Those “Free Will” experiments

The “This Week” section of New Scientist for 2009-09-26 reports on an experiment (Consciousness and Cognition, DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2009.08.006) that apparently refutes Benjamin Libet’s conclusions about his experiment of 1983 (Brain, vol 106, p623)

What they don’t mention in the article is that Libet’s experiment fails under the following simple argument. The experimental subjects exercised free will (if they have it) at the point when they decided to enrol in the experiment. Barring capriocious behaviour¹, by the time the experimenter tells them what to do, their earlier decision dictates what they do.

When it comes to the task of pressing a button “at random” no conscious decision need be involved: it is perfectly reasonable to posit the delegation of a random choice to an unconscious process (I’m not sure what one could consciously do to wait a random interval; most of the notions I come up with involve making a choice some time before acting, and then working through the process. Again the free choice happens some time before the action)

[Perhaps on seeing the look of the experimenter they also decided whether to cooperate in the experiment or to do whatever they could to confound it. This makes little difference to the argument above]

Not entirely regular

If something tastes of sugar, you can say it tastes sugary. If something tastes of salt, you can say it tastes salty. So we see a pattern here, and try taking it further, for example, having boiled some rhubarb in a copper pan, one might find that it tastes coppery. Then we find that the hoped-for rule breaks down for iron. If you read enough of these posts, though, you might taste irony.

Intercity Inconvenience

Intercity Toilets¹

Travelling on an intercity train recently, I had cause (as one does) to visit the toilet, and to marvel at the door system. Now a lavatory door, as most people know, serves multiple purposes that I shall not list, but fairly high among them is keeping other people out whilst one is (so to speak) incommoded. To this end, they are typically provided with a lock that can be operated from within. Evidently the designers of the intercity train were aware of this, and provided a mechanism to lock the door. They also (one would think this would go without saying) provided a means to open and close the door.

So far so good, but this is where things diverge somewhat from the expected. For some reason — perhaps a good one, such as wanting to avoid the door to an unoccupied lavatory swinging open and clashing as the train rattles along, or perhaps a poor one, such as fashion — the designers decided to make the door automatic. Automatic in the sense that it moves itself, rather than in the sense that it detects someone’s presence and opens and closes appropriately (probably this sense occurred to them, but they sensibly rejected it after due consideration of the difficulty of the problem). Not being automatic in this second sense, they provided the door with a user interface. Now, going back to the typical toilet door that everyone is familiar with, the user interface consists of a handle for opening and closing and another handle (perhaps on a visible bolt, perhaps not) to operate the lock. These human input devices (to use the current terminology) are located on the fore-end of the door. While I grant that this location is largely dictated by engineering convenience, it has the advantage that it is close to the point of use; one wants to enter the toilet, so one approaches the door and the means to open it is immediately to hand. On leaving the same applies.

What of the intercity train toilet door? I have been here before so I know that instead of the on fore-end, the opening mechanism — a largeish round button — is located on the wall near the hind-end of the door. When I first encountered one I did have to look around for it, something that one from time to time sees the occasional unseasoned traveller do. Once they are inside, we don’t see what they are doing, but I can guess from my own behaviour on my first visit. They turn around and reach for the closing mechanism, because in pretty much every other bog they’ve visited that’s where it was located. On being confronted with a completely empty doorway (the door having been reduced to the merest sliver) they start to search, fruitlessly scanning the wall either side of the door up and down, then across the washbasin and above it, below it and to the right of it, until they have turned around completely. Now, in front of them, as it would have been the moment the first crossed the threshold, but cunningly located below the usual line of sight of any upright citizen, eventually they find two buttons and a whole A5 sheet of instructions.

It was these instructions that caught my attention on this trip. Previously the user manual had been confined to a sentence or two by each button, but presumably sufficiently many users of the facilities had misinterpreted these sentences and been interrupted in full flow by some other seeker of relief that the train operators felt the need to add clarification. That no interruption happened to me on my first visit was more down to the absence of any other would-be user than any astute reading on my part. But really! A user interface for a door that takes half a side of A4 to document?

Terminology

This small room contains no bath, so I cannot bring myself to call it a bathroom, even if to do so would increase the number of possible transatlantic readers of this piece.

back

Scrambled Black Pudding

Recently I took a trip with my partner to Granada (my first time abroad for twenty years). All the food we tried was excellent with one exception, which was Revuelto de Morcilla. The name was promising — morcilla is a Spanish type of black pudding, and revuelto means scrambled eggs. Alas, it was sweet. Even setting aside the raisins in it, it was sweet. If that’s what you want, I’m sure the version we got was perfectly fine, but the taste really didn’t match the vision that the name had given us — and given that I can’t eat anything with a significant sugar content, really not what I wanted.

The principle of the thing was attractive nonetheless, so once back in Britain I decided to try making my own version without the sweetness (and definitely without raisins). It’s really simple, quick and tasty.

Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 fresh egg
• about 110g^* of a Charles Macleod Stornoway Black pudding
• olive oil for frying

* Which is about one third of the small ones that you can get in Victor Hugo delicatessen in Edinburgh; the ones available direct from Charles Macleod are much bigger.

Method

Beat the egg in a bowl.

Remove and discard the skin from the black pudding; mash the pudding all to bits. Fry gently in a little olive oil in a small frying pan until it turns colour.

Turn the heat right down, then pour in the egg and scramble vigorously. Cook only until most of it is not runny, don’t cook the egg completely. The finished product should be moist. Serve and eat straight away.

This makes enough for breakfast for one, assuming that you eat some porrige too. You could serve it with potatoes or whatever you normally eat with scrambled eggs

Remarks

Actually, the dish we had in Granada was Revuelto de Morcilla con Piñones, ie with pine kernels. I imagine adding some toasted pine kernels to the above recipe would be OK, though I don’t think it really necessary, and anyway it already tastes really rather different from Revuelto de Morcilla! If you like sweet savouries, it’s fairly easy to find recipes in Spanish for the real thing, but the method is not much different — just replace the black pudding with Morcilla and add some raisins.