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Hi. Thank you
all for coming.
We’re going
to be talking about why we human
beings have a determined will
rather than a free will, and why
understanding and acknowledging
this matters. We’ll go
into the history of the topic.
We will look at some relatively
recent neurobiological and
psychological research that
provides us compelling evidence
for this conclusion. I’d
like to take some time after
that to address any questions or
comments you might have. We’ll
conclude by exploring why this
question of a determined will
vs. a free will matters both at
the personal and the societal
level.
O.K. Let’s
begin with the acknowledgement
that Mother Nature loves to play
tricks on us.
1) It seems
to us that the Sun is revolving
around our planet Earth, but
upon closer inspection we
discover that it is we who are
revolving around the Sun.
2) Our world
also seems perfectly still, and
motionless, yet our scientists
tell us that our planet Earth is
hurtling around the Sun at a
speed well over 600 thousand
miles per hours.
3) We’ve even
learned how to create our own
illusions
When we dig a
bit below the surface of how
things appear, we discover that
the notion that we human beings
have a free will is actually
also an illusion. Before
we go further, what we need to
do first is to be very, very
clear about exactly what we mean
when we say “free will.”
Let’s begin
with the word “will.” We human
beings all have a will or
volition, and this is certainly
no illusion. We make choices all
of the time. We decide to do
things or to not do them.
But that’s not what’s at issue
here. What we need to
explore is what exactly do we
mean by a FREE will, or, put a
different way, what is our human
will supposedly free FROM.
The term FREE
WILL is generally taken to mean
that we human beings are free to
think, feel and do whatever we
want regardless of:
1) Whom
we were born to, and how
they raised us
2) Where
we were born, and where we
grew up
3) What
we learned, or didn’t’
learn, in school and from
life in general
4) How
young or old we are
5) How
smart or not we are
6) What
experiences we’ve had, or
haven’t had
7) What
type of personality we have
8) What
our genetic makeup is,
including whether we were
born male or female
9) What
our unconscious mind happens
to be doing
10) Our
preferences, needs and
desires
11) And
various other factors
That’s what we mean by free
will, and that’s what the vast
majority of philosophers and
scientists mean when they use
the term free will.
In science
there was a debate that
presumably went on for decades
over whether what we human
beings think, feel, and do is
the result of nature or nurture.
Is human behavior caused by our
heredity or by our environment.
Well, it turns out that human
behavior results from both our
genetic endowment AND by our
environment. But, the very
important point here is that
both nature AND nurture, both
heredity AND environment
prohibit free will.
And before we
go on, I’d like to address what
some of you are very likely
thinking “Of course we human
beings don’t have a completely
free will, but isn’t there some
room left in all of this for us
to have some control over what
we do; don’t we have some
degree, or a partial, free
will?” Well, the short
answer is, as you might have
guessed, “NO.” And I’ll explain
this right now.
Individually
those factors we went over that
determine what we do or don’t do
either contribute to determining
our behavior or they don’t.
Let’s look at this by way of an
illustration.
Let’s assume
it will take exactly two points
of factors to result in our
finally deciding to do
something. So, in our example,
if we tally up two points, will
go into our freezer for a
delicious pint of Hagen Daz
double chocolate ice cream.
Our first
point is an urge arising within
us “Hey, some ice cream would be
perfect right now.” O.K., it looks like
we’re now half way to ice cream
heaven. But suddenly we
find ourselves thinking “Oh no;
eating that ice cream would be
absolutely sinful.” And this thought
registers on our scale as a
point against our ice cream
quest
Now, we
happen to be seated in front of
our TV at the time and what come
on at this very instant but a
commercial ad for, you guessed
it, Hagen Daz ice cream.
(Factor 3 1 point) And were
suddenly almost at the fridge
again.
Now all this
is actually happening sometime
next week, and we had attended
this talk today, but we really
didn’t feel comfortable with the
idea of giving up on our free
will. We decided to hold on to
our free will, simply because it
made us feel better to keep it
than to let it go. So we
say to ourselves “Wait a minute,
I have a free will. I can choose
to not eat that ice cream if I
want. I’m going to prove that
guy at the Empire State Student
Acdemic Conference wrong. I will RESIST!
And
we do, and we’re back down to
one point again, and no ice
cream.
But just as
we finished thinking that to
ourselves, who comes into the
room but our very favorite
person in the world, and what
does this person just happen to
say to us? “Hey, who’s in mood
for ice cream?” and we score a point.
Well, I think
you can guess what happens next.
We think to ourselves “I do have
a free will, and I’ll surely
prove it….sometime tomorrow. And we
score that second point and race
off to the freezer in
anticipatory delight. So,
I think we can see that some or
another factor will ultimately
and completely tip us over the
edge to where we will do
something, or not do something,
and that the notion that we have
some amount of free will, some
partial free will, really does
not stand up to the test of
reason.
I trust
you’re beginning to understand
exactly why we human beings do
not actually have a free will.
We have what we can best be
described as a determined will.
And if you are, this is a good
place to consider some very
important caveats. First,
understanding that we human
beings really do not have a free
will does not mean…
A) We can
all now do whatever we want
Other
people, and probably also
our conscience, will not
suddenly stop holding us
accountable.
B) does
not mean we’ll accept bad
behavior from others
We will
still need to address
threats to value we hold
dear
C) Will
not mean we will do away
with our rules, governments,
and systems of law
We will
still need sociatal
insititutions and guidelines
for maintaining order and
morality.
D) will
not cause civilization to
crumble.
In fact,
it will probably help us all
get along a lot better.
We are hardwired to seek
pleasure and avoid pain, to do
what seems most reasonable to
us, and to do what seems most
morally appropriate. I’ll
go into this more later, But for
now I hope we all understand
that our acknowledging that free
will is a delusion will not
create chaos.
Now, let’s go
into the history of the matter.
At about the
5th century BC, in
his work On the Mind, the
Greek Philosopher Leucippus
penned the earliest known
universal statement describing
what we today understand as
determinism, or the law of cause
and effect. Leucippus
wrote that
“Nothing
happens at random, but
everything for a reason and by
necessity.”
With this understanding, we
consider the idea of a causal
regress, and it is easy to see
how we humans have determined
wills rather than free wills.
The concepts
of will and free will are
actually Christian concepts. It
was Saint Paul in his Letter to
the Romans, which is dated at
about 58 A.D., who first
discovers this thing we call
human will. He came to it by
recognizing that he could not
often do as much right as he
wanted. In Romans 7 15 He says:
“I don’t
understand myself at all, for I
really want to do what is right,
but I can’t.” I do what I don’t
want to – what I hate.”
Apparently,
nothing new was said on the
matter for the next few hundred
years until St. Augustine
grappled with the concepts of
evil and justice. In his book
De libero arbitrio,
which is translated as “On Free
Will,” Saint Augustine writes:
“Evil deeds
are punished by the justice of
God. They would not be punished
justly if they had not been
performed voluntarily”
The problem
he saw was that if human beings
did not have a free will, it
would be unfair for God to
arbitrarily reward or punish us.
St. Augustine concluded that God
could not be unfair, and so he
created the concept of a human
free will, whereby we earn our
reward or punishment by what we
freely do.
We now have a
definition for the term free
will, a general understanding of
why free will is logically
impossible, and a brief history
of causality and the idea of
free will. So, how do
our greatest modern philosopher
weigh in?
British
physicist, astronomer and
mathematician Sir James Jeans
wrote in his 1943 book
Physics and Philosophy
"Practically
all modern philosophers of the
first rank -- Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume,
Kant, Hegel, Mill, Alexander, as
well as many others -- have been
determinists in the sense of
admitting the cogency of the
arguments for determinism, but
many have at the same time been
indeterminists in the sense of
hoping to find a loophole of
escape from these arguments.
Often they conceded that our
apparent freedom is an illusion,
so that the only loophole they
could hope to find would be an
explanation as to how the
illusion could originate."
Why were
these philosophers forced to
admit that free will was, in
fact, an illusion?
In addition
to the logical arguments against
free will dating back to
Leucippus’ statement that
“Nothing happens at random, but
everything for a reason and by
necessity,” there was solid
scientific and mathematical
theories to contend with.
In
the late 1600s, the British
genius Sir Isaac Newton
developed what came to be the
dominant scientific theory of
physical reality for the next
three hundred years. It was
known as Newtonian or Classical
Mechanics, and it lent
undeniable and powerful
scientific evidence to the
causal principle that Leucippus
had stated two thousand years
previously with his statement
“----.”
This view of
causal determinism held that the
universe is completely
mechanistic, and that it is
governed completely by the
principle of cause and effect.
This theory presented a strong
scientific challenge to the
notion of free will.
As Sir James
Jeans stated, many of our top
thinkers were not at all pleased
with this idea that we are all
robots, or puppets or actors,
and that free will is nothing
more than an illusion. So in the
early twentieth century, some
hope for human free will was
revived because a development in
an interpretation of the new
quantum mechanics that had
recently been developed.
In 1925,
physicist Warner Heisenberg came
out with what came to be
referred to as the Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle.
Basically, his uncertainty
principle says that we can
measure the position of a
particle or the momentum of a
particle (momentum meaning its
direction and velocity), but we
cannot simultaneously measure
both the position and momentum.
At the same
time, physicists were grappling
with how to explain or interpret
their new quantum mechanics.
This Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle , one of Heisenberg’s
contemporaries back then was
Niels Bohr, who was very
instrumental in developing our
understanding quantum physics.
He and others, including Albert
Einstein, set about to interpret
what the new quantum mechanical
equations meant about the nature
of physical reality. Bohr’s view
came to be known as the
Copenhagen Interpretation of
Quantum Mechanics, and it was
opposed by many in the field,
including Albert Einstein.
Bohr’s
position was that if you
couldn’t simultaneously measure
the position and momentum of a
particle, they didn’t’ have a
simultaneous position and
momentum. That’s like saying
that a quarter doesn’t have a
head and a tail simultaneously
because we can’t see both at the
same time.
Bohr also
claimed that because of the
Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle, the sub-atomic
particles that quantum physics
deals with are therefore able to
violate the principle of cause
and effect.
Many of our
greatest modern philosophers and
scientists understood that
reason and classical mechanics
made free will impossible, but
they didn’t like it.
Some of them saw the Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle and Bohr’s
Copenhagen Interpretation of
quantum physics as a way to
defend their desire that we
human beings have a free will.
So, they advanced the view that
determinism, with it’s principle
of cause and effect, was no
longer a threat to free will
because elementary particle
behavior was inherently
indeterministic; in other words
it occurred essentially
uncaused.
Well, that
worked well for a while, until
everyone realized that an
indeterministic universe where
things happen at random and for
no reason was no help in
defending the notion of free
will. What would be the meaning
and value of a free will if we
did all that we did for no
reason at all that we could
claim as our own?
Quantum
Mechanics and the Heisenberg
Uncertainly Principle was the
last serious argument for a free
will, although it turned out to
be no argument at all. Some
people still insist that certain
activities like radioactive
decay transgresses determinism,
but that assertion faces the
same dilemma as the Copenhagen
Interpretation; if an action is
acausal it is certainly cannot
be freely willed in any
meaningful sense.
So, the
notion of free will was shown by
physics and logic to be false,
and while many philosophers
continue to assert that human
beings do have free will, their
view is more a belief than a
philosophical or scientific
argument
And during
the last several decades, the
notion that we human beings have
a free wil has suffered numerous
and major blows at the hands of
geneticists, neurobiologists,
sociologists, and psychologists,
who have devised brilliant
scientific methods for
empirically demonstrating that
we human beings do not have a
free will.
Here is some
powerful evidence from the field
of neuroscience. In 1964,
neuroscientist Hans Kornhuber
discovers “the readiness
potential”
1. Attaches electromyogram (EMG)
to measure muscle activity of a
finger as it flexes.
2. Attaches an
electroencephalogram (EEG) to
the same person’s head to
measure brain activity.
3. Detects brain activity before
the finger flexes – calls it the
readiness potential, and it
signals that muscle activity is
unequicovally about to occur.
In the 1970s, neurophysiologist Bejamin Libet
applies Kornhuber’s findings to
the determined will vs. free
will question.
1. Attaches EMG and EEG to his
subjects in a similar manner as
Kornhuber.
2. Instructs his subjects to
flex their wrist whenever they
want
3. Instructs his subjects to
tell him the instant they decide to flex their wrist.
4. Libet discovered that the
readiness potential occurred at
550 milliseconds before the
wrist flexed.
5. Libet also discovered that
the subjects became aware of
their decision to flex their
wrist at 300 milliseconds before
they flexed their wrist.
Libet’s experiment showed that
the subjects unconsciously
decided to flex their wrist 200
milliseconds before they were
consciously aware of their
decision to flex. The decision to flex their wrist
could not be attributed to a
free will, since it was
initiated at the level of the
unconscious.
Now let’s
explore some more recent
findings from the field of
psychology. In 1996, Yale psychologist John
Bargh and his colleagues publish
their paper on priming and free
will.
1) Bargh assigned his target and
control subjects the task of
making sentences from scrambled
words.
2) The target group’s words --
gray, wrinkled, wise,
Florida, Bingo --were
purposely chosen to connote the
stereotype of “elderly.” The
control group was given neutral
words.
3) After finishing their task,
the two groups are observed as
they walk toward an elevator to
leave the building.
4) The target group is observed
to walk at a slower pace than
the control group.
Bargh’s experiment shows how our
unconscious, and not our free
will, is responsible for
behavior we ordinarily assume is
under our conscious control.
In a second experiment published
in 1996, Bargh and his
colleagues prime his target
groups for either rudeness or
politeness.
1) Bargh assigns the scrambled
word task to each group.
“Politeness”
subjects are assigned words like
aggressively, bold, rude,
annoyingly, interrupt,
audaciously
“Rudeness”
subjects are assigned words like
respect, honor, considerate,
appreciate, patiently
2) After completing task,
subjects are instructed to
notify one of Bargh’s
colleagues.
3) Bargh’s colleague is
instructed to remain busy in
conversation for 10 minutes.
4) 67 percent of the subjects
primed for rudeness interrupted
Bargh’s colleague, while only 6
percent of the subjects primed
for politness interrupted
Bargh’s colleague before the 10
minutes elapsed.
5) When Bargh asked subjects in
both groups why they interrupted
or waited, they offered creative
answers, but none were aware of
the unconscious priming.
So,
psychology seems also to weigh
in on the side of humans having
a will determined by unconscious
processes rather than a free
will. These are
just example of the dozens and
dozens of experiments across
various disciplines that provide
very strong evidence that
decisions we ordinarily
attribute to a free will
actually result from factors
completely outside of our
control.
So, we have
explored very strong logical,
physical, psychological and
neurological evidence that our
notion of free will is no more
of a reality as is a flat,
motionless earth, or a Sun that
revolves around our planet.
Before we explore why this topic
is so very important to how we
live our lives, I’d like to
offer one more explanation for
why we human beings do not have
a free will and then take a few
minutes to address some comments
or questions you may have.
QUESTIONS AND
COMMENTS
Okay, now
let’s explore why all of this
matters. Let’s take a
look at two hypothetical
individuals, John and Grace.
A. Grace has learned from
everyone he has ever known that
voting is the right and moral
thing to do.
B. John has learned from
everyone she has ever known that
voting is wrong and immoral.
C. Grace always votes. John
never votes
Questions:
1. Is Grace
praiseworthy for always voting?
2. Is John
blameworthy for never voting?
3. Should
Grace feel proud of always
voting?
4. Should
John feel ashamed or guilty of
never voting?
Let’s explore the same concept
through another example.
Ten very big, strong guys walk
into this room, take hold of
this person, force her to grasp
a magic marker, and despite her
resistance, make her scribble
FREEBIRD in large letters on the
floor in front of her. Would it
right to hold her accountable
for this action?
On a personal level, the belief
in free will leads to irrational
blame, guilt, arrogance, and
envy --
1. Blame
rather than understanding.
2. Guilt
rather than acceptance.
3. Arrogance
rather than gratitude.
4. Envy
rather positive self-regard.
On a societal level, the
belief in free will leads to
irrational condemnation,
punishment and indifference –
1. The U.S. accounts for about 5
percent of the world’s
population, but is responsible
for 25 percent of incarcerations
throughout the world.
During the last hundred years
criminal justice in the U.S. has
moved from the model of reform
(as in reformatory and
penitentiary) to the model of
condemnation and punishment.
2. In our world, every day
29,000 children aged five and
under die of largely preventable
poverty related causes.
Many of us in the rich justify
our indifference toward their
plight by blaming their parents
for giving birth to them, or not
working hard enough to feed and
care for them.
How does
transcending the illusion of
free will create a better world?
1) It enables
us to see our reality in a
completely new and different
light, and from a completely
different perspective.
2) It
represents an giant leap forward
in the evolution of human
consciousness.
3) It brings
our perception of reality more
in line with the facts of our
universe.
4) It enables
us to be better people.
Thank you for coming to my
talk,. May we all act with the
determined will to create a
better world for ourselves and
those who follow after us.
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