From time to time, I've been interested in the notion of free will and discussions about the phenomenon. The notion that we do or do not have "free will" has extremely committed adherents on both sides of the issue. I personally like to keep an open mind about these things.
What strikes me about this discussion is that, as far as I can tell, it seems to be conducted on purely binary terms: we either do or do not have "free will" (and sorry for the air quotes, but until we can define the idea in terms that can be generally accepted, it will serve as a weasel word). But since the universe stubbornly refuses to be shoved into the little boxes we create for our convenience, I would like to explore the idea that free will exists on a spectrum where beings can have more or less ability to deviate from innate programming, or instinct, or the prodding of the autonomous nervous system -- however you want to characterize it.
I have heard people argue that the Newtonian conception of the universe is actually responsible, and my sitting here at this precise instant in the Blend Coffee Bar with my ThinkPad laptop and my empty latte mug sitting 12.5 centimeters to my right, and my typing these words, bad keystrokes and all, was foreordained from the beginning of time and completely predictable based on the initial configuration of the universe. I have a hard time believing this, or rather, there is a heck of a burden of proof that would need to be met before I could be convinced of it. I have yet to see any evidence at all that the behavior of emergent systems simply can be derived solely from the properties of their underlying constituents.
But as I said, my purpose here is not to take sides in a very old philosophical tug of war. Rather, I would like to go outside the existing framework altogether and talk about sentience. I think it is uncontroversial to say that there exists a scale on which it is possible to compare the relative sentience of beings or entities. Rocks and banana cream pies, for example do not seem to exhibit qualities like self awareness or self determination. Trees and fungi are higher up on the sentience ladder, responding as they do to various stimuli in surprisingly sophisticated ways. Bacteria and reptiles seem to fall higher up the ladder than plants (though I could be wrong). Mammals seem much more self-aware than (individual) insects, though colonies of certain insects can display what seem to be astonishing feats of cognition. Finally, 'higher' mammals like dogs and apes can show many behaviors that we can relate deeply to - the expression of easily recognizable emotions, the ability to learn and solve problems, and the ability to perceive and respond to the internal states of other individuals.
There is a long and extensive history of comparing animals to humans in a way that places all humans in one bucket and all animals in another, and separating them in a way that focuses entirely on our differentness and neglecting the aspects of our sameness, which are extremely numerous. Normally, I like to focus on the sameness aspects, but in this case I want to point to the differentness as important to my topic. What is it about humanness that has made it possible for us to essentially supersede the slow processes of evolution and take charge of our destiny in a way that no other species has ever done? This question talks directly to the notion of free will. How is it that we alone could decide to build this, invent that, abandon old ways of being and adopt new ones? Is our current conception of "free will" actually a barrier to understanding important truths about what both links us to and differentiates us from other mammals?
One of the arguments that some scientists use as evidence that we do not have "free will" is that our decisions can be detected from brain patterns before we are aware of them. This is essentially an argument around what it means to be conscious. But let us examine carefully the language that is used. What does it mean to "become aware" of something? Who or what is it that is becoming aware? We're so afraid of the whole "ghost in the machine" thing that I think we tend to shy away from discussions of multiple intelligences inhabiting our brains. I am not referring to schizophrenia. The interesting data in this space comes to us from so-called "split brain" patients who have undergone a severance of the corpus collosum (either surgically or pathologically) making the right and left hemispheres of the brain unable to communicate with each other through internal pathways. Very interesting tests on these individuals make it clear that what we think of as "I" is likely a cognitive construct called by some the "theater of consciousness."
Like in any play, it is easy to forget that what is going on "on stage" is the not only thing that is going on. There's always a lot happening "off stage" that's making the illusion possible. Split brain studies make it obvious that there are intelligences working "off stage" about which we are still extremely ignorant. Given this perspective, it seems crystal clear to me that the fact of detectable synaptic activity preceding the conscious awareness of the results of that activity does not necessarily speak to our being hapless puppets of Newtonian physics.
So what about the idea of a spectrum of behaviors around our choices? Why can and should we be held responsible for our bad choices in a way that animals cannot really? Surely Dan Dennett's concern that we have to "withhold the knowledge from the unwashed masses that they do not have free will because otherwise society will descend into chaos" is not without some justification. But rather than having to contemplate keeping "dangerous knowledge" under wraps, always a problematic notion, I think we should give more credence to his intuition. I think it points us in the direction of needing more nuanced thinking about free will at multiple levels. I think we need to be much more circumspect about stating what we think we "know", and more open about our still vast ignorance about how the brain works at levels that intervene between the firing of synapses and those that give rise to thoughts like 'cogito ergo sum'. Otherwise, how do we ever find our way to answers that actually reflect reality, both in a way that encompasses the known 'laws' of physics AND can account for an unknown number of layers of emergent systems building one upon the other? We cannot just solve for the former and blithely assume that the latter is just some "summer project for a grad student".
And it strikes me that if we can abandon some preconceived determination that this is a binary phenomenon and look at it as a smooth gradient in capability from species to species, we can search for the minute differences that are amplified and combined in unpredictable ways to form emergent system upon emergent system. When we have completely solved for traffic, weather, language, consciousness, and cognition, then only will we be qualified to have the chutzpah to address free will in anything approaching an authoritative way.
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