Psychology essay thing

Does free will exist?

In this essay, I’m going to be presenting the different points of view, (including my own) on one of the most controversial topics in psychology: The existence (or lack thereof) of free will

Now, there are some things which I must first establish and consider axiomatic for the duration of this essay. The way in which a person is, acts and behaves can be explained purely in terms of physical, scientifically measurable processes. Brain chemistry, electrical activity in the brain, different brain regions fulfilling their tasks, etc. As I will demonstrate later on, some people legitimately believe that this doesn’t preclude the existence of free will. It does, however, preclude the idea that free will exists as something separate to the physical world; an almost ‘spiritual’ entity that transcends the cause and effect model of the universe which science assumes to be true. There is no evidence that anything exists outside of this model, and it would be special pleading to (in the absence of evidence) assert that a human being is somehow special enough to exist on a different plane to everything else. As such, the concept of ‘true’ free will as espoused in theology or certain psychological approaches (such as the humanistic approach) is indefensible, because there is the assumption that there is a free will which exists on a different plane than any other part of human psychology, as opposed to a ‘free will’ which exists directly due to purely physical processes.

To summarise the different remaining perspectives: Firstly, there are hard determinists. These people believe that free will does not exist in any capacity. This can be due to internal determinism (proposed by people such as Sam Harris), which claims that due to the fact that everything that we are and that we do is just a result of predictable, physical causes in the brain; there cannot truly be a free will that is making those decisions. Rather, there is a very complex marvel of biology that takes many complex inputs and produces complex outputs in a way that is theoretically predictable with enough information and computing power. The subjective experience of free will is just caused by the same sort of process as every other component of psychology.

Hard determinists can also take the form of external determinists. Behaviourists such as Skinner would argue that nobody chooses what their external circumstances are, yet a person’s environment largely shapes who they are. As such, it is meaningless to judge or punish people for the way that they are and the way that they act, because these things are largely pre-determined by circumstances totally out of one’s control. Massive differences between individuals of different cultures, for example, prove conclusively that people’s beliefs and actions are largely due to the circumstances in which they are born, so it cannot be claimed that they themselves freely chose to believe those things.

Compatabilists, for example Daniel Dennet, would state that determinism doesn’t necessarily preclude free will; both are true at the same time. Ultimately, people can all subjectively feel that they’re in control of what they do. Even if they are no more than a sum of physical actions within the brain, they still have control over what they do at any given time. No person or thing is forcing their brain to do the things that it does other than the person themselves. Individuals can still in the moment decide what they do and don’t do. The fact that this is theoretically measurable and understandable in purely scientific terms doesn’t take away from the fact that realistically speaking, there is a sense of the self, and the fact that the self is making decisions means we truly do have free will. Right now, you could choose to lift your left hand, your right hand, or neither. The fact that the ultimate decision to lift one or the other (or neither or both) can be explained purely in physical terms does not stop a conscious individual from making that decision. Intuitively, we can all feel it to be true that we are in control of what we do. Determinism is, to a compatibilist, answering a different question.

Finally, there are various types of soft determinists. Proponents of psychological approaches such as social learning theory would be considered soft determinists. A soft determinist would partially agree with a behaviourist insofar as people are indeed shaped by their environment, so people do not from birth have a completely ‘free’ will as to how they will behave and who will they be. However, this doesn’t take away from the fact that ultimately, they can choose to be different to how their environment would shape most people. Many different factors, some outside of someone’s control, go into how a person acts, but there is still a will that each individual has to act how they choose. Additionally, approaches such as social learning theory account for the fact that people still need to choose for their environment to shape them; they need to choose who to pay attention to and they need to have the necessary beliefs (such as that the person is worth emulating) in order to be socially influenced. The environment heavily affects people, often in predictable ways, but this just informs people’s free will rather than replace it.

To begin to decide between the different views, we must define exactly what 'free' and 'will' mean in this context. This in and of itself is a source of contention. Nobody can deny that people are affected by things totally outside of their control. Somebody born in Texas is overwhelmingly likely to be Christian and someone born in Saudi Arabia is even more overwhelmingly likely to be Muslim. To an external determinist, this alone makes free will impossible. That person didn’t choose to be born in Saudi Arabia, just as I didn’t choose to be born in the irreligious UK. Our differences in belief can be attributed to the place in which we were born, not any genetic predisposition that the average Saudi Arabian has which I don’t, or a different ‘free choice’ that we made. Does this mean that our choices are not truly ‘free’?

To a compatabilist, this still does not mean that free will is illusory. The environment is informing what a person believes. In this instance, the environment is heavily informing what a person believes. However, the environment is not forcing anybody to believe anything. The individual is not forced to believe anything. The fact that a small proportion of people born in a place where one belief is enforced end up believing something different proves that. People are still the ultimate arbiter of their thoughts. People can choose what they believe. You are what creates thoughts in your head, and you are what makes you do anything. The environment just provides the framework in which your free will can operate, but it does not displace it, even if the framework is such that it would restrict most people to believing and doing certain things.

To an internal determinist, however, this misses the point. People can create their thoughts, but this isn’t done in a vacuum. An individual’s brain is, totally separate from any sort of control, something which is in a certain condition at a certain time. Every memory, thought, belief, action and trait is exclusively the result of a very specific brain configuration. The very biological structures that allow for things such as ‘willpower’ ‘belief’ ‘resistance to social influence’ ‘hard work’ or anything else that some people would cite as evidence of free will are just as automatic and uncontrollable as blood cell production. Yes, some people can resist their environments. Yes, some people can through extraordinary feats of will force themselves to do difficult things. However, none of these things are any more the case of ‘free will’ than anything else in the brain or even the rest of the body. Nobody chooses how their brain is at any particular time. It just is. A combination of genes, environment and experience, no more. This leaves no room for free will. No one component of somebody’s body (including their psychology) is separate to this. Everything that is ever done in the body, including in the brain, is an automatic, physically explainable occurrence. Just because our (very complex) brains create an illusion that one subsection of these occurrences are under ‘our’ control, doesn’t mean it really is under the control of an individual’s will (if there is such thing as a discernible ‘individual’, more on that later). In fact, this too is explainable by the very same physical causes as anything else in the body. Any examples of people doing something which suggests that external determinism doesn’t completely remove free will can be explained with internal determinism. Due to a very specific configuration of the brain at that moment in time, the ability to resist the environment is strong in that person. This process and the resulting experience is just as much a free, conscious decision as your heart beating. The subjective experience that there is a difference in how ‘chosen’ each one of these things is can too be explained by the fact that a very specific brain configuration that is not ‘chosen’ by any one creates that illusion.

Some (perhaps macabre) examples demonstrate that the condition in which somebody’s brain is in at a specific moment determines (at the expense of any possibility of free will) what they will do. Over a third of death row inmates have some sort of damage to their frontal lobe (a part of the brain that is, amongst other things, responsible for things such as self control and discipline). A man (who’s name remains anonymous) once, apparently unprompted, murdered his family, despite seemingly being a normal person. It was later found that he had a tumour growing on his amygdala, which was responsible for him suffering through uncontrollable bursts of intense rage. We can all (probably) intuitively agree that it is unfair to hold the individual accountable for their literal brain malfunction; they did not have ‘free will’ at those moments in time. They didn’t choose how their brain was in that moment, so why consider them to have freely chosen to commit heinous crimes? This logic should extent to everybody. It is not, as some would intuit, the case that free will exists only for those with ‘healthy’ brains (a vague term which would need to be defined further). Every single brain is in a certain state at any one time. This state determines how the person will act. If this can be accepted in cases such as a tumour on the amygdala, it logically follows that this can be accepted in all cases. The brain is in a certain condition, and nobody chooses what condition their brain is in, and this condition is the only basis upon which actions occur. A tumour or a gene or a temperature in the room, a very large amount of very complex inputs determine everything about somebody’s brain.

One of the largest illusions when it comes to people believing in free will is the concept of a ‘self’. Even if it is accepted that genetics and the environment inform how people are and how they act, many people believe that there is a ‘you’ who exists ‘underneath’ everything else. A person who is defined by their conscious, continuous experience. Again, there is no evidence that this is the case. Many different components of the brain contribute to the continuous experience, but there is no one ‘person’. Each ‘person’ is just a mix of their memories and their language and their emotions and their different senses and every other component of consciousness, all contributing to a coherent experience. The ‘self’ is a useful illusion that exists for life to be understood in more useful terms. In reality, all that exists is the different components of the brain working in tandem to produce a liveable experience.

One topic that is often brought up with regards to the existence of free will is the fact that it is ethically and legally inconvenient for free will not to exist. The concepts of personal responsibility both in a legal sense and a daily life sense are at the centre of how the modern world exists. I think it is both very interesting and very relevant what the ethical conclusions of the lack of free will should be, but I also think it’s a question entirely separate to ‘do we have free will?’. Whether or not current ethics and legality aligns with objective reality is irrelevant to what that objective reality is. If our understanding of the physical world (and as I stated at the beginning, I am working off of the premise that the brain is just another part of the physical world) contradicts the legal system, then we don’t pretend that the physical world isn’t as it is. The physical world is unchanging and non-negotiable. Legality and ethics are not. They should change around objective truths, as the reverse is by definition impossible.