The Project Gutenberg eBook of Damm, A book of Calumny by H. L. Mencken.

A pillow for free will to fall upon—but one loaded with disconcerting brickbats. Where the occupants of this last trench of libertarianism err is in their assumption that the pulls of their antagonistic impulses are exactly equal—that the individual is absolutely free to choose which one he will yield to. Such freedom, in practise, is never encountered. When an individual confronts alternatives, it is not alone his volition that chooses between them, but also his environment, his inherited prejudices, his race, his color, his condition of servitude. I may kiss a girl or I may not kiss her, but surely it would be absurd to say that I am, in any true sense, a free agent in the matter. The world has even put my helplessness into a proverb. It says that my decision and act depend upon the time, the place—and even to some extent, upon the girl.

The throwing overboard of free will is commonly denounced on the ground that it subverts morality and makes of religion a mocking. Such pious objections, of course, are foreign to logic, but nevertheless it may be well to give a glance to this one. It is based upon the fallacious hypothesis that the determinist escapes, or hopes to escape, the consequences of his acts. Nothing could be more untrue. Consequences follow acts just as relentlessly if the latter be involuntary as if they be voluntary. If I rob a bank of my free choice or in response to some unfathomable inner necessity, it is all one; I will go to the same jail. Conscripts in war are killed just as often as volunteers. Men who are tracked down and shanghaied by their wives have just as hard a time of it as men who walk fatuously into the trap by formally proposing.

Even on the ghostly side, determinism does not do much damage to theology. It is no harder to believe that a man will be damned for his involuntary acts than it is to believe that he will be damned for his voluntary acts, for even the supposition that he is wholly free does not dispose of the massive fact that God made him as he is, and that God could have made him a saint if He had so desired. To deny this is to flout omnipotence—a crime at which, as I have often said, I balk.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Damm, A book of Calumny by H. L. Mencken.

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Immune system may target some brain synapses

A baby's brain has a lot of work to do, growing more neurons and connections. Later, a growing child's brain begins to pare down these connections until it develops into the streamlined brain of an adult.

Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered the sculptor behind that paring process: the immune system.

The value of this discovery goes beyond understanding how connections are weeded out in a normal, developing brain. The finding could also help explain some neurodegenerative disorders - such as glaucoma, Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis - that result from the loss of too many neuronal connections, which are known as synapses.

But according to an unknown model of the brain (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_adapation#the-evolution-in-the%20b...)
an algorithm such as Gaussian adaptation may - according to its theory - simultaneously maximize the mean fitness and disorder (entropy, average information) of signal patterns, thus climbing a mental landscape efficiently obeying the Hebbian rule of associative learning. This disorder and average information may be of crucial importance to the success of the process.

I think therefore I am, I think

But the American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet has shown that before every such movement, there is a distinctive build-up of electrical activity in the brain. And this build-up happens about half a second before your conscious ”decision” to move your arm. So by the time you think, ”OK, I’ll move my arm,” your body is halfway there. Which means your conscious experience of making a decision - the experience associated with free will - is just a kind of add-on, an after-thought that only happens once the brain has already set about its business. In other words, your brain is doing the real work, making your hands turn the pages of this magazine or reach over for your cup of tea, and all the time your conscious mind is tagging along behind.

But if this is true, the implications for our systems of morality, of crime and punishment, are shattering. We only punish those we think voluntarily did wrong - not those who literally had no choice but to act as they did. But if there is no free will, then no one has ever had a choice but to act as they did. That Eve ate the apple was as predetermined as the leaves falling to the ground in autumn. None of us could ever truly be said to be responsible for our actions. In very different ways, three new books tackle the question of whether we are free and what it means if we are not.

There is already ample evidence that prison is effectively where society sends those whose brains do not work properly. A report released last month suggested over a quarter of the UK’s almost 80,000 prison population have an IQ of lower than 80 and suspected learning disabilities, such as forms of autism and dyslexia. Another study carried out at the Young Offenders’ Institute in Aylesbury showed that if prisoners were given minerals and fatty acids essential for proper brain functioning, they committed 37 per cent fewer violent offences.