Free will is an interesting topic which carries significant religious baggage and has been a focal point of philosophical thought for centuries. Intuitively it seems to us that we have the free will to make choices but upon closer inspection it becomes less obvious.
The brain is a machine that operates according to the laws of physics. The complexity of the brain is very high - it's certainly not understood fully - but we know how big neurons are and how they communicate. And at those length and time scales we would not expect quantum mechanics to be relevant; that is, we would expect the behavior of the brain (and, by extension, the entire physical self) to be a deterministic result from sensory input.
(Of course quantum mechanics introduces perfect randomness, so that doesn't give you free will anyway, but it would at least be somewhere to start.)
Now the way we test whether this is the case is as follows. I give you the choice between chocolate and strawberry ice cream. You choose one. Then I rewind the universe and ask you the exact same question in the exact same environment while your brain is in the exact same state, over and over again. If you choose chocolate every single time, your brain is deterministic; otherwise you have free will.
Unfortunately this test is not possible, for obvious reasons. And the brain is far too complex for us to assemble a perfectly controlled test without time travel. Barring significant advances in brain-related technology, testing free will in any conclusive way is a bust. There plenty of science trying to inch towards understanding free will, of course, but studies are extremely limited in scope. In general they aim to influence or predict the subconscious actions of an individual.
Since there's no known physical or biological mechanism by which we could reasonably expect free will to arise, its existence is starting to seem unlikely.
This seems strange, at least at an intuitive level, because we are conscious beings (I am at least!). I can process information and make decisions. I can choose to take particular actions. If you ask me a question I can think about it, consciously come to a conclusion, and use my mouth and lungs to tell you the answer.
The problem is, as far as I can tell, nobody has a clue why that is. In an academic context consciousness doesn't seem to be well defined (which is unsurprising as it's inherently subjective). Studies regarding consciousness, like those regarding free will, seem more or less in line with tests of the limits of subconscious behavior. That leaves me feeling not much closer to an answer, but at least I'm feeling like I've come up with a good question:
I am conscious, whether or not I can rigorously explain to you what that means. Is there some mechanism by which my consciousness exerts control over my body? Or is my consciousness a by product of a complex but deterministic machine?
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If everything falls under the laws of physics, can't we say that anything in the physical world could ever have free will. Not only that but as entirely physical beings, we cannot conceive of anything that would have free will. Yet we have a very good conception of free will so something has gone awry with our physicalism argument.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that something is lost when reductionism is used here. The human brain produces outputs like a computer and based on its components, we have no reason to think that it shouldn't act like a computer. But in practice it produces mental states for which we have no explanation and at the end of the day are just bizarre.
So I think something else is going on. Something which is not the sum of its parts emerges when you put together a human brain. And physics seems to be completely useless in explaining that emergence (at least at this point in time).
A like to think of the mind as a Rube Goldberg machine. You can reduce it down to an input and an output (I flick a switch and a match is lit). But then you've entirely missed the point.