Will of the Free, Freeish will, or Will with some Freedom

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

We are emotional beings that only sometimes utilize the thinking strategy called “reason.”

We are not rational beings, that only sometimes enjoy the amusement park of emotions.

My response: So, not a very high accuracy, and not many people being studied, as well as not using morality questions, which then leads some to have 100% doubt in any free will?

I don’t believe in full free will. I disagree “will” is all or nothing as well. I see “will” as a moving thing. Sometimes, “little will,” and sometimes “more will,” as I explain in the video on Free Will. I believe we have a “freeish will,” not a complete free will.

“Author and philosopher Eddy Nahmias argues that recent discoveries about brain function do not, in fact, equate to the death of free will, that they really only speak to our faulty operating definitions of the term, that free will is not an all-or-nothing faculty, and even if it were, the implications for consciousness (reduced to inner spectator) are too absurd to fathom.” ref

Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It

“The concept of free will is hard to define, but crucial to both individual and social life. For centuries people have wondered how freedom is possible in a world ruled by physical determinism; however, reflections on free will have been confined to philosophy until half a century ago, when the topic was also addressed by neuroscience. The first relevant, and now well-known, strand of research on the brain correlates of free will was that pioneered by Libet et al. (1983), which focused on the allegedly unconscious intentions taking place in decisions regarded as free and voluntary. Libet’s interpretation of the so-called readiness potential (RP) seems to favor a sort of deflation of freedom (Soon et al., 2008). However, recent studies seem to point to a different interpretation of the RP, namely that the apparent build-up of the brain activity preceding subjectively spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) may reflect the ebb and flow of the background neuronal noise, which is triggered by many factors (Schurger et al., 2016). This interpretation seems to bridge the gap between the neuroscientific perspective on free will and the intuitive, commonsensical view of it (Roskies, 2010b), but many problems remain to be solved and other theoretical paths can be hypothesized. The article therefore, proposes to start from an operationalizable concept of free will (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015) to find a connection between higher order descriptions (useful for practical life) and neural bases. This new way to conceptualize free will should be linked to the idea of “capacity”: that is, the availability of a repertoire of general skills that can be manifested and used without moment by moment conscious control. The capacity index, which is also able to take into account the differences of time scales in decisions, includes reasons-responsiveness and is related to internal control, understood as the agent’s ownership of the mechanisms that trigger the relevant behavior. Cognitive abilities, needed for one to have capacity, might be firstly operationalized as a set of neuropsychological tests, which can be used to operationalize and measure specific executive functions, as they are strongly linked to the concept of control. Subsequently, a free will index would allow for the search of the underlying neural correlates of the capacity exhibited by people and the limits in capacity exhibited by each individual.” ref

“Free Will Is Only an Illusion if You Are, Too. New research findings, combined with philosophy, suggest free will is real but may not operate in the ways people expect. Most empirical studies of free will—including Libet’s—have focused on these kinds of arbitrary actions. In such actions, researchers can indeed “read out” our brain activity and trace information about our movements and choices before we even realize we are about to make them. But if these actions don’t matter to us, is it all that notable that they are initiated unconsciously? More significant decisions—such as whether to take a job, get married or move to a different country—are infinitely more interesting and complex and are quite consciously made.” ref

“Why neuroscience does not disprove free will: researchers review the most important challenges to the common interpretation of Libet-style tasks and argue that the common interpretation is questionable. Brain activity preceding conscious decisions reflects the decision process rather than its outcome. Furthermore, the decision process is configured by conditional intentions that participants form at the beginning of the experiment. We conclude that Libet-style tasks do not provide a serious challenge to our intuition of free will.” ref

• Scientists have not yet been able to find a unifying theory of physics.
• The theory of quantum mechanics (one of the major theories in modern physics) gives results in terms of probability, rather than deterministic results.
• The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics limits our ability to measure the state of the universe at any given time, so even if you had a unified, deterministic theory, you couldn’t measure the present state of the universe accurately enough to exactly predict its future state.” ref

To me, so-called determinism is more like evidence of limitations of choices, not no choice at all. Moving from some pressure may make some things more favorable than others into something that will make some things forcibly chosen over other choices a self-directed being could make. If you change what determinism can mean, then you reject the original offer of determinism, and thus, in trying to sustain its truth, you defeat its original meaning of determinism, in which no one ever makes a self-directed choice. I don’t think “human experience” happens in a vacuum. I see the “human experience” as related to an Ecological Systems Theory (individuals with their surrounding systems), in general; I say we experience both internal and external pressures, influences, and manipulation. Evolution is not some absolute fate, it is pressures and influences, that involve adaptations, which become useful, thus life sustainability, not forced determination.

Determinism against free will

“The first argument against free will — which is a scientific argument — starts with the observation that it doesn’t matter whether the full-blown hypothesis of determinism is true because it doesn’t matter whether all events are predetermined by prior events. All that matters is whether our decisions are predetermined by prior events. And the central claim against free will is that we have good evidence (from studies performed by psychologists and neuroscientists) for thinking that, in fact, our decisions are predetermined by prior events.” ref

“The second argument against free will — which is a philosophical argument, not a scientific argument — relies on the claim that it doesn’t matter whether determinism is true because indeterminism is just as incompatible with free will as determinism is. The argument for this is based on the claim that if our decisions aren’t determined, then they aren’t caused by anything, which means that they occur randomly. And the central claim against free will is that if our decisions occur randomly, then they just happen to us, and so they’re not the products of our free will.” ref

“Despite bold philosophical and scientific claims, there’s still no good reason to doubt the existence of free will. Well, if determinism is true, then your choice was completely caused by prior events. So, if determinism is true, then it was already settled before you were born. If determinism is true, then as soon as the Big Bang took place 13 billion years ago, the entire history of the universe was already settled. Every event that’s ever occurred was already predetermined before it occurred. And this includes human decisions. If determinism is true, then everything you’ve ever done — every choice you’ve ever made — was already predetermined before our solar system even existed. And if this is true, then it has obvious implications for free will. The idea behind the argument seems to be that determinism is just a commonsense truism. But it’s actually not a commonsense truism. One of the main lessons of 20th-century physics is that we can’t know by common sense, or by intuition, that determinism is true. Determinism is a controversial hypothesis about the workings of the physical world. We could only know that it’s true by doing some high-level physics. Moreover — and this is another lesson of 20th-century physics — as of right now, we don’t have any good evidence for determinism. In other words, our best physical theories don’t answer the question of whether determinism is true.” ref

I do not agree with “Determinism,” which entails that “people can not/could not have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did is always true and never untrue.

“In contrast, so-called “soft” determinists, also called compatibilists, believe that determinism and free will are compatible after all. In most cases, soft determinists attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will.” ref

“Compatibilist free will has also been attributed to our natural sense of agency, where one must believe they are an agent in order to function and develop a theory of mind.” ref

“Soft determinism (or compatibilism) is the position or view that causal determinism is true, but we still act as free, morally responsible agents when, in the absence of external constraints, our actions are caused by our desires.” ref

“Compatibilist models of free will often consider deterministic relationships as discoverable in the physical world (including the brain). Cognitive naturalism is a physicalist approach to studying human cognition and consciousness in which the mind is simply part of nature, perhaps merely a feature of many very complex self-programming feedback systems (for example, neural networks and cognitive robots), and so must be studied by the methods of empirical science, such as the behavioral and cognitive sciences (i.e. neuroscience and cognitive psychology). Cognitive naturalism stresses the role of neurological sciences. Overall, brain health, substance dependence, depression, and various personality disorders clearly influence mental activity, and their impact upon volition is also important. For example, an addict may experience a conscious desire to escape addiction, but be unable to do so. The “will” is disconnected from the freedom to act. This situation is related to an abnormal production and distribution of dopamine in the brain. The neuroscience of free will places restrictions on both compatibilist and incompatibilist free will conceptions.” ref

“Compatibilist models adhere to models of mind in which mental activity (such as deliberation) can be reduced to physical activity without any change in physical outcome. Although compatibilism is generally aligned to (or is at least compatible with) physicalism, some compatibilist models describe the natural occurrences of deterministic deliberation in the brain in terms of the first-person perspective of the conscious agent performing the deliberation. Such an approach has been considered a form of identity dualism. A description of “how conscious experience might affect brains” has been provided in which “the experience of conscious free will is the first-person perspective of the neural correlates of choosing.” ref

“Libertarianism (metaphysics), one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics. In particular, libertarianism is an incompatibilist position which argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe. Libertarianism states that since agents have free will, determinism must be false. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires the agent to be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances. Accounts of libertarianism are subdivided into non-physical theories and physical or naturalistic theories.” ref 

It is amazing, all the dogmatic thinking, which seems to be connected to the topic of “Free Will”

There is a big connection between religion and free will. I think this can also be a reason some atheists also attack free will, thinking they are attacking religion. To me, religion’s full free will is in error, and the thinking that we lack all free will is likewise also in error. To me, there is a moving “Will” that is at times more free and at other times less free. I think of it as will of the free or freeish will. I approach it from a psychological and philosophical point of view. I don’t stick to others’ styles and prefer reason. I would just say I use my normal rationalism, as all the available evidence points to an amount of free will, even if not the absolutely free will many conceptualize. It has been a common claim in neuroscience since 2008 to say “free will” was an illusion based on questionable tests and even more questionable assumptions driven from these tests. Several famous atheists have promoted this thinking. Philosophy has not agreed that this entire free will debate should be seen as nothing but an illusion and nothing more. And now, with more science testing and rethinking, it seems these disagreements that the philosophy addressed were closer to being correct, and neuroscience beliefs were in error in understanding.

Science supports the existence of free will – (Johns Hopkins News-Letter)

Psychology shows we can manipulate people’s thinking/actions to some limited amount. But, this used manipulation is nowhere near 100% and is like all other things, just a pressure, an influence, a manipulation attempt which will to a “fluctuating amount” have some success but not unlimited because we still have our choice and minds able to reason beyond our pressures, influences, and/or manipulation attempts. I don’t think “human experience” happens in a vacuum. I see the “human experience” as related to an Ecological Systems Theory (individuals with their surrounding systems), in general; I say we experience both internal and external pressures, influences, and manipulation.

Talking About Free Will with Damien Marie AtHope (VIDEO)

Emotional Hijacking: Amygdala hijack

“We’ve all been there. Moments earlier, you were firing on all cylinders, ready to take on the world. But then everything changed. Where you were once full of energy, excitement, and confidence, you now feel unmoored and adrift. You want to keep being productive, but your entire emotional system has gone haywire. Maybe you feel devastatingly sad. Maybe you feel utterly apathetic. Maybe you feel completely unhinged. Whatever the feeling, you’ve been emotionally hijacked. Emotional hijacking is a common psychological phenomenon that occurs when your emotions overcome your rational mind and take control of your decision-making. Sometimes, this can result in something as simple as being unproductive for an afternoon, but other times, it can result in shockingly poor decision-making, with lasting consequences for you, your life, and your work.” ref

“An amygdala hijack is an emotional response that is immediate, overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat. The term, coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, is used by affective neuroscientists and is considered a formal academic term. The brain is made up of two halves. Every half’s amygdala is made up of a small, round structures located closer to the forehead than (anterior to) the hippocampus, near the temporal lobes. The amygdalae are involved in detecting and learning which parts of our surroundings are important and have emotional significance. They are critical for the production of emotion. They are known to be very important for negative emotions, especially fear. Amygdala activation often happens when people see a potential threat. The amygdala uses a person’s past, related memories to help them make decisions about what is currently happening.” ref

“The output of sense organs is first received by the thalamus. Part of the thalamus’ stimuli goes directly to the amygdala or “emotional/irrational brain”, while other parts are sent to the neocortex or “thinking/rational brain”. If the amygdala perceives a match to the stimulus, i.e., if the record of experiences in the hippocampus tells the amygdala that it is a fight, flight or freeze situation, then the amygdala triggers the HPA (hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal) axis and “hijacks” or overtakes rational brain function. This emotional brain activity processes information milliseconds earlier than the rational brain, so in case of a match, the amygdala acts before any possible direction from the neocortex can be received. If, however, the amygdala does not find any match to the stimulus received with its recorded threatening situations, then it acts according to the directions received from the neocortex. When the amygdala perceives a threat, it can lead that person to react irrationally and destructively.” ref 

“Goleman states that emotions “make us pay attention right now—this is urgent—and gives us an immediate action plan without having to think twice. The emotional component evolved very early: Do I eat it, or does it eat me?” The emotional response “can take over the rest of the brain in a millisecond if threatened.” Goleman later emphasized that “self-control is crucial … when facing someone who is in the throes of an amygdala hijack” so as to avoid a complementary hijacking—whether in work situations, or in private life. Thus, for example, “one key marital competence is for partners to learn to soothe their own distressed feelings … nothing gets resolved positively when husband or wife is in the midst of an emotional hijacking.” The danger is that “when our partner becomes, in effect, our enemy, we are in the grip of an ‘amygdala hijack’ in which our emotional memory, lodged in the limbic center of our brain, rules our reactions without the benefit of logic or reason … which causes our bodies to go into a ‘fight or flight’ response.” ref

Preventing Emotional Hijacking and Developing Emotional Intelligence

“Emotional relearning: Joseph E. LeDoux was positive about the possibility of learning to control the amygdala’s hair-trigger role in emotional outbursts. “Once your emotional system learns something, it seems you never let it go. What therapy does is teach you how to control it—it teaches your neocortex how to inhibit your amygdala. The propensity to act is suppressed, while your basic emotion about it remains in a subdued form.” ref

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“Biopsychosocial models are a class of trans-disciplinary models which look at the interconnection between biology, psychology, and socio–environmental factors. The biopsychosocial model adopts a holistic viewpoint, acknowledging the complex interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors in shaping health and illness. In the last decade, there has been a rising interest among healthcare researchers and practicing medical professionals in the biopsychosocial model. Gatchel and colleagues argued in 2007 that the biopsychosocial model is the most widely accepted as the most heuristic approach to understanding and treating chronic pain. The biopsychosocial model is still widely used as both a philosophy of clinical care and a practical clinical guide that is useful for broadening the scope of a clinician’s gaze. A biopsychosocial approach was used to assess race and ethnic differences in aging and to develop the Michigan Cognitive Aging Project. Borrell-Carrió and colleagues reviewed Engel’s model 25 years on. They proposed the model had evolved into a biopsychosocial and relationship-centered framework for physicians.” ref

“They proposed three clarifications to the model, and identified seven established principles.

1. Self-awareness.
2. Active cultivation of trust.
3. An emotional style characterized by empathic curiosity.
4. Self-calibration as a way to reduce bias.
5. Educating the emotions to assist with diagnosis and forming therapeutic relationships.
6. Using informed intuition.
7. Communicating clinical evidence to foster dialogue, not just the mechanical application of protocol.” ref

“Within the framework of the biopsychosocial model, gender is regarded by some as a complex and nuanced construct, shaped by the intricate interplay of social, psychological, and biological factors. This perspective, as echoed by the Gender Spectrum Organization, defines gender as the multifaceted interrelationship between three key dimensions: body, identity, and social gender. In essence, this characterization aligns with the fundamental principles of the biopsychosocial model, emphasizing the need to consider not only biological determinants but also the profound influences of psychological and social contexts on the formation of gender.” ref

“According to the insights of Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker, the biopsychosocial model provides a comprehensive framework to understand the complexities of gender. They illustrate that biological, psychological, and social factors are not isolated entities but rather intricately intertwined elements that continually interact and shape one another. In this dynamic process, a person’s gender identity emerges as the result of a complex interplay between their biological characteristics, psychological experiences, and social interactions.” ref

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“An adapted illustrated model of a Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory (Adapted from Berger, 2007).” ref 

“Ecological systems theory is a broad term used to capture the theoretical contributions of developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner. Bronfenbrenner developed the foundations of the theory throughout his career, published a major statement of the theory in American Psychologist, articulated it in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Development and further developing it in The Bioecological Model of Human Development and later writings. A primary contribution of ecological systems theory was to systemically examine contextual variability in development processes. As the theory evolved, it placed increasing emphasis on the role of the developing person as an active agent in development and on understanding developmental process rather than “social addresses” (e.g., gender, ethnicity) as explanatory mechanisms.” ref

“Ecological systems theory describes a scientific approach to studying lifespan development that emphasizes the interrelationship of different developmental processes (e.g., cognitive, social, biological). It is characterized by its emphasis on naturalistic and quasi-experimental studies, although several important studies using this framework use experimental methodology. Although developmental processes are thought to be universal, they are thought to (a) show contextual variability in their likelihood of occurring, (b) occur in different constellations in different settings and (c) affect different people differently. Because of this variability, scientists working within this framework use individual and contextual variability to provide insight into these universal processes.” ref

• “Microsystem: Refers to the institutions and groups that most immediately and directly impact the child’s development including: family, school, siblings, neighborhood, and peers.
• Mesosystem: Consists of interconnections between the microsystems, for example between the family and teachers or between the child’s peers and the family.
• Exosystem: Involves links between social settings that do not involve the child. For example, a child’s experience at home may be influenced by their parent’s experiences at work. A parent might receive a promotion that requires more travel, which in turn increases conflict with the other parent resulting in changes in their patterns of interaction with the child.
• Macrosystem: Describes the overarching culture that influences the developing child, as well as the microsystems and mesosystems embedded in those cultures. Cultural contexts can differ based on geographic location, socioeconomic status, poverty, and ethnicity. Members of a cultural group often share a common identity, heritage, and values. Macrosystems evolve across time and from generation to generation.^[14]
• Chronosystem: Consists of the pattern of environmental events and transitions over the life course, as well as changing socio-historical circumstances. For example, researchers have found that the negative effects of divorce on children often peak in the first year after the divorce. By two years after the divorce, family interaction is less chaotic and more stable. An example of changing sociohistorical circumstances is the increase in opportunities for women to pursue a career during the last thirty years.” ref

“Later work by Bronfenbrenner considered the role of biology in this model as well; thus the theory has sometimes been called the bioecological model. Per this theoretical construction, each system contains roles, norms and rules which may shape psychological development. For example, an inner-city family faces many challenges which an affluent family in a gated community does not, and vice versa. The inner-city family is more likely to experience environmental hardships, like crime and squalor. On the other hand, the sheltered family is more likely to lack the nurturing support of extended family.” ref

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“Different people show caring for others in different ways. They may demonstrate sympathy, empathy, or compassion. Compassion is translating caring into action. This has led to people creating the circles of compassion approach. This starts with the individual at the center of the circle and them also having compassion for their loved ones. Some individuals have compassion for people who are similar to them. Some have compassion and respect for people who are different from them. The extent to which we have compassion can govern our actions. Some people have love and compassion for their community. Some for their nation. Some for all living things. Some for the whole planet. Some believe it is vital to care for the life-giving forces of the whole biosphere. Jeremy Rifkin built on the circles of compassion approach in his book The Empathic Civilization. In it, he describes how the future of humanity may depend on us extending our empathy to the entire human family and the biosphere.” ref

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Universal Ethics: Organized Complexity as an Intrinsic Value

“How can we think about a universal ethics that could be adopted by any intelligent being, including the rising population of cyborgs, intelligent machines, intelligent algorithms, or even, potentially, extraterrestrial life? We generally give value to complex structures, to objects resulting from long periods of work, and to systems with many elements and with many links finely adjusted. These include living beings, books, works of art, and scientific theories. Intuitively, we want to keep, multiply, and share such structures, as well as prevent their destruction. Such objects have value, not because more information (in bits) would simply mean more value. Instead, they have value because they require a long computational history – assuming that the numerous interactions governing their construction constitute a computation – and they display what we call organized complexity. To propose the foundations of an universal ethics based on the intrinsic value of organized complexity, we first discuss conceptions of complexity and argue that Charles Bennett’s logical depth is a satisfactory notion of what we are looking for. We then put forward three fundamental imperatives: to preserve, augment, and recursively promote organized complexity. We show a broad range of applications with human, nonhuman, and nonliving examples. Finally, we discuss some specific issues of our framework such as the distribution of complexity, the managing of copies and erasures, and how our universal ethics tackles classical ethical issues. In sum, we propose a clear, homogenous, and consistent ethical foundation that can integrate many universal ethics desiderata.” ref

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The last three info pics are all similar to Ecological Systems Theory, also known as human ecology. And I see them as levels of influence and valueized care/importance. I don’t think we have a will outside of both internal motivations and external motivations, but we still have a will, and we can do things that improve our self-mastery over these motivations that oppress and limit our freedom of self-guidance of our will.

Axiology and the Morality Realms of Any Moral Reasoner’s Connections

Reasoned Axiological thinking on morality realms, of any moral reasoner’s connections, and the moral weight they could motivate or affect in any assessed or concluded valuation, they use in making an ultimate choice of behavior. The axiological Valuation approach to moral decision-making would likely use an Ecological Systems Theory modal. And in order to conceptualize “value” you need to understand the environmental contexts, five ecological systems:

• Individual: Usually highest value, though for some people, family members may have the same or higher value than themself.
• Microsystem: Usually the next highest value is placed with the closest relationships to an individual and encompasses interpersonal relationships and direct interactions with immediate surroundings, for example, family members or friends of friends.
• Mesosystem: Usually includes close to semi-close relationships, for example, family friends or friends of friends.
• Exosystem: Usually only involves things such as semi or not directly involved individuals, for example, people at one’s job, people at places you frequent, then moving out and lessening in assessed value as it goes to further removed or extended networks of connectedness or relatedness. Such as the likely value distinctions in the value of the people in one’s city, the people in one’s state, the people in one’s geographic location, region, and/or county, then their perceived home or chosen country.
• Macrosystem: Usually involving all other people outside their likely value distinctions in the value of the people in one’s city, the people in one’s state, the people in one’s geographic location, region, and/or county, then their perceived home or chosen country. Others not often even acknowledged or if assess generally not as favored as the known. As we seem to hold a tendency to overreact with fear at the different or unknown or even the unfamiliar. What we don’t understand, we come to fear. What we fear we learn to hate and often what we hate we seek to destroy. Thus, for clear thinking and ultimately good acting, we should fight such destructive fear. This area of connectedness relates to its farthest possible extent involving the entire world.

I am a high-functioning sociopath due to extreme child abuse, and it is only from many years of counseling that I am not the thing that abuse made me. I am now a good person, and most cannot tell I still suffer from my mental health issues. So, for me, it is self-evident we have will with some freedom, and counseling effectiveness in my own life demonstrates this.

I once thought no one was friendly, so I decided to try to be friendly to everyone. No one seemed to care, so I realized I needed to care. No one made you feel as if you mattered, so I started valuing others. I see the world I wish to live in starts with me…

“Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy that aims to reduce symptoms of various mental health conditions, primarily depression, PTSD, and anxiety disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on challenging and changing cognitive distortions (such as thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and their associated behaviors to improve emotional regulation and develop personal coping strategies that target solving current problems. Though it was originally designed as an approach to treat depression, CBT is often prescribed for the evidence-informed treatment of many mental health and other conditions, including anxiety, substance use disorders, marital problems, ADHD, and eating disorders. CBT includes a number of cognitive or behavioral psychotherapies that treat defined psychopathologies using evidence-based techniques and strategies.” ref

“CBT is a common form of talk therapy based on the combination of the basic principles from behavioral and cognitive psychology. It is different from other approaches to psychotherapy, such as the psychoanalytic approach, where the therapist looks for the unconscious meaning behind the behaviors and then formulates a diagnosis. Instead, CBT is a “problem-focused” and “action-oriented” form of therapy, meaning it is used to treat specific problems related to a diagnosed mental disorder. The therapist’s role is to assist the client in finding and practicing effective strategies to address the identified goals and to alleviate symptoms of the disorder. CBT is based on the belief that thought distortions and maladaptive behaviors play a role in the development and maintenance of many psychological disorders and that symptoms and associated distress can be reduced by teaching new information-processing skills and coping mechanisms.” ref

“Therapists use CBT techniques to help people challenge their patterns and beliefs and replace errors in thinking, known as cognitive distortions with “more realistic and effective thoughts, thus decreasing emotional distress and self-defeating behavior”. Cognitive distortions can be either a pseudo-discrimination belief or an overgeneralization of something. CBT techniques may also be used to help individuals take a more open, mindful, and aware posture toward cognitive distortions so as to diminish their impact. Mainstream CBT helps individuals replace “maladaptive… coping skills, cognitions, emotions and behaviors with more adaptive ones,” by challenging an individual’s way of thinking and the way that they react to certain habits or behaviors, but there is still controversy about the degree to which these traditional cognitive elements account for the effects seen with CBT over and above the earlier behavioral elements such as exposure and skills training.” ref

“Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), previously called rational therapy and rational emotive therapy, is an active-directive, philosophically and empirically based psychotherapy, the aim of which is to resolve emotional and behavioral problems and disturbances and to help people to lead happier and more fulfilling lives. REBT posits that people have erroneous beliefs about situations they are involved in, and that these beliefs cause disturbance, but can be disputed and changed.” ref

“Rational emotive behavior therapy was created and developed by the American psychotherapist and psychologist Albert Ellis, who was inspired by many of the teachings of Asian, Greek, Roman and modern philosophers. REBT is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and was first expounded by Ellis in the mid-1950s; development continued until his death in 2007. Ellis became synonymous with the highly influential therapy. Psychology Today noted, “No individual—not even Freud himself—has had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy.” ref

“The REBT framework posits that humans have both innate rational (meaning self-helping, socially helping, and constructive) and irrational (meaning self-defeating, socially defeating, and unhelpful) tendencies and leanings. REBT claims that people, to a large degree, consciously and unconsciously construct emotional difficulties such as self-blame, self-pity, clinical anger, hurt, guilt, shame, depression and anxiety, and behavior tendencies like procrastination, compulsiveness, avoidance, addiction and withdrawal by the means of their irrational and self-defeating thinking, emoting and behaving.” ref

“REBT is then applied as an educational process in which the therapist often active-directively teaches the client how to identify irrational and self-defeating beliefs and philosophies which in nature are rigid, extreme, unrealistic, illogical and absolutist, and then to forcefully and actively question and dispute them and replace them with more rational and self-helping ones. By using different cognitive, emotive, and behavioral methods and activities, the client, together with help from the therapist and in homework exercises, can gain a more rational, self-helping, and constructive, rational way of thinking, emoting, and behaving.” ref

“One of the main objectives in REBT is to show the client that whenever unpleasant and unfortunate activating events occur in people’s lives, they have a choice between making themselves feel healthily or, self-helpingly, sorry, disappointed, frustrated, and annoyed or making themselves feel unhealthily and self-defeatingly; horrified, terrified, panicked, depressed, self-hating, and self-pitying. By attaining and ingraining a more rational and self-constructive philosophy of themselves, others and the world, people often are more likely to behave and emote in more life-serving and adaptive ways.” ref

“A fundamental premise of REBT is that humans do not get emotionally disturbed by unfortunate circumstances, but by how they construct their views of these circumstances through their language, evaluative beliefs, meanings and philosophies about the world, themselves and others. This concept has been attributed as far back as the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who is often cited as utilizing similar ideas in antiquity.” ref

To me, some amount of Freeish Will is involved as seen in the scientifically proven effectiveness of REBT therapy: “studies reported significant reductions in irrational beliefs, increases in rational beliefs, and improvements in mental health outcomes” and the scientifically proven effectiveness of CBT therapy: “studies demonstrated higher response rates in comparison to treatment as usual in the treatment, and higher or equal response rates as compared to other therapies or psychopharmacological interventions in most studies.” and “response rates of CBT varied between 38% for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder and 82% for treating body dysmorphic disorder.”

Cognitive bias

“Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics. A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own “subjective reality” from their perception of the input. An individual’s construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.” ref, ref

“While cognitive biases may initially appear to be negative, some are adaptive. They may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore, allowing cognitive biases enables faster decisions which can be desirable when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics. Other cognitive biases are a “by-product” of human processing limitations, resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), the impact of an individual’s constitution and biological state (see embodied cognition), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing. Research suggests that cognitive biases can make individuals more inclined to endorsing pseudoscientific beliefs by requiring less evidence for claims that confirm their preconceptions. This can potentially distort their perceptions and lead to inaccurate judgments.” ref

“A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics. The study of cognitive biases has practical implications for areas including clinical judgment, entrepreneurship, finance, and management. Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them. Several theoretical causes are known for some cognitive biases, which provides a classification of biases by their common generative mechanism (such as noisy information-processing). Gerd Gigerenzer has criticized the framing of cognitive biases as errors in judgment, and favors interpreting them as arising from rational deviations from logical thought.” ref

“Explanations include information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive (“cold”) bias, such as mental noise, or motivational (“hot”) bias, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Both effects can be present at the same time. There are also controversies over some of these biases as to whether they count as useless or irrational, or whether they result in useful attitudes or behavior. For example, when getting to know others, people tend to ask leading questions which seem biased towards confirming their assumptions about the person. However, this kind of confirmation bias has also been argued to be an example of social skill; a way to establish a connection with the other person. Although this research overwhelmingly involves human subjects, some studies have found bias in non-human animals as well. For example, loss aversion has been shown in monkeys, and hyperbolic discounting has been observed in rats, pigeons, and monkeys.” ref

Reducing Cognitive bias: Cognitive bias mitigation and Cognitive bias modification

“Because they cause systematic errors, cognitive biases cannot be compensated for using a wisdom of the crowd technique of averaging answers from several people. Debiasing is the reduction of biases in judgment and decision-making through incentives, nudges, and training. Cognitive bias mitigation and cognitive bias modification are forms of debiasing specifically applicable to cognitive biases and their effects. Reference class forecasting is a method for systematically debiasing estimates and decisions, based on what Daniel Kahneman has dubbed the outside view.” ref

“Similar to Gigerenzer (1996), Haselton et al. (2005) state the content and direction of cognitive biases are not “arbitrary” (p. 730). Moreover, cognitive biases can be controlled. One debiasing technique aims to decrease biases by encouraging individuals to use controlled processing compared to automatic processing. In relation to reducing the FAE, monetary incentives and informing participants they will be held accountable for their attributions have been linked to the increase of accurate attributions. Training has also shown to reduce cognitive bias. Carey K. Morewedge and colleagues (2015) found that research participants exposed to one-shot training interventions, such as educational videos and debiasing games that taught mitigating strategies, exhibited significant reductions in their commission of six cognitive biases immediately and up to 3 months later.” ref

^“Cognitive bias modification refers to the process of modifying cognitive biases in healthy people and also refers to a growing area of psychological (non-pharmaceutical) therapies for anxiety, depression, and addiction called cognitive bias modification therapy (CBMT). CBMT is sub-group of therapies within a growing area of psychological therapies based on modifying cognitive processes with or without accompanying medication and talk therapy, sometimes referred to as applied cognitive processing therapies (ACPT).” ref

“Although cognitive bias modification can refer to modifying cognitive processes in healthy individuals, CBMT is a growing area of evidence-based psychological therapy, in which cognitive processes are modified to relieve suffering from serious depression, anxiety, and addiction. CBMT techniques are technology-assisted therapies that are delivered via a computer with or without clinician support. CBM combines evidence and theory from the cognitive model of anxiety, cognitive neuroscience, and attentional models. Cognitive bias modification has also been used to help those with obsessive-compulsive beliefs and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This therapy has shown that it decreases the obsessive-compulsive beliefs and behaviors.” ref

“People do appear to have stable individual differences in their susceptibility to decision biases such as overconfidence, temporal discounting, and bias blind spot. That said, these stable levels of bias within individuals are possible to change. Participants in experiments who watched training videos and played debiasing games showed medium to large reductions both immediately and up to three months later in the extent to which they exhibited susceptibility to six cognitive biases: anchoring, bias blind spot, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, projection bias, and representativeness.” ref

“Individual differences in cognitive bias have also been linked to varying levels of cognitive abilities and functions. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been used to help understand the connection between cognitive biases and cognitive ability. There have been inconclusive results when using the Cognitive Reflection Test to understand ability. However, there does seem to be a correlation; those who gain a higher score on the Cognitive Reflection Test, have higher cognitive ability and rational-thinking skills. This, in turn, helps predict the performance on cognitive bias and heuristic tests. Those with higher CRT scores tend to be able to answer more correctly on different heuristic and cognitive bias tests and tasks.” ref

“Age is another individual difference that has an effect on one’s ability to be susceptible to cognitive bias. Older individuals tend to be more susceptible to cognitive biases and have less cognitive flexibility. However, older individuals were able to decrease their susceptibility to cognitive biases throughout ongoing trials. These experiments had both young and older adults complete a framing task. Younger adults had more cognitive flexibility than older adults. Cognitive flexibility is linked to helping overcome pre-existing biases.” ref

“The list of cognitive biases has long been a topic of critique. In psychology a “rationality war” unfolded between Gerd Gigerenzer and the Kahneman and Tversky school, which pivoted on whether biases are primarily defects of human cognition or the result of behavioural patterns that are actually adaptive or “ecologically rational“. Gerd Gigerenzer has historically been one of the main opponents to cognitive biases and heuristics. Gigerenzer believes that cognitive biases are not biases, but rules of thumb, or as he would put it “gut feelings” that can actually help us make accurate decisions in our lives. This debate has recently reignited, with critiques arguing there has been an overemphasis on biases in human cognition. A key criticism is the continuous expansion of the list of alleged biases without clear evidence that these behaviors are genuinely biased once the actual problems people face are understood. Advances in economics and cognitive neuroscience now suggest that many behaviors previously labeled as biases might instead represent optimal decision-making strategies.” ref

The “Free Will” Debate.

To me, we have a “will” that is lesser or greater all the time, not really “free will” as some think and that does not remove how in a general way, we tend to have something close to free will. Think if we had true “free will” we would never be limited by influences such as environments, or our fight-or-flight response, or our tend and befriend behaviors. We do not start the world as blank slates, nor does it take long to recognize the beginnings of morality in humans, we see it is babies at around a few months old not after they learn religion nor any philosophy. I see our ebbing and flowing will, one that at times we feel 100% free of will does not equal a mind 100% free-thinking devoid of any basis when we know such thinking errors are the rule, not an unlikely accident. Choose wisely.

I see our will as at times possibly close to what people think of as free will. But such a time is not fixed or lasting and ranges up and down during the day and is in no way actually regulated. As in think of the moment you hear of a crushing loss, could you make truly clear-headed moral reasoned decisions? I do not know about you, but I likely could error being so emotionally hijacked in my thinking. I believe generally most can but there is not just one thinking state nor is simple awareness the came as a critical reflection over days on one idea. is just swimming in our cognitive motivations stemming from both external and external influences thus we are not as free as we believe but yes, we have some “will”, I do not know if free is the best word as it could give a wrong impression or exaggerated explanation and maybe why there is all the confusion.

I am not trying to just push one thinking without thinking, rather I seek to desire truth even if it is being spoken from the mouths of others. I strive to be a free thinker with only reason as my master and humanity in my heart. May I use all the will I have to be the best me I can be, may I be a good human. To me, we are responsible to do what is of value; not ego, not pride, not self-dealing, but genuinely embody a heart of kindness, one that breathes deep a care for humanity. When we stop focusing our great minds on better ways to kill, we can focus on ideas that heal.

Free will?

“Free will is the capacity or ability to choose between different possible courses of action. Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, and other judgements which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. Whether free will exists, what it is and the implications of whether it exists or not constitute some of the longest running debates of philosophy. Some conceive of free will as the ability to act beyond the limits of external influences or wishes.” ref

“The term “free will” has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designator for a significant kind of control over one’s actions. Questions concerning the nature and existence of this kind of control (e.g., does it require and do we have the freedom to do otherwise or the power of self-determination?), and what its true significance is (is it necessary for moral responsibility or human dignity?) have been taken up in every period of Western philosophy and by many of the most important philosophical figures, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. (We cannot undertake here a review of related discussions in other philosophical traditions. For a start, the reader may consult Marchal and Wenzel 2017 and Chakrabarti 2017 for overviews of thought on free will, broadly construed, in Chinese and Indian philosophical traditions, respectively.) In this way, it should be clear that disputes about free will ineluctably involve disputes about metaphysics and ethics. In ferreting out the kind of control at stake in free will, we are forced to consider questions about (among others) causation, laws of nature, time, substance, ontological reduction vs emergence, the relationship of causal and reasons-based explanations, the nature of motivation and more generally of human persons. In assessing the significance of free will, we are forced to consider questions about (among others) rightness and wrongness, good and evil, virtue and vice, blame and praise, reward and punishment, and desert. The topic of free will also gives rise to purely empirical questions that are beginning to be explored in the human sciences: do we have it, and to what degree?” ref

“Some conceive free will to be the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events. Determinism suggests that only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with a libertarian model of free will. Ancient Greek philosophy identified this issue, which remains a major focus of philosophical debate. The view that posits free will as incompatible with determinism is called incompatibilism and encompasses both metaphysical libertarianism (the claim that determinism is false and thus free will is at least possible) and hard determinism (the claim that determinism is true and thus free will is not possible). Another incompatibilist position is hard incompatibilism, which holds not only determinism but also indeterminism to be incompatible with free will and thus free will to be impossible whatever the case may be regarding determinism.” ref

“In contrast, compatibilists hold that free will is compatible with determinism. Some compatibilists even hold that determinism is necessary for free will, arguing that choice involves preference for one course of action over another, requiring a sense of how choices will turn out. Compatibilists thus consider the debate between libertarians and hard determinists over free will vs. determinism a false dilemma. Different compatibilists offer very different definitions of what “free will” means and consequently find different types of constraints to be relevant to the issue. Classical compatibilists considered free will nothing more than freedom of action, considering one free of will simply if, had one counterfactually wanted to do otherwise, one could have done otherwise without physical impediment. Many contemporary compatibilists instead identify free will as a psychological capacity, such as to direct one’s behavior in a way responsive to reason, and there are still further different conceptions of free will, each with their own concerns, sharing only the common feature of not finding the possibility of determinism a threat to the possibility of free will.” ref

Arguments for the Reality of Free Will?

“If one is a compatibilist, then a case for the reality of free will requires evidence for our being effective agents who for the most part are aware of what we do and why we are doing it. If one is an incompatibilist, then the case requires in addition evidence for causal indeterminism, occurring in the right locations in the process leading from deliberation to action. Many think that we already have third-personal ‘neutral’ scientific evidence for much of human behavior’s satisfying modest compatibilist requirements, such as Fischer and Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness account. However, given the immaturity of social science and the controversy over whether psychological states ‘reduce’ in some sense to underlying physical states (and what this might entail for the reality of mental causation), this claim is doubtful. A more promising case for our satisfying (at least) compatibilist requirements on freedom is that effective agency is presupposed by all scientific inquiry and so cannot rationally be doubted (which fact is overlooked by some of the more extreme ‘willusionists’ such as Wegner).” ref

“However, effective intervention in the world (in scientific practice and elsewhere) does not (obviously) require that our behavior be causally undetermined, so the ‘freedom is rationally presupposed’ argument cannot be launched for such an understanding of freedom. Instead, incompatibilists usually give one of the following two bases for rational belief in freedom (both of which can be given by compatibilists, too). First, philosophers have long claimed that we have introspective evidence of freedom in our experience of action, or perhaps of consciously attended or deliberated action. Augustine and Scotus, discussed earlier, are two examples among many. In recent years, philosophers have been more carefully scrutinizing the experience of agency and a debate has emerged concerning its contents, and in particular whether it supports an indeterministic theory of human free action. For discussion, see Deery et al. (2013), Guillon (2014), Horgan (2015), and Bayne (2017).” ref

“Second, philosophers (e.g., Reid 1788 [1969], Swinburne 2013) sometimes claim that our belief in the reality of free will is epistemically basic, or reasonable without requiring independent evidential support. Most philosophers hold that some beliefs have that status, on pain of our having no justified beliefs whatever. It is controversial, however, just which beliefs do because it is controversial which criteria a belief must satisfy to qualify for that privileged status. It is perhaps necessary that a basic belief be ‘instinctive’ (unreflectively held) for all or most human beings; that it be embedded in regular experience; and that it be central to our understanding of an important aspect of the world. Our belief in free will seems to meet these criteria, but whether they are sufficient is debated. (O’Connor 2019 proposes that free will belief is epistemically basic but defeasible.) Other philosophers defend a variation on this stance, maintaining instead that belief in the reality of moral responsibility is epistemically basic, and that since moral responsibility entails free will, or so it is claimed, we may infer the reality of free will (see, e.g., van Inwagen 1983, 206–13).” ref

Science and Free Will

“Science has contributed to the free will problem in at least three ways. First, physics has addressed the question of whether nature is deterministic, which is viewed as crucial by incompatibilists (compatibilists, however, view it as irrelevant). Second, although free will can be defined in various ways, all of them involve aspects of the way people make decisions and initiate actions, which have been studied extensively by neuroscientists. Some of the experimental observations are widely viewed as implying that free will does not exist or is an illusion (but many philosophers see this as a misunderstanding). Third, psychologists have studied the beliefs that the majority of ordinary people hold about free will and its role in assigning moral responsibility.” ref

“From an anthropological perspective, free will can be regarded as an explanation for human behavior that justifies a socially sanctioned system of rewards and punishments. Under this definition, free will may be described as a political ideology. In a society where people are taught to believe that humans have free will, free will may be described as a political doctrine. Like physicists, biologists have frequently addressed questions related to free will. One of the most heated debates in biology is that of “nature versus nurture“, concerning the relative importance of genetics and biology as compared to culture and environment in human behavior.” ref

“The view of many researchers is that many human behaviors can be explained in terms of humans’ brains, genes, and evolutionary histories. This point of view raises the fear that such attribution makes it impossible to hold others responsible for their actions. Steven Pinker‘s view is that fear of determinism in the context of “genetics” and “evolution” is a mistake, that it is “a confusion of explanation with exculpation“. Responsibility does not require that behavior be uncaused, as long as behavior responds to praise and blame. Moreover, it is not certain that environmental determination is any less threatening to free will than genetic determination.” ref

“It has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the brain’s decision-making process at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick their wrist while he measured the associated activity in their brain; in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential (after German Bereitschaftspotential, which was discovered by Kornhuber & Deecke in 1965.). Although it was well known that the readiness potential reliably preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether it could be recorded before the conscious intention to move. To determine when subjects felt the intention to move, he asked them to watch the second hand of a clock. After making a movement, the volunteer reported the time on the clock when they first felt the conscious intention to move; this became known as Libet’s W time.” ref

“Libet found that the unconscious brain activity of the readiness potential leading up to subjects’ movements began approximately half a second before the subject was aware of a conscious intention to move. These studies of the timing between actions and the conscious decision bear upon the role of the brain in understanding free will. A subject’s declaration of intention to move a finger appears after the brain has begun to implement the action, suggesting to some that unconsciously the brain has made the decision before the conscious mental act to do so. Some believe the implication is that free will was not involved in the decision and is an illusion. The first of these experiments reported the brain registered activity related to the move about 0.2 s before movement onset.” ref

“However, these authors also found that awareness of action was anticipatory to activity in the muscle underlying the movement; the entire process resulting in action involves more steps than just the onset of brain activity. The bearing of these results upon notions of free will appears complex. Some argue that placing the question of free will in the context of motor control is too narrow. The objection is that the time scales involved in motor control are very short, and motor control involves a great deal of unconscious action, with much physical movement entirely unconscious. On that basis “…free will cannot be squeezed into time frames of 150–350 ms; free will is a longer term phenomenon” and free will is a higher level activity that “cannot be captured in a description of neural activity or of muscle activation…” The bearing of timing experiments upon free will is still under discussion.” ref

“More studies have since been conducted, including some that try to:

• support Libet’s original findings
• suggest that the cancelling or “veto” of an action may first arise subconsciously as well
• explain the underlying brain structures involved
• suggest models that explain the relationship between conscious intention and action.” ref

“Benjamin Libet’s results are quoted in favor of epiphenomenalism, but he believes subjects still have a “conscious veto”, since the readiness potential does not invariably lead to an action. In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett argues that a no-free-will conclusion is based on dubious assumptions about the location of consciousness, as well as questioning the accuracy and interpretation of Libet’s results. Kornhuber and Deecke underlined that absence of conscious will during the early Bereitschaftspotential (termed BP1) is not a proof of the non-existence of free will, as also unconscious agendas may be free and non-deterministic. According to their suggestion, man has relative freedom, i.e. freedom in degrees, that can be increased or decreased through deliberate choices that involve both conscious and unconscious (panencephalic) processes.” ref

“Others have argued that data such as the Bereitschaftspotential undermine epiphenomenalism for the same reason, that such experiments rely on a subject reporting the point in time at which a conscious experience occurs, thus relying on the subject to be able to consciously perform an action. That ability would seem to be at odds with early epiphenomenalism, which according to Huxley is the broad claim that consciousness is “completely without any power… as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery.” Adrian G. Guggisberg and Annaïs Mottaz have also challenged those findings.” ref

“A study by Aaron Schurger and colleagues published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences challenged assumptions about the causal nature of the readiness potential itself (and the “pre-movement buildup” of neural activity in general), casting doubt on conclusions drawn from studies such as Libet’s and Fried’s. A study that compared deliberate and arbitrary decisions, found that the early signs of decision are absent for the deliberate ones. It has been shown that in several brain-related conditions, individuals cannot entirely control their own actions, though the existence of such conditions does not directly refute the existence of free will. Neuroscientific studies are valuable tools in developing models of how humans experience free will.” ref

“For example, people with Tourette syndrome and related tic disorders make involuntary movements and utterances (called tics) despite the fact that they would prefer not to do so when it is socially inappropriate. Tics are described as semi-voluntary or unvoluntary, because they are not strictly involuntary: they may be experienced as a voluntary response to an unwanted, premonitory urge. Tics are experienced as irresistible and must eventually be expressed. People with Tourette syndrome are sometimes able to suppress their tics for limited periods, but doing so often results in an explosion of tics afterward. The control exerted (from seconds to hours at a time) may merely postpone and exacerbate the ultimate expression of the tic.” ref

“In alien hand syndrome, the affected individual’s limb will produce unintentional movements without the will of the person. The affected limb effectively demonstrates ‘a will of its own.’ The sense of agency does not emerge in conjunction with the overt appearance of the purposeful act even though the sense of ownership in relationship to the body part is maintained. This phenomenon corresponds with an impairment in the premotor mechanism manifested temporally by the appearance of the readiness potential recordable on the scalp several hundred milliseconds before the overt appearance of a spontaneous willed movement. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging with specialized multivariate analyses to study the temporal dimension in the activation of the cortical network associated with voluntary movement in human subjects, an anterior-to-posterior sequential activation process beginning in the supplementary motor area on the medial surface of the frontal lobe and progressing to the primary motor cortex and then to parietal cortex has been observed.” ref 

“The sense of agency thus appears to normally emerge in conjunction with this orderly sequential network activation incorporating premotor association cortices together with primary motor cortex. In particular, the supplementary motor complex on the medial surface of the frontal lobe appears to activate prior to primary motor cortex presumably in associated with a preparatory pre-movement process. In a recent study using functional magnetic resonance imaging, alien movements were characterized by a relatively isolated activation of the primary motor cortex contralateral to the alien hand, while voluntary movements of the same body part included the natural activation of motor association cortex associated with the premotor process. The clinical definition requires “feeling that one limb is foreign or has a will of its own, together with observable involuntary motor activity” (emphasis in original).” ref

“This syndrome is often a result of damage to the corpus callosum, either when it is severed to treat intractable epilepsy or due to a stroke. The standard neurological explanation is that the felt will reported by the speaking left hemisphere does not correspond with the actions performed by the non-speaking right hemisphere, thus suggesting that the two hemispheres may have independent senses of will. In addition, one of the most important (“first rank”) diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia is the patient’s delusion of being controlled by an external force. People with schizophrenia will sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they do not recall initiating the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot controlled by someone else. Although the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet clear, one influential hypothesis is that there is a breakdown in brain systems that compare motor commands with the feedback received from the body (known as proprioception), leading to attendant hallucinations and delusions of control.” ref

Free Will Experiments in Psychology

“Experimental psychology‘s contributions to the free will debate have come primarily through social psychologist Daniel Wegner‘s work on conscious will. In his book, The Illusion of Conscious Will, Wegner summarizes what he believes is empirical evidence supporting the view that human perception of conscious control is an illusion. Wegner summarizes some empirical evidence that may suggest that the perception of conscious control is open to modification (or even manipulation). Wegner observes that one event is inferred to have caused a second event when two requirements are met:

1. The first event immediately precedes the second event, and
2. The first event is consistent with having caused the second event.” ref

“For example, if a person hears an explosion and sees a tree fall down that person is likely to infer that the explosion caused the tree to fall over. However, if the explosion occurs after the tree falls down (that is, the first requirement is not met), or rather than an explosion, the person hears the ring of a telephone (that is, the second requirement is not met), then that person is not likely to infer that either noise caused the tree to fall down. Wegner has applied this principle to the inferences people make about their own conscious will. People typically experience a thought that is consistent with a behavior, and then they observe themselves performing this behavior. As a result, people infer that their thoughts must have caused the observed behavior.” ref

“However, Wegner has been able to manipulate people’s thoughts and behaviors so as to conform to or violate the two requirements for causal inference. Through such work, Wegner has been able to show that people often experience conscious will over behaviors that they have not, in fact, caused – and conversely, that people can be led to experience a lack of will over behaviors they did cause. For instance, priming subjects with information about an effect increases the probability that a person falsely believes is the cause. The implication for such work is that the perception of conscious will (which he says might be more accurately labeled as ‘the emotion of authorship’) is not tethered to the execution of actual behaviors, but is inferred from various cues through an intricate mental process, authorship processing. Although many interpret this work as a blow against the argument for free will, both psychologists and philosophers have criticized Wegner’s theories.” ref

“Emily Pronin has argued that the subjective experience of free will is supported by the introspection illusion. This is the tendency for people to trust the reliability of their own introspections while distrusting the introspections of other people. The theory implies that people will more readily attribute free will to themselves rather than others. This prediction has been confirmed by three of Pronin and Kugler’s experiments. When college students were asked about personal decisions in their own and their roommate’s lives, they regarded their own choices as less predictable. Staff at a restaurant described their co-workers’ lives as more determined (having fewer future possibilities) than their own lives. When weighing up the influence of different factors on behavior, students gave desires and intentions the strongest weight for their own behavior, but rated personality traits as most predictive of other people.” ref

“Caveats have, however, been identified in studying a subject’s awareness of mental events, in that the process of introspection itself may alter the experience. Regardless of the validity of belief in free will, it may be beneficial to understand where the idea comes from. One contribution is randomness. While it is established that randomness is not the only factor in the perception of the free will, it has been shown that randomness can be mistaken as free will due to its indeterminacy. This misconception applies both when considering oneself and others. Another contribution is choice. It has been demonstrated that people’s belief in free will increases if presented with a simple level of choice. The specificity of the amount of choice is important, as too little or too great a degree of choice may negatively influence belief. It is also likely that the associative relationship between level of choice and perception of free will is influentially bidirectional. It is also possible that one’s desire for control, or other basic motivational patterns, act as a third variable.” ref

Believing in Free Will?

“Among philosophers: A recent 2020 survey has shown that compatibilism is quite a popular stance among those who specialize in philosophy (59.2%). Belief in libertarianism amounted to 18.8%, while a lack of belief in free will equaled 11.2%. Among evolutionary biologists: 79 percent of evolutionary biologists said that they believe in free will according to a survey conducted in 2007, 14 percent chose no free will, and 7 percent did not answer the question.” ref

“Baumeister and colleagues found that provoking disbelief in free will seems to cause various negative effects. The authors concluded, in their paper, that it is belief in determinism that causes those negative effects. Kathleen Vohs has found that those whose belief in free will had been eroded were more likely to cheat. In a study conducted by Roy Baumeister, after participants read an article arguing against free will, they were more likely to lie about their performance on a test where they would be rewarded with cash. Provoking a rejection of free will has also been associated with increased aggression and less helpful behavior. However, although these initial studies suggested that believing in free will is associated with more morally praiseworthy behavior, more recent studies (including direct, multi-site replications) with substantially larger sample sizes have reported contradictory findings (typically, no association between belief in free will and moral behavior), casting doubt over the original findings.” ref

“Moreover, whether or not these experimental findings are a result of actual manipulations in belief in free will is a matter of debate. First of all, free will can at least refer to either libertarian (indeterministic) free will or compatibilistic (deterministic) free will. Having participants read articles that simply “disprove free will” is unlikely to increase their understanding of determinism, or the compatibilistic free will that it still permits. In other words, experimental manipulations purporting to “provoke disbelief in free will” may instead cause a belief in fatalism, which may provide an alternative explanation for previous experimental findings. To test the effects of belief in determinism, it has been argued that future studies would need to provide articles that do not simply “attack free will”, but instead focus on explaining determinism and compatibilism.” ref

“Baumeister and colleagues also note that volunteers disbelieving in free will are less capable of counterfactual thinking. This is worrying because counterfactual thinking (“If I had done something different…”) is an important part of learning from one’s choices, including those that harmed others. Again, this cannot be taken to mean that belief in determinism is to blame; these are the results we would expect from increasing people’s belief in fatalism. Along similar lines, Tyler Stillman has found that belief in free will predicts better job performance.” ref

Sam Harris: The Illusion of Free Will (Damien disagrees with Sam on Free Will)

“Sam Harris, an atheist, is the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz).” ref

“Sam Harris Has Nothing Useful to Say About Free Will. Sam Harris has done a lot to promote strident skepticism about free will and moral responsibility. His arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny. In the atheist movement’s past, Harris was one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism. Along with his fellow horsemen Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he rode around proclaiming the non-existence of God and battling the Religious Right.” ref

“Later on, he was a charter member of a different group of culture-war flamethrowers—the Intellectual Dark Web. His allies this time around included a religious fundamentalist who believes there shouldn’t be a Palestinian state because God promised the entire Land of Israel to the Jewish People (Ben Shapiro) and a deeply strange Jungian psychologist incapable of giving a straight answer to the question “do you believe in God?” (Jordan Peterson). All that was beside the point, though, because this round of the culture war wasn’t about religion. The IDW’s enemies were censorious green-haired college kids who cared too much about safe spaces and pronouns. A couple years ago, Harris fell out with his IDW friends over their predilection for conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines and the 2020 election. A segment of his audience was deeply disappointed.” ref

“None of this is even a little bit surprising for a man of his background, education, class position, and cultural context. Honestly, you can’t throw an empty Starbucks cup in Santa Monica without hitting someone who would check every single one of those boxes. And Harris’s impatience with the “delusion” of free will is a perfect fit with these sensibilities. He sees people as walking bundles of utility, not autonomous agents responsible for their own decisions. Morality and justice are a matter of managing the bundles so as to maximize good consequences and minimize bad ones. There’s a lot to dislike about these beliefs.” ref 

“I know that a lot of people whose politics are a lot closer to mine than Harris’s would still endorse some of the philosophical premises I just mentioned. For the record, I think that’s a mistake. I’ve had an essay half-written in my head for a while now called “Being a Leftist Without Being a Utilitarian or a Skeptic About Free Will.” With any luck, you won’t have to wait too many Sundays for that one. But until then, let’s put a pin on the politics of belief or disbelief in free will. Not try to convince you of the Definitively Correct Theory of Free Will and settle for debunking Harris.” ref

“We can ask two kinds of questions about free will—a conceptual question about what would count as free will and an empirical one about whether anything in reality matches that description. There are a few different reasons why philosophers in different eras have worried about whether we have free will, but for now let’s stick to the dominant modern worry, which is causal determinism—the idea that everything that happens is ultimately a result of complex chains of cause and effect where the later links in such chains are inevitable given the earlier ones.” ref

“A fun way to explain determinism is by thinking about the total state of the universe—the current position of every molecule in existence, for instance—at any moment of time. Causal determinism is the claim that, given the total one any particular “time slice” of the universe is, there’s only one possible way for future time slices to be, since the future is causally baked into the present. A conceptual question about free will and determinism is whether they’re compatible. In other words, if we live in an entirely deterministic universe—one where in principle a being with God-like knowledge of every aspect of one time slice of the universe could, like, mathematically extrapolate the next time slice and the one after that—could it still be true that some human decisions can be reasonably classified as instances of free will?” ref

“An empirical question is whether we do in fact live in such a universe. You can produce different positions with different combinations of answers to these questions. “No” on the first question and “yes” on the second adds up to “hard determinism,” which is one version of skepticism about free will. The hard determinist thinks free will is an illusion if determinism is true, and determinism is true, therefore free will is an illusion. (I say “one version” since another option is “hard incompatibilism”—the view that determinism and indeterminism are both incompatible with free will. That seems to be Harris’s own view.)” ref

“No” on both questions gets you a position confusingly called “libertarianism.” In political philosophy, “libertarianism” refers at a rough approximation to the idea that the right of rich people to hold onto all their money is more important than the right of poor people not to starve to death or die of easily treatable diseases, so I feel a little bad for free-will libertarians that they have to share a label with that, but in this context “libertarianism” means the idea that we have the kind of free will we wouldn’t have if determinism is true.” ref

“Finally, compatibilism is what you get when you answer “yes” to the first question—regardless of how you answer the second one. Sometimes you’ll see compatibilism referred to as “soft determinism,” but I don’t love that terminology because (i) it confuses the issue by making it sound like hard determinists are just more committed to the empirical claim that causal determinism is true than these squishier “soft” determinists—which is wrong, remember, since what the hard determinist and the compatibilist disagree about is the conceptual question—and (ii) many compatibilists aren’t actually committed to answering “yes” on the second question. Compatibilists about free will and determinism are usually also compatibilists about free will and indeterminism, so their position can just be “ask a scientist if determinism is true, that’s not my department, but as a philosopher I can tell you that we have free will either way.” ref

“In his 2012 book Free Will, Harris sneers that compatibilism “amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.” That’s a nice turn of phrase. But is it true? More precisely: Does it track what compatibilist thinkers are saying well enough to even work as a put-down? One of the first things Harris says about compatibilists is that they “generally claim that a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions.” That’s the definition he’s working with throughout the compatibilism chapter of the book. In a later chapter, he says that “certain compatibilists” think “freedom of the will is synonymous with the idea that one could have thought or acted differently.” ref

“His first claim about what compatibilists “generally” think might be more or less accurate as a description of some very simple forms of compatibilism like the one defended by David Hume in the Liberty and Necessity chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It’s certainly not anything like what the most plausible compatibilist accounts of free will developed in the last century claim. But before we get to all that let’s hone in on that business about “certain” compatibilists. I’m fascinated by his use of the word “certain” there because that’s the only indication I see anywhere in the book that he knows that there are important differences between different kinds of compatibilists. If certain compatibilists believe that, what do the rest believe? He doesn’t tell us.” ref

“Harris’s response to the “certain compatibilists” is very odd. He says that “to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, ‘I could have done otherwise’ after doing whatever I in fact did.” To which I’d respond: No, it’s not. Like, literally, that’s not what “I could have done otherwise” means. What are you talking about? Perhaps the idea is that it’s the only thing “could have done otherwise” could mean given causal determinism. But that’s still just straightforwardly wrong. I don’t mean, like, it’s wrong because compatibilism is true. I mean, just straightforwardly wrong as a matter of ordinary usage regardless of what’s true about the free will debate.” ref

“He claims earlier in the book that the only thing it could mean to say that rapists and murderers were free “not to rape and murder” is “they could have resisted impulse to do so (or could have avoided feeling such an impulse at all), with the universe—including their brains, in precisely the same state it was at the moment they committed their crimes.” But that’s clearly not the only thing it could mean. In fact, even the most plausible versions of libertarianism about free will don’t set the bar quite this high. The libertarian philosopher Robert Kane, for example, takes it for granted that most of the time we’re just sort of acting on autopilot—our actions are determined by our characters without much thought in the moment, so if we zoom in on the details of a particular action, it won’t be true that we could have done otherwise in the moment. Still, he thinks, it can be true in a morally important way that a rapist could have not raped or murdered if their characters were formed in the right way.” ref

“By analogy: If a very drunk driver kills someone, we think it’s true in a morally significant way that he could have not done that even though in the moment he may have been driving as carefully as he literally could have given the road conditions and the conditions in his alcohol-soaked brain—because at any earlier moment when he was in his right mind he could have decided to hand his keys to a designated driver. Kane thinks there are relatively rare but important moments in which different preferences are at war with each other—think of Sartre’s student here—and quantum indeterminacy in the human brain means that you genuinely could have made a different decision in those moments. These “self-forming acts” (SFAs) are when we adjust the settings on our cognitive autopilot.” ref

“Now, I’m not compelled by Kane’s account. He’s making a series of empirical assumptions about subjects ranging from psychology to neuroscience to quantum physics that could just be false. And even if he were right about all of the above, I’m not convinced that he’s got the conceptual question—the question of what factors matter for free will—right. I’m a compatibilist. But the point is that Harris’s breezy assertion about the “only thing” it could mean to say rapists and murderers could have not raped and murdered doesn’t even intersect with what the smartest libertarians believe. Harris’s position seems to be that (i) “you could have done otherwise” means “you could have done otherwise given no changes whatsoever to the time slice of the world immediately preceding your action” and (ii) the only thing anyone who denies this truth could mean when they perversely persist in saying “you could have done otherwise” is sometimes true is that you can tell yourself you could have done otherwise.” ref

“But none of that’s right—just as a description of what we ordinarily mean by the phrase “could have.” If you’re playing basketball and you miss a shot at a crucial time, and you say “damn it, I could have made that shot,” how do we understand what you mean? Surely not that you could have made that shot given that every single atom in the universe was configured in exactly the same way as the basketball was leaving your hands. And not just because whether we’re compatibilists or incompatibilists about free will, everyone’s a compatibilist about missed shots. Let’s say you don’t believe that we live in a completely deterministic universe. Maybe you’re totally convinced that the Coopenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics is true. Even so, it’s fantastically unlikely that this has a damn thing to do with what you mean when you say “I could have made that shot.” You’re making a claim, ultimately, about your basketball-playing capacities. Similarly, the “certain compatibilists” are making claims about your capacities to do things like consider alternatives, rationally deliberate between them, and settle on a plan of action.” ref

“One thing you absolutely don’t mean in the basketball case is that you could have made the shot even given the exact angle at which you aimed, the exact amount of force you applied, your exact position on the court, and so on. You don’t mean that quantum indeterminacy manifesting in the macroscopic world led you to miss the shot. In fact, if you did believe that, you’d be a lot less frustrated. You mean that holding a bunch of relevant facts—but crucially not all of the relevant facts—constant, there’s a scenario where you would have made the shot. No one evaluating any ordinary “could have” claim is holding all of the relevant facts constant. To use the terminology of David Lewis’s classic paper on time travel paradoxes, what you’re doing is asserting that you making the shot would be “compossible” with a particularly pertinent subset of facts about the situation. And as Lewis points out, which facts belong in the relevant set “is determined, but sometimes not well enough, by context.” ref

“So for example: An ape can’t speak a human language—say, Finnish—but I can. Facts about the anatomy and operation of the ape’s larynx and nervous system are not compossible with his speaking Finnish. The corresponding facts about my larynx and nervous system are compossible with my speaking Finnish. But don’t take me along to Helsinki as your interpreter: I can’t speak Finnish. My speaking Finnish is compossible with the facts considered so far, but not with further facts about my lack of training.” ref

“So, what does it mean to say that a rapist or murderer could have done otherwise? Presumably that there’s some interesting and important set of facts about them that would be compossible with their doing otherwise. What facts go in that set? Whichever ones are relevant to what we might means when we talk about, for example, people being “in control” of their actions—when we attribute control to mentally competent adult humans in a reasonably broad range of circumstances and deny it to various other categories of people. But the more you think about that last point, the trickier it gets, because there are plainly a bunch of different things we could mean by being in control of your actions. Some of them are going to be compatible with determinism and some of them aren’t. It all depends on what goes in that set of pertinent facts. Everything about a relevant time slice of the universe or a more restricted set of facts? If a more restricted set, what’s in it?” ref

“At this point, it can start to sound like the free will debate is just a dispute about semantics—that the compatibilist is using the word “can” in a loose way and the incompatibilist is using it in a stricter way but ultimately they’re just talking past each other. We can just say you “can₁” do some action and “can’t₂” do it and call it a day. A more useful way to think about the debate is that we’re trying to figure out which sense of “can” is relevant for the contexts we’re interested in—of which the most important is moral responsibility. What has to go into the relevant set of facts for you to be morally responsible for your decisions—for them to be your fault (or to your credit)? Is it enough that your preferences be playing the right role in bringing about the action, or does it matter how those preferences were formed? Does it matter if we’re talking about simple preferences (“I want a cigarette”) or higher-order preferences (“I want to to not want a cigarette, I’m trying to quit”)? Should we be talking about how the process of deliberation works?” ref

“There’s a giant complicated debate about these points. One way that it proceeds is by thinking about examples that test different intuitions we have about this stuff. Would this example which meets some definition really count as the kind of free will we need for moral responsibility? OK, how about this one? If your account can’t plausibly cover the example, can you plausible adjust your definition—or do you have to go back to the drawing board? Harris, in his depressingly popular little book, does exactly none of this. He vaguely refers to the existence of a “vast literature” on the topic at one point. But if he’s read any of it, you certainly wouldn’t know that from reading Free Will.” ref

“Everything I’ve said above is framed in terms of compatibilist accounts of “could have done otherwise.” And I do think that some such accounts are considerably more plausible than Harris indicates. But what about the other compatibilists—the ones who presumably disagree with the “certain compatibilists”? A key figure here is Harry Frankfurt. In the world at large, Frankfurt is probably best known for writing an entertaining and entertainingly titled book called On Bullshit. (He aims there at providing a rigorous philosophical analysis of “bullshitting” and how it’s different from “lying”—a subject that continues to inspire interesting discussion.) He was interviewed by John Stewart about that one on The Daily Show when it came out.” ref

“Within academic philosophy, though, Frankfurt is best known for spawning a whole cottage industry of thought experiments called “Frankfurt cases.” These probably deserve an essay of their own some Sunday, and I’m going to resist the temptation to go any deeper than this right now, but basically these are cases in which someone intuitively seems to be morally responsible for something even though there doesn’t seem to be any particularly interesting sense in which they could have done otherwise. So a mad scientist installs a chip in your brain that will go into effect if your thoughts start to drift in a non-rape-y, non-murder-y direction. But your thoughts never do drift that way, so the chip remains inert—it plays no more role in the chain of cause and effect leading up to you committing your crimes than if it hadn’t been there. Pretty clearly, Frankfurt thinks, the existence of the chip isn’t morally exculpatory. You can’t reasonably say, “It wasn’t me, it was the chip.” ref

“This kind of thing—and I know that some of you live and breathe Frankfurt cases and are wincing about how quick and superficial this is, and I’m sorry, I really am, but we have to move on—inspired Frankfurt himself and many subsequent compatibilists to think the kind of “free will” that matters for moral responsibility isn’t a version of “freedom to do otherwise” at all. They de-emphasize the whole question—as independently interesting as it might be—of the semantics of doing otherwise and develop accounts of the kind of control that matters for moral responsibility that are just about whether the right kind of causal chain led to your action in the actual case.” ref

“Frankfurt’s own view of the “right sort of chain” is all about those higher-order desires we encountered a minute ago. But I think a much richer and more interesting compatibilist account is the one offered by John Martin Fischer. That account says roughly that you have “free will” in the way that matters for responsibility if your decisions arise from an at least moderately “reasons-responsive” cognitive mechanism. That doesn’t mean you can only be free if you’re perfectly rational. But the relevant capacities we’re talking about when we attribute the kind of control to you that matter for responsibility are capacities for understanding and being at least somewhat moved by reasons for and against various proposed courts of action.” ref

“These are the kind of capacities that—although it’s a matter of degree, and there are complicated questions about where the threshold is for moral responsibility—seem to differentiate mentally competent adult humans from non-human animals or even minors with sufficiently undeveloped brains that we excuse things we wouldn’t in adults. Or people suffering from various forms of severe mental illness, addiction, or developmental challenges. And it’s pretty clearly compatible with determinism.” ref

“Of course, whether determinism is true or not, you don’t decide whether to have the right sort of cognitive mechanism in your brain for your decision-making to rise to the Fischer standard for free will. To adapt the sort of point Harris loves to make about this, if I swapped bodies and brains—atom for atom and neuron for neuron—with someone who lacked this capacity, I would lack it. I’m lucky to not be that person. Fair enough. But does that mean that, since it’s a matter of luck, I’m not responsible for my actions after all?” ref

“By analogy: Magnus Carlsen being very good at chess is, at least to some extent, a matter of luck. He could have been unlucky and been born with a set of cognitive defects that made that impossible. Or he could have grown up in circumstances that weren’t compatible with him spending very much time on the game when he was a kid. Or…etc. But that doesn’t mean that what he does when he plays a game now is a matter of luck rather than skill. Similarly, if you’re capable of understanding and being moved by reasons for and against various courses of actions to an adequate extent, you are in all sorts of ways lucky. You could have been severely mentally disabled, you could have had various kinds of psychiatric conditions, you could have….well, you can come up with all sorts of scenarios. But none of that means that the decisions you make now are a matter of luck as opposed to being under your control.” ref

“Is this account correct? That’s a complicated question. There are mega-tons of room for reasonable people to disagree about these issues. But Harris, in his bestselling book introducing people to the issue and the positions—surely the book where most of his readers first heard the word “compatibilism”—simply passes on the opportunity to weigh in on the real debate. Nothing he says there would give a well-informed advocate of any major theory of free will—libertarian or consequentialist—so much as a moment’s pause. We can disagree about whether it’s Sam Harris’ s fault that he wrote a superficial book full of arguments that collapse given any real scrutiny. Perhaps nothing is anyone’s fault. But I really wish he’d done otherwise.” ref

Free Will and Sam

Dmitry Epstein

Sep 12, 2021

“Sam Harris gives an impossible definition to “free will” — far outside any popular conception of the term. The way Harris describes it, “free will” must mean the ability to create your own set of options — or to choose the type of being you are — rather than simply the ability to choose among whatever set of options is available to you, as an ordinary human being, at any given moment. In other words, it’s not enough to be able to freely choose an item from an available menu; to have free will, you also must have created that menu, and further, you must have chosen to be the creator of that menu; you must have chosen to have every possible choice available to you.” ref

“Of course, no one logically can possess such power. Indeed, according to Harris’s expansive definition, not even an omnipotent God could have free will because God did not choose to be God. And even if God did make a “free” choice to be an omnipotent and omniscient being, God did not choose to be an entity that could make such a choice, and so on. If that’s the definition of free will, then I agree with Harris that the concept of free will is incoherent. But again, Harris’s definition is not the popular conception that he ostensibly tries to repudiate. In the popular conception, “free will” is less about your power to create options and more about your ability to choose consciously among whatever set of options happens to be available, while being reasonably aware of the potential consequences of your choices.” ref

“As Harris acknowledges, our criminal justice system presumes the existence of free will. Lawmakers, judges, and lawyers know that people’s options can be severely limited by circumstances outside their control. Nevertheless, laws which govern people’s conduct presume that, in any given situation, most individuals have at least two options that they can freely choose from — to do something or not to do it. And this ability to make a conscious, reasonably informed choice among two or more alternatives is what free will is all about.” ref

“Another way in which Harris alters the popular conception of free will is by attacking the common notion that, for any conscious decision we make, we could have decided something else. According to Harris, the universe does not allow for this possibility because each physical state of the universe is determined entirely by the preceding state (more on this later). Let’s say that last summer, after extensive deliberation, I chose to buy a Honda Civic rather than a Toyota Corolla. According to Harris, if we go back to the moment of my decision, and if every particle in the universe was in the exact same state, then my decision would be the same — I would choose to buy the Civic. There is no sense in which I could have bought a Corolla.” ref

“Let’s assume that Harris is right on this point; if we take the universe to the exact same state as it was at the moment of my decision, I would have decided the same thing. But this is little more than a tautology. Because my brain and my conscious decision-making processes are part of the physical state of the universe, this amounts to saying that, had I decided to buy a Civic last summer, I would have bought a Civic. Obviously, if I had decided to buy a Corolla instead, the state of the universe at the moment of my decision would have been different. Indeed, as Harris rightly observes, to say that I could have done something different — assuming the same state of the universe — is like playing back a recording of his podcast and expecting to hear something different the second time around.” ref

“But again, that’s not what most people ordinarily mean when they say, “I could have done something else”; that’s certainly not what I mean when I contemplate the fact that “I could have bought a Corolla.” Rather, what we mean is that the universe hypothetically could have been slightly different than it is today; my conscious brain process could have made a different decision.” ref

“To give another example, suppose that on my weekly trip to the grocery store, I buy either beer or wine, but not both. Let’s say this week I bought beer. I can legitimately say, “I could have bought wine instead of beer” because, in very similar circumstances in the past, I have bought wine. I certainly don’t mean that if I look through the store’s security footage, I could somehow see myself buying wine. The real question is not whether I could have done something else in the exact same circumstances (which include my brain state), but whether I could have done something else in substantially similar circumstances. The answer is undoubtedly yes — as my past experience proves.” ref

“One argument Harris makes that does strike at the common notion of free will is an appeal to physical causation — an argument that’s popular among free-will skeptics. In this regard, Harris proposes that the universe is completely deterministic; that is, the current state of the universe (including my thoughts) is determined entirely by the preceding state, and so on to the very beginning. I’ll refer to this theory as “classical determinism” because it stems from a worldview based on classical or Newtonian mechanics. Harris then acknowledges that our current model of the universe is based on quantum mechanics, which introduces pure randomness into reality, so it may be that the current state of the universe does not entirely predict the future state. But whatever the case may be, Harris says, the state of the universe (including all your thoughts and actions) is either entirely predetermined, or it’s random, and where’s the freedom in that?” ref

“Although this argument may seem persuasive, it’s fundamentally flawed because it conflates the very different meanings of classical determinism and quantum mechanics. Classical determinism posits that everything that has ever happened or will ever happen has been determined by the initial conditions of the universe. There is only one way in which events can unfold, and only one way in which your life can possibly turn out. Even the very specific choices you make tomorrow, such as what to eat for breakfast, already have been determined by the state of the universe long before you were born; the future is set in stone. If that’s true, then it’s indeed difficult to see any room for free will.” ref

“Our current understanding of quantum mechanics, however, severely undermines this picture of reality. Two identical atoms can decay at different times, and as far as we know, nothing about the current state of the universe tells us when a particular atom will decay (though we can predict with great accuracy the average decay time of large numbers of identical atoms). But this fundamental randomness does not mean that human decisions and actions are also random. It means only that our decisions and actions are not predetermined.” ref

“To see this, consider that modern technology allows us to observe the decay of individual atoms, so it’s trivially easy to turn a random atomic decay into a macro-level event; for example, an experimenter can tell the subject, “If the atom decays within five minutes, press the red button, and if not, press the green button.” Thus, from an identical set of initial conditions, two potential futures are born — one in which the red button is pressed and one in which the green button is pressed.” ref

“Suppose the subject decides to press the green button. Although this decision was not predetermined, we also wouldn’t characterize it as random. The subject was aware of the experiment and its potential consequences. The subject pressed the green button for a reason — she understood the experimenter’s instructions, and the atom decayed after five minutes. On a macro-level, the subject consciously chose to press the green button because she agreed to participate in the experiment. The subject’s action was neither random nor determined.” ref

“I can perform a similar experiment myself (and you can as well). Right now, I’m thinking of picking a movie, and I have narrowed my choices to two options: The Fifth Element and Rush Hour. I know that my decision is fairly inconsequential, and I don’t want to spend much time on it. So I decide to pick a movie randomly, using a quantum random number generator available at https://qrng.anu.edu.au/ (it works ostensibly by “measuring the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum”). And I will finalize my choice by typing the name of the movie below, in all-caps. The process is simple. I’ll ask the generator to pick a number between 0 and 99. If the number is 0–49, I’ll choose The Fifth Element, and if it’s 50–99, I’ll choose Rush Hour. To be clear, the number generated will be completely random — nothing in the current state of the universe will determine the number, and by extent, my choice of the movie. So here we go, drumroll please… the number generated is 37!” ref

“Was my decision to pick this movie completely random? No. I knew exactly what I was doing, and I gave you a reasoned explanation for my decision-making process. And, after the random number was generated, I decided to follow through with my original intent. Could I have chosen Rush Hour? Absolutely. The number generator could have worked differently, or I could have decided to ignore it.” ref

“This experiment does not necessarily prove free will. But it does show that your actions are not determined by the initial state of the universe and, at the same time, cannot be characterized as entirely random. Quantum mechanics is a theory of fundamental physics — it does not say anything about free will, which is a macro-level phenomenon operating at the level of conscious thought. But quantum mechanics does refute a major aspect of classical determinism that’s used to deny free will; it shows that the initial conditions of the universe do not wholly determine the very specific state of the universe today. The same initial conditions could have led to numerous different states.” ref

“At this point, it’s worth making an informal observation. In trying to refute free will, some thinkers first invoke classical determinism to show that free will does not exist, and then they argue that quantum mechanics does not save free will. This sure seems like a strange way to prove a point — to invoke a discredited theory of reality as proof and then say that the better theory does not negate the proof. If you want to disprove free will, why not just start with the best current model of fundamental reality — quantum mechanics? How does quantum mechanics disprove free will? Why refer to classical determinism at all? My guess is that disproving free will is much harder to do by relying solely on quantum mechanics; as mentioned above, quantum mechanics doesn’t say anything about free will.” ref

“Quantum mechanics is an independent theory of fundamental reality — it’s not merely a “randomness” complement to classical determinism. The latter can serve to disprove free will because it purports to say something about the cause of human actions. It suggests a clear and uniform chain of causation from elementary particles to macro-level events, so once you’ve seen one link, you’ve seen all, and you can safely ignore the rest. With classical determinism, one is tempted to view fundamental particles as tiny billiard balls that bump into one another and cause each other to move in entirely predictable ways, eventually cascading into a human act. If, for example, you describe my movie-picking act using classical determinism, you could say that “elementary particle A moved particle B, which then moved particles C and D, and yada yada yada … you picked a movie.” ref

“But that’s not how the world actually works; in your description, to paraphrase Seinfeld, you yada-yada’d over the most important part — the emergence of complex systems culminating in consciousness. Quantum mechanics does not allow us to treat elementary particles as tiny billiard balls that, once let loose, “cause” human actions. A quark inside a proton doesn’t really cause anything, and neither does an electron “orbiting” the proton. As physicist Sean Carroll observes in The Big Picture, the ordinary concepts of causes and effects are “no longer part of our best fundamental ontology.” ref

“Rather than “cause” anything, quarks and electrons combine to form macro-level conglomerations — atoms, molecules, neurons — which themselves exhibit certain macro-level laws or regularities. These conglomerations combine further to form a super-conglomerate that we refer to as consciousness, or conscious brain process. It’s that super-conglomerate that can best be described as the “cause” — the proximate, most direct cause — of my picking a movie. The universe didn’t have to allow for the emergence of complex systems, but it does, and we can’t ignore it.” ref

“Another way to think of quantum mechanics and classical determinism is that they each answer a different question about the universe. With classical determinism, we ask, “What is determined?” and the answer is, “Everything, including the movement of elementary particles, all the way to human actions.” With quantum mechanics, we ask, “What is random?” and the answer is, “Some movements of elementary particles and fields”; that’s it. Quantum mechanics doesn’t go much further. Alternatively, we can ask, “Are human actions determined or random?” Classical determinism answers this question; quantum mechanics does not. It’s a mistake to think that both theories give answers to the same question.” ref

“I’ll address one more argument that Harris weaves into his discussion — an argument based more on the physiological role of consciousness than fundamental physics. In this regard, Harris asserts that your consciousness is just a “witness” to your actions and has no power to affect them; you’re like a wave crashing onto the shore, driven entirely by physical forces outside your control. This argument is rooted in epiphenomenalism — the idea that consciousness is a mere side effect of physical processes, with no more ability to affect your body than a rainbow can affect the weather.” ref

“The main fallacy of this argument is that it sneaks in dualism — a largely discredited view that mind and matter are composed of fundamentally different substances. In the spirit of dualism, epiphenomenalism views consciousness as somehow separate from the associated physical processing of the brain. As neuroscientist Mark Solms puts it in his book, The Hidden Spring, epiphenomenalism relegates consciousness to a “parallel universe” or “some non-physical dimension of reality.” ref

“If the universe is entirely physical, however, there is absolutely no daylight between subjective experiences and the brain processes associated with them. They’re just different manifestations of the same physical event. As soon as you introduce some sort of disconnect between subjective experience and the associated brain process — such as saying that “subjective experience is merely an ‘effect’ of a physical brain process” — you remove subjective experience from the realm of the physical; you slip into dualism. (After all, a physical effect of a physical brain process is itself just another physical brain process.) If you’re a physicalist (as Harris appears to be), it’s important to realize that your entire subjective experience of being a conscious self — the thing you refer to as “I” — is manifested as a physical, neuronal brain process. We may be uncomfortable with the fact that physical neuronal activity manifests as subjective experience, but that’s how nature works, and we must deal with it.” ref

“So it’s wrong to say that you’re merely a witness to actions, that you’re controlled entirely by physical brain processes, or that you’re simply along for the ride. You are the physical brain process — particularly the process associated with consciousness; you are the very mechanism enabling the ride. If we substitute “you” for “specific physical brain process,” we can say that you are both affected by some physical brain processes and, in turn, affect other physical brain processes. It follows that you are the source of at least some of your thoughts and actions.” ref

“Let’s go back to Harris’s movie-picking experiment, which I conducted several times. I admit that, each time I begin, I have no control over the movies initially percolating in my mind. But I always know that the movies I think about comprise only a limited set, and that I can expand that set if I think a little longer. I’m aware of the numerous criteria available to guide my decision (a movie I’ve seen recently, or as a teenager, or one I liked most, or one I have seen the most times, or just a random movie, etc.). I’m further aware of the consequences of my particular choice (practically none), and the fact that I can choose some other movie the next time around. I can simulate my choices in my mind before I make them — I can imagine myself choosing a romantic comedy or a psychological drama.” ref

“And with that knowledge, I pick a movie by typing it on the screen, knowing exactly which movie I’m picking and why. I consciously “order” my hands to type a particular movie (e.g,, Reminiscence), and lo and behold, my hands type the very movie I “ordered”! And this happens time and time again. I can always predict with 100% accuracy the movie that my hands type on the screen, and I’m never surprised by my choice after I make it. Further, I can be confident that this act of picking a movie is proximately caused by my conscious brain process, by “me,” and was not predetermined by the initial state of the universe. If that’s not freedom, what is?” ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art