I Was Predestined To Believe In Free Will

Ques­tions about free will ever keep you up at night? I just read a great ram­bling round­table of an essay called Faith and The Sci­ence of Free Will.

It’s a response to an essay by John Hor­gan in the New York Times, which reads in part: A cou­ple of books I’ve been read­ing late­ly have left me brood­ing over the pos­si­bil­i­ty that free will is as much a myth as divine jus­tice. The chief offend­er is The Illu­sion of Con­scious Will, by Dr. Daniel M. Weg­n­er, a psy­chol­o­gist at Har­vard.… We think of will as a force, but actu­al­ly, Dr. Weg­n­er says, it is a feeling—“merely a feel­ing,” as he puts it—of con­trol over our actions. I think, “I’m going to get up now,” and when I do a moment lat­er, I cred­it that feel­ing with hav­ing been the insti­gat­ing cause. But as we all know, cor­re­la­tion does not equal cau­sa­tion.

The exchanges (sev­er­al peo­ple com­ment) are insight­ful, such as this one: My response to this is based on The Voli­tion­al Brain: Towards a Neu­ro­science of Free Will, edit­ed by Ben­jamin Libet (Imprint Aca­d­e­m­ic, 2000). As I under­stand it, Libet was actu­al­ly one of the sci­en­tists involved in the exper­i­ments that Dr. Weg­n­er refers to. The fact that Libet’s posi­tion is nowhere men­tioned makes me very sus­pi­cious of Weg­n­er’s agen­da.

The con­scious will appears to be ini­ti­at­ed by an uncon­scious brain event. If the exper­i­ment is cor­rect, then this calls into ques­tion free will. But Libet says the con­scious will can veto these sub­con­scious deci­sions (see page 51 of The Voli­tion­al Brain). The con­scious veto may itself have a pre­ced­ing uncon­scious process. But this would become an uncon­scious choice of which we become con­scious rather than a con­scious­ly causal event (52). The con­scious veto is a con­trol func­tion, not just sim­ply becom­ing aware of a wish to act. The role of con­scious free will would be, then, not to ini­ti­ate a vol­un­tary act, but rather to con­trol whether the act takes place. The eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of this are actu­al­ly con­sis­tent with most eth­i­cal and reli­gious sys­tems. Most of the Ten Com­mand­ments are thou-shall-not com­mand­ments (54). The exper­i­ments cit­ed by Weg­n­er give us no indi­ca­tion that actions can­not be con­scious­ly con­trolled.

Pret­ty cool stuff. You can read an expand­ed ver­sion of the essay here.