Free Will

7. Can We Block the Scientific Argument Against Free Will?

Can We BloCk the sCientiFiC arguMent against Free Will? It’s finally time to assess the scientific argument against free will and to decide whether it gives us a good reason to deny the existence of free will. In a nutshell, the scientific argument proceeds as follows: The scientific argument against free will There is strong scientific evidence (from psychology and neuroscience) that supports the claim that our socalled conscious decisions are completely caused by events that occur before we choose, and which are completely out of our control, and indeed, which we’re completely unaware of. There are actually a few arguments here—one based on findings from psychology, and a couple of others based on findings from neuroscience. The argument from psychology is the least troubling, so let’s start with that one. 7 90 Chapter 7 The Argument from Psychology Let’s begin by recalling how the argument from psychology goes. The argument is based on the fact that many of our actions and decisions are caused by things that we’re completely unaware of—things like subliminal messages. Moreover, when this happens, people are often completely mistaken about why they did whatever it was that they did. They construct elaborate theories about the reasons for their actions; they believe that these theories are true, but from the outside, we can see that they aren’t true at all. In short, the main idea behind the argument from psychology is that our actions are often caused by unconscious factors that are completely out of our control. Given the discussion in chapter 5 about what free will is, we are now much better situated to see what might be wrong with this argument. The first point to make here is thatmostofthestudiesthatpsychologistshaveperformed on this topic have been centrally concerned with our behavior —in other words, with things that we do. But as we saw in chapter 5, free will doesn’t really have anything to do with our behavior. It has to do with our conscious decisions. In fact, on the view I’ve been developing, we’re only supposed to exercise our free will when we’re making torn decisions —decisions that we make while we’re feeling torn as to which option is best. Now, it turns out that almost none of the psychological studies that we’re talking about here Can We BloCk the sCIentIFIC argument? 91 are concerned with torn decisions, and so you might think that these studies are just irrelevant to the question of free will. But I think this would be too quick. For when we put all of the psychological studies together—when we look at them as a whole—they provide ample evidence for the following conclusion: Our actions—across a whole spectrum of kinds of cases—are often influenced by unconscious factors that are completely out of our control. The evidence for this is so widespread and so overwhelming , that it seems to follow that the phenomenon we’re talking about here—the phenomenon of unconscious causes of our actions—almost certainly extends to our torn decisions. In other words, even if very few of the studies are explicitly concerned with torn decisions, the sum total of the studies suggests that human actions of all different kinds can be caused by unconscious factors that are completely out of our control. And so it stands to reason that torn decisions can be caused by unconscious factors as well. But the psychological studies don’t show—in fact, they don’t even come close to showing—that our torn decisions are always caused by unconscious factors. And this is what they would need to do in order to show that we don’t have free will. Think about it. If you believe in free 92 Chapter 7 will, you don’t have to say all of your torn decisions are the products of your free will. You only have to say that some of them are. Suppose that you make, on average, five torn decisions a day. And now suppose that, on average, two of these decisions are caused by unconscious factors—in other words, by things that you’re completely unaware of and that are completely out of your control. For instance , maybe you decided to order chocolate ice cream because you subconsciously hate your mother (because, unbeknownst to you, when you were a toddler, she used to...