Are You Sure We Don’t Have Free Will?

It certainly feels like we do.

A few years ago, during a deep dive into brain-related topics, I wrote a blog exploring the question ‘Do We Have Free Will?’ At the time, much of what I read suggested that our feeling of choice is an illusion — a conclusion that felt unsatisfying.

Image Courtesy of Dall-E

I was pleased to read this recent book by Kevin Mitchell: “Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will”. In this book I was hoping to read and think more on some of these questions:

1. If our brain is made of physical wetware, doesn’t it function like a machine governed by the laws of physics? And if so, doesn’t that mean our actions are deterministic and preordained?
2. Isn’t free will merely an illusion — a construct of the brain to create a sense of control over our actions?
3. If our actions are shaped by genetics and environment, how can free will genuinely exist within those constraints?
4. Haven’t scientific experiments shown that our brain makes decisions before we are even consciously aware of making a choice? How does this impact the idea of free will?

After reading the book and doing some thinking on the topic — here’s my brief and updated understanding of free will. This first section attempts to address the questions #1-#3, and the second section attempts to specifically address question #4. Finally I’ll share some nice quotes that I enjoyed from the book.

Challenging Determinism: The Science of Free Will

• Science does not support the concept that everything is preordained and that the world is purely marching along a deterministic, preordained path based solely on the laws of physics. Quantum mechanics introduces randomness and indeterminacy, particularly at small scales, and we observe definite randomness at the neuronal level. This doesn’t mean that quantum randomness equates to free will, but it does challenge the idea that the world is entirely deterministic or that we are merely mechanistic machines.
• Free will is an emergent property. What does free will mean? It means that we can draw upon all the things that make us who we are — our evolution, past experiences, the stimuli around us (or even the absence of stimuli) — and combine these with our long-term goals to make decisions. What does it mean for “we” to make those decisions? It’s the feeling that we are actively making choices that are consistent with our goals and sense of purpose.

Is this process of decision-making supported by neurons, chemistry, and physics? Yes. Is it purely mechanistic, a simple output of input stimuli? No, not entirely. The system — our mind — operates with a long-term sense of meaning and purpose, striving to make decisions aligned with that. Furthermore, randomness plays a role in some of these decisions, both at the neuronal level and the systems level.

This view is a compatibilistic picture of meaning: it is supported by science (not dualistic) while rejecting hard determinism.

With this foundation, let’s revisit a well-known experiment often cited in discussions about free will — the Libet experiment — and explore why its conclusions might not be as definitive as they seem.

The Libet Experiment and Its Claim

Libet’s experiments measured the “readiness potential” (a buildup of electrical activity in the brain) before participants consciously decided to move their hand. These findings are often interpreted as showing that:

• The brain decides to act before we are consciously aware of making a decision.
• Free will is an illusion, as conscious thought seems to follow brain activity rather than initiate it.

It was great to read a more thoughtful treatment of this experiment which I’ll try to summarize here.

First the experiments only studied simple, arbitrary actions (e.g., moving a finger) and did not address complex, deliberative decisions involving reasoning and goals. I think this squares well with our personal experience — that some things in our body do take place automatically but making big decisions — moving across the country, taking a new job, etc. do feel like they are deliberate.

The experiment’s author, Libet, himself acknowledged that his findings do not disprove free will and cautioned against extending the results to all human decisions. His experiments highlight the role of unconscious processes but leave room for conscious control in complex decision-making.

The readiness potential likely reflects random neural fluctuations, unrelated to deliberate, goal-oriented decisions.

“In the trials where the decision was arbitrary, a readiness potential was detected… But in the trials where the subjects made a deliberative, consequential choice, no such association was found.”

Deliberative decisions, as opposed to arbitrary ones, engage other brain areas responsible for processing information, evaluating consequences, and forming intentions. These processes are not reflected in the readiness potential.

“The results confirm, first, that neural activity in the brain is not completely deterministic and, second, that organisms can choose to harness the inherent randomness to make arbitrary decisions in a timely fashion.”

Free will is about our ability to make meaningful, deliberative decisions aligned with our goals, not the kind of trivial actions studied in Libet’s experiments. These experiments are not evidence that free will is an illusion but instead show the limits of interpreting brain activity in arbitrary contexts.

Interesting Quotes

Here are some nice quotes I’ve extracted from the book:

On Determinism and Indeterminacy:

“The low-level details of physical systems plus the equations governing the evolution of quantum fields do not completely determine the evolution of the whole system. They are not causally comprehensive: other factors — such as constraints imposed by the higher-order organization of the system — can play a causal role in settling how things go.”

“The universe is not deterministic, and as a consequence, the low-level laws of physics do not exhaustively encompass all types of causation. The laws themselves are not violated, of course — but they are not sufficient either to determine or explain the behavior of the system.”

“Physical indeterminacy opens the door for true agency and free will. The constant jitteriness of neural activity means that the whole system is not predetermined to adopt any particular state: there are degrees of freedom in the system that the organism can exploit.”

Free will as an Emergent Property

“What does free will mean? It means using the hard-won knowledge accumulated by your past self to guide action in the present moment in the service of your future self. If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing you.”

“Life itself entails a causal insulation from the rest of the world. Living organisms accumulate causal power over evolution and over their individual lifetimes. And we, like other animals, have a set of neural resources designed specifically to allow us to select our actions in the service of our goals; that is, to act for our own reasons.”

On the Nature of Decision-Making:

“Exercising free will requires an open-ended ability for individuals to learn, to create new goals further and further removed from the ultimate imperatives of survival, to plan over longer timeframes, to simulate the outcomes of possible actions and internally evaluate them before acting, to decouple cognition from action, and ultimately to inspect their own reasons and subject them to metacognitive scrutiny.”

“Organisms have developed numerous mechanisms to directly harness the underlying randomness in neural activity. It can be drawn on to resolve an impasse in decision-making, to increase exploratory behavior, or to allow novel ideas to be considered when planning the next action.”

On Meaning and Complexity:

“The brain doesn’t run on spikes but on patterns. The way in which system activity evolves through time is driven by what those patterns mean. That meaning is grounded in the history of interactions of the organism with its environment.”

“It’s not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It’s an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons.”

“Living organisms do things, for reasons, as causal agents in their own right. They are driven not by energy but by information. And the meaning of that information is embodied in the structure of the system itself, based on its history.”

Conclusion and Open Question

Our brains and behavior do not appear to be fully deterministic. Instead, it seems that free will emerges from the complex interplay of physical processes, randomness, and meaning-making within our brains, allowing us to act in alignment with our goals and sense of self.

This view suggests that free will is compatible with the constraints of physics, offering a scientific foundation for the sense of agency and purpose we experience.

In spite of the seeming clarity and understanding of free will there are of course many open questions:

• The Hard Problem of Consciousness — How exactly do complex neural systems give rise to subjective experiences and the sense of self?
• The Role of Randomness — While randomness seems to enable flexibility and even creativity, how does the brain integrate randomness or neural noise into meaningful goal-directed decision-making without becoming chaotic?