Denis
Noble on how our bodies give us freedom
From: IAI News
By Alexis Papazoglou, Editor for
IAI News, October 21, 2022
“My genes made me do
it” encapsulates how many geneticists, following the footsteps of Richard
Dawkins, think of our genome’s relationship to us: complete control over our
mind and body. That seemingly leaves no room for free will, relegating it to a
mere illusion. At the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London last month,
distinguished biologist Denis Noble sought to dismantle this picture. Our
bodies, argued Noble, exhibit agency, an ability to choose between
alternatives, even at the cell level, dispelling the idea that we’re mere
automata, programmed by our genome.
You do what you do
because of who you are, and you are who you are because of your genes and your
environment. That’s how a contemporary argument against the existence
of free will usually goes. The first claim, about the way our genes determine
our fate, has come out of an interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution
often associated with Richard Dawkins. According to this picture humans are
just vehicles for the propagation of genes, and it is them, not us, who are
running the show. This seems to leave little room for human agency: for our
judgements and actions to be genuinely shaped by reflection and deliberation.
Free will is therefore a myth, and the remaining puzzle for geneticists like
Jerry A. Coyne seems to be “why evolution bequeathed us such a powerful
illusion.”
Denis Noble doesn’t buy
it. In a talk he gave at HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London last month, the
distinguished Oxford physiologist, musician, and philosopher of biology, argued
that a closer look at what our bodies are made of and an understanding of how
they work reveals that free will is no illusion. We all know that water is
essential to living organisms – it’s what astrophysicists look for on other
planets when speculating about the existence of extra-terrestrial life.
According to Noble, water and the controlled stochasticity that it allows of
molecules that are suspended in it, is also what makes us free. That’s the key
difference between living organisms and computers made of silicon: they are
determinate machines, we are creatures of stochasticity, of chance. This still
leaves open the question of why stochastic processes entail freedom, as well as
whether our social environment still determines us in ways that undermine our
agency. But for Denis Noble a rejection of the idea of genetic determinacy is
genuinely liberating, allowing us “the only form of free will worth having”.
“There is no program of
life or a blueprint for life in a genome, we’ve been looking for one for over
20 years.”
There is a deep chasm
that separates Noble’s approach to biology from that of Neo-Darwinians like
Richard Dawkins who have described the genome as “the book of life”, “creating
us body and mind”. For Noble, the genome is the wrong place to look if we want
to understand life, and what has led some biologists astray in thinking that
our genes determine our behaviour. “There is no program of life or a blueprint
for life in a genome, we’ve been looking for one for over 20 years.”
Choice, for Noble, is
key to understanding intelligent life “the ability to distinguish, and choose,
between different behavioural options”. And looking at our genome we find
nothing that resembles a kind of conditional logic -- a set of “if X, then Y,
else Z” type of instructions – a structure of switches that would allow organisms
to make choices between different outcomes, argued Noble.
Where we can find
such a structure of switches, and where various control processes take place
are our membranes. Without these membrane processes there could be no such
thing as a choice between different behavioural options, and choice is of
course central not only to our idea of intelligence, but to our idea of free
will.
“The possibility of
systems that can make choices arose when the first cells emerged with their
membranes during an evolutionary process. That is where
intelligence became possible in living systems.”
To really understand
how our membranes work and the various processes they enable, according to
Noble, we need to understand where we find them: suspended in water inside our
bodies. Nearly all of the molecules in our bodies can be dissolved in it,
except fats. The fats in our bodies are like soap bubbles that go on to form
vast structures of membranes in our cells that eventually become our organs.
It’s the fact that these membranes are suspended in water that gives them the
special properties that can be found only in living organisms, and not, for
example, in a sophisticated computer. If you recall, the recent debate over
whether Google’s AI was genuinely conscious focussed on the nature of
its software. Again, that’s the wrong place to look, according to Noble.
What makes humans and other living organisms different from our most advanced
machinery isn’t that we run on a more advanced code, but that we are built of
different materials. In particular, the combination of hydrogen and oxygen to
make water seems to have almost magical properties: retaining its liquid form
in much higher temperatures than most elements and freezing in an unusual way,
making ice lighter than liquid water (the opposite of what happens when other
solvents freeze).
Whereas Neo-Darwinian
biologists accept that living organisms are subject to stochasticity, they see
this chance as blind, completely unregulated by the organisms themselves.
But the key property
water has is related to something known as Brownian Motion. The physicist
Robert Brown was the first to observe, under a microscope, dust particles suspended
in water jiggling around in every possible direction. Albert Einstein in one of
his four 1905 annus mirabilis papers described the random
motion of these particles using a stochastic model. This is what makes living
organisms so different from determinate computers, according to Noble. “The
atoms in silicon are not freely engaging in a stochasticity like we observe in
water-based environment.” Whereas the suspended particles in water travel great
distances, much greater than their diameter, no such thing is observed in
solids. What we’re made of matters.
Of course, chance and
randomness are no strangers to Neo-Darwinians, in fact they are an important
part of their theory of life, and Noble is aware of that. That’s not where
their dispute lies. But whereas Neo-Darwinian biologists accept that living
organisms are subject to stochasticity, they see this chance
as blind, completely unregulated by the organisms themselves. According to that
approach, a few random changes in our DNA over a long period of time accumulate
and propel evolution. Noble doesn’t believe it’s possible for the chance
involved to be blind. The details of why that is are rather technical and have
to do with how we understand the process by which our DNA replicates. The
Neo-Darwinian paradigm claims that DNA self-replicates like a crystal. Noble
argues that this isn’t possible. Organisms must be capable of regulating the
stochasticity involved in DNA’s replication. If they weren’t, the errors that
would accumulate from a completely random self-replication process – like in
the case of crystals – would be so large that the results would be catastrophic
for the organism.
Noble doesn’t seem to
think that consciousness is a prerequisite for the ability to make choices.
So where does all this
leave the question of free will? Noble acknowledged that while the answer to
the question requires empirical investigation by the sciences, it also requires
a conceptual framework, to be provided by philosophy.
The first problem that
Noble’s account seems to face is that randomness doesn’t equal freedom.
Philosophers have long argued that even if the universe as a whole is shown not
to be deterministic, that doesn’t by itself rescue free will. A
non-deterministic universe in which things happen at random is equally a threat
to free will. If the reason I chose to write this article rather than another
is blind chance, that doesn’t render me any freer than if my decision was
preordained the moment the universe was created.
Of course, Noble wants
to deny that the chance involved here is blind. What he’s arguing is that there
is a “harnessing of stochasticity” by the organism that “enables a form of
creativity and behaviour” which in turn allows things like values and
judgements to influence what our bodies do. This response, however, brings up
another question: who’s doing the “harnessing” of chance, who is regulating
what would otherwise have been random processes. It seems that Noble wants to
attribute this kind of agency not just to the organism as a whole, but even at
the level of individual cells. But that seems like a very strange place to
ground free will in. How exactly are some of the myriads of unconscious
processes taking place in my body - including digestion, blood circulation,
breathing, etc - supposed to grant me free will? Does it even make sense to
describe anything other than a fully-fledged agent as “making choices”, as
acting with intention? Noble doesn’t seem to think that consciousness is a
prerequisite for the ability to make choices. After all when playing a musical
instrument, or driving, many of the movements we make come to us
“automatically”, we don’t form conscious intentions on which we then act.
But even if we somehow
granted that there are genuine decisions happening at a microlevel inside every
organism, do myriad of small unconscious choices add up to the free conscious
choices of the organism as a whole?
“I’m not particularly
worried by the fact that my upbringing and social interactions greatly influenced
my values and actions. Why would I want it to be otherwise?”
Ultimately, Noble wants
to dispel what he sees as the myth of genetic determinism. The thought that “my
genes made me do it” sits very uncomfortable with him. It doesn’t seem to allow
for the influence of the social world on our decisions, what most of us take to
have shaped who we are: our experiences. Noble want to make room for that and
is very comfortable with acknowledging the impact of social forces upon who we
turn out to be: “I’m not particularly worried by the fact that my upbringing
and social interactions greatly influenced my values and actions. Why would I
want it to be otherwise?” But that’s not the appropriate contrast with genetic
determinism. The social equivalent of “my genes made me do it” would be “my
upbringing made me do it”, and surely that kind of social determinism is just
as uncomfortable.
https://iai.tv/articles/free-will-is-not-an-illusion-auid-2274?_auid=2020
