I’ve heard
and read a lot about the “evidence” that free will is just an illusion. Sometimes that evidence comes from
experiments such as the one I addressed in my previous post on this topic. Sometimes that evidence comes from
observations. For example, I just
listened to something from Sam Harris (one of my least favorite authors!) where
he tried to make the point that our thoughts just come to us and it’s not like
we freely decided to have those thoughts.
So, therefore, free will is just an illusion that we make up after the
fact.
As you may
imagine if you’ve read other posts from me, I don’t agree that such evidence
proves the case against free will. The
problem I see with all of these arguments is that the people making these
arguments, or the people doing the experiments, pick the wrong kind of
tasks. They do not pick tasks that require free will; rather, they pick tasks
that require decisions. To me, a
decision is not the same as exercising free will. I will try to explain that here.
I would
describe a decision as something that happens to us constantly because we are
alive. Decisions can be fairly complex,
can be incredibly simple, or can even be subconscious. Do I get up or lay back down? Do I go left or right? Do I hold my breath until I turn blue? Do I spell “tomorrow” with one “m” or
two? Should I super-size it? Should I keep thinking up examples or should
I stop? What card should I pick from the
magician’s deck? Etc. etc. etc.
In my view,
free will is not a critical component of the vast majority of the kind of daily
decisions we are constantly bombarded with.
That’s what makes it so hard to test.
Recall that
I’ve defined free will with respect to human beings being responsible for their
own actions. This is critical. We do not hold dogs or monkeys or even cows[1]
to be morally responsible for the decisions they make. Therefore, I say, those animals do not have
free will. Despite their lack of free
will, it certainly seems that those animals have to constantly make decisions
as well. Do I get up or lay back
down? Do I go left or right? Do I chew on this bone or chew on the
couch? Do I drink water from this bowl
or from the toilet? Dogs do not make moral decisions involving free will,
but, as living things, they have to make decisions all the time. Constantly.
As a first
pass, I would suggest that free will is only involved in those decisions that
have a moral outcome. If the result of
the decision could be called morally wrong or morally right, then it is at
least a candidate for free will. I’m not
sure every moral decision involves the free will either, but it’s a good
starting point. Someone with a Christian
view would say these types of decisions result in either a “virtue” or a “sin”. I don’t even know if there is always a clear
demarcation between a decision that is just done as part of life, versus a
decision that has moral implications.
For example, speeding down the highway may be illegal but not
necessarily immoral, and the act of speeding can become so rote that it does not
involve a moral decision at all (and maybe never did for most of us[2]). To be honest, I don’t know where to draw the
line between what I would call a “rote decision” and what I would call a “moral
decision”, and that could be a problem with my line of thinking here. But I also don’t think that free will comes
into play as an “all or none” proposition.
I can imagine that there is a continuum of moral decisions where free
will is more or less active in the decision-making process.
Is free will
testable? Well, going back to the design
of experiments, I think it is very difficult to come up with a decision that,
without question, requires an exertion of the will. I do not consider a contrived “moral dilemma”
to necessarily require the use of free will, because it is contrived. Sometimes people are tricked into what they
think is a real moral dilemma – like that TV show “What Would You Do?” – but it
would be pretty hard to get human studies approval to put people in those
situations! Plus, a lot of those types
of situations involve requiring the person to make a quick response, and I’m
not sure a “reaction” typically requires free will either. Or, think of it this way: is there any kind of moral decision you could
make “on command” in an MRI machine for which you could be later convicted of
and jailed?
Even if you
could figure out a good moral dilemma for testing, what would you measure? As I’ve stated before, the will is a “weak
force”. The overwhelming activity in your brain for any given decision, even a
moral decision, would still be the rote
learned reactions. To pick out the
bit of neural activity influenced by free will from this torrent of ongoing rote
activity would be nearly, if not completely, impossible. If there really was only one neuron in the
whole brain that was influenced by the will in a given moral decision, how
would you possibly find it? And if you
did find it, how would you know you found it?
How would you be able to identify the response of that neuron as being
distinct from just a random signal? I
don’t think it can ever be done – either now or in the future.
My main point
in this entry is just this: whether free
will is real or not is still very much an open issue. It has not been debunked as some might claim,
and it’s not going to be debunked any
time soon. We may someday have flying
cars and cloaks of invisibility, but I don’t believe we’ll ever have a
definitive materialistic explanation of free will. It will remain elusive…and utterly
fascinating!
Could the question "what is the meaning/purpose of life show free will?"
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