The Illusion of Free Will

The concept of free will is something that has been debated for centuries. Some philosophers believe in the idea of determinism, which indicates that everything is planned and one event is the consequence of another’s action; other philosophers, on the other hand, argue that free will does exist and humans possess it. Philosophers have dedicated their lives in attempting to define what constitutes an individual as being “free” to no avail. To some, freedom could simply mean having the option to make decisions, while others could define free will as not having any constraints at all. The concept of free will is still significant in society today as researchers struggle to understand whether humans truly possess it. More recently, the field of neuroethics has studied this issue in greater depth from both a philosophical as well as neurobiological perspective.

 On October 17, 2017, Dr. Joseph Vukov, presented his research at Loyola University Chicago, which involved the study of unconscious actions and the neural behavior that correlated with these actions in order to illustrate whether humans have free will. Dr. Vukov alluded to a study was conducted in which participants were given a task, the Libet task, to perform in which they were instructed to push a button when they felt the urge to do so. While they were performing this task, each participant’s readiness potential was being recorded through EEG readings. The EEG readings also measured each time an individual flexed as well as when they had the urge to flex. In addition to this, the time that it took for each participant to become consciously aware of their decision was also noted. The readiness potential data from this experiment illustrated an increase at 200 ms to indicate the awareness of a participant’s urge to flex. This, along with the rest of the readiness potential data indicated that the brain had made the decision to flex before the awareness of wanting to flex occurred. A second similar experiment was then performed with the use of fMRI to measure brain activity. In this study, instead of providing participants with 1 button as was done in the initial study’s task, 2 buttons were provided and the participant had to pick which button to press. From this experiment, the readiness potential data illustrated that the participants made the decision to press a certain button 500 ms before being aware of the decision to press it. Through Dr. Vukov’s lecture, it was noted that the readiness potential was released from the SMA before the conscious decision to perform an action was determined, which suggests the idea that humans may not have free will.

Furthermore, another study was conducted recently that also tested the concept of free will in humans. The study was conducted by psychologists Kathleen Vohs from the University of Minnesota and Johnathan Schooler from the University of California at Santa Barbara. In their study, some participants were asked to read a passage from a book written by Francis Crick that detailed how humans do not have free will. On the other hand, the rest of the participants, the control group, were asked to read a scientific paper on the study of consciousness. Both group of participants were then given arithmetic problems on a computer that they had to complete. They were told that they needed to press the space bar once the question appeared, otherwise, they would be shown the answer and that would result in cheating. The results of this experiments indicated that participants who were asked to read the passage by Crick regarding the non-existence of free will reflected more cheating behavior than those that read the scientific paper on consciousness and did not have any preconceived notions about free will. This study illustrated how participants that believed that they did not have free will participated in cheating behavior because they held the belief that the cheating was bound to happen as their actions were already predetermined, which meant that they could not have been blamed for the cheating either. Through this experiment, it was noted that cheating behavior was correlated with participants that did not believe in the existence of free will, which suggests that the participants were skeptical of the concept of free will as they engaged in unfair behaviors. In addition to this, the free will and deterministic conditions were both simulated for this study, which also begs the question of whether free will is an illusion that one creates in their mind similar to how it was done in this study.  

These two studies provide some evidence to suggest that humans may not have free will. However, a lot more work is still left to be done in order to come up with a definitive answer. The intersection between the fields of psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience has great implications for gaining answers to the heavily questioned concept of free will.

Sources:

Nichols, Shaun. “Free Will versus the Programmed Brain.” Scientific American, Scientific American Inc, 19 August 2008, www.scientificamerican.com/article/free-will-vs-programmed-brain/. Accessed 16 October 2017.

Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.J., & Haynes, J.D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature neuroscience, 11(5), 543-545.