Philosophy professor Hanok Ben-Yami criticizes the position of cognitive scientists who believe that a person does not have free will, and explains why you need to be careful about the results of experiments and not take on faith statements about the total influence of the unconscious on us.
Recently Scientific American has published two articles on human free will. One belonged to the pen of psychologist Adam Biard, who studies the brain and consciousness. By consciousness, scientists usually understand the totality of mental processes that are controlled by a person - approx. the author., another in response to the first was written by the philosopher Hanok Ben-Yami criticizing Biar's position. What the pundits argued about, read our material.
The Free Will Question: Philosophy vs. Neuroscience
In his article “What Neuroscience Says About Free Will,” published last year in Scientific American, psychologist Adam Biard consistently defends the idea that humans do not have free will, as cognitive research tells us.
As an example, Adam Biard mentions several cases that are familiar to all of us. Usually, when in the morning we wake up a minute before the alarm clock or pull the shirt we need out of the closet without looking, we do it automatically. A person does not need to think over absolutely every step: we perform many actions unconsciously, as if mechanically, as if according to a program preset by the brain.
Developing this idea, Biard refers to the research of psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley, who suggested that the choice that a person makes when making any decision depends on his past experience, and therefore, on the unconscious area of the psyche.
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Usually, people are confident that consciousness allows them to completely control their behavior, control reactions and make informed choices. However, cognitive scientists argue that human behavior in many situations is influenced by the unconscious - that area of the psyche that does not obey consciousness and is not controlled by a person.
According to Wegner and Wheatley, we need the unconscious as a defense mechanism against "overheating." Just imagine how difficult it would be for us to act if we had to think about every gesture. For the sake of experiment, try to "turn on" consciousness and control muscle movements while walking. You are guaranteed not to be able to develop your usual speed and in general you will feel tremendous stress. That is why our brain, having worked out a scheme that allows you to successfully perform a certain action, for example, walking, excludes this operation from the conscious area and transfers it to the unconscious area.
However, the philosopher Hanok Ben-Yami, having read the opinion of Adam Biar, writes about the doubts that cause the arguments of the neuroscientist. The philosopher seems questionable about the idea that the human brain distinguishes between processes that are controlled by consciousness and those that are performed unconsciously. He sees in the postulation of a certain specific area, called the "unconscious," a mystical character. The main argument of the philosopher is that it is impossible to carry out an experiment that would show and prove that the unconscious exists as a separate area of the psyche.
Ben-Yami writes that Dan Wegner and Talia Wheatley's suggestion only confuses us and explains nothing. How do we understand the idea that a person's previous experience in some mysterious way influences decision-making at the moment? In the assumption of cognitivists, it remains unclear how to draw this line and how to separate the actions that we perform consciously from the actions performed under the influence of the "mysterious unconscious."
The philosopher, on the other hand, resolves this question in this way: the one that we perform in pursuit of a certain goal will be considered a conscious action. And confirmation that a person has free will will be the observation that under similar circumstances, but having more options for choice, he would have made the same choice. According to Ben-Yami, goal-setting is one of the main abilities and features of the human psyche. We always structure our activities so as to quickly achieve our goals, and never do anything without a reason.
Thus, according to Hanok Ben-Yami, Wegner and Wheatley are only misleading us, claiming that our choice, our goal is due to semi-unconscious motives and clouded by previous experience. According to the philosopher, science cannot give us convincing arguments about the existence of free will, since it cannot prove the existence of the unconscious area at all.
However, Biard went further and conducted his own experiment with his colleague Paul Bloom to confirm his position. The participants in the experiment were in front of a computer monitor, on which five white circles were presented in a free order on the screen. The challenge was to quickly select a circle before time runs out and one of the five white circles turns red. In this case, choosing a circle is a moment of focusing on it. However, as the experiment showed, it was not so easy to make a choice in favor of one of the white circles against the background of the other white circles. In 30% of cases, participants reported that the exact circle they chose turned red. At the same time, since the circle that should change color was determined by the computer, the percentage of coincidence with the person's choice should have been 20%. Scientists concluded that in 10% of cases, participants in the experiment hesitated to make a choice until one of the circles turned red and helped to fix attention. Moreover, because the time intervals between experimental sessions were very short, the participants were often unable to establish the order of events. They did not understand what had happened before: their personal choice of the circle on which to fix their gaze, or the change in the color of the circle, which attracted attention and determined the final choice.what happened before: their personal choice of the circle on which to fix their gaze, or the change in the color of the circle, which attracted attention and determined the final choice.what happened before: their personal choice of the circle on which to fix their gaze, or the change in the color of the circle, which attracted attention and determined the final choice.
While Biar and Bloom admit the possibility that the short time between sessions could spoil the statistics of the results, they are confident that the error is negligible and the conclusions from this modest experiment are really significant. According to psychologists, the experimental data indicate that we can be systematically mistaken about understanding how we make a choice, and, accordingly, do not have any free will. They insist that the brain influences human decision-making.
However, Ben-Yami, having familiarized himself with the process of conducting the experiment and its results, concluded that the theoretical generalizations that cognitive scientists strive for do not reflect the actual state of affairs. The philosopher emphasizes that the experiment does not allow making unambiguous conclusions, and psychologists adjust the results to the predictions they made before starting the experiment. So, for example, one of the problems arises when trying to extrapolate the conclusions of the experiment with the choice of circle to the situation, say, the choice of products in a store. It is completely unclear how to transfer these results to a live situation. Ben-Yami insists that theoretical generalizations about how a person makes choices are speculative. The purpose of this speculation is to make us agree with the idea,that the brain is able to influence and distort a person's attention at the time of making a choice. However, according to the philosopher, the experiment does not prove anything other than that our brain switches from one task to another more slowly than a computer program is capable of.
Ben-Yami concludes that despite the growing amount of data from the cognitive sciences, we cannot be sure and definitively convinced that this data represents the situation as it is. At this stage, the question of free will cannot be definitively resolved by neuroscience, and belief in statistics is just belief. Since scientists cannot yet prove the existence of a sphere of the unconscious, they can only hope that there will be people who will find their arguments convincing, and they will believe that there is an area of the unconscious that has a tremendous influence on human decision-making.
Ben-Yami urges not to accept this hypothesis of scientists on faith, as well as critically interpret the information that is given to us as true.