This month, I’ve decided to write about free will. I could have chosen to write about other topics, and if you want to know what these might have been, then you’ll have to wait for future issues of the Catholic Herald. But the claim that I could have chosen from a variety of different topics turns out to be rather controversial.
In 1814, the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace published a philosophical essay on probabilities in which he said that if a great intellect knew at a certain moment in time all the positions of every particle in the universe and all the forces that acted between them, then to such an intellect, nothing about the fut-ure would be uncertain – everything would be completely determined. This great intellect has come to be known as Laplace’s demon. Those who endorse the underlying principle behind Laplace’s demon would say that given the configuration of all the particles and forces in my brain and their interactions with all the other particles in the universe at a particular time, perhaps years in the past, it necessarily follows that I had to write about free will today. My perception that I made a choice in the matter is just an illusion, so they say.
Some scientists have even performed experiments which they claim confirm that free will is an illusion. The most famous of these experiments is by the neuroscientist Benjamin Libbet. In the experiment, test subjects who were wearing an electrode cap were asked to move their hand when they freely chose to do so, and they were asked to report the time at which they had an awareness of wanting to initiate this movement. Libbet discovered that the electrode cap detected brain activity associated with the hand movement about half a second before the hand started to move, whereas the awareness of wanting to move only occurred around a fifth of a second before the hand movement. Libbet therefore concluded that it was the unconscious brain activity detected by the electrodes that initiated the hand movement rather than the conscious willing of the test subject, and he went on to suggest that this was evidence that all human willing was physically determined and hence not free.
There are, however, some fundamental flaws in Libbet’s experiment. Firstly, if the des- ire to move one’s hand really was caused by some deterministic physical process, then we would expect there to be a fixed time duration from the beginning of this physical process to when the subject becomes aware of the desire to move. However, further experiments have shown that this duration can fluctuate for a test subject. Experiments have also shown that the brain activity measured by the electrode cap is not sufficient to guarantee any hand movement – rather like the way a bowler bowling a ball is not sufficient to guarantee a batsman scoring a run.
But the biggest flaw in Libbet’s experiment is that it is only concerned with meaningless hand movements. It has nothing to say about ordinary situations of willing where we recognise and deliberate over various courses of act- ion and come to a decision. In order for us to will something, we need to perceive that there is something good in doing it. We may sometimes be mistaken about the good we perceive, and sometimes we may be more attracted to a lesser good while still aware that there is a more noble course of action. But just because we perceive some goodness in an action, it doesn’t automatically follow that we will do it, for we might at the same time perceive goodness in another possible action which is incompatible with it. Therefore, there needs to be some principle within us that actualises one of these actions rather than the other, and this principle is the will. To my mind, the reality of the will seems far more obvious than the assumptions underlying Libbet’s experiment.
As for Laplace’s demon, in the light of quantum mechanics, many physicists would deny the deterministic assumptions on which Laplace’s thought experiment is based. This is not to say that we should deny all notions of determinism. After all, if we believe in a God who is all powerful and all knowing, then we should believe that everything that happens is ultimately determined by God. But because God freely creates, we have the power to participate in His creative freedom. We have a dominion over our human actions that reflects the dominion that God has over the whole of creation, and the more closely our wills are conformed to God’s Will, the more free we will be.
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