The human machine: salvaging free will from the jaws of science

In a recent article by Tom Chivers, neuroscientist Patrick Haggard describes an experiment in which magnetic stimulation of his brain forced him to waggle his fingers against his will. His conclusion was shocking:

“We don’t have free will, in the spiritual sense. What you’re seeing is the last output stage of a machine. There are lots of things that happen before this stage – plans, goals, learning – and those are the reasons we do more interesting things than just waggle fingers. But there’s no ghost in the machine.”

It’s easy to see why this is so unsettling. The assumption that we have free will and responsibility is fundamental in law and social interaction. Such a claim shatters the traditional picture of what we are and how we function, forcing us to reconsider almost every aspect of our being. It’s a difficult pill to swallow; despite Professor Haggard’s nonchalance, it’s hard to believe anyone wants to be a robot.

Haggard is quick to write off free will entirely. But his use of concepts, such as determinism, hint at a misunderstanding that threatens to taint public discourse about free will and neuroscience. We’ll look at the reason for this shortly, but first let us examine what fuels the perceived threat that neuroscience poses to free will.

More and more, science is helping us understand the world around us. From the production of medicines to the reason an apple falls to the ground, science is helping us understand the mechanics of our day - to - day lives. Until recently the world inside us- or at least the brain - was uncharted territory. However with the progress being made in neuroscience, the cogs that spin and whir behind the eyes are coming to light and with them, troubling questions. It was the first examples of fMRI scanningt inspired Tom Wolfe to remark in Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died.

“Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system —and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth — what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from? What “ghost,” what “mind,” what “self,” what “soul,” what anything that will not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you?”

That was nearly 15 years ago. The rate at which science progresses today sees researchers such as Sebastian Seung in the process of discovering the human connectome- a comprehensive map of every single synapse (or connection) and neuron in an individual human brain. This task is as colossal as it sounds. In 2002, Sydney Brenner won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a 12 year project mapping the 7,000 connections of the 302 nerve cells in a tiny worm, C. elegans. The human brain contains around 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections as C. elegans. Seung himself recognises that we are in no way technologically advanced enough to complete this task at present, but with the developments being made in nanotechnology it seems as if it is only a matter of time before we can produce a blueprint of the brain.

It gets worse for free will. A 2008 study showed that several seconds before a conscious decision is made, it can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. Professor John-Dylan Haynes used software capable of recognising micro patterns in the brain’s frontal lobe (involved with reward, attention, long-term memory and planning), which predicted a subject’s choice even before they consciously decided on what to do.

Participants could freely decide whether to press a button with their left or right hand. Researchers found it was possible to predict participant’s decisions a full seven seconds before they consciously made the decision. In neuroscience, seven seconds is an eternity.

The implications such a study holds for free will are devastating. If decisions are prepared by our brains seconds before we consciously make them, how are we, and not our brains responsible for them? Haynes was quick to point out:

“Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed.”

So with Haynes in mind, are Seung and others like him getting ready to drive the last nail into the coffin of free will? Haggard would have you believe that the job has already been done, and that Seung will be laying flowers at the graveside. But why? We need to take a step back and really examine determinism to get a better idea of where Haggard is coming from.

Imagine you’re standing at the top of a hill. Ahead of you lies a steep slope, pocketed with diverts, punctuated by rocks and undulations. You have a stone in your hand, and you hurl it down the hill. As it hits the ground, it spins off at an angle, bounces off bumps and rolls to a stop somewhere at the bottom. You want to say where it ends up is random, but it’s not. As soon as the rock left your hand, a huge number of scientific laws were already in play. The eventual resting point of the rock wasn’t random- it was the vast number of variables that came together, giving the illusion of randomness.

This is a causal concept that can be applied to the entire universe, including us and our choices, as we are materiel beings. If determinism were true, in any given moment there is really only one choice that I can take. I may have the illusion of openness and choice but in some important sense what I am actually going to do was something that—had I known everything in the universe since the Big Bang—I would have known in advance was going to occur. If determinism were true, I could not have done anything differently.

We should consider that most of the studies that people find threatening such as the ones above, do not appear to be of the same type of determinism which actually worries us. In a 2005 study, a group of experimental philosophy researchers set out a deterministic scenario in which a person performs certain actions, such as robbing a bank. When asked whether it would be fair to hold the person morally responsible for her decision: 66% of subjects judged that she acted of her own free will, and 77% judged her to be morally responsible. What seems to be concerning people here is something unique about our perception of the human brain. It is as if we just become machines. It is not as if we become deterministic machines. People are happy think of themselves as free if we are just deterministic animals.

The second consideration is normative - should we feel threatened? Chivers’ article boils down to this. Haggard can bypass conscious control and stimulate an area in the brain that causes my finger to move with a magnet. Oh by the way, we live in a deterministic universe, so there’s no such thing as free will. Haggard assumes that free will is incompatible with determinism, which makes him an incompatiblist, philosophically speaking.

But is determinism incompatible with free will? Dr Thomas Nadelhoffer works at the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience project in Tennessee. He sees Haggard as confusing important distinctions that philosophers have already made. Haggard’s interpretation of determinism entails unnecessary threats to free will. We get the feeling that determinism means everything that will happen is inevitable and will happen regardless of desires or decisions. It are these mistakes that generate a feeling that people do not have moral responsibility. He is even less thrilled about the media attention such views get:

“The extent to which neuroscientists themselves operate with an impoverished understanding of the distinctions I take to be fundamental are the ones getting interviewed. They’re the ones talking to the public.”

In a slightly confusing addendum, Chivers attempts to smooth things over by looking at how free will is defined:

“As Prof Haggard put it in the interview: “The philosophical definition of free will uses the phrase ‘could have done otherwise’”. Given the initial conditions, is there any way that I could have behaved differently? If the universe is deterministic, it would appear not.”

Yes and no. “Could have done otherwise” is a philosophical definition of free will, and not surprisingly, one which fits the incompatiblist framework. If we take the ability to have “done” differently as a strict definition for free will, it is far more troubling to make it compatible with a deterministic universe. But there are other definitions. How about free will defined as having conscious control over the choices you make?

Chivers ends his article with a reference to the importance of semantics, and I will too. In light of the exponential progress being made in neuroscience, we are on the brink of radical change with regards to how we define ourselves as conscious beings. Now, more than ever, we need scientists, science journalists and philosophers to read from the same hymn sheet in order to move public discourse in a productive direction. The real worry is that the public will end up losing grip of some of the traditional pictures of agency, but it wont be because they should, it will be because they are taking on good faith the pronouncement of neuroscientists who themselves have confused important issues.