Je ne regrette rien (1): On the

neuropsychology of free will

Jess Zamora Bonilla April 2, 2014
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One of the most classical problems in philosophy is the existence and nature of free will.
Though the growth of our scientific knowledge about the brain, and about the universe in
general, is making the notion of free will less and less tenable, it seems that the major
difficulty becomes to reconcile this idea with a naturalistic vision of nature, the most
important effort is devoted by defenders of free will to find arguments that could allow to
accept its existence, desperately looking within the mysteries of quantum mechanics or
within a systemic conception of the brain, some hideouts where this venerated and elusive
property may resist the buffetings of the naturalistic tide.
In order to count as not-merely-apparent explication of the idea of free will, any scientific
or philosophical account of it must respect these two fundamental theses:
1. Possibilism: when someone makes a decision, she could have made a different one.
I.e., the global state of the world just immediately before her making that decision
did not wholly determine what decision were going to be made, but left at least two
options open.

2. Ultimate control: the decision of a subject is not the product of a set of causes
external to her, but is in some substantial way spontaneous or autonomous; the
subject is the author (or actor) of her decisions.
There is an old argument (the skeptical argument) against the compatibility of these two
properties: either physical determinism is true or it is false; if determinism is true, then
possibilism is false; if determinism is false, then non determined events happen by chance,
and hence those decisions of us which are not determined by the physical laws happen by
chance, and we are not the authors of then in the sense of the ultimate control thesis.
Hence, free will is impossible. Traditionally, defenders of free will have resorted to
basically three strategies: either claiming that free will is really compatible with
determinism (compatibilism), or that it is compatible with indeterminism (libertarianism),
or that the dichotomy determinism-indeterminism is inappropriate (there is not a common
label for this strategy; for example, Kants theory of freedom could be included here)*. The
only other position, which is the one I will adopt in this series, is just to accept the
argument as it is, and deny that free will (in the sense of the combination of possibilism and
ultimate control) is a legitimate notion to understand our actions. I will not concentrate,
however, in examining the arguments against the other three strategies, but on something
that I think is more interesting from a biological point of view: why it is that we have so a
convincing feeling or impression of having something like free will; i.e., why we
instinctively tend to believe that 1 and 2 are true. After all, our having this impression is a
non-problematic psychological or neurobiological fact (at least, not more problematic than
any other mental state or happening, if we just ignore by now the so called hard problem
of consciousness, to which I will probably devote some future entries), not clearly
contradicting deep features of the physical laws as thesis 1 and 2 seem to do. It is possible
to ask, hence, about both the neurophysiological basis of that impression, and about the
evolutionary advantage that having the capacity of experience such feeling may have
provided to our ancestors.
Nevertheless, before entering into that question in the next entry, I shall briefly discuss
about what cannot be the cause (in a naturalistic worldview) of our feeling of being free,
and how we cannot find that cause. Regarding the latter, we must not confuse the event of
decision taking with our experience of that event; it is as if we wanted to know the nature
of heat just by analysing our phenomenological feeling of heat; our feeling of deciding
need not have any special resemblance with what deciding consists really in. As in the case
of heat, the only important thing, from an evolutionary point of view, is that we have the
sensation of heat in the presence of hot bodies (not of cold objects), or the feeling of being
deciding something when we are deciding something (not when we do something
involuntarily, for example); but nothing in the phenomenological content of those
sensations need to have any similarity with the real physical processes (the energy of
vibrating particles, the firing of certain neurons) those feelings have. If we take this into
account, we will immediately conclude that most of the arguments on the literature on free
will are dubious, just because they are based on how the experience of deciding (its
phenomenology) intuitively manifests to us: we feel we have authority, we dont feel
compelled, we feel we have different alternatives to choose between, etc.; but there is no
reason at all to assume that these feelings are more informative about the real causal

processes underlying decision making than the feeling of heat about the atomic nature of
matter and the notion of mean kinetic energy of molecules.
Regarding the possible causes of our impression of being free, and in particular, our
impression of the future being open in front of us (i.e., the impression that possibilism is
true), it is also important to notice that there is absolutely no causal link, compatible with
the known laws of physics, that takes as input the truth of possibilism (i.e., the
-conjectured- real existence of alternative futures), and gives as output our supposed
experience of those possible futures. Perception is always a causal process that transmits
information from some event in the past, and has as its effect a particular neural state, that
of perceiving something (of course, many aspects of this process can lead to cases of
misperception). But in the case we are dealing with now, we feel there is not something in
the past, but in the future, for example, my possibility of staying seated during the next
minute, or the possibility of standing up. Perhaps some can counter argue that this is not
really a case of perception, but of (intellectual) inference: I conclude, by induction on my
past experience, that in the next future both possibilities are open. But, first, I think that,
phenomenologically speaking, this is not an inference, but some immediate intuition: I feel
that I can do one thing or the other. And, second, and more importantly, nothing in my past
experience has shown anything about possibilities: I have never (nor can) experience
something like a (mere) possibility, only actual occurrences. It is a much simpler
explanation the one according to which it is mere uncertainty what drives me to feel
dubious about the future and hence experience (logically) alternative events as equally
possible.
*See Moya Esp (2006) 1 as one systematic exploration of these alternatives, and Harris
(2012)2 as a rebuttal.

References
1. Moya Espi, C., Moral Responsibility. The Ways of Scepticism. Abingdon and New
York, Routledge, 2006.
2. Harris, S., Free will, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Je ne regrette rien (2): Consciuous decisions in the lab

Jess Zamora Bonilla April 23, 2014

Filed under

Credit: Abir Sultan / ELSC

Credit: Abir Sultan / ELSC

Psychologists and neurologists have been interested in the problem of free will
since the beginning of their specialities, though the first clearly devised and
relevant experiments on the topic were those of Libet and colleagues1, in the
early eighties. In this famous experiment, subjects who were before a clock,
and whose brain electrical waves were being observed, were asked to flex a
finger, and to notice as accurately as possible the moment in which, according
to the clock, they had consciously decided to perform the movement. Though
obviously the conscious decision was experienced before the fingers
movement, an electrical potential known to be correlated with voluntary
actions since the sixties was observed by Libets equipment about 0,2 seconds
before the reported making of the conscious decision, and about 0,5 seconds
before the movement itself. By the way, the motivation of Libets experiment
was that of testing a prediction made in the seventies by the Nobel prize
winner, the Christian dualist neurobiologist John Eccles, who had conjectured
that the electrical potential should be observed after the reported conscious
decision of the subjects. Of course, Libets experiments created a deep
disturbance amongst defenders of free will. Libet himself declared that, though
his discovery seemed to preclude the existence of free will, it did allow the
existence of something like free wont, i.e., the capacity of conscious free
choice for vetoing a decision that has already been unconsciously triggered by
our brain.

Nevertheless, further experiments have not only largely confirmed Libets

former discovery, but have helped to discard the free wont interpretation.
For example, Filevich et al. (2013)2 have studied in a Libetian way the neural
precursors of decisions to inhibit actions, finding that also in this case there is a
considerable time lag (around 0,1 sec) between the electrical signal that the
action has been vetoed, and the perceived vetoing decision of the subject.

A similar experiment, but without the need of a clock, was carried out by
Matsuhashi and Hallet (2006)3. They asked the subjects to freely decide to
move a finger at random intervals, while listening tones that sounded also at
random times. The subjects had to report whether the tone had sounded after
their conscious thought to move the finger, but after the movement itself, and
had to try to stop the movement in that case. Consistently with Libets result,
these experiments also showed that the conscious perception of the decision to
move occurred systematically too late to be the physical cause of the
movement.

Other experiments have shown that we can be easily mislead into attributing to
ourselves voluntary actions that are not really ours. For example, in one study
by Daniel Wegner4 the participants were invited to use a computer mouse in

concert with someone who is a secret confederate of the experimenter. They

are told to choose freely where on the screen to move the cursor, although in
fact the confederate is the one making the selection. When, just before the
mouse is moved, subjects hear in their headphones a word corresponding to
the confederates chosen target, they have an increased tendency to report
that they acted intentionally in making the selection. There are more studies
showing how external events (e.g., the testimony of others) can lead subjects
to falsely attributing to themselves actions they did not performed.

Based on this type of results, the psychologist Wegner has been one of the
main defenders that conscious free will is really an illusion. However, it can be
argued that one thing is to establish that our conscious experience of free
deciding is not causally responsible of our physical actions (something that
experiments like the ones referred to above certainly seem to establish beyond
any doubt), and a different thing is to deny the voluntariness of our actions or
the causal relevance of consciousness tout court. Regarding the former, my
own interpretation is that conscious will must not be identified with voluntary
action: there are voluntary (e.g., deciding what to prepare for meal) and
involuntary actions (e.g., sneezing), that are not only different from a
phenomenological point of view, but also with respect to the neuronal and
brain structures involved in each of them, and to the interactions between
those structures in each case. Not all involuntary actions are unconscious, nor
are all voluntary actions conscious, but complex voluntary actions usually
demand the exercising of our conscious attention and deliberation. The fact
that our conscious perception of our voluntary decision happens some
milliseconds after some neural events have started to trig our action, does not
entail that these neural events cannot be classified as voluntary; i.e., one thing
is the voluntariness of our action, and another thing is our perception of that
voluntariness. Usually, dualist thinkers in the Cartesian tradition have tended to
identify voluntariness with conscious voluntariness, but our knowledge of the
brain functioning seems to entail that this is a mistake: consciousness is an
essential part of a process of which it is simply not the uncaused first cause.

Regarding the second point, consciousness might play a causal role in our
behaviour even if its role is not that of initiating our decisions. It can be as
important to consciously notice whether something that has happened has
been a voluntary decision of mine, as to consciously notice that there are three
different trains I may take this afternoon. The neural event consisting in our
consciously perceiving that we have made a voluntary decision may just be a
way our brain has of classifying certain types of other events (i.e., the event of
having made a voluntary decision), in order to produce relevant regularities
that can be stored in our long term memory, so as to modify our future
behaviour in a more adaptive way. For, after all, how can one learn, if not in this
way, that one can do something like voluntarily act in the world?

References

Libet, B. (1985) Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will
in voluntary action. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8, 529566.
Filevich E., Khn S., Haggard P. & Pourtois G. (2013). There Is No Free Wont:
Antecedent Brain Activity Predicts Decisions to Inhibit, PLoS ONE, 8 (2) e53053.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0053053.s002
Matsuhashi, M., Hallett, M. (2006): The timing of conscious thought into
action. Clinical Neurophysiology 117(suppl. 1), S96.
Wegner, D. (2002) The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press, Cam