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We are all sometimes told                                 that free will is an essential part of being human. On the concept of free will we build our sense of justice, our somewhat democratic society, our understanding of human nature, all our religious doctrines, our sense of leading lives that we choose. It is easy to believe in this idea because its existence is obvious. We continually experience our own free will and we see it in others. We find ourselves every day making choices of all kinds, some routine and simple, some extremely difficult with lasting consequences for ourselves and those around us. Of course, we try to make the best choices we can, but all of those choices, we believe, could have been made differently.  It could have been yes instead of no, the road not taken could have been the one we took.

 

It is also easy to believe in free will because we want it to be real, we want to make choices for ourselves, we want others to do the same and, if necessary, we want to be able to hold others accountable for their freely chosen behavior. So it may come as an unexpected and unwanted surprise to you, as it did to me, to learn that free will does not exist. In spite of the obvious and central role it plays in our lives, it isn't real; it exists only as a conceptual construction, an extremely convincing illusion. We know that it doesn't exist because we know that it cannot exist; there is simply no way to make it work in a world that operates entirely according to physical laws.

 

In a sense, we are free to do as we want, but what we want is not our choice, it is given to us by our brain, generated by evolutionary history and by chemistry.  We could not have taken that other road because we weren't given the desire to make that choice. Support for this conclusion can be found in three simple arguments, as follow:

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1. The argument of physics as universal law.

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Throughout nature, events follow one another not as floats in a parade, with no particular relationship to one another, but as a continuous series of states each causally linked, each leading to the next in strict accordance with the laws of physics.  And, as much as humans would like to believe otherwise, our species has appeared on earth not in opposition to nature but as a result of natural processes.  Events over which we have no control, happening around and within us, continually generate the actions that we take. Because the laws of physics--and only the laws of physics--determine the course of events in the natural world, and because the natural world includes humans, it follows that humans cannot choose the course of events, not even the personal decisions that shape our lives. There is no room for free will in nature, not in rocks, not in rodents, and not in humans.

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2. The argument of continuous evolution and continuous             human development.

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The evolutionary process that led from single celled organisms to human beings occurred continuously over millions of years in many tiny increments.  If single celled organisms do not have free will and humans do have free will, then at some point in the evolutionary process, at least once, a species that did not possess free will produced offspring that did.  This seems unlikely. The same argument can be made with respect to the development of a human being from just a few cells. If fully formed humans possess free will but the starting cells do not, then the developing human, simply by adding more cells, at some point must change from a group of cells not having free will to one that does.  This, too, seems to be unlikely.

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3. The argument of universal illusion.

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Our perception of the world fails to coincide with the description of the world presented by science.  For instance, the solidity of objects underlies our experience of things but, in fact, we know that objects are not solid. Objects are mostly empty space and their "solid" parts spin, orbit, and vibrate at speeds and frequencies beyond our imagination.  We perceive none of this. Similarly, we experience sound as something out there in the real world. Actually, only waves of higher and lower air density fly around us, no sound at all. The illusion of sound has evolved as an interpretation of the complex wave patterns caused by action at a distance in a fluid; the illusion helps us perceive our environment but it happens in a universe without sound. You might be tempted to say "yes, but there is sound when our inner ears interpret the waves or in our brain when the signals are received."  But there is no sound there either, just very quiet electrical and chemical signals generated in the inner ear and received in some appropriate part of the brain. Similarly, color cannot be found in our universe; our brains construct the experience of color in relation to the different energy levels of visible light. The light itself has no color, only energies of various amounts.  

So,If free will were to exist, it would perhaps stand alone in its direct correspondence to human experience. On the other hand, if free will were an illusion created by the brain to help us navigate the world, it would be a useful fiction similar to other illusions created in the brains of humans (and mice). That's what brains do. 

 

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A Thought Experiment

 

Imagine two identical universes, universe 1 and universe 2.  Each universe contains a human, also identical, human 1 and human 2.  Of course, each universe is governed by the same laws and acts upon its respective human in exactly the same way.  In universe 1 the human walks straight ahead twenty feet and stops.  The question is whether it is possible for the human in universe 2 to do something other than to walk straight ahead twenty feet and stop.

 

If free will exists, human 2 should be able to do anything he wants, regardless of what human 1 does.  But human brains are chemical and electrical, they respond to their environment in ways that are entirely consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry and, threfore, identical brains under identical circumstances cannot do different things.  If human 2 can do something other than what human 1 does, then free will exists, but then human brains are unique in the known universe in their ability to violate natural law.  If human 2 can do only what human 1 does, then, humans behave as everything else does--in accordance with the laws of the physics--and there is no free will.

 

 

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A Letter

 

A letter written to Scientific American in response to an article by Michael Schermer in which he claimed that although free will seems to be limited, humans have a veto over the brain's decisions.  The following letter was published, in part, in the September 2012 issue of Scientific American.

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Dear Sirs:

 

Michael Shermer’s defense of free will (“Free Won’t”) rests on two inconsequential distinctions, one of procedure and one of place.  He argues that although the individual may not be making the choices, he is free to veto choices presented by the brain.  But a veto is not different from a choice, it is simply a choice to reject a previous choice.  The distinction between choice and veto is one of sequence within the process of choosing, a process that is solely a function of the brain.  Similarly, in arguing that the veto takes place in a separate part of the brain and is therefore an act separate from choosing, Mr. Shermer ignores the obvious fact that all locations within the brain are part of that organ--there is no outside authority.  The brain is the “self” and responds in ways over which neither it nor the individual have control.  Free will cannot be conjured up by dividing the activities of the brain and pretending that some of them are directed by something higher.

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Respectfully submitted,

James Leritz