Introduction to
the 2013 Digital Edition
The year following the release of
the first edition of Exploring
the Illusion of Free Will on
December 2, 1011 saw an explosion of
coverage on the illusion of free
will both in the mainstream press
and in the Internet blogosphere.
During this time, The New York
Times, USA Today, The
Atlantic and other major
newspapers and magazines published
often first-ever pieces refuting
free will. Scientific American
Mind, in fact, featured a cover
story on the free will illusion in
their May/June, 2012 print issue. I
have compiled a virtually complete
hyperlinked list of that coverage,
and included it in the epilogue.
I have also included a
hyperlinked listing of books
throughout history, both in and out
of print, devoted to refuting the
notion of free will.
In this second edition introduction,
I have additionally outlined a brief
history of some of the major causes
and landmarks in this unprecedented
public awakening to, and interest
in, the question of whether or not
we have a free will.
Along
with this new interest among the
public regarding who we humans truly
are and what causes us to do what we
do has come substantial
misconception about the term free
will. In this introduction, I
clarify some of this confusion so
that we can arrive at a clear and
specific understanding of what the
vast majority of philosophers and
social scientists mean when they say
that free will is an illusion. The
term free will is generally
taken to mean that we human beings
are free to think, feel, say and do
whatever we want regardless
of:
To whom we were born, and
how they raised us
Where we
were born, and where grew up
What we
learned, or didn't learn, in school
and from life in general
How young
or old we are
How smart
or not we are
What
experiences we’ve had, or haven’t
had
What type
of personality we have
What our
genetic makeup is, including whether
we were born male or female
What our
unconscious mind happens to be doing
Our
preferences, needs and desires
And
various other factors
That’s what the vast majority of
philosophers and scientists mean
when they refer to free will.
The basic reason we humans do not
have a free will is because of the
principle of causality, which is
better known as the law of cause and
effect, and is also referred to as,
or held to be synonymous with, the
concept of determinism. Causality
basically means that everything that
happens is caused. Things don't just
happen. The most general and
comprehensive description of this
principle is that the state of the
universe at one moment is the
complete cause of the state of the
universe at the next moment and the
complete effect of the state of the
universe at the previous moment.
From this, it follows that the
ensuing chain of universal causality
stretches back in time to before the
Earth was created and reaches
forward in time into the indefinite
future. That’s essentially the
reason free will is an illusion.
Through the process of cause and
effect, the universe long before we
were born has predetermined
everything that happens in our
universe today, including everything
we think, feel, say and do. We can
also understand why free will is
impossible through other means.
In science there was once a
debate over whether what we humans
do is the result of nature or
nurture. Scientists ultimately
proved that human behavior results
from both our genetic endowment
and our environment. But,
neither nature nor nurture, nor
their combination, allows for a free
will. If you are beginning to see
why we human beings do not have a
free will, this is a good place to
consider two important caveats.
Understanding that we do not have a
free will does not give us
permission to do whatever we want,
does not mean we must passively
accept bad behavior from others,
does not mean we must do away with
our rules, governments, and
principles of law, and will not
cause civilization to crumble.
A brief
history of determined vs. free will
ideas
Cause and Effect – 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: “Nothing happens at
random, but everything for a reason
and by necessity.”
Human Will – Paul, in his Letter to the Romans,
which is dated at about 58 A.D.,
recognized that he could not often
do as much good as he wanted. He
wrote in Romans 7:15 that: “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.” (Translation – The
Living Bible)
Free Will – A few hundred years later, Augustine
was grappling with the concepts of
evil and justice, and wrote in his
book De Libero Arbitrio,
386-395 A.D., (translated as “On
Free Will”) that “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
humans do not have a free will, it
would be unfair for God to
arbitrarily reward or punish us.
Augustine concluded that God could
not be unfair, and so he invoked the
concept of a human free will,
whereby we earn our reward or
punishment by what we freely choose.
Classical Mechanics – In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton
published his “Laws of Motions” that
mathematically describes the
physical universe as acting
mechanistically according to the
principle of cause and effect.
Classical Mechanics is a completely
deterministic theory.
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle – In 1927
Warner Heisenberg described
mathematically why we cannot
simultaneously measure the position
and momentum, and other conjugate
variables, of a particle.
Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics –
Niels Bohr and others asserted that
elementary particles do not have a
simultaneous position and momentum,
and that they are not subject to the
principle of cause and effect.
Believers in free will saw the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and
Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum
Mechanics as providing a possibility
for free will to exist. They
asserted that if elementary
particles behave indeterministically,
they are not subject to the
principle of cause and effect that
prohibits free will. But, as noted,
it became apparent that
indeterminism, or the idea that
certain actions including human
choices have no cause, prohibits
free will perhaps even more strongly
than does determinism.
Other Sciences, and Free Will – During
the last several decades, the idea
of free will has been repeatedly
refuted by geneticists,
neuroscientists, sociologists, and
psychologists, who have devised
various experiments to explain why
we do not have a free will. In 1964,
neuroscientist Hans Kornhuber
discovered what has come to be known
as “the readiness potential.” He
used an electromyogram, or EMG, to
measure the muscle activity of a
person’s finger as it flexed, and an
electroencephalogram, or EEG, to
measure the person’s brain activity.
He detected brain activity before
the finger flexed, and called that
activity the readiness potential.
The readiness potential signals that
muscle activity is absolutely and
irrevocably set to occur.
In the 1980s, neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet used
Kornhuber’s findings to explore the
determined will vs. free will
question. Like Kornhuber, he
attached an EMG and EEG to his
subjects. He instructed them to flex
their wrist whenever they wished,
and to tell him exactly when they
made their decision. Libet found
that the readiness potential
occurred about 550 milliseconds
before the wrist flexed. But the
subjects became aware of their
decision to flex their wrist about
300 milliseconds before they flexed
their wrist. This experiment showed
that the subjects had unconsciously
decided to flex their wrist 200
milliseconds before they were
consciously aware of their decision.
Since their decision was initiated
at the level of the unconscious,
flexing their wrist could not have
been consciously, or freely, willed.
During the mid 90s, Yale psychologist John Bargh and
his colleagues studied the effects
of priming on our human will. Bargh
assigned two groups of subjects the
task of making sentences from
scrambled words. The target group’s
words – gray, wrinkled, wise,
Florida, and Bingo – were chosen to
prime the stereotype of “elderly.”
The control group was given neutral
words. After finishing their task,
the two groups were observed as they
walked toward an elevator to leave
the building. Bargh observed that
the target group consistently walked
to the elevator at a slower pace
than did the control group. His
experiment shows how our unconscious
is responsible for behavior we
ordinarily assume is under our
conscious, or free, control. In a
second experiment, Bargh and his
colleagues primed his target groups
for either rudeness or politeness.
Again, Bargh assigned the scrambled
word task to each group. The
“Rudeness” group was assigned words
like aggressively, bold, rude,
annoyingly, interrupt and
audaciously. The “Politeness” group
was assigned words like respect,
honor, considerate, appreciate and
patiently. After completing the
sentence task, the subjects from
each group were instructed to notify
one of Bargh’s colleagues that they
were done. Bargh, however,
instructed his colleague to remain
busy in conversation for ten
minutes, so that the subjects would
either have to wait a long while or
interrupt the conversation.
As it turned out, before the ten
minutes had elapsed 67 percent of
the subjects primed for rudeness
interrupted Bargh’s colleague, while
only 6 percent of the subjects
primed for politeness interrupted.
Also, very interestingly, when Bargh
asked his subjects why they
interrupted or chose to patiently
wait, they offered creative answers,
but none showed any awareness of the
unconscious priming that had
compelled their choices. These are
just a few of the dozens of
scientific experiments from various
scientific disciplines that reveal
that decisions we ordinarily
attribute to a "free" will are
actually caused by factors
completely outside of our control.
Why all of this matters – Let’s look at two
individuals, Grace and John. Grace
learned from everyone she ever knew
that voting is the right and moral
thing to do. John learned from
everyone he ever knew that voting is
wrong and immoral. Grace always
votes. John never votes. Should we
consider Grace praiseworthy for
always voting? Should we blame John
for never voting? Should Grace feel
proud of always voting, and should
John feel ashamed or guilty of never
voting?
We can explore this notion of fundamental
accountability through another
example. Ten big guys walk into a
room, take hold of a person, force
him to grasp a magic marker, and
despite his resistance, make him
scribble FREEBIRD in large letters
on the floor in front of him. Would
it be right to hold him accountable
for this action? Basically all of
our choices are as completely forced
or compelled as were the person’s in
this example. On an individual
level, the belief in free will leads
to irrational blame, guilt,
arrogance, and envy. It causes blame
at the expense of understanding and
problem solving. It causes guilt
rather than acceptance. It causes
arrogance rather than gratitude. It
causes us to envy others at the
expense of positive self-regard.
On a societal level, the belief in free will leads to
irrational condemnation, punishment
and indifference. The U.S. accounts
for about 5 percent of the global
population, but is responsible for
25 percent of incarcerations
throughout the world. During the
last hundred years, our criminal
justice system has moved from reform
(as in reformatory and penitentiary)
to condemnation, revenge,
retribution and hateful punishment.
Regrettably, no prisoner has ever
truly had a choice but to do what
they did. While we must certainly
protect ourselves from those who
pose a threat to our safety and
rights, to the extent we acknowledge
the true causal nature of our human
will, we would do so with far more
understanding and compassion. Also,
we would better appreciate the value
of reaching potential criminals when
they are still young, thereby
lessening the likelihood that they
will resort to crimes as adults. In
our world, every day over 20,000
children aged five and under die of
largely preventable poverty-related
causes. Sadly, many of us from rich
countries justify our indifference
toward them by blaming their parents
for, of their own free will, having
them, or for, of their own free
will, not working hard enough to
feed and care for them.
How would transcending the illusion of free will
create a better world?
We would see the world from a new,
refreshingly different perspective.
It would represent a giant leap
forward in the evolution of human
consciousness.
We would navigate our reality
according to the known facts of our
universe.
It would enable us to be better
people.
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