Free Will and the Brain

Kidnapping Scenario

• Kidnapped and thrown from a helicopter. Survives but someone below dies.
• Police arrive and arrest the individual who was thrown. The individual says, "I am not responsible for this. I was thrown off a helicopter".
  • Individual was an object thrown away

Free Will and Responsibility

• The fundamental question: What is missing in the scenario of being thrown from a helicopter that absolves the individual of responsibility?
• Topic of the day: The nature of free will.
• Does neuroscience threaten the idea of free will by suggesting our brains predetermine our choices?

Why Free Will Matters

• Legal and moral implications:
  • Unfair to charge someone with murder if they were thrown from a helicopter
• Praise and Blame:
  • Without free will, praise and blame are not deserved.
  • There is an essential tie between being free to do something and being worthy or praised or blamed for doing that thing.
• Self and Self-expression:
  • Free will is central to the self.
  • You are your choices insofar as those choices are free.
  • The ability to change and improve as a person is fundamentally tied to the idea that you are free.
• Addiction:
  • Urging people to overcome addictions assumes they are free to do so.
• Punishment:
  • Punishment isn't justifiable without free will.
  • Even without free will, people may be locked up to protect society, but they don't deserve the punishment.

Jeffrey Dahmer Case

• Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer with heinous crimes mentioned in the video.
• Obsessive thoughts of violence intermingled with sex began around age 14 or 15.
• Crimes included luring victims, strangulation, dismemberment, and cannibalism.
• Dahmer was sentenced to 937 years in prison but was killed by a fellow inmate.
• The central question: Was Jeffrey Dahmer free to kill?

The Illusion of Free Will

• Some argue that free will is an illusion. Sam Harris, Daniel Wagner, and others are described as "willusionists."
• Daniel Wagner (2002): It seems that we are agents. It seems that we cause what we do. It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion.
• Jeffrey Rosen (2007): Someone who has the illusion of making a free and rational choice may be deluding himself since the choice is ultimately predestined by forces hardwired in his brain.
• Sam Harris (2012): Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making.
• Sam Harris's Thought Experiment:
  • Think of any city in the world.
  • Harris suggests that we don't know why we pick what we pick.
  • Even if choices are based on memories, we can't explain why those memories have the effect they do.
  • The conscious witness of inner life does not make these decisions; they only witness them.
  • No evidence for free will and our experience in life is compatible with the truth of determinism.

Response to "Willusionists"

• Eddie Namias:
  • Challenges the notion of free will presupposed by scientists.
  • Scientists assume free will requires an immaterial soul or non-physical mind.
  • The brain is seen as physical machinery, so its output is caused by micro-forces.
• Neuroscientist Reid Montague defines free will as:
  • Free will is the idea that we make choices and have thoughts independent of anything remotely resembling a physical process.
• Namias argues free will must not be a non-physical thing.

A Better Definition of Free Will

• Free will: a set of capacities for:
  • Imagining future courses of action.
  • Deliberating about reasons for choosing them.
  • Planning actions.
  • Controlling actions in the face of competing desires.
• Planning a murder involves:
  • Imagining future courses of action.
  • Deliberating about reasons.
  • Planning actions.
  • Controlling bodily movements to execute the plan.
• This is absent when someone is thrown off a moving helicopter.
• Science hasn't proven a lack of abilities to:
  • Imagine future alternatives.
  • Evaluate them.
  • Pick the best alternatives without undue external constraints.

Physical Stance vs. Intentional and Reason Stances (Dan Dennett)

• Need to move from the physical stance to the intentional and reason stances.
• Physical Stance:
  • Treating entities as purely physical objects obeying the laws of physics.
  • Applicable to billiard balls, waterfalls, electric circuits.
  • Explaining behavior in terms of physical causation.
• Intentional Stance:
  • Thinking of agents acting on beliefs and desires.
  • Applicable to animals, chess programs, and humans including infants.
  • Explaining behavior in terms of folk psychology.
  • Ascribing intentions, plans, beliefs and desires.
• Reason Stance:
  • Understanding agents as moral agents with responsibilities.
  • Agents who act on reasons, choose, promise, and plan.
  • Applicable to humans (older than infants) and sane agents.
  • Explaining behavior in terms of conscious and moral reasons.

Dennett on Free Will and Reasons

• Trees do things for reasons, but humans represent and reflect on reasons.
• The practice of justifying reasons informs and governs the intentional stance.
• Free will is found at the appropriate design level where reasons are considered.

Determinism

• Definition: Every event has a sufficient complete cause such that, given the cause, the event must occur.
• Implication: The past fully determines the future.
• Threat to Free Will:
  • Free will requires the ability to do otherwise in a given situation.
  • If determinism is true, there is only one possible future.
  • Thus, if determinism is true, we don't have free will.
  • Moral responsibility requires free will.
  • So, if determinism is true, we're not morally responsible.
• Responses to Determinism:
  • Determinism is incompatible with free will.
  • Quantum physics shows determinism is not true (indeterminism rules).
  • Compatibilism: Determinism and free will are compatible.

Compatibilism

• Namias believes that people can have free will and be responsible for their actions even if all decisions are caused by earlier events.
• Experiments suggest that when people fully understand determinism, they don't see it as a threat to free will.

Bypassing

• The real threat to free will: actions are caused in ways that bypass conscious deliberations and decisions.
• The threat is that past decisions and thoughts about what to do don't determine the future.
• Has neuroscience shown bypassing?

Libet's Experiments

• Experiments cast doubt on the assumption, flex my wrist.
• Subjects wired to an EEG machine and asked to perform a simple hand movement when they felt like it, and to record the time.
• Brain activity initiating the movement was found hundreds of milliseconds before the conscious decision was reported.
• Some see this as proof that free will is an illusion.
• Libet suggested there might be "free won't": a conscious veto of an action.

Haynes' fMRI Studies

• Haynes updated Libet's research using fMRI technology.
• Subjects were given a button in the left and in their right hand, and they were asked to make the decision to spontaneously make up their mind and choose either to press the left or right button.

Results of Haynes's experiment

• 7 seconds before the muscles move activity predicts which button will be pressed. Five seconds predict when a decision to pick left or right is already predicted seven seconds before.
• Conscious decision is irrelevant with current predictions based on processes outside of awareness.

Namias' Response to Haynes

• The predictions were not 100% accurate. Only did this 60% of the time.
• The type of decision made in the experiment (left or right button) doesn't involve free will as we understand it.
• The experiment doesn't show that a decision was made before people were aware of making it.
• Neural activity that precedes time $w$ might be evidence of considering future courses of actions, deliberating, planning, and controlling.
  *The evidence of neural activity that precedes time $w$ might be precisely the evidence that we are considering future courses of actions, deliberating, planning, and controlling.