Aristotle and the Ten Second Problem: Free Will and the Martial Arts

There was a fascinating article in Science Journal on new consciousness research. The study demonstrates that at least some decisions are made by the brain ten seconds before we are conscious of making a decision.

The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought.

Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice.

"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

That cannot be the whole truth, obviously. Clearly some decisions are not made this way, because some have to be made in far less than ten seconds -- turning the wheel of the car to avoid an accident, for example. We would normally say that these choices are the least likely to be products of free will, because there is not time for deliberation beforehand.

In the extended entry, I will sketch a response drawing on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics that shows how free will is in fact responsible for those decisions -- and must therefore be preserved in the "ten second problem" also. It may not be quite what we thought it was, but free will is not implausible.

Aristotle treats the problem of decisions that must be made without time for deliberation in the Nicomachean Ethics' section on the virtue of bravery. (That would be EN 1115a6-1117b22; the section quoted below is 1117a17-22, following Dr. Terence Irwin's translation.)

Indeed, that is why someone who is unafraid and unpeturbed in a sudden alarm seems braver than [someone who is unafraid only] in dangers that are obvious in advance; for what he does is more the result of his state of character, since it is less the outcome of preparation. If an action is forseen, we might decide to do it [not only because of our state of character, but] also by reason and rational calculation; but when we have no warning, [our decision to act] expresses our state of character.

For Aristotle, the aim of ethics is to train the soul to act rationally in accord with virtue. This is a long process, one that involves your upbringing as a youth, and then a period of training as an adult in practical virtue. If you reach adulthood without the proper upbringing, you cannot be trained unless you undergo a second upbringing that reforms your basic character to one that can learn practical virtue. The Marine Corps calls this second upbringing "Boot Camp," and it is for just that reason that they do it: they wish to teach young men and women to be professionals who will meet danger with just the kind of undeliberated courage that Aristotle wants to see in a virtuous man. They need first to make sure that your character is properly formed to receive the instruction and understand why it is important. What does that proper upbringing entail? Chiefly: teaching you what is beautiful.

Aristotle says plainly and repeatedly what it is that moral virtue is for the sake of, but the translators are afraid to give it to you straight. Most of them say it is the noble. One of them says it is the fine. If these answers went past you without even registering, that is probably because they make so little sense. To us, the word noble probably connotes some sort of high-minded naivetÈ, something hopelessly impractical. But Aristotle considers moral virtue the only practical road to effective action. The word fine is of the same sort but worse, suggesting some flimsy artistic soul who couldn't endure rough treatment, while Aristotle describes moral virtue as the most stable and durable condition in which we can meet all obstacles. The word the translators are afraid of is to kalon, the beautiful. Aristotle singles out as the distinguishing mark of courage, for example, that it is always "for the sake of the beautiful, for this is the end of virtue." (111 S b, 12-13) Of magnificence, or large-scale philanthropy, he says it is "for the sake of the beautiful, for this is common to the virtues." (1122 b, 78) What the person of good character loves with right desire and thinks of as an end with right reason must first be perceived as beautiful.

Emphasis added.

The Marine Corps, to continue with that example, puts you in a position in which you are -- as a professional fighting man is apt to be -- in a condition of hardship. They also then provide an exemplar, the Drill Instructor, who works even harder than you do. As exhausted as you may become, you cannot avoid admitting to yourself that they do more, longer, and with aplomb. The courage and professionalism of the DI is what is beautiful in hardship, and that is what you are taught to wish to become. Once you have learned that lesson, you are ready to begin the training in the Corps' values.

Successful military services do this more or less the same way, not only in America but throughout the world. They train recruits in a very precise notion of the nature of beauty: virtues of courage and honor, and of patriotism and devotion to the ideals of the nation, but also aesthetics such as the correct wearing of the uniform. This is as true for the Japanese Self Defense Forces as it is for the Black Watch. However, the modern military does not attempt to retrain its soldiers in every aspect of beauty or life. Much of the "first upbringing" is left alone.

For those who were never in the military, the first upbringing may be supplemented by a "second upbringing" in school, where a professor or some cultural figure is the exemplar of the beautiful. It may be that you have many such figures, one or more for each virtue that you decide is important to you.

The best people devote themselves to attempting to make real some part of that ideal beauty in their own lives. This is done through training and practice. Once you have performed the deliberation to know what is right in a given circumstance, you become virtuous by training your character so that you do that, and silence in your mind all arguments to the contrary. Eventually you should become the kind of person who can only do the right thing -- but it was freely chosen training and practice that got you there.

What Aristotle was saying in the initial quote was that we can best be sure that a man has is fully trained in a given virtue if he expresses it in sudden circumstances without time for deliberation. His character is fully formed, so that the deliberation and argument is no longer necessary: he just does what is right, without thought.

This is, for ethical decisions, precisely the condition that the martial arts aspires to teach in physical decisions. It is the condition the Japanese martial arts calls mushin, "No Mind." The Japanese concept is deeply informed by Zen Buddhism, which has a very different goal than Aristotelean ethics: but thoughts of such high concepts are not present in the moment.

When a man is swinging a stick at you and you are to reply with a stick of your own, the experience is that you make a proper reply without having to think about what a proper reply would be. "When a stone is tossed into clear water, the ripples spring forth by themselves." If your mind is like clear water, the simple fact of the attack creates the response, and so your stick goes where it should to block the attack -- and then to where it should to reply.

You get to this point only through very careful and diligent practice. "No mind" is exactly like Aristotle's state of virtue-without-deliberation. In both cases, you are seeing right now the expression of decisions made previously: first, a decision to accept a definition of beauty; and second, to train yourself constantly in pursuit of that beauty.

We may have very different concepts of what true beauty entails. The Zen concept of "no ego" does not, on the surface, look much like Aristotelean nobility of character: but they are both aesthetic concepts at last. Both are images of the most beautiful kind of life, and the most harmonious. Finally, the only real way to tell Aristotle's fully-trained virtuous man from one who has fully-trained himself to viciousness is that harmony with the greater world. Both the virtuous and vicious man acts without need for deliberation in the moment, but one is harmonious:

In addition, (B) there is a type of agent who refuses even to try to do what an ethically virtuous agent would do, because he has become convinced that justice, temperance, generosity and the like are of little or no value. Such people Aristotle calls evil (kakos, phaulos). He assumes that evil people are driven by desires for domination and luxury, and although they are single-minded in their pursuit of these goals, he portrays them as deeply divided, because their pleonexia—their desire for more and more—leaves them dissatisfied and full of self-hatred.

It should be noticed that all three of these deficiencies—continence, incontinence, vice—involve some lack of internal harmony. (Here Aristotle's debt to Plato is particularly evident, for one of the central ideas of the Republic is that the life of a good person is harmonious, and all other lives deviate to some degree from this ideal.)

Still, even allowing for that concept of harmony, there are noteworthy differences in the precise qualities of the aesthetics. Neither has exactly the view of any of the military services mentioned. There is a great deal of dissent on the question of precisely what beauty is. People make different choices, and the best people pursue them with constant practice, and therefore two virtuous people end up looking quite different from one another.

For example, consider this:

It should be obvious that the first arises from a vision of beauty offered by Hollywood Westerns: some combination of Roy Rogers and John Wayne, I would guess. (John Wayne did a great thing by continuing to play heroes as he got older, so that men could have a vision of how to age with honor. It is easy to present a vision of beauty while young, as much of the work is done for you by nature: but if you can still present a vision of beauty at sixty, it is only by what you have earned.) The second draws its vision of beauty from Japanese sources. Both men have devoted themselves to their individual visions, however, and have achieved a mastery that is beautiful to behold -- even if we do not agree precisely with their final vision.

That is clear evidence that free will does exist. Even if "the ten second problem" proves that a far greater number of decisions are decisions-without-time-to-deliberate, because they are made subconsciously, there is still a profound exercise of free will. We exercise free will in choosing a vision of beauty from what the world presents us. We exercise free will in training ourselves to accomplish it -- or, we exercise free will in not training, and accepting ourselves as less-beautiful than we might have been.

The fact that some decisions are made without conscious thought does not put that free will into question, even if it turns out that most decisions are made without conscious thought. We are still creatures of free will, because we choose the beautiful, and choose to train. It is that training that allows the best men to answer a challenge with what is ethically right, as it is that training that allows the best martial artists to answer an attack with what is physically right.