Mick Hartley

From a review of some recent books on free will (via b&w):

If I had free will, I would choose to be funnier. I would choose always to have the right witty riposte ready to disarm adversaries and delight friends. But sadly, it is not so. My lot is for the same lame old gags to hobble out whether I will them to or not, like embarrassing aunts at a wedding.

Indeed if we had free will, we might all choose to have the punning powers of the Two Ronnies, combined with the benevolence of Bob Geldof. But we do not. And that is a fact, laboratory proven.

This is not a good start. It suggests that the reviewer doesn’t even know what free will is, and may possibly be confusing it with omnipotence.

Then there’s this:

But of course we have free will, you might be thinking. You could prove it by, for example, choosing to raise your arm at some point in the next five seconds. Go on then. Done it? There, that was easy. Of your own volition, at the time of your choice, you moved your arm: QED.

But the American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet has shown that before every such movement, there is a distinctive build-up of electrical activity in the brain. And this build-up happens about half a second before your conscious ”decision” to move your arm. So by the time you think, ”OK, I’ll move my arm,” your body is halfway there. Which means your conscious experience of making a decision – the experience associated with free will – is just a kind of add-on, an after-thought that only happens once the brain has already set about its business. In other words, your brain is doing the real work, making your hands turn the pages of this magazine or reach over for your cup of tea, and all the time your conscious mind is tagging along behind.

This result depends on the accurate reporting of the conscious experience of making a decision, which is always going to be unreliable. But then why assume that your free will is always conscious? Yes, you may report that the decision took place, as far as you were aware, after the neurological activity appeared – but what prompted that neurological activity? What else but a decision of yours? Otherwise why doesn’t your arm keep moving all the time, randomly? The cause of your arm moving was your decision to move your arm. The fact that your awareness of that decision follows on from the neurological activity doesn’t change that. All it shows is that (perhaps) a part of your decision-making is pre-conscious, or unconscious. That’s not an uninteresting finding, but it certainly doesn’t show that you have no free will.

Two neuroscientists working in Australia have taken Libet’s discovery one step further. They found that, when asking people to choose to move either their left or right hands, it was possible to influence their choice by electronically stimulating certain parts of their brains. So, for example, the scientists could force the subjects always to choose to move their left hands. But despite their choice being electronically directed, these patients continued to report that they were freely choosing which hand to move.

So you can fool people by electronically stimulating parts of their brain. Well who knew?

Thanks to modern neuro-imaging technology, we now know that our minds – our conscious, mental life – are a product of activity in the brain. What Libet’s and subsequent experiments show is that even when we have the conscious experience of deciding, our brains have really already taken the decision for us. Free will is an illusion.

It’s not thanks to modern neuro-imaging technology that we know that our mental life is a product of brain activity. Those of us of a materialist way of thinking knew that already, and if you’re not a materialist then no amount of neuro-imaging is going to convince you. It’s a philosophical point, not a scientific discovery. And what these experiments show, at the most, is that the workings of our mind – of our will – are not always consciously available to us.

Of course there are neurological correlates to psychological states, whatever you think of as the underlying reality. But why should that mean that the neurology causes the psychology? Is it that old way of thinking whereby lower is always logically prior to higher? – that somehow the real ultimate explanation for everything is going to involve atoms and suchlike?

Consider: someone asks you to raise your arm. You raise your arm. In what possible sense could the fact that neurological activity in your brain is measured as coming before you report that you made the decision to move your arm be taken as a demonstration that you didn’t move your arm out of choice? It’s philosophically incoherent. Either your movement was voluntary, or it wasn’t: you felt constrained perhaps; you noticed the gun in your interlocutor’s hand; someone had stuck a wire into your brain. And if it was voluntary then it was a case of you exercising your free will.

But if this is true, the implications for our systems of morality, of crime and punishment, are shattering. We only punish those we think voluntarily did wrong – not those who literally had no choice but to act as they did. But if there is no free will, then no one has ever had a choice but to act as they did. […]

Derk Pereboom [contributor to “Four Views on Free Will“] recognises that our lack of free will means we need to rethink morality – but sees this as no bad thing. It would, he suggests, lead to sensible reforms, such as shifting the focus of the criminal justice system away from retributive punishment and towards re-education and deterrence – or towards protecting society: ”Suppose that a serial killer continues to pose a grave danger to a community. Even if he is not morally responsible for his crimes, it would be as legitimate to detain him as it is to quarantine a carrier of a deadly communicable disease.”

Ah yes, this is where it’s going: the triumph of the therapeutic. By this logic, of course, no one is responsible for anything. Morality ceases to have any meaning. But this isn’t really anything to do with the findings of modern neuroscience: it’s a political or philosophical programme masquerading as science. It’s a blueprint for a world run by technocrats. Sensible reforms – freed from the tired old constraints of personal responsibility – would include the incarceration of anyone deemed by scientific experts to be likely in the future to commit a crime. Indeed, once we rid ourselves of the old-fashioned and, we are clearly meant to think, barbaric notion of retributive justice, with its medieval emphasis on revenge, this brave new justice wouldn’t bother itself at all about whether or not a person has actually committed a crime: that’s no longer of relevance. All that matters is whether or not someone poses a danger to the community and therefore needs to be incarcerated. Why bother to wait for the actual event? Deal with potential miscreants before they have the chance to become criminals. Save them from themselves.

I don’t think the opinions expressed by the reviewer here are particularly unusual. For anyone who reads much about psychology or neurology, it’s familiar stuff. It seems to me that as well as being profoundly illiberal, it’s also based on muddled philosophy.