Most people believe they have free will in the sense that
when confronted with an issue that demands resolution, they will consider the
possible responses and all possible pluses and minuses of each and will select
the action that is consistent with their experiences, goals, and sense of right
and wrong. However, there are many who
will claim that the individual is only responding to all the neuronal exchanges
going on in the physical brain which is making the decision for the
person. A smaller minority will take
this notion that our brains make our decisions for us to the logical extreme
and claim that our lack of free will results in a lack of responsibility for
our actions. If we have no free will and
are unable to not do what we have just done, how can we be held accountable for
committing a crime?
Physical scientists tend to be comfortable with their
understanding of physical laws and believe that the human body and its brain
are a mechanical system that moves from one point in time to the next in a
defined, deterministic fashion, and there is no way to stop it. Bio-scientists, as they learn more about
biofunction, tend to be less rigid in their thinking. Kevin J. Mitchell is associate professor of
genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He believes that evolution created animals
that needed free will and natural selection provided them with it. He makes his case in his book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.
“It is fashionable these days to
claim that ‘free will is an illusion!’: either it does not exist at all, or it
is really not what we think it is. I am
not willing to give up on it so easily.
In this book I argue that we really are agents. We make decisions, we choose, we act—we
are causal forces in the universe. These
are the fundamental truths of our existence and absolutely the most basic
phenomenology of our lives…It is to accept instead that there is a deep mystery
to be solved and to realize that we may need to question the philosophic
bedrock of our scientific approach if we are to reconcile the clear existence
of choice with the apparent determinism of the physical universe.”
“All living things have some
degree of agency. That is their defining
characteristic, what sets them apart from the mostly lifeless, passive
universe. Living beings are autonomous
entities, imbued with purpose and able to act on their own terms, not yoked to
every cause in their environment but causes in their own right.”
Mitchell’s task is to convince his readers that brains of
humans and many other animals are designed to accept inputs from many lower
order neural functions about memories, past experiences, current intentions,
and such, yet are capable of reaching a decision that need not be directly
based on any of those inputs. In other
words, the brain cannot ignore those inputs, but it can be creative.
He builds his case by taking us through the development
of agency in animals from single cell bacteria to complex human-like species,
illustrating how natural selection recognizes mutations that are beneficial and
allows them to propagate. An amoeba that
can take in nutrients and excrete waste is at risk of losing a food source if
it is just floating around randomly in water, but if it develops an ability to detect
interesting chemicals in its surroundings and the ability to move it has a much
better chance of survival. Natural
Selection provided these things.
Higher-order animals such as mammals that have developed
mobility, vision, hearing, smell, and other capabilities need neural functions
to manage inputs from the various senses and provide appropriate information
for planning actions. If they are to
perform effectively, they must break from the simple sensation-response
patterns of simple animals and create a hierarchical structure in which the
machinery of consciousness can, if necessary, take control of any impulsive responses
that might be suggested and provide an analysis of potential options before
choosing a course of action. Natural
selection provided the necessary neural functions as animals’ environments
became more complex, requiring ever more complex means of reasoning to prosper
“Through the cumulative effects
of natural selection across millennia and of learning over the course of
individual lifetimes, living things accrete causal power. Although they are made of physical
components, they are not merely physical systems, where the things that happen
within them are driven by low-level causes.
They are organized for a purpose, and that organization constrains the
physical components to enable true functionality and goal-directed action. Their physical structures are configured so
that they run on meaning, on patterns of activity that represent things—percepts,
concepts, beliefs, needs, goals, plans, causal relations, regularities of the
world, memories, scenes, narrative sequences, and possibilities.”
“First, organisms do not
passively wait for external stimuli to respond to. Their brains, when awake, are constantly
cycling through possible actions, and this stream of behavior accommodates to
new information and the changing environment.
Second, this is not a one-way relationship from environment to organism:
it is a recursive loop of mutual interaction.
The activity of the organism changes the environment and the organism’s
relation to it. The apparently linear
chain of causation is really a loop or a series of loops—you can think of it
as a spiral stretched through time. If
we ignore these reciprocal effects, we are left studying only half the overall
system. Third, the processes of decision
making and action selection are just that—processes:
they have duration through time. They
are not instantaneous transitions from one physical state of the system to the
next. This point is crucial when we
consider some philosophical challenges to the idea that choices can be made at
all.”
“Finally, the description of the
processes involved in action selection risks giving the impression of a
mechanism churning away or of a computer running a linear algorithm…However,
the idea of an algorithm—a series of steps being completed
methodically and sequentially—is not an accurate conception of what is
happening. The various subsystems
involved are in constant dialogue with each other, each attempting to satisfy
its own constraints in the context of the dynamically changing information it
receives from all the interconnected areas.
Ultimately through these dynamic, distributed, and recursive
interactions, the whole system settles into a new state—one that drives the
release of one of the set of possible actions under consideration and the
inhibition of all the others.”
“In a holistic sense, the
organism’s neural circuits are not deciding—the organism is
deciding. It’s not a machine computing
inputs to produce outputs. It’s an
integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of
all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is
grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but
it is not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms. What the system is doing should not be
identified with how the system is doing it.
Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it’s the self that
decides. If we break them apart, even
conceptually, we lose sight of the thing we are trying to explain.”
“Our minds are not an extra
layer sitting above our physical brains, somehow directing the flow of
electrical activity. The activity
distributed across all those neural circuits produces or entails our
mental experience…The meaning of those patterns for the organism has causal
power based on how the system is physically configured. We can thus build a holistic physical
conception of agency without either reducing it or mystifying it.”
We feel we have free will because we know that we are
going through the same sort of process that Mitchell describes above when we are
trying to reach a decision. The self we
have become requires nothing beyond our physical structure to reach such decisions. It is imperative to realize that the agency
our brains provide allows us to make decisions that will be incorporated in the
experience base of the self that will emerge from this decision process. We thus have the power to modify the self we were
into a new self (better or worse?).
Mitchell goes at length to eliminate the common attempts
to claim our actions are predetermined and not under our control. But the most compelling counter to them is
his in-depth description of what happens in the brain as we struggle to
understand something or to make a decision.
Some background on the properties of neurons is required.
“Cells come in all shapes and
sizes, but whether they are globular or are packed together like little bricks,
most are content to keep their bits local.
Neurons, by contrast, send long, thin cellular projections out from the
cell body, which branch to form wondrous tree-like structures that enable them
to connect with many other neurons or with sensory or muscle cells. Importantly, they can bypass many cells along
the way, specifically connecting over long distances—up to a meter in the
human body!”
“There are two types of these
extensions: dendrites, which are specialized for receiving signals, and
the axon, which is specialized for sending signals. The neuron is thus polarized: it has an ‘input’
end and an ‘output’ end, with the cell body, where the nucleus is, sitting in
the middle.”
“The real power of neurons comes
from the way they are connected. They
rarely have input from only one cell that they send to just one other cell:
frankly, that would be pointless.
Instead, their branching dendrites collect signals from many cells,
allowing the neuron to perform all kinds of integrative operations to extract
relevant meaning from that incoming information…Similarly, they can send output
to many cells, allowing them to convey information in a coordinated fashion
across a network of connected cells.”
The simple act of trying to recall a memory can be quick
or slow, and it can be clear or indistinct, or maybe it cannot be found at all. A murky memory can be disappointing or
deceptive, but in some instances, it can provide a new interpretation of the
event being recalled. The author
provides this perspective on neurons.
“They are made of wet, jiggly,
incomprehensively tiny components that jitter about constantly, diffusing
around at random, bumping into each other, engaging in transient molecular
interactions, shifting their conformations, and continually being chemically
modified, transformed, broken down, and remanufactured. How can you make a reliable information
processor out of this kind of messy wetware?”
Trust natural selection to turn an apparent weakness into
a survival enhancement feature.
“This generates what engineers
call noise in neural populations: random fluctuations in the very
parameters that are used to transmit signals.
This noise presents nature with a problem: it is difficult to build
structures capable of complex cognitive operations out of individually
unreliable components. But organisms
also capitalize on this underlying variability.
Crucially, it breaks what Epicurus called ‘the treaties of fate,’ under
which the behavior of the organism would simply reflect the inevitable
transitions from one physical state to the next. Instead, the brain has evolved to take
advantage of the noisiness of its components to allow the organism to make some
decisions itself.”
“The noisiness of neural
components is a crucial factor in enabling an organism to flexibly adapt to its
changing environment—both on the fly and over time. Moreover, organisms have developed numerous
mechanisms to directly harness the underlying randomness in neural
activity. It can be drawn on to resolve
an impasse in decision making, to increase exploratory behavior, or allow novel
ideas to be considered when planning the next action. These phenomena illustrate the reality of
noisy processes in the nervous system and highlight a surprising but very
important fact: organisms can sometime choose to do something random.”
So much for the assumption that all our actions are
predetermined.
“In humans we recognize this
capacity as creativity…When we are frustrated in achieving our
current goals or when none of the conceived options presents an adequate
solution to the current problem, we can broaden our search beyond the obvious
to consider new ideas. These do not
spring from nowhere but often arise as cognitive permutations: by combining
knowledge in new ways, by drawing abstract analogies with previously
encountered problems in different domains, or by recognizing and questioning
current assumptions that may be limiting the options that occur to us. In this way, humans become truly creative
agents, using the freedom conferred by the underlying neural indeterminacy to
generate genuinely original thoughts and ideas, which we can then scrutinize to
find the ones that actually solve the problem.
Creative thoughts can thus be seen as acts of free will, facilitated by
chance but filtered by choice. As dual
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling said, ‘If you want to have good ideas
you must have many ideas. Most of them
will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away’.”
Freed from the notion of neural determinacy, we can
celebrate the fact that when we work hard to understand difficult concepts and
occasionally succeed, or we come up with a new concept and we are heralded for
it or solve a difficult problem we can enjoy it as truly our accomplishment. For our brain works exactly as we thought it
did. We just didn’t know all the
details.
Mitchell closes with this final comment.
“Thinking may have evolved for
controlling action. But the expansion of
our neural resources and the recursive architecture of our cognitive systems
gave us the ability to think about our thoughts. We internalized cognition to such an extent
that it became its own world: what cognitive scientists Uta and Chris Frith
have called a world of ideas. Our
minds were set free. We are capable of
open-ended, truly creative thought; of imagination; of entertaining fanciful
notions and hypothetical futures; of creating art and music and science; and
abstract reasoning that has revealed the deepest laws and principles of the
universe.”