Great Illusion

by Paul Singh

  In the end, for Swinburne, forming intentions is usually done without free will, or if freely done, they don’t feel important to us, but rather arbitrary instead. Only those rare difficult moral decisions could really be occasions when the agent displays free will: not only could the agent do otherwise, the agent actually does otherwise.

  Swinburne couldn’t be taking a more counter-intuitive stance on acts of free will. People who really believe in free will suppose that they exercise this power all the time, at every other moment. People talk about how free they feel precisely when they pursue a strong desire of theirs, or incline their beliefs towards those supported by good reasons, or have to make a momentous decision between equally valid moral options. To be told that one is only really freely willing in any interesting sense when one is being a very moral person must strike the typical free will advocate as perfectly ridiculous. To hear friends of free will put the matter, sometimes doing the wrong thing is exactly when one feels extraordinarily free.

  In any case, not only must Swinburne contravene what most people expect from “free will,” it is also clear that his free will must always be unreasonable. Not only can’t this free will make free decisions based on good reasons, it really can’t make its choices for any reasons at all. The basic problem is this. When a part of the person (call it the ‘will’ if you like) is responsible for making free choices, then those choices can’t be determined by anything outside of it. They must be determined by something inside of it, or come from no cause at all. If the will’s choices are determined by something inside of it, then those choices are determined by some kind of causes, and hence choices cannot be freely done (this won’t pass the FoW test). This means that nothing inside the free will is really responsible for causing how choices get made. But to say that a choice comes from nothing and no cause at all is to contravene a highly respected principle of reason, “From nothing, nothing comes,” or, put another way, “Every change must have a cause.” Furthermore, such uncaused choices would be indistinguishable from choices happening from pure chanciness. Enthusiasts of free will typically deny that choices made freely are supposed to feel like they are utterly uncaused and chancy every time. Free will is supposed to be about taking control, not abandoning control. Perhaps some free choices seem random and whimsical but most do not seem that way at all.

  We have selected an Oxford professor of philosophy for critical scrutiny, but these difficulties arise for anyone affirming both FoW and PAP. The unnaturally free will has no understandable way of either receiving worthy influences from the brain or executing its intentions upon a brain, and its aloof independence deprives it of any way to respond appropriately to good reasons or to make choices for good reasons. The only thing that this sort of free will is free from is reasonableness itself.

  Freedom is More than a Feeling

  Friends of freedom of the will are often satisfied by how free their decisions appear to be when they make them. Because those decisions are theirs, made for whatever reason (or no reason), they strike the decider as reasonable enough. The important thing, as far as they are concerned, is whether decisions feel uncompelled and free from control by anything else.

  But placing trust in one’s feelings isn’t wise. How would feelings be able to override sound reasoning or scientific knowledge? Only from a philosophical (or religious) standpoint could a privileged type of knowledge get bestowed on mere feelings about one’s freedom of action. The actual source of this feeling isn’t hard to identify, because we may all grant that a feeling of freedom can be intuitively sensed in our ordinary actions we take from second to second. Philosopher John Searle points out how we are all intimately acquainted with this intuitive freedom:

  The characteristic experience that gives us the conviction of human freedom, and it is an experience from which we are unable to strip away the conviction of freedom, is the experience of engaging in voluntary, intentional human actions. . . . It is the experience which is the foundation stone of our belief in the freedom of the will. Why? Reflect very carefully on the character of the experiences you have as you engage in normal, everyday ordinary human actions. You will sense the possibility of alternative courses of action built into these experiences. Raise your arm or walk across the room or take a drink of water, you will see that at any point in the experience you have a sense of alternative courses of action open to you. If one tried to express it in words, the difference between the experience of perceiving and the experience of acting is that in perceiving one has the sense: “This is happening to me,” and in acting one has the sense: “I am making this happen.” But the sense that “I am making this happen” carries with it the sense “I could be doing something else.” In normal behavior, each thing we do carries the conviction, valid or invalid, that we could be doing something else right here and now, that is, all other conditions remaining the same. This, I submit, is the source of our unshakeable conviction of our own free will. [John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 95.]

  Searle only aims to account for our intuitive sense of freedom—he has no intention of defending freedom of the will, especially any sort of unnatural will, with these observations. As Searle realizes, this intuitive sense of freedom is most likely what must be expected from having the kind of self-awareness and executive self-control that we humans do have, quite naturally, as described in previous chapters. As we pointed out in an earlier section, ordinary voluntary action is no illusion.

  Searle is also quite aware that staunch advocates of freedom of the will aren’t satisfied by crediting ordinary voluntary control over our actions for this intuitive feeling of freedom. Those advocates instead demand to know how the will itself can be free from physiological and psychological influences long enough to exert a peculiar sort of uncaused power over intentions and decisions. Neither Searle nor any scientific-minded philosopher would try to satisfy that demand. There simply is no reasonable place for such an unnatural will.

  Undeterred, advocates for freedom of the will are eager to award a privileged status for intuitive freedom. They not only endorse PAP, but a Cartesian version of PAP: “Cartesian PAP: A can know that he does x freely only if he has the firm intuition that he could have done not-x at t instead.” Wielding Cartesian PAP, advocates of freedom of the will won’t be told that it must be an illusion, compared to the solid status of ordinary voluntary action. Instead, these advocates announce that self-conscious certainty cannot be overridden or overruled by any sort of knowledge, even scientific knowledge. Again, these advocates demonstrate how they have no qualms about telling science how it is incompetent to deal with freedom of the will. They (the linguist Chomsky, for example) believe that this unnaturally free will can’t be understood by mere physical or psychological science anyway. Chomsky further believes that the fact that the brain’s decisions are in the unconscious says nothing about whether we have free will or not. This is pure nonsense from the viewpoint of scientists who are engaged in research of the nervous systems. Scholars engaged in soft sciences such as Chomsky often jump to such conclusions without delving fully into the scientific research on this subject matter. Such individuals refuse to believe that free will could be a biological phenomenon such as photosynthesis or digestion and that it can be studied by tools of science used in biology. They also make a fallacious claim that science is objective and therefore incapable of studying subjectivity, free will being a subjective phenomenon. They are not likely to understand any of this if they don’t bother to learn a bit of science which is making strides in studying the subjective objectively. People engaged in the neuro-scientific fields have been exploring, understanding, and explaining the subjective with objective data all the time.

  Defending a transcendent and unnatural free will takes many forms because there are so many ways to express this intuition of freedom. Its advocates make frail arguments based on intuitions, such as: Freely made decisions don’t seem to be controlled by what
my brain is doing at those times; freely made decisions don’t seem to me to be controlled by any natural laws; and, freely made decisions don’t feel like they have to be made at all—I can freely decide to not decide.

  Opposition to these weak arguments has been raised by a mountain of scientific evidence that our voluntary decisions (even decisions against deciding) are in fact regulated by habitual cognitive processes controlled by the functioning nervous system that each of us relies upon for life. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether most people even agree that Cartesian PAP fits how they think about their freedom. Surveying large numbers of people from diverse cultures doesn’t confirm that everyone shares basic intuitions about the significance of intuitive freedom. [Myrto Mylopoulos and Hakwan Lau, “Naturalizing Free Will: Paths and Pitfalls,” in Surrounding Free Will: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience, ed. Alfred Mele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 123-144. Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe. “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions.” Noûs 41 (2007): 663—685.]. Despite the pleas and warnings from friends of unnatural free will, it simply isn’t the case that rejecting this kind of Cartesian free will amounts to telling everyone that their intuitive certainties are illusions or that our conscious awareness of freedom amounts to nothing. If people shouldn’t be attaching certainties to ordinary intuitive feelings in the first place, as reasonableness requires, then nothing of value is lost when accepting science’s perspective on freedom.

  Setting aside Cartesian PAP as unreasonable and anti-scientific, we should look more carefully into the proper place for our intuitive sense of self-control over our voluntary activities. After all, there is a genuine and detectible difference between controlling one’s own decisions and having our decisions and actions compelled by external powers. Freedom does require personal control.

  Lack of personal control implies a lack of ordinary free will over one’s actions. As an earlier section emphasized, the degree of control that one can exercise may not be large compared to other external factors in one’s situation. Nevertheless, we expect freely willed actions to exhibit a measure of personal control. How do I know that I am controlling my actions? If external factors are in complete control, then no matter what I try to do, I cannot do anything except something that I’m not trying to do. If my body is moving but I’m not trying at all to move it, or especially if I’m trying to not move it that way, then my helplessness tells me how external matters are forcing me to move. Indeed, whatever I’m being forced to do isn’t really an action of mine at all—I’m not responsible in the least.

  Only those movements which I am deciding to do are genuinely actions of mine. I know when I’m having some control over my actions when I can change what I’m doing as I will it, and that when I decide to do something else, some other chosen action directly follows. This is what we mean by being able to do otherwise as we will. The will is free when I can actually perform an action as I will it. If I cannot perform an action as I will it, then I intuitively judge that I am not acting freely.

  We expect freely willed actions to exhibit this action control. We also may worry about whether a decision to act is itself freely made. But there is a tremendous problem that immediately arises. What is the practical test for a freely willed decision? Perhaps the test should be whether I could have decided otherwise. Yet we have already rejected the formula, “If I couldn’t have done otherwise than what I did decide to do, then I didn’t freely will it,” as nonsense. Utilizing that formula as the test would prevent us from knowing that we have personal control over our actions in the first place. We must find a different formula to test for a freely willed decision.

  What is it like to make a decision, while feeling like one isn’t in control of that decision? Ordinarily, our sense of making decisions and immediately acting on them just is our sense of personal control over what we do. These two things, “my deciding” and “my control” aren’t two separate matters. If they are, then I lose my sense of control. If it did seem like “my deciding” is one thing, while “my control” is quite another thing, then I’d be in a terrible condition, unable to perceive how my decisions are responsible for what I actually can do.

  Still, some people suffering from unusual psychological or neurological disorders can sometimes feel like they make decisions which aren’t authentically theirs. Although they do sense that their decisions still control their action—they don’t feel like automatons or puppets —they also feel that their decisions aren’t really controllable anymore. They can remember and compare what it was like to make decisions before their disorder with what it feels like to make certain kinds of decisions now. They can therefore dimly sense, or even acutely perceive, how it no longer feels like they can decide otherwise than the way they do when suffering from an episode of their disorder. Decisions can feel compulsory or automatic in a weird and disturbing way.

  Interestingly, people not suffering from any disorder also experience their ordinary minute-to-minute decisions as fairly intuitive, habitual, and automatic. When I decide to reach for the keys before leaving my house, I’m quite comfortable with the way that my hand almost automatically grabs the keys on the table next to the door before I shut that door behind me. If that decision didn’t feel habitual and intuitive—if instead that decision required a thoughtful and hesitant pause while my mind searched for what exactly to do —then I would get worried about my mental acuity. What is different about people suffering from a mental disorder affecting decisions is that they notice the reverse discrepancy —what would have ordinarily called for a hesitant judgment call now seems too automatic and compulsory. They find themselves acting hastily on decisions that they wouldn’t have made so intuitively before. It is that recalled contrast which arouses the concern over authenticity. Am I still quite the same person making such decisions nowadays? It is not action-control, but decision-control, which appears to have been tampered with.

  Depending on whether such persons are prone to delusional rationalizations, the source of that impersonal tampering may be externalized. They might suppose that an outside influence is controlling their decisions. Trying to explain to such delusional persons how internal neurological problems are actually to blame can be a difficult endeavor. Regardless of whether they learn to fault only internal brain processes, it remains the case that they aren’t wrong for feeling a loss of authenticity and authorship of decisions during disturbing episodes. They rightly sense that their free will has suffered.

  A far better formula for checking for freely made decisions is something like this: “If I ordinarily would decide otherwise than what I am now find myself deciding to do, then I am not freely willing it.” Ordinary and natural free will requires a consistent sense of control over how one ordinarily makes decisions. This applies no less to people in sound mental health than those who aren’t. Free will doesn’t depend on what one does; it depends on how one does it. A murderer cannot reasonably claim that he lacked free will, for example. Although an ordinary person would not murder someone without feeling a deep sense of guilt, true murderers are able to kill someone without any qualms given the way they have been making decisions about violence. Only if the murderer passed psychological tests showing that in fact his brain processes had become disturbed, distorting his recent decision-making, might the criminal justice system be tempted to judge him as less than responsible. Absent a psychological disorder, the murderer is fully responsible for his act of murder because he is the sort of person who would decide to do that sort of violence.

  But, one might ask, how I can say that the murderer had free will when he murdered someone when I have already argued that free will is an illusion. The answer is that—as I have just argued—we need to distinguish an absolute free will that is unconstrained by the brain (Cartesian free will, for example) from the concept of free will argued for by Hume or John Stuart Mill according to which we act freely when we act according to our desires (our habitual desires). Murder
ers, like everyone else in this world, have free will in Mill’s sense of the word; no one has absolute, Cartesian free will. If the standard of free will is a will unconstrained by brain processes then, it is true, no one has free will. In fact, the concept of an absolute free will (in the Cartesian sense of the word) is incoherent. It might seem to make sense, but it really doesn’t. So when we deny absolute free will what we are really denying is something that is inherently incoherent and nonsensical in the first place. In Wittgenstein’s terms, you might say that people who espouse absolute free will are led astray by language. Language has gone on holiday. Ultimately, whatever we do is caused by brain processes. And if that is true and everything in science indicates that it is true—then we all do what we must do—or what our brain constrains us to do.

  Summing up so far, exhibiting ordinary free will over one’s actions requires both (a) a degree of independent control over what one does, which is manifested in the way that one understands how one could have done otherwise if a different decision had been made; and (b) a sense of control over one’s decisions, which is manifested in the way that one feels consistent about making decisions.

  Freedom from One’s Self

  We can now see why we shouldn’t rely on any simplistic formula for verifying free will, such as, “Unless a person could have done otherwise, their action cannot be freely willed.” When I know that I’m controlling an action, I sense how my decision is determining that action, and I wouldn’t have done otherwise. If it turns out that I could have done otherwise despite my decision, I realize that I lacked free will in that situation.

  Similarly, we must reject another simplistic formula such as, “Unless a person could have decided otherwise, their decision cannot be freely made.” When I feel in control of my decisions, I wouldn’t decide otherwise, because I’m feeling reliably consistent with how I decide matters. If I’m suddenly starting to make decisions in a quite different manner, inconsistent with those I have been in the past, then I reasonably worry that I’m suffering from a loss of freedom over my decisions. Now, on rare occasions, I may put deliberate effort into altering how I make certain kinds of decisions. However, re-learning habits of decision making is a way to demonstrate control over decisions. In such cases, there is no question that I am still controlling how I make decisions, and no worries about some outside influence trying to alter my thoughtful decisions could seriously arise.