Free Will Is Not an Illusion

Excerpted from the author's new book, "Making A Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will," Academic Press, Feb. 2016.

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. —Invictus

Scientific and philosophical fashion these days claims that humans have no free will. That is, we are basically biological robots, driven to our thoughts, beliefs, choices, intentions, and actions by unconscious forces in our brain. We are puppets controlled by the programming from our genes and life experience. Free will is deemed an illusion. Conscious mind is informed after the fact, and it generates the illusion that it has agency. Freudian psychology is reborn in the framework of a pre-eminent unconscious mind.

Mental States are Physical States

The conscious sense of self is the mental state most crucial to our perception of free will. It is "I" who thinks, feels, decides, etc. The serious challenge of free will comes from assumptions that conscious mind has no agency, is only aware of choices and decisions without ability to make or alter them.

The Original Free-will Research

In terms of biological science, research that began in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet and his followers was the major source for the current free-will debate. Many investigators interpret a series of related tests of free will to indicate that certain brain activity increases not only before a specific willed movement, as expected, but also a fraction of a second prior to the conscious realization that the decision to move was made. The untested assumption was that this early activity was solely due to unconscious decision making.
Flaws in the research fall into several categories: 1) premise deficiencies, 2) technical limitations in experimental design, 3) misinterpretation of events preceding the decision, 3) unreliability of self-reported decision, 4) over-drawn generalizations of the implications. I and numerous others have identified these flaws in some detail. As long as Libet-type experiments can't pass analytic muster, free-will illusionists have no real evidence for their conclusion that humans lack free will.
I contend that when the sense of self emerges consciously, it permits a degree of freedom from such processes as language, flexibility, reason, patience, will power, memorization, and creativity in ways not demonstrated for unconscious thinking. When self emerges consciously, it operates as a reality check and aid for unconscious thinking. Conscious sense of self has a unique degree of autonomy and opportunity for flexible and choice- and decision-making.

Re-framing the Free-will Issue

An obvious first step to counter the illusory free-will argument is to challenge its premise that consciousness lacks agency. Intentions, decisions, and choices are of course influenced by their unconscious antecedents, but are not inevitably determined by them because conscious mind can intervene, veto, or otherwise influence. A simple parlor trick illustrates in a simplistic way a difference between unconsciousness and conscious influences. Clasp your hands together in front of your face with fingers overlapping. Raise each index finger and move about one inch apart. Shut your eyes. Amazingly, the fingers drift together, even though you did not consciously issue such an instruction. This is your unconscious mind exerting its will. Now repeat the process with eyes open but willfully try to prevent the drifting. With some mental effort, you can stop the movement. This is the "I" of your conscious mind freely exerting executive control.
Scholars who assert that consciousness cannot do anything other than "observe" often do this because they are repelled by their idea of "mind" as dualistic. With a dismissive wave of the hand, they assert that consciousness cannot generate any freely willed action. But free will, to the extent it may exist, could not only be a vital component of decision-making but also of many consciously mediated antecedent elements and their implementation.

Free-Will-Dependent Human Thought and Behaviors

In many kinds of new learning, conscious mind has to teach the unconscious mind in a top-down way. Since in new learning an algorithm does not pre-exist unconsciously, the conscious brain must surely have some freedom in deciding how to proceed with the teaching and the learning. Conscious mind probably also initiates the use of mnemonics, deliberate practice, and recall strategies. In general, we can say that intentions, choices, and decisions may be unconsciously driven in simple, well-learned tasks, but novel and complex tasks require or at least benefit from conscious intervention.
While it is true that brain circuitry is programmed by genetics and experience, the same circuitry that generates a conscious mind is also involved in making choices about who and what to interact with and what experiences to value, promote, and allow. Conscious mind can insist that some lessons of experience need to be remembered and valued, while others are not. In short, the conscious mind gets to help shape what its unconscious mind becomes. Indeed, that is probably the main value of consciousness.

Recognizing that willed action, free or not, is generated in neural circuits, we must explain how such circuits make choice and decisions. Specifically, we should seek to understand how neural circuits weigh options and make final selections. In the process, we may see what a degree of free-choice could mean in materialistic terms. Details of brain function in generating consciousness, decisions, and free will are provided in subsequent chapters. Of special relevance is the freedom that comes from inherent nonlinear dynamical electrical and biochemical properties of brain.

Conclusion

Brains are programmed by their experience. But free will provides another opportunity for programming in that some brain processing can consciously select and modify reactions to experience. We can over-ride biased and stereotyped unconscious decision-making when appropriate. Moreover, we can choose many of our experiences and avoid others and thus affect our own programming.
As succinctly as I know how to summarize, the crucial reasoning presented herein includes:

Research purporting illusory free will was inadequately designed and inappropriately interpreted.
Humans have a profound sense of having free will. Accordingly, they hold themselves and others accountable. Such belief is necessary for social order, legal constraints on behavior, and most religious belief systems. But identifying bad consequences of an absence of free will does not provide evidence that it exists.
Many neural functions and behavior are difficult to explain as the sole result of unconscious brain operations, especially during the unconsciousness of non-dreaming sleep.
Consciousness is more than a state. It is a being, the functional equivalent of an avatar acting on behalf of embodied brain with agency and thus the potential for instantiating freely willed thoughts, choices, and behavior.
The human brain has enormous degrees of freedom that enable a corresponding degree of flexibility and unpredictability–even creativity.
When information is processed consciously, the brain has access to mechanisms for generating willed actions that are neither pre-determined nor predictable.
Brain functions have self-organizing non-linear dynamics that are readily re-set and adjusted by situational contingencies and conscious language and imagery), judgment, reason, and creativity.

Trying to prove a negative, that there is no free will, is a fool’s errand. More promising research would aim at discovering ways that a material brain might generate free will. This book has identified specific approaches.
Whatever we have become, we had some freedom in making it so. Likewise, we have some freedom to sculpt our future nature.

Additional Readings

Balaguer, Mark. (2010). Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press.

Baumeister, R.F., Masicampo, E.J. and Vohs, K.D. (2011) Do conscious thoughts cause behavior? Annual Review of Psychology. 62 (1), 331–361.

Dennett, D. (2015) Stop telling people they don't have free will. http://bigthink.com/videos/daniel-dennett-on-the-nefarious-neurosurgeon. Accessed Oct. 18.

Freeman, W. J. (2000). How brains make up their minds. New York: Columbia University Press.
Klemm, W. R. (2014). Mental Biology. The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. New York: Prometheus.

Klemm, W. R. (2010). Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple. Advances in
Cognitive Psychology. 6: (6) 47-65.

Koch, Christof (2004). The Quest for Consciousness. Englewood, Co.: Roberts and Company Publishers.

Mele, Alfred. (2014) Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will. New York: Oxford.

Search This Blog

TENZOHOLIC