderful than yours, you have to understand that the intensity of the feelings that i will be experiencing tomorrow will be way beyond what is normally available to a human being: feelings that in our normal lives are rarely glimpsed and very brief will be my minute-by-minute reality. I can't wait.

Could you tell us about the research project that has lead to this possibility?
Well, that's quite confidential. I've been a contributor for the last ten years, but the project has been operational in various forms for more than fifty years. Many of the top scientists are involved, forsaking publicity because they believe that such research is the only thing worth studying.

Aren't you concerned about the impact on society?
That's two questions. Am i concerned? Yes, i am concerned, but i won't be concerned tomorrow. Second question: Will society break down? Well, maybe. Certainly when the technology becomes more affordable there will be profound changes to society in general, profound changes in people's priorities. The impact on the economy will be interesting to see... but I won't be around to see it, because it won't be as interesting as actually being on The Bed.

Aren't you being a bit selfish?
Absolutely. But I've discovered that my fear of being regarded as selfish isn't a sufficiently powerful feeling to forego a life of barely-conceivable bliss for.

Are you indeed the first?
I'm the first to publicise, yes.

But not the first?
At this final question, Mr Mclure smiled and turned away from the reporters.