FM: What is your opinion on free will – do we have it or not?
JDH: First of all, you have to define what you understand when you mean free will. There are different things people associate with free will. The most important distinction you can make is between freedom from external constraints versus freedom from internal constraints. So if someone is pointing a gun at your head, you are not free to decide the way you want to react. But if no one is pointing the gun at your head, there might still be no freedom in the sense that you can’t change the course of the events because you are determined by a causal chain of events happening in your brain.
Humans tend to be dualistic; they tend to think that their mind is something separate from their body. The fact that there exists a field of 'psychosomatics' already suggests that they think that the body is something different from the mind. I believe that the mind is something that is realized by the body, specifically by the brain. It takes place in the carrier medium of the brain and it follows the laws of nature. So our mind is a natural process. But most people, including us scientists in our day-to-day lives, follow dualistic thinking patterns. We think that when we make a decision to do something, that this decision somehow happens in a separate space, independent from our brain. We believe that our brain and body only come into play when we want to execute our decisions, to make our choices become reality. According to what we know from modern neuroscience, this view is definitely wrong.
DECISION DOES NOT START IN
THE MIND, INSTEAD IT EMERGES FROM PRIOR BRAIN ACTIVITY.
Our own research suggests that a decision does not start in the mind, instead it emerges from prior brain activity. The brain seems to be the starting point of the causal chain leading to the conscious decision. If the decision really starts in the brain at a time when you do not even notice it happening, then to me this suggests that one aspect of freedom does not exist; Our mind is not able to overcome the laws of nature. Many philosophers disagree with this interpretation, but I am not claiming that there are not other ways of defining freedom. As a psychologist, I am more interested in the ways which people actually think about freedom, and not the ways in which we can redefine our concept of freedom to be compatible with natural sciences.
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| Prof. Dr. John-Dylan Haynes, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience |
FM: I read an interview where you said that we could trace our decisions to the moment of big bang, is that true?
JDH: Oh I did not say that. It is a statement on our website and people cite it, which is very funny. It reads: “Decisions don't come from nowhere but they emerge from prior brain activity. Where else should they come from? In theory it could be possible to trace the causal pathway of a decision all the way back to the big bang. Our research shows that we can trace it back 10 seconds. Compared to the time since the big bang this is not very long.”
This is of course a highly provocative and exaggerated statement, which I put up to provoke counter reactions. I have to admit that I enjoy the Darwinism of ideas, where you put up strong points just to see what kind of arguments people come up with to pull them down. Of course I don’t believe that it’s practically ever going to be possible to work your way backwards in the causal chain of the world back to the big bang. The point serves more as a reminder that there is nothing mysterious about predicting (or better 'postdicting') backwards in time, even if according to physics and thermodynamics working backwards will be more difficult. If there are laws governing processing in our brains then it should be possible – at least to some degree – to unwrap the previous steps in the processing chain. Obviously, you can imagine very specific cases, where, for example, a few hundred synapses converge onto one neuron. Then, the neuron does not know from which cell it originally got input. But in neuroimaging with population-level signals, it appears possible to work your way backwards in time.
FM: I think you definitely succeeded in provoking the counter reactions. Do you think it would be correct to say your research has proven that there is no free will?
JDH: To be precise, I do not think we have proven that there is no such thing as free will. I think our data suggests that one specific intuition we have about the freedom of our will might not be true. But a single experiment will never be able to finally solve such a problem forever. There is still a lot to do to convince the skeptics. Our experiments do not have perfect predictive accuracy, we have not shown causation, we do not know whether people are able to find ways to overrule the neural precursors of their choices, and we have mainly studied very simple choices, not the complex kind of life-changing choices people care about. We are addressing some of these limitations right now.
FM: But don’t you think that it is dangerous pursuing this path? I mean there were already some studies suggesting that when we tell people that they do not have a free will…
JDH: You mean the Schooler and Vohs experiment published in Psychological Science in 2008 [1]? The basic finding was that people behave less ethically if they stop believing in free will. Specifically, they found that people cheated more in math tests after reading a text that claimed there is no free will. This poses a challenge: in humanism, you want to educate people to the good and truth. In this case, bringing people the truth made them behave badly. So you have the choice to decide if the truth is more important or if ethical behavior is more important. I do not know where I position myself there. As a scientist I think I have to say the truth is more important and society should adapt to it.
PEOPLE CANNOT THINK OF THEIR
MIND AS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS IN THEIR BRAIN.
I think the whole discussion on free will is just a distraction from a more important point: determinism. No matter how hard the data are, people cannot think of their mind as something that happens in their brain and as something that follows the deterministic laws of nature. I think we have no good way of thinking about ourselves in these non-dualistic terms. It is very difficult to integrate your scientific views into your day-to-day intuitions about the mind.
FM: Thank you, John!
Reference
[1] Vohs and Schooler, Psychol Sci., 2008
by Filip Morys
this article originally appeared 2014 in CNS Volume 7, Issue 1, Mind and Brain
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