Pain and Free Will

A constant debate of the 21^st century- nature over nurture, do we have a choice or are we biologically programmed to be the way we are? Joe Vukov provided an excellent perspective on this debate through the reference of Soon and colleagues’ (2008) paper on the “Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain”. During this talk, he did not support nor deny the conclusion of free will, but rather, he shed some light on how the varying definitions of free will could impact how we measure free will. Vukov provided reasons as to why neuroscience cannot rule out the idea of free will, implying that we, as neuroscientists, still have a lot of work to do when it comes to understanding what free will is and how it looks on a neurological basis.

Countless experiments have said yes to free will, and philosopher Stephen Cave wrote an article, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will,” bringing together evidence bashing the existence of our ability to make our own decisions rather than having them already biologically programmed. Without getting too philosophical and focusing on the neuroscience part of this, I’m going to argue for the existence of free will.

Some argue humans have no control over the decisions and actions that we make. However, explaining the argument against this is similar to explaining the ‘think away the pain’ techniques. Most people are aware of meditation and it’s healing properties, however not many are aware that monks and people who have studied to inhibit themselves from feeling pain at all actually exist. A popular example of this is the monk who caught himself on fire in protest- he could endure it because he thought away the pain. People don’t die from the fire wounds, they die from the pain. This technique could be used as an argument against people who suffer from addiction, schizophrenia, and other psychotic disorders. This 2017 article “Pain is Weird” covers the scientific perspective on pain being an ‘opinion’ (Ingraham, 2017). 

Since pain is completely based on the receptors of the brain, it is possible that with training those with psychotic disorders extreme as schizophrenia and addiction or as mild as anxiety can be trained to control different areas of their brain, therefore make better decisions. It is proven that people with mental disorders have a hard time making decisions in stressful environments and a possible therapy technique is putting them in those situations and trying to help them work through the issue (Culbreth, 2016). There are doctors actively studying this and showing results. A disease is something that prohibits the body from running functionally, but if we can biologically control our pain then it is possible to control other hurdles our brain has to jump through. There is evidence of this through patients choosing to not be on medicine to treat their psychotic disorders because they handle it in their own way.

In his article against free will, Stephen Cave says “If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.” However, humans overcome the mental issues they are born with all the time. Even in a mental hospital where everyone is told they are sick and everyone around them is acting sick, a person can still decide to not take their medicine or act a different way even with the same illness as others. Sometimes they or their support system might claim that they can’t, but really they have just been exposed to techniques to help them accomplish those goals. 

In conclusion, without the ability to obtain everyone’s empirical certainty, it’s never certain why a person does something. Even if a neurological scan of a person’s brain all points to one thing, there is scientific proof of exercising the brain to work a different way. An individual’s brain may be predisposed to behave a certain way, but it is us as humans who program it to be the way it is - whether we are conscious of this process or not.

Works Cited

Cave, Stephen. “There's No Such Thing as Free Will.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 10 June 2016, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/.

Culbreth, Adam J., et al. "Reduced Model-Based Decision-Making in Schizophrenia." Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 125, no. 6, Aug. 2016, pp. 777-787. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1037/abn0000164.

Ingraham, Paul. “Pain Is Weird: A Volatile, Misleading Sensation.” Www.PainScience.com, 17 Sept. 2017, www.painscience.com/articles/pain-is-weird.php.

Soon, Chun Siong, et al. “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain.”Nature Neuroscience, vol. 11, no. 5, 2008, pp. 543–545., doi:10.1038/nn.2112.