Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the article that inspired this one, see Stupid Questions.
Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns to the thing—patterns of thought, of feeling, of action. That’s what brains are for. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast. You see if it works for you.
We’ve finally passed the introductory lectures and into the real thing. Shorter introductions now. The last one went pretty well, turned out pretty short. I’ll be curious to see what you think of shorter lectures, whether we prefer them one way or the other.
But I’m going to continue now on my series of bits that I have on questions that seem important but don’t really actually end up mattering for most people. Certainly not in the way that they’re typically deployed, because usually you’ll find that people deploy these like stupid questions that make them seem smart.
And I’m going to tell you about one.
The Ancient Question
There’s always been a question about whether free will exists. It’s probably a question that goes back as far as people have been thinking about dual-process models of mind. And this is more modern terminology for a very old idea—that there are obviously some actions that are under our control because there are just as obviously actions that are not under our control. If I ask you what’s two plus two, you’re going to say four. But if I ask you what’s 36 times 74, you’ve got to stop and work that out. One of them is automatic, happens, not really under your control. And the other is more deliberate, more effortful.
And this has been called a lot of stuff: hot and cold thinking, fast and slow thinking, passion and logic, emotion and reason, conscious versus unconscious processes, rational versus irrational processes. I’ve called them before thinky versus non-thinky motivations. I’ll put a link to an article that talks about that in more detail.
But there is this question that comes out of it about how much control we have over our behaviour. And indeed, more specifically, the question is: do we actually have any control at all? Is there even such a thing as free will? Or is our behaviour completely deterministic? Is it entirely determined by aspects of our environment?
And it’s a debate with a great deal of history. You just have to consider the concept of fate to really get a flavour for it. If you believe in fate, then you believe that there’s no such thing as free will in an important way. You’re a fatalist. The world unfolds as it will. Or if you’re the kind of person who believes in an omniscient God, then the logical consequence of that is to grapple with this question of whether you have free will. If God or gods know what you’re going to do at any given moment in time, then are you in control of that process?
Libet’s Legacy
And in the modern science of mind, things started to heat up with a guy called Benjamin Libet. He has this famous experiment. He had people make a voluntary action and then report when they became aware of the urge to make that action. And when he got people to report when they were aware that they were going to make an action, he reliably detected this brain activity—brainwaves specifically—that predicted their conscious awareness by something like 350 milliseconds.
And that doesn’t sound like a lot, but in brain science it’s quite a substantial prediction. And more to the point, if brain activity predicts voluntary decisions even before we’re aware of their voluntary nature, then how exactly could they be voluntary? That’s the question that Benjamin raised.
Now his study is old as hell and it’s been picked over hundreds of times, but we actually regularly find stuff like this in brain science. I’ll link you to an article that we were particularly interested in in my old lab at Cambridge, where you could predict people’s brain activity something like five seconds into the future. So now we’re not even predicting behaviour any more, we’re actually predicting how the brain activity is going to unfold.
And indeed, more generally, there is an entire field now called the neuroscience of free will, because we find brain stuff that predicts voluntary action in all sorts of places, all over the brain, which again raises these questions about just how voluntary it is.
And what I want to do now is get into how I’m just not really sure that any of this matters.
The Infinite Regress
As I said—and maybe this is surprising at the outset—this isn’t actually really the interesting thing, even in the free will debate. Now I’ll link to a place that talks about this more, but unless you’re a really strict non-materialist, unless you really think that there is some kind of soul or psyche that’s distinct from all this stuff sloshing around in your body and your glands, then it’s probably obvious to you that if you’ve had a thought, something in your body needed to precede the thought. It doesn’t just arise from nowhere.
And some people interpret this as necessarily deterministic. So I’ll give you a case. I’m quoting this from somewhere—I wouldn’t be able to tell you where—but it goes something like this:
Is mental activity determined or not? This is the question you need to ask yourself. Is it determined by something else, or is it undetermined by anything? Because if it’s undetermined by anything, that mental activity is random. And you can’t be in control of something that’s random.
And if it’s determined by something, then is that thing further inside the mind, or is it external to the mind? If it’s external, then you’re not in control of it. And if it’s internal, then you’re simply deferring the problem. What you need to do is go back to the start again and answer the question of whether it’s determined or undetermined.
And you get this sort of infinite regress. It’s either determined or undetermined. And if it’s undetermined, it’s random. And if it’s determined—if it’s determined externally, it’s not you. And if it’s determined internally, then you return to the question. And on this model, there can’t be free will.
There’s another cut on this that I actually like—I think it’s a bit more poetic and a bit less ruthless. Again, I’m quoting somebody. It’s probably Instagram. I’d be happy to add it in the show notes if somebody sends me an email about who this is from. But it goes something like this:
Ask yourself who you are. You might give your name to answer that question, but you’ll notice that your name isn’t you. That’s just a word. So you might point to your body, but of course, you’re not your body. You don’t say “am hand” or “am head.” We say “my hand” and “my head.” So then you say, okay, well, I’m going to point to my spirit or my mind. But again, this is your spirit, your thoughts—they aren’t you. And so on and so forth.
And put in either of these kinds of ways—the cuter one or the more clinical one—determinism feels kind of inescapable.
Agent Causation
But this is actually a bit of a mislead, because what it’s doing is treating the brain like some kind of passive transformer of events into action. And what it’s ignoring is the possibility that any of this could actually be determined by the agent itself.
If it’s determined externally, it’s something else. If it’s determined internally, you ask again. Maybe that is actually not the right question to ask, because internally generated mental activity could well be determined by the agent in some complicated manner.
So let’s again assume that you’re not getting around all this messiness with a soul or a psyche or some kind of non-materialist answer. It’s not actually that hard even to imagine some kind of foundational mental state or states—some sort of resting state of the brain, of mental activity. And you can also imagine a web of interconnected mental states. Marvin Minsky has this beautiful idea called a society of mind that I’ll link to in the show notes.
And the idea is, if you have this web of interconnected mental states, none of them necessarily need to be privileged over any of the others. There’s no one mental state in control determining the others. They all sort of determine and are determined by the others.
It sounds kind of messy, but essentially what I’m saying is the very same infinite regression that our clinical example before used to deliver this sort of punchy account of determinism can be used to illustrate the exact opposite—that personhood could rely on this regressive structure. Acting in accordance with our desires, even if those desires are determined, but in a structure where everything is determined by everything else—why is this inadequate to explain free will?
Mental states can be both caused by prior mental states but also constitute genuine mental agency because they form this sort of integrated system. The person is the system.
And honestly, that is why most contemporary free will defenders are what are called compatibilists—people that accept determinism but argue that free will is in some way compatible with it. So for them, determination doesn’t undermine control.
Why It Doesn’t Matter Anyway
Now, that’s all very complicated and messy, but I want to get into one final point before I wrap up, and that’s about how none of this matters anyway.
So this all brings me to my final point. If we have to get this far into the weeds to even debate this, then what’s the point? As I talk about elsewhere—and many people agree with me on this point, I’ll link to those in the show notes—this world is so intractably complex that for all practical purposes it doesn’t matter whether we have free will or determinism.
And it’s not even clear to me that if we could prove it, then it would matter. Neuroethicists obviously think so. If our behaviour is determined, for example, then how can we justify punishing people for their crimes? If they have no control over their behaviour, then it’s not up to them to behave differently. It’s up to us or the environment or the structures that we build.
But to me, that’s the wrong way to think about things. Like I often point out—and the previous podcast in this series on nature versus nurture is on the same point—all it does is highlight the critical importance of the environment and of our socialisation. And if we act on those, then we change our behaviour, even and in fact especially because our behaviour is determined.
And if it’s not something that we can change, then we’re stuck at what’s called the Fatalist’s Idle Argument. I think it was Cicero who talked about this. But it says, for example, if it’s fated for you to recover from the illness, then you’ll recover whether you go to the doctor or not. But if you’re fated not to recover from an illness, then you’re not going to recover whether you go to a doctor or not. Either you’re going to recover from the illness or you’re not, if you’re fated. So it’s futile to consult a doctor.
In the same way, if you’re fated to behave in a certain way, then it doesn’t matter what you think or do. It’s fated. So why even bother asking the question?
I’ll leave you with that.
