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Consciousness and Free Will

An ancient Greek water vase with an image of a seated woman reading from a book scroll, while companions stand nearby.

Roy Baumeister and E. J. Masicampo propose that consciousness is a simulation in which past memories, understandings of the current social situation, and plans for the future are related to each other. It has effects on action, but usually over a period of reflection, and discussion with others. Nico Frijda argued that coming to be the kind of person we have decided to be involves free will, and conscious consideration. This kind of will can be an important principle in how we think about our interactions with others, and how we become ourselves with these others.

Greek Poetry

“Know yourself.” That was the injunction of the oracle at Delphi. How is it possible? What is it to be conscious? Earlier in this book we have assumed that we each have a mind and we’ve asked how we can understand it in others and ourselves. In his book of 1948, Bruno Snell proposed that mind was not just there. It needed to be discovered.

Snell cites the incident near the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, on which the story turns. Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greek army in their attack on Troy, has had to restore to her father, who is a priest of Apollo, a girl who was awarded to him as a prize of battle. Agamemnon says he prefers this girl to his wife. Now that he has lost her, he threatens to confiscate from Achilles his prize, “the beautiful Briseis.” Homer says that anger came upon Achilles, and caused in him the intention to kill Agamemnon.1 As he starts to draw his sword, the goddess Athene appears to Achilles, and says, “I have come from heaven to stop your fury, if you will obey me.” Here, says Snell, we see that for Homer, human beings do not regard themselves “as the source of [their] decisions.”²

Snell does not put it this way, but it’s as if Homeric man is a stimulus-response machine. At first, Achilles responds to the stimulus of Agamemnon’s threat to confiscate Briseis. Then another stimulus occurs: Athene.³ She promises a greater reinforcement. She describes it in exactly these terms. She says, “three times these splendid gifts will be laid before you.”

If we were in the situation of Achilles, we might think of self-control as a mental problem. But, says Snell, this idea had yet to occur in Greek culture. Words that Homer uses, which we might think of as mental, were not mental. Psyche meant “livingness.” It’s what leaves the body when you are killed. Noos referred to seeing, visually. Thumos is an agitation that helps propel a person toward certain behavior.

Not until the lyric poets, 200 years after Homer, does mind begin to be discovered. Sappho is one of its inventors, perhaps its principal inventor. It’s almost as if the idea of mind and selfhood begins, wonderfully, to emerge in Sappho’s consciousness.4 At the beginning of the chapter you can see an ancient Greek water vase on which is pictured a woman, whom some think is Sappho, reading a book scroll, as three companions stand nearby.

It is Sappho who, most clearly, starts to write in a modern way: “Once again Love loosens my limbs and turns me giddy, bitter-sweet creature, irresistible.”⁵ Sappho’s word, “bitter-sweet” is glucopicron. In English, the order of the two senses is changed; “bitter-sweet” seems smoother than the Greek order “sweet-bitter.” Sappho’s idea of two opposing senses has continued in European thought for more than 2,500 years, bringing to mind for us, and hinting at, an essence: love as both anguish and joy. From Sappho comes the idea that love moves us in ways that prompt us toward action, but now, as with “bitter-sweet,” we may experience ambivalence, perhaps even ambiguity, which invites reflection within us, as we wonder about the influence that love can have on us. It’s no longer a matter of stimuli, but a matter of the person, and of choice. Sappho writes, for instance: “Some say an army of horsemen is the fairest thing on the black earth, others an army of footsoldiers, others a navy of ships—but I say the fairest thing is the one I love.”⁶

Snell writes that the lyric poets introduced not just new language, but new ways of thinking. They were the first, he says:

to voice this new idea, that intellectual and spiritual matters have “depth.” Archaic poetry [of lyric writers such as Sappho] contains … concepts like “deep knowledge,” “deep thinking,” “deep pondering,” as well as “deep pain” … In these expressions, the symbol of depth always points to the infinity of the intellectual and spiritual, which differentiates it from the physical.7

In Snell’s use of the term “physical,” here, he refers to Homeric terms such as psyche, noos, and thumos as happenings, caused by something outside the self. The “new ideas” about which he writes are those of the movement depicted by the lyric poets, in which psyche comes to mean mind as consciousness, a world within. Noos comes to mean understanding, or conscious mind. Thumos becomes emotion which, although it can move and shake one, and although it functions to give priority to a concern and action of a particular kind, has about it an element of choice, of free will.

In his book of 2016, Brian Stock shows how, in the West, influenced by Plato and some early Christian thinkers, it was thought that the self was in two parts: body and soul, which have different roles in life. So, for some, the body was the prison of the soul. Stock proposes that it was Augustine who realized, and wrote about, how the self is integrated, so that body and soul, body and mind, are interdependent. From there we can move forward via the case of Phineas Gage, whose emotional and interpersonal self became disordered from his brain damage, to Nico Frijda’s proposal that emotions, which affect mind, body, and action, are about events that affect our inner concerns, our selfhood.

A strong strain in research on emotions is that of regulation of emotions, of being able to moderate them rather than letting them just take us over, or letting them drive us into actions that might be destructive to people we care about, or that we might regret. An important paper on this by Batja Mesquita and Nico Frijda is “An emotion perspective on emotion regulation.” In it they say:

Emotional events in real life have the potential of eliciting several emotions … at the same time. We are happy as well as embarrassed when our guests sing the “Happy Birthday” song at our birthday party. The same event is relevant to multiple concerns, and evokes … happiness and embarrassment simultaneously.8

Consciousness

Consciousness seems to be the means by which, rather than just being propelled by reinforcements or buffeted by circumstance, we can choose to act. But a finding by Benjamin Libet suggests that this may not be so. He used ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) and asked people to flex their fingers within a certain time period, and to notice the point a spot had reached on a revolving wheel when they decided to move their fingers. He found that electrical activation of the motor areas in the brain that controlled the fingers occurred a third of a second before people were conscious of their intention to act.

This result shocked the neuroscientific community because it seemed to imply that processes in the brain initiate action, and that consciousness has no role in this.⁹ Controversy has arisen. In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett argues that the brain determines behavior, and that consciousness is an extra. The brain computes what it needs to compute; neurons and muscle fibers are recruited to determine behavior. Consciousness has no causal effects. Every aspect of human behavior, says Dennett, could occur without it. Consciousness is a small, and not particularly significant, summary, largely in narrative form, of what the brain has already done in the way of determining decisions and actions.

The function of consciousness, continues Dennett, is to put a good face on what we have done. Rather than having any causal influence, it’s like an industrial company’s public relations office. Or, using another metaphor, Dennett says each of us has a self, a kind of novelist, who makes what happens and what we have done about it into a single good story, our autobiography.

Dennett and people who are known as hard determinists say that what we do is explained by our DNA having structured our brain so that our neurons and other physiological mechanisms, together with learned and immediate input from the physical and social world, determine what we do on a moment-by-moment basis. Unconsciously these determinists seem to provide a strong argument for discounting what they say. If they were correct, then their argument could not be meaningful. It would be empty, just a scattering of marks on a page that results from a mechanical process such as the pattern of leaves on a tree, or a noise like the clattering of a water wheel in a mill.

Or, if we don’t like the idea of a clattering water wheel, but were to take up Dennett’s proposal that consciousness is just the brain’s public relations office, then by his admission he hasn’t explained consciousness at all. All he has done is to say: “Look, see: I have written a book with all these words, less than $30 for more than 500 pages.”

Consciousness and Decisions

If consciousness seems not to have an immediate effect on action, perhaps it can act over a longer period. Silvia Galdi and her colleagues completed an ingenious experiment to take this idea further. In the Italian city of Vincenza, they studied conscious and unconscious processes of 129 residents in their thinking about a controversial proposal to enlarge a U.S. military base in the city. The residents’ decisions about the proposal were assessed by a single question: whether they were for or against it or were undecided. Their conscious beliefs were assessed by a ten-item questionnaire on environmental, social, and economic consequences they thought the enlargement might have. Unconscious associations to the proposal were measured by a test in which people had to make categorizations such as “good” or “bad” by pressing separate buttons in response to positive and negative words, and then pressing these same buttons when shown pictures of the base.10 These tests were run on a first occasion, and then again a week later.

For people who were decided—for or against the base’s enlargement—their conscious thoughts about the base predicted both their decision at the time and their unconscious associations one week later. In contrast, among people who were undecided on the first occasion of testing, their conscious thoughts at that time did not predict the decision they would make a week later. For these people, however, their unconscious associations on the first occasion of testing did predict both their decision and their conscious beliefs a week later.

Figure 26. What is this young person thinking? Is she on the edge of consciousness? Source: Photo by Josie Holt, with permission.

Our conscious thoughts are affected by processes of which we are not always consciously aware—including the processes that produce our emotions—and rather than conscious thoughts being in synchrony with the processes that control our decisions they can, instead, work over a longer term to affect the structure of our minds, for instance as we think about an issue, become aware of our emotions about it, and discuss it with others. Figure 26 depicts a young person looking upwards. At what age do you imagine she might become conscious of her thoughts and emotions so as to recognize them in herself and discuss them with others?

Consciousness as Simulation

Roy Baumeister and E. J. Masicampo were influenced by the experiments of Libet, and of Galdi and her colleagues. They suggest that the function of consciousness is not to initiate actions. Instead, it works over a longer period to relate our general knowledge (stored in long-term memory) and remembrances of specific incidents (stored as episodic memories) to our understandings of our selves in our current social situation, and to our plans. It’s a process of simulation. It is the means by which we explain ourselves to ourselves, by which we explain ourselves to others, by which we reflect on ourselves and others, as Sappho does. It’s a means, too, by which we use our theory-of-mind to understand those with whom we might interact in our plans and arrangements, and for creatively exploring options in complex situations.

Baumeister and Masicampo offer this example of how consciousness can work in planning:

When one has a plane to catch tomorrow, one typically engages in a simulation that calculates backward from the plane’s takeoff time, allowing for airport procedures, the trip to the airport, and perhaps the hotel checkout before that, so one knows at what time to commence the sequence of acts. All the information used for this simulation is already in the mind, so conducting the simulation does not bring in new information from the environment … These simulations work remarkably well in enabling people to be on time for their flights without having to spend many extra hours at the airport.11

The implication of the experiments of Galdi and her colleagues is that consciousness helps us, literally, to make up our minds. It enables us to compose our mental associations so that when it comes to making decisions, these associations, including those necessary for taking actions, are ready, having set up the conditions for making an action. Baumeister and Masicampo say this:

The influence of conscious thought on behavior can be vitally helpful but is mostly indirect. Conscious simulation processes are useful for understanding the perspectives of social interaction partners, for exploring options in complex decisions, for replaying past events (both literally and counterfactually) so as to learn, and for facilitating participation in culture in other ways.¹²

When something pressing happens and we don’t know what to do about it, or when we are moved by an emotion that doesn’t seem appropriate, the everyday advice is to “Sleep on it.” It’s an idea that resonates with the extended functioning of consciousness. The idea resonates with the proposal by Henri Poincaré and Graham Wallas of incubation, that in a creative endeavor, we can work intensely for a period without reaching a solution. Then a way forward, or a solution, may come, after a period during which we have not been thinking about the problem consciously.

Free Will

Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran have found, in a meta-analysis of experimental tests, that the formation of conscious intentions to act in a particular way has a causal effect on implementing these actions; this indicates that the will is important.13 Nico Frijda, thought by many to be the twentieth century’s principal researcher on emotions, has also considered this issue. In an article of 2013, he proposed that although some people sneer at the idea, free will is important in psychology. Among examples he relates are how, during World War II, non-Jewish people resisted Nazi threats and coercion to shelter Jewish people. In his article on this issue he does not mention that he had been harbored in this way.

Frijda discusses how, more recently, in the genocidal conflict in Rwanda, as described by Gerard Prunier, some women who were members of the Hutu ethnic group sheltered Tutsi children. These people were acting freely to protect others rather than simply giving priority to their own self-interest. They were able not just to withstand the fear for their own lives, to be merely members of the “Us” group of their ethnicity. They were not just obedient, in the way Stanley Milgram argued. They were able to mobilize their empathy. They chose to become “We” with the children of the Tutsis, to do what was important, rather than to do what was expedient, what the social situation seemed to coerce them into.

Should we hope that we would be among the number of those Hutu women? Should we think of ourselves as among those who usually conform? Or can we learn from the lessons of the genocides of the last century?

If there is to be hope for the human experiment, we need not think that we are on the right side against those on the wrong side. Perhaps instead we might learn to think not in terms of Us-versus-Them, but in terms of Us-and-Them: black people and white people, Jews and Muslims, Westerners and Asians, Conservatives and Liberals, women and men, we who live now and those who will live in the future. “Us-versus-Them” continues to be a scourge of humankind, one that threatens to destroy us all, perhaps in the not-too-distant future. Perhaps we might consider not just “Us-versus-Them,” but “We.”

The whole idea of law in society depends on free will: A person who commits a crime is said to do so because of a personal intention. If the act is committed because of a compulsion of a mental illness, it is not a crime. There may be paradoxes here. Azim Shariff and colleagues did a set of studies in which people who were less sure about whether free will existed, were less retributive in their attitudes toward punishing criminals. They showed too that people who had learned some neuroscience, about how the brain works, also reduced their support for retributive punishment.

In our day-to-day lives we see people we know caught up in actions and emotions in which they don’t seem to have any free will. Such people may be psychotic, or obsessive-compulsive. They may be caught up in an addiction. In anxiety states, they are unable to free themselves from fear. In oppositional states, they seem only able to act in resentment and aggression. In depression, they can become self-absorbed and despairing, without the will to act in the world or relate to others.

We can think of free will as an opposite of compulsion and coercion. It’s being able to choose, to make plans, to relate to others in cooperation and in kindness, even when self-interest or social pressures might prompt us otherwise. It is being able to discuss actions with others, and to choose how to act responsibly to realize our values, although we are not always conscious of what really motivates us.14 Sometimes it is choosing to do what we are doing, even when we may not want to. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus writes of this state. Sisyphus was an ancient Greek king of Corinth, who was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill and, at the top, watch it roll down. Then he had to go down and roll the boulder up again. For Camus the allegory is of Sisyphus being able to choose, and he does so. We may be reminded of Rico Medellin, interviewed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his study of flow, working on a production line as a modern Sisyphus. To roll the bolder up the hill, and to go back down and do it again, is Sisyphus’s task in life. He is not one of the gods (whoever or whatever they may be). He is not a rock. He is a human being and as such, Camus says, in the last line of his essay: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Perhaps we can choose freely in only 5 percent of our actions. Part of the project of humankind, in that case, might be to create societies in which the ecological niche enables us more frequently to act freely, perhaps in 6 percent or 7 percent of our actions, perhaps for instance to promote joint goals, “We” goals, rather than just egotistical goals. It’s up to us to create such societies. Cities are recent habitats, and new observations indicate that animals and birds that have come to live in cities have started to produce genetically transmissible adaptations to city dwelling much more quickly than had previously been imagined, perhaps in less than a thousand years.15

We may know some people who don’t seem to have much free will, who react to events always in much the same way, who interact with others in a monotonous fashion. We may notice such tendencies in ourselves. Perhaps we human beings, having left the ranks of those animals who survive because they are fitted to their physical environment, are still adapting to the cooperative life which means being open to others, which means changefulness and creativity. Perhaps as a species, we humans have not yet had much time to cultivate, in societies and in ourselves, the ecological niches that might best enable both cooperation and free will.

The cognitive psychology of the meaningful mind suggests that whether or not the physical world has meaning, we humans make meaning for ourselves and those with whom we interact. We construct worlds of shared meaning. If we can choose in relation to the meaningful, we act not just as a mechanism, but because of what we consider to be the better thing to do, not just for our own benefit but also for others. As George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, “What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?”16