Abstract
Free will in this paper is presented as an illusion with emphasis on the factors that contribute to the choices we make. The term free will comes with religious connotations in many cultures; those who do not relate free will to a reward granted to them by the god of their faith still tend to believe they have free will. This paper provides examples and misconceptions such as the ability to make a choice equating to free will.
People, religious or not, seem to have an extraordinarily hard time accepting, or even considering, that maybe they do not have free will; that all the choices, they feel, they are making without constraints can actually be measured, determined, and attributed to their genetics, and life experiences. This paper will also exploit the ideas that many people have who claim to embrace science and yet are unwilling to even acknowledge that free will could, quite simply, be a watered-down way of defining human intelligence.
The history of free will dates back to the origins of religion, has been widely debated in a philosophical sense for many years, is believed to be real to people of nearly all faiths, and even those who do not have faith in a religion. Similar to that of religion, free will is hard to prove or disprove, unless you are a neuroscientist, who also have a difficult time disproving the existence of free will altogether.
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Free Will Is Not A Choice
According to most theologies, free will is granted to humans by an all knowing, omniscient being; the notion of free will seems contradicted by the principle that a divine creator already knows everything that will happen and therefore one’s fate has already been determined. Outside of theology, free will is believed to be a phenomenon that allows us to make choices. Science, more specifically neuroscience (the study of the brain) explains that the choices we make can be determined, influenced, and even seen in the brain before we become consciously aware of the choice we are about to make. Through the explanation of how the physical brain works and our inability to control every thought we have, or how the thought impacts our decisions; we cannot possibly be the author of our thoughts, and are more accurately the recipient of our thoughts.
Our thoughts directly impact the choices we are presented with and the decisions we make are influenced by a wide array of factors, many of which, are not readily available to our consciousness. Our mood affects how we act and the choices we make. The level of chemicals being produced in our body affects how we feel. There are times when we voluntarily interfere with the chemicals in our body by drinking alcohol, consuming caffeine, eating foods high in sugar, or taking drugs. All of these items directly impact the chemical balance in our bodies and while our body is trying to get the levels back to normal, they have an exponential impact on our decision making ability. An intense moment of fear, joy or sadness also causes of rush of chemicals throughout the body which can make it next to impossible to control our display of emotion. Do we have the free will to shut off sadness as soon as we decide we do not want to be sad? Try placing this as an option in front of all emotions, we do not have the free will, or “will power” to instantaneously decide which emotion we want to feel, when we want to feel it. We are more accurately a victim of our emotions.
If we choose to take a substance that alters our state of mind, do we then dismiss the illusion of free will until the affects have subsided? Does a diabetic dismiss free will when they eat the same meal that someone else does but the diabetic has to take a shot to prevent them from going into shock? Does someone with ADHD not have free will, or do we dismiss free will to those who have ailments that can be explained? Even ingesting food that would normally not have an effect on you, if you have been without a meal for a long time, this will fill you with a surge of nourishment. This surge will fill you with energy, usually followed by a crash. These have all been examples of substances that affect how you feel which in turn greatly affects how you carry yourself. We cannot control our thoughts; on a chemical level, mental disorders are often linked to chemical imbalances, many of which are treatable with medication and therapy. A person who is bipolar will seem to be a completely different person as the pendulum swings from a high to a low, this is an extreme example but it is an example of how much our chemical make-up has to do with who we are, how we feel, and what we do.
The physiology of the brain is very sensitive to the chemicals already in our body or that we put into our body. Our brain is constantly doing things for us that we are not consciously aware of, such as, processing information that does not make it to our conscious. If our brain brought everything to a level of awareness that it is constantly doing for us we wouldn’t be able to concentrate on our day to day life. We would instead be busy thinking of each blood cell we need to create, remind ourselves to breath, decide what we are going to remember and what not to remember. The way things taste to us is due to the chemical reaction the item has with our tongue and how those signals are sent to our brain. Somehow we all, as humans, have different likes and dislikes, even though our 5 senses have evolved to work in the same way. We all have different favorite foods, colors, activities, and hobbies. We can tell ourselves that we like what we like because we decided to, but if we’re really honest with ourselves can we say that we decided to love mushrooms, or maybe to hate mushrooms?
As defined by (Oxford, n.d.), free will is “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion.” This notion that we can make choices without constraint or fate is misleading. Even the smallest most insignificant choices we make have some kind of a consequence that impacts the choice we make. Acknowledging that we have the intelligence to predict the outcome of a choice is learned as our brains mature. It’s this learning process that allows us to make choices, to include mistakes, and learn which outcomes are pursuing. We then make the choices that we think will get us to the end goal, and we will have tendency to make many mistakes along the way; these mistakes play a huge role in the future choices we make.
Per (Hawking, 2013), “science has shown that our brains are physical and that they operate by following the laws of sciences, not some agency outside of our body.” This is to say that free will is not a phenomenon or something granted to us, and is rather, a sum total of our collected intelligence through our life’s experiences that are processed through the physiological differences of each brain doing the processing. There is a worry about the world if free will didn’t exist that without free will would couldn’t differentiate between good and evil; in the view of (Harris, 2012),
The reality of good and evil does not depend upon the existence of free will, because with or without free will, we can distinguish between suffering and happiness. With or without free will, a psychopath who enjoys killing children is different from a pediatric surgeon who enjoys saving them. Whatever the truth about free will, these distinctions are unmistakable and well worth caring about.
To address the concern of those who feel evil would be perpetuated in the absence of free will; we live in a world where the vast majority of civilization believe in the existence of free will and yet there are countless observable acts of evil that occur each day.
Through our scientific advancements and continued understanding of how the brain works, scientists such as (Nichols, 2011) have postulated, “that consciousness is a population of neurons firing in certain areas of the brain, no more and no less.” On that note, in regards to the parts of the brains attributed to consciousness, a person in a coma is someone who has likely experienced severe brain trauma. Their brain is still keeping them alive by creating new blood cells, as well as many other functions needed to keep a person alive. The person in the coma is unable to decide to wake up and unable to control the part of their brain that grants them consciousness. In the rare event that a person suddenly wakes up from a coma the doctors are able to observe the new activity in the brain before it reaches a point of consciousness for the patient. The person who is no longer in a coma was not able to make a conscious decision to finally wake up, this was achieved by the new brain activity that allowed for the event, and was completely out of the control of the patient.
The state of consciousness is completely controlled by a person’s genetics, chemicals produced or ingested, and events that the brain observes and relays to the consciousness. The parents we have, the schools we go to, the friends we make, the failures and successes, the gains and losses, the relationships we build and the ones we lose, are all by in large out of our control. We can try to itemize the things we like and dislike by their attributes but the fact that we enjoy one thing over another comes from a force that is hard to explain and even harder to provide as a result of free will. If free will was not an illusion I would have been able to decide to love radishes because I knew I was going to have to eat them if they were included in my dinner; when I lost a loved one and felt terribly depressed for a time, I could have exercised free will and washed away the sadness; when something made me angry at a time when all I wanted was to feel joy I could have simply chosen to be joyful instead of upset; I could have made the choice to only fall for the girls who shared my feelings in return; I would only care about the things that make me happy, I would not care about the things that upset, or better yet I would choose to not allow upsetting things to upset me anymore. A more simple example of our brain taking over our conscious choice is to decide which hand we are going to open, left or right, we feel we are making the choice on our own but a neuroscientist would be able to tell us which hand we were going to open before we even knew which hand it would be. Following this same premise, not that you would want to, but, if you were to put your hand on a scolding hot frying pan, your brain would remove your hand from the pan through reflex which is not a conscious choice.
From an evolutionary perspective as per (Dennett, 2012), “for billions of years on this planet there was life, but no free will.” He continues to explain that if free will does exist, it has to do with evolutionary biology and not something granted from an outside agent. The brain has been built for survival through. Some of the things that our brain can pick up without entering our consciousness are easily observed while someone is sleeping. A fun exercise would be to softly touch the foot of someone sleeping, they will move their foot. If you continue to tickle them they will continue to respond unconsciously aware of it. Eventually if the brain receives enough stimulus it will wake the person up to alert them of what is happening, allowing them to get to safety if needed. The person didn’t make a conscious choice to wake up or acknowledge what is happening, the brain does this for them just as it does thousands of times a day while they are awake; only bringing what is deemed essential, to the level of consciousness.
It’s hard to prove something doesn’t exist when it can’t be proven to exist. For this reason I attempt to refute the existence of free will from a scientific point of view instead of a philosophical point of view. Most theologies teach free will as a gift from god, an ability granted to us in which we can do good or do evil. This claim cannot be proven and therefore cannot be disproved. If free will was proved to be an illusion and nothing other than a by-product of intelligence, the very foundation of many religions would crumble, and how we obtain our morals would become even harder to give credit to that of ancient text instead of a society that continues to learn how to better function as it matures.