Patrick Haggard - How Can Free Will Work?

Assume that free will is real, not an illusion, and that the only reality is physical. How then could the will possibly be free? By what mechanism could human choice transcend the strong determinism of a closed physical world? One can try diminishing one side or the other: reducing free will or softening determinism, but each has its own difficulties.



Patrick Haggard is a neuroscientist and current Deputy Director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, where he is a professor in the department of Psychology.


Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[ScottyHugefellow]

Time to read the comments to see what the experts have to say about all this

[B.S...]

_"Should two courses be judged equal, then the will cannot break the deadlock, all it can do is to suspend judgement until the circumstances change, and the right course of action is clear."_
— [Jean Buridan, French philosopher, c.1340]

[secullenable]

Just because your conscious mind is not aware of an action does not mean you don't have 'free will'. At least in a brain enclosed system...let's leave out determinism and souls for now and focus on the origin and mechanics of thought in the brain itself (conscious vs subconscious), which is where I think most of Haggard's work is focused. Do you think your subconscious mind is not 'you'? Given that it underpins your innate motivation and long held beliefs about yourself and the world (which ultimately dictate almost all of your actions), one could argue that your subconscious is more 'you' than your conscious.

Either way, it is your conscious mind that is ultimately in control of writing the script through which your subconscious mind operates your day to day life. So in a roundabout way, your conscious mind (what one might call the 'you') is always in control, albeit from a more indirect and distant vantage point as it watches, almost absentmindedly, as the script that it wrote plays itself out. Your subconscious drives the car, but your conscious programs the GPS. The good news is that you can step in and change those coordinates or subconscious scripts if you don't find them helpful (eg change a bad habit). The bad news is that it takes an awful lot of conscious time and effort to do so. But your conscious mind ('you') is in charge of the long term plan and direction of your life, as long as you dedicate the often considerable conscious energy required to change.

Ultimately, the feeling that 'you' ie your conscious mind is in control on a day to day basis is mostly an illusion to comfort your conscious mind. It is your subconscious that pulls almost all of your strings as you act mostly on autopilot throughout the day, with your conscious stepping in every now and again to make executive decisions. Your life is just more efficient that way because if you had to take the time to think before every action then you'd accomplish very little. Why would we have evolved such an illusion? Perhaps because the conscious and the subconscious operate on such completely different levels and languages (tried making sense of your dreams lately?) that your brain could only operate efficiently if there was a hard boundary separating the two systems, albeit with some necessary lines of ongoing communication. And given that the subconscious is just better at doing things on autopilot but your conscious evidently needs to 'feel' like it's in control, this illusion perhaps functions to keep the peace between the two systems, so to say. Could madness be, in part, the end result of this boundary/illusion disintegrating? Interesting to think about.

In the end however, your conscious and subconscious are like two sides of the same coin. The combination of both is the real 'you'. In this context, the question do 'you' have free will (at least in the closed system of your brain) has only one possible answer. Whether there are processes outside of your brain (universal determinism, souls etc..) that dictate your decision making is a related, but different question.

[nisarabro]

Excellent Program and my Most Favorite One

[BrianGay]

Of course we have free will. We have no choice.

[longcastle]

The Tata Steel Chess Tournament just finished yesterday... Really difficult to watch those Grand Masters studying those board and running various series of moves through their heads before actually deciding which move to make -- without thinking we most certainly do have free will decision making capability. Additionally, difficult for me to understand why Nature would have Selected for us such large brains and mega complex wrinkly frontal lobes just to give us the _illusion_ of being able to reason, make plans, think things through, weigh pros and cons and engage in complex decision making etc... when _actually_ giving us those things would surely give us an edge in survival...

[jackarmstrong]

Until the phenomena of experience is understood some aspect of it like the ability to move the arm at will can never be understood.

[PaulHoward]

Choices produce impressions, habits, and consequences. These partially determine the future, leaving the opportunity for "free won't, " or the ability to resist the urges that our prior choices have created for the situations it brings.

[CalebMadrigal]

I am free to choose my actions, but I am not free to choose my desires.

[rc]

Free will seems to function independently from unconscious activity... it's amazing how the brain coordinates all these processes in an orderly manner...

[longcastle]

Nietzsche I think had one of the best takes on Free Will, saying there probably wasn't free will, but rather lots of different wills, each vying for attention -- some stronger, some weaker -- opened up before us (this is where I start giving my own extrapolation of what I think he meant) like the possibilities in a quantum probability wave, some interactions highly likely, others much less so -- untill the interaction occurs or (in the case of a person) a decision is made and the wave collapses and the dominos all line up behind it. Making, in this scenario, Determinism the illusion. This last bit is mine too, I admit, although Nietzsche did say in addition to Free Will probably not happening per se, that Cause and Effect also probably never happened -- clearly indicating (I think) that he viewed both human terms as not quite up to the task of explaining really what was going on.

[matterasmachine]

free will is a mistake probability - probability to do not what you should do. If it gives good results, we call it intuition. If it gives bad results, we call it mistake.

[TurinTuramber]

Your limbic system tells you what restaurant to go to, who to invite, what to order from the menu and the order of how to eat it.

Your free will is you deciding on what to tip.

[GBuckne]

..this is in accordance with a statement I made on another video, "just because you don't use free will most of the time, doesn't mean you don't "have" it...the word "have" is interestingly provocative in this context...

[CrowMagnum]

Conscious awareness and the associated narrative generation exists in the feedback path which informs the evolution of the organism. In some cases that feedback is acted on very quickly by the organism, in others it is stored as memory or neural network reorganization. In all cases it is a reaction. The closest you can get to will is to observe the process of memory formation and neural reorganization; the processes that build and modify the organisms capacity to react.

[SRAVALM]

Isn't freewill a trait of intellect?
We see it in art of every kind.
If we do not have freewill then can somebody give me an example of what freewill would be and look like?

[jamesruscheinski]

Does the difficulty of willing, or volition, indicate a mental causation?

[daveyjones]

There is another option when it comes to free will that no one ever mentions.

[jamesruscheinski]

Is the readiness potential always the same place in brain; or in different places for different actions?

[AlienRelics]

I can pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time. Either hand on top, or I can rub my head while patting my stomach.

I can also fence with two blades, a blade and a dagger, fence left or right handed, or fence with just a left-handed dagger (I'm right handed).

I am not ambidextrous, I trained myself to do this.