A Psychological Study of Free Will

A Psychological Study of Free Will

Hannah Knerr

What is free will?

One of the main problems I have had in my research is that different people discussing free will have different definitions of free will. Alfred R. Mele nicely describes this problem when he examines the different standards for free will (Mele 88). He claims that there are two main high bars for free will which can be described as follows: “1) having free will requires making conscious choices that are entirely independent of preceding brain activity and 2) having free will requires being absolutely unconstrained by genetics and environment (including the situations in which we find ourselves (Mele 89). While these definitions do give a good example of an extremely high bar to set for the existence of free will, I happen to find Mele’s definition of free will to be subpar as well. He claims that if we find it “plausible that people sometimes deserve – from a moral point of view – credit or blame for what they do” then we must also think it “plausible that people sometimes exercise free will” (Mele 89). I do not like this definition because he seems to want to describe the cause by the result. He assumes that the result of free will is credit or blame for our actions, and thus that the only cause of credit or blame for our actions must then be the existence of free will. If this line of reasoning were true, then perhaps it would be good evidence that free will does exist. However, he does not seem to consider that even though we may find people to deserve credit or blame for their actions, this may just be a construct of the human mind in order for us to create a functioning society. If we did not give people credit or blame for their actions then no one would care to act in ways other than those directly beneficial to themselves. It seems to me very possible that even though we desire to assign people credit or blame for their actions, this is not because they deserve it, but rather it is to preserve the society that we have built around this illusion of free will.

This has distracted me from the main point of this section though. Why we desire and function under the guise of free will is something that I will further discuss later. For now we go back to defining this elusive term. In my introduction to philosophy class we learned that there were three levels of belief in free will: hard determinism, compatibilism, and libertarian freedom. Hard determinism is the belief that everything we think or say or do is determined, and we do not have free will. Compatibilism is a similar belief in that compatibilists also believe that everything we think or say or do is determined, but they also believewe do still have free will (Vance 20414). This view can be summed up with a quote from Harris: “You can do what you decide to do – but you cannot decide what you will decide to do” (Harris 38). In other words, even though everything is determined, what is determined is what you want to do anyway, so it hardly even matters that it is determined. I suppose this is what I believe in, but unlike a compatibilist I find it hard to say that we have free will if everything is determined, even if what is determined is what we want to choose anyway. That just doesn’t seem like free will to me even though there are good thought experiments that argue otherwise. I will give you the one my philosophy professor used for us to explain the concept:

“Tomorrow is Election Day, and you have made plans to vote for your favorite candidate, Mrs. Winner. While you are sleeping, a neurosurgeon installs a chip in your brain. The neuroscientist intends to watch your every move tomorrow. They WANT you to vote for Mrs. Winner. If you try to vote for Mrs. Winner, the scientist will do nothing. However, if you try to vote for Mr. Loser, the scientists will push a button that activates the chip in your brain. This chip will cause you to vote for Mrs. Winner instead. As it turns out, you vote for Mrs. Winner without the scientist ever having to activate the chip” (Vance 2014).

So did you freely vote for Mrs. Winner? The compatibilist would answer yes. However, the third view of free will, Libertarianism, would say no. Those who believe in Libertarianism believe that we do have free will and this is because they believe that with every action we take that we had the ability to do otherwise. They also require that we have the ability to do otherwise in order for us to have free will, which the compatibilist view does not require.

Mele also suggests a similar three-tiered division of levels of free will. His third tier division appears to be the same as my philosophy professor’s definition of Libertarianism, but Mele describes the view under the name “ambitious free will” (Mele 79). He describes this view as follows: “If you have free will, then alternate decisions are open to you in a deep way…deep openness…what’s needed is that more than one option was open to you, given everything as it actually was at the time” (Mele 2). My issue with this view is that to prove it you should in theory need to believe that if I picked a color shirt to wear today and the color was red then if we rewound back to that exact moment again then I may pick a different color shirt because that option was also open to me and the only way to prove it was open to me would be for me to pick a different color. However, is everything is the same as it actually was at the time the first time I picked, then why would I not pick the same red shirt again? Whether conscious or unconscious there must have been something to provoke me to pick the red shirt, so if everything were the exact same as the first time I picked a shirt, then those same factors should be in play again and I should again choose the red shirt leaving me I suppose incapable of choosing a different color. Do you consider this to mean that I lacked another option? I had the option of choosing a different color shirt, but to do so the initial conditions would have had to be slightly different (maybe I would have needed to have chosen a different pair of shorts previous to choosing a shirt). In this sense it does sound like a lack of free will because if everything were the exact same then I would be in a sense forced to pick the red shirt. However, I think many people who believe in free will do not appreciate the real meaning of what I mean when I say forced. No one held me at gunpoint and forced me to pick the red shirt, but everything in my life and the environment up to that point made it so that I wouldn’t want to pick any shirt but the red shirt. I don’t know if this fits your definition of forced or not especially considering that even a small change in conditions could allow me to choose a different shirt. Suppose the red shirt ended up on the bottom of the pile instead of the top, and then perhaps I would have picked a different color shirt to wear. I think many people don’t consider that other options are available they just need to come with different prerequisites. Once again I have wandered off topic though, so back to Mele and his two other views of free will.

The next view of free will he discusses is the belief that “free will is housed in souls” (Mele 1). This belief is then closely followed by the belief that “whether or not souls exist, free will doesn’t depend on them” (Mele 1). Unfortunately, a debate on the existence of souls is not one I would like to get into at this moment, and this is the true peril of philosophical speculation: one question leads to another question which leads to another question, not all of which can simply be covered in one book or probably even in three books. So here we must limit ourselves. I will not be delving into the reasons behind my belief that souls do not in fact exist, but to appreciate many of my following arguments you will just have to assume this is a true fact. Perhaps if I have the time I will one day write a follow up article on why I do not believe in souls, but I would like to keep this paper more focused than that, so we barrel onwards.

With this belief in mind I will pose to you the next big issue in defining free will that I came across in my studies: is our brain us? Obviously yes our brain is physically a part of us, but many people (myself included) have an issue with the idea that our brain is functioning to make all of our choices and create all of our beliefs before we are consciously aware of what or why, assuming that is that we ever really become aware of what or why we have done or believe something. I will discuss many studies later that show evidence of this type of brain functioning, but I wanted to at least plant in your mind that debate that runs through my head every time I read one of these studies. Initially, it always seems scary that so many of the decisions I make are for reasons apparently totally unknown to me, and that perhaps it is true that all consciousness is just a post hoc explanation to make sense of what is happening and what I am doing in the world. However, when you really think about it: if it is your brain making all of these decisions, and your brain is a part of you, isn’t it still you making these decisions, even if you lack the conscious awareness about making them? Does this count as having free will? You are in a sense free because it is your body that is choosing (is choosing the right word? Can you choose something if you are not conscious?) to do everything, but if you lack the conscious portion of the process, does it really count as free will? I am still inclined to say no, but why not? It is my body doing this to me?

Now that I have posed all sorts of crazy questions to the definition of free will, I will attempt to give you the definition of what I am trying to defend, so that moving forward we can be clear what exactly my argument is. I claim that I do not believe we have free will. To contrast Mele’s high bar definitions of free will, I feel I have a low bar belief of free will. I believe that lacking free will requires making conscious choices that are entirely dependent on preceding brain activity and that lacking free will requires being absolutely constrained by genetics and environment. Basically, I believe that between environmental factors, genetic factors and the way our brains function, all of our decisions are out of our control. If you consider the plethora of factors that are utterly out of our control then I’m not sure how you can ever claim to make a decision independently. Your actions are driven by things like where you were born, how you were raised, basic human needs, the way your genetics interplay with your environment, the functioning of your brain, and so many more different factors. Overall, this brings us to the two major arguments against free will, both of which I support.

What are the arguments against free will?

There are two main approaches to the argument against free will. There is the neuroscience claim, which is that “all our decisions are made unconsciously and therefore not freely”, and then there is the social psychology claim, “that factors of which we are unaware have such powerful influence on our behavior that no room remains for free will” (Mele 1). The social psychology claim is by far easier to imagine in everyday life, but it just requires you to think a little deeper about your decision making process. To try to demonstrate what I mean I have prepared an example.

Example 1: What college should I attend?

A year and a half ago I had to decide where I was going to go to college. It came down to Davidson or William & Mary, and it was a close call. I ended up choosing the college of William & Mary. The next logical question is why did I do that? I chose the college of William & Mary because both of my parents attended the college, and I wanted to feel close to them even when I was far away at school. This seems like a choice I made, but really did I? I had no control over the fact that my parents went to the college of William & Mary because I wasn’t even born yet. I had no control over the fact that I grew up having a good relationship with my parents that would lead me to desire to follow in their footsteps because this relationship was forged before I can remember and before I had choice of my own. I had no control over the fact that I grew up in a school district where it was frowned upon to not attend college after high school leading me to believe it was the only suitable path to take therefore leading me to having to decide where to go to school. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

As you can see, when you really try to imagine the causes of your decision making process, it becomes clear just how many factors that lead you there are not in your control at all. The example I gave is a fairly easy one to look at because it was a decision I labored long and hard over, so tracing the causes of my choice is easier for me to do. However, there are also some cases you can look at where it may seem like you made a choice, but the factors that really caused you to make that choice just aren’t obvious to you. I will demonstrate this with another example.

Should I ask out that woman?

You are sitting at the bar and a woman comes in and sits down to seats next to you. She is alone, so you decide to approach her. Why did you decide to do this? You may think it was randomly or just because why not? However, you didn’t realize it was because her eyes were dilated and she is the peak of her fertility. It has been shown that “men [are] consistently more attracted to women with dilated eyes” (Eagleman 4), and that “a woman is considered to be most beautiful at the peak of fertility in her menstrual cycle (Eagleman 93). So while you may be able to tell you me approached her because she is attractive, the reasons you found her attractive were not only out of her control, but also left you with “no insight into [your] decision making” process (Eagleman 4).

This second example better demonstrates the neuroscience view of free will: everything we do is done for reasons our consciousness cannot or struggles to explain. We could apply this view to the first example to by saying that even though I may think that I chose the College of William & Mary because my parents attended school there, I really am attending school their for reasons only my unconscious knows about, and saying I chose to go there because my parents went there is just my consciousness attempting to explain the actions that my unconscious has made for me. You could also apply the social psychology view to the second example by saying something like you decided to go over and talk to her because you were feeling lonely. You were feeling lonely because when you were a child you had an anxious attachment relationship with your mother, and this anxious attachment relationship leaves you feeling like “in order to get close to someone and have your needs met, you need to be with your partner all the time and get reassurance.” However, your now ex-girlfriend couldn’t handle the pressure of this need because she grew up with dismissive/avoidant attachment and was constantly seeking isolation from you until she finally dumped you (Firestone 2013). As you can see, the dumping was not in your control because the types of attachment styles you each had was not in your control, and therefore this leaves your loneliness and desire to approach this new woman out of your control as well.

Each of these arguments provides at least partial reasoning for how this action or choice is left out of your control, and this is the reason why I prefer a combination of the two views. It seems to me that on their own each explanation can account for a least most of the reasons behind a decision or action, but then together I can hardly believe that there is anything that these two explanations cannot account for. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed to find that most of the literature I approached focused on one view or first one view and then the next, not a combination of the two. This is probably because proving or supporting just one view is a hefty enough task, much less both at once. However, I hope that, as more work on the subject comes about that there will be a better combination of the two views to try to really eliminate the possibility of belief in free will.

What studies or evidence support a lack of free will?

The studies probably most famous for opposing a belief in free will and the studies that led me to want to explore this topic of research are Libet’s studies. His experiments focused on the timing of neural events versus physical events. His most famous experiment worked as follows: he had participants sit in a chair and randomly flex their wrist. They were looking at what is now known as a Libet clock, a spot that revolves around the clock face in about 2.5 seconds, and after flexing the clock would stop, and participants would report where on the clock face the dot was when they felt the intention to flex. Libet also had his participants hooked up to an EEG machine and was taking measurements of their wrist movements. What he found was that the brain would show activity known as a readiness potential that signaled the beginning of a movement at about 550 milliseconds before the wrist flexed. However, participants reports of when they had the intention to flex was only 200 milliseconds before the wrist flex. To Libet, this showed that the unconscious decided to flex about 350 milliseconds before we are consciously aware of this decision. This shows a lack of free will because this, and in theory all, decisions are made unconsciously before we are aware of them (Mele 8-10).