The Real Reason You Don't Have Free Will | Unveiled

The Real Reason You Do Not Have Free Will

For thousands of years, it’s been believed that our ability to think and overcome basic instincts is what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Humans can communicate in ways no other animal does, we can build and use tools, write, invent, and make informed decisions. But are we just deluding ourselves?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what’s the REAL reason that you don’t have free will?

Philosophers have been interested in the concept of “free will” for millennia. The earliest examples we have date back to Ancient Greece, when leading minds pondered the significance of fate, asking; if our fates are divinely decreed, then what control do we have over our lives? This was especially relevant in a world where the gods were thought to regularly use humans as pawns in their schemes. The capricious deities of Ancient Greece were always working their own angles, often selfishly, and manipulating humans from afar, sometimes for no reason other than to cause mischief and sow chaos! How do you know whether you’ve done something because you wanted to do it, or because the gods made you? That was the question that concerned the Ancient Greeks. But today, neuroscientists investigating free will have different qualms with the idea, and have been conducting research for decades to try to decipher how it really works. Or, if it even exists at all.

From a scientific perspective, the question about free will centers on consciousness versus subconsciousness. Has your brain, on a far deeper level than anyone could be aware of, already made up its mind before you make a conscious decision? A handful of philosophers and psychologists over the years have drawn conclusions from this, saying that your brain only tricks you into thinking you’re making a conscious decision. Really, you’re not free to make any choice other than the one you do. Your subconscious has already chosen for you. And even if you go back and change your decision, well, that could still be your subconscious at work, too! Perhaps you were just fighting against its initial decision until you couldn’t fight anymore.

One of the most famous experiments in the field was neuroscientist Benjamin Libet’s, in 1983. Libet found that when subjects moved their wrists, unconscious brain activity preceded their conscious decision to do so. Studies have also found that people’s brains will retroactively trick them into thinking they made a ‘correct’ choice in simple questions, regardless of the actual answer. And this isn’t quite the “false memory” phenomenon, either; as it’s been shown to occur immediately after an event.

The controversial philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris agrees with this, saying that the free will of an individual is an illusion, and that people’s choices are determined by myriad, uncontrollable factors, both internal and external. We’re being made to think we have freedom when, really, experiments have shown the brain often makes decisions long before we’re consciously aware of them. For example, humans all have reflexes, and you may react to an event before your conscious brain can make sense of it. Reflexes are often characterized as “involuntary”, and are things we do to protect ourselves from harm. If an ancient caveman, for instance, was getting attacked by a wild animal, he wouldn’t have time to think everything through. He’d just have to react, without making a conscious decision, to save his own life. THIS is what neurologists are getting at when they say free will is an illusion, that our reactions are determined by physical, often unconscious processes. But this is an area of science that’s proven very tricky to study. It’s hard to pinpoint which parts of the brain are responsible for these processes, making it difficult for scientists to examine them.

Another academic, Professor Peter Tse, disagrees with Harris’s assessment, and has released books saying that, of COURSE humans have free will, the evidence of that is all around us. Tse emphasizes people’s ability to resist base impulses – like when you really want to order an unhealthy takeout, but stick to your decision not to. He also points out the abilities we have to convert to vegetarianism, to pick up a new hobby, or to reinvent ourselves in any other way, if we so desire.

From another perspective, society also has a role in what people are able to decide for themselves. In most countries, for instance, you can’t really just choose whether or not to get a job. If you DON’T get a job to earn money, the consequences could be dire. It could then be argued that the fact that everyone apparently must get a job - and often one that isn’t personally fulfilling - is an erosion of an individual’s free will. And also of their quality of life. Furthermore, any one person might desire to buy expensive things or to get involved in a costly hobby, but if they don’t have the financial means to do that… then arguably their free will is again being limited. Maybe your free will is to buy a new instrument and learn how to play it… but if you’re unable to buy the instrument itself, then you can’t enact this. So, free will is an even more complex problem from a purely sociological perspective.

There are non-neurological ways to study this question, too. As mentioned at the top of this video, the Ancient Greeks wanted to know how free will factored into fate and their pantheon of machinating gods. Today, people wonder the same thing in relation to our modern-day concept of divinity. A big debate between theists and atheists is why evil exists in the world. Called the “logical problem of evil”, it’s often used as a reason why God cannot exist by atheist philosophers, who argue that if God DID exist and was all-loving, He wouldn’t allow evil in the world. The “free will defense”, however, is something religious believers use to counter the atheist perspective on evil, saying that God imbued humans with free will when He created us, and it’s not up to Him what humans choose to do with that. Some perpetrate horrific acts against others, because it’s their free will to do so. In this model, free will itself is so important that it’s ‘worth’ the evils that ensue. What this tells us about humans is just how much we DO value free will, or at least, the illusion of free will, if we place so much importance on it that we’re willing to accept terrible things as a consequence.

Another question about free will arises from the religious belief in God’s foreknowledge of events to come. If God is omniscient (all-knowing), and can see the future - including the paths we will choose, ourselves - doesn’t that mean that we can’t actually choose otherwise? One response to this is to see God as outside time, looking at complete lifetimes, with all their choices and consequences. The idea of free will can be more challenging to reconcile with other conceptions of God’s omnipotence and omniscience however. Calvinism, for instance, an early branch of Christian Protestantism, has a doctrine of “predestination”, meaning that even before we’re born, God chooses who will go to hell and who to heaven.

It's not all about religion, though. Philosophers and scientists are also interested in ideas of predestination, or rather, determinism – the idea that all events, including our choices, are determined by previous causes. According to this view, the brain state that leads us to a ‘choice’ was just the physical result of the brain state that came before it, and so on. An associated idea is ‘fatalism’, or the idea that future events are inevitable, and we should resign ourselves to our predetermined destiny. In a sense, we must all live with a sense of fatalism, because even if we believe we can make free choices in the future, we can’t go back and change the choices we already have made.

One of the most famous thought experiments touching on this issue is the grandfather paradox. If you could go back in time, and had the chance to kill your grandfather before he had your father or mother, could you? You’re standing there, finger on the trigger, with nothing physically constraining you. Doing so would result in a paradox however, because you would have never been born to travel back in time to kill him in the first place. So it must be impossible. Yet, not being able to do so seems to violate our basic idea of free will. It could be argued however that in this situation, the future, which is now our past, has already taken into account what we will decide to do.

There are various other alternatives to fatalism, too. Some thinkers believe that free will and determinism are compatible, for example, provided we define free will in the right way. Many compatibilists believe that, as long as someone had the freedom to act in accordance with their own motivations, they can always be said to have chosen freely.

Ultimately, whether or not humans have free will is something you need to decide as an individual – that is, if you’re “free” to do so in the first place. All in all, it’s certainly a mind-bending subject… but that’s the real reason you might not have free will.