A Crisis on Free WIll Most Recently Triggered by Epigenetics Research

"Some people think that science takes the wonder out of the world."

"Nonsense. [It] absolutely baffles me about how anyone can think that how learning more about something can take the wonder out of it. I mean, you look at the stars and they are [just] pretty points of light in the sky... and once you know about it, once you learn some more about the physics and that just blows your mind!"

- Elise Andrew, founder and maintainer of Facebook page and very nifty blog "I Fucking Love Science", responding to Natasha Mitchell on ABC Radio National a couple of weeks ago.

..."OK I'm here... I read your last post on epigenetics. We made it through all that sciency stuff. Where's your free will crisis? Isn't a deeper scientific understanding clearly more marvellous?"

I am just getting worried that there isn't very much of 'me' in this brain and body. Nor of any other human in theirs. That our 21st century Western cultural conception of self, of freedom of action, and of mastery of our own destiny, is (broadly speaking) totally false. Just about all the time, we are reactive, contextually adaptive, neural systems with only a very tiny capacity for self-control or self-change, and what we perceive as self-change is actually the consequential shifts in habits following a series of standard epigenetically driven life-stage transitions, awakening latent multi-generational adaptations at the key trigger points of time (eg. puberty) or contextual stresses (eg. a tricky work situation or a new best friend). 

Any human being is a complex system. But complex systems can be modelled, if you know the parameters. Here is the history of that modelling of 'self', in super-fast-forward and in diagrams. (These are mine, not ganked, If you're pinching them, have the courtesy to drop me a message & say hi.)

Enlightenment (1650-1709) philosophy provided the following simple and happy framework based around clever well-to-do gentlemen:

In 1921, Sigmund Freud published a revolutionary and highly controversial idea that everyone had a 'subconscious', which made a person do things without their conscious awareness and shaped their perceptions, and that this was worth exploring in conversation. These days it seems obvious but at the time it was very difficult for the medical and philosophical communities to swallow. This might be because Freud instantly halved a person's capability to control their actions (although this had been coming; the law had invented "criminally insane" as a defence some time before....)
Here is a diagram of that revolutionary idea.

Come with me to the year 1985. Through the 'science' of marketing, the modelling of human behaviour was no longer a purely intellectual pursuit - large amounts of money were being made. The models of human behaviour had been divided into sub-populations, mostly for the purpose of predicting and manipulating buying habits. Based on age, gender, socio-economic origins, current profession, income, and geographic location, a good marketing database can predict purchasing habits quite precisely. The spooky thing is that what works very well for aggregated humans also works quite well for each individual in that demographic. Any 6 yr old girl is very likely to covet a set of pink butterfly hair clips. Any reasonably affluent, urban young man is extremely likely to have an interest in car audio. Any mid-50's male is likely to be totally unwilling to change his political stance. Thus, our model of 'self' now includes an age, gender, and socio-economic context component - all embedded deep in Freud's subconscious.

Psychological research in the 20th century included a number of fragments, which, when pieced together in the 1990s, give a picture of how this 'subconscious' might work. Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow" (...have you read it yet? It's a very good book. Just sayin.....) assembles a number of these fragments to provide a construct of two different systems of thinking, 2 different bosses job-sharing the task of being in charge of your decisions. 'System 1' works quickly, automatically, without conscious effort, and uses short-cuts like emotional preference and whatever is stored in your short-term memory to make its decisions. It is very good at answering questions of preference (eg. Do you like apples?). Its counterpart, 'System 2', finds mental effort a bit painful, and works much more slowly, but is better at weighing up alternatives (Do you like apples more or less than you like peaches?) and providing answers to non-intuitive problems (148 x 51 = ?). But System 1 almost always interferes with the result that System 2 gives.
Kahneman and Tversky's 2-system model leads me to draw up a model of 'self' a bit like this:

See how that conscious part, where "I" have conscious control, is shrinking. Every time the model gets richer, the conscious part gets smaller.

And now here is my crisis of self.
The book "The Epigenetics Revolution" describes in some detail the intercellular mechanism that allows trees, mice, bees etc. and certain human bad-behaviour and disease populations to be shaped, and triggered at key times, sometimes for multiple generations, providing extraordinary degrees of flexibility for the organism to adapt to its environment. And the book keeps mentioning how 'tagged' (in long words: multigenerationally persistent epigenetically modified) sections of chromosome are more active in human brain cells, to up-regulate and down-regulate neurotransmitters and hormones, sure, but also possibly to store memory, control synapse growth and activity, and in short, shape the structure that holds our 'self'. But that's only speculation because we don't know yet. Genes and proteins are very very small, and it's unethical to set up experiments on live human brains (which wasn't a problem for those the enlightenment-era gentlemen, by the way!)

So, my epigenome drives how my experiences alter the structure and function of my brain (and body), and the brain holds 'me', and the structure keeps adapting itself at the neurochemical level to all the immediate situations and changes in life, refining how I react moment-by-moment. All of my actions are reactions by my epigenome and my physical soma to my life up until then. I cannot control anything in the moment. The consciousness is an observer, running a commentary on the things the mammal body and brain does. In the moment, nothing is a choice.

A little pathetically, this is the model that I am left with.

So here I am, a human, with a genome almost identical to every other human, plus a bunch of unique epigenetic marks. What is 'me', as opposed to my genetic, epigenetic, demographic, and somatic reactions to my environment? How much control do I really have over what I choose? How much of my life is destined by my epigenome - how long I live? My faith in a higher power? My physical abilities? The way I look? My intelligence? The way I will adapt to situations in my future, of which I have no idea yet?

• Based on honeybee studies, the book thinks that memory is a function of DNA methylation.
• Based on rat studies and backed up by psychological evidence, the quality of my relationships is linked to my emotional self-regulation and my ability to love. These are built on histone bonds in my hippocampus, which were mostly set when I was being held and cuddled and carried around by the people who loved me when I was an infant, and in early childhood, while my brain was growing neurons and laying down synapses in the hippocampus, amygdala, and related deep brain structures. Emotional intelligence is a combination of the epigenome and childhood circumstances.
• Based on the outcomes of the "Terman" longevity study, as a vaccinated and urban 21st century woman, my life expectancy up to age 40 is more or less determined by my 'conscientiousness', ie my natural temperament and tendency to look after myself (and temperament is loosely linked to epigenetically-set neurochemical base levels, from environmental conditions during my mum's pregnancy with me). A component of my life expectancy includes my predisposition to early-onset disease, both genetic and epigenetic, eg. diabetes, asthma, breast cancer, schitzophrenia, alcoholism.
• Based on the same longevity studies, my life expectancy past 40 is more or less determined by the quality of my physical and mental lifestyle up to age 40. These are somatic variations, or the way the human organism in question bounces off their environment and circumstances. If I smoke, drink, party hard, take performance-enhancing drugs or get psychologically traumatised, I could change my late life trajectory, in particular my predisposition to disease, and my socioeconomic status. But my highly conscientious temperament makes such somatic variations unlikely.
• Various meditation frameworks including Tibetan Buddhism and Alcoholics Anonymous provide a suggeston on how to have some power over self. The first step is almost always to acknowledge that a person is powerless over their destructive actions. Then by submitting to faith in a higher power and by engaging in deliberate, difficult, persistent reflection, you can retrain your old habits, incrementally, painfully, day by day.

While I gaze in wonder at our species (and all mammal species) and consider our capacity to adapt to environments and situations, the science of self has indeed blown my mind. It has also, inadvertantly, blown 'me' into a very insignificant and powerless little spot on the periphery of what I used to think of as my mind. I feel very very small.

I might stop reading neuroscience and go study some theology for a bit.