Am I free to act as I see fit? Can I choose to walk away from my computer right now and stop writing this blog? The answer, it seems, most be yes. If I didn’t feel like blogging right now I could get up, walk away and focus on some other activity.
We experience ourselves as having conscious control over most of the actions or set actions that we perform. Indeed, it seems almost ridiculous to question whether we are in control of our own actions in normal circumstances. Of course we are, can’t you feel it? Nonetheless, experiments in neuroscience and cognitive psychology have cast some doubts on the notion that the experience of control conforms to actual control.
Famously, Daniel Wegner has provided a number of arguments that tried to establish that free will as we normally understand it is an illusion. Wegner thinks that having free will at a minimum entails that our conscious thoughts play some role in the production of our actions. This seems to fit nicely with how we normally think of our freely willed actions: conscious thought cause action. In his book ‘The Illusion of Conscious Will’ (2002) Wegner presents a number of experiments that supposedly contradicts this causal process. I do not wish to recount the experimental data here (For a review of the experiments see Wegner (2004) “Précis of the illusion of conscious will” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences). Instead suffice it to say that Wegner suggest that our conscious ‘willings’ can be dissociated from the ‘real’ cause of our actions i.e. some unconscious neural state.
Wegners book seem to have convinced many a neuroscientist (and even some psychologist) that conscious thought cannot effect our actions. If you listen to neuroscience podcast, follow prominent neuroscientist on twitter or read newspaper articles on neuroscientific research it is often stated that humans falsely believe that they have free will. One recent article published in frontiers in psychology highlight this point by compared the belief in free will with the belief in the paranormal. The method of investigation was simply to have subjects answer a questionnaire and rate their agreement or disagreement with certain statements on a likert scale. First, they rated their agreement with free will statements like “Humans have free will” and “in everyday life, you are actually choosing your actions freely”. Secondly, they rated their agreement with “paranormal” statements like “UFO’s are flying to the earth, with aliens on them” and “reincarnation exists”. The papers analysis of the answers showed that people that believe in free will, will be more likely to believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena.
A simple question to ask is why it is interesting to compare the belief in the paranormal with a belief in free will. Perhaps connecting the belief in free will to beliefs that are more readily perceived as ridiculous works as an argument that the belief in free will should be perceived as ridiculous. This seems to be part of what the author intends. It is for example stated that “Holding the paranormal belief seems to indicate a lack of critical thinking…” (Mogi 2014: 5), in turn suggesting that the same goes for holding a belief in free will. According to the author we hold paranormal and free will beliefs despite of the fact that there is (scientific) evidence that these beliefs are false. There is no such thing as UFO’s or reincarnation. Neither is there an ability to act according to ones (free) will. It is ridiculous to hold such beliefs when there is evidence to the contrary. The author goes on to suggest that having such “illusionary” beliefs might have an adaptive value, since “…those who believed in internal agency might have been more effective in controlling there environments” (Mogi 2014: 7).
Whatever one might think of this type of research it seem to point to a tendency among some researcher to assume the falsehood of free will because they think there is evidence that shows that our experience of our thoughts as the cause our actions is inconsistent with the actual causal chain that leads to action. One prominent model in this regard explains our experience of free will as a product of matching the content of our thoughts with the outcome of the action.
As the above depiction from Wegners book (2002: 68) suggests unconscious (neural) processes serve as the actual cause of action and thought. Further, our thoughts our do not have any causal power on this picture since the (unconscious) decision to act is temporally prior to the onset of our action-congruent thought. If this model is correct then, given that our thoughts have no causal power, we cannot freely will anything.
Problematically there are many reason to think that the evidence provided by Wegner and others do not show that there the type of relationship between unconscious phenomena and actions as depicted above. In most cases the phenomena identified as the unconscious cause of action simply temporally precede the action, and cannot be manipulated in a way that might be evidence that it is the cause of the supposedly free action. In addition, many of the experiments provided as the source of evidence against free will have not been replicated successfully (but some have been replicated unsuccessfully). There are many other reason to be skeptical about the conclusion that Wegner draws from neuroscientific experimental data that I will not touch upon here (see for example Roskies (2011) in Sinnott-Armstrong and L. Nadel (Eds.), Conscious Will and Responsibility, or Bayne (2006) in S. Pockett, W. P. Banks and S. Gallagher (Eds.) Does Consciousness Cause Behavior). The jury is still out on whether conscious thoughts can cause action (for now I will maintain that they can).
The point here is that the falsehood of free will and the efficacy of conscious thought has become a self-evident truth in neuroscience that might lead to misguided research projects and overly confident conclusions in for example research on decision-making and reasoning. We should not readily accept that conscious thought has no influence in the causal chain that leads to us acting in a certain way, since the idea that consciousness does influence our actions is fundamental to the way we think of, among other things, responsibility and morality. In other words, the epistemological bar for accepting the falsehood of free will should be kept exceptionally high. We are no way near reaching a level of accumulated evidence for the falsehood of free will for us to accept it as true. There is yet little evidence to that suggest that our experiences of free will, like the paranormal, are illusional in nature.
