The Brain’s Predetermined Decisions
Often,
humans like to believe that the decisions they make throughout their lives,
simple and menial or complex and life-changing, are a product of their
independent decisions. However, are these decisions really ours to make? Or are
our actions predetermined, with us merely under the impression that we are
controlling our lives? This concept of free will is one that has been hotly
debated, not only by philosophers, but also by neuroscientists. In a marriage
of modern neuroscience and philosophy, the field of neuroethics emerges,
studying the neural basis of decisions and whether or not they are a product of
one’s free choice or a predetermined factor. Studies done by various neuroscience
labs, such as the lab of Benjamin Libet, have come up with a surprising result:
the “timing these conscience decisions was consistently preceded by several
hundred milliseconds of background preparatory brain activity.” However, Libet’s
study, having been done in the 1980s, was supported by few accurate readings of
the exact measurements of the difference between the brain already deciding and
preparing for an action and a person making the conscious decision. However,
the implication of this study, along with others, is quite clear: humans do not
actually have free will. The actions we preform and the decisions we make may
feel conscious to us, yet they are actually predetermined by ongoing neural
processes. Dr. Joseph Vukov, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at
Loyola University Chicago, presented research which studied the neural behavior
associated with the unconscious actions of the brain, indicating whether or
humans truly have free will.
The
study Dr. Vukov explained, Unconscious determinants of free decisions in
the human brain, done by Soon, Brass, Heinze, and Haynes, detailed an
experiment in which the neural behavior associated with cognitive tasks was
determinant of whether humans had free will or not. Based on the previously
mentioned study done by Libet, participants were given tasks which measured
their readiness potential through EEG readings and fMRI. The study demonstrated
that the readiness potential that was measured indicated that before the
participant had decided to do the action, the brain released the readiness
potential, proposing that perhaps humans do not actually have free will. However,
Vukov proposed 5 reasons as to why the idea of free will cannot be completely
discarded by neuroscience, some of which include the complexity of free actions
and that many free actions do not necessarily have to be conscious.
In
the article What Neuroscience Says about
Free Will, researchers Adam Bear and Paul Bloom, from Yale University,
explored the connections between free will and the human mind. They sought to
find out which decisions humans make consciously, and which decisions are just
the predeterminations of our brains. Bloom
and Bear conclude that the concept of free will is merely an illusion, during
which a decision was made unconsciously by our brains. Our conscious mind is
not responsible for our actions, as we think. Rather, it is our unconscious
brain which is controlling these decisions, and when the decision is made, we
are made to believe that the result we sought was intentional. Therefore, we do
not truly have free will in our choices and decisions.
In order
to get their findings, Bloom and Bear conducted an experiment, during which
subjects had to choose which of the dots on their screen would turn red. The
participants would have to self record their predictions after they witnessed
which dot would turn red. However, it was interesting to see that when the
correct answer showed up, the participants said they had a higher accuracy rate
than expected, while when the answer took a while to appear, they mentioned
that the predictions which they reported were closer to the results which they
expected. The conscious brain was not in charge of this situation, rather it
was the unconscious simply observing the answer, concluding that it is in fact
the unconscious that is in charge of decision-making before the brain is made
aware.
Dr.
Vukov and Bloom and Bear are of the common opinion that there is a link between
neuroscience and the philosophy of free will. However, they differ in the
degree to which they observe such findings. While Bloom and Bear believe that
certainly humans are not in charge of their free will, Dr. Vukov is of the
opinion that although there is a correlation, there is still not enough yet to
concretely say that there is such a definite and tight connection between the two.
Concisely, it cannot be completely proven that neuroscience disproves the
concept of free will, yet the study of neuroethics is an important segway into future
research on the topic.
Bear, A. (2016, April 28). What
Neuroscience Says about Free Will. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/what-neuroscience-says-about-free-will/
Soon, et al. ”Unconscious determinants of free decisions
in the human brain,” https://luc.app.box.com/v/neuroseminar/file/216116077901, date accessed October 18th, 2017.
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