The Free Will Conundrum

The more I read the less place there seems to be left over for Free Will. A couple of months ago (in December or January, if I remember correctly) The Economist ran a story about neuroscience and the impact of recent advances in neuroscience on law, philosophy and society as a whole.

One of the stories they talked about was of a very ordinary man who suddenly started displaying paedophilic tendencies. He was caught with a large amount of kiddie porn on his computer and was then prosecuted. While this was going on he went to the hospital and had a brain scan done. A large tumour was found in his head. When they cut it away, the paedophilic tendencies suddenly disappeared. Later, when he noticed that they were returning, they scanned again and, lo and behold, the tumour was growing again. He wasn’t prosecuted for his behaviour, seeing as he had no control over his actions.

Not a bad story, right? Well, not if you’re a judge who strongly believes that people should be held responsible for their actions, or a philosopher who strongly believes in the precepts of free will. When tumours can influence how we behave, then what does that mean for our law system? After all, our entire law model is built on the idea that a person is in control of his or her actions, that’s why we have the insanity defence; if people are insane and not in control of their actions, they are not considered criminals but instead as suffering from an illness.

Other stories talk about a family that has a genetic propensity for violence (making it very hard to hold them responsible for their behaviour), as well as numerous studies that are slowly revealing which substances in the brain are responsible for what types of behaviour (including substances which block out common sense in times of extreme excitement). We already have some legal and medical recourse for these things, such as ‘crimes of passion’ arguments, but are they really enough?

And what about Free Will itself? As we understand the brain more and more, what room will be left for our ability to choose? This becomes even more difficult when you no longer believe in the existence of a soul (like me), though I think I prefer my position to the unenviable one of later on finding a new place for the soul to reside, if – when we’ve fully mapped the brain – no connection is found between the brain and ‘something else’.

The problem is that when you see the brain as purely chemical, it becomes very hard to find any process for making choice. You see, all chemical processes can in theory be predicted. Yes, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does eventually lead us down a street where we can no longer predict what is going to happen, but simply because we are incapable of predicting it doesn’t mean it isn’t still predictable.

Choice isn’t logical. Choice means that even when a set of circumstances is exactly the same (in every single way) twice over, a different outcome might still happen. That’s the principle of free will. Chemicals don’t work that way, if you have exactly the same circumstances a billion times over, you will get the exact same result a billion times over (yes, we can’t do it; but again, just because we can’t do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done).

Even with the utmost complexity of our brain, the underlying chemical reactions can in theory still be predicted and built upon to show us how the complex decision making processes in our brain will work. Not being able to make those predictions doesn’t mean we have Free Will, it just means we’ve got the Illusion of Free Will.

I really wonder if we have choice, or just the illusion of choice, much like very advanced computer AIs in computer games that seem to react intelligently, but in truth are just following a very complex program. And no, an extremely complex program that mimics free will in every way is still not the same, conceptually, as Free Will itself.

Though admittedly we might never be able to tell the difference.