We Have Free Will
What calculators and arithmetic can tell us about our causal powers
Do we have free will?
My answer is a pretty definitive "Yes".
This might be a surprise to some readers who know I'm a naturalist/materialist. I think the physical laws of the universe describe what matter does. Nothing special is happening with the matter in the brain, or at least nothing that breaks the laws of how matter is "supposed to" work. And I definitely don't think the randomness in quantum physics helps the case for free-will.
I believe free will is compatible with causal determinism. That means that even if everything is determined by the laws of nature, including every neuron firing in your brain that causes every muscle activation in your limbs, we still have free will.
You might think "Tommy's just engaging in some whacky hopeful thinking here, that view is incoherent." But the view I just described is not only a mainstream view of philosophy, it's by far the most dominant view of free will among professional philosophers. The view is called compatibilism, and most philosophers accept or lean towards it:
Most non-philosophers I've talked to about free will fall into one of two camps. Many have never really thought about the tension between free will and determinism and believe in free will without worrying about the issue. Or they've thought about it and believe there's a conflict between free will and determinism and conclude that free will is an illusion.
Why is there such a big disconnect between philosophers and intelligent lay people on this issue?
Mostly, I think the issue is that it's natural for us to think of mental processes as separate from the physical world. If physical happenings explain our actions, it seems the mental part is unrelated. I want to take a stab at making compatibilism more intuitive by taking on these natural inclinations.
Calculators, Arithmetic, and You
What's the difference between a wink and a blink?
Okay, some smart-ass just thought "a wink only closes one eye". Everyone's clapping for you. Congratulations, you've solved free will. Let's move on.
The wink-blink question is how Owen Flanagan opens his discussion of free will in his excellent book The Problem of the Soul. Winks are actions that are voluntary, things we did of our own free will. Blinking is just something that happens (most of the time, now that I'm thinking about it I can't stop "manually" blinking).
In both a wink and a blink, the same muscle (the palpebral orbicularis) causes the eyelid to move. Nerves extending back into the brain cause that muscle movement. There's a causal story involving the activity of brain cells that explains the wink or blink. If we go back far enough in the causal chain, the particular neurons involved will be different for winking and blinking, but this isn't a great answer to what distinguishes them. Saying "Voluntary actions involve a different part of the brain, therefore free will" isn't very satisfying.
Let's forget about the brain for a second and look at an analogy. Neural circuits in the brain cause winks and blinks. Electronic circuits in a calculator cause certain digits to show up on the display.
Let's say I press the following sequence of buttons on the calculator: "1+1=". The calculator will display "2".
Why does it display 2? I could describe this in two ways. I could say that pressing the buttons completed certain circuits, activating wires connected to logic gates that, when I finished pressing the sequence of buttons, activated further wires that are connected to the display in such a way that the numeral 2 appears. I could refer to the wiring diagram of the calculator and follow the logical sequence pressing those buttons would cause and give the full story in the logic of the flow of electrical current.
I could also give the explanation "2 showed up because the rules of arithmetic say 1+1=2".
These are both correct descriptions, but they're operating on different levels. The reason I can give the second explanation is that the wires and logic gates in the calculator embody the rules of arithmetic. It isn't just a fluke that pressing those buttons results in a 2, it's because the calculator is wired up to perform arithmetic.
What "caused" the 2 to appear? Was it the wires or the rules of arithmetic? The correct answer is "both". Different levels of explanation can both be true at the same time.
Back to the brain. Why do we wink? It's both correct to say the eyelid moved because of the chain of neural activations (the wiring in the brain explanation) and to say "you wanted to", or more to the point, "you willed it" (you get to be arithmetic in this analogy. Didn't you always want to be math?).
The key here is, just as the wires in a calculator embody the rules of arithmetic, the wiring of your brain embodies you.
Everything you are—your dreams, desires, personality, memories—they are all embodied in the incredibly complex tangle of trillions of connections between billions of neurons in your brain.
But what, then, is the difference between a wink and a blink? Let's go back to our calculator.
I could get the calculator to display a "2" in other ways. I could simply press the number "2" and it would display it. Or I could take the calculator apart and directly run a current through the relevant wires connected to the display to cause a "2" to appear. In neither of these cases does it make sense to describe the resulting display as because of the rules of arithmetic.
With a blink, we might see the same result (eyelid movement), but something is different. Sure, there is something different in the specific chain of neurons leading to the activation of the muscle, but again, that's not satisfying. Why is one willed by me and one is not?
Here I think it matters the cognitive processes involved in winking and blinking. Winking (the conscious sort) is initiated by the frontal cortex, while (automatic) blinking is initiated by the pre-motor brainstem. It's not just that the chain of neural events leading to a wink differs from a blink, but it's different in important ways.
The brainstem handles many of our vital bodily functions, like breathing, heartbeats, and digestion. These things just happen automatically. Some of them (like breathing and blinking) we can "take over" control of, but by and large they just happen without us in control.
Notice that it's natural to talk about what we do and don't control, even when talking about things happening in our own brain.
The frontal cortex (and the cortex more generally) is where much of what we would consider our advanced cognition happens. Planning, reasoning, emotional regulation all happen in the frontal cortex. These are all activities we feel more responsibility for than our heart rate.
More importantly, activity in these areas is more tightly connected to two important features for free will: consciousness and what philosophers call reasons-responsiveness.
Conscious willing
A big part of why the idea that we lack free will is so shocking (and therefore generates so much interest when certain people loudly proclaim it) is because it feels like we will things to happen. We consciously plan actions, they happen, and we feel like we've caused them to happen.
In the interests of keeping the scope of this post from exploding, let me just say: I don't think this feeling is an illusion. This gets us deep into murky territory of what consciousness is, and I'll have more to say on that at some point, but the point is that the processes involved in winking are more closely associated with consciousness than the blinking ones.
I think it's pretty incontrovertible that conscious thoughts cause behavior. There's plenty of empirical evidence that this is the case.
(There's also very interesting evidence that we deceive ourselves about when we've consciously willed something. To me, these kinds of empirical cases against free will are way more interesting than the metaphysical ones. That's for another time, though).
Using conscious willing, we override automatic responses. For example, I can force myself to stop blinking while I type this sentence, and continue to keep them open even though my eyes are getting dry and oh god this is uncomfortable they are starting to water why don't I hit the period but this is my chance to prove free will so I'm going to keep going I can't even see the screen anyemroee helph me,
I can suppress my breathing or force myself to sit in the dentist's chair while they poke around in my mouth, suppressing my automatic defend-yourself-against-sharp-mouth-pokes impulse. I can also initiate actions through my conscious willing—like winking. I can think through complex problems and come up with an action plan and then carry out that action plan.
The point is, our consciousness has a causal impact. And we are our consciousness. We don't identify with every cognitive process, but we definitely identify ourselves with our conscious ones. If consciousness is controlling (some of) our behavior, it's correct to say we are.
Reasons Responsiveness
What's so special about consciously willed actions, though? We consider free will not just to be about us being able to control things, but also tie it to moral responsibility. People often have the sentiment that if we don't have free will, we can't blame anyone for their actions.
To make this concrete, let's take an everyday scenario: Let's say the crew of your spaceship is under attack by a member of the Predator species.
Knowing you stand no chance fighting the thing, you hide in a cupboard with the ship's chef while the Predator dismembers the captain.
Your brain is now performing all kinds of automatic actions that are actively putting you and the chef in danger: you might try to consciously quiet your breathing, but you have little control over the thumping of your heart.
If the Predator finds you and the chef by hearing your beating heart with its super sensitive hearing, we wouldn't blame you. But if you decided to shout "Yo, Predator, we're over here", we would find you morally blameworthy.
What's the difference here? Even if we can say you are not in control of your beating heart, why can't we blame your brainstem for making your heart beat so loudly?
One of the big ingredients philosophers talk about for moral responsibility is being responsive to reasons.
Your conscious shouting is responsive to rational considerations—presumably you would not shout because it would mean your death and the death of the chef. If, after dismembering the captain, the Predator looked fatigued, and you looked it up on your phone and learned Predators love to snuggle while fatigued and will instantly bond with anyone they snuggle with, you might change your mind. You might shout "Hey, get in here big guy" and all have a nice cuddle in the cupboard, resulting in a new pal and ending the slaughter of your crew. You are able to change your shouting behavior based on rational considerations.
Your heartbeat is going to continue regardless of how much it would make sense to stop or slow. You might consciously control it slightly by trying to calm yourself, but you have very limited control. The automatic processes that control your heart don't respond to reason the same way your consciously controlled actions do.
This kind of regulatory control over our actions that is responsive to reasons is the ingredient philosophers often look to as required for moral responsibility. It makes sense—if the process involved in causing an action is responsive to a wide range of reasons, we can judge whether it is appropriately responsive to morally important reasons, and cast moral judgment on it if it is not. We can blame you for murder because we know you respond to reasons, and apparently didn't see "this action will cause pain, suffering, and snuff out a life" as reason enough to not murder. That makes you a bad person who did a bad thing. No amount of "my brain made me do it" makes sense here, because you are the part of your brain that has regulatory control over those actions, and you respond to rational considerations in a wide range of areas (if you don't, that would be when you could make the insanity defense).
Wrapping up
Bringing this all together: The laws of nature combined with the physical state of your brain cause your actions. This is consistent with you causing your actions because you are the physical state of your brain. Even if we can describe the physical causation at a lower level, it's still true to say you, and your conscious willing, cause your behavior. This conscious willing is the sort of stuff we hold each other morally responsible for because it responds to rational considerations, like whether you are in a cupboard hiding from a dangerous alien.
My hope here is I was at least able to convey the intuitions of compatibilism as I understand them. I think we are sorely lacking intuitive explanations of this view even though 1) it's the dominant view among those who are professional philosophers and 2) it's the correct view. If I at least made this view seem slightly more plausible to some subset of readers, I'll be happy.
That said, I expect I will write more on free will in the future. The parts of free will I find most interesting and will probably spend the most time exploring are the connections between our actions and consciousness. But I also suppose I will spend part of the next week responding in the comments to objections to compatibilism 😬
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Really interesting continuation of the conversation about Sapolsky’s book here — although I know you don’t discuss his arguments here.
I’m intrigued by your understanding of free will but am not sure I fully agree with it. That said, I’m closer to a lay person than a philosopher, so I fall under that “it’s an illusion!” camp 😊
Knowing that our feelings are often powerful and intuitive but also wrong, I don’t like to rely on the sense of conscious willing to justify the reality of conscious willing. And just because it appears that a behavior is responsive to reasons and thus worthy of moral judgment doesn’t mean it is.
For me, the free will question is often one of appearances vs reality — and I worry that philosophical explanations fall short of getting to the heart of it. But this has me reevaluating some of that worry. More to come, I’m sure. Great article and explanation!
The 'Free Will' debate is the main reason I'm on SubStack. Fascinating stuff. I very much enjoyed the article. I'm still yet to be convinced of a soft-deterministic interpretation of free will, but I grant I'm only a curious layman who lacks any formalised education in the relevant fields,; philosophy, neurology, etc. I do wonder where you would posit the urge to wink comes from prior to one's conscious recognition of the thought? It's seems that the thoughts that we are consciously responding to, and our emotional reactions to them, all must arise without preemptive thought. One never 'chooses' to think about winking (or anything). The concept of winking either arises or it does not. If you 'chose' to think about winking, you would have had to have thought about it, before you thought about it. That seem impossible by definition, so where did the thought come from?