What The Heck Raw Story?

THE ATHEIST WOULD BE LEFT'S ideology would be the destruction of any liberalism or leftism whose goal was the increase of egalitarian justice and freedom as much as it would be, in the last resort, for the human discernment and identification of reliable, known truth.  

I have repeatedly said that it was when a would-be rip-roarin' village tap-room leftie atheist going by the pseudonym of "Woody's Guitar" summarily declared on Eschaton that "science proved that free thought is a myth" that I realized in a flash that if that were true then everything everyone was saying on that blog and on the entire left was based on a deluded belief that freedom was a real thing instead of a scientifically disposed of fiction.   

It was before I started writing posts and refuting that has been one of the major focuses of my efforts. 

It is both literally and logically true that if "free thought" "free will" is a delusion then the entire basis of self-government by free people is a delusion along with it and any such attempt is no more legitimate than the worst of the alternative forms of governance that are the default position.

While I am certain that many a self-satisfied, sufficiently comfortable, sufficiently affluent, straight, white male (such as Woody appeared to be) can do without a presumption of freedom and egalitarian justice (if that isn't to be gotten from egalitarian self-governance, it's not going to happen in this world) those not so favored by the status quo really can't do without them.  

Which brings me to the second article from the ideological atheist would-be lefty online outfits  Alternet-Raw Story typist Alex Henderson in one week which apparently pushes the declaration that the would-be Woody made.

I'll risk a cease and desist and give you the whole thing with my running commentary, eye-opening extraneous stuff on the page picked up as well as the article.  But first I'll ask you to keep in mind the question, what is the motive of this article being written in the first place, how does it fit in with the alleged political goals of Alternet, Raw Story and the rest of the atheist-secular would-be left?

How a groundbreaking 1964 study 'introduced a genuine neurological argument against free will'
Alex Henderson, AlterNet
November 29, 2021
How a groundbreaking 1964 study 'introduced a genuine neurological argument against free will'

Brain image (Shutterstock)

Tempted as I am to go into what fMRI shows and doesn't show, how the imaging is purposely created to show what the researchers want to show, just let me say that the pictures are a chosen construct, not a reproduction of any kind of objectively observed phenomena.  I question even if such things are legitimately considered as observations of nature instead of consciously made images.  But the picture that illustrates it isn't even that, it's a bogus computer artist image that merely calls to mind all those pretty brain images that are so beloved by the neuro-sciency.

For decades, neuroscientists have been debating the question: How much free will do people actually have? Why are some people inclined to make better, wiser decisions than others? And why do some people, even those considered highly intelligent, act on their worst impulses while others don't?

Those are the sort of questions that neuroscientists have been grappling with over the years.

New York City-based science writer Bahar Gholipour discussed the "death of free will" in a much-read article published by The Atlantic on September 10, 2019. And he explained why a 1964 study continued to have an impact on how some neuroscientists view that subject.

I'll keep the comments on the article that motivated this Alternet-Raw Story tripe till the end of the piece at it appeared at Raw Story.

"The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps," Gholipour wrote. "In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people's brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists' lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit."

Gholipour continued, "The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants' brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world — when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph —but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone's brain actually initiating an action.

"RAWSTORY+
A 76-year-old essay teaches us how to be free

THIS LINK TO ANOTHER RAW STORY PIECE THAT THIS PIECE DECLARES TO BE AN ILLUSION REALLY DID APPEAR RIGHT HERE ON THE PAGE!  That the piece is about an essay by the Black writer Ralph Ellison strikes me as of evidentiary value supporting my contentions.

That German experiment from 57 years ago, according to Gholipour, was groundbreaking because it showed "the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement."

Gholipour explained, "This momentous discovery was the beginning of a lot of trouble in neuroscience. Twenty years later, the American physiologist Benjamin Libet used the Bereitschaftspotential (readiness potential) to make the case not only that the brain shows signs of a decision before a person acts, but that, incredibly, the brain's wheels start turning before the person even consciously intends to do something. Suddenly, people's choices — even a basic finger tap — appeared to be determined by something outside of their own perceived volition."

Libet, according to Gholipour, "introduced a genuine neurological argument against free will."

"Over time, the implications have been spun into cultural lore," Gholipour wrote in 2019. "Today, the notion that our brains make choices before we are even aware of them will now pop up in cocktail-party conversation or in a review of Black Mirror. It's covered by mainstream journalism outlets, including This American Life, Radiolab, and this magazine. Libet's work is frequently brought up by popular intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari to argue that science has proved humans are not the authors of their actions."

AND THAT'S IT.  That's where this Raw Story attack on the basis of egalitarian self-government by free people as a legitimate lefty-"science based" belief ends.  

BUT IT LEAVES OUT THE POINT OF THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE WHICH WAS TO DEBUNK THAT ATHEIST-MATERIALIST USE OF THE EXPERIMENT. That is as apparent as the title of the piece in the Atlantic.

A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.

After the section quoted by Raw Story, the article goes on:

It would be quite an achievement for a brain signal 100 times smaller than major brain waves to solve the problem of free will. But the story of the Bereitschaftspotential has one more twist: It might be something else entirely.

And, as is so often the case when scientists are allegedly measuring and, especially when they are analyzing tiny effects, AND EVEN MORE SO WHEN SCIENTISTS USE SUCH STUFF TO SUPPORT THEIR ATHEIST IDEOLOGY, their most cherished findings of science can turn out to be mere illusions based in the currently primitive state of the technology (to get back to my statment about fMRI above).  I'm going to again risk a cease and desist to show what Raw Story ignored in order to debunk the basis of egalitarian self-government by free People.

In 2010, Aaron Schurger had an epiphany. As a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, Schurger studied fluctuations in neuronal activity, the churning hum in the brain that emerges from the spontaneous flickering of hundreds of thousands of interconnected neurons. This ongoing electrophysiological noise rises and falls in slow tides, like the surface of the ocean—or, for that matter, like anything that results from many moving parts. “Just about every natural phenomenon that I can think of behaves this way. For example, the stock market’s financial time series or the weather,” Schurger says.

From a bird’s-eye view, all these cases of noisy data look like any other noise, devoid of pattern. But it occurred to Schurger that if someone lined them up by their peaks (thunderstorms, market records) and reverse-averaged them in the manner of Kornhuber and Deecke’s innovative approach, the results’ visual representations would look like climbing trends (intensifying weather, rising stocks). There would be no purpose behind these apparent trends—no prior plan to cause a storm or bolster the market. Really, the pattern would simply reflect how various factors had happened to coincide.

“I thought, Wait a minute,” Schurger says. If he applied the same method to the spontaneous brain noise he studied, what shape would he get?  “I looked at my screen, and I saw something that looked like the Bereitschaftspotential.” Perhaps, Schurger realized, the Bereitschaftspotential’s rising pattern wasn’t a mark of a brain’s brewing intention at all, but something much more circumstantial.

Two years later, Schurger and his colleagues Jacobo Sitt and Stanislas Dehaene proposed an explanation. Neuroscientists know that for people to make any type of decision, our neurons need to gather evidence for each option. The decision is reached when one group of neurons accumulates evidence past a certain threshold. Sometimes, this evidence comes from sensory information from the outside world: If you’re watching snow fall, your brain will weigh the number of falling snowflakes against the few caught in the wind, and quickly settle on the fact that the snow is moving downward.

But Libet’s experiment, Schurger pointed out, provided its subjects with no such external cues. To decide when to tap their fingers, the participants simply acted whenever the moment struck them. Those spontaneous moments, Schurger reasoned, must have coincided with the haphazard ebb and flow of the participants’ brain activity. They would have been more likely to tap their fingers when their motor system happened to be closer to a threshold for movement initiation.

This would not imply, as Libet had thought, that people’s brains “decide” to move their fingers before they know it. Hardly. Rather, it would mean that the noisy activity in people’s brains sometimes happens to tip the scale if there’s nothing else to base a choice on, saving us from endless indecision when faced with an arbitrary task. The Bereitschaftspotential would be the rising part of the brain fluctuations that tend to coincide with the decisions. This is a highly specific situation, not a general case for all, or even many, choices.

Other recent studies support the idea of the Bereitschaftspotential as a symmetry-breaking signal. In a study of monkeys tasked with choosing between two equal options, a separate team of researchers saw that a monkey’s upcoming choice correlated with its intrinsic brain activity before the monkey was even presented with options.

In a new study under review for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schurger and two Princeton researchers repeated a version of Libet’s experiment. To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment.

In other words, people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision.

When Schurger first proposed the neural-noise explanation, in 2012, the paper didn’t get much outside attention, but it did create a buzz in neuroscience. Schurger received awards for overturning a long-standing idea. “It showed the Bereitschaftspotential may not be what we thought it was. That maybe it’s in some sense artifactual, related to how we analyze our data,” says Uri Maoz, a computational neuroscientist at Chapman University.

For a paradigm shift, the work met minimal resistance. Schurger appeared to have unearthed a classic scientific mistake, so subtle that no one had noticed it and no amount of replication studies could have solved it, unless they started testing for causality. Now, researchers who questioned Libet and those who supported him are both shifting away from basing their experiments on the Bereitschaftspotential. (The few people I found still holding the traditional view confessed that they had not read Schurger’s 2012 paper.)

“It’s opened my mind,” says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London who collaborated with Libet and reproduced the original experiments.

It’s still possible that Schurger is wrong. Researchers broadly accept that he has deflated Libet’s model of Bereitschaftspotential, but the inferential nature of brain modeling leaves the door cracked for an entirely different explanation in the future. And unfortunately for popular-science conversation, Schurger’s groundbreaking work does not solve the pesky question of free will any more than Libet’s did. If anything, Schurger has only deepened the question.

Is everything we do determined by the cause-and-effect chain of genes, environment, and the cells that make up our brain, or can we freely form intentions that influence our actions in the world? The topic is immensely complicated, and Schurger’s valiant debunking underscores the need for more precise and better-informed questions.

“Philosophers have been debating free will for millennia, and they have been making progress. But neuroscientists barged in like an elephant into a china shop and claimed to have solved it in one fell swoop,” Maoz says. In an attempt to get everyone on the same page, he is heading the first intensive research collaboration between neuroscientists and philosophers, backed by $7 million from two private foundations, the John Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute. At an inaugural conference in March, attendees discussed plans for designing philosophically informed experiments, and unanimously agreed on the need to pin down the various meanings of “free will.”

In that, they join Libet himself. While he remained firm on his interpretation of his study, he thought his experiment was not enough to prove total determinism—the idea that all events are set in place by previous ones, including our own mental functions. “Given the issue is so fundamentally important to our view of who we are, a claim that our free will is illusory should be based on fairly direct evidence,” he wrote in a 2004 book. “Such evidence is not available.”

If I wanted to be a real dick about it, I'd wonder if maybe the original studies might not have been actually demonstrating the kind of "presentiment"  such as has been repeatedly demonstrated in some of that research going against the atheist-materialist Index of Prohibited Ideas, demonstrating a physical response to a future stimulus that may happen even before the intended stimulus occurs. Something which happens even when the subject tested is unaware of having the physical response.   But that has nothing to do with my goal which is to ask why the hell would an alleged lefty outlet like Raw Story go with this piece of crap except that it supports their atheist materialist ideology at the expense of egalitarian self-government by free People?