Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

I decide as I decide, I do as I do? Free will sits at the center of human thought, behavior, morality, and responsibility. But what may seem obvious may be strangely not so.

Al Mele

We find people claiming that it’s obvious that there’s no free will. We find people claiming it’s obvious that there is free will, there’s no doubt about it.

Galen Strawson

It’s perhaps the most dramatic, irresoluble clash in the whole of philosophy.

John Searle

We have inconsistent views, each of which is supported by overwhelming reasons.

Peter Van Inwagen

It’s a mystery to me what’s wrong with one of these arguments so, I regard free will as a complete mystery.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Al, you believe that God knows the future, right?

Alvin Plantinga

Right, I do.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

You also believe that human beings have free will.

Alvin Plantinga

I believe that too, right.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

How do you reconcile the two?

Alvin Plantinga

Uh, well, first of all, I’d have to ask why there’s a problem about that.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Here’s the Deep Problem of Free Will: On the one hand, our human sense is that our actions are fully free. On the other hand, our scientific sense is that every action is determined by a prior action. What is Free Will? Do We Have Free Will? That’s the Big Question.Free will is such a big question that the John Templeton Foundation has funded a multiyear study with experts in science, philosophy, and theology. The project is called “Big Questions in Free Will.” It has 60 participants, four conferences, numerous experiments and papers all to research, test, discuss and debate free will. I’m Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and Closer to Truth follows the project – asking the Big Questions in Free Will. The four-year Big Questions in Free Will Project kicks off in Tallahasse, Florida, on the campus of Florida State University, where participants gather to present their findings, state their cases, and deliberate the implications. The leader of the project, Professor Alfred Mele, invites me to the first conference and starts with his favorite analogy for describing free will.

Al Mele

Somewhere along the line, I thought of a gas station analogy for free will. So at gas stations, you can get regular gas, you can get mid-grade gas, or you can get premium. The regular way of thinking about free will is like this, sufficient for having free will would be just that you’re sane and rational, nobody’s pushing you around, there’s no compulsion or coercion, that would be enough. When you bump up to the midgrade, you need to add something to this. And what you have to add is that at the very moment you made a decision, everything being the same, right up until then, um, you could have done otherwise. So that’s the midgrade conception. And the third one, that’s not enough for free will either. You also need to have a non-physical soul, or a non-physical mind.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Three conceptions of free will, each with its own issues. But why dedicate multiple years and significant resources to exploring Free Will? What makes free will a “Big Question” – one that explores the deep nature of reality or human existence?

Bertram Malle

Free will is a big question because humans struggle with understanding it. Humans have the need to explain and to postulate something like free will – helps you understand why certain actions are unique, why certain things are unpredictable, why certain things are new. Because somebody freely, creatively did something that you didn’t expect would happen before.

Eddie Namhias

Free will lies at the heart of our conception of ourselves and our conception of being morally responsible agents. So, if people feel like they have free will, they feel like they’re in control of their lives, and they feel like what they do matters. And if they don’t feel they have free will, they feel like what they do is not making an impact on the world, and that relates to our conceptions of moral responsibility and it might end up affecting the way we understand legal responsibility as well.

Roy Baumeister

I think of free will as a new kind of controlling and producing behavior, that is produced by evolution but that sets us apart from other creatures. We have basic desires the same as they do. Every animal gets hungry. And when it gets hungry it wants to eat. We do that too but we might refrain from eating because we’re on a diet or it’s a religious holiday or the food belongs to someone else. Free will is one of the basic human traits. Some people are going around saying there’s no such thing as free will, it’s an illusion blah, blah, blah. I think people are upset by that partly because it takes, it denies one of the basic facts of human experience.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

How does the Big Questions in Free Will Project address the issues? If the world is determined, can we have free will? Is free will an illusion? Is free will required for moral responsibility? What happens to free will when God is involved? Al Mele explains that the project is divided into ‘three wings’: science, philosophy, theology.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

So in the science wing, how who are the scientists, what are the kinds of problems they are working on?

Al Mele

Well there are neuroscientists, social psychologists, cognitive psychologists. Neuroscientists are working on roughly what goes on in the brain when people make decisions. Also the sense or feeling of causing something of being an agent as opposed to you know something happening to you. The social psychologists are studying things like the effects of people’s beliefs about free will on their behavior, and they are studying things like will power. In the conceptual underpinnings wing, our main questions are traditional philosophical questions like what are the necessary conditions for free will. And the theologians are dealing with questions about divine freedom and questions about the connection between the possible existence of God and human freedom.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

So do you see a cross pollination between these three wings?

Al Mele

I do. The philosophers and scientists meet together at three conferences and there will be a lot of productive exchange of ideas.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

I begin with the ‘science wing’. For science to explain free will, it need start with the seat of thought and emotion – the brain. What does brain science say about free will? I ask Al Mele for some history.

Al Mele

I’ll start with an experiment that really got the ball rolling. It’s by a neuro scientist named Benjamin Libet. So the task subjects had was to flex a wrist whenever they felt like it, and then after they flexed, they would report where a spot was on a very fast clock when they first felt the urge, intention, wish, will, decision to flex. And they were hooked up to two machines, so they were getting EEG readings from the scalp and they were getting muscle motion readings with an electromyograph. And, uh, what he discovered is that when subjects were regularly reminded not to plan in advance when to flex, you got an EEG ramp up that started at 550 milliseconds before the muscle burst, and that’s about a half a second.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

That’s a long time in brain terms, half a second.

Al Mele

Oh, it sure is. Now, the average time of first reported awareness of this mental event, the decision or intention or whatever, was 206 milliseconds before the muscle –

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

About a fifth of a second.

Al Mele

That’s right. So there’s a lag between the EEG ramp up, and this reported time of first awareness.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Which seems to indicate that the brain, without our conscious knowledge, is already planning and then I’m suddenly aware of it, as if my consciousness, my so-called free will, is sort of a froth. It’s just kind of riding along but has no impact on really what’s happening.

Al Mele

Yeah, that’s exactly right. So his thought is, the brain is making these decisions, about a third of a second before you become aware of them, so it’s making them unconsciously, free will has to be a conscious process, so free will’s not involved.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Many scientists concluded that the Libet experiment abolished free will. But EEG readings on the scalp are weak – it’s difficult to get precise measurements insulated from the brain. One neuroscientist in the Big Questions in Free Will Project – Christof Koch – is working to improve Libet’s experiment – by recording directly on the brain, and by examining decisions that have consequences.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Christof, your experiment involves real time work with patients who have electrodes implanted for medical reasons. What is the basic science, the basic neurobiology, behind the experiment?

Christof Koch

Our experiment, a basic variant of a famous experiment by Benjamin Libet. We try to understand the neuronal mechanism that underlie a voluntary decision, that traditionally people would say involves free will. And we know from previous experiments, there are several components to this. One component relates to this feeling that psychologist now call authorship or agency, I lift my right hand and I’ve a feeling that I, not you, not my parents, not my friend for responsible for me lifting this hand. We know there’s a specific locus in the brain that generates this, the, this conscious sensation. We like to separate that out from the neural mechanism that actually give rise to what I personally feel is this voluntary action. What are the actual mechanisms, where’s the decision first taken, in what part of the brain involved in what sequence, so finally I lift my right hand and more interestingly, from a practical perspective, can I predict this ahead of time, can I maybe read off your brain signals so I can know one second ahead of time, are you going to move the right hand, are you going to move the left hand. The other thing we interested in is choices that involve deliberations, because that also brings in moral judgment. Should I be doing this, is this a wise idea, am I going to hurt somebody, et cetera. And so there we’re devising a slightly different paradigm where we play a simple game, where the patient is free to move one or the other hand, at some command, we lift both of our hands. However, if you lift the same hand as I do, then you win one dollar, and if we do this, you see, then I win a dollar. And once again, this is much closer to the real decision that we care about, because it has consequences and you deliberate, rather than just, ah, doesn’t matter, pick this or this, exactly identical. I can’t take out both, I have to take one.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Christof sends me to Cedar Sinai Medical Center in West Los Angeles. I’ll have a ring-side seat watching the brain make real-world decisions. A patient has graciously allowed me to observe as she undergoes brain surgery for epilepsy. And then afterwards, as she participates in experiments of decision making and free will. I meet the neurosurgeon, Doctor Adam Mamelak.

Doctor Adam Mamelak

We do an operation, a craniotomy, where we open the skull, make a reasonably large opening, and put a sheet of electrodes on the surface of the brain. It covers the area that we think is involved, plus the periphery around it.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Doctor Mamelak introduces his patient – Audrey. Every week of her life, since she was a baby, Audrey has endured multiple epileptic seizures. Now she can be cured.

Doctor Adam Mamelak

We’ll be able to record your seizures, but we’ll also be able to map the different areas of brain function.

Audrey

OK

Doctor Adam Mamelak

We can also do other tests, to really try to understand not specifically how your brain works, but how the brain works in general.

Audrey

OK

Doctor Adam Mamelak

And, uh, one of the questions that we’re very interested in studying is, how do you make conscious decisions?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

It’s a remarkable procedure. By charting Audrey’s brain waves, neurosurgeons create a fine-grained map of her brain, enabling them to locate and remove the lesion that causes her seizures. At the same time, neuroscientists can examine brain activity during decision making, seeking brain-based facts about free will. A week later, at Cal Tech, Christof’s partner, neuroscientist Uri Maoz, shows me the results.

Uri Maoz

Basically the patient and I are playing a simple version of the rock, scissors, paper, that, that children play. If I raise the mirror image of what you raise and let’s say I win, and if we raise the same hand, so if you raise your right hand and I raise the right hand, then, then you win. We start with five dollars and every time she wins, I give her ten cents, so I lose ten cents and she gains ten cents, and if she loses it’s the other way around, and if she doesn’t react quickly enough because the idea, of course, you could always just wait to see what the other guy’s doing and move, we just deduct ten cents. So it’s, it becomes competitive. We play for about fifty rounds. What we were interested in is finding the difference between preparatory activity towards, uh, moving the left hand, versus moving the right hand, to be able to predict which hand you will raise before the go signal telling you to raise your hand is even, is even there. So we, we have this grid here, which is much closer to the source of the signal, than you would have if it was EEG and it’s sitting here and there’s the, the tissue and the skull and everything, the attenuation of the signal and you don’t know where it’s coming from. So here we’re much closer to the signal, so this grid is in her head here, and from this grid, we see these wires coming out, from here it goes into, uh, these panels here, and from there there’s a wire that goes to a system that records and does some analysis and from that system through another wire that you kind of maybe see here, goes into this machine. I get a beep either on the right ear or on the left ear, which tells me to raise my right hand or my left hand in order to beat the patient. And this is half a second before the go signal, so I know what I need to move, and I just wait half a second for the go signal and move it.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Okay, let’s, uh, let’s, let’s see what really happened.

Uri Maoz

Okay. This is counting down five, four, three, two one and then go, go, go and we raise our hands. So if I win, my side of the response box lights up in blue, and if she wins, her side of the response box lights in red. Five, four, three, two one, go, and this time I win, and then again, so I win this time, and then we try it again, and so this goes on like that for about fifty trials. Here is a screen behind Audrey, she can’t see it, and the screen shows an arrow which hand she’s going to raise according to the real time system. So she’s about to raise her right hand. And it was, it –

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Okay, so what are the implications for free will here?

Uri Maoz

Well, if I can predict what you’re doing when you’re sit, when you’re, uh, um, decision is making a difference, it might be stronger evidence that, uh, these unconscious processes are, are affecting also these types of decisions that are more important for moral responsibility.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Now, the implications of what you’re saying though, is that if you are able to predict this to the degree of accuracy that, that you can, our brain is making our decisions and we’re not. It does give us some philosophical pause about what free will is.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

So Uri and Christof replicate Libet’s experiment with more precision – literally on the brain – and the results are similar. Uri can predict what Audrey is going to do – even before Audrey herself is aware of her own inner decision to do it… Does this suggest that free will – is an illusion? That our conscious decision to act, does not cause us to act? But can science really explain Free Will? I ask philosopher Jenann Ismael, who focuses on science at its most fundamental level – physics.

Jenann Ismael

If physics is the most fundamental science, then everything that there is in the world, including ourselves, and including free will, if there is free will, ultimately has to be at least implicitly included in the description of the world that’s given us by physics. So from that point of view, everything else that’s described by the special sciences, including neuroscience, social psychology, ordinary psychology, that’s all ultimately a more coarse-grain description, um, of what’s described completely and precisely and at the most fine-grained level in physics. So, the goal of physics is ultimately to, at least implicitly, encompass all of what there is, including all the, you know, phenomenal feel that is the way, listening to a symphony feels to you. It’s a matter of great controversy and it’s an unsettled question whether physics ever will be able to resolve that goal. I think right now it is not the case in my view that we have any knock down arguments that that’s not possible.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

But even if physics could explain everything, would that make free will an illusion? Free will, an illusion? It just doesn’t seem right. It seems more a philosophical question. So can philosophy help? I ask Al Mele to explain the philosophy of free will.

Al Mele

We have to start with this notion of determinism. And determinism is the idea that a complete description of the condition of the universe at any point in time, together with a complete list of all the laws of nature, would entail all other truths about the universe, including all truths about everything you’ll ever do. Okay, that’s determinism. Some philosophers say, well, you can’t have free will in that case, because you could never have done otherwise than you did. Well, suppose determinism isn’t true? Then, what do you have, now? Well, they say randomness at the point of decision.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And so, that’s not free will, either.

Al Mele

That’s what they say. Either way, then, there’s no free will. But still, people feel as though they’re free, and so the claim is, well, that feeling is an illusion. So, there are philosophers called compatibilists. And compatibilists say that, even if determinism is true, people can act freely. What compatibilists think is that what you need is to be responsive to reasons in a certain way, so that if the reasons had been different, you would or might have acted differently.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Even though there was no possibility that the reasons were different, based on the universe that we live in.

Al Mele

That’s right. The other way to go is to say, no, you’re right, free will does require that determinism be false, but the falsity of determinism doesn’t just put you at the mercy of chance or randomness or luck. You’re still enough in control of what you do to act freely. That kind of response is called the libertarian response. So, the pro-free-will views, then, divide into those two camps. My own view is this: either compatibilism is true, or libertarianism is true. That either/or proposition is more credible than the opposing proposition, which is, no free will, either way, free will is an illusion.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Philosophers propose these two basic mechanisms to explain why Free Will: compatibilism and libertarianism. Though they differ dramatically in characterizing free will, both counter the claim, made largely by scientists, that free will is an illusion. Al concludes that free will is not an illusion – that either compatibilism or libertarianism is correct – but as for which is correct, he is not prepared to decide. Of the two philosophical positions, compatibilism seems the more perplexing. If determinism is true, every event caused by a prior event, how could we ever act freely? I ask Peter van Inwagen, an authority on the philosophy of free will. He too finds compatibilism perplexing.

Peter van Inwagen

In the history of the problem of free will there has been a long tradition of philosophers saying that you can have both – you could have free will in a world that was completely deterministic. And I remember the first time this view was pointed out to me, and I said but wait a minute; I said. If my actions are the inevitable causal consequence of the past, I don’t have any choice about what went on in the past, and I don’t have any choice about what evolved out of it according to the laws of nature. I can’t work miracles. I can’t change the laws of nature. So I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think I can do this other thing. But this was only one side of the problem of free will. Because simply to show that free will is incompatible with determinism is, well it’s really to pose the problem in a much more pressing form. Because there are also good arguments to show that free will is incompatible with indeterminism. If you knew that it was just a matter of indeterministic chance, which thing you would do at a certain point in time, you wouldn’t be able to promise to do one or the other. You would just have to wait and see what would happen. And so I have tried to work on this problem, to put all this together, to find the place where- that allows both free will and moral responsibility in a world that’s certainly either deterministic or indeterministic, for more than 40 years now. And I confess myself just baffled by this problem. It is too difficult for me.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Peter can argue that free will is not compatible with determinism – and not compatible with indeterminism. And because these are the only possibilities, then free will would be impossible or nonsensical. To Peter, neither compatibilism nor libertarianism at least in their present formulations can account for free will. But in no way does he think that free will is an illusion. Perhaps the confusion comes at a more basic level. Perhaps we should refine the basic terms – “free” and “will”? I ask philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

I take “free” to mean there’s no barrier of the relevant sort. And when we’re talking about freedom in the context of free will and free action, we’re talking mainly about physical barriers, or psychological barriers, to doing the things that you want to do. And to say that you’re free to do it is then to say there are no relevant physical or psychological barriers to you doing the thing you wanna do.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Hmm. So, the classic, uh, critical question is to say, could you have done something otherwise?

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Right but notice the word “could” doesn’t really help. People seem to think it’s clear what counts as “could” and what counts as “could not.” But you might say, “Oh can you come to the movie with me tonight?” “No I can’t come, I’ve gotta work.” Well it’s not that it’s physically impossible; it’s that it would be too costly for me. Because I need to get this work done. So even the word “could” has this relevant- to say you can do something is again to say there’s no relevant barrier or constraint.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

The key is relevant there.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Absolutely.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Because in each circumstance you have to determine what’s the relevant barrier that defines freedom.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Right. And that’s gonna depend on what your interest is, right? If your interest is whether or not to hold someone responsible for example, then certain kinds of barriers are gonna be deemed relevant. It might be relevant that the person, uh is delusional. Doesn’t know what they’re doing. It might be relevant that they are locked into their room. That’s why they couldn’t leave and, and get to work in time. Uh, whereas the fact that it’s caused in a certain way in your brain, I think would not be relevant if the context is about whether to hold a person morally responsible. Because after all, our desires are lodged in our brains. They are patterns in our brains that lead us to do the things that we do. And so to say that the wiring of my brain is what caused me to do it, is just another way of describing the same situation as I’m doing it ’cause I wanna do it. And so once we get clear about what we mean by freedom, then we can ask are wills really free in that sense that we care about…

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

But no matter definitions of freedom, science claims that because the feeling of making a choice comes after brain activity correlated with that choice, free will is not what it seems, and may indeed be an illusion. I ask philosopher Eddie Nahmias, who thinks that when it comes to Free Will, distinctions between science and philosophy aren’t so clear.

Eddie Nahmias

Well to start with I think the brain scientists do use philosophical arguments that you might not always realize it but they are using arguments by suggesting that a particular definition of free will is the right one and then trying to show that their data undermines that. They are all looking at what happens right before you typically do something rather unimportant like deciding or picking whether to choose your you know push a right button or a left button. But what they haven’t shown is that when you are doing something important or making a decision about what college you’re going to go to or who you are going to marry or whether you are going to have children that the sort of planning and conscious thinking you do there doesn’t get a, a hold on your actions downstream.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

But is that not just a difference in degree as opposed to a difference in kind. Couldn’t the same argument hold that every piece of that there is something in the brain going on before we’re conscious of it.

Eddie Nahmias

Right, right and I think that’s the sort of philosophical argument that comes into play because they are assuming that this shows sort of a universal determinism of causation before we’re aware of what we are doing. But the key is to recognize that just because something is caused doesn’t mean that it’s not a cause. So even if there’s earlier stuff happening in the brain that might cause the brain activity that’s involved in my conscious planning, that doesn’t mean that my conscious planning doesn’t play a causal role in what I do. Here is the crucial part. We have no idea how that works. So consciousness is still a mystery in the sense that we don’t have a good theory of how to explain how the conscious mental processes are related to the neural processes. The illusion here to turn it around is that the conscious states do, do something once we recognize the connection.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

You are saying free will is not an illusion.

Eddie Nahmias

No if consciousness were actually cut out of the picture then it would be an illusion… but I don’t think any of the evidence has suggested that yet.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Well, one team of scientists claims they may have such evidence. At least evidence that a feeling of “agency” – ‘personal authorship’ or ‘conscious Awareness’ – is not required for decision making. The team has found a clever way to eliminate “agency” or conscious awareness in the decision process. I ask one team member, Thalia Wheatley, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth, to explain.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Now you have a research project, part of this big questions in free will project, that is going to use hypnosis.

Thalia Wheatley

That’s right.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

How is that going to work?

Thalia Wheatley

Which is free will. So the basic idea with what we want to do is use hypnosis to take away this conscious awareness that you’re about to move and see do you still move if you’re if you don’t know you’re about to do it. And does the neural activity look the same? If nothing changes then it suggests that becoming aware that you’re about to move isn’t really instrumental to your movement. If we showed the opposite that it does change things, we don’t really get the movement or the neural activity looks completely different then it is doing something and we need to take that into account and maybe I need to revise my strong stance.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

That free will is an illusion.

Thalia Wheatley

Yeah, maybe.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Thalia takes me to watch her experiment.

Thalia Wheatley

I want you to just relax as much as possible, get yourself in a comfortable position. Take a few deep breaths.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Once the subject is hypnotized, Thalia instructs her to perform actions – actions that will be triggered after she wakes up – but without the conscious feeling that she is ‘willing’ those actions herself.

Thalia Wheatley

A little later you will watch some video clips. Each video clip will have a red arrow next to it. If the red arrow is on the right side of the video, you will squeeze the ball in your right hand.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

She will watch a screen, and squeeze a ball when she sees an arrow. She will assume this is an involuntary action when in fact it was implanted by the Hypnosis.

Thalia Wheatley

You will remember nothing of what has happened until I say to you, “Now you can remember everything.” 3…2…1… wide awake. Let yourself wake up.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

So what was the last thing you remember before you woke up?

Participant

Sitting in the chair and yeah (laughs) nothing else besides that.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Let’s go do the experiment!

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Now, as in the Libet experiment, the subject is fitted with electrodes on her scalp and arms – to measure electrical impulses in her brain and muscle movements in her arms. But this time, the subject is told that the electrodes on her arms will stimulate her muscles – so she will believe that her arm movements – which are really triggered by hypnotic suggestion – are not voluntary, not affected by her conscious thoughts.

Research Assistant

You’re going to be just viewing some short nature videos. They’ll be about 20 seconds each and then there will be a pause.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Thalia’s research assistant shows me the real-time results.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

So in each video clip of 20 seconds there would be one.

Research Assistant

One squeeze…so see she just squeezed with her left arm, so that’s what a squeeze of the stress ball, that’s what we want to see…so there she just moved her right arm so that’s the muscle potential from her right arm…so what we’ll be looking at is the data preceding, leading up right to that squeeze.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Later, Thalia brings the subject out of hypnosis.

Thalia Wheatley

Now you can remember everything! Now you can remember everything!

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Then they re-attach the electrodes and ask the subject to contract her arm muscles voluntarily, to see if there is any difference when conscious decision-making enters the process. After the experiment, I meet with Thalia, and her partner in the project, neuroscientist Peter Tse, to discuss – and debate – the results.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

So this is Keileigh.

Thalia Wheatley

That’s Keileigh’s data.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And what are we looking at?

Thalia Wheatley

Well, zero is when she made a squeeze, and the red line is when she made a squeeze based on the—due to the post-hypnotic suggestion. And the blue line is when she made a squeeze because she decided consciously to do so. And you can see that lines are largely overlapping.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And so what’s the significance of that?

Thalia Wheatley

Well, it shows that motor action and the accompanying readiness potentials don’t require the sort of feeling of authorship, of agency of your action. They unfold naturally with or without it.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And how does that comport with each of your views of the nature of free will?

Thalia Wheatley

(laughs)

Peter Tse

(laughs) We’ve been doing this dance for seven years, so it’s an old debate.

Thalia Wheatley

We disagree. I think that um, it’s a problem for the sense that we have that at any moment we could decide to do otherwise. That this conscious feeling of being sort of free agents making decisions, this is I think a problem for that view.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Peter you disagree with that I think.

Peter Tse

For something to be causal, it has to be indicative of the future. A future event. Something going on now causes something in the future. But these kinds of judgments that we’re talking about, that I did it, or about what just happened…

Thalia Wheatley

Or I have decided to do it.

Peter Tse

Yes. But these are retrospective. They’re due to a comparison of what’s intended or planned and what is actually being executed. Thalia and I, we’ve had these debates for seven years now. Ever since she came to Dartmouth we’ve been duking it out.

Thalia Wheatley

II think actually we agree. We don’t agree on the definition of the term free will. That’s where the disagreement lies.

Peter Tse

What does free will mean?

Thalia Wheatley

I think it means that I could choose otherwise in the moment.

Peter Tse

Right, and I think it means that you can choose otherwise in the future. The system can make choices now that will have an influence on what will happen in the future.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

But is that a fundamental difference?

Peter Tse

Yes. It’s a difference in kind, not just degree.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

What do you think?

Thalia Wheatley

I think the- I mean the jury’s out. We just don’t know. I don’t think that there’s a different kind of neural causality that plays out.

Peter Tse

The fact that we found an example where consciousness appears not to play a role in subsequent acts doesn’t mean that consciousness does not play a role in all subsequent acts.

Thalia Wheatley

Granted. But it does… does demonstrated here.

Peter Tse

Sure

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Thalia and Peter agree that Conscious awareness does not affect simple actions like squeezing a ball. But they disagree on whether that feeling of agency can affect more complex decisions like whom to marry. Both of them make their case – using the same hypnosis data to support their divergent views. Both concur that the brain activity prior to the apparently ‘Free will Decision’
was the same under hypnosis with no conscious awareness as it was without hypnosis with full conscious awareness. In Thalia’s view, conscious awareness is not needed for so called ‘Free will Decisions’. In Peter’s view, free will does not reside in these simple decisions – we can choose otherwise but not in the present – in the future. Free will is not getting any simpler. I ask about the implications.

Peter Tse

So it has to be the case that neural activity generates later neural activity so there’s only neurons in our brain. There’s not magical elves or anything so I don’t disagree that there’s neuronal causation. That doesn’t mean that there’s no role for consciousness in freely willing because there could be this other role, for example that you have to play scenarios out internally and play options out and evaluate them and then select among them. I don’t think that the Libet task is getting at that. What we need to do is focus on where the action is, which is in working memory and deliberative processing.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Peter thinks free will lies in meaningful deliberation – in planning, evaluating and choosing future action. His theory gives conscious awareness a central role in future-oriented decision-making — even if his experiments show that it has no role in the moment of meaningless action. If conscious awareness does play a role in Free Will, how would it work? I ask Tim Bayne, a philosopher of mind, who focuses on consciousness’s role in volition – and how it may connect to free will.

Tim Bayne

Consciousness is important and necessary for certain types of action, for certain types of functions. So patients who are in a vegetative state can do very little. And recent work, using an FMRI study, functional magnetic resonance imaging study, asked a patient, um, to engage in, um, some voluntary imagery. Uh, they asked this vegetative state patient to imagine, um, walking around her house for thirty seconds, um, and then asked her to imagine playing tennis for thirty seconds. And we know that these types of imagery, because they involve different types of behavior, um, different contents, um, trigger different types of the brain. And they looked at her brain patterns over those thirty seconds, and it looked like she was following these commands. And the authors of the study concluded that she was conscious, even though she hadn’t engaged in any outward behavioral manifestations of consciousness. The reason why they took the neural activation to be evidence of consciousness in this patient, was that they took the neural activation to be evidence of agency, voluntary agency….so that’s a manifestation of the link that many people find very plausible between certain kinds of action – intentional action, voluntary action – and consciousness.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

So that’s the nexus between consciousness and free will.

Tim Bayne

Exactly.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Because you need the consciousness to have the volition to –

Tim Bayne

That in a nutshell is the idea.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Although Tim links consciousness to free will, one neuroscientist in the Big Questions in Free Will Project is sure that our feeling of free will is an illusion. To Patrick Haggard, the debate is settled. That’s why I go to London to see him.

Patrick Haggard

I think, in some strong sense, free will is an illusion. In neuroscience, we have a real problem with the idea that a conscious event, which is somehow independent of the brain, which is occurring only in the mind, but not in the brain, can somehow trigger the brain activity, which then triggers the movement of my arm. From a neuroscientific point of view, there is no conscious mind independent of the brain. So, the way that we think about free will in our everyday lives, in which Descartes summarized for us, is that our conscious thoughts cause our actions, but really, this is not neuroscientifically possible. So, no neuroscientists are really surprised by the result of the Libet experiment, because consciousness has got to be a product of our brain activity.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Because Patrick already thinks free will is an illusion, he uses the Libet technique for a different purpose – to discern ways by which the brain makes decisions.

Patrick Haggard

So during the whole yellow period of that circle you need to be preparing the intention to press that key. And you actually press it just when the yellow circle turns green. And we’re going to be trying to see whether we can spot anything in your brain waves corresponding to those intentions. Great. And we’re just going to leave you to get on with it. We’ll be back in about five minutes, is that alright? Thanks very much. Here we go.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Go for it!

Patrick Haggard

So now that we’ve found out how to measure the code in the brain for the action that you’re about to make, we’ve been playing in the second part of the project with looking at the, the dynamics of that code. How, how flexible it is. And in particular how quickly it can change. I’ve been interested in the strength of individual decisions. So if I choose to do something, can I do it really strongly, or can I just decide to do it. Do decisions come by degrees, or are they a simple binary yes/no kinda thing.

Patrick Haggard

(ROBERT AND PATRICK RETURN TO THE TESTING ROOM) Hi Jennifer, how was that?

Jennifer

It was fun!

Patrick Haggard

Okay good…now we’re going to ask you to develop an intention to go left or go right, and then suddenly switch it to go right or to go left. So we’re going to give you the arrow in the center of the circle, right at the start…. which explains the intention we want you to have. And then as the yellow circle rotates on the screen, it will give a very little, brief green flash. And that’s a signal to you, that you have to switch your intention to make the other action. Think left…switch…good. Think right…switch…good…and we’re going to leave you to get onto that, and we’re going to come back later. Thank you.

c

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Patrick shows me the results of his experiment. First, the baseline condition, in which he asked his subject to maintain a single intention to go left or right.

Patrick Haggard

In green we can see the individual trials…for the trials where the person is going to press with their right hand, when the circle ends, and in red where they’re going to press with their left hand. So in the second condition, we were asking her to switch from a left intention to a right intention or from a right intention to a left intention. So what we’ve shown here is a clear change in the position of the green and red trace on the y-axis, at the point where the circle gave a little flash telling her to switch. What we can see is when she’s—was originally intending to press with her right hand, and was asked to switch, then this trace goes down and we can see it crosses over the trace that corresponds to intending to press with the left hand, and switching to the right. We’re trying to work out not only when intentions develop, but how they evolve over time.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah, right.

Patrick Haggard

And in particularly how rapidly they can be switched. Because it’s very common that you develop an intention, and then you might change your mind. Perhaps you change your mind at the last moment, and actually perhaps that’s really useful. So it might well be that one feels like punching somebody in the face. That’s not very good. But what’s really bad is if you actually do it. So the ability to change an intention or switch an intention or suspend it is probably extremely important in terms of self-control. And in the long run I think there’s a very strong relation between the neuroscience of free will and the way we control our behavior as social animals.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Patrick raises a real-world issue – the social impact of how we characterize decision making. Our justice system of crime and punishment is based on how we make decisions. If we are to be held responsible for an action, shouldn’t it have been chosen freely? So is free will necessary for moral responsibility? This is another ‘Big Question’ that the free will Project explores. I begin with Al Mele.

Al Mele

The dominant view in philosophy is that free will is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. So that a person who has no free will is not morally responsible for anything. There are ways to try to separate the two, pull them apart. You can think about them as different views about places to put the bars. On one view of free will all you need to have it, is to be sane, rational, no gun to your head, have good information and make decisions on the basis of the good information you have. So that, that’s a relatively low bar for free will. And you might think well that’s a good bar for moral responsibility too. But then you might think oh yeah but those conditions I gave you and suggested that they were sufficient for free will are consistent with determinism and you might think free will requires that determinism be false. So then you might raise the bar for free will up to there. But you might think ah but the bar for moral responsibility doesn’t have to be raised up to there, that can stay down here. ..Then you have a view according to which moral responsibility doesn’t require free will. Another school of thought is, no, free will really is required for moral responsibility and if you think the bar for moral responsibility should be where we set it you know relatively low that’s where you need to bring the bar for free will. So you know it’s really a subtle and really interesting set of issues.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

To Al, free will and Moral Responsibility can be teased part, making the problem more complex. But free will and moral responsibility do not exist in Isolation. Social and cultural factors are involved. I turn to Roy Baumeister, a leading Social Psychologist at Florida State, who ties the evolution of free will to the need for moral responsibility. Reversing the traditional cause and effect.

Roy Baumeister

The idea of free will is that the person could act differently. A moral judgment is essentially a judgment about should that person have acted differently. The same with a legal judgment, that should the person have done something else rather than rob the liquor store. So the judgment that the person should act differently is based on the assumption that the person could act differently. So to my way of thinking, at least in this very simple sense of free will, that is essential to moral responsibility. Now the argument goes the other way too; why did we evolve free will? Why did we develop that capacity? The ability to act morally is one of the crucial things that makes us human, that enables us to function well. One of the most basic norms is reciprocity. All other cultures do, if you do something to me, I should do it back to you. That’s a kind of moral idea. But to control our behavior by it and actually pay someone back for it, for having- for something they’ve done for us, that requires a sense of moral responsibility, requires that higher mentality. So developing this better sense of moral responsibility was crucial for our developing of culture. And goes with this new way of controlling our behaviors, that you know I think goes by the name free will. Some people object to the term free will and you know then it goes by what is mistaken for free will.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

If indeed free will and moral responsibility developed through evolution science should tell us more about them. I ask Adina Roskies, a neuroscientist and a philosopher, who studies how brain imaging impacts philosophical questions.

Adina Roskies

The first big breakthrough in a sense was putting people in the scanner and having them make moral judgments and looking at this really complicated activity and being able to see what parts of the brain are active when people make certain kinds of moral judgments. For one thing we can see that when people make judgments that doing harm is bad for instance that there are parts of the brain that are usually involved in emotional reactions that are active. And it suggests that moral thinking at least as normal people do it is not a purely rational process.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Oh ok if you’ve now shown that emotions which we don’t have conscious control over can affect decision making, does that degrade the level of free will in moral decisions.

Adina Roskies

There is no reason to think that we have to have control over every aspect of our decision making in order to freely choose and we know we don’t have control over all kinds of things. We don’t have control over our genetics. We don’t have control over our upbringing. We don’t have a lot of control over our environment and so the fact that there are parts of our brain that we don’t have control over also doesn’t seem to make it impossible to have free will. So I think there is a lot about free will that has to do with these higher level executive processes and our ability to control our own reactions and ultimately what we’re interested in is what are our actions, not what are our judgments or our thoughts.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Do you ever envision a time where brain scans can be used in some legal forensic approach to, to whether a person was fully responsible for their actions in a free will sense?

Adina Roskies

My prediction is it’s not that far off. But no matter what the images say you still have to make some kind of normative decision that isn’t going to come out of the images alone about what’s our standard for responsible behavior when is somebody so impaired that they can’t be held responsible. So, so that decision doesn’t go away just because we have more fine grain ways of looking at the brain.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Thalia Wheatley also studies what happens in the brain when we make moral decisions. For her, the key lies in distinguishing diverse meanings of the word “morality.”

Thalia Wheatley

I think we first have to define our terms because free will can mean lots of different things but morality also if we’re just using one word there but it’s not clear that it’s one unified thing. For example you can think that it would be immoral to eat your dog for example or you would think it’s immoral to cheat on your taxes. And it’s not clear that those are really the same kind of judgment you make.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

How can you determine is it in fact one sense of morality that’s just expressed in two ways or two radically different kinds of things that we are constructing.

Thalia Wheatley

Well one experiment we have done to help answer that question is to write scenarios that are either disgusting or harmful or dishonest. So we’ve got disgusting scenarios but they’re not harmful, they’re not dishonest. And you’ve got harmful ones that are not disgusting or dishonest and dishonest ones that are not harmful or disgusting. So you could cleanly separate these types of moral judgments.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Can you give me some examples without being too offensive to me?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

It is disgusting.

Thalia Wheatley

It is disgusting. But it’s not harmful and it’s not dishonest. Right it’s just purely dis, very disgusting. Then there’s the case of harm so for example two people are walking upstairs and one says something to make fun of the other person. And the other person hits them back really hard, and they tumble back down the stairs. It’s harmful but it’s not dishonest or disgusting. And then there’s cases where there is dishonesty. For example the bank makes an error and puts a little more money in your checking account than what you really should get from your salary. You don’t tell the bank. That’s dishonest. It’s not disgusting, it’s not harmful. So you’ve got these cleanly separated. And then we see what happens in the brain when you are processing these kinds of transgressions.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And what do you find?

Thalia Wheatley

Well we find that very different systems are used for each of these different kinds of transgressions. So there doesn’t seem to be a moral center, a moral module in the brain in any kind of monolithic sense. There seems to recruit different kinds of reasoning areas to understand these different things. And we can’t really answer the question of what the relationship is between free will and morality until we really understand what we’re dealing with morality. What does morality mean? And because I don’t’ really believe in a conscious free will it makes questions of moral responsibility a bit iffy for me to, to say.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

So if morality is a composite of diverse meanings as is free will. Then figuring out how free will affects moral responsibility gets tougher still… And if free will itself is an illusion, as Thalia suggests, how then moral responsibility? For Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, the term “responsibility” is equally crucial. What do we mean when we say someone is responsible? How do we decide? What are the theories?

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

To say that someone’s responsible is to say that they are the kind of creature who is appropriately subject to some kind of negative sanction or punishment. Then there’re gonna be a lot of different theories about when people are responsible in that sense. There are mesh theories where the question is whether your desires fit together in the right way. So an addict who can’t control whether or not they take drugs, well they’re still gonna be responsible if they’re happy being an addict. But they’re not gonna be responsible if they wish they could quit, and they’ve tried and they failed. The main competing theory in philosophy these days, is the reasoned responsiveness theory, that you’re responsible when you’re able to respond to reasons. First you can detect when you have a reason to do something or not to do it, and then you act accordingly. If you have a reason to do it, you do it, if you have a reason not to do it, you don’t do it. But I actually hold a theory that I think in a way captures both of the truths behind those approaches. It’s called the deep self theory. And the idea is that you’re responsible for actions when those actions issue from you. One might say that the fact that your desires mesh in the right way shows that it’s part of your deep self. You might say that the fact that you’re responding to the relevant reasons shows that it’s part of your deep self. There was an individual who lived in Virginia in the year 2000. And he was perfectly normal, and started to collect pornography all of a sudden and by the summer he was collecting child pornography. And in September of that year he molested his step-daughter. They convicted him of child molestation. And by October, he was losing coordination. And he was soliciting staff in the sex treatment program that he had been committed to. All of a sudden they have to kick him out of this program, send him to jail. Right before he’s sentenced, they do an MRI and sure enough he’s got a big right orbital frontal tumor. Which they take out, and when they take it out, he’s fine. No more desire to have sex with kids. But then ten months later, tumor grows back, now he’s got that desire back again. They take it out again, then it’s gone again. It looks, for all the evidence that we’ve got, like the tumor is causing this behavior, not him. And what’s making him do these things is something outside himself. And that’s I think the basic intuition behind saying he’s not really morally responsible. So the burden is gonna be, where do you draw the line between the tumor case and the normal person, to be able to say these people are responsible and those people are not responsible. And my answer to that question is there are gonna be degrees of responsibility. Part of the problem is that the law often wants to say, this person’s guilty, we’re gonna send them to prison; or they’re not guilty and we’re gonna let ’em out. That forces a dichotomy in a situation that really is essentially a continuum.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Responsibility. Judgment. Guilt. Punishment – the chain of causation begins with responsibility, which depends on our beliefs about free will. So could our beliefs about free will determine how we exercise it? This is a question for social psychologists — several are participating in The Big Questions in free will project. I ask Al Mele to describe their work and its relevance.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Al it’s been a year since the projects and the big questions of free will project have been going on and many of the science projects are in the social psychology of free will. What is that, what kind of progress have we seen. Are you satisfied?

Al Mele

Well I’m really happy with the results so far. So they’re studying a variety of things in social psychology of free will. So the effects of people’s beliefs about free will on their behavior is one. Another one is how people think about free will. What they take it to be. One thing they test is the effect of lowered confidence that you have free will on your behavior. And one way to induce lower confidence is you make these fake newspaper stories where you have fake scientists saying there’s no free will, and they had people read that, and then they had a task in which they could cheat…And those people, the people who read the no free will article, cheated significantly more often than the control group who grabbed just a neutral thing. Why do people behave worse when they read that there’s no free will? When their confidence goes down? Well it could be simple, like they’re thinking, hey, I don’t have free will, you can’t blame me I might as well go ahead and cheat and steal and behave aggressively. Another possible explanation, is that people’s motivation to… just to do things in general sort of goes down. So if they have these urges, they don’t have much motivation to combat them. You know it has sort of a depressing effect, let’s say, the news that you have no free will. Roy Baumeister’s doing some really interesting work on self-control which is related to free will. If you have no self-control at all, then you’re just gonna act on your strongest urge and you don’t seem free, you seem more at the mercy of your urges.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Self control seems a novel approach to free will. Can our capacity for self-control affect the degree of our free will? I should learn more by asking about Roy’s work.

Roy Baumeister

My goal as a research psychologist is to figure out what happens inside the mind and so forth that produces the behavior. I got into studying free will by virtue of my research on self-control. Self-control is difficult so it depletes some energy and after that you’re not as good at self-control until you, you replenish. When we found that the same energy is also used for decision-making and initiative, and I said ok well this is bigger than self-control. That’s when we started talking about free will.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Roy is conducting two kinds of experiments on free will. The first examines beliefs about free will, and how they can change.

Roy Baumeister

Robert this is Michael Ent, he’s a PhD student in our laboratory. This was all his idea, he came up with the idea that we could manipulate people’s beliefs about free will by manipulating their body’s states.

Michael Ent

Ok, so there’s two conditions. Participants in one condition, they demonstrate a voluntary response. So they bounce a ball in one hand and catch it in the other.

Roy Baumeister

They get the feeling of deliberately, consciously controlling their bodies and that should increase their belief in free will, because it calls attention to how they’re mentally controlling their actions.

Michael Ent

And then participants in the other condition, they have their involuntary reflexes triggered. So I blow a puff of air into their eyes and then I shine a light to stimulate their pupillary reflexes.

Roy Baumeister

The important idea here is that beliefs about free will are flexible or malleable subject to cues even coming inside ourselves, and perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that philosophers have been debating this for centuries and haven’t reached a decision yet, because even each person’s own beliefs might change…So what we might think of as a medical or physical opinion in this very abstract way is in fact something that’s influenced by cues coming from inside our bodies and can go up or down.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Next, Roy investigates the individual psychology of free will, asking whether our capacity to exercise free will can change. In Roy’s theory, making free-will decisions takes energy, and since bodily energy is finite, the more decisions we make, the less free will we have. Roy and his assistant show me the experiment.

Andy (interview)

First we have people make a variety of decisions.

Andy (during experiment)

This first task is a choice task, so there’s a variety of products on the screen, and I’ll ask you to make choices between the two products one on each side.

Andy (interview)

And then we bring them over to the ice bath and we put their hand in the ice water, and see how long they can take it. Both how long they wait until they can actually feel pain, and then also how long they can last total.

Andy (during experiment)

When you feel pain at first, say “now,” and when you can’t bear the pain any longer, remove your hand and say stop.

Subject

Now.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

To determine how prior choices affect subjects’ willpower, Roy repeats this experiment, but with one crucial difference. Subjects view the same products, but now do not choose between them. This is the control.

Andy

People in the control condition tend to last about a minute, on average. And after making choices, they only last about 45 seconds.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

That’s a big difference when you think about it. So will power is like a kind of muscle, exhausted by repetition. The more we use it, the harder to continue to use it. This means that free will has biological constraints. Is this a new kind of free will?

Roy Baumeister

So philosophers have debating for centuries, yes or no, do people have free will or not? We should stop trying to give a yes or no answer to what people say about free will and instead say how hard is it or how much does it take for this person to exert free action, what are the things that will make free action easier, what are the things that will impede free action.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

For Roy, psychology shows the working complexity of free will. How we view it, how we exercise it and what our capacity is for free action. How do these complexities come about? How do they develop over time? How does free will develop in childhood? I ask developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, who studies free will in children.

Alison Gopnik

There are many, many, many different elements to our concept about something as complex as free will. And as an adult, all of them are sort of lumped together. But if you’re a developmentalist, what you realize is that when you look at children, some pieces of an idea like free will seem to be in place really early. And other pieces only develop much later, and only develop as a result of particular kinds of experiences or influences. What we’ve discovered is that some concepts of free will, the basic concept of choice, the basic concept of agency, rather surprisingly seem to be there even in very very young children. Even in infants. The concept that you can act freely if you’re not externally constrained seems to be there in a very full form by the time children are about four. But other ideas, like the idea that you can act against your own desires, don’t seem to be in place until later. So if you have- ask a four-year-old, here’s a cookie, this cookie is delicious and you really want the cookie; can you simply decide not to take the cookie? Four-year-olds say no. They understand the words. They understand about being able to do otherwise in other contexts. But they think that if you actually really have the desire, there’s no way that you can overcome that desire. The interesting thing is that if you ask a six-year-old the same question, the six-year-old acts like a philosopher. The six-year-olds not only say yes, you can overcome your desire, but they say, the reason why you can do that is because you’re autonomous. You’re… they have these wonderful phrases: You’re the boss of yourself. Nobody can tell you what to do. Your brain lets you do what you want to. But if you ask about moral questions, could you do something that would make somebody else sad, then it’s not until about eight or nine years old that children say, well, it would be wrong to do it, but you could actually act otherwise than by a moral constraint. And it’s interesting because there are at least some notions for example that think that moral responsibility depends on our concept of free will. And in some ways the developmental research suggests the opposite. It suggests that we have a notion of moral responsibility in place, and there’s lots of evidence that even, again even infants have some basic moral notions and ideas. And the link between that and free will is actually something that’s only developing much later.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Moral responsibility before free will? Does the developmental sequence in children affect the philosophical essence of free will? It certainly sets apart facets of free will. There is another discipline that also expands our appreciation of free will. The third wing the Big Questions in Free Will Project – Theology. Even imagining the existence of a supreme being – a greatest possible being – subjects free will to extreme conditions, which may reveal free will’s inner workings. One does not have to believe in God to appreciate how philosophers of religion seek to solve the puzzles of God and free will. Al Mele introduces their thinking.

Al Mele

The theological part of the grant deals mainly with questions about divine freedom but also with questions about the bearing of god, if god exists or is possible, and human freedom. Questions about divine freedom are interesting. For example if god is perfect, can he do anything other than what’s best. But if he can’t do anything other than what’s best than how can he be free. Questions about God’s connection to human beings are interesting, for example: If God exists and is omniscient and knows in advance everything that we’ll ever do, how could we possibly do it freely. So these are really old chestnut questions.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

To find out more about the project’s theology wing, I go to the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, where philosophers of religion gather for the ‘Theology of Free Will’ workshop. We start with God and Human Freedom. If God knows the future, if God literally knows today what I am going to do tomorrow then how are my actions not constrained? I ask Philosopher Peter van Inwagen to explain the problem.

Peter van Inwagen

So God knows everything that I’m going to do in the future, some say. So in the year 1900 for example, he knew that I’d be sitting here at this table talking to you. Well, was I able to decline your kind invitation to come and talk? Well, suppose I had. If God in 1900 knew that I was going to be here talking to you, now he believed it. That was a state that he was in. Then I can’t go into a future in which he wasn’t in that state because that would be changing the past. It’s over and done with. God did believe that or he didn’t. But then I must go into a future in which God was wrong back then, but that’s not – it’s not possible for God to be wrong. Any being that could be wrong wouldn’t be God. So then those are the only possibilities so it does look like I am unable to do anything else.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Peter‘s Point is that because God can never be wrong and because God’s knowledge now includes propositions about events in the future, then those future events cannot change. How then free will? Brian Leftow, a Philosopher of Religion at Oxford attending the workshop, claims he knows how.

Brian Leftow

God stands outside of time. And from that standpoint he can simply see the things that to us are in the future. So just as it doesn’t infringe on my freedom for you to be watching me speak, it doesn’t infringe on my freedom for God to have seen me speak from all eternity.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And what do you mean by ‘God sees it’?

Brian Leftow

When I see you, what’s happening is that I have knowledge which is caused by your impact on me. You know light reflects off you, goes in the eyes, zips around the brain and eventually I know it. For God we get rid of most of the details of that process. We simply say there’s me here, and somehow I caused God to have a cognitive state. It’s like observation in that his cognitive state is caused by what I’m doing.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And it’s perfect.

Brian Leftow

Right, right.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

It cannot be otherwise.

Brian Leftow

Right.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And yet even though it cannot be otherwise, you still have a freedom that we call libertarian means, which means technically that you could do otherwise.

Brian Leftow

To say that I have freedom is to say well I’m doing this one thing and God sees that. I could have done something else. And had I been doing that other thing, God would have from all eternity seen that, perfectly and every bit of it.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And that’s a coherent concept.

Brian Leftow

I hope so.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Does Brian’s ‘Timeless God’ resolve the problem of divine foreknowledge and human free will? Peter van Inwagen thinks not – and he tells me why.

Peter van Inwagen

As Boethius and Augustine and Aquinas have taught us, God is outside time. He sees the whole past, present and future once but he doesn’t even see a moving line of the present in there, he just sees the whole thing at once. Maybe so. As Aquinas says, when the Bible says that God did something at some particular time, that meant that was when the effect in the temporal world of one of his actions was. Well one of the effects in the temporal world is to reveal, to say a prophet, what the future is going to be. Suppose he revealed to a prophet in the year 1900 that I was going to be speaking to you here today, an odd thing but I- he’s God, he can do as he likes. And then what would we say about my ability to decline your invitation and not be here? Well, I can’t change the fact that the prophet said that in 1900. I can’t change the fact that it was divinely revealed to the prophet. I can’t make a divine revelation to a prophet to have been false. All those things are impossible. So I think there is a genuine problem.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

To Peter, even a timeless God cannot escape the paradox of divine foreknowledge vs. free will. No matter how God “sees us,” if God knows what we’re going to do, we cannot do otherwise. Philosopher of Religion Hugh McCann has a radical solution. He asserts God’s extreme sovereignty over everything and proposes a way to reconcile that with human freedom.

Hugh McCann

When God creates us or creates the universe, two things are true. First of all God is not a temporal being so he creates everything at once. And the other thing is that God doesn’t choose among options. It’s not as if that there are two versions of Bob Kuhn and Hugh McCann, one of pair of who have this conversation and the other pair don’t, and then God selects them. That’s not what happens. What happens is just us. And what God does first is he creates us. So he doesn’t select a thing. The only selecting is done by you and me in framing questions and giving answers. But there’s no reason why that can’t be free.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And God knows that only because God is not in time? Or because God actually created it in the first place?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And God knows that only because God is not in time? Or because God actually created it in the first place?

Hugh McCann

That’s what it really is. God is not in time, true, but he knows it by creating it. And the whole process is what he creates, not just bits and pieces of it. He doesn’t jump in and produce a result from time to time; the whole thing is the result. Only an inferior God would have to plan what universe he’s gonna create and what’s he going to do?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Hugh’s free will seems a kind of “Theological Compatibilism”. Even though God creates everything and causes everything because there are no possibilities other than what is nothing is done to you to ‘make’ you do anything. But Theological Compatibilism has its problems – what does Brian Leftow think?

Brian Leftow

Even if compatibilism works without God, it might not work with God. So, if you’re gonna be a theological compatibilist, you’re gonna say God has determined everything we do and yet we’re in some sense free as we do it. Well that means God determines all the evil we do, and that means that God is the cause of all human evil, all human suffering and so on. Well, God couldn’t be the cause of all that if he’s perfectly good. It’s because there’s a problem about the permission of human evil that I want to hang onto human free will. Because I want to say that’s our doing, not God’s.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

That’s your escape clause. Brian differentiates God “causing” from God “permitting”. This means that God can enable human free will in our present while still maintaining providential control of our future and be absolved from the Problem of Evil! Giving God full sovereignty and humans full freedom may be theologically desirable but it is logically challenging. Philosopher of Religion Matthews Grant, the organizer of the theology of free will workshop, offers a different kind of argument.

Matthews Grant

God is the creator, the cause, the source of everything that exists apart from himself. So any entity other than God, God would be the cause of. So what does that mean for creaturely actions? I think a lot of people think if you hold that strong conception where our very actions are caused by God, then you get a kind of theological determinism. Which would be incompatible with libertarian free will.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And theological determinism means that- not just that God knows what you’re going to do, but God is literally causing what you’re going to do in order to fulfill his plan or whatever.

Matthews Grant

Yeah. And I want to hold that God is causing our action, but not determining it. The key is having the right account of divine agency. If God decrees that I act such and such a way, it’s not possible that I not act in such and such a way. Rather what it is for God to cause my act or to cause any other creature, is simply for my act to be causally dependent directly, immediately, on God.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

But if God ‘causing’ acts does not ‘determine’ acts, what happens to God’s omniscience? If God, to be God, must ‘know all’, We dare not degrade God’s foreknowledge. I put the question of God’s omniscience to Peter van Inwagen.

Peter van Inwagen

There are things that it’s not possible for any being to know, and therefore there are things that the greatest possible being couldn’t know. Nobody except Descartes thinks that it tells against God’s omnipotence that he’s not able to draw a round square. Let’s just define omniscience as knowing whatever an omnipotent being would be able to know.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

What you’re doing with that analysis is degrading God’s providence.

Peter van Inwagen

I don’t see how it undermines his providential care for us. I think the more serious charge is that I degrade the idea of God as a perfect being. An unlimited being, which of course implies no limitations of knowledge. But I don’t think that it undercuts his omniscience to say that he doesn’t foreknow the free actions of future beings because I don’t think that’s a possible kind of knowledge.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

To Peter, God can be perfect and still not know human future actions.
Because the future does not exist there are no facts about the future to now know – even for a Perfect Being. What makes God a “Perfect Being”? God is supposed to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good. And also all-free. What does it mean for God to be ‘all-free’? Is God able to do anything? Is God free to sin? Lie? Marry? Be brave? Improve? Must God always do the best? The test is whether God has real choices or is tightly bound by God’s own nature. I ask Brian Leftow what God’s freedom might possibly mean.

Brian Leftow

We ordinarily understand freedom as having options, having choices, being able to do one thing or another. And there have been arguments that God really doesn’t have options or choices. His goodness kind of limits, and his rationality kind of limits what his options would be. For example, suppose that there really is a best thing God can bring about. Well, if you’re perfectly good, truly you want the best, and if you’ve got perfect rationality you see what the best is, you understand that it’s the best, and if you’ve got the power to do it then well then you just do the best. And so bang, if you’re God, you’re stuck with the best so to speak. You’re kind of a slave to it.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah those sound like significant problems. So how do you begin to address them?

Brian Leftow

Okay. One broad picture of God sort of sees him as this perfectly rational cosmic computer of objective value. And it’s an uncomfortable sort of picture because well, for one thing it makes us, through the winners of a lucky divine lottery; For every creature there could be a slightly better one, and if there’s no best, God would have no best guided reason to pick one creature rather than the other. So what would he do? Well on this picture he just kind of draws a card, and what do you know, we came out. So that’s not a picture of God that I find congenial. A second picture of God would say well, when there’s no best, and maybe even when there is a best, he’s got personal preferences and those guide him. He’s got likes, dislikes, loves. More of a personality, passions. And those can also guide his choices.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

So are you saying that God’s love can enhance God’s freedom by challenging or contradicting God’s rationality?

Brian Leftow

It does enhance his freedom. If God can have loves, then he can sort of speak be free from the domination of the best. Suppose just for the sake of argument that there was a best creature God could possibly make, a super archangel. If God was bound to the best, he’d have to make that sort of thing. But suppose also that’s not what he loves. What he loves is things like you and me. If he can follow his loves he can make us instead. Or us in addition. Whereas if he was just bound to the best, that would be all he had reason for doing.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Brian poses the problem of God’s freedom. If God is perfectly rational and perfectly good, God would seem without option or choice. God must always do ‘the best’. Brian rejects this kind of robotic god. He favors a God who has preferences, desires, loves. This kind of God is not “bound to the best” and thus has free will. But how then is God a ‘Perfect Being’? Which makes for a ‘More Perfect God’? A God who can choose? Or a God who can ‘only’ remain perfect? Dean Zimmerman, a Philosopher of Religion at Rutgers, takes the traditional view that God can be both perfect and free.

Dean Zimmerman

I’d like to think that we can retain the traditional conception of God as unable to do anything wrong. Impeccable. And nevertheless free in a morally significant sense. The way I would hope to that is to ask the question what is it about human free will that’s significant? If we’re determined to do what we do by things outside of us, then we’re not the source of the kind of character that we develop. Then we wouldn’t be free. In God’s case, that’s not a danger. God has nothing outside of God that’s constraining God. God has always existed. Didn’t pop into existence with a built-in nature that wasn’t God’s own doing so to speak. So the things that- about us that require- that there be indeterminism in our lifetime, in order for us to be the partial author of what kind of person we turn out to be, those threats to our autonomy, they’re not there for God.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

To Dean, even though God’s perfection limits God’s options, because all of God’s actions are generated from within God – God has Ultimate Freedom. I return to Brian Leftow pressing him whether God is able to do other than which God does.

Brian Leftow

The big question about God’s freedom is how much his goodness limits his range of choices. Does his goodness so constrain his choices that he can’t choose to do an overall evil act? I’m inclined to say that yes it does constrain him that way.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

So that makes God less free in some sense than you and I?

Brian Leftow

In one respect, he’s got fewer options. I accept that. When thinking about God as perfect being, you’ve got a place where goodness and freedom have to be balanced in a certain way. You can emphasize the freedom, but that would take away from the perfection of his goodness, because it would leave a little possibility of doing evil. Or you can emphasize the goodness. But if you push that far enough, you’re taking away from the perfection of his freedom. You’ve gotta choose one or the other. I think the balance of the arguments is for choosing perfect goodness. For God the fundamental obligation is to be what he is.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Still, to Peter van Inwagen, we’re left with the mystery of free will. For God, as for us.

Peter van Inwagen

We don’t understand free will very well, in my view. But if we don’t understand it in the case of persons, I don’t think that we’re going to understand it well enough in the case of God to say there’s a problem here about why God would choose one thing rather than the other when there wasn’t some good reason to choose this one. If state of affairs A is better than state of affairs B, maybe God is constrained by his nature to choose A if he chooses either. But if they’re of equal value, what God chooses to do then can’t be simply a product of his nature. I think whether there’s a created world at all, it does depends on God’s free choice.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Consider God as the ultimate ‘stress test’ for free will. Like physics can be advanced by the extreme conditions of a black hole. So free will can be advanced by the extreme conditions of a supreme being. By subjecting the tenets of free will to the traits of God, we enrich understanding of free will. Thus the Theology Wing of the project expands our appreciation of what it means for God and for us to be free. The end of the Big Questions in Free Will Project approaches. It has been four years of study, research, experimentation, contemplation. Four years of thinking afresh about one of humankind’s most profound questions. What has been learned? What are the advances? What are the outcomes? What comes next? At the final Conference at Florida State, participants offer their impressions.

Roy Baumeister

When philosophers talk about free will, they will talk about exerting self-control. They’ll talk about making rational wise decisions that are good in the long run. But they have no way of showing that those are really linked in some fundamental way. But our research shows that yes those draw on the same research. They affect each other. They even have common underlying physiological basis in body & brain processes. So we can say yes there is some meaningful and causal link between self-control and decision-making. So it is appropriate to put those together under the broader term to be called free will. In that way I think we can advance the debate.

Patrick Haggard

I think the work that we’ve been doing on this project suggests that if you do believe in free will it may not be as strong as you think it is. And I find that quite surprising because in our everyday lives we’re very attached to our idea of free will. But it turns out that in terms of the brain’s representations of the different actions that I do make or don’t make, the code is actually surprisingly weak. So we think we have a strong and determining will but I think that our brain is always a little bit uncertain when it has to make up its own mind as it were.

Peter Tse

So one thing I’ve learned from uh talking to philosophers and my colleagues in neuroscience about free will is that people mean different things by free will. And so it leads to a quagmire of, um confusion and uh, sort of quarrelsomeness, because people mean different things. To focus on um, the final act as the key place where free will is active I think is a mistake. That’s sort of the end product of a whole chain of actions that precede it. So my hope is that um…people will stop emphasizing so much you know this very proximal late stage of the game where people happen to move a finger which might anyway just be an automatized act. So basically putting the Libet paradigm behind me, and I hope that the field will put it behind it, and focus on free will uh where the action is. Which I believe is the imagination.

Adina Roskies

The project has been great actually. It’s uh, been really eye-opening. These meetings bring together people with such different backgrounds and views and expertise that it’s uh just so educational to listen to everybody else’s talks.

Patrick Haggard

I was really pleased that there was actually a project on free will because I think it marked a sort of coming of age of interest in the field to have a project which is academically well founded, which has got some excellent researchers involved in it, and which is using a range of interdisciplinary measures—some scientific, some more philosophical—to approach what must be one of the really crucial questions about being human.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

I don’t think our group reached a consensus, which you know shouldn’t be surprising. These issues have been around for thousands of years and people haven’t reached a consensus. I think one big lesson of this project is that any type of serious cooperation between scientists and philosophers needs to go on for years. Scientists are not going to listen to an argument by a philosopher and go oh, you got it. And philosophers are not gonna go, ah, Libet, I never thought of that, I’m gonna totally change my views. It’s not gonna happen. They have to spend a lot of time working with each other in detail. And one of the great things about this project has been you know conference at the start, conference in the middle, conference at the end, lots of work in between. It’s only that type of sustained activity that’s going to change the isolation of these fields. So I have great hope that this type of project will bring science and philosophy a lot closer together, but not if we simply get together for a weekend. That’s not gonna do it. And that’s what I love about this kind of project, is the fact that it goes on and on and on, and I’m very sorry to see it end.

Al Mele

What I’m happiest about is that I was able to help bring together a lot of really smart people who are very productive from a lot of different disciplines and get them to work together. The scientists in the project have gained new respect for philosophers; the philosophers have gained new respect for scientists. They’re designing experiments together. Some of the scientific work is theoretically more sophisticated than it had been in my opinion. So this is just gonna get amplified into the future. They’ll, they’ll train new people to do this kind of thing. They’ll keep working with each other, in this sort of interdisciplinary um approach to philosophical issues will uh, will improve and increase. So I’m very happy about that.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

What does it mean for free will to be a big question? Free will probes human mind and nature, seeking insight and essence. If there’d ever be meaning and purpose – free will would be one window through which we might see it. The big questions in free will project is complete. By bringing together diverse disciplines – philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, theology – the project enriches appreciation of primary questions, and suggests avenues for further research. Case and point, Al Mele’s New Project – also funded by The John Templeton Foundation – The Philosophy and Science of Self-Control.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (VO)

Scientists and philosophers discover that they can work together – designing experiments, thinking through problems. Conundrums persist and disagreements remain – artificial harmony is no panacea. Free will has displayed its breathtaking scope. From the electrical activity of a single brain. To the ineffable nature of a Supreme Being. Free will is more complex than many had imagined. And the claims of some scientists that free will is an illusion have been tempered. There is a ‘truth’ of free will – we are now closer to it.