Free-will paper (Philosophy Seminar Final)
There Is No Free Will—and No Self to Have It:
A Phenomenological Critique of Agency and Selfhood
Many have argued that regardless of whether the universe is causally deterministic or indeterministic, free will cannot exist. If free will does not exist, moral responsibility cannot exist (van Inwagen, 2008). This seemingly unpalatable conclusion leads many to blame the premises about causality, but the real confusion lies deeper: free will presupposes that there is a continuous, unified, agentic self that chooses among actions and thoughts. But, as both contemplative traditions and cognitive neuroscience suggest, that self doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. We don’t author our experience: we witness it. In this essay, I will first clarify the relevant terminology (free will, determinism, self) and then show that no self can exist through a neuroscientific and a phenomenological lens. Finally, I will propose what implications this can have for human experience.
Free will, causality, and the self are notoriously inconsistently defined across philosophy (Inwagen 2008). I will lay out clear definitions here. Determinism is the view of causality that the past and the laws of nature uniquely define the future. The denial of determinism is indeterminism. According to determinists, knowing the state of every particle in the universe and every force acting on them, and the laws, suffices to predict the state of the universe at any point in time. As I will explain later, determinism seems to imply that free will is non-existent. By free will, I mean that we are sometimes in the situation relative to a future act in which we can either perform that act or refrain from performing that act. For example, if we chose to bike to class, it would be accurate to say that if time were rewound to before we made that decision, we could have chosen instead to walk to class.
Both determinism and indeterminism seem to render free will impossible. If determinism is true, your actions are the unique result of prior causes such as your brain states, genetics, and environment, so you could not have done otherwise. If indeterminism is true, then some part of your choices is the result of chance, not agency, so in no sense are you the true originator of your actions. But as mentioned, both of these arguments presuppose that something is there to be free or unfree—that there is a metaphysical “self” to do the choosing (Harris 2012).
I am speaking about the self in the way that most people believe in it: a locus of consciousness that is the driving force behind their decisions and interpretations of the world that most intuitively feel to be roughly behind their eyes and inside their brains (Metzinger 2009). (Some argue that they actually possess the self, but that begs the question: who possesses the self?) The neuroscientific case against such a self is growing stronger and stronger.
Cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga’s research on split-brain patients (those with the corpus callosum severed) has led him to the conclusion that the self is not a unified entity and that our thoughts often provide post-hoc reasoning for our actions rather than driving them. He demonstrated that both hemispheres of the brain can act and be interacted with independently. In experiments, he prompted the right hemisphere only of patients with a command such as “walk”. Upon walking, he asked the patient to explain why they did so (essentially interacting with the left, linguistic hemisphere) and found they would confabulate some story, such as “I walked to get a drink of water.” Notably, they fully believed their confabulation to be true. Gazzaniga explained: “The human interpreter has set us up for a fall. It has created the illusion of self and, with it, the sense we humans have agency and ‘freely’ make decisions about our actions” (Gazzaniga 2011).
Work by other neuroscientists has linked the sense of self to neural correlates such as the default mode network and the medial temporal lobe. In a few experiments on consciousness, individuals who ingested a psychedelic entheogen such as psilocybin reported “ego-dissolution,” which was found to be highly correlated with decreased functional connectivity between the above two brain regions (Lebedev 2015). Recent work has shown that dissociation (a disruption of the sense of self and integrity of experience) can be consistently induced in mice by stimulating neurons in the retrosplenial cortex at ~3 Hz. This work, led by Vesuna et al. (2020) in Karl Deisseroth’s lab at Stanford, identified the same ~3 Hz rhythm in an analogous brain region for humans experiencing dissociative seizures. These experiments suggest that the self is not a continuous and unified entity; rather, it is a contingent construct.
That there is no self to choose among thoughts and actions is not merely some recent neuroscientific theory; contemplative traditions and philosophers have many times converged upon that observation that the self is an illusory construction of the mind. The Buddha’s doctrine of recognizing "anattā” (literally “no-self”) is key in Buddhist enlightenment. In the 1700s, David Hume posited that, via introspection, one can realize that the self is really just a “bundle” of sensations, thoughts, and perceptions, rather than a unified entity.
I invite the reader to phenomenologically verify the illusion of a free-willing self through a simple meditation. Consider a choice that feels free: one that is unrushed, unconstrained, and nontrivial. Close your eyes and think of a person (living or dead, real or imaginary). Now observe how the choice unfolds. You likely generated a list of candidates and weighed them before settling on one. But you did not choose someone you've never heard of; there is no freedom to choose what can appear. Likewise, many known individuals never entered your mind at all. You didn’t choose for Paul Revere, for example, not to show up. He simply didn’t. Even among those who did appear, you didn’t control which reasons surfaced or how persuasive they felt. Suppose you are torn between Millard Fillmore and Amelia Earhart. Perhaps the thought “I should pick Amelia because she’s an underrepresented woman” arises and sways you. But why didn’t the thought “I should pick Fillmore to seem historically knowledgeable” occur instead? You didn’t author these thoughts; they appeared in consciousness. And you did not choose which would carry emotional weight or feel right. That, too, simply happened. At no point is there a self steering the process; there are just thoughts arising and passing in consciousness. As a matter of direct experience, you are not the thinker of thoughts. You are their witness (Harris 2012).
To be clear, my claim is not that no stable personality exists, nor that humans lack continuity over time. Rather, I deny the existence of a unified, agentic, continuously existing entity that stands apart from the flow of thoughts and experiences and “chooses” among them.
Some counter that the self isn’t a static agent but a dynamic, emergent process arising from the mind. But processes don’t choose. They just unfold. Claiming that the self is a process of mind or brain is admitting that it has no control over the system that generates it. Analogously, a computer operating system is an emergent process but one would be confused if they argued that the software chooses what goes on in the processor of the computer.
To address the dilemma at the beginning of the essay: yes, denying that the self exists pokes massive holes in our system of morality. But this does not need to destabilize society. First of all, we can dispense with statements such as “if there is no free will and no self, why should I ever strive to do good? After all, I am destined to act in one predetermined way.” This confuses determinism with fatalism. Again, determinism says that all actions have causes. Fatalism says that outcomes are unavoidable. They are not. There are still good choices and bad choices, there is simply no self to be identified that does the choosing. Secondly, absence of metaphysical free will does not invalidate social accountability, it just means we must root our ethics in consequences and compassion, not cosmic blame. Rather than view others' bad behavior as an expression of the rottenness of their selfhood, we can compassionately recognize that they were never free to do otherwise, so our response should be to prevent a repeat of bad behavior rather than punitive punishment. We can keep the same social structures that heavily reward good behavior and harshly penalize bad behavior, but we should recognize that it makes no more sense to blame a person for how they act than it makes sense to blame the clouds for a storm.
Bibliography:
Inwagen, Peter van. “How to Think about the Problem of Free Will.” The Journal of Ethics 12, no. 3/4 (2008): 327–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40345385.
Gazzaniga, Michael S. Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York: Ecco, 2011.
Harris, Sam. Free Will. New York: Free Press, 2012.
Lebedev, Alexander V et al. “Finding the self by losing the self: Neural correlates of ego-dissolution under psilocybin.” Human brain mapping vol. 36,8 (2015): 3137-53. doi:10.1002/hbm.22833
Libet, B et al. “Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act.” Brain : a journal of neurology vol. 106 (Pt 3) (1983): 623-42. doi:10.1093/brain/106.3.623
Metzinger, T. (2009). The ego tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self. Basic Books/Hachette Book Group.
Vesuna, Sam et al. “Deep posteromedial cortical rhythm in dissociation.” Nature vol. 586,7827 (2020): 87-94. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2731-9