Harris, Sam, Free Will (2012, New York: Recorded Books)1 disk, read by the author.

I usually pick up tomes on this subject and peruse them.  The basic script is short and sweet: there is no evidence from neural biology that there is nothing in the nervous system that hasn’t arisen there: the notion of free will is a meaningless superaddition to the electrochemistry of nerve conduction.  We cannot choose our path because the nervous system never presents a choice of paths.  The key evidence cited is a classic study in which a subject (college sophomore?) is told to press a button when a particular image is displayed.  Sure enough, they can do it, and quite ably.  But, marvel of marvels, the instruction to push the button comes after the button push by no less than 3 μs.  Thus, the reasoning goes, it could not possibly be the cause of the event, so free will is an illusion.  

So what?  It is just as easy to imagine that the 3μs pulse is not an instruction to push, so much as a query to determine that the pulse actually occurred. Such a sequence makes no evolutionary sense, because requiring that all actions be activated immediately by the CNS ineluctably slows the organism’s response and thus ensures its offensive/defensive capability is less than optimal, and hence likely to increase an individual's chance of dying early.  Why not allow a lower threshold which does not require full CNS verification and is therefore faster (although thus more susceptible to error).  I frequently have my own experience of something like this: namely, when I have my hearing tested.  If I hear a sound, I must press a button.  I am sure that I push the button more often than I hear sounds.  Being on a knife edge, it is easy to slip to the wrong side.  I am on a knife edge because of my conscious desire to comply with my instructions. 

And that is the best definition of free will.  My conscious desire to comply with the button push instruction is my intention to act. We form (for whatever reason) intentions: consciously accepted definitions for future actions.   Somehow this intention then resets the sensitivity of certain neural (central and peripheral) neurons, making us more likely to act as we “intended” when the occasion arises.  These actions then bend the future for us in ways which may or may not evolutionarily adaptive, but they may still be meaningful in achieving our personal goals.  Thus, I chose to go to Harvard because of my prior intention to spend my adulthood either as a Methodist minister or a chemistry prof, and this intention led me to a whole raft of subsequent actions, one being an application for undergraduate work at Harvard.  

The problem with arguments like Harris’s is that they embody the straw man fallacy. unless it is significant in all our neural choices, it is not free.  Again, we are generally not very good at doing this, so natural selection seems to eliminated the possibility. [As Norman Thomas once put it, “I am glad I do not have to make hepatic decisions for my liver.”]  It is our intentions that give us our sense of free will, much more than our immediate responses to novel situations. Not all choices are free of the neurochemical automata (reflexes?) with which nature has provided all mammals facing complex situations and capable of directed locomotion. 

As a theist, I can only add: “Thank God, and, God willing, I will use my intentionality wisely."

Cahalan, Susannah, Brain on Fire - My Month of Madness (Prince Frederick, MD: 2012), Read by the Author, 7 CDs.

(Spoiler Alert:I discovered late in the set of disks that I had a special interest in this book: it turns out that suffered from an autoimmune disease just as KK did and Annette does.)

The author was a reporter for the New York Post when the events the book describes happened in 2009. For the next few months she gathered all records she could find of the incident (hospial records, family notebooks, etc.) and then she describes in remarkable detail the episode described by the title.

It was an ordinary day when Susan Cahalan decided that her Hells’ Kitchen NY apartment was under attack by bedbugs, despite the fact that she had no identifiable bites and a licensed exterminator inspected her apartment and told her it was bedbug free.  Then there were the strange light patterns in Times Square as she was going to work.  Before long her behavior became so bizarre that her family checked her into New York University where she was placed on the epilepsy floor of the neurology unit and her long diagnostic ordeal. 

Her labs, remarkably, were clear of any usual causes of the seizures she was experiencing, except that her spinal tap showed abnormally high levels of white blood cells (immune system components) in the cerebrospinal fluid.  Extensive tests by the NY State Health Department Lab failed to find any of a large battery of bacterial or viral pathogens that may have produced mental symptoms.  For a few days her case was in limbo.  However, fate intervened to find a solution: her primary neurologist was replaced.

When he was taken off the case another neurologist, Dr. Nadjar, happened to consult on the case and he recalled a disorder recently described by a Dr. Dalmal.  Dalmal’s disorder appeared to be an autoimmune disease inside the brain.  It has since been designated as Anti-NMDA autoimmune disorder.  Since antibodies don’t normally cross the blood-brain barrier, it was considered controversial, so Dr. Nadjar said that a brain biopsy was required to confirm the diagnosis.  The family was in a turmoil, since removing a piece of the brain is a risky procedure, but the obvious distress of their daughter and the failure of conventional treatments to provide her any relief provided a justification for the risk.

The samples were sent to Dr Dalmal’s lab which confirmed that she was the 210th patient in the world to be confirmed with the disorder.  The treatment had a familiar sound, since it was a similar (but not identical) treatment administered to my daughter: primarily steroids and IgG infusions.  She recovered completely (but slowly), and then spent three years writing the story of her tribulations.

The writing is clear and she is a good storyteller.  She has recently brought out a book called The Great Pretender about the psychologist who in the early ‘70s brought the whole apparatus of psychiatry and mental hospitals into question. 

Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park (Old Saybrook, CT: 2008, Tantor Media), 12 CDs, read by Wanda McCaddon

This is, to my recollection, the  first Jane Austen novel I have ever read.   I may read another, but I am not dashing out to get the collection.   The pace is obviously suited to a more leisurely climate, and the manners of the English country gentry are not exactly my cup of tea, even if this were a work of nonfiction.

The writing is elegantly and sensitively done, to be sure (although how many undergraduates would know that the word “awful” is better translated to “awesome” today and thus understand Fannie’s comment on Edmund’s soon-to-be parish church.  This was only the most striking of the translations needed for the modern reader and, fortunately, is not essential to the plot.  

She generally keeps the (romantic) story line moving along well, although [spoiler alert] I had figured out well before midbook whom Fanny would marry, and the only question was how Austen would pull it off.  I was a little annoyed by the somewhat strained plot twist she pulls near the end to make it work.  So, as you can tell, I am not likely to work my way through the Austen bibliography.