Free will - real or illusionary?

[OutwiththeOutCrowd]

I have an interest in free will. (Whether that interest is freely willed is a moot point!)

As a student, I read Roger Penrose’s book The Emperor’s New Mind about minds, machines, quantum mechanics and consciousness. Several sections in the book attracted my attention at the time but one part that I have been thinking about more recently discussed the experiments of Benjamin Libet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet

Libet’s work involved monitoring the timing of brain signals associated with actions perceived by the subject to be voluntarily willed. His experiments appear to suggest that the subconscious mind is already gearing up for an action before the conscious mind is aware that it has made a decision to execute that action. If the results are taken at face value – and many scientists do so – they seem to suggest that free will is just an illusion.

Here is the well-known neuroscientist Susan Greenfield being a guinea pig for a reproduction of one of Libet’s experiments.

What is your reaction to these results?

Atheists, suppose you adopt this scientific view and accept that free will doesn’t exist. Suppose you are up a creek without a paddle. If you then find a floating plank and use it as a paddle, your solution is not down to your own ingenuity, it’s predetermined. And as you start to paddle your canoe, it’s not really you that’s doing it. You are trapped in a paddling automaton with the mere illusion that you are controlling it.

Does that sound satisfactory to you?

Theists, suppose you refute the scientific view that Libet’s experiments seem to push us towards. Suppose you are also up a creek without a paddle. You know that your sinful nature – or that of others – has brought this bad situation into being. If you then find a floating plank to use as a paddle, it’s down to divine providence. And, as you start to paddle, you know that God wants you to paddle home safely but you still have the free will to mess up.

Does that sound satisfactory to you?

Personally, I find myself resisting the apparent implications of Libet’s work. I don’t think the results are wrong – just that they might be being misinterpreted. Why would consciousness evolve in the first place if it was an entirely passive construct and there were no evolutionary advantage to it? I find it hard to accept that I am a spectator watching my own biopic rather than a player participating in it.

What do you think? Do you care? Do you think Outwith should cease cogitating and make the (illusionary?) choice to start cleaning her house instead?

Thanks for reading this far!

I also remember being a bit older (about 2yrs) and crying because I did not liked the sound of a motorbike going past. My mother told me not to cry and explained the motorbike would not harm me. I remember actually thinking she was wrong and that of course you cry when there is something you don't like! So my mother told me to consciously choose not to do something which I then considered and came to the conclusion I was correct and crying was the natural reaction!

Hi VelvetGreen I liked what you had to say and wanted to - finally -respond!

I have no specialist knowledge here

Join the club! MN would be like a ghost town in the Old West with the wind blowing tumbleweed around and not much else happening if people had to know what they were talking about before posting. Anyway, free will is befuddling to everyone so we are all equally qualified to fumble around in the dark trying to understand it. That’s what I think!

I practice meditation and yoga, both with the aim of quieting the conscious mind so that the subconscious can be observed.

I’ve been doing some meditation too and find it helpful. (I’m not very good at it yet so I need the meditation to be guided.)

I was interested to read about the MRI brain scans of meditating Buddhist monks. It seems that activity in the frontal lobes – associated with attention and focus - is increased whilst activity in the parietal lobes – associated with orienting yourself in time and space and giving you a sense of self - is reduced. The latter effect gives a sense of the dissolving of selfhood and of a sense of oneness and connectivity taking over. I think this would be like turning the knob down on the self-aware conscious mind.

I suspect that a scan of my brain under normal conditions would show it lit up like a Christmas tree in all the wrong regions, as I too am prone to anxiety. But meditation does help.

(Incidentally, off-topic but anyway, some of the loveliest people I know are susceptible to anxiety and depression. I sometimes think of it as a necessary forfeit for being sensitive, empathetic and reflective. Not that I’m saying that’s me – more that I’m saying it might be you!)

The greatest barrier to true free will as i see it is our own experiences, and our thoughts and feelings around them.

I think what you are talking about has to do with what PeppermintCrayon called agency up-thread. It has more to do with your capacity to act according to your will in day-to-day life rather than whether your will is in any real sense free in a deterministic universe.

And in the end, that more pragmatic idea of free will or ability to make choices and transcend any internal or external barriers in our way - is more important to us all than the more abstract conception of free will I was musing about.

Thanks Out

I hadn't heard of the mri scans of meditating monks, but i'm not surprised by the results. I would say the sense of self is very much a product of the conscious mind. The main purpose of Buddhist practice is to move past the illusion of self, fuelled by the ego, and so relieve the cause of suffering, primarily our clinging to a self that is impermanent. I'm not a Buddhist, and i still struggle with ego and the concept of not being 'me', but i do find the concept of impermanence hard to argue with.

I've probably massively missed a point somewhere, but if there is the possibility that we do not have free will, what mechanism would you think is responsible for it?

Just thinking a bit more...

Re agency, i understand it is slightly different to what you mean by free will. I do think it is important to recognise that free will, as in freedom to act unimpeded by any other force, is constrained by our past, the society we live in and by our biological make-up.

It is such an interesting question. When i think of the countless actions that have taken place from the earliest beginnings of the universe to this point in time to bring you, me and everyone and everything else into their current form and circumstances, i can't help but wonder how much control one has over their future trajectory. If we retain free will despite this, in terms of the choices we make, then it is tempered by the conditions that have brought us to the present moment.

I think if you go with the concept that there is no self, then free will does kind of lose its meaning. It's quite long but this piece is quite a good assessment of the Buddhist view of free will.

Velvet

I’ve had a chance to read through the article about Buddhism and Free Will you linked to – thank you for posting that!

I was interested to read that the Buddha is sitting on the fence – possibly in the lotus position – between determinism and indeterminism! It makes sense that he would advocate a middle path between extremes.

He also seems to be concentrating on the agency sort of free will. So accept that free will is possible in principle and carry on from there.

It’s the sort of article that requires reading a few times to let it sink in, I think – so I shall be returning to it.

Also intrigued by the notion that phenomena are actually created by mind rather than the other way round. That sounded a bit like a modern idea called biocentrism.

if there is the possibility that we do not have free will, what mechanism would you think is responsible for it?

The reason why I think that ‘real’ free will might not be possible even in principle is because science doesn’t seem to leave room for it. We've got equations that tell us how the world works and those are deterministic – the future is as fixed as the past is. The world including living creatures is just like a very sophisticated piece of clockwork and the conversation we are having now could not be avoided once the clockwork was set into motion by the Big Bang at the very beginning. Our thoughts and actions are locked into this mechanism, which is changing in a predetermined way we are powerless to alter.

That's the orthodox world view of science.

Quantum mechanics might be able to rescue us from this situation but nobody is quite sure how!

The reason why I think that ‘real’ free will might not be possible even in principle is because science doesn’t seem to leave room for it. We've got equations that tell us how the world works and those are deterministic – the future is as fixed as the past is

See, I don't think that's true. Scientific theory used to think that if you could understand all of the variables then you could in theory (but likely never in practice) predict all outcomes but I don't think that's the concencus anymore.

That's interesting Binkybix. Are you referring to chaos theory or something else? I mean quantum mechanics is actually deterministic. It's the observation that introduces the probabilistic element but if you had a wavefunction for the whole universe - if that's meaningful - it would evolve in a deterministic fashion.

Making a free choice to mark this thread

If you have any illuminating thoughts to add on this enigmatic subject, feel 'free' to do so!

Glad you thought the article from a Buddhist perspective was worthwhile. I did think about linking to something from Taoism - how we have free will and no will as both are of the Tao but that is even more brain achey!

The phenomena from the mind thing. It's basically saying that objects as perceived do not exist independently from our perceptions, and have no permanence. So a chair is only a chair because we perceive it to be and label it as such. My dog would see a stick that would be good to chew (oh yes). You could see it as the tree from which it was made, or the seed from which it grew. It is equally all those things, and will be something else when we no longer label it chair. In the some way if the idea of self exists only as a concept of the mind, then what self is there to exercise free will?

I feel quite comfortable with the middle path as far as free will goes, philosophically at least (i need to do some reading about the science). If our fates were already set then there would be massive implications for moral and legal judgements, and whatever else, we certainly have the illusion of choice, which may well be healthier for our society. On the other hand we are clearly not free and unfettered when it comes to making our decisions for all the reasons we've discussed.

If we do have a degree of free will, be it only in a limited way, i'm beginning to think that it isn't a given (by a god or the universe) but a skill we have to learn. Surely this is reflected in to what degree we are held culpable for our actions in law. The clearer our thinking the freer our choices are - the greater our awareness the greater our capacity for right thinking and right action. So, maybe a practice like mindfulness could actually increase our quota of free will by putting us in the present moment and detaching us from past conditioning, as well as by clarifying are thinking processes?

About the experiments - if the action involved has little or no consequence for the subject (lifting a finger or pressing a button), then there is no reason why conscious thinking processes would be particularly involved is there? If they had been monitored while trying to decide whether to put an offer in an a house or similar complex decision with consequences then the results could well show far more conscious thinking before the decision is made. Maybe?

I woke up thinking about this!

the phenomena from mind thing

This actually fits in quite well with science too – the idea that all we know of reality is our perception of it in our heads.

So looking at a flower. It might look red but the redness is not what’s out there. What’s out there is just light scattered from the flower of a particular wavelength, which goes into the eye. The sensation of it being red is produced in the brain.

Colours, sounds, smells, textures – all are produced in the brain. They have no reality external to the brain. We don’t recreate the world out there in our minds – we create our own reality just like the Buddha says.

I’m not sure how that relates to free will since it is unclear if we have any choice in how our minds create perceived reality – but I think we would at least have some choice how we interpret it.

if the idea of self exists only as a concept of the mind, then what self is there to exercise free will

Good point. I suspect the Buddha would say that the interconnectivity of all things should lead us towards exercising a collective version of free will that ought to result in choices which benefit society and the environment rather than more egocentric choices that would benefit this illusory self.

I feel quite comfortable with the middle path

I do too! It reminds me of the serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

which is very sensible but not always easy to achieve in practice.

Exercising whatever sort of free will we have certainly does require some skill as you say and some people are better at it than others! Personally I often feel paralysed by past events and find it difficult to let go and move on. The sort of mindfulness you suggest putting us in the present moment and detaching us from past conditioning reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, which in itself is influenced by the ideas of Buddhism.

A pat for Velvet’s stick-loving dog! (And any other dogs that happen to be reading and lurking, paws poised over keyboards!)

What sort of role does the subconscious mind have in making more complicated decisions than the finger lift in Libet’s experiment?

Strangely enough, recent research seems to show that the subconscious mind tends to make better choices than the conscious mind if the decision process involves considering many factors, while the conscious mind is better for choosing between two alternatives.

themindlab.co.uk/why-the-subconscious-matters/#.VVrfrK5biRm

If correct, these experiments suggest that if you have a complex decision to make the best way to proceed after finding out as much relevant data as you can is to make a cup of tea, stick some music on and do a crossword puzzle whilst your subconscious mind takes the strain rather than consciously weighing up the facts!

I’m not sure I can believe this! What do you think?

I can believe that, Out. I don't know whether you've ever been caught in the trap of 'overthinking a decision', where your mind goes round in circles, because I have - analysis paralysis. It is only when I have managed to calm down, I have been able to make the decision that just felt right.

A pat for Velvet’s stick-loving dog!

If only it was sticks and not antique french chairs (though of course they're just posh sticks (actually not that posh at all - think rustic breton rather than Versailles))!

I’m not sure I can believe this! What do you think?

I don't know ! I'm off out now, but will have a read of the link later. Of the top of my head, i would think the subconscious does what we consider intuitive thinking (not necessarily less logical, but in the sense we don't experience the thought processes in an accessible way), while the conscious is what we'd define as rational (though clearly not always), listing the pros and cons, though we can bypass that when we make snap decisions - like which button to press, since there are no pros or cons to evaluate.

I have read some education articles, which talk about the requirement of always requiring children to show their working out can be biased against some people, who are very good a calculus. Some people can just come to the right answer very quickly without really taking a great deal of conscious though over it and asking them to show their working out (especially a small child) can be problematic. I wonder if it is because the subconscious does not really use our (spoken) language to operate...

conscious thought not though. Typo.

Caps this is an area that is actually very interesting to me mainly because of my experiences with DS when he was little and it ties in with what you were saying about your own pre-verbal thoughts as a young child.

DS was a late talker. The experts seemed to see him as having limited potential. It was all quite distressing at the time. Back then I thought myself that he was thinking very sophisticated thoughts – they just weren’t verbal. But there seemed to be a real prejudice amongst the experts. Verbal thoughts – sign of intelligence. Other sorts of thoughts – primitive.

Anyway, DS is doing fine now but his mathematical thinking often has that quality – he knows the correct answer but can't explain how he got there. So his thinking is still not always in a linear verbal sequence that he can explain to someone else but seems to involve another style of thinking, which I believe has a strong intuitive visual-spatial element.

Out I get that. My DS, I knew, understood language, much before he said very much. Yet he began to start reading from about 2yrs, was pretty fluent at 3. There were quite a few 'professionals' who would have limited his potential. I think also people forget you have to have something you want to say, to particular people, to talk to people. So much conversation with children tends to be directed by the adult, though not always to what a child is interested in

I do find myself agreeing with that article. I can think of at least one major example in my own life where my gut feeling was a resounding don't do it, but rationally, on paper, having 'thought about it logically' the answer was do it (we did, and wished we hadn't) - hard thinking did not lead to a better outcome. It's the head and heart thing isn't it? Over-thinking can certainly backfire.

I don't agree that if it is not a conscious choice then it is no real choice at all, but people seem to trust their conscious decisions more as they recognise that they have got there through a process. With the subconscious, we seem to see at as a gut feeling and find it harder to justify, despite it often being rather reliable.

Maybe the subconscious has the advantage of not having to be the direct interface with the outside world, processing all our sensory input and responses, registering every thought, feeling and emotion, real and imagined that pops up. If i can bore on about mindfulness again for a moment, when you pay attention in a mindful way to your thoughts you come to realise how much utter nonsense passes through our consciousness, barely perceived. By noticing them and letting them go we can identify and focus more fully on the useful activity going on in there. There is i think quite a bit of evidence for how meditation can improve your brain function.

(Disclaimer - there is obviously so much cross traffic between the subconscious and conscious mind, that it is probably really over-simplistic to keep talking about them as separate entities - they are both our brain. I'm also aware i may be contradicting myself sometimes - if i am it is because i'm thinking it through, and don't have a position to defend, though i'm definitely bigging up the subconscious!)

Re language - this is quite interesting. The article is about mantra which is a bit of a digression, but it shows scan images of how the brain responds differently whether we hear, see, speak or think words. It shows quite clearly that thinking and speaking are very separate activities - worrying that experts would conflate the two.

Dear Velvet’s dog

Outwith’s dog here – Dr Woof.

With these big paws of mine, I’m not sure I’ll be able to hit the right keys in the right order but just thought I’d give you my tuppence worth.

So - free will – real or illusionary?

Illusionary, I’m afraid.

We might dream of running with the pack and howling at the moon at midnight, but the reality is collars, leads and getting our poop scooped into a plastic bag before it’s posted in a box. Oh, the indignity!

It’s enough to make you want to gnaw on chair legs!

Friendly wuffs,

Dr Woof

Ha ha! The Velvet Hounds (for there are two, though only one is a chair muncher) have certain ideas about their station in the Velvet household and expect full secretarial services to be provided, so will not trouble themselves with the vagaries of typing and predictive text. They have however asked me, in capacity as their minion to send their felicitations and greetings to Dr Woof.

Chair Muncher is of the opinion that she exercises free will, at least in relation to which item of soft furnishing on which to recline. She is prepared to concede that that this choice may be an illusion (but seems to express a preference for Minion's bed over her own comfy basket).

Sending virtual gravy bones

Right, this quantum mechanics malarky.

Am i right in thinking that what it introduces isn't so much randomness, but a range of probability? So, if this is the case we still don't have free will in the sense of being able to act with any real sense of freedom, but it does make our actions harder to predict.

If there is complete randomness, then that still does not equate to free will as our decisions are randomly generated rather than consciously determined (though where then does our past experience fit in the decision nmaking process?).

If the multiverse theory proved to be correct wouldn't that also argue against free will? If every possible action is taking place in any number of universes, then we are unlikely to have any choice in the decisions we make in this universe.

Why, if we do not have free will, do we have the illusion of it?

Quantum malarkey

I think quantum malarkey does introduce randomness in experiments that involve measurements on subatomic particles. For any one experiment, the outcome is unpredictable, but you can assign a probability to a particular outcome and if you repeat the experiment many times, you can predict quite well the number of times a particular outcome will happen overall. A bit like a coin toss. You can’t predict if it’ll be heads or tails if you toss a coin once but if you toss the coin enough, you know that half the time it’ll be heads and half tails.

When you get to human-sized objects, classical mechanics is supposed to take over from quantum mechanics – and classical mechanics is predictable.

However, human-sized objects can be complex – particularly sentient ones! If we didn’t have consciousness, science would say that we behave in a deterministic fashion, so predictable in principle but in practice, since we are so complex, probably not possible.

On top of that, though, we do have consciousness and nobody quite knows whether that stops us being predictable even in principle. And if we are no longer predictable, because we are conscious and have free will, some put this down to quantum mechanical effects in the brain. The way this would allow for free will is unclear as we can’t take conscious advantage of the randomness of quantum mechanics.

Many Worlds

The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that every time a measurement is made on a quantum system, like a photon or electron, and one definite result is obtained for that measurement, all the other possible results are also obtained in other universes. So all possibilities actually occur. If tossing coins were a quantum mechanical process, the original universe would split in two for every toss. In one of the new universes the coin would have landed heads and in the other tails. And that also means, as well as all other aspects, the person tossing gets ‘cloned’ and is in both universes.

We can think of the Many Worlds interpretation as a universe tree with branches branching into more and more universes. There is no sense in which a choice is being made because all possibilities are realized. This interpretation, therefore, doesn’t provide a mechanism for free will to come in.

There are other interpretations of quantum mechanics in which a choice is being made – at every fork in the universe tree reality proceeds along one branch only out of the possible branches.

The question is how is this choice being made and does it have anything to do with free will?

The orthodox scientific position is that the choice has nothing to do with human minds. But nobody is quite sure.

There are some ‘quantum woo’ scientists who say that consciousness is ultimately deciding the outcome of these processes and so sentient beings are influencing how the universe actually unfolds out of all the potential ways it could unfold. If there is any truth in this, it is a subconscious choice. But it would fit in with the Buddhist idea of the mind creating reality and gives us a kind of free will.

Why, if we do not have free will, do we have the illusion of it?

That is a very good question! Thinking about it can make you go a bit bonkers – that’s all I can say for sure.

Serendipity

DS (Y8) is currently reading ‘How to teach your dog Quantum Mechanics’. Dr Woof can’t wait to learn!

Sooooo, to summarise:

Newtonian physiscs = everything is determined = no free will

QM = randomness = no free will, or
QM = predicatable odds = very limited free will

It seems that QM demonstrates that not everything is determined at all levels, so leaves the door open a tiny crack for free will. It certainly isn't a proof for it, and doesn't explain how it could work. We clearly make decisions, but those decisions are framed by multiple limiting physical and experiential factors.

Unless you add a non-physical dimension, it does not look good for free will, does it?

However, given our limited understanding of consciousness, we are unable to say with certainty that it functions in a deterministic way. We may expect it to, but our experience of choosing and decision making gives us the sense that we have the ability to change our future course, even if only in certain ways. This may be an illusion however, in which case, why do our brains appear to be indeterministic if in fact they are not?

But it would fit in with the Buddhist idea of the mind creating reality and gives us a kind of free will.

Yep. No self = no requirement for free will. Even allowing for a kind of world soul/cosmic consciousness kind of spirituality there would be no requirement for free will. It only becomes an issue if you think you have a self.