Science is Destroying the Concept of Free Will

Science appears to have killed the concept of “free will.”

A growing number of scientists have come to the conclusion that the physical universe is completely determined and that this removes any possibility of free will. Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher of science, lays out the basic scientific view of reality in his recent book, “The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.” Here is how he summarizes reality: The physical universe and the laws of physics are completely deterministic. The universe began about 14 billion years ago with the Big Bang and everything that has happened since, including everything humans have ever done, was determined in that instant by the conditions of the fundamental parameters (e.g., the strength of the nuclear force) and the laws of physics. The brain is a physical system operating according to the laws of physics and the mind is a function of the brain. Thus the mind is completely determined.

Mr. Rosenberg writes, “When I make choices—trivial or momentous—it’s just another event in my brain locked into this network of processes going back to the beginning of the universe, long before I had the slightest ‘choice.’ Nothing was up to me. Everything—including my choice and my feeling that I can choose freely—was fixed by earlier states of the universe plus the laws of physics. End of story. No free will, just the feeling, the illusion in introspection, that my actions are decided by my conscious will.”

In the last decade or so numerous studies in neuroscience have made it obvious that most of the mental processes running our lives are completely below the level of our conscious awareness, so the concept that we have control over what we do has become laughable.

Earlier this year the New York Times had a review of three bestselling books on this topic, “The Amydala Made Me Do It,” by James Atlas. Mr. Atlas writes, “These books possess a unifying theme: The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that—to put the matter plainly—we have no idea what we’re doing.”

One of the books reviewed is “Thinking Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his research that launched the field of behavioral economics.

Perhaps my favorite example from Kahneman’s book is a study of judges in Israel who spend all day considering requests for parole. Sixty-five percent of requests for parole were granted right after the judges had eaten, dropping steadily to zero just before the judges’ next meal. Are these judges exercising free will in their estimation of the inmates’ qualifications? Or are they clearly limited by their animal nature; getting more critical the hungrier they got?

If you asked the judges about their decisions, do you think they would be aware of this tendency to get grumpier as they got hungry, or do you think they would believe they were being equally neutral and fair throughout the day? I imagine the latter would be the case.

Mr. Kahneman cites other studies involving associative thinking (for example: think of “banana” and “vomit,” now try to think of a banana without feeling slightly sick) and priming (think of “yellow,” now think of “fruit”—you probably thought “banana” because you were primed with the idea of yellow). These studies, Kahneman asserts, “have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices.” We are, he concludes, strangers to ourselves.

In “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain,” David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine, argues that there are multiple systems running in our brain at all times: “The main lesson is that you are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and systems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanisms, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystems inside the brain. It can be disquieting to consider the extent to which all of our actions are driven by hardwired systems, doing what they do best, while we overlay stories about our choices.”

After establishing that most of the brain’s processes operate at a subconscious level, and that our actions, emotions, and perceptions are determined by our genetics, social conditioning, and experience, Mr. Eagleman argues that “we are driven to be who we are by vast and complex biological networks. We do not come to the table as blank slates, free to take in the world and come to open-ended decisions. In fact, it is not clear how much the conscious you—as opposed to the genetic and neural you—gets to do any deciding at all.”

Mr. Eagleman addresses arguments in favor of free will from both quantum physics and chaos theory and dismisses them both. As to quantum theory, “A system that is probabilistic and unpredictable is every bit as unsatisfying as a system that is deterministic, because in both cases there is no choice. It’s either coin flips or billiard balls, but neither case equates to freedom in the sense that we’d desire to have it.”

As to chaos theory, “the systems studied in chaos theory are still deterministic; one step invariably leads to the next. It is very difficult to predict where chaotic systems are going, but each state of the system is causally related to the previous state.” He imagines making a pyramid of ping-pong balls and knocking them over. “The complexity of the system makes it impossible to predict the trajectories and final positions of the balls—but each ball nonetheless follows the deterministic rules of motion. Just because we can’t say where it’s all going does not mean that the collection of balls is ‘free.’”

Of course some people still have trouble dealing with the lack of free will. Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine and author of “The Science of Good and Evil” (2004) presents convincing evidence that free will can’t exist, and concludes that, for him, free will is a “useful fiction.” Mr. Shermer writes, “My friend and skeptical colleague Martin Gardner is a fideist [accepting things on faith when there’s no convincing evidence either way] and takes this approach to both the God question and the free will/determinism problem. He has chosen God and free will, not because there is better evidence for them, but because they are important issues, the evidence is inconclusive, and it works better for him to believe in God and free will.”

Maybe this is the best example I’ve ever seen of how people irrationally cling to the belief in free will: a professional skeptic would rather admit to taking a leap of faith than give it up.