The British philosopher Galen Strawson doesn't think much of free will. His argument is fairly straightforward. It goes something like this:
I do what I do because of the way I am. If I want to eat Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, or listen to Blonde on Blonde, it's because I prefer, at this moment, the taste of that cereal and the sound of that album.
If I'm going to be responsible for my choices, then I also have to be responsible for the way I am.
But I'm not responsible for the way I am! At some point, my wants and needs - the stew of factors behind my preferences - are beyond my control. They've been programmed by natural selection and embedded in my genes; they've been influenced by my parents, and shaped by my siblings and peers and all those commercials on television.
Ergo, I can't be ultimately responsible for my choices. I don't want Cheerios because I want them. Instead, my preferences have been shaped by a million little forces that have nothing to do with me. I can't be the cause of myself.
Over at The Stone, Strawson elaborates on this bleak view of human freedom. While most conversations about free will are framed in terms of scientific determinism - we're either constrained by the rigid laws of physics, or those neural circuits that precede conscious awareness - Strawson thinks the worry over determinism misses the point:
And yet...There's a certain frivolousness to all these eloquent arguments over free will. The fact is, we are deeply wired to believe in our freedom. We feel like willful creatures, blessed with elbow room and endowed with the capacity to pick our own breakfast cereal. Furthermore, there's probably a very good reason why this belief is so universal. Consider this recent study by the psychologists Kathleen Vohs, at the University of Minnesota, and Jonathan Schooler ,at the University of California at Santa Barbara. They gave a few dozen subjects a short passage from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick. Half of the participants read a paragraph insisting that free will is a romantic illusion:
Crick then discusses the neural basis of choice, before claiming that “although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” The other subjects got a passage that was similarly scientific-sounding - it was filled with references to neurons and cortical oscillations - but it was about the importance of studying consciousness. There was nothing about the will.
Here's where things get interesting. After reading the passages, the subjects were then told to complete twenty arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that after the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer visible on the screen. The participants were told that no one would know whether or not they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.
You can probably guess what happened: Those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often. Instead of pressing the space bar, they tended to let the answer appear. Furthermore, Vohs and Schooler found that the amount of cheating was directly correlated with the extent to which the subjects rejected free will. (Everybody was given a survey after reading the passages.) In a second experiment, the psychologists found that subjects exposed to determinism also overpaid themselves for performance on a cognitive task, at least when compared to subjects who read a control paragraph. These experiments suggest that our faith in freedom is intertwined with ethical behavior. (Of course, the data also implies that modern neuroscience is slowly eroding our morality, or at least making us more likely to cheat.)
Strawson ends his essay with a literary flourish. He quotes the novelist Ian McEwan on the necessity of assuming responsibility for our actions even if we don't actually control them:
Of course, this debate isn't going to disappear anytime soon. Some scientists continue to search for the neural correlates of freedom, and even argue that our will is simply an evolved elaboration of circuits that exist in fruit flies. Others insist, pace Laplace, that physics and neuroscience are slowly whittling away the illusion and, at some point in the future, we'll finally realize that we're about as free as a video game character. All I know is that all the sophistry doesn't really matter. We'll continue to believe we pick Cheerios for the simple reason that we want to eat Cheerios; I feel like the cause of myself, even if I "know" that I have many other causes, from my genetic inheritance to the marketing team at General Mills. William James, as usual, said it best. After struggling through a dark depression, James came to the following conclusion:
