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Indeterminism in the brain

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Abstract

Does the brain behave indeterministically? I argue that accounting for ion channels, key functional units in the brain, requires indeterministic models. These models are probabilistic, so the brain does behave indeterministically in a weak sense. I explore the implications of this point for a stronger sense of indeterminism. Ultimately I argue that it is not possible, either empirically or through philosophical argument, to show that the brain is indeterministic in that stronger sense.

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Notes

  1. Some authors, such as Butterfield (2005), speak of worlds rather than systems.

  2. Similar to Butterfield, Van Inwagen (2015) gives a definition in terms of alternative futures. Nothing depends here on whether determinism includes only future states or past states as well. Likewise, though Werndl (2013) restricts herself to talk of models, any difference between the determinism of theories and models is irrelevant in this paper.

  3. My discussion is also orthogonal to concerns about objective chances (Lewis 1980, 1994), or what Werndl (2016) calls “ontic probabilities.” These are “probabilities that are real features of the world” (Werndl 2016, 14). Objective chances worried Lewis because, if they exist in a deterministic world, they seem to present a problem for the Principal Principle. That principle says that an agent should set their credence to the actual chance of an event, conditional on that agent’s admissible information. See Frigg and Hoefer (2015).

  4. Brandon and Carson (1996) make this argument about evolutionary theory, and I review their approach below.

  5. Here we see the appeal of predictability and causation in explicating determinism. Physics may have expunged causes, but they permeate our own experience of the world; causes and prediction are the marks by which we would judge an indeterministic system. An indeterministic system could be one whose behavior is not predictable even in principle, and perhaps is it unpredictable because not all of the system’s events are fully caused. These questions arise naturally when investigating deterministic properties. They are not likely to help us think about indeterminism, however, at least for the brain.

  6. I exclude problems of quantum measurement, which may be different; see Butterfield (2005). The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics takes Schrödinger’s equation to be deterministic, and the de Broglie–Bohm theory is explicitly deterministic. It is a separate question whether one of these interpretations may be preferable on the basis of experiment. In a sense the idea is already familiar in thinking about incompatible interpretations of quantum mechanics. What matters here is that we are in much the same position for other physical processes, at least when it comes to indeterminism.

  7. See also Liebovitch and Czegledy (1992), Cavalcanti and Fontanazzi (1999) and Liebovitch and Krekora (2002).

  8. I have simplified things slightly—deterministic models are based on deterministic chaos, but they are not necessarily fractal. Though researchers often lump chaos and fractal models together (Liebovitch 1996, 170), “chaos does not imply fractal nor does fractal imply chaos” (Lowen and Teich 2005, 31).

  9. Werndl’s criterion is that there is indirect evidence when the models (predictions all confirmed) are unified by a well confirmed theory and by confirmed similar additional assumptions about physical systems (Werndl 2013, 2258, emphasis in original).

  10. Since shifts in amino acid structure happen on a micro-scale, a channel protein in fact has an enormous number of states. But there exist a smaller number of metastable states which comprise many substates, and these metastable states are those represented by channel models. See Colquhoun and Hawkes (1995, 400–401).

  11. Section 2 of Butterfield (2005) mentions a version of this argument as well but does so in the context of a complete theory for a possible world.

  12. But see Stamos (2001). Millstein (2000) notes that the percolation argument may be too vague to settle.

  13. Werndl (2012) mentions a similar view.

  14. List and Pivato (2015) target views like Schaffer (2007)’s, which seem to say that if we have indeterminism at one level, there must be indeterminism at every level below that; the indeterminism must go “all the way down.”

  15. Level-relative chance views would have other unsavory implications if they could get us to strong indeterminism. For example, since the strong sense effectively collapses into the weak sense on level-relative chance, then real indeterministic systems would be everywhere—for any stochastic model, we could infer that the represented system itself is indeterministic. Level-relative chance would also blur the line between cases like ion channels and those like quantum mechanics, where (on some interpretations) the latter probabilities are more fundamental.

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  1. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Bryce Gessell

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Correspondence to Bryce Gessell.

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I wish to thank Robert Brandon, Felipe De Brigard, Paul Henne, Rafael Ventura, and Jing Hu for their comments on earlier drafts, as well as two anonymous reviewers, whose criticisms have greatly improved the article.

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Gessell, B. Indeterminism in the brain. Biol Philos 32, 1205–1223 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9601-3

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