Free Will

5. What Is Free Will, Anyway?

What is Free Will, anyWay? In the last chapter, we distinguished two kinds of free will—Hume-style free will and not-predetermined free will. It’s pretty obvious that we have Hume-style free will, but this isn’t very interesting. The interesting question is whether we also have not-predetermined free will. This is the kind of free will that we want but might not have; and it’s also the kind of free will that’s come under fire recently from psychology and neuroscience. In chapters 6 and 7, I’m going to discuss the question of whether we have this not-predetermined kind of free will; but before we get into this, we need to get a better understanding of what this kind of free will consists in—or more precisely, what it would consist in, if we had it. That’s what this chapter will be about; I will provide a picture of what not-predetermined free will is, or what it would be. (And, again, I will usually drop the “not-predetermined” qualifier and just call it free will.) 5 56 Chapter 5 Having a better understanding of this kind of free will is going to be crucial in the rest of this book. The scientists who argue against free will are often rather confused about what free will is supposed to be. And so it will be very important for us—when we go to evaluate the anti-free-will arguments—to have a clear, unconfused picture of what free will would consist in, if indeed we had it. Therefore, I’m going to start out here by clearing up four confusions that are often present in discussions of free will. In particular , these confusions are often buried in the discussions of those who argue against free will. Four Confusions The First Confusion: Remnants of Spiritualism The people who reject free will—mostly, psychologists and neuroscientists—almost always endorse the materialistic, scientific view of humans. In other words, they reject the view that we have nonphysical souls. But then when they talk about mental events like conscious decisions, they talk about the neural events that realize these decisions, or the neural correlates of our decisions. This is an utter confusion. If you don’t believe in nonphysical souls, then you have to say that a conscious decision is a neural event. You can’t say that there’s a conscious decision and then say that there’s also a neural correlate What Is Free WIll, anyWay? 57 of the decision, as if the neural event and the conscious decision are two different things. That’s what religious people who believe in nonphysical souls should say. But when materialistic neuroscientists talk this way, they’re just confused. Let me make sure this point is clear. Think about the relationship between Mark Twain and Sam Clemens. Imagine someone saying that Mark Twain is the “literary correlate” of Sam Clemens. If we heard someone say this, we would scratch our heads and respond by saying something like this: What on God’s green Earth are you talking about? Mark Twain is Sam Clemens. When you say that he’s the “literary correlate” of Sam Clemens, it sounds like you think there are two different men that stand in some special relationship to one another. But, of course, there aren’t two different men here. There’s just one. The names “Mark Twain” and “Sam Clemens” are just two different names of the very same man. If you don’t believe in nonphysical souls, then this is exactly what you have to say about your conscious decision to order chocolate ice cream and its so-called “neural correlate .” You have to say that the conscious decision just is the neural event. There aren’t two different things here; there are just two different ways of describing a single event. You 58 Chapter 5 can call it a “neural event” or a “conscious decision,” but when you do this, you’re just giving two different descriptions of the same thing. It’s easy to see that if you endorse the materialistic, scientific view of humans, then you’re forced to accept this view. Think about it. A conscious decision has to be either a physical event or a nonphysical event. But if you endorse the materialistic, scientific view of humans, you obviously can’t say that...