Idea 15. Free will may be an illusion yet we're accountable for our actions

My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

William James, Journal (1870)

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated

are confident they are acting on their own free will.

Joseph Goebbels

According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, God endowed humans with free will so they, on their own accord, can decide to do good and reach salvation, or do evil and be condemned to eternal damnation: “I set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse, therefore choose life that both you and your children may live.” (Deut. 30:19). Each person is therefore morally responsible and accountable for his or her own actions.

Our modern legal system also considers conscious will, or a person’s intentions, to decide guilt or innocence. This is reflected in the legal notion of mens rea (guilty mind), or actual evil intent, the standard Common Law test of criminal liability. This generally means that the offender must have acted purposely, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently in committing the criminal act. This is expressed in the Latin phrase actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea, which means “the act does not make a person guilty unless the mind is also guilty.” Hamlet himself used the insanity defense in explaining to Laertes why he had killed his father, Polonius.

Most people, most of the time, have the conviction that they are the cause of their own actions. People usually take for granted that the experience of consciously willing an action, and the action by their conscious mind, is the same thing. The evidence, however, tells us otherwise. As Samuel Johnson concisely put it, “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it.” Experiments reveal that the brain “acts” before we experience awareness of the action. In other words, the experience of conscious will occur at some point after the brain has already prepared for the action.

In the 1980s, Benjamin Libet, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, connected study participants to an electroencephalogram (EEG) and asked them to watch a clock face with a dot sweeping around it. When the participants felt the urge to move a finger, they had to note the dot’s position. Libet recorded brain activity several hundred milli-seconds before people expressed their conscious intention to move.[1]

In a 2008 experiment, people were put into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters. The subjects were told to press a button with either their right or left index fingers, whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results showed that the conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.[2]

Many neuroscientists now believe that conscious will is an illusion, a powerful and pervasive one, but an illusion all the same. In other words, consciousness is not an active participant in the decision-making process. “The position of conscious will in the timeline suggests perhaps,” writes the Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner in The Illusion of Conscious Will, “that the experience of will is a link in a causal chain leading to action, but in fact it might not even be that. It might just be a loose end – one of those things, like the action, that is caused by prior brain and mental events.”[3]

Still, the illusion that we are willing an action is powerful, even when we clearly are not. Wegner describes an experiment (“not for the squeamish”) in which electrical stimulation to the exposed conscious brain of a patient produced movements such as head turning and slow displacement of the body. The interesting part is that the patient considered the evoked activity as spontaneous and always offered a reasonable explanation for it. When asked what he was doing, the patient answered things like “I am looking for my slippers,” “I heard a noise,” and “I was looking under the bed.” They sound like the confabulations, convenient stories made up to fit the moment that we saw in Idea 10. The experiments “suggest the interesting possibility that conscious will is an add-on, an experience that has its own origins and consequences.”

Box 17: The Mystery of Consciousness Science has made progress in identifying the structures in the brain that give us, and other animals, the ability to discriminate and integrate information, but consciousness itself remains a mystery. Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons is giving rise to a conscious experience. However, scientists are far from explaining how inert matter can generate consciousness and subjective experiences (or “qualia”). This is known as the hard problem of consciousness. All the evidence indicates that the mind is the product of the brain, not of some mysterious or supernatural force or energy. One school of philosophy, known as mysterianism, claims that consciousness cannot be resolved by humans. For example, Colin McGinn, a “mysterian” philosopher, has said that consciousness is “a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel”. Basically, our minds are “too primitive” to figure out what consciousness is. However, others believe that consciousness may be comprehensible to future advances of science and technology. There is no evidence that we have hit a hard barrier that prevents us from understanding the nature of consciousness. Could it be, for example, that consciousness is inherent in even the tiniest pieces of matter such as electrons? This idea, known as panpsychism, and supported by some scientists such as Roger Penrose, suggests that the fundamental building blocks of reality have conscious experience. Crucially, it implies consciousness can be found throughout the universe. Another theory, known as Integrated Information Theory (IIT), states that consciousness is integrated information and that a system's consciousness is determined by its informational properties. According to IIT, consciousness varies in quantity and comes in many degrees which correspond to the values of φ, a mathematical formula that aims to measure not merely the information in the parts of a given system but also the information contained in the organization of the system over and above that in its parts. Still others hope that quantum mechanics will provide the means to “decode” consciousness. According to such theories, the nature and basis of consciousness cannot be adequately understood within the framework of classical physics but must be sought within the alternative picture of physical reality provided by quantum mechanics. The proponents of this approach regard the radically alternative, and often counterintuitive nature, of quantum physics as just what is needed to overcome the supposed explanatory obstacles that confront more standard attempts to bridge the psycho-physical gap. These approaches and interpretations provide different ways of thinking about the relationship between us, consciousness, and the universe as a whole. It is unlikely that any single theoretical perspective will suffice for explaining all the features of consciousness that we wish to understand. A synthetic and pluralistic approach may provide the best road to future progress. At the same time, researchers are getting new insights on the nature of consciousness. For example, in his 2022 book The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka, a professor at Queen Mary University, reviews several experiments which suggest that bees have an inner world of thought and are not only responding to stimuli with hard-wired responses. Abilities include being able to roll balls to a goal; recognize shapes across senses; and display emotion-like states. As Chittka points out, discovering that bees are most likely sentient beings has important ethical implications. The insight that bees have a rich inner world and unique perception, and, like humans, are able to think, enjoy and suffer, commands respect for the diversity of minds in nature. This finding is at least consistent with panpsychism, in that consciousness may be prevalent in nature. The impressive advances in artificial intelligence have some people, even experts, convinced that we will be able to create conscious machines, if not we have already done so. We’re at a point at which machines can easily pass the so-called Turing test, in which a machine must convince a human interrogator that it is conscious. For the philosopher Daniel Dennett this is enough, “if conducted “with suitable vigor and aggression and cleverness.” On his part, the neuroscientist Michel Gazzaniga thinks that it is possible to build a conscious machine “if we can a machine that thinks and believes it has consciousness. And those are confirmable because you can understand, in principle, how the machine is processing information.” This would provide support for IIT, which states that consciousness is integrated information and that a system's consciousness is determined by its informational properties. Of course, not everyone is convinced, and even if we can build such machines there is no way to prove that they experience consciousness as we do. See: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Consciousness. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#Con. (Retrieved Oct 13, 2022). It provides an excellent summary of the latest research and the main approaches to the problem of consciousness. Also “Can a robot ever be conscious and how can we know if it were?” By Kate Douglas, NewScientist, Jul 7, 2021.

The power of the conscious self to control our actions is tenuous at best. One stark example is the appalling behavior of those suffering from the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome (LNS). These individuals tend, literally, to chew off their own fingertips and lips. As they do so, however, they scream for help as if an irresistible internal force compels them to bite off their own fingers against their own will. In the Dark Ages the Church would have accused LNS sufferers of demonic possession. The culprit, however, is not demons but a mutation in a single gene. Patients born with this condition do not produce an enzyme called HGPRT, present in all normal cells. The mere absence of this enzyme is enough to overcome their willpower and harm themselves.[4]

Is consciousness the driver or the passenger?

We are good at making inferences that best explain the sequence of events we have just experienced. Sometimes, however, our inferences are plain wrong (see Idea 10). Consciousness, Wegner explains, is as an interpreter and commentator, with limited access to the actual machinery, more like a press secretary than a president or CEO: “Consciousness … doesn’t really do anything” and conscious will is, as the title of his book proclaims, just an illusion. This raises profound questions about responsibility, not just regarding morality and criminal justice, but in the day-to-day business of life.

Why should humans experience consciousness if it is useless? Conscious will, argues Wegner, is an emotion that allows us to keep track of our own actions. It makes it possible for us to learn from our actions and keep track of who does what. He likens this sense of free will to an accounting system, a way to keep a tally. Free will is therefore useful in maintaining a sense of responsibility, the basis for a morally functioning society.

As Wegner also argues, free will gives us a sense of perceived personal control, or self-efficacy. As experience shows, people who believe they are the cause of events in their lives tend to be more active in controlling those events. This is true, even if no real control exists at all; an individual with a high sense of efficacy can make wise decisions and can set goals that are congruent with the content of the self. “Each surge of will we feel,” writes Wagner, “accrues very quickly into our overall experience of effectiveness and achievement.”

Understandably, given what is at stake, some people are concerned about these findings. The physicist Paul Davies, for one, argues that there is an acute risk that knowledge on the limits of volition will be oversimplified and used to justify an anything-goes attitude to criminal activity, ethnic conflict, even genocide: “People convinced that the concept of individual choice is a myth may passively conform to whatever fate and exploitative social or political system may have decreed for them. If you thought eugenics was a disastrous perversion of science, imagine a world where most people don’t believe in free will…. The scientific assault on free will would be less alarming if some new legal and ethical framework existed to take its place. But nobody really has a clue what that new structure would look like.”[5]

Are these fears justified? Even if volitional states are predetermined, people behaving as if they have free will and are personally accountable for their actions has been essential for the functioning of modern societies. One possible explanation for the widespread social belief in free will is that it helps produce socially desirable and harmonious actions. There is evidence that beliefs regarding free will can influence our moral judgment, at least temporarily. In one study, psychologists gave participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix. Half of the participants got a passage from the book saying that there is no such thing as free will. The other half got a passage that was similarly scientific sounding, but it was about the importance of studying consciousness, with no mention of free will. After reading the passages, all participants completed a survey about free will. They were then told to complete 20 arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen, and that when the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen, too. They were told that no one would know whether they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat. The results showed that those who read the version of the book with the anti-free will text cheated more often. Also, the amount a participant cheated, correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.[6]

Should we then dread the “scientific assault” on free will Davies worries so much about? I do not think so. Many philosophers and scientists reject the idea of free will (there is currently little reason to think that they are generally less morally principled than those who believe in it). Besides, not everyone is convinced that consciousness does not really do anything. Some researchers believe that consciousness plays an important, but limited, role in the decision-making process. The mind, as we saw in Idea 14, operates as a two-system dual processor: the intuitive and the deliberative. Intuitive judgments are produced by System 1 operations, which are automatic, involuntary, and effortless. In contrast, the deliberate activities of System 2 are controlled, voluntary, and effortful. The psychologist Roy F. Baumeister sees System 1 as “running the show” and System 2 as sometimes intervening “to make changes.” “Free will,” he writes, “should be understood not as the starter or motor of action but rather as a passenger who occasionally grabs the steering wheel or even just a navigator who says to turn left up ahead.”[7]

Humans have “selective” free will: An example

The work of neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga can help us understand how Baumeister’s “passenger” may operate in practice. It is not clear at what time one becomes aware of a decision, but for Gazzaniga the important thing is that when that happens, we have the option of changing or vetoing the actions. Using Baumeister’s analogy, the passenger is also able to apply the brakes. In Gazzaniga’s view, the time at which one becomes aware of a decision is not as important as some have thought.[8]

To illustrate this idea, suppose you, a movie fan, are walking to attend a college lecture one afternoon. You see a billboard for a movie you are dying to see and realize that today is the show’s last day. Suddenly, a thought takes over (“I would like to see the movie”) followed by another (“I really cannot miss this important lecture.”) At some point, the decision is made within your brain to skip the movie as you become aware of the implication of not going to college today.

This is a volitional act, “primed” by the billboard. You could have made a different choice under slightly different circumstances. For example, you could have remembered that your teacher has been sick and may not come to class today, so you err on the side of seeing the movie. The key insight from this is that most decisions in life are not linear – straight from cause to effect – but circular – the results of one process become the next starting conditions. It would be difficult or even impossible to find the actual moment in which you decide to skip the movie, because it is buried in a circular process in which thoughts and experiences feed off each other. In this example, awareness becomes part of the decision process at some point, although the initial neuronal activity was triggered by an external stimulus (the billboard you saw).

Most humans can consider different courses of action before committing to any of them, by weighing them through projecting the probable outcomes. As we deliberate about a choice, we reflect on past deeds, recollect pertinent stories, and imagine the sequence of effects that would be brought about by choosing one option or another. The neurologist Antonio Damasio calls the feelings generated in the imaging-deliberating context “secondary emotions” to indicate that they respond, not to external stimuli, but to internally generated representations. According to Damasio, the immediate emotions affect our choices and the anticipated emotions of future consequences.[9] Anticipated feelings of guilt and excitement allow us to simulate what life would be like if we made one choice or another.

New research provides further insight into how the conscious and the unconscious work in unison to allow the human mind to accomplish complex tasks. Our brains constantly monitor our internal and external environment, so that when the input becomes important enough, the unconscious “decides” to engage the conscious, and it is then that we become aware of what is there. Once the conscious “awakes” it takes over, depending on the level of uncertainty of the situation we experience.

What about new skills? The conscious is engaged at the forefront until we achieve expertise in a skill such as driving, biking or typing. When that skill is achieved, the subconscious is back in control. Although we need consciousness to learn new tasks, with experience they become second nature and we can do them automatically. In fact, once that happens, conscious analysis may inhibit performance.[10] According to this model of the mind, the unconscious and the conscious roles complement each other, not compete against one another. This assigns an active role to the conscious self, not only that of a mere spectator.

Box 18: Willpower: A powerful but limited resource Achieving anything of value in life requires effort and discipline. That is, it requires willpower, or self-regulation, as some psychologists call it. Through self-regulation, we consciously control how much we eat, whether we give in to impulse, task performance, obsessive thoughts, and even the extent to which we allow ourselves recognition of our emotions. Self-regulation failure is considered by some researchers as “the major social pathology of our time,” contributing to high divorce rates, domestic violence, crime, and a host of other problems.1 We all have a hard time controlling urges, desires and natural drives that demand satisfaction. Most often, we need to delay gratification of these urges until a more appropriate time and place. Such self-management takes a great deal of mental effort, both cognitive and emotional. Even relatively minor acts of self-control, like selecting our wardrobe in the morning, can take a toll. According to a theory that goes by the name of ego depletion, the self’s acts of volition draw on some limited resource, akin to strength or energy; therefore, one act of volition will have a detrimental impact on subsequent volition. In other words, all activities that require self-control seem to draw from the same “energy” source, which is in limited supply. Ego depletion happens when people use up their available willpower on one task. As a result, they are unable to exert the same level of self-control on subsequent, often unrelated tasks. The idea behind this theory is that willpower is like a muscle in that it can be both strengthened and fatigued.2 For example, if you exhaust yourself doing sprints, you will be less able to perform other physical tasks. Similarly, if you use your available “volition” energy you will have less self-control when faced with ensuing tasks. As in the case of physical exhaustion, this drain is temporary, and rest, positive emotions, and possibly other factors seem to promote recovery. Moreover, like a muscle, willpower can be strengthened over time. Although some researchers have suggested that ego depletion doesn’t exist, or that it is less powerful than previously believed, more recent findings have lent support to this effect, and at the same time have gained a more precise, mechanistic insight of how it works. The evidence shows that exerting self-control causes temporary shifts in both motivation and attention that undermine self-control later. However, it is not merely a result of draining limited self-control resources. Instead, factors such as shifts in motivation, attention, and emotion play a critical role. For example, when we engage in sustained mental effort for which we aren’t motivated or that we do not seek pleasure our brains drain faster. In a study exploring this theory, participants first completed a task designed to deplete willpower. Some of the participants were then told that the purpose of the study was to provide evidence supporting a new therapy that would help people with Alzheimer's disease. Participants who had been given this incentive were motivated to perform well for the benefit of Alzheimer's patients, leading them to outperform those in the control group. Motivation, the research suggests, plays an important part in ego depletion. This information about the self is critical, as we must be able to accomplish a great deal with a limited resource. When we exhaust our willpower, we make suboptimal decisions and become vulnerable to impulsive behaviors such as alcohol and substance abuse. This explains why socio-economic factors play a significant role in determining life outcomes. Indeed, poverty consumes so much mental energy that people struggling to make ends meet often have little brainpower left for anything else, leaving them susceptible to bad choices that can perpetuate their situation. The fact that willpower is limited means that we must be judicious in how we use it to avoid being trapped by vicious cycles. Modern life carries with it many opportunities for conflict, requiring self-control and delay in the gratification of many needs and desires. The main lesson here is that we all can improve self-control by focusing our attention on where it really matters and doing so in such a routine manner as to become a habit (see Idea 14). This mental skill is only getting more valuable. We live, after all, in the information age, which makes the ability to discard bogus data and focus on what is important to us incredibly critical. 1. Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F. & Trice, D. M. (1994). Losing control: How and why people fail at self-regulation, Academic Press, p.3. Also, Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Ego depletion and executive function. In Tesser, A., Felson, R. B., & Suls, J.M. Psychological Perspectives on Self and Identity, American Psychological Association. 2. Gailliot, M. et al. (2007). Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 325-336. For a non-technical discussion see: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=thinking-hard-calories.

For example, our decision to buy a new house may be influenced by both explicit and implicit factors such as price and location, and implicit ones such as our esthetic appreciation of the place, or peer or family pressure that we have not yet processed consciously. We are constantly influenced by unconscious stimuli that can change our thinking and behavior.

We also seem to constantly shift back and forth between the unconscious and the conscious. Studies on creativity, for example, reveal that it depends on an ability to shift gears between conscious and unconscious processing. Other studies show that in highly creative people, sub-conscious activity is more likely to overspill into consciousness, given them richer mental resources from which to make creative connections.[11]

Research also shows that conscious thoughts are influential in situations that present multiple alternative possibilities. Conscious thought can simulate alternative realities and by imagining them, increase the likelihood that they will come true. Conscious thought can also inform us of the temporal and social consequences of our actions (thinking back to the skipping college example). Therefore, a vital function of consciousness may be to comprehend the multiplicity of possibilities to facilitate bringing about the preferred one.[12]

You will probably go back and forth between your gut feelings and your rational self before you make a final decision. You may find a creative way to go to your college lecture and see the movie by, say, waiting until it comes to a streaming service. In the end, we can always choose to do the “right thing.” We do not really need to solve the problem of free will to preserve personal responsibility. Rather than showing that free will is an illusion, neuroscience can help us understand how it works in the real world. We have, in fact, “intertemporal” free will.

The main lesson: Use willpower for your most important goals

Free will remains a fascinating topic for philosophical debate. However, neuroscience has led some philosophers to conceptualize free will in a more practical way. Many philosophers now understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action; deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them; planning one’s actions based on this deliberation; and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we can exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. In other words, we are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities, and we have opportunities to exercise them.[13] Put simply, the more we make use of our ability to ponder and assess the possible impact of our actions, the more we exercise our free will.

As we saw in Idea 14, even if we know what our most important psychological needs are, it is sometimes difficult to fulfil them. It is wise to follow Aristotle’s advice: He thought that developing good habits is critical to achieve valuable goals in life, such as staying healthy, physically and emotionally, and doing something that has a positive impact in the world. Good habits will allow us to perform certain actions with excellence, regularly and without effort. As we saw, once we create a habit, we can free System 2 resources as we delegate actions to System 1. So, developing good habits will allow you to save limited energy and willpower (see Box 18) and apply it to achieve your most important life goals, whatever they might be.

[1]Libet, B., et al. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain, 106:623-642. [2]Soon, C. S., et al. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain Nature Neurosci. 11, 543–545. [3] Wegner, D. M. (2002) The Illusion of Conscious Will, Bradford Books. The MIT Press, p.55. We assume conscious will and freedom of will are the same thing, although this may not be the case. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#QuaThe. [4] Hladnik U, Nyhan WL, & Bertelli M (2008). Variable expression of HPRT deficiency in 5 members of a family with the same mutation. Arch. Neurol. 65, 1240–3. [5]Davis, P. (2004). Undermining free will, Foreign Policy, September/October 2004, p.37. [6] The passage begins as follows: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” The passage then goes on to talk about the neural basis of decisions and claims that “…although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” See: Vohs, D. K. & Schooler, J. W. (2008). The value of believing in free will: Encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating, Psychological Science, 19, 1, p.49-54. [7]Baumeister, R. F. (2008). Free will in scientific psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, p.14. [8]Gazzaniga, M. S. (2011). Who’s in charge? Free will and the science of the brain, HarperCollins. [9] Damasio A. R. (1994) Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Grossett/Putnam. [10] Daw, N., Niv, Y. & Dayan, P. (2007). Uncertainty-based competition between prefrontal and dorsolateral striatal systems for behavioral control, Nature Neuroscience, 8, p.1704-1711. [11] Douglas, K. (2007). The subconscious mind: Your unsung hero, New Scientist, (December 1, 2007), p.42-46. [12] Baumeister, R. F., Masicampo, E. J. & Vohs, K. D. (2011). Does conscious thoughts cause behavior? Annu. Rev. Psychol., 62, 331-361. [13] Nahmias, E. & Murray D. (2010). Experimental philosophy on free will: An error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. In Aguilar, J., Buckareff, A. & Frankish, K. (eds.) New Waves in Philosophy of Action. Palgrave MacMillan.