Is There Such a Thing as Free Will?
I’ve been fascinated with the concepts of free will and determinism for as long as I can remember.
As a child, my friends and I would read Latin excerpts from the encyclopedia just as a storm would come rolling in — pretending (completely believing?) that our force of will alone had some special power over our surroundings.
Later, as a teenager, I dug deep into religion. Maybe broad is a better word, but still; more content and context than most, from my experience. I attended every local church I felt welcome walking into, at least once. I read the Bible cover to cover (I might have zoned out for some of it), thinking maybe that was the secret to unlocking its incredible power.
I later moved on to study all forms of what most would call “the occult”. I just saw it all as history and religion, intertwined. I felt like surely the answers to real power were there — just buried by the ever-shifting sands of time like all other ancient treasures.
Enochian, Ceremonial, Druidism, Wiccan, Zoroastrianism, and of course, Shamanism. That one did get pretty deep, actually. I devoured every scrap of text I could find — not an easy feat in the 1990s.
Once I got around to getting a proper college education, I realized in my newfound sense of enlightenment that what I was really interested in the whole time was power.
And the problem was I had been looking at and defining power all wrong.
I was thinking of power the way we see it in superheroes and sorcerers and other fictional beings that are all deliberately created to be more than we are, in every respect.
Because in the end, power is nothing but the ability to influence other people into acting against their own will.
If someone is already going to do a thing, and you compel them to, say, pick your brand — this is not the same thing.
People have two kinds of constraints:
- Internal Constraints — the product of the entirety of context, including but not limited to background, environment, socioeconomic class, etc. that culminate in an uncontrollable domino effect of choices
- External Constraints — the stimuli or motivations that compel people to make morally questionable choices (money, sex, authority, etc.)
Internal constraints are kind of the deterministic part of the equation.
They are, ironically, everything that has been an external influence on you leading up to that very moment where your choice must be made.
Determinism says that no matter what you choose, or how it turns out, that it isn’t your fault because the cosmic dominoes fall where they fall and it was never your choice to make in the first place.
It was already determined by the culmination of every other factor leading up to that moment — no matter how trivial.
External constraints are basically factors that either inhibit free will, obviously taking away the ability to choose at all, or otherwise act as motivators for a person to go against the grain of what they would choose without said stimulus’ effect.
Money is an easy example. People don’t want to scrub other people’s toilets or stand up for hours a day ringing up stuff they can’t afford to buy for themselves — but they tolerate it in exchange for money.
Without money on the table, it is guaranteed NOT how they would spend their time.
So — why do we make the choices we make? And why do we choose differently? A good choice is a good choice…right?
Understanding Free Will — The Libet Experiment
The Libet Experiment was designed by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s to help better understand the mechanism of decision-making inside the brain.
The experiment required the subject to watch a dot spin inside a clock-face reticle and then click a mouse button when the dot aligned with a “time” that is randomly determined by the subject. They simply have to tell the scientist the time they were clicking for.
Instead of a spike in brain activity at the moment the choice is made as you might expect, there was instead a buildup and then a plummet in brain activity.
The folk definition of free will is that the mind controls the body. The Libet Experiment, which has been replicated hundreds of times, turned this notion 180° on its head for a lot of people. Instead of the mind deciding anything, choices are the direct result of brain function.
In other words, your subconscious physical brain spends an entire second oozing and sparking before your conscious mind “decides” to click a button.
Every time.
“The folk definition of free will is that the mind controls the body.” — Dr. Emilie Caspar, Neuroscientist
The implications, of course, are enormous. If the Libet Experiment is legit, then free will doesn’t exist as anything other than a pipe dream. Every decision is instead not a decision at all, but a culmination of conditioned responses to stimuli in the brain chemistry.
In other words — determinism.
Determinism, simply put, is the philosophical theory that all things in the universe, including moral choices or any choices at all, are predetermined by all of the events leading up to the occurrence of the given choice at hand.
A common analogy is to consider a mighty King who thinks his decrees are the result of his decisions solely, when in fact they are all influenced by the advisors, social peers, public perception, etc.
The end result is that while they spoke the choice aloud, many factors directly attributed to it happening no other way but that way.
The Controversy — Challenging the Libet Experiment
There are plenty of neuroscientists that disagree with Libet’s findings, however, no matter how replicable.
Just because you recognize a puzzle piece as a corner doesn’t mean you have the correct interpretation of the entire puzzle.
Dr. Steve Taylor published an article in Scientific American that directly challenges certain assumptions of the Liber Experiment, as well as its findings.
Dr. Taylor points out that Libet’s test “relies on the participants’ own recording of when they feel the intention to move.”
In other words, there is no means of quantifying any possible delay between the impulse to act and the subject’s recording of the action. There is also no measure of the shift in the subject’s attention; the transition from exercising their will to reading the clock.
He also questions the accuracy of subjects’ ability to record the precise moment of their decision to click the button. In tests such as these, milliseconds are where the real story is, and glossing over seconds worth of data per action simply won’t do.
“Our subjective awareness of decisions is very unreliable.”
- Dr. Stephen Taylor, Neuroscientist
The largest issue that Taylor takes with Libet’s approach is with the lack of clarity in confirming that the brain’s rise in electrical activity, which Libet describes as “readiness potential” is related to the willful decision to move, as well as to the actual movement.
The inherent problem here is that the readiness potential spike could simply relate to the consciousness on the wrist, a button, or even the clock, rather than the choice to move.
Dr. Taylor also suggests that the area of the brain where the “readiness potential” occurs — the supplementary motor area (SMA)— is usually associated with imagining movements rather than actually performing them.
The initiation and mental programming of movements depend on activity in many areas of the brain, including the supplementary motor area, the preSMA, and several parts of the parietal cortex.
Swiss neuroscientist Dr. Peter Clarke also argues that electrical stimulation of the motor areas produces movements, but not the will to move. In contrast, electrical stimulation of relevant areas in the parietal lobe elicits the will to move but does not cause a mechanical (involuntary) movement.
