My Brain Made Me Do It: Is Free Will Real or Just an Illusion?
Who is in control of you? Why do you do the things you do? Why do you think the things you think? Where do those thoughts even come from? Do you have any control at all?
(If you are interested, you can watch me discuss this idea on YouTube here.)
I suppose the overarching question really is: what is the biggest thing that takes away the possibility of free will? Is it all the random events that lead up to each moment you find yourself in? Is it your DNA, your genes? Is it your subconscious (whatever that is)?
These and other questions can keep you up terrified late at night. And each question seems to simply lead to another. Questions upon questions. But let’s start with the big question and move on from there to the others. So what do we even mean by free will?
It seems, on the face of it, a fairly easy question to answer. Free will means you are freely making the choices in your life. But how can you know if your choice was truly free? It certainly seems as if we are somehow “preprogrammed” to believe that we have free will, but it does not follow that we do in fact have that ability. Think of all the random events that had to happen to place you exactly where you are now, how many of these things were out of your control? Think further on the fact that your DNA, your very genetic makeup, was yet another random occurrence, and yet it has had a profound impact on who you are. Can you act outside of your genes? What would that even look like?
Is there an “I” that is separate from our body (soul?)? It certainly “feels” like there is. I feel that I am in my body, but not necessarily that I am part of my body. But then, how can we account for how we act when we use things like alcohol and drugs. Are the drugs just affecting our bodies, or is something deeper happening? Or consider the profound changes to our personalities and behavior that brain injuries can have on us.
An interesting counter-argument to this has been put forward by a few philosophical minded people. Perhaps the body is like a radio receiver? Just like a real radio, if the equipment is damaged in any way, then the signal does not come through properly. However, the signal itself has not been changed in any way. Perhaps our bodies are the same and our soul is the message?
This is a nice thought, but I think we need to apply Occam’s razor here. This “receiver” type of argument raises more questions than it answers (where is the signal coming from? Who is sending it? Why are they sending it?). It seems much simpler to believe that our bodies are all that there is.
And what can be said about Benjamin Libet’s experiments into consciousness, initiation of action, and free will. Libet, a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco possibly proved that there is no such thing as free will. In his most famous experiment, he asked participants to “decide” when they would move their hand. However, by observing their brains with an fMRI, he was able to see that “electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she moves her hand; this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.”
I find this experiment really quite disturbing. There is a ghost in the machine. A silent passenger. Is it the puppet master and are we the puppet? Is our own consciousness just an irrelevant emergent phenomenon of other processes happening in our brains?
There is yet another frightening outcome from all of this logical thinking. In theory, these ideas seem to suggest, if we can perfect our understanding of an individual’s brain architecture and their accompanying DNA/genetic profile we could accurately predict their response to any given stimulus. In fact, it seems likely that we do not even need perfect knowledge of an individual before we can make highly accurate predictions of behavior, just take a look at our trillion dollar advertising industry (Google, Facebook, etc.)
I often find myself wondering about the subconscious, the source of many of our thoughts and behaviors. Is our subconscious still us in any meaningful way if we are unaware of how it is making decisions? Does it constitute some other “person” inside of us? And if it is really a part of us, then does this give us back at least a small piece of free will?
Let’s now turn to a different set of questions: what would be the impact on society if we decided there is no free will? Now that god is dead, would this next step mean that we will lose our last grip on morality?
What if there really is no free will? What then?
Let’s pretend for a moment that we have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no such thing as free will, what would that mean for the world? What might that mean for you as an individual? Would, as many have predicted, society collapse into an immoral chaos, a Hobbesian every man for himself? How could we structure our society and how could we control it without this concept? Our current ethical and legal systems certainly seem to be predicated on the idea that we have free will.
Our criminal justice system is a perfect example of this. In a world with no free will, what would it mean to be “guilty”? “I had no choice, my brain made me do it” could be an all encompassing defense. And it wouldn’t end there, all parts of society would be affected. Why was I late for work? Well, there was nothing I could have done about it. Why am I so fat? Ditto. We would have to forgive all sins.
And here, perhaps, we have stumbled our way into the potential positives of a world with no free will. Ideas like hatred and revenge would be nonsensical in this new reality. It would be like taking revenge on a chair that I bumped my foot on. It was not the chair’s fault and it is silly to talk about intentions here anyway. In fact, we are already moving in this direction. There have been numerous cases of “temporary insanity” for violent crimes. People have even blamed such things as low blood sugar and too much caffeine for their actions.
This would not necessarily mean that there would be no such thing as prison or punishment. For example, if someone truly poses a danger to other people, there is a strong argument for locking that person away somewhere until his condition can be adequately resolved. It could even still mean that a great variety of punishments might be on the table, as long as they have a proven effectiveness. But it would still mean that the idea of retribution would no longer be a key part of the process.
Lies, secrets, and conspiracies
Even if there is no free will, are we still better off believing/pretending that we have it? Might this be a reality that needs to be “hidden” from the masses who are not ready to face such a truth? Not everyone can be awakened from the matrix.
Despite its clearly elitist reasoning (keeping the hoi polloi down and all that sort of thing), there may be some logic to this way of thinking. After all, what would be the purpose of telling a young child that they have no free will, that they are not to blame for their actions. Children are already hard enough to deal with as it is now! I shudder to imagine an unrestrained four-year old set loose with the knowledge that they will not be blamed for whatever they do.
As a result, we would clearly reveal that truth over time, doling out knowledge drip by drip rather than releasing it in a torrent. And of course, there are clearly some adults who have not progressed much further in their behavior and thinking than a child. And what about the more extreme examples, a psychopath with barely restrained blood lust or a sexual predator? Are they worthy of the “truth”?
All this sounds tempting, but it sounds a bit too close for my ear to the same old arguments used in the past to keep certain people out of participating in a democracy (no blacks, no women, no teens, etc.). We are either going to get through this together or not at all.
An island in the distance…
Science has steadily chipped away at our cherished beliefs about free will and there is no sign that this destruction will end anytime soon. Will a final sliver of free will remain at the end? Are there certain decisions that we really are consciously making? Perhaps our brains are on autopilot for many things, the everyday things, so that our conscious mind (the I) can focus on the important things? I am holding out hope that some variation of this could be true, but I am not optimistic.
Finally, I am not sure how realistic it is to expect anyone to genuinely except the concept that they have no free will. It is the same as the concept of death. Most of us have, to varying degrees, internalized the philosophical idea that we will die. But that is very different from saying that we have really accepted the fact that we are going to die.
There may well be a time in the future when we, as a species, have achieved a higher intellectual plane wherein we truly understand these things and know what we should do about them. We are not there yet.
(Not had enough of this topic yet? You can watch me discuss this idea on YouTube here.)