Free Will – plain and simple
I found this article the other day on BPS Research Digest. Do you remember Dr. Read Montague we spoke about at How a single neurotransmitter can provide the basis for the explanation of all social phenomena? This post provided a link to his homepage where he has an article he published recently on a magazine. The article is this http://www.hnl.bcm.tmc.edu/articles/Read/FreeWill2008.pdf and its subject is free will.
Free will is one of my favorite subjects. According to Read Montague the definition of free will is this:
Free will is the idea that we make choices and have thoughts independent of anything remotely resembling a physical process.
The reason I find free will so interesting, is that it is directly linked to basic existential questions: who we are, what is consciousness, what defines our actions and, therefore, society. Are our actions really any different than the laws of gravity that govern the planetary orbits? Is the whole something more than the sum of its parts, or are we simple matter and our consciousness and minds will disolve after our deaths?
It can become pretty obvious from the first minute of this discussion that free will is a subject that, pretty much like consciousness, is linked with the idea of a soul and has been a theme in all religions in one way or the other.
Christianity for example believes in free will as most would people define it today. There is a soul (non-material) that is the cause of our actions. We choose our actions freely and if we choose to obey to a higher being, then our souls will be saved. If not, things go to hell 
This is where you’ll go
Ancient Greeks showed examples of both a faith in free will and of destiny. For example, we see many times in ancient greek stories mentions of seers that forecast future events. However, Aristotle and Socrates believed in choice, while the Stoics did not.
Of course there is also the philosophical theory of determinism that obliterates any notion of free will and assumes that the physical laws work in an absolute cause and effect chain that can explain everything. Determinism could be deemed as something like the scientific analog of destiny.
Other religions, like Hinduism or Budhism, hold somewhat blurred views over the subject and many times try to find a middle ground other than the western dualism of free will vs determinism.
Of course, modern science is not ignorant of this matter. Rather the opposite, free will has place in many modern sciences. For example, a patient’s belief in absence of his own free will would probably make a psychiatrist think that his patient is paranoid. Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists study free will as part of their respective disciplines and physicists try to find the connection between the theory of everything and the questions of consciousness and free will. And of course, we have the opinion of behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner who believe that there is no such thing as free will and our actions are completely determined by the environment. This view can also be linked with social psychological research on obedience and conformity (see Asch and Milgram experiments).
B.F. Skinner
Now, concerning the modern approaches to the subject, there have been some experiments which I consider them to be some of the most important experiments done in the history of psychology for two reasons. First, because they have found some amazing and provoking results, while, secondly, they show how science can study subjects that were once deemed to belong out of its boundaries.
The experiment we will discuss concerns Benjamin Libet. In the 1970s he proved that pretty much all the things we knew about free will were wrong. The subjects, who had electrodes plucked in their brains, were told to push a button whenever they wanted, while they watched a dot move in circular motion like a clock. The subjects then had to tell the researchers at which position the dot was when they took the decision. By comparing the electrical current from the brain, the push of the button and where the dot was, the experimenters calculated that our brain takes the decision at about 200 milliseconds before we (our consciousness that is) realize it. However, Libet proposed that free will exists and is the product of the prefrontal cortex that can veto an action in the first 100-150 miliseconds. Recent findings (which I read about in BPS Research Digest) provide a few possible corrections to the timing of the results (Exposing some holes in Libet’s classic free will study).
My opinion on this theory is that the fact that the prefrontal cortex vetoes an action does not constitute free will. The prefrontal cortex is composed of neurons like any other part of the brain, and it could simply be a trained response.
The Libet study has been repeated by Dylan Haynes (Libet Redux: Free will takes another hammering), who managed to guess when the action would happen 5 seconds before the subjects said they decided it. If Libet’s results are just unnerving, Haynes’ results are outright freaky!
Libet?!?! Haynes?!?!?! OMG!!!!!!
However, there have also been other approaches to the subject of free will. Read Montague takes a different view on the subject on the article we cited above. He begins with the observation that there is always a limited number of choices. Then, he concludes that free will is nothing, but the ability to choose between them. Of course, by theorizing that the neural correlates of free will lies in the brain systems that control choice, Montague falls to the error I believe that Libet made, too. If we just talk about the brain, then free will is something that we don’t need, since we can explain (reduct) everything in terms of chemistry.
If free will is to be found through research in the brain, it would not be found in it, but out of it. Brain research could help us find free will (if that exists), only if the data found wouldn’t explain the results, therefore forcing us to create a new theory to explain them, other than the current neuropsychological paradigm, that would be based upon a scientific notion of free will (scientific meaning that it would be based on the evidence that the current data can’t be explained without it, unlike religion for example that considers it a fundamental characteristic of the universe).
Who knows… maybe not!
Of course, the implications of these researches do not stop at psychology. As you can guess, these experiments raise fundamental questions about the nature of ourselves. If there is no free will, then everything might be truly predetermined. Furthermore, what can this mean for the juridical system? If there is no free will, can we say that a man is guilty of a crime?
Nevertheless, our science ought the be nihilistic. That is, it ought to start with no preconceived notion or prejudice. Free will is a subject that goes back the the question of who we really are, but our beliefs about that shouldn’t interfere with the results and the implications of our findings. I will close this article with two quotes from Baron d’Holbach which I believe are related to the opinion I just expressed
"If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests."
"If ignorance of Nature gave birth to gods, then knowledge of Nature is calculated to destroy them."
Baron d’Holbach
Further Reading:
No Soul? I Can Live with That. No Free Will? AHHHHH!!!
For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything
Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will? (Order in Spontaneous Behavior – original paper)
