Earlier this year, Closer to Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewed Monash University philosopher of mind Tim Bain and asked, “Does brain science eliminate free will?” (April 14, 2024, 9 minutes and 5 seconds).
Many of the materialistic arguments against free will are based on neuroscience experiments conducted in the early 1980s by physiologist Benjamin Libet (1916-2007). Libet showed that brain activity associated with the choice to perform a simple action (the readiness potential) precedes awareness of the choice. This was seen at the time as evidence against free will.
Bain offers a different approach.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn: [0:00] Tim, it’s said that today the greatest challenge to free will comes from brain science, specifically the Libet experiment. As a philosopher, what is the line of logic behind the claim that brain science can eliminate free will?
Tim Bain: [2:19] Reframing the argument, the first premise is: “Rivett’s actions” — let’s call them the actions we take here — [2:27]Actions such as raising your arm are initiated by a readiness potential, not a conscious decision.
The second premise is [2:39]If an action is not initiated by a conscious decision, it is not free – so this is a conceptual claim about what free will entails: initiation by a conscious decision.
How would Bain argue differently?
Bain [4:33] If you want to avoid being a skeptic, there are a couple of places to get off the bus here. One place to get off is to say that Libet has shown that these actions are not free will. You could concede that point, but you could also say that there is an important difference between a very automatic, very familiar kind of action like raising your hand (the kind of action we often do unconsciously) and twitching your leg or bobbing up and down in thought. You might say that, yes, these were not free will, but they were not a paradigm of free will.
So a classic case of free will might be something like Sophie’s Choice. [5:18] When we make moral judgments, we have time to decide and deliberate about what to do. So there’s a very important difference between certain actions that we think of as being of free will and what Libet did. It’s one of those places where you get off the bus. So that’s the generalization from the experiment…
Where to get off the bus early [5:44] The simple answer is that the concept of free will doesn’t incorporate the idea that a freely willed action must be initiated by a conscious decision. If there is a readiness potential that occurs here, at least based on a certain understanding of what a conscious decision is… it’s the moment when you become aware of the decision to act, the moment when people report, “I initiated the action.” And he assumes that the readiness potential caused the action, either directly or indirectly, by causing the event that they reported. And since they occur twice at different times, they can’t be the same thing, right?
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Thus, one point of contention is the importance of self-consciousness to free decision-making.
Many of us can recall decisions that we are sure we made free, but before we were truly conscious of the reasons why. For example, a proudly independent woman may decide to move closer to work (as she tells herself and others) to shorten her commute. But later she realizes that she was quite anxious about the recent increase in violent crime in her previous area and the associated rent increase to offset significant new security costs. Once she is living in a safer environment, closer to work, she begins to feel safe enough to recognize her actual decision-making process. The fact that she was unable to recognize the important reasons at first does not mean that it was not a free decision. In fact, most humans stay calm by limiting their raw exposure to the worst realities they have to deal with. These are decisions, even if they are not necessarily conscious.
In any case, as Michael Egnor points out at Mind Matters News, Libet’s work is often misrepresented to advance arguments against free will.
… Misunderstandings are so common that it is almost routine to read or hear Libet’s work described as scientific evidence for the lack of free will. This is odd, since Libet himself was a clear and forceful advocate of the reality of free will.
Famously, one of Libet’s experiments visualized the power of free will, the free decision not to do something, and he not only supported the idea of free will, but also said that traditional religious understandings of temptation, sin, and free will provide a sufficient explanation (Benjamin Libet, Mind in Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 151).
Either way, recent research suggests that the brain activity recorded by Libet and others before we recognize our choice may simply be the brain noise that precedes any decision. The most relevant brain activity coincides with conscious decisions. And important decisions aren’t accompanied by much brain noise.
So, both philosophical reasoning and research make free will a reasonable assumption. The fact that it doesn’t line up with materialist philosophy is more of a problem for materialists than it is a problem for free will.
