Does Free Will Exist? | Alfred Mele | Big Think

Does Free Will Exist?
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The question of human autonomy, the alternate universes that our choices can open up, and the problem of measurement awareness.
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ALFRED MELE:

Alfred Mele is an American philosopher and the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He specializes in irrationality, akrasia, intentionality and philosophy of action. He is the author of several books, most recently "Effective Intentions," published in 2009.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Do human beings have free will?

Alfred Mele: Yes. Yes they do. But it turns out that not everybody understands the expression “free will” in the same way. And there are lots of different ways of understanding it. Unfortunately, that makes it hard to just say, “Yes, this is true that isn’t.” One thing philosopher’s spend a lot of time doing is trying to sort out the possible meanings of an expression like “free will,” and the history on the literature on free will is a couple of thousand years old. So, when I talked to the general public, one thing I say about free will is, you can think about it on a sort of gas station model, service station model, So, when you go to the gas station and get regular gas, or the mid grade gas, or the premium. And maybe we could simplify things by thinking of like regular free will. Well, regular free will would be the sort of thing that is presupposed in courts of law when somebody is judged guilty of an offense. So, just that you understood what you were doing, you’re sane and rational, and nobody was forcing, or compelling you to do it, and you didn’t have any medical condition that forced or compelled you to do it. That would be enough to be acting freely. Now, that’s regular free will.

Yeah, okay, so now how do we understand this being able to do otherwise, everything being the same up until that moment? And by everything, I mean the entire history of the universe and all of the laws of nature. So, one way to picture this ability to do otherwise is as follows. If I could have done otherwise at a given moment, then there’s another possible universe. You don’t have to suppose that this universe actually exists. Another scenario where the entire universe is the same up until that moment, and even so, I do something else instead. So maybe what I did was decide to call a taxi, but at that very moment, everything being the same up until then, I could have decided to take a subway instead, and then started heading down the stairs.

Okay. So, some people require that kind of ability for free will. Now, if we’re going to have it, then the brain has to work in such a way that everything being the same up until a given point in time, although I did one thing, I decided to call a taxi. I could have decided to take the subway. And we don’t have good evidence that the brain does work that way, but also, we don’t have good evidence that it doesn’t. Right? So, this is a question that is empirically open. And it could turn out that the brain doesn’t work this way, and then if it doesn’t, then we’re not going to have free will at this mid grade level, but we could still have regular free will.

So, I’m convinced we have regular free will, the mid grade thing, I’m not convinced we have because we don’t have the empirical evidence that we need. But we don’t have it either way.

Question: What is the main experiment that’s driven this kind of free will?

Alfred Mele: So these were originally done starting in the early ‘80’s. They are still being done today. The technology today is better, but it’s the same kind of experiment. What you have are subjects seated in a chair like the one I’m sitting in, and they have this task. To flex the wrist whenever they want. They’re watching a fast clock. There’s dot on the clock and it makes a complete revolution in less than 3 seconds, and they’re hooked up to two machines. One is measuring EEG, electrical conductivity on the scalp. And the other measures a muscle burst on the wrist, it’s an electromyogram. Okay? So, they’re supposed to flex whenever they want and watch this rapidly revolving spot on the clock and then after they flex, they’re supposed to indicate where the spot was on the clock when they first became aware of their urge, intention, decision, to flex. And they indicate it by moving a cursor to that spot on the clock. Okay, is that clear?

All right. Now, when these subjects are regularly reminded to be spontaneous and not to plan in advance when to flex, what you see is that...

[Skeptik]

Does free will exist?  Yes, unless married.   Chuckle....

[nicmuddmusic]

What is "you"? Are you your brain, your whole body, or your experiences? What is consciousness exactly?

[DoctorZisIN]

Me: "OK brain, you have to decide when to flex the wrist... or you have to decide whether to push A or B.
Brain: "I don't give a shit. It's too much work to decide something which doesn't matter. I'll pass it down to the subconscious."
Subconscious: "I don't give a shit, I will load a pre-set pattern for 2 variables (be it "A vs B" or "flex now vs not yet") You will have your pattern fed to your conscious before you know it".
Me: "Thank you brain, that sounds like the most comfortable and efficient way to handle this stupid test".

[Dillinger]

"Do I believe in free will? 
I have no Choice"

[srrlIdl]

Look at all these youtube kids here being smarter than a professor of philosophy.

[darkcylander]

if there is no free will, then why would we need to have the ability to read our own minds? why doesn't every action just involuntarily cut strait to the chase without any conscious perception? if there is no choose in anything anyway, why not have it feel that way as well?

[RobertDigitalArtist]

The Libet experiments are/could be interesting in their own right but would only be interesting for free
will if it would conclusively prove all actions are made without conscious thought (and only in hindsight sends back signals to the conscious part of the brain).

Not proving it (or only with some actions) does nothing for the question of free will (in the strict libertarian philosophical sense).

The question of true (libertarian) free will is about whether our will is determined, not whether our will determines our actions (most people don't deny that).
And since the will has to be determined - due to causality (the only other option being randomness, which isn't free will) - the concept of true free will is an incoherent one.

[kendallburks]

Free will in the mid-grade sense of “could have done otherwise” will always remain fundamentally incomprehensible. Comprehensibility imposes the restriction upon our explanation of events that all events must have a prior cause. This is how our minds necessarily make sense of things. In what other form would a “reasonable” explanation of behavior take?

“Could have done otherwise” requires two components that contradict this requirement of causal explanation. First, it requires that a degree of “wiggle room” or indeterminacy exists in the world. The randomness implied in this defies the need for sufficient causal explanation. Just try making sense of quantum indeterminacy to get a feel for the way such a thing is beyond our grasp. Second, it requires agent causation, the notion that I am the source of my decision. At bottom, this requires that my “self” can spontaneously generate something like a “first cause” or an “uncaused cause”. It is not difficult to see why such a thing will forever evade the requirements of comprehension. By definition it resists such requirements.

All this, of course, is not an argument against believing that free will exists. It very well may be reasonable to believe that something exists while also recognizing that it is incomprehensible. Why should we assume (as it will always be an assumption) the the truth of things conforms precisely to the requirements of a certain mental function? An example of a thing we tend to regard as self-evidently true is our own consciousness. Our own first person, subjective experience is as self-evident a reality as we’re going to face, and yet it too is incomprehensible. To make sense of this, consider that any thing which is comprehended assumes there is something which comprehends. Everything that is perceived assumes a perceiver. In addition, the object of comprehension must remain on one side of this subject/object dichotomy. The eye cannot turn inwards to perceive itself.

Considering this, one also notices that free will, in terms of agent causation, is always fundamentally connected to subjectivity. Perhaps these fundamental realities must simply be accepted as undeniable axioms of our existence. To deny them is itself highly unreasonable. That’s at least how it seems to me.

[fdja]

Darn it, why the volume is so low even after i maxed out my laptop volume.

[irrelevant]

1:24 Everything we do or don't do is based on a "medical condition". This is either at a micro degree which is not apparent or at a macro degree like a brain tumor which is very apparent as in the case of Charles Whitman.

If I go and commit a crime which was actually due to a microscopic brain tumor but with the current medical technology we have today, the brain tumor could not detected and therefore, I am deemed responsible for my actions is ridiculous. We simply don't have free will.

[TheReddaredevil]

I am aware that it is "conventional wisdom" that free will exists. But why would we even think free will exists in the first place? The very concept of it was a fabrication/assumption by philosophers. Up until that assumption was made, we just "live". Animals just do what they do. Children just live their lives. At no point would I have ever thought something as arcane as free will was even relevant until I was told it exists in school. The religious certainly believe in it because without free will almost every single religion is false or indadequate. I think it would be a good idea to just stop using the term free will because it is a recursive tautological absurdity. 

[kennguyen]

lol the experiments dont prove shit, I can sit there and not flex and what they going to do?

[TheSledgeer]

Super interesting stuff. It's one of those subjects that you can go crazy thinking about. Especially when you start getting into multiverse hypotheses and supernatural factors.These types of discussions are best done under the influence of something. Makes for interesting conversations where no one really makes any sense, but will still agree with everything you say.

[ConQuiX]

To say you really could have done otherwise is to forget that our brains are also subject to the laws of physics. This is the error that has led to our confusion (and has apparently confounded some neuroscientists. Even if it turned out that our brains work on quantum mechanical principles (and there's not much evidence for this) - that still doesn't get you the ability to consciously do otherwise. That would get you to a random outcome with a reliable probability distribution of collapse of some complex wavefunction at most.

It's really easy to get these two different things mixed up. The quantum weirdness of electrons being everywhere at once - or spinning all possible ways at once *until you measure them* with a photon - *SEEMS* a lot like the subjective feeling we get when we are considering alternate possibilities in the future. Truly - there seems to be an eerie similarity between these two phenomenon - UNTIL YOU LOOK CLOSELY.

These are two completely different aspects of physics - do not get them confused! Quantum mechanics doesn't let you *CHOOSE* what you find after you measure the spin direction of the electron. You can't choose spin up or spin down! For some people people forget this rather important detail when they conflate the two situations. When we are picking from different possible future scenarios and trying to decide we are using past knowledge, communicated language - and our mental model of the world to run mental thought experiments. Though it seems similar this is just completely different from any kind of quantum mechanical activity. We're not collapse of a wavefunction - we are making up our minds given what we've learned about the past - apples and oranges. 

Sam Harris really just crushes the idea that you could ever have "chosen" to do otherwise - even in the subjective sense (I suggest you look him up). Even if we could have done otherwise - it certainly wouldn't be our conscious intent that was in control of that choice. People seem to have a really hard time with this - but the truth is we can do no such thing - and you don't need these experiments to rule it out, you just need to think about what it would mean if you COULD do that (you get something profoundly ridiculous - a kind of infinite regress where you can never say you consciously started the ball rolling).  

Determinism at the deepest level of our thinking *MUST* be true. There really would have to be some other dimension or physical reality we have no evidence for for it to be otherwise - whatever we find there would have to make less sense than quantum mechanics.  That doesn't mean we can ever perfectly predict our future behavior or that the future is "fixed" - the uncertainty principle and pseudo-randomness of complex systems ensures this. Fatalism is untrue, but determinism has to be true - or we just don't live in a causal reality with a-causal quantum randomness at bottom.

[jamesclerkmaxwell]

People believe we don't have free will for many reasons which are absurdity at best .

[michaelbartlett]

Free will absolutely exists and the least evidence of ANY FREE WILL validates all free will!

[georgwachberg]

finally someone who is skeptic about both free will in the naive sense and the science currently available. refreshing and great video!!!

[billskinner]

If you sound a tone, and ask people to indicate where the dot was, they will get that wrong, too.  The delay proves nothing.

[ispinozist]

I'm reminded of the Woody Allen line about being brilliant and having no idea what's going on.

[runswithbears]

The ability to resist impulse is not only proof that mind is master over the body, but also master over the brain. If you're incapable of resisting impulse, much like an animal, you do not have free will. Discipline is the practice of free will.