Evolutionist, Jerry Coyne, has written an article in USA Today promoting the idea that free will is an illusion. After several paragraphs of attempting to convince his readers that they have no free will, Coyne raises the question of justice: Why punish people if they did not freely choose to do bad? His answer: “But we should continue to mete out punishments because those are environmental factors that can influence the brains of not only the criminal himself, but of other people as well. Seeing someone put in jail, or being put in jail yourself, can change you in a way that makes it less likely you’ll behave badly in the future. Even without free will then, we can still use punishment to deter bad behavior, protect society from criminals, and figure out better ways to rehabilitate them.” But wait, what is this talk of “should”? That presumes some sort of rational or moral obligation, but both are impossible in Coyne’s world since we have no ability to choose, and obligations cannot be met by those who lack the ability to choose to fulfill them. We can’t decide how we will respond to criminal behavior. Physics determines that for us. I may be determined to respond by refusing to punish anyone’s bad behavior or rewarding anyone’s good behavior. It’s not within my control, nor Coyne’s. We are just puppets on the strings of physics.
And just how exactly does seeing someone get put in jail affect other people in such a way so as to deter them from doing the things that caused those people to go to jail? Coyne does not explain. As I explained elsewhere, materialism cannot explain such phenomena because there is no physical interaction sufficient to cause one’s own physical machinery to experience change in any way at all.
Coyne concludes his article by saying once we recognize free will to be an illusion “we can go about building a kinder world” because jettisoning the concept of free will makes us realize that all people—whether good or bad—are just a product of their genes and environment, and such a realization creates in us a sense of empathy for all people. Really? Couldn’t the recognition that all people are determined to do what they do make us uncaring toward them? If people who act badly do so because their hardware is broken, why not respond by killing them? Isn’t that what we do to broken machinery—discard it? The only way to build a kinder world is if we choose to do so. But if Coyne is right, we can’t choose anything, and we don’t know whether physics will determine that we build a kinder or a crueler world. Coyne wants us to do the very thing he says is impossible: to choose. And that is the fundamental flaw in his thinking: He invokes the very thing he is trying to eliminate.
Thinking to Believe 
January 3, 2012 at 8:13 pm
“Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.”
This quote seems to me to be the fundamental flaw of his argument. The brain is not the mind. It would be one thing to hypothesize or write in suppositions, but to say “must” as he does here is wrong.
And just because crude imaging of the brain shows some decisions are made approximately seven seconds before the conscious mind is aware does not indicate they weren’t freely chosen. It may only indicate a type of prescience of the mind, much like deja vu. I would also argue that such pre-decision chemical actions in the brain can be resisted, since, once those seven seconds have passed and the conscious mind realizes the decision its about to make, a last moment alteration can be decided upon.
I may subconsciously be thinking of what I’m going to type next and my fingers may hit the keys according to that subconscious decision, but at the last second, right before my finger tip hits the letter _____, I can consciously change my mind. And that’s the point, really. It’s a matter of the mind, not the brain and its related biology/chemistry.
“Coyne concludes his article by saying once we recognize free will to be an illusion “we can go about building a kinder world” because jettisoning the concept of free will makes us realize that all people—whether good or bad—are just a product of their genes and environment”
Sounds like an argument for eugenics. Isolate those defective people who had “bad genes” and eliminate them. Brave New World, indeed.
LikeLike
January 4, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Here is some additional information and criticisms of the experiment Coyne appealed to in support of the idea that scientists can tell what you will do 7 seconds before you do it:
Professor Coyne’s second argument against human freedom is an experimental one: our choices are predictable, several seconds before we consciously make them:
Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject “decides” to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it.
Well, let’s have a look at these experiments, shall we? The following video of a “No free will” experiment by John-Dylan Haynes (Professor at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin), appears to refute the notion of free will. According to the video, an outside observer, monitoring my brain, can tell which of two buttons I’m going to push, six seconds before I consciously decide to do so. But there are several things about this experiment that Professor Coyne left out of his op-ed piece.
Unimpressive results
First, as Coyne acknowledges in a post on his Web site, Why Evolution Is True, entitled, The no-free-will experiment, avec video, “the ‘predictability’ of the results is not perfect: it seems to be around 60%, better than random prediction but nevertheless statistically significant.” Sorry, but I don’t think that’s very impressive. What we have here is the simplest of all possible choices – “Press the button in your left hand or the button in your right hand” – being monitored by an MRI scanner, while a trained professional is looking on. If the outside observer guessed the subject’s choice, he’d be right 50% of the time; with the aid of an MRI scanner, the accuracy rises to 60%. This is the experiment that’s supposed to shatter my belief in free will? I’m absolutely devastated.
Adina Roskies, a neuroscientist and philosopher who works on free will at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, isn’t too impressed with Professor Haynes’ experiment either. “All it suggests,” she says, “is that there are some physical factors that influence decision-making”, which shouldn’t be surprising. That’s quite different from claiming that you can see the brain making its mind up before it is consciously aware of doing so.
Reflection was ruled out at the start
Second, the experiment was deliberately designed to exclude the possibility of reflection. In the experiment, as narrator Marcus du Sautoy (Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford) puts it, “I have to randomly decide, and then immediately press, one of these left or right buttons.” Now, most people would say that a reflective weighing up of options is integral to the notion of free will. There is a philosophical difference between liberty of spontaneity – as exemplified by the phrase, “free as a bird” – and liberty of choice, which is peculiar to rational animals like ourselves. Acting on impulse is not the same as making a free decision.
The choice was artificial, in several ways
Third, the experiment relates to an artificial choice which is stripped of several features which normally characterize our free choices:
(a) it’s completely arbitrary. It doesn’t matter which button the subject decides to press. Typically, our choices are about things that really do matter – e.g. who the next President of the United States will be.
(b) it’s binary: left or right. In real life, however, we usually choose between multiple options – often, between an indefinitely large number of options – for example, when we ask ourselves, “What career shall I pursue after I graduate?”
(c) it’s zero-dimensional. Normally, when we make choices, there are multiple axes along which we can evaluate the desirability of the various options – e.g. when deciding which city to move to, we might consider factors such as weather, proximity of family members and income earning opportunities. One city might have ideal weather but few job opportunities; another may be close to where family members live, but bitterly cold. In the experiment described above, there were no axes along which we could weigh up the desirability of the two options (left or right button), as there was literally nothing to compare.
(d) it’s impersonal. We are social animals, and most of our choices relate to other people – e.g. “Whom shall I marry?” Pressing a button, on the other hand, is a solitary act.
(e) it contains no reference to second-order mental states. Typically, when we choose, we give careful consideration to what other people will think of our choice, and how they’ll feel about it – e.g. “What will people think if I wear a clown suit on Casual Friday, and will my boss be annoyed?” To entertain these thoughts, we have to be capable of second-order mental states: thoughts about other people’s thoughts. These are a vital part of what makes us human: although chimps certainly know what other individuals want, there’s no good evidence to date that chimps have beliefs about other individuals’ beliefs. Humans may be unique in having what psychologists refer to as a theory of mind.
(f) it’s future-blind. The choice of whether to press the left button or the right button is a here-and-now choice, with no reference to future consequences. In real life, choices are seldom divorced from consequences, and we fail to advert to these consequences at our peril. For example, choosing to party the night before an exam may ruin your career prospects forever.
(g) it has no feedback mechanism. Not only do choices typically have consequences, but the results of our choices are usually communicated back to us in a way that influences our future behavior. Think of the experience of learning to ride a bicycle, when you were a child. And now compare this with the button-pressing example: no feedback, nothing learned by the subject.
So, what can the predictability (60% of the time) of an arbitrary, binary, impersonal choice, which involves no weighing up, no worries about what other people might think, no thought of the future and no feedback, possibly tell us about the existence of free will in human beings? Absolutely nothing.
What about “free won’t”?
Fourth, the experiment described by Coyne made no attempt to evaluate Benjamin Libet’s hypothesis of “free won’t”: “while we may not be able to choose our actions, we can choose to veto our actions.” What happens if the subject is permitted to decide in advance which button they will press, but is also free to change their mind at the last minute? Can a trained outside observer, who is monitoring an MRI scanner, pick up this sudden change of mind on the subject’s part? Coyne does not tell us. He writes that “from the standpoint of physics, instigating an action is no different from vetoing one, and in fact involves the same regions of the brain.” Fine; but that does not tell us whether a veto is in fact predictable in advance. Only experiments can demonstrate whether this is true or not.
Can free will be meaningfully attributed to acts performed over a short time period?
A fifth criticism that can be made of Haynes’ experiment is that the time scale involved makes it meaningless to speak of free will or its absence, just as it would be meaningless to ask what color a hydrogen atom is. Typically, our free choices are preceded by an extended period of deliberation, followed by the brain’s preparation for the execution of a bodily movement, followed by activation of specialized areas of the brain which are responsible for the contraction of specific muscles in the body. It could therefore be argued that freedom is a property which does not attach to the decision to act here and now, but to the entire process leading up to the decision. If this criticism is correct, then those who argue against free will based on experiments like the one recently conducted by Professor Haynes, are simply making a category mistake.
Do magnetic fields interfere with free will?
Finally, we need to consider the possibility that magnetic fields themselves may actually interfere with the exercise of free choice, which would invalidate the experiment described by Coyne. After all, scientists have already shown that they can alter people’s moral judgments simply by disrupting a specific area of the brain with magnetic pulses (Liane Young et al. “Disruption of the right temporoparietal junction with transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces the role of beliefs in moral judgments.” In PNAS April 13, 2010 vol. 107 no. 15, 6753-6758, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0914826107). In another experiment, researchers found that it was possible to influence which hand people move by stimulating frontal regions that are involved in movement planning using transcranial magnetic stimulation in either the left or right hemisphere of the brain. Curiously, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely. (Ammon, K. and Gandevia, S.C. (1990) “Transcranial magnetic stimulation can influence the selection of motor programmes.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 53: 705–707.)
To be sure, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a much more invasive procedure than lying inside an MRI scanner, as the subject did in Professor Haynes’ experiment: in the case of TMS, a coil is held near a person’s head to generate magnetic field impulses that stimulate underlying brain cells in a way that that can make someone perform a specific action. But I would argue that if powerful magnetic fields can temporarily disrupt free choices, then it should be no surprise that the “choice” made by a person while inside an MRI scanner turns out to be predictable more often than not. Thus the 60% accuracy claimed for Professor Haynes’ experiment, far from showing that human choices are predictable, may only be a measure of how strongly even an MRI scanner can bias the normal exercise of our free will.
But the most damning evidence of all comes from the Wikipedia article on functional magnetic resonance imaging, which makes the following admissions:
While the static magnetic field has no known long-term harmful effect on biological tissue, it can cause damage by pulling in nearby heavy metal objects, converting them to projectiles…
Scanning sessions also subject participants to loud high-pitched noises from Lorentz forces induced in the gradient coils by the rapidly switching current in the powerful static field. The gradient switching can also induce currents in the body causing nerve tingling. Implanted medical devices such as pacemakers could malfunction because of these currents. The radio-frequency field of the excitation coil may heat up the body, and this has to be monitored more carefully in those running a fever, the diabetic, and those with circulatory problems. Local burning from metal necklaces and other jewelry is also a risk. (Italics mine – VJT.)
So these magnetic currents are strong enough to turn metal objects into projectiles, make metal necklaces burn people wearing them, heat up people’s bodies and make their nerves tingle, and even cause pacemakers to malfunction? Why, I have to ask, are we using devices like this to study free will? I could not think of a better illustration of the maxim, “To observe is to disturb,” if I tried.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/is-free-will-dead/
LikeLike
January 10, 2012 at 9:54 am
The only illusion is the one Coynes is having …………..sorry.
Naz
LikeLike
January 25, 2012 at 3:12 am
Where does free will come from? How can it be explained? It makes no sense. At least Coyne offers arguments for his position. Those who believe in free will only ever say they just know that they have it. Not enough justification for believing it and allowing that belief to influence how we judge others and ourselves. More and more people accept free will is a myth and as this knowledge becomes more well known (it is hardly discussed outside of the internet at the moment, mass media ignores it) we must face this fact and start to think about how we want to organise society.
LikeLike
January 25, 2012 at 5:16 am
Larry,
We know our will is free through our direct experience. Even those who argue that our will is determined by physics freely admit that this idea goes against our common experience. Belief that our wills are free requires no more justification than our belief that there are other minds or that that the world was not created 5 minutes ago with the appearance of age. Indeed, the onus of proof is on anyone who would deny these things because these intuitions are so basic to our common experience.
Those who say we have no free will have not proven it. They have simply applied their materialistic worldview to the topic of volition, and recognize that to be consistent they must conclude that the will is determined just like everything else in the world. But this begs the question of whether or not materialism is true. And if the will is truly free as we experience it to be, that is good reason to believe that materialism is false if materialism requires that the will be determined.
If our wills were not free, then how could we distinguish between our choosing of something, and our being coerced into choosing something? For example, a person who is having their brain operated on can distinguish between their own thoughts, and memories that are conjured up in their minds by the doctor prodding certain portions of the brain. They can tell the difference between thoughts they freely conjured up, and thoughts that were conjured up for them by external forces. In order to tell the difference between the two, there must actually be a difference.
We must face this fact? Think about how we WANT to organize society? These statements presume that we have free will. If determinism is true, then many people cannot face the fact that determinism is true because they have been determined to believe in free will and to reject determinism. And how can we “want” to organize society if we truly do not have any volition of our own? Perhaps we have been determined to be anti-social instead. You deny free will, but presume it in your speech and actions.
And if determinism is true, you are not rational for thinking it so because you did not come to that conclusion through rational processes. Rather, you were forced to believe it through prior physical causes, wholly unrelated to reasons and intellectual deliberation. Your conclusion that determinism is true is no more rational than earthquakes. They are both just physical events determined by prior physical events.
Jason
LikeLike
June 10, 2013 at 3:18 am
[…] say the darndest things. Last January I blogged on an article Jerry Coyne wrote in USA Today regarding free will. At one point he said, “So if […]
LikeLike
June 10, 2013 at 11:50 am
[…] say the darndest things. Last January I blogged on an article Jerry Coyne wrote in USA Today regarding free will. At one point he said, “So if […]
LikeLike