Free Will: Yes, It Does Exist

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.”