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The Trouble with Free Will

Most of us believe that unless we are under duress or suffering from some form of mental disorder, we all have the capacity to freely make decisions and choices. This is the common belief that our decisions are not preordained and that we can choose between alternatives. This is what most people mean by having free will – the belief that human behaviour is an expression of personal choice and is not determined by physical forces, fate or God. In other words, there is a self in control.

However, neuroscience tells us that we are mistaken and that free will is also part of the self illusion – it is not what it seems. We think we have freedom but, in fact, we do not. As such, we need to start rethinking how we apply the concept of free will or, rather, the lack of it as an excuse for our thoughts and behaviours. For example, I believe that the sentence that I have just typed was my choice. I thought about what I wanted to say and how to say it. Not only did I have the experience of my intention to begin this line of discussion at this point but I had the experience of agency, of actually writing it. I knew I was the one doing it. I felt the authorship of my actions.

It seems absurd to question my free will here but, as much as I hate to admit it, these experiences are not what they seem. This is because any choices that a person makes must be the culmination of the interaction of a multitude of hidden factors ranging from genetic inheritance, life experiences, current circumstances and planned goals. Some of these influences must also come from external sources, but they all play out as patterns of neuronal activity in the brain. This is the matrix of distributed networks of nerve cells firing across my neuronal architecture. My biases, my memories, my perceptions and my thoughts are the interacting patterns of excitation and inhibition in my brain, and when the checks and balances are finally done, the resulting sums of all of these complex interactions are the decisions and the choices that I make. We are not aware of these influences because they are unconscious and so we feel that the decision has been arrived at independently – a problem that was recognized by the philosopher, Spinoza, when he wrote, ‘Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.’5

Also, logically, there can be no free will. There is no King Solomon in our head weighing up the evidence. We already discussed why the little person inside our head making decisions, the homunculus, can’t exist because that solution simply creates the problem of an infinite regress – who is inside their head and so on, and so on. Nor are we going to allow for a ‘ghost in the machine’ – which introduces spiritual influences, that scientists have been unable to find – into our explanation.

If we remove free will from the equation, some have worried that the alternative is one of determinism – that everything is predetermined and that our lives are simply the playing out of a complicated game of set moves in which fate reigns over freedom. Most people find that notion just as scary, because it means we have no control in shaping the future. Surely the future is not already preordained?

Faced with such an existential crisis, some have sought a way of introducing randomness into the equation. If there are no spirits or gods and only physics governs us and the world we live in, then maybe the physics is less predictable than one would think? One seemingly attractive way of escaping the determinist view is to get rid of predictability at the smallest level of the brain. This is where we enter the mysterious and peculiar world of quantum physics, where the rules that govern the physical world we know no longer apply. And if these rules are gone, then so has the predictability of how our brain works, thereby leaving the door ajar for some freedom of choice.

Charming Quarks

The world of quantum physics is weird. It doesn’t obey the laws of the normal world. Elements can pop in and out of existence, be in two places at the same time and basically not conform to the sorts of rules of matter that operate in the Newtonian world. Put simply, quantum physics has revealed that the basic building blocks of matter, the elemental subatomic particles, behave in decidedly unpredictable ways. They are known as ‘indeterminate’ – as opposed to determined. They don’t behave like objects in the Newtonian world. These elementary particles of matter are known as ‘quarks’. Their unpredictability undermines determinism because it indicates that laws of cause and effect do not apply at the quantum level. Advocates of this position argue that if the fabric of the universe is inherently unpredictable, then choices are not determined and multiple potential futures are possible. This is why quantum indeterminacy is reassuring to those of us who want to retain the possibility that we are free to decide our own destiny.

One of the problems of applying quantum indeterminacy to explain free will is that the signalling between neuronal networks in the brain happens at a level much larger in scale than that observed at the subatomic particle level at which indeterminacy happens. It’s like saying the individual grains of sand that make up an individual brick could influence the structure of a cathedral made out of millions of bricks as well as the societies that spawn from such institutions. More importantly, even if randomness at the quantum level somehow translated up to the molecular level of brain activation and the macro-level of societies, then that would equally not be a satisfying account of what most of us experience as free will. Decisions would not be choices but rather the outcome of random events, which is not free will either. As I quipped in my last book, SuperSense, even if there were a ghost in the machine exercising free will, then we don’t want one flipping a coin when it comes to making a decision!

Our belief in free will not only reflects our personal subjective experience of control over our actions on a daily basis, but also our own ignorance of the mechanisms, both conscious and unconscious, that determine our decisions. Many people find such a conclusion deeply disturbing, as if their life is already predictable. Dan Dennett is quoted as saying, ‘when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.’6

But why should that be upsetting? Many things in life are not what they seem. Arguably all of our perceptions are illusions because we don’t have any privileged access to reality. Our minds are a matrix simulating reality. Even the physical world is not what it seems. Quantum physics reveals that a solid brick is made up of more space than matter. Does a deeper understanding of the nature of the brick undermine how we should behave when someone throws one at our head? Clearly not.

The pessimistic view of determinism is also unwarranted because we simply wouldn’t be able to comprehend the patterns of causality in any meaningful way. Aside from very simple actions that we consider next, the complexity of the underlying processes that make up our mental lives is going to be one that proves impossible to predict with any degree of certainty – it might as well be random and undecided. It’s like watching a soccer match. We appreciate that the laws of physics govern the movement of the players and ball but that does not mean you can predict with any certainty how the moves in the game will play out. At best, we may be able to get close to figuring out what will happen, but to use a term borrowed from engineering, there are simply too many degrees of freedom to make an accurate prediction of what the system will do. The problem of too many degrees of freedom means that, every time you add another factor that can exert an influence on your decision-making, you change the predictability of a system.