I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.
—MAE WEST
IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM QUITTING SMOKING, THERE IS A simple solution, at least potentially. Your neurobiologist could soon be able to inhibit your insula—a small portion of the cerebral cortex in each of your brain’s hemispheres—and voilà, your addiction will be gone. Unfortunately, there is no free lunch to be had in neurobiology, so the operation would probably have some unpleasant side effects: you would experience loss of libido, become apathetic, lose your capacity to emotionally appreciate music, and develop a peculiar inability to distinguish fresh from rotten food. But at least your chances of getting lung cancer will go down dramatically! Welcome to the strange world of human volition, an ancient topic of discussion among philosophers and an active field of research in cognitive science.
The ability to make willful decisions—to exercise volition—is fundamental to the meaning of being human. With our need to feel in at least partial control of our lives, we must have the freedom to make choices between different courses of action. Our entire system of justice (Chapters 14 and 15) is based on the idea of moral responsibility, which in turn hinges on the possibility that we do make free choices. If we can’t, if all our actions are determined by forces outside of our control, then it makes no sense to talk about morality. Further, without a sense of ownership of our actions, we couldn’t even meaningfully take credit for what we do, no more than a computer programmed to play chess can take credit for beating a human chess master. The computer just did what it was programmed to do—no more, no less.
Not only is the concept of free will (as philosophers put it), or volition (a term more frequently adopted by cognitive scientists), fundamental to our conception of ourselves and of others, but the concept is also related to the idea of willpower. Our ability to make hard choices and stick with them is another aspect of the human condition that generates admiration for those of us who seem to display a lot of it, as well as criticism of those of us who appear to be deficient in it. Just think of the roots of the Christian idea of sin, which originated in the lack of willpower displayed by our paradise-dwelling ancestors who fell for a simple temptation offered by Lucifer.
Even today willpower features prominently in social and popular discourse and is sometimes elevated to an almost mystical level. Not long before I wrote the first draft of this chapter, US Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot in the head at close range by a lunatic who also fired on eighteen other people, killing six. During her recovery, the newspapers were full of quotes to the effect that it was her fierce “spirit” that was helping her throughout—even though the research clearly shows that willpower is, well, powerless when it comes to major health issues. For instance, Naoki Nakaya and his colleagues at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology of the Danish Cancer Society conducted a large study of 60,000 subjects and followed them for thirty years; they found absolutely no connection between personality traits and the likelihood of surviving cancer. And for any positive anecdotes like the ones involving Representative Giffords, we can easily find matching stories of people who fought just as hard but lost a similar battle.
There is a dark side to this idea that we can overcome all sorts of difficulties if we just try hard enough, and that is the pernicious consequence that if we fail it must in some important sense be our own fault. This is, for instance, the sort of callous nonsense that is propagated by books like The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, which has become popular in part through the complicity (surely in good faith) of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey. The basic idea of The Secret is that through a “law of attraction” positive thoughts bring about positive outcomes, while negative thoughts bring about negative outcomes. Needless to say, there is no such thing as a law of attraction—this is New Age metaphysical baloney. But it is easy to turn the idea around and conclude that since a negative thing happened to someone, he must have been thinking negative thoughts, and so whatever befell him was his own fault: the victim gets blamed, adding insult to injury. Even the positive side of this supposed law can be pernicious because it easily leads us to ignore the people who in fact deserve to be praised for the good that happens. In Representative Gifford’s case, for instance, one would think that the primary tribute should be paid to the able doctors who operated on her and to those who later helped her through her difficult rehabilitation.
Of course the so-called power of positive thinking is not a new idea, and The Secret is simply the latest in a long procession of snake oil sales of this particular kind. The early part of the nineteenth century, for instance, brought us the “mind cure,” later in that century we had the New Thought Movement, and in 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale was published around the same time that people thought that women get breast cancer because they are sexually inhibited! I could go on with countless more examples, but the point is that arguably millions of people have been duped over the years into thinking that their minds have magical powers over matter and then swindled not only of their money but in many cases of the power to make rational decisions concerning their lives.
This book is for people who are weary of nonsense and want access to the best that science and philosophy can tell us about our problems. So what does the science of willpower say we actually can and cannot do? One of the most fascinating discoveries in the cognitive science of willpower is that we apparently have a short (if refillable) supply of it and we need to be parsimonious with it, spending it only on things that really matter. For instance, in a simple experiment, subjects were asked to solve a puzzle after having been divided into two groups: the first group was given a chocolate cookie, the other some radish. The subjects in the group that ate the cookies did significantly better than those in the group that ate radish; subjects in the latter group had part of their focus taken away by the exercise in willpower that was required to “enjoy” the radish. Similarly, if you are meeting someone for lunch and are concerned about controlling how much you eat, you may want to go straight to the restaurant without window-shopping at the mall nearby. After using up some of your willpower to refrain from buying yourself a new dress or pair of shoes, it will be particularly difficult to resist putting the butter on that large slice of bread.
The list of ways to deplete our already somewhat meager reserves of willpower is long, and it unfortunately includes many common events in our everyday lives: controlling our appetite, declining to drink (or to drink one more), not having sex (when we want it), suppressing our emotional responses (particularly anger), and even taking a simple test like the puzzle-solving exercise. The first line of defense therefore is to stay mindful and try to avoid having to resist more than one of these (or any other) temptations at any given time. Luckily, cognitive scientists have also discovered something that Aristotle intuited twenty-four centuries ago. (See the discussion of eudaimonia and particularly of akrasia in Chapter 5.) Just as the Greek philosopher suggested that “virtue” is a matter of mindful practice, so modern scientific research tells us that we can improve our willpower. The way to do this is to treat willpower like a muscle (this is obviously only an analogy, not to be taken literally!): you can exercise it by exposing yourself to small temptations and successfully resisting them. For instance, you go out for dinner with friends, and they order dessert. You smile at the waiter, order coffee or tea instead, and then calmly sip your beverage while telling your brain not to salivate too much at the view of the decadent chocolate dessert enjoyed by your table neighbor.
There are also more unusual ways to improve your willpower—for instance, by exercising your body regularly, or by forcing yourself to use your nondominant hand to perform simple tasks. From a physiological perspective, it seems that willpower is influenced by something as basic as the amount of sugar in your blood. Indeed, there is evidence showing that the mere act of exercising willpower reduces blood sugar, which implies that giving a quick boost to your blood sugar level—for instance, by eating a cookie before a test—is likely to give you the edge you need. (Of course, the problem with that strategy is that complex carbohydrates are themselves addictive and not particularly good for your long-term health, and if you become addicted to them you’ll then have to rely on your willpower to fight that addiction. Who said life is fair?)
Then again, you could take the religious route. Research conducted by Michael McCullough and Brian Willoughby at the University of Miami clearly shows that so-called intrinsic religiosity (as opposed to the extrinsic variety practiced by people who simply go to church to impress their neighbors) is a good predictor of your ability to engage in self-restraint. This shouldn’t really be surprising, considering how many modern religions—particularly those in the monotheistic Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition—are founded on the idea of exercising willpower to overcome temptation. Of course, it is hard to tell whether engaging in religious practice improves one’s willpower, or whether a certain type of person with well-developed willpower is attracted to and can endure religious rituals. Psychological research shows that both adults and children who are religious are capable of more restraint in their actions, and neurobiological data show that the same areas of the brain that are pivotal to self-control are also activated during prayer. Again, however, it is hard to establish the direction of causality.
Interestingly, being spiritual—as opposed to explicitly religious—is not enough: people who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious” (as the by-now-standard phrase goes on so many online dating sites) are no better at exercising their willpower than the rest of us; the implication is that there is something in the religious experience itself, or perhaps in the social setting provided by a religious community, that is efficacious. Still, not all is lost for the secular among us: the researchers from the University of Miami mentioned earlier think that nonreligious people can get the same benefits by engaging in meditation, the secular equivalent of prayer, and by joining secular analogs of churches, such as organizations devoted to social causes. Or you could simply keep up your gym subscription and occasionally write with your other hand.
All of this discussion of willpower is predicated on the basic idea that we actually have a conscious “will” of some sort. Although this notion is, of course, extremely commonsensical, both science and philosophy have a habit of wreaking havoc with our common sense, and sure enough, the very concept of free will is one of those perennial topics of debate, a debate that has been made only more intriguing by the latest contributions from neuroscience. Let’s start with the basics on the science side. A major area of the brain involved in our decision-making is the parietal cortex. How do we know this? Because of the sometimes devilish way in which neuroscientists do their experiments. Researchers can stimulate the parietal cortex with low-level electrical currents, and when they do so, subjects report the desire to engage in particular actions—say, rolling their tongue. When the researcher turns up the dial on the electrical stimulation, the subject actually does roll her tongue! The experimenter has essentially succeeded in remotely taking over the subject’s will, triggering an action that the subject wants to do not because of an internal motivation but because of the electrical stimulus imposed from the outside.
If that’s not weird enough for you, consider the ways in which we can now also determine what makes people feel that they “own” a particular action. Was it really I, you might ask, who decided to roll my tongue? The way your brain deals with this is through the parietal cortex’s ability to send signals to the premotor cortex, where your movements get started. You feel that the movement was really your own only once your premotor cortex signals back to your parietal cortex that the movement has indeed been executed. Notice that only part of this process deals with the actual action, and that a large part has to do with your desire to engage in that action, as well as your sense of ownership of the action, once performed. Your subjective sense of free will resides in those components, and it can be perturbed if your brain is damaged anywhere in the relevant areas.
But is free will a real ability to make conscious autonomous decisions, or is it rather an artifact of the way the brain works? In other words, are all our decisions made at a subconscious level, before we are even aware of what is going on? This possibility was raised by a now-classic experiment that was first conducted by Benjamin Libet and his colleagues in the 1970s at the University of California at San Francisco and has been repeated and confirmed several times since. It is important to understand exactly what Libet did to see the relevance of these experiments to our discussion. He asked his subjects to carry out the simple action of pressing a button, as many times as they wished within a given time frame. He also asked the subjects to note the exact time when they felt the “urge” to press the button—that is, approximately when they became conscious of wanting to do it.
Libet then measured the interval between the moment in which subjects were conscious of having made a decision to press the button and the moment in which they actually pressed it. On average the time delay was about 200 milliseconds. (Libet had shown that the subjects were reporting the time of their awareness of the decision within a reasonable margin of error of about 50 milliseconds.) So far, nothing extraordinary: subjects made a decision about an action, and it took about 200 milliseconds for their brains to communicate the decision to their muscles so that the action could be carried out. But here is the weird part: Libet and his colleagues also measured—through an electroencephalogram—when the secondary motor cortex registered activity correlated to the decision to act. The secondary motor cortex is the part of the brain that conveys the initial message that eventually leads to the contraction of the muscles. To everyone’s surprise, the researchers measured activity in the secondary motor cortex about 300 milliseconds before the subjects said that they had made the conscious decision! Indeed, more recent experiments have shown that there can be a delay of up to seven seconds between the onset of activity in the parietal and prefrontal cortices and the moment in which subjects think that they have made their conscious decision. To put it bluntly, it looks like the conscious so-called decision is an afterthought, a matter of simply becoming aware of the real decision that was already made several seconds earlier by a subconscious part of the brain!
Does Libet’s evidence pretty much dispatch the intuitive—and strongly emotionally held—idea that we are the captain of our own (mental) ship? Not quite. First of all, Libet himself did not draw this conclusion from his work. He suggested that while conscious will may not originate the decision to push the button (or do whatever else), it can still “veto” that decision after the motor cortex has given the signal. Of course, this means that our veto power has to be exercised in less than 150 milliseconds, the time it takes for the spinal motor neurons to be activated and to initiate the action. Libet thinks that we all experience this veto power in action, and that this in itself leaves enough room for the concept of a conscious will.
Philosopher Adina Roskies and others go much further than that, however. They point out that Libet’s experiments—as interesting and even somewhat disturbing as they are—are concerned with a very narrow and artificially constrained aspect of conscious will. For instance, the subjects in the experiment were not asked to do anything like what we normally associate with deliberation: they were not instructed to explicitly lay out options and provide reasons to pursue one course of action or another. Indeed, one could argue that Libet’s experiments do not address conscious will at all, since the subjects were simply told to report when they felt the urge to push the button. It is entirely possible that what Libet measured was just the time it takes for a subconscious urge to come to our awareness. If that is the case, then it is not surprising at all that the activity in the secondary motor cortex can be measured before we consciously know what is going on. This is no different from someone moving rapidly to avoid an obstacle before he is actually aware that there is an obstacle and that he has engaged in an avoidance maneuver. (We will see other examples of this type of “zombie” behavior in the next chapter.)
Although it is certainly the case that philosophers have been talking about free will for a long time without reaching a consensus on how it works, we have to remember that the purpose of philosophy is not to answer empirical questions (we’ve got science for that, and it does an excellent job at it!), but rather to clarify our thinking. Let’s see if a philosophical examination helps us a bit. David Hume famously defined free will as “a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will”; in other words, free will is the ability to act according to our considered desires, or as Timothy O’Connor of Indiana University puts it, “the ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire.”
The main problem facing philosophical discussions of free will is the issue of determinism. Simply put, the question is: if everything that happens in the universe is the result of causal necessary relations (for example, the laws of physics), then how can one have a “free” will in the sense of a decision-making mechanism that is independent of influences that are both external (such as environmental ones) and internal (such as one’s genetic makeup)? The three types of answers to this question divide philosophers into three camps: compatibilists, libertarian incompatibilists, and deterministic incompatibilists. (Note that the word libertarian here has nothing to do with the meaning it has in American politics.)
Compatibilists think that the universe is deterministic, but they think that this in itself does not preclude free will. Libertarian incompatibilists think that the universe is not deterministic, but that if it were that fact would preclude free will. And deterministic incompatibilists think that determinism is real and therefore free will is precluded. Now, whether the universe is deterministic or not is a question that can be informed by science, since the universe is empirical in nature and current science does seem to have given us a pretty clear answer at this point—though, alas, it is one that doesn’t help the debate. If most current interpretations of quantum mechanics (the most accurate of physical theories proposed so far) are correct, then the universe isn’t deterministic because there are truly random events (uncaused and completely unpredictable) at the quantum level. Many neurobiologists and some philosophers have seized on this to claim that therefore quantum mechanics provides a scientific answer to the issue of free will. Unfortunately, this is nonsense on stilts, so to speak. Even if quantum events might conceivably “bubble up” to the much more macroscopic level at which the chemical and electrical processes of the brain take place, thus influencing what we do, this would be an example of “random will,” not free will. Nobody associates freedom of choice with random decision-making, as if our brains were a roulette machine picking whatever course of action corresponds with a random draw of the wheel. No, we need some other way to think about the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists.
A famous example of a libertarian incompatibilist is the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who said, “No limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself, or, if you prefer, we are not free to cease being free.” As much as I have a certain degree of sympathy for existentialism (its radical doctrine of freedom and consequent responsibility for one’s life are intoxicatingly empowering), this simply won’t do. There are plenty of limits to our freedom, imposed both by the (physical as well as cultural) environment in which we grow up and in which we live and by our genetic makeup. There is pretty clear evidence from biology and cognitive science that accidents of the chemical machinery of our bodies, for instance, affect our character and our behavior and pose both cognitive and physical limits to what we can do. A clinically depressed person, for instance, can hardly “choose” without constraints not to be depressed and is only partially responsible for whatever decisions and actions characterize his life. Indeed, existentialism runs dangerously close to the same pernicious mentality of blaming the victim that we have seen associated with The Secret and other forms of “positive thinking.”
The second kind of incompatibilism accepts that the universe is deterministic and denies the possibility of free will. A slightly weaker version of it takes into account the quantum loophole I mentioned earlier, but maintains that—save for truly random events—a science-informed view of the universe, where everything has a physical cause, is simply not reconcilable with any meaningful sense of free will. It follows that, for instance, writing this book wasn’t really my choice; it was the foregone outcome of everything else that had happened to me throughout my life up until the point at which I decided to write it. The same, of course, holds for your decision to read it, or for anything we “decide” to do, from the big decisions (choosing a career, getting married) to the very small ones (getting up to get a beer from the refrigerator). The obvious casualty of this type of incompatibilism is any meaningful notion of moral responsibility—or any type of responsibility for that matter. If you really didn’t have a choice in doing what you did, then you can neither be blamed (for someone’s murder, for instance) nor justly be praised (say, for being faithful to your spouse).
This pessimistic view runs counter to our very strong intuition that we do make decisions that are actually ours in a strong sense of the word. But of course, history is full of instances where common sense flew out the window—just think of the previously universally accepted precept that the earth is flat and at the center of the universe. Still, the trouble for the incompatibilist is that we need only scratch the surface before it becomes increasingly unclear what he means by free will. If “free” here means “uncaused”—that is, completely disconnected from any physical phenomenon or psychological process—then the concept risks running into one of the worst things that can happen in philosophy: incoherence. It is simply hard to make sense of what an incompatibilist might mean when he talks about free will if “free” does not mean “random” and yet also means “unaffected by external and internal causes.” Where exactly would such a magical property come from, and how would it work?
This leads us to what the savvy reader has already imagined is my personal favorite: compatibilism. The compatibilist acknowledges that our actions have to be caused, and that they are limited or channeled by physical, biological, and psychological constraints. But the compatibilist claims that this is the kind of free will “worth wanting,” in the phrase of Daniel Dennett. No magical hand-waving here, invoking a free will that cannot be, nor the simplistic, existentialist-like rejection of the reality of being human. Quite simply, free will is in this sense our (demonstrable) ability to consider information, balance it against our desires, and take a particular course of action among several available to us. Of course, our desires are themselves the result of our upbringing, our genetic constitution, our experiences in life. How could it be otherwise? And of course, our way of reasoning is also the result of all those things. Again, what would it mean if that were not the case? So compatibilism is a compromise between the undeniable fact that we are a particular type of biological being, with all that entails, and our sense that we own our decisions and can therefore—within limits—be held responsible for them or praised for them.
As in many other areas we are discussing in this book, debates about free will are excellent examples of how both philosophy and science contribute to our understanding. Philosophy helps with clearing up the conceptual issues, and science settles (if possible) the empirical ones. There are some things, however, that science cannot settle, despite some scientists’ misguided pronouncements to the contrary. For instance, a recurrent discussion in neurobiological papers concerned with free will issues is that the idea of determinism could in principle be tested by checking whether certain classes of brain signals follow a pattern that is clearly random. This proposal is conceptually confused on several levels. First off, any set of empirical data may look random until we discover the causal mechanism generating it—that is, “randomness” is often simply how we label our ignorance of a given phenomenon. Second, as I explained earlier, even if it were possible, showing beyond reasonable doubt that some brain events are truly random would not purchase us free will in any meaningful sense of the word. So, while neurobiology certainly has a lot to tell us about this issue, one thing it will not do is settle the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists.
Another common mistake in discussions of neurobiology and free will is to conclude that if science could give us a mechanistic account of the phenomenon, then in some important sense science would have demonstrated that free will doesn’t exist and that it’s all about neural pathways. Again, this claim strikes a philosopher as bizarre. Of course free will, however conceived, has to have a neural basis of some sort. Unless we are talking about magic, everything that human beings feel and think will turn out to be based in their brains in one way or another. No brain, no feelings or thoughts. So providing a mechanism for phenomenon X does not in any way tell us that X was some sort of illusion; it simply tells us how it is that X can be part of the human experience, because human beings are biological organisms that require a physical substrate to have any experience.
It also turns out that there is more than one conception of free will that can be investigated neurobiologically. Specifically, neurobiologists distinguish among at least the following five possibilities: (1) free will as the initiation of motor activity, as in Libet’s experiment; (2) free will as “executive control,” that is, Libet’s idea that we still have veto power over our unconscious decisions; (3) free will as a feeling of ownership, which we have seen has its own neurological basis; (4) free will as intention, which philosophers think of as a representational stage between deliberation and action (though, according to some, intentions may be unconscious); and finally, (5) free will as decision-making, which can be a long process that takes hours or days, depending on its object. That neurobiologists have identified at least these five aspects of free will as fodder for research suggests the very real possibility that what we think of as free will isn’t a unitary phenomenon after all, but a broad label we apply to a set of disparate things that the brain does. And so the interplay between philosophical clarification and scientific investigation continues.