Scientists have solved a problem that philosophers could not solve: the reason for our actions is an unconscious choice
People consider themselves free only for the reason that they are aware of their actions, but do not know the reasons that caused them. Spinoza The existence of free will is one of the most important unsolved problems of philosophy since antiquity. Do we accept …
People think they are free just for the reason
that they are aware of their actions, but they do not know the reasons that caused them.
Spinoza
The existence of free will is one of the most important unsolved problems of philosophy since antiquity. Are we making decisions consciously, or is it possible that our choice is made without the participation of consciousness long before we are aware of it? Immanuel Kant included the problem of free will in the number of his antinomies - questions, the answers to which lie beyond the bounds of possible knowledge. But scientists are not afraid of difficult tasks in which philosophers have not succeeded. Hundreds of experimental works by psychologists and neurophysiologists have been devoted to the study of free will, and it seems that the answer has been found: the reason for our actions is not a conscious choice.
One of the leading experts in this field is Daniel Wegner, professor of psychology at Harvard University, who summarized the available experimental data in the monograph "The Illusion of Conscious Will". As the title of the work suggests, Wegner concludes that free will is an illusion. Free will is not the cause of our actions, but it accompanies them in the same way as the signal of a low battery on the screen of a mobile phone accompanies the discharge of the battery, but is not the cause of discharge. It is just a sensation that allows us to distinguish the action performed by us from processes that are beyond our control.
When we do the desired act, we tend to interpret it as a manifestation of free will. However, sometimes people do an act, but they do not feel the feeling of realized free will. Wegner, Carpenter, and a number of other psychologists were interested in the unusual effect that occurs during seances. A group of people places their hands on a round table that can rotate. The participants in the session believe that the table will begin to rotate at the will of the spirit they have called. Quite often the table really starts to move, and every single member of the group is ready to swear that they are not involved in this rotation. When the Bible is placed on the table, the rotation stops to everyone's shock.
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You can check the involvement of spirits in the rotation of the table by the nature of the fingerprints left by the participants in the seance on the dusty countertop. It is one thing for the fingers to passively resist the rotating table, and quite another when they actively spin the table. The direction of the strokes will be different. Observations have shown that people, not spirits, spin the table. But people did not feel free will and therefore experienced the illusion that someone else was spinning the table. Another type of Ouija uses a cardboard board that contains words or letters. For example, the words "yes" and "no". A group of people take the disc and hold it over the board. They ask questions of the called spirit, and that spirit brings the disk to one of the answers. In this case, the answers are logical, for example, to the question "are you alive?" the spirit consistently answers no. As in the previous example,people are convinced that they do not induce movement. However, if the participants are blindfolded and secretly unfold the board, the answers of the "spirits" cease to be logical, that is, the answers are chosen by people, not spirits, although they themselves do not realize it. There are many such examples, called automatisms.
But the opposite is also true: we often feel free will in actions that we did not perform. For example, in a series of experiments described by Wegner, people admitted their guilt for pressing the "wrong" computer key that they did not press. For this, it is enough to provide a false witness to the error, and the nature of the error must be such that its commission seems plausible. In a number of cases, a person not only experiences a sense of guilt for an imperfect act, but also "recalls" the details of his violation. Wegner gives an example from his own life, when he sat down to play a computer game and only after some time of enthusiastic keystrokes realized that he was not controlling the game, but watching the splash screen for it.
Serious impairments to the sense of free will can occur in patients with brain disorders. For example, clinical cases have been described where people feel that they are controlling the movement of the sun across the sky or cars on the roads. They believe that their will is the cause of these movements. On the other hand, there are people with the syndrome of "alien hand" who are sure that their hand lives its own life, does not obey their will. To an outside observer, all hand movements look like conscious ones: the hand can perform complex actions, for example, buttoning a shirt. But the owner is convinced that someone else is controlling the hand. Some people believe that they are being controlled "from space" and do not feel their will behind the actions they take.
Thus, free will is a sensation that does not always correspond to reality. We know for sure that free will can be an illusion, and we are justified in asking: Couldn't any feeling of free will be an illusion? When we begin to utter a long monologue, we do not think it through from beginning to end, but each word falls into place and fits into an elegant coherent picture, as if we knew the whole monologue from the very beginning. Our consciousness does not yet know what we will say next, but for some reason this does not prevent us from expressing our thoughts. Isn't it strange?
However, the arguments are not limited to philosophical reflections. A number of scientific studies show that the "free will" we perceive is not the reason for our actions. Psychologist Benjamin Libet discovered in the brain the so-called "readiness potential", an excitement in a specific area of the brain that occurs hundreds of milliseconds before a person makes a conscious decision to take action. In the experiment, people were asked to press a button at an arbitrary moment in time when they wanted to. At the same time, the participants were required to mark the moment at which they made a conscious decision to press the button. Surprisingly, the experimenters, when measuring the readiness potential, could predict the moment of pressing the button hundreds of milliseconds before the subject realized that he decided to press the button. The chronology was as follows: first, scientists saw a jump in the readiness potential on the measuring devices, then the person realized that he wanted to press the button, and after that the button was pressed itself.
Initially, many scientists reacted to these experiments with skepticism. It was suggested that such a delay may be associated with impaired attention of the subjects. However, subsequent experiments conducted by Haggard and others showed that although attention affects the described delays, the main effect is reproduced: the willingness potential signals a person's will to press a button before the person experiences this will. In 1999, the experiments of neurophysiologists Patrick Haggard and Martin Eimer showed that if a person is given a choice between two buttons, measuring similar readiness potentials, one can predict which button a person will choose before he realizes his choice.
In 2004, a group of neurophysiologists published an article in the authoritative scientific journal Nature Neuroscience that people with certain damage to a part of the cerebral cortex, called the parietal cortex, cannot say when they decided to start moving, although they can indicate the moment when the movement began. The researchers suggested that this part of the brain is responsible for creating a pattern of subsequent movement. In 2008, another group of scientists tried to replicate button-pushing experiments using a more modern technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI allows you to study changes in the activity of various parts of the brain, observing the change in blood flow (the most active parts of the brain require more oxygen). The subjects were seated in front of a screen on which the letters changed. The subject had to rememberat the appearance of which letter they made a choice between the two buttons. Scientists tried to determine which excitation of which parts of the brain contains the most information about what choice a person will make: will he press the left or right button.
Taking into account all the statistical corrections, the activity of the brain in the above-mentioned parietal cortex (and several other areas) made it possible to predict a person's choice before he was aware of it. Under a number of conditions, it was possible to carry out the forecast 10 seconds before the subject made a conscious decision! Neurophysiologist John-Dylan Haynes and colleagues who participated in this study concluded that a network of control regions of the brain responsible for making decisions begins to form long before we begin to suspect it. This work was also published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
In the review "The Gene of God" (see "New" dated 2008-06-06), we touched upon the research of Roger Sperry, the subject of which were people who had undergone surgery to separate the cerebral hemispheres. For this research in 1981 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Sperry showed that people with a severed corpus callosum (the bridge connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain) have two independent personalities - one in the left, the other in the right hemisphere. This has a direct application to the issue of free will: the amazing fact that two personalities of such a person do not conflict and do not even realize the existence of each other. The hemispheres were divided, but for them nothing seemed to have changed! One gets the impression that any action performed by our body is interpreted by consciousness (consciousnesses?) As a result of the manifestation of its free will, even if it was not. Imagine two people living in the same room but unaware of their neighbor. Every time a window is opened, each of them is convinced that it was he who opened it.
The belief that we can freely and consciously choose our actions is fundamental to our view of the world. However, this point of view does not agree with the latest experimental data, which indicate that our subjective perception of freedom is nothing more than an illusion that our actions are determined by processes in our brain, hidden from our consciousness and occurring long before the sensation of a decision is made.
Alexander Panchin