Answering Life’s Big Questions: Do We Have Free Will?
Let’s say someone has a major epileptic seizure, wrenches his arms around and punches someone. If you really believe that we can freely control our behavior, you must convict him of assault.
Virtually everyone thinks this is absurd.
And yet, half a millennium ago, such a sentence would have been passed in much of Europe. This seems ridiculous because in the last centuries the West has crossed a border and left it so far behind that a world on the other side is unimaginable. We embrace a concept that defines our progress: “It’s not his fault. It’s his inability.”
In other words, sometimes biology can overpower anything resembling free will.
This woman did not bump into you maliciously; she is blind.
This soldier standing in formation didn’t pass out because he doesn’t have what it takes; he’s diabetic and needs his insulin.
This man is heartless not because he did not help the elderly person who fell, but because he is paralyzed due to a spinal cord injury.
Brain-specific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis, and aspects of brain function can be influenced by a person’s prenatal environment, genes, hormones, whether their parents were authoritarian or egalitarian, and whether they experienced violence in childhood when they ate breakfast. These are just a tiny fraction of factors to consider when looking at someone’s behavior.
In the 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet of UCSF reported something fascinating:
A subject is hooked up to an EEG machine that monitors electrical excitation patterns in the brain. She sits quietly and looks at a clock. Then she was instructed to flick her wrist whenever she felt like it, noting the time to the second when she decided to do so.
Libet identified what he called a “readiness potential” in the EEG data — a signal from the motor cortex and complementary premotor areas that a movement would soon be initiated.
The readiness potentials consistently occurred about half a second before the time when the conscious intention to move was reported.
Interpretation: your brain “decided” to move before you were even aware of it.
We are not conscious of anything except what we are conscious of.
Most of what is in your mind is subconscious and you have no control over it, we don’t know how it works or how to control it. Humans are hostages to the universe, our environment, our genes, our upbringing, our neurological configuration and our subconscious mind.
The conscious mind can fight the subconscious when it comes to making decisions, but we base our decisions on past experiences, so the path is technically already paved.
Looking at all these influences, the challenge is basically to show a neuron that just caused this behavior or a network of neurons that just caused this behavior.
This is to show that none of what they just did was influenced by anything, from the sensory environment a second ago to the evolution of your species.
There is no room there for a concept of free will that is in your brain but did not come from your brain.
Our behaviors and our choices are the consequences of a long series of dominoes that fell before that behavior.
Even if we had full control over our subconscious, what would it mean to have “free will”? Where would this “free will” come from? From a soul? A god? Randomness?
Before recognizing e.g. a dangerous situation, our brain directs our face (eyes enlarge to see the surroundings, and the mouth is opened to breathe in and possibly call for help).
Free will is not possible; it is an improbability BUT…
If you look at inanimate objects in the world, rocks, water bottles, whatever, they have a very limited behavioral repertoire because their internal organization is too crude for them to do much right. If you talk to a glass of water, you send sound waves, it doesn’t do much, it may vibrate a bit, but the repertoire of responses is incredibly limited.
We have accumulated through evolution a huge repertoire of behaviors that are finely tuned to stimuli from the outside world. You ask me a question, that’s a stimulus and all of a sudden these particle processes go into action and that’s the result, the response. The freedom we have is not in controlling the laws of physics and chemical reactions, but in that, that we have no behavioral limitations. We are free from a limited behavioral repertoire and are shaped by new experiences and environments.
Having this wide range of responses is unique and while we do not specifically choose them, we still have them and can marvel at them, marvel at these behaviors and that is the freedom we have, this complexity to choose from.
Here is a good example of this dualism. Remember Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State University football coach who was a cruel serial child molester. After his conviction, an opinion piece appeared on CNN. Under the provocative headline “Do pedophiles deserve pity?” wrote James Cantor of the University of Toronto, gave an overview of the neurobiology of pedophilia.
For example, it occurs in families, suggesting that genes play a role. Pedophiles have atypically high rates of childhood brain injury. There is evidence of endocrine abnormalities during fetal life. Does this raise the possibility that the neurobiological stage is set for some people to be that way? Precisely.
Cantor concludes, “You can’t choose not to be a pedophile.”
That’s bold and right. And then Cantor makes a startling long leap regarding mitigated free will. Does any of this biology mitigate the condemnation and punishment Sandusky deserved? No. “You can’t choose to be a pedophile, but you can choose not to be a child molester.”
What Did We Learn From This?
The only form of “Free Will” we possess is the repertoire of actions and thoughts to choose from. We are incredibly complex creatures that have the freedom to react to stimuli in various ways. These reactions may be paved by recent experiences, but we still have a choice. It’s more difficult to refrain from alcohol when you’ve been through a bad childhood, yet it’s still possible to fight the urge.
In most cases, we have absolutely no clue why a behavior occurred the way it did. There are millions of factors to consider when making assumptions regarding other people and ourselves.
Here are just a few of the things that can affect us:
blood sugar levels; the socioeconomic status of your birth family; a concussion; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress and glucocorticoid levels; whether you have pain; whether you have Parkinson’s disease and what medications you were prescribed; perinatal hypoxia; your dopamine D4 receptor gene variant; whether you had a stroke in the frontal cortex; whether you were abused in childhood; how high your cognitive load was in the last few minutes; your MAO-A gene variant; whether you are infected with a particular parasite; whether you have the gene for Huntington’s disease; the lead concentration in your tap water when you were a child; whether you live in an individualistic or a collectivistic culture; whether you are a heterosexual male and there is an attractive woman nearby; whether you have smelled someone’s sweat fear. And so on.
I’ve been greatly influenced to write this article by neuroendocrinology researcher and author Robert Sapolsky.
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