On Free Will
Published on August 19, 2016
The concept of free will is not just a topic of academic debate, but has an important role in everyday human life because concepts like responsibility, guilt, praise, sin and retributive punishment are validated using the concept of free will. There are three popular definitions of free will which I am arguing against. The first one is that each of us was free to think and act differently than we did in the past. The second one is that we are the conscious source of our thoughts and actions. The conscious part of our inner life is the author of our inner life. The third one is that free will is a subjective experience that cannot be mapped onto objective reality. General opinion is that it is too soon to scientifically argue that free will is an illusion. But my claim is that free will as a concept is so incoherent that it cannot be mapped onto any conceivable reality.
The first problem with free will is that thoughts just emerge in consciousness. We don't choose what to think next. If we did, we would have to choose them, before we think them. That means we would have to think them before we think them. So this should mean that we should have already chosen the current thought we are having now long ago in the past. But we never knew what we would be thinking now until we actually thought it. Hence, if we cannot control our next thought and we don't know what it is going to be until it arises, then where is our freedom of will? Then how can we give ourselves the authorship of our thoughts? The next problem with free will is that we live in a world of cause and effect. Everything that could possibly constitute our will is either a product of a long chain of prior causes or is a product of randomness, or some combination of the two, all of which we are not responsible for. What does it mean to say that a person acted of his own free will? It must mean that he could have consciously done otherwise, not based on random influences over which he had no control but because he, as the conscious author of his thoughts and actions, could have thought and acted in other ways. But the problem here is that no one has ever described a way in which mental and physical events could arise that make sense of this claim. For example, consider a generic murderer. His choice to commit his last murder was preceded by a long series of prior choices, a certain pattern of electrochemical activity in his brain, some combination of bad genes and the developmental effects of an unhappy childhood, whatever influences were impinging upon him the day he committed his crime etc. The moment we catch sight of this stream of causes that precede any conscious experience, the sense of his culpability disappears. The place where we would place our blame disappears. From the perspective of our conscious mind, we are no more responsible for our next thought than our birth into this world. None of us picks our biological parents, the society which we were born into, the moments in history we live, our genes or the exact shape and structure of our brain. We are no more responsible for the exact shape and structure of our brain than our height. We did essentially not build up our minds. In those moments where we seem to build our mind by acquiring knowledge or learning a new skill, the only tool we have is that which we inherited from the moments past.
Another problem with free will is that the third definition I mentioned in the introduction can be proven wrong with the help of neuroscientific evidence. Using EEG scans (Electroencephalography), neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment where he was able to predict what the volunteer was committed to doing before the volunteer experienced the decision. He was able to do this because of a phenomenon called Readiness Potential. Libet's 1983 experiments measured the time when the subject became consciously aware of the decision to move the finger. Libet created a dot on the screen of an oscilloscope circulating like the hand of a clock, but more rapidly. The subject was asked to note the position of the moving dot when he/she was aware of the conscious decision to move a finger or wrist. Libet found that although conscious awareness of the decision preceded the subject's finger motion by only 200 milliseconds, the rise in the Type II readiness potential was clearly visible at about 550 milliseconds before the flex of the wrist. The subject showed unconscious activity to flex about 350 milliseconds before reporting conscious awareness of the decision to flex. Indeed, an earlier slow and very slight rise in the readiness potential can be seen as early as 1.5 seconds before the action. This electrical activity (readiness potential) in the brain starts to build up for an action even before the volunteer consciously experiences deciding it, and there is a time lag between the beginning of the buildup of electrical activity and the experiencing of the decision. This proves that free will is not something that cannot be mapped onto objective reality. But even if there was no time lag, the volunteer still wouldn't know why he/she chose what he/she chose.
The concept of free will is not necessary for morality. For example, punishment of convicts should be for the prevention of further crimes and/or to rehabilitate them. Retributive justice is never moral, given that free will is an illusion because retribution, as I have mentioned before, works on the principle of free will. Also, stating that free will is an illusion doesn't imply that we need not make any decisions in life because the decision to not make a decision is also a decision. What we have to understand is that our brain keeps on making decisions every second. It is just that we become aware of some of them, which we may feel like we actually had a choice.