The Illusion of Choice: Free Will and Determinism

By Vexen Crabtree
Science and Truth Versus Mass Confusion

1. Nothing Escapes the Laws of Physics

Free will is an illusion. Our amazingly, wonderfully complex brains are comprised of various cognitive systems cycling amongst themselves and generating our thoughts, consciousness, choices and behaviour. These systems and their effects all result from the mechanical, inorganic laws of physics, over which we have no control.

Consciousness is presented to us as a result of our neurons, our brains, our senses. When we lose these, we lose consciousness. These systems are governed and controlled by neurochemicals, hormones, ionisation, impulses: in short, by biochemistry. Biochemistry is in turn merely a type of chemistry, and when we look at the molecules and atoms that make up our chemistry, they obey the laws of physics.

Balls bouncing around a pool table have no free will. The basic chemicals that make up our bodies and minds have no free will. Neurons fire when they should fire, according to their electrochemical properties. They don't randomly fire: They fire when they're stimulated to fire by other neurons or by environmental inputs. Stimulation results from a constant biochemical cycle. These natural cycles determine our states of mind and our choices. Through a long and complicated series of cause and effect, our choices are made. As such, all our 'choices' are ultimately the result of impersonal and mechanical forces. There is no "free will force" that causes neurons to fire some times and not at others. They fire in accordance with the rules of physics, firmly beyond our control but not beyond our appreciation. These facts are proclaimed also by none other than the foremost physicist Albert Einstein:

“I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity.”
Albert Einstein (1954)

Sociologists and psychologists have studied the subliminal, subconscious and external factors that affect our behaviour, and a vast number of studies that have found that our behaviour is determined by outside agency but that we always think it is caused by our own will.

The entire blog entry is here.

Why the Free Will Debate Never Ends

By Julian Baggini
The Philosophers Magazine
Originally published October 13, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Smilansky is speculating about optimism and pessimism. But one study has come up with some empirical evidence that extraversion and introversion are correlated with beliefs about free will, concluding that “extraversion predicts, to a significant extent, those who have compatibilist versus incompatibilist intuitions.”

Many are appalled by this idea as it goes against the whole notion that philosophy is about arguments, not arguers. But you only need to read the biographies and autobiographies of great philosophers to see that their personalities are intimately tied up with their ideas. W V O Quine, for instance, recalled how as a toddler he sought the unfamiliar way home, which he interpreted as reflecting “the thrill of discovery in theoretical science: the reduction of the unfamiliar to the familiar.” Later, he was obsessed with crossing state lines and national borders, ticking each off on a list as he did so. Paul Feyerabend recalled how, not yet ten, he was enchanted by magic and mystery and wasn’t affected by “the many strange events that seemed to make up our world.” Only a philosopher with delusions of her subject's objectivity would be surprised to find out that Quine and Feyerabend went on to write very different kinds of philosophy: Quine’s in a formal, logical, systematising tradition (though typically on the limits of such formalisations); Feyerabend’s anti-reductive and anti-systematising. It would take a great deal of faith in the objectivity of philosophy and philosophers to think that Feyerabend and Quine arrived at their respective philosophical positions simply by following the arguments where they led, when their inclinations so obviously seem to be in tune with their settled conclusions.

The entire article is here.

Jerry Coyne: "You Don't Have Free Will"

Originally Published on Jul 7, 2015

Jerry Coyne's presentation at Imagine No Religion 5 in Vancouver, June 2015

Free Will Skepticism and Its Implications: An Argument for Optimism

By Gregg Caruso

For Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society, ed. Elizabeth Shaw & Derk Pereboom

Here is an excerpt:

     What, then, would be the consequence of accepting free will skepticism? What if we came to disbelieve in free will and moral responsibility? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some maintain? Or perhaps increase anti-social behavior as some recent studies have suggested (Vohs and Schooler 2008; Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall 2009)? Or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our  practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of free will belief? These questions are of profound pragmatic importance and should be of interest independent of the metaphysical debate over free will. As public proclamations of skepticism continue to rise, and as the mass media continues to run headlines announcing "Free will is an illusion" and "Scientists say free will probably doesn't exist,"we need to ask what effects this will have on the general public and what the responsibility is of professionals.

The entire book chapter is here.

Mind Over Masters: The Question of Free Will

World Science Festival
Originally streamed May 30, 2015

Do we make conscious decisions? Or, as many scientists and philosophers argue, are all of our actions predetermined? And if they are predetermined—if we don't have free will—are we responsible for what we do? These are questions that have been debated for centuries, but now neurotechnology is allowing scientists to study brain activity neuron by neuron to try to determine how and when our brains decide to act. With neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers we’ll use the latest findings to explore the question of just how much agency we have in the world, and how the answer impacts our ethics, our behavior, and our society.

Why Free Will Makes No Sense

By Daniel Miessler
danielmiessler.com
Originally posted June 3, 2015

In this short presentation I discuss the flaws with the common and Compatibilist views on Free Will. It covers the following topics:

Definitions
Absolute and Practical Free Will
Experience is Not Reality
Moral Responsibility
The Ability to Do Otherwise
Real-world Implications of Discarding Free Will

Born this way? How high-tech conversion therapy could undermine gay rights

By Andrew Vierra and Brian Earp
The Conversation
Originally published on April 21, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

We fully agree with the President and believe that this is a step in the right direction. Of course, in addition to being unsafe as well as ethically unsound, current conversion therapy approaches aren’t actually effective at doing what they claim to do – changing sexual orientation.

But we also worry that this may be a short-term legislative solution to what is really a conceptual problem.

The question we ought to be asking is “what will happen if and when scientists do end up developing safe and effective technologies that can alter sexual orientation?”

Based on current scientific research, it is not unlikely that medical researchers – in the not-too-distant future – will know enough about the genetic, epigenetic, neurochemical and other brain-level factors that are involved in shaping sexual orientation that these variables could in fact be successfully modified.

The entire article is here.

Moral Responsibility and Free Will: A Meta-Analysis

By Adam Feltz and Florian Cova
Academia.edu

Abstract

Fundamental beliefs about free will and moral responsibility are often thought to shape our ability to have healthy relationships with others and ourselves. Emotional reactions have also  been shown to have an important and pervasive impact on judgments and behaviors. Recent research suggests that emotional reactions play a prominent role in judgments about free will, influencing judgments about determinism’s relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, the extent to which affect influences these judgments is unclear. We conducted a meta-analysis to estimate the impact of affect. Our meta-analysis indicates that beliefs in free will are largely robust to emotional reactions.

The entire meta-analysis is here.

What is Free Will?

Closer to Truth
Interview with John Searle
PBS Series

What is Free Will? Our host Robert Lawrence Kuhn poses the question to John Searle, in an interview from our series "Closer To Truth," currently airing on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings for times.



Closer to the Truth web site.

Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will and Moral Responsibility

By Gunnar Björnsson and Derk Pereboom
Forthc., Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.)
Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell

1. Introduction

From the early days of experimental philosophy, attention has been focused on the problem of free will and moral responsibility. This is a natural topic for this methodology, given its  proximity to the universal concerns of human life, together with the intensity with which the issues are disputed. We’ll begin by introducing the problem and the standard terminology used to frame it in the philosophical context. We’ll then turn to the contributions of experimental philosophy, and the prospects for the use of this methodology in the area.

The problem of free will and moral responsibility arises from a conflict between two  powerful considerations. On the one hand, we human beings typically believe that we are in control of our actions in a particularly weighty sense. We express this sense of difference when we attribute moral responsibility to human beings but not, for example, to machines like thermostats and computers. Traditionally, it’s supposed that moral responsibility requires us to have some type of free will in producing our actions, and hence we assume that humans,  by contrast with such machines, have this sort of free will. At the same time, there are reasons for regarding human beings as relevantly more like mechanical devices than we ordinarily imagine. These reasons stem from various sources: most prominently, from scientific views that consider human beings to be components of nature and therefore governed by natural laws, and from theological concerns that require everything that occurs to be causally determined by God.

One threat to our having the sort of free will required for moral responsibility results from the view that the natural laws are deterministic, which motivates the position that all of our actions are causally determined by factors beyond our control. An action will be causally determined in this way if a process governed by the laws of nature and beginning with causally relevant factors prior to the agent’s coming to be ensures the occurrence of the action. An action will also be causally determined by factors beyond the agent’s control if its occurrence is ensured by a causal process that originates in God’s will and ends with the action. For many contemporary philosophers, the first, naturalistic version of causal determinism about action is a serious possibility, and thus the threat that it poses to our conception of ourselves as morally responsible for our actions is serious and prevalent.

The entire chapter is here.

The Dark Side of Free Will

Published on Dec 9, 2014

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. What would happen if we all believed free will didn't exist? As a free will skeptic, Dr. Gregg Caruso contends our society would be better off believing there is no such thing as free will.

The status of NeuroLaw: A plea for current modesty and future cautious optimism

By Stephen J. Morse
Journal of Psychiatry and Law
39/Winter 2011

Abstract

Legislators, jurists, and advocates often turn to science to solve complicated normative problems addressed by the law.  This article addresses what motivates these parties, surveys the psychology of law and its concepts of the person and responsibility, and describes the general relation of neuroscience to law in terms of the issue of “translation.”  Numerous distractions have clouded our understanding of the relationship between scientific, causal accounts of behavior and responsibility. The notion of “NeuroLaw” is examined here in detail, with the conclusion that a cautious optimism regarding the contributions of neuroscience to the law is warranted.

The entire article is here.

Ethics & Free Will

by Mike LaBossiere
Talking Philosophy Blog
Originally published on July 18, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

One impact is that when people have doubts about free will they tend to have less support for retributive punishment. Retributive punishment, as the name indicates, is punishment aimed at making a person suffer for her misdeeds. Doubt in free will did not negatively impact a person’s support for punishment aimed at deterrence or rehabilitation.

While the authors do consider one reason for this, namely that those who doubt free will would regard wrongdoers as analogous to harmful natural phenomenon that need to dealt with rather than subject to vengeance, this view also matches a common view about moral accountability. To be specific, moral (and legal) accountability is generally proportional to the control a person has over events. To use a concrete example, consider the difference between these two cases. In the first case, Sally is driving well above the speed limit and is busy texting and sipping her latte. She doesn’t see the crossing guard frantically waving his sign and runs over the children in the cross walk. In case two, Jane is driving the speed limit and children suddenly run directly in front of her car. She brakes and swerves immediately, but she hits the children. Intuitively, Sally has acted in a way that was morally wrong—she should have been going the speed limit and she should have been paying attention. Jane, though she hit the children, did not act wrongly—she could not have avoided the children and hence is not morally responsible.

The entire blog post is here.

Do You Really Have Free Will?

Of course.  Here's how it evolved.

By Roy F. Baumeister
Slate
Originally published September 25, 2013

It has become fashionable to say that people have no free will. Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will. Others note that people are unaware of some causes of their behavior, such as unconscious cues or genetic predispositions, and extrapolate to suggest that all behavior may be caused that way, so that conscious choosing is an illusion.

Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom, and so bashing free will is appealing. But their statements against free will can be misleading and are sometimes downright mistaken, as several thoughtful critics have pointed out.

The entire article is here.

Irresponsible brains? The role of consciousness in guilt

By Neil Levy
The Conversation
Originally posted June 5, 2014

Can human beings still be held responsible in the age of neuroscience?

Some people say no: they say once we understand how the brain processes information and thereby causes behaviour, there’s nothing left over for the person to do.

This argument has not impressed philosophers, who say there doesn’t need to be anything left for the person to do in order to be responsible. People are not anything over and above the causal systems involved in information processing, we are our brains (plus some other, equally physical stuff).

The entire article is here.

Does 'free will' stem from brain noise?

Press Release
University of California-Davis
Originally published June 9, 2014

Our ability to make choices — and sometimes mistakes — might arise from random fluctuations in the brain's background electrical noise, according to a recent study from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis.

"How do we behave independently of cause and effect?" said Jesse Bengson, a postdoctoral researcher at the center and first author on the paper. "This shows how arbitrary states in the brain can influence apparently voluntary decisions."

The brain has a normal level of "background noise," Bengson said, as electrical activity patterns fluctuate across the brain. In the new study, decisions could be predicted based on the pattern of brain activity immediately before a decision was made.

The entire press release is here.

What Are the Implications of the Free Will Debate for Individuals and Society?

By Alfred Mele
Big Questions Online
Originally posted May 6, 2014

Does free will exist? Current interest in that question is fueled by news reports suggesting that neuroscientists have proved it doesn’t. In the last few years, I’ve been on a mission to explain why scientific discoveries haven’t closed the door on free will. To readers interested in a rigorous explanation, I recommend my 2009 book, Effective Intentions. For a quicker read, you might wait for my Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will, to be published this fall.

One major plank in a well-known neuroscientific argument for the nonexistence of free will is the claim that participants in various experiments make their decisions unconsciously. In some studies, this claim is based partly on EEG readings (electrical readings taken from the scalp). In others, fMRI data (about changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain) are used instead. In yet others, with people whose skulls are open for medical purposes, readings are taken directly from the brain. The other part of the evidence comes from participants’ reports on when they first became aware of their decisions. If the reports are accurate (which is disputed), the typical sequence of events is as follows: first, there is the brain activity the scientists focus on, then the participants become aware of decisions (or intentions or urges) to act, and then they act, flexing a wrist or pushing a button, for example.

The entire article is here.

Beware toxic fatalism, in its atheist and theist forms

By Jules
Philosophy for Life Blog
Originally published November 15, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Nonetheless, his story does illustrate the power of culture – by which I mean the amniotic fluid of ideas that we find ourselves absorbing and feeding off. We may have some choice what we believe, but our range of choice is limited by the ideas we find in our culture at any one moment. And that is what worries me about the popularity of hardcore materialism in our culture – I think the theory that we have no free will is a toxic idea, which has serious real world implications for those unfortunate enough to swallow it, because it attacks and dissolves their sense of meaning, purpose and autonomy.

I don’t think the main battle line in our culture is between theists and atheists. The main dividing line, for me, is between those who believe in free will, and those who don’t. It’s between those who think we can use our conscious reason – however weak it is – to choose new beliefs and new directions in our life; and those who think we are entirely automatic machines, without the capacity to choose.

The entire blog post is here.

Does Belief in Free Will Make Us Better People?

By Jonathan Schooler
Big Questions Online
Originally published August 12, 2013

Resolving what to think about free will is itself a choice. Like many other important decisions, there may be alternatives that are better or worse for each of us, but no single conclusion is necessarily appropriate for everyone.

Too often scholars treat the topic of free will as if there currently exists a single indisputably “correct” perspective. However, the sheer variety of accounts of whether and how our choices control our actions demonstrates that this issue is far from resolved.

Given this lack of consensus, each one of us is faced with deciding for ourselves where we stand on an issue that may have important consequences for how we lead our lives. Increasing evidence suggests that people’s views about free will bear on their pro-social behaviors, sense of personal control, and general well being.

The entire story is here.

Editor's note: Psychologists often provide feedback to their patients about responsibility, choice, options, and autonomy.  In essence, psychologists have, if nothing else, a folk view of free will and it becomes part of the therapeutic relationship.  The articles on free will are meant to provoke self-reflection on our views of free will and how these are expressed in psychotherapy.  This topic may become a future podcast.

Cognitive science and threats to free will

By Joshua Shepherd
Practical Ethics
Originally published on May 6, 2014

It is often asserted that emerging cognitive science – especially work in psychology (e.g., that associated with work on automaticity, along with work on the power of situations to drive behavior) and cognitive neuroscience (e.g., that associated with unconscious influences on decision-making) – threatens free will in some way or other. What is not always clear is how this work threatens free will. As a result, it is a matter of some controversy whether this work actually threatens free will, as opposed to simply appearing to threaten free will. And it is a matter of some controversy how big the purported threat might be. Could work in cognitive science convince us that there is no free will? Or simply that we have less free will? And if it is the latter, how much less, and how important is this for our practices of holding one another morally responsible for our behavior?

The entire article is here.