Are we free agents?
We must believe in free will – we have no choice.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
That we are conscious beings who have experiences, that there is “something it is like” to be us, seems undeniable since it is our immediate experience – although, somewhat surprisingly, there are those who would deny this. Christof Koch compares this view with Cotard’s syndrome, a psychiatric condition in which patients deny being alive! [Koch 2019]
It is also undeniable that we have a deeply held intuition of having freedom of choice and the ability to affect the world around us by the choices which we make. Most people take it for granted that we have this freedom, albeit limited by external circumstances and our own abilities.
We make choices all the time, from the trivial “shall I have coffee or tea” to the far reaching “shall I go to University or start an apprenticeship”. We tend to assume that whatever choice we make, we could have chosen differently.
However despite our intuition and despite appearances, this is by no means self evident and many researchers would give good reasons to deny it.
Many people believe that the material world can be described by a deterministic and immutable set of natural laws which have been, or can be, deduced by observation. It is also widely believed that a person is nothing more than the material out of which their bodies, including their brains, are composed.
They would argue that our apparent choices are actually the inevitable result of our past experience, genes, persuasion etc. Although it seems certain that we have a lot less freedom of choice than we think we have, the actual extent of our ability to choose, if any, is disputed.
As with consciousness, this phenomenon of “free will” is something which science is not able to address despite many attempts to make it do so.
There are three main views concerning Free Will or Agency:
- Libertarian freedom
- In this view we are free to choose from options and whatever we choose, we could have chosen something else.
- Hard Determinism
- In this view, our sense of freedom is an illusion. We may think we have chosen freely but, in fact, we couldn’t have done anything different.
- Compatibilism or “Soft Determinism”
- In this view, our sense of freedom is an illusion but we act as if it is not. Although this view is very common, it has many problems associated with it. It seems a contradiction to say that freedom of any meaningful sort can exist in a completely deterministic Universe.
Whereas Libertarian freedom posits that we are actors in the world around us, Determinism, whether “hard” or “soft”, posits that we are merely observers.
This view,“Epiphenomenalism” [Huxley 1874] says that we are like people watching a football match on TV. We are spectators but we are powerless to influence proceedings even though we may believe, or act as if, we can. If we cheer on our favourite team, sometimes that might be followed by their scoring a goal. Although this can give the impression of causation, that impression is false. Epiphenomenalism has severe difficulties but, on the other hand, if consciousness does affect behaviour, as it appears to, nobody knows how.