EPILOGUE
In Defense of Free Will
War is not the only obsession I inflict on my students. Free will is another. No matter what class I’m teaching—“War and Human Nature,” “History of Science and Technology,” “Seminar in Science Writing”—sooner or later I end up talking about free will. The two issues are closely related. You are less likely to see war as a choice—as something that we make happen rather than something that happens to us—if you doubt whether choices of any kind are really possible.
To my dismay, many leading scientists view free will as an illusion. “It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law,” the physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow declare in a recent book, “so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.” Even Einstein, the most humane of scientists, doubted free will. He once wrote that if “the moon were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord.”
Einstein and Hawking are physicists, who may be more prone to determinism. I’m more disturbed by the skepticism toward free will expressed by Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helix. Crick, who spent the last decades of his life studying the brain, once tried to talk me out of my belief in free will. Picking up a pen from his desk, he noted that even this simple act was underpinned and preceded by complex biochemical processes that take place below the level of consciousness. “What you’re aware of is a decision,” he explained, “but you’re not aware of what makes you do the decision. It seems free to you, but it’s the result of things you’re not aware of.”
Crick was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, but he was wrong about free will. Like many other free will deniers, he cited experiments carried out in the 1980s by the psychologist Benjamin Libet. Libet asked subjects to push a button at a moment of their choosing while noting the time of their decision as displayed on a clock. Subjects took one fifth of a second, on average, to push the button after they decided to do so. But an electroencephalograph (EEG) monitoring the subjects’ brain waves revealed a spike of activity almost a second before the subjects decided to push the button. This and other findings show that our conscious decisions are literally afterthoughts, according to Crick and other neuroscientists. “Our belief in free will,” Sam Harris contends in his 2010 best seller The Moral Landscape, “arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes.”
EEGs are a crude measure of neural activity, but in 2011 neuroscientists led by Itzhak Fried replicated Libet’s results with electrodes implanted directly into the brain. Fried’s group inserts electrodes into epileptics’ brains to pinpoint the epicenters of their seizures, which are then surgically removed. While gathering this clinical information, Fried’s team, after getting patients’ permission, had them perform the Libet experiment. The electrodes revealed a burst of activity in the supplementary motor area of patients’ brains—which underpins the decision to act—as much as one and a half seconds before the patients actually pressed the button.
“So it turns out that there are neurons in your brain that know you are about to make a movement the better part of a second before you know it yourself,” the cognitive scientists Daniela Schiller and David Carmel comment in Scientific American. “It might be tempting to conclude that free will is an illusion.” I choose to resist this temptation. Libet’s clock experiment is a lousy probe of free will, because the subject has made the decision in advance to push the button; the only question is the timing. I would be more surprised if the EEG sensors or implanted electrodes did not detect any neural build-up to the subject’s action.
I’m more impressed by implant experiments that reveal how we fool ourselves into thinking we’re in control when we’re not. Scientists can make a patient’s arm shoot into the air, for example, by electrically stimulating a spot in the motor cortex. The patient often insists that she meant to move the arm and even invents a reason why: she was waving to that handsome doctor! In his 2002 book The Illusion of Conscious Will, the psychologist Daniel Wegner calls these delusional, after-the-fact explanations “confabulations.”
We all confabulate now and then. We docilely do what we’re told to do—and believe what we’re told to believe—by parents, priests, and presidents, and we convince ourselves it’s our choice. We subvert our wills by deliberating insincerely, toward a foregone conclusion, and by failing to act upon our resolutions. Sometimes we act out of compulsion—out of fear or rage—without thinking through the consequences of our actions. But just because our wills are weak doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Sometimes we use reason to decide not only what is best for us but also what is best for others, and not just relatives and friends, but all our fellow humans, and even other living things. We reason, and act, morally.
Free will is not a binary property, which you either have or lack. It varies in intensity. My teenage daughter and son have more free will—more choices to consider and select from—than they did when they were infants. I have (on my good days) more free will than adults my age suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or psychopathy. Free will is a function of our social, cultural, economic, and political milieu as well as our biology. Try telling prisoners in Guantanamo, Tibetans living under Chinese rule, or Sudanese women fleeing ruthless militants that free will does not exist. “Let’s change places,” they might say, “since you have nothing to lose.”
My view of free will resembles the position of the philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his 2003 book Freedom Evolves, Dennett lays out a sensible view of free will. He notes, first, that free will is “not what tradition declares it to be: a God-like power to exempt oneself from the causal fabric of the physical world.” Free will, he argues, is an emergent property of the brain, like consciousness, that allows us to perceive, mull over, and act upon choices; in fact, choice, or even freedom, are reasonable synonyms for free will.
Dennett calls free will “an evolved creation of human activity and beliefs,” which humanity acquired recently as a consequence of language and culture as well as consciousness. Our free will grows along with our knowledge, material well-being, and political freedom. Dennett’s most subtle, profound point is that free will is both an “objective phenomenon” and dependent on our belief in and perception of it. In other words, as we believe we have more free will, freedom, and choices, we actually do have more.
A recent experiment confirms Dennett’s claim that belief in free will has measurable consequences. The psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler asked subjects to read a passage by Crick that casts doubt on free will. Crick writes that “although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” Subjects who read this passage were more likely to cheat on a test than control subjects who read a passage about brain science that did not mention free will. Mere exposure to the idea that we are not really responsible for our actions, it seems, makes us less moral. These results, the researchers conclude, “point to a significant value in believing that free will exists.”
Belief in free will underpins all our ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to genes or divine planning. Choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful. Denying free will means denying that our conscious, psychological deliberations influence our actions. Our lives hinge on choices, over which we often agonize. Should I major in mechanical engineering or music? Keep going to church to please my parents? Vote for Barack Obama or his opponent? Ask my girlfriend to marry me? Enlist in the Army or the Peace Corps? Bomb Qaddafi or negotiate with him? Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging or explaining the vitality of a life or a society. And if we don’t believe we’re free, we will be less free.
CHARMY’S HOPE
To help them appreciate the importance of free will, I occasionally ask my students whether they would rather live today or in the Stone Age, prior to civilization. Although some students are enticed by the imagined simplicity of hunter-gatherer life, most choose the present. They express appreciation for iPhones, cars, jets, television, the internet, beds, microwave ovens, take-out pizza—as well as the comfort and security of life in a first-world country. A few provide the answer I am really looking for. “In today’s world anyone can try to do anything they want,” one student, Tim, wrote a while back. “It is this freedom of choice that is the reason why I would rather live in modern times than in the Paleolithic era.”
“Yes!” I scribbled in the margin of Tim’s paper. Our Paleolithic ancestors had little or no choice when it came to where, how, or with whom they lived. The very notion of choice would have been foreign to them. My students—and my two children—have degrees of freedom that our ancestors could not have imaged. With hard work and a little luck, young people today can become video-game designers, brain surgeons, organic farmers, pastry chefs, even science journalists. They can be gay, straight, or bisexual, married or single. They can have three kids, or no kids. They can worship God, Allah, Mother Nature, or the Almighty Dollar.
Many people in this country and around the world—far too many, and these are no doubt tough economic times—still don’t have meaningful choices. But civilization keeps giving more of us more freedom, including the freedom to help those oppressed by poverty, tyranny, racism, sexism, ignorance, and war. I tell my students, most of whom are engineering majors, that they can make the world a better place by designing more efficient photovoltaic cells or portable water purification systems for people in third-world countries. They can also speak out against this nation’s exorbitant military budget, arms sales to other nations, and involvement in wars overseas. They can vote or volunteer for or become politicians who make ending war a priority.
The end of war, I tell my students, means the end of one especially destructive, stupid, immoral form of conflict—not all forms. We will still get angry with each other and bicker over the usual things: politics, money, morality, ideology, religion, sex, love. But ending war and even the threat of war between nations will transform the world in countless ways.
I’ve persuaded some of my students to share my optimism. One was Charmy, a Muslim born and raised in India. She was a biochemistry major and hoped to become a doctor. At the beginning of my “War and Human Nature” class, Charmy was one of my most pessimistic students. She worried that conflicts between haves and have-nots in India, and between Muslims and Hindus, might erupt into large-scale violence. The long-simmering tension between India and Pakistan, she told me, might even trigger a nuclear war.
By the end of the semester, she had apparently changed her mind. Maybe she felt sorry for me, but I doubt it, because throughout the semester she had been brutally blunt. If I said something she found foolish, Charmy rolled her eyes and let me know. In her final paper, she still expressed doubts, reminding me that wars are raging in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
But she saw signs of progress, such as India’s offer to help Pakistan after Pakistan was devastated by an earthquake. In her final paper, Charmy explored measures that she thought might reduce the risk of war: finding alternatives to fossil fuels, improving education, supporting democracy, bolstering U.N. peacekeeping efforts, and promoting international exchange programs (like the one that brought her to my school). Charmy emphasized that none of these steps guarantees peace. If people want to wage war, she said, they will always have plenty of excuses to do so.
But at the end of her essay, Charmy allowed herself to dream a little. “Imagine a future in which the children ask their mothers, ‘What were wars?’ Every child, man and woman will have enough to eat, to cover themselves, access to a school, and a clean and beautiful environment, regardless of their religion or nationality. Just imagine other infinite possibilities available to humans with their resources, their intellect, and most importantly, their creativity!”
The hope of the young gives me hope.