Free Will and the Brain

Free will is the idea that we are the driver of our own actions. We feel that we are in control of what we do. Our behavior does not seem like it is happening to us in a deterministic fashion. We feel that we are not passively watching the "movie of life", but can will our own actions to almost whatever we so desire. Is the position that we actually have something analogous to free will tenable, given what science currently tells us? Do we merely have the perception of free will? Also can future neuromodulation techniques potentially enhance our perception of being in control of our own lives?

There is a lot of confusion about free will and quantum mechanics. All particles in your brain, your body and any external non-conscious object all follow the same probabilistic laws. So you can't claim that the brain has some special laws of physics that are separate from anything else. Invoking quantum mechanics to explain "free will" is sort of like arguing that a slot machine has "free will" because it gives out prizes based on probability. All that quantum mechanics means is that there are things that happen indeterministically at the atomic/subatomic level and we can't predict their outcome ahead of time (measuring the spin of an electron for instance). This applies to all matter equally. Consciousness has absolutely nothing to do with these sorts of outcomes either. Most quantum effects are at such a low level, that they have basically no effect on the overall mechanistic action of how neurons function. Anyways, a widely accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics hypothesizes that the the probabilistic outcomes we view are merely a subset of outcomes in a larger multiverse where all possibilities are realized. The many world's interpretation IS a deterministic theory. The only reason we see probabilistic outcomes is that we can't interact with other branches of the universal wave function. The universal wave function evolves in a deterministic fashion.

I think there is an important thought experiment about free will and consciousness. What if your consciousness was exactly the same as it is now, but was lacking one crucial detail? You would wake up, eat, talk to people, go to work, go to sleep etc. The exact same thoughts would run through your head as they do now. However, with this consciousness you would feel like your body just did things without you exerting any control over it. You wouldn't feel like you were consciously selecting your thoughts, they would just happen. This is opposed to our current mental state of feeling like we are the driver of our thoughts and actions. It would basically be like you were passively watching a movie of your own life. Why don't we experience this? My guess is that over the course of millions of years, evolution has increasingly coupled a feeling of being the driver of our actions with conscious experience. It may merely have been adaptive to have this feeling of control over ourselves.

There is evidence from neuroscience that our brain can create a "narrative" and makes us think we did something by willed choice of action when in reality we did not. Researchers have used transcranial magnetic stimulation targeted to frontal brain regions on people to see its resultant effect on decision making. Normally people who are right-handed would choose to move their right hand 60% of the time. However, when the right hemisphere of their brain is stimulated with TMS they would choose to move their left hand 80% of the time. Even with this obvious manipulation of behavior, people's perception of free will remained intact. They still erroneously believed that they had chosen that behavior by their own cognizance. That would indicate that there may be a mechanism in the brain that essentially confabulates about whether we freely made a specific choice.

There are a variety of brain disorders where free will seemingly begins to vanish. In obsessive compulsive disorder, people may repeat specific behaviors again and again. They don't really want to do these behaviors and find them extremely distressing. Schizophrenic patients may sometimes have "thought insertions". They may have ideas in their head that they think are being put into their brain by outside sources. So these are in essence analogous to the thought experiment above. Certain thoughts or behaviors that they have feel like they are not being selected for by themselves. There is also alien hand syndrome where the hand moves on its own and it doesn't feel like the person has any control it. As opposed to these being instances where people lose their free will, it's possible that people merely lose the perception of free will in these disorders.

In some sense you could argue that a lack of free will is already embedded into how we consciously perceive the world around us. We can't currently control (at least not very well) how we perceive the world. Our perception of the world is based on a built up consciousness constructed by natural selection over the course of millions of years (selfish gene). Our conscious view of "objective reality" is merely an artificial representation of reality. People sometimes tend to forget how much of our consciousness is highly variable from one individual to the next. On earth you have billions of people and each is living in their own "virtual world" that is tainted by their unique brain chemistry. Each person may experience different perceptual qualia of varying magnitudes of intensity. An example being taste pleasure. Sugar tastes sweet because experiencing this sensory qualia was adaptive for our ancestors. Natural selection has the ability to fine tune perceptual qualia over time and environmental circumstances can change. Now sugar is available in abundance for many people. If finding sugar sweet suddenly became maladaptive, then experiencing sweetness might eventually be weeded out of the gene pool. Maybe people who don't find sugar that sweet have more children on average now. It is possible that our descendants may find sugar neutral or even repugnant in flavor.

Many males may find younger women more beautiful on average because those females have a higher fertility than older women. Finding younger women more attractive increases the probability that a male will pass on his genes and have more descendants. Evolution constructs a brain that places positive or negative value on external objects (prettiness, ugliness, tastiness etc.) Maybe I find scenes of nature beautiful because my ancestors were the ones who explored new territory. Perhaps people in the past who didn't find nature beautiful never went on to spread their genes to new worlds. Obviously conscious experience is complicated and is dependent on many factors other than genetics (such as environment, upbringing). However our consciousness is what drives our behavior. Our whole brain reward system is specifically set up to get us to do behaviors which are good for our genes (eating, mating, having children etc.). If you find sugar sweet, you bet you're going to be eating a lot more of it. Stimulating certain brain regions can make people desire to move their appendages. So evidence like this shows that we are basically slaves to our own brain chemistry and the consciousness it creates. A lot of our wants and desires are reducible to how our brain functions.

What about the future of free will? We know that consciousness drives behavior. New neuromodulation techniques will increasingly become available so as to allow us to shape our consciousness to anything we desire. You could identify the neural correlates of beauty in the brain and then amplify them, applying them to any external object. You could theoretically make the average 90 year old woman appear more stunningly attractive to a male than any young female supermodel. The only reason that this isn't the norm now is because it would have been maladaptive in the past. By understanding how consciousness motivates behavior you can possibly predict how a specific change in brain function will alter the way you act. So in some sense this is improving free will, as we are uncoupling our consciousness from our evolutionary past. We can create a consciousness to be whatever we want.

Will it be possible to find the neural correlates of the perception of "free will" and then amplify that perceptual state? Using advanced brain imaging techniques and subsequent neuromodulation we may theoretically be able to artificially enhance our feeling of being in control and the driver of our own actions. An absolute and all consuming feeling of being able to manipulate the environment can be embedded in the texture of every day experience. Perhaps this could even ludicrously be extended to having a feeling of being one with the universe and that you have absolute power to exert control over all things outside oneself. Even distant objects that you do not have direct contact with. This would be the ultimate feeling of "free will". You would feel like you were the driver of every action you observe in your perceptual consciousness. This would be an almost psychotic perception of control exertion.

In the past, your consciousness never evolved the capacity to attribute free will to objects that are not directly connected or manipulated by yourself. I would imagine it could be possible to trick your brain into thinking that you control every object in your perceptual consciousness by willed action. I'm not necessary talking about making a person believe they have psychokinetic powers. I'm talking about tricking your brain into creating a narrative that explains all events happening in your conscious perception as being attributable to your own exertion. Just as the people's brains in that transcranial stimulation experiment made them think that they chose to move that specific hand after the fact. It could be akin to some sort of confabulation that your brain would make to explain away things no matter how absurd they might seem. While all of this is highly speculative, I definitely think that better understanding of the brain and new brain stimulation techniques could be used to enhance feelings of being in control of our own lives. For many people this may be a welcome change in consciousness.