Consciousness and the illusion of free will

Like most people, it seemed obvious to me that we have free will and up until recently, I had not thought about it much or questioned it. Then I read Sam Harris’ small book Free Will, which made the case that we do not have free will. I came away largely convinced that he is right in seeing free will as a very convincing illusion. Thoughts, intentions, conscious decisions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control.

For most people, consciousness not only involves a sense of self but also the feeling of being in control of your actions, of being the author of your thoughts. In other words, you have free will, the ability to consciously choose among potential decisions or actions. I refer to this as free will in the ordinary sense, because as I explain below, it is quite different to what most philosophers mean by free will. This idea of free emerges from a felt experience, and most people do not question it. That included me until relatively recently.

Three main positions on free will

There are three main approaches to free will in the philosophical literature: determinism, compatibilism and libertarianism. Determinists believe that our thoughts and actions are fully determined by internal and external background causes and free will is an illusion. The biologist and neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky, has written a 2023 bestseller Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Unlike Sam Harris’s short and largely jargon-free 66-page book, Sapolsky has written a 511-page tome complete with extensive endnotes which reviews a wide range of evidence supporting the conclusion that we do not have free will. Very well worth a read. Sapolsky is a “hard” determinist and provides the following description of what he means by free will:

“Suppose that a man pulls the trigger of a gun. Mechanistically, the muscles in his index finger contracted because they were stimulated by a neuron having an actual action potential (i.e. being in a particularly excited state). That neuron in turn had its action potential because it was stimulated by the neuron just upstream. Which had its own action potential because of the next neuron upstream. And so on.

“Here’s the challenge to a free willer: find me a neuron that started this process in this man’s brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before. Then show me that this neuron’s actions were not influenced by whether the man was tired, angry, stressed, or in pain at the time. That nothing about this neurons function was altered by the sights, sounds, smells, and so on, experienced by the man in the previous minutes, nor by the levels of any hormones marinating his brain in the previous hours to days, (and so on…)

“Show me a neuron being a causeless cause in this total sense…. show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behaviour is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will.”

Compatibilists accept determinism and redefine “free will” as being free from any outer or inner coercions that would prevent the person from acting on his actual (determined) desires and intentions. Daniel Dennett was a prominent compatibilist who accepted that our choices are determined, not free. He redefined free will as the freedom to do what is determined. Einstein also expressed this compatibilist view very clearly. In a 1929 interview in The Saturday Evening Post, he said: “I do not believe in free will. I believe with Schopenhauer: we can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.”

Libertarians (no relation to the political philosophy) believe that free will occurs outside of physical causation, whether as the causal action of consciousness on the physical brain or perhaps via metaphysical entities such as a soul. While both determinists and libertarians believe determinism and free will are incompatible, libertarians reject determinism in relation to the decisions we make. I will refer to libertarians in this article as non-determinists to avoid confusion with the extreme right-wing political libertarians.

What do philosophers think about free will

Whether or not Sapolsky has made his case for determinism, our modern understanding of brain and behaviour strongly supports a determinist view and, today, the only philosophically respectable way to endorse free will is to be a compatibilist.

David Bourget and David Chalmers surveyed 931 philosophy faculty members at 99 institutions in many countries and found that 12% of philosophers were determinists, 59% compatibilists, 14% non-determinists, and 15% had other views. Only 14% of philosophers (the non-determinists) believed we have free will in the ordinary sense. Most philosophers (12+59 = 71%) do not believe we have free will in the ordinary sense.

This means that almost three quarters of philosophers agree with Sam Harris’ case that (ordinary) free will is an illusion, except that some like Dennett have been quite angry with him for not accepting their redefinition of free will as the freedom from coercion. Dennett was very aggressive in attacking Harris for claiming there is no free will, even though Harris is talking about the type of free will Dennett agrees is an illusion.

Dennett has written a book Freedom Evolves (2003) in which he defends his compatibilist view that that the concept of free will should be redefined so that it no longer involves a free choice among alternatives but rather refers to our freedom to do that one thing that we must wish to do, in other words our freedom from coercion. I think even this definition is incoherent, since if there is external coercion, it is just one of the external determining factors in the determination of our decision, either to change our choice because we are coerced, or to not change it and accept the consequence of the coercion. Our decision whether to be coerced or not, may not even reach consciousness, but it surely is also determined by whether or not the fact of coercion along with all the many other causal factors going into the choice of action, results in doing the action or not doing the action.

Eyal Moses’ 2010 review of Dennett’s book stated:

“For Dennett, the significance of free will is that it is the basis of morality and moral responsibility, of engaging in moral judgment and holding people responsible for their actions. His thesis is that while free will in the ordinary sense is an illusion, these consequences of free will are real and compatible with his deterministic model of the universe, so free will should be redefined to refer to these consequences. Dennett suggests that calling an action “freely chosen” should not mean that the person had some other possible alternative action (which Dennett claims is never true), but rather should mean that we are justified in holding the person morally responsible for that action.”

Dennett wrote a long, condescending and incoherent review of Sam Harris’ book on free will. Harris responded to this here, and Daniel Miessner has written a devastating critique of Dennett’s arguments and examples in his review of Harris’s book. Miessner summarizes Dennett’s position as (1) We have free will because we feel like we do and (2) It’s useful to hold people responsible for their actions, so we must tell people that free will is real. I find position (1) quite bizarrely inconsistent with Dennett’s view that consciousness is an illusion, even though in that case we also “feel like” we are conscious.

If you want to dig a little deeper into the issues around understanding the true nature of free will, I can recommend reading Dennett’s review, Sam Harris’ response and Miessner’s detailed critique.

Another leading philosopher of consciousness, David Chalmers, made a fairly strong case in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of mental functioning and itself has no causal role. But he resisted drawing this conclusion, saying he is agnostic and hopes to find some subtle role for consciousness in causing behaviour. Annaka Harris identified one such potential causal role in relation to the behaviour of someone who is reporting on their experience of meditating on their empty consciousness (formless awareness). It’s hard to imagine how a zombie could exhibit such behaviour.

Whether or not consciousness has any causal role in decisions is clearly fundamental to the issue of whether we have free will, and I find it odd that Chalmers does not discuss free will directly. He is on record as saying he does not have strong feelings about free will. For some reason, he appears to act coy around expressing a view on free will, though he is clearly skeptical and tending towards compatibilism, saying in the Scientific American interview that “If it just means you can do what you want to do, then, well, that seems pretty straightforward. If it’s the ability to do something completely non-deterministic, well, I don’t know if we have that.”

What does neuroscience and psychology tell us about free will

The scientific evidence includes:

• Given the right experimental manipulations, people can be led to believe that they consciously intended an action, when they neither chose it nor had control over their movements.
• Hypnotized people who are asked why they have done things that were suggested by the hypnotist will confabulate reasons for their actions that have nothing to do with the actual reason.
• Experiments done with split brain patients, where an action is requested to one side only of the split brain. When the patient is asked via the other side of the split brain why they did that action, the other side will invent a plausible reason that it believes.
• A large body of psychological research showing that conscious decisions are strongly influenced by current body states (such as hunger or tiredness), hormones, neurotransmitter levels, as well as past influences relating to family, culture, religion, educational, and childhood factors.

Sapolsky reviewed much of this evidence in the first half of his book Determined. Sam Harris also has a neuroscience background and reviews this evidence as well.

Anil Seth is another well-known neuroscientist who has recently written a bestselling book on neuroscience and consciousness, Being You. He also comes down very clearly on the side of no “spooky free will” (free will where consciousness causally intervenes in the flow of physical events). He discusses in some detail how intentions are formed in the brain before we become aware of making a decision and the very strong feeling that our “self” has made the decision and is causing the action. He is also a compatibilist, quoting Schopenhauer in slightly different words “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”

But Seth, somewhat like Dennett, is clearly unwilling to state that free will is an illusion. Indeed, he says that the conscious experience of volition is as real as any other conscious perception, such as a visual experience of colour. I find it somewhat difficult to take him seriously after he has just reviewed at length all the neurological experiments showing brain activity a significant time before a conscious volition is experienced and that people will experience volition if they are fooled into thinking they are controlling a series of events or the real cause is hidden from them.

What Seth actually means by saying the experience of volition is “real” is that it is indeed an experience we have, even though it does not reflect a reality in which our “self” makes choices from a range of options, any of which the self could have chosen. Seth argues that the reason we have this experience of volition is that it is indispensable to our survival and assists us to realize that we can learn from our previous “voluntary” actions, and possibly make a different choice next time. He may well be right.

Subjective evidence from first-person introspection and meditation

The case that Sam Harris makes for the non-existence of free will rests on objective, scientific observations on the one hand, and subjective evidence from introspection and meditation on the other. He devotes a substantial part of his book to discussion of our subjective experience, arguing that free will is not only an illusion, but it doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us.

Introspection or meditation soon shows us that thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds. As an experienced meditator, I am well aware that my thoughts appear spontaneously in my mind, and I cannot choose what I will next think or intend to do until a thought or intention arises in my mind. To directly observe this is to understand that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. You might respond that you can think connected chains of thought, but meditators know that these arise and cease, or skip around, for reasons outside our conscious control.

Part of the perceived experience of free will is to feel that you could have chosen to do something other than what you did, to think the thought “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever you did do. But it is not possible to go back and make a different decision. To think you could chosen to make a different decision at that time is an untestable belief. The perception that you could have done that is actually an understanding that you could make a different decision if similar circumstance arose in the future. And that is likely true, particularly if what you did do last time had undesirable consequences. Read Harris for a fuller discussion of this. The belief that we could have made several choices of action at a point in time is not amenable to the methods of science. Only to first-person observation.

In conclusion

The objective evidence, well discussed in some detail by Anil Seth and Robert Sapolsky, and the subjective evidence, well laid out by Sam Harris, together make a strong case that free will in the ordinary sense, is an illusion. Sam Harris puts it more strongly, even the illusion of free will is an illusion. It seems to me very likely not only that free will and the sense of a conscious self are illusions, but that consciousness is largely along for the ride, and plays at most only a limited causal role in behaviour and thought.

I have not touched on the implications of this for moral responsibility, which Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky both spend quite a bit of time discussing in their books, and which Daniel Dennett sees as necessary and justifies redefining free will so people can still be told they have it. There is quite a body of empirical evidence around this issue and I will examine it, as well as evidence on the free will beliefs of the general population and specific groups, in my next article.