It's been a while since I've written about free will. I was recently asked a question (by an atheist who believes in determinism) about free will and wrote the following response.

Question:

What is the source of free will? How do you explain its existence?

Answer:

That’s a daunting question! Semantics are so critical to any discussion of free will, I hesitate to discuss the topic. But I can’t resist! :-) To me, free will is not absolute or limitless. Free will is constrained by physical laws, ethics, and circumstances.

There is evidence that thoughts arise from diverse modules within the brain. These diverse sources of thought, within the brain, are integrated somehow (i.e. in the brain’s electromagnetic field) and passed back for a decision. It’s the decision – yes, no, maybe, I don’t know, not yet, if conditions warrant, keep in mind, that’s interesting, etc. – that constitutes choice and, thus, free will.

Of the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, human intelligence has only existed for one or two hundred thousand years. That's just the blink of an eye in cosmological time.

Until we discover extraterrestrial life, our best understanding says that the universe was over 10 billion years old before the first single-cell life forms arose. Until that point in time, THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE WAS TOTALLY INANIMATE. Then life introduced motility: the ability of animate beings to move about on their own. Life was a major milestone in the history of the universe because, instead of inanimate matter, the universe now had animate beings too. Life is intrinsically and intimately shaped by evolution; an entirely new process in the universe. Pretty major stuff, this life force!

It would be another 3.5 billion years before humans evolved. Human intelligence is the next major milestone in the history of the universe. Instead of living at the mercy of nature (like all other animals), humans had the intelligence to harness nature: which is to say, humans had the ability to understand, anticipate and use causality for their own purposes . . . clothing, shelter, weapons, tools and fire. This expertise with causality is a prerequisite for intelligence and is also demonstrable evidence of free will.

Without free will, nature would be the only source of causation on Earth. But free will rises (modestly) above causality and harnesses it to do our bidding. Nature didn't cause man's achievements . . . man did. The only way that could happen is if man has free will. There's nature; and then there's human nature.

From the empirical point of view, free will is taken for granted: we live, work, play and plan as if we have free will. We don’t experience the horror of watching helplessly as we do things we don’t want to do (unless you suffer from a compulsive disorder).

I’m aware of the usual objections to the notion of free will. Many very educated people – even those in the fields of physics and neuroscience – believe that everything is physical: matter or energy. There are far too many people who treat the current scientific paradigm just like a religion: they actually put their faith in reductionistic physicalism and conclude that EVERYTHING is determined and that free will is an illusion. They believe it absolutely –despite the experience of their everyday existence.

The fact is, science is still maturing. Its history is one of successive paradigm shifts. What was once seen as obvious, develops nagging problems, inconsistencies and contradictions. The problems beget new understandings that usher in a new paradigm that becomes the new obvious answer.

We already know that the existing paradigms are flawed. Relativity doesn’t get along with the quantum world. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle points to a mystical side of quantum physics that stretches credulity and suggests "mind" as a component of the material universe.

Matter emerges from nowhere and disappears again. Subatomic particles can’t both be and be known to be. Matter shifts from existing to only having the potential to exist.

Our human acts affect what is true at the quantum level. The act of measurement distorts what’s being measured. Human consciousness itself seeps into the discussion of quantum physics. Consciousness, mind, data, or whatever you want to call it, is beginning to factor into quantum physics and even black holes. These curious developments are the dissonances that precede paradigm shifts. It appears that the next paradigm will need to accommodate "consciousness, mind, data, or whatever you want to call it".

The question of human consciousness has been relegated to philosophers until fairly recently. As of late, neuroscience has made some amazing inroads to understanding this “emergent property of the brain”. The more they learn, the more it seems that consciousness defies the reductionistic physicalism of science’s true believers. Consciousness (and life and intelligence) is one of the incongruencies revealing the gaps in the physicalism of our current paradigm.

Life itself is a (relatively) new phenomenon in the universe. Life, in turn, has spawned amazing phenomena that never existed before: motility, evolution, instinct, procreation, consciousness, intelligence and, I assert, free will.

Perhaps the next scientific paradigm will account for the distinct differences between inanimate matter and animate beings (especially human beings). If you look at the trends in the history of the universe, it appears almost as if everything has been leading up to a universe that acknowledges itself via life: human life. Until the question is resolved, I’ll try to keep an open mind and remember that opinions are a dime a dozen until facts decide the issue.

P.S.
Science is one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, human endeavor. However, as an atheist, you should not be substituting science for religion. Science is the question, NOT the answer. Atheists, to my experience, seem likely to forget that, unlike religion, science has never claimied to be the final word.



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I thought I was done writing about freewill. But then I came across this article by Johnjoe McFadden (author of Quantum Evolution: Life in the Multiverse).

The following is a summary of the CEMI field theory. It echoes much of what I've been asserting about free agency and freewill.

. . .

--- THE CONSCIOUS ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD THEORY ---

Most scientists now embrace monism, that the stuff of mind is the same as the stuff of the brain, matter. Many, particularly in the artificial intelligence field, take the view that consciousness is just an inevitable product of complex computation, as the evolutionary biologist T. H. Huxley put it, like the ‘steam whistle, which accompanies the work of a locomotive [but] without influence upon its machinery.’

In the steam whistle view, consciousness just pops out of the complex interconnected computations performed by the network of neurons within our brain. But why should it? The Internet now links up millions of computers in a gigantic superbrain that will soon rival our own organic version in computational capability. But does anyone seriously believe that, like HAL, driven by its digital consciousness, the Internet may soon turn on us its creators? The plain fact is that nothing rendered in silicon remotely resembles a conscious mind.

Another problem with the steam whistle is that it goes against the grain of everything we have learnt, since Darwin, about how complex biological systems evolved. Every bit of our body and our mind is here today because it provided some function – some advantage to us – that had been captured, and improved upon by natural selection over millennia. Bodies don’t have steam whistles, but if they did, they would have a role to play in the survival of the creature that blew them. Consciousness is a product of evolution and, as such, it has a role to play in our survival. What is that role?

The most obvious answer may be the right one – we are aware because we then have the power to change our actions. Consciousness endows us with free will. There are many operations that our brain performs automatically, without conscious control – simple tasks like walking, to incredibly complex tasks like playing a musical instrument from a written score. But it is hard to remove the impression that under some circumstances, our conscious brain takes over, to influence and will these actions.

Consider driving along a familiar road. You may be listening to the radio, thinking about some problem at work, but your brain is busy performing all the complex computations necessary to control your limb movements and maintain your car on the busy road, unconsciously. You spot a hazard sign ‘Roadworks – Major Congestion Ahead!’ and immediately your conscious mind takes control, to slow the car and perhaps try to find an alternative route home. What is it that is taking control in these situations?

What we need to look for is something that is a product of the brain’s activity, but which also has the power to influence that activity. Surprisingly, we have known for years that such an entity exists within our brain. The neurons in our brain transmit electrical signals along and between nerve fibres. It is always assumed that the electrons and neurotransmitters moving down these nerves are the movers and shakers of neuronal computation.

However, all electrical circuits - and that’s basically all neurones are – generate an associated energy field, known as an electromagnetic field or em field. This field contains precisely the same information as the circuitry that generated it. However, unlike neuronal information, which is localised in single or groups of neurons, the brain’s em field will bind the neuronal information into a single integrated whole.

This conscious electromagnetic information field (cemi field) theory may sound far-fetched, but it rests on just three propositions. The first is that the brain generates its own em field, a fact that is well known and utilised in brain scanning techniques such as EEG. The second is that the brain’s em field is indeed the seat of consciousness. This is far harder to prove but there is plenty of evidence that is at least consistent with this hypothesis. Em fields are waves that tend to cancel out when the peaks and troughs from many unsynchronised waves combine. But if neurones fire together, then the peaks and troughs of their em fields will reinforce each other to generate a large disturbance to the overall em field.

In recent years neuroscientists in many laboratories across the world have become interested in the phenomenon of neuronal synchrony. Experiments from Paris’ Laboratoire de Neurosciences demonstrated synchronous firing in distinct regions of the brain when a subject’s attention is aroused by a pattern that resembled a face. When the subject saw only lines then his neurones fired randomly but when the subject realised he was looking at a face, his neurones snapped into step to fire synchronously. In this, and in many similar experiments, neurone firing alone does not correlate with awareness – but the em field disturbance generated by synchronous firing, does. The simplest explanation is that the brain’s em field is conscious awareness - the cemi field.

The last cemi field proposition is that the brain’s (conscious) em field can itself influence neuronal firing. Like the first proposition, this is easy to prove and is indeed inevitable. Radio sets and TV’s are designed to be sensitive to the electromagnetic fields of radio waves; but in fact all electrical phenomena are sensitive to the surrounding em field. Neurones are fired by specific structures, known as voltage-gated ion channels that respond to the external em field. Mostly they are gated in such a way that only massive changes to the brain’s em field are likely to influence neurone firing. However, in a busy brain there will be many neurones teetering on the brink of firing and these undecided neurones may be exquisitely sensitive to the em field. The cemi field – our consciousness - will come into play when the brain is poised to make delicate decisions.

That concept of information encoded as an electromagnetic field is actually a very familiar one. We routinely encode complex images and sounds in em fields that we transmit to our TV and radio sets. What I am proposing is that our brain is both the transmitter and the receiver of its own electromagnetic signals in a feedback loop that generates the conscious em field as a kind of informational sink. This informational transfer, through the cem field, may provide distinct advantages over neuronal computing, in rapidly integrating and processing information distributed in different parts of the brain. It may also provide an additional level of computation that is wave-mechanical, rather than digital; one that drives our free will. This is the advantage that consciousness provides: the capacity to make decisions.

Several other researchers have also recently proposed that brain em fields are the substrate of consciousness, including:

Dr. Susan Pockett, University of Auckland
E. Roy John, NYU Medical Center, New York

For those who believe in it, there's a lot of interpretations of the word "freewill" (or "free will"). At one extreme, freewill represents complete and total freedom of choice. At the other extreme, freewill is a matter of choosing from limited options or alternatives. For those who don't believe in it, freewill is an illusion or delusion.

Determinism renders us puppets acting out a cosmic script written at the moment of the Big Bang: we are absolutely compelled and have no choice about anything. This view of reality surrenders experience and individuality to our scientific understanding of physics: most notably, causality. This surrender to science is as abject an article of faith as is belief in God. Science is constantly pushing frontiers and reforming its worldview: with something so scientifically unexplored and mysterious as consciousness, I see no reason to surrender my experience and individuality just yet.

In my freewill-versus-determinism debates, my belief in free agency often comes up against the following objections or assertions:

• Everything is physical, including mind, and entirely controlled by causality
• Brain activity is physical activity, so the mind – whether or not it is abstract – is wholy a product of physical activity and, thus, is entirely controlled by causality
• Free agency is just a theory
• Freewill is an illusion

I will address all these objections/assertions, below.

First of all, “everything” is NOT physical. The only way to achieve compliance with that assertion is to toss out all the dictionaries and substitute your own personal definitions. These kinds of semantic rationalizations are common in debate and even casual conversation. The assertion that mind is physical is just plain wrong. It is clearly NOT physical. The BRAIN is physical but the mind is an abstraction. The abstract, subjective and intangible properties of mind are included in all the definitions of mind I can find. By denying the abstract nature of mind, one changes its definition. Look it up for yourself. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

The emphases are mine. This excerpt confirms the abstract nature of mind and hints at the mental feedback mechanism I'll be advocating later, below.

ANYTHING abstract is, by definition, non-physical. The mind is abstract but is nonetheless real. Other abstractions are: art, love, fiction, democracy, freedom, justice and music. Being abstract doesn't mean it's not real: only that it's intangible. In the words of LSD guru, Timothy Leary: "Even illusions are real: they're real illusions".

The mind is an intangible abstraction of the brain. The mystery of mind is a closely held secret. Science is slowly but surely picking the brain apart but is not much closer to explaining consciousness itself. Our quest for understanding is still in its early stages: I readily admit that any theory of consciousness is, for now, conjecture.

Human intelligence is a higher form of consciousness than found elsewhere. I believe higher brain function in humans has crossed a threshold. That threshold is mental feedback. The biofeedback machine provides demonstrable proof of this mental (mind/brain) feedback mechanism. This confirmation of a mental feedback mechanism also suggests free agency is not outside the bounds of scientific inquiry. Consciousness may be a tough nut to crack but it's certainly within the purview of science to solve.

With biofeedback, science has revealed a clue to human consciousness but hasn't yet explored its ramifications. At this point, I need to explain how the ramifications of biofeedback (which is actually mental feedback) relate to free agency and freewill.

But first, I want to lay a little groundwork and assert a key physical difference between animate and inanimate matter.

I don't deny the universal application of causality (above the quantum level). What I claim is that causality is not predictable with living beings in the same way it is with inanimate things. For instance, a head-on car crash takes just a moment: the energy released crumples metal and sends a sound wave out in all directions. Physically, this is not significantly different than a pair of meteors colliding (except for the sound waves). However, the living occupants of the car (recognizing an impending collision) may brace themselves for impact; they may writhe in pain until sedated by a paramedic; they may crawl out from the wreckage or they may die. Inanimate matter doesn't understand causality, so it can't brace for impact. Inanimate matter doesn't feel pain or die because it's not alive. This difference is important because it establishes life as a unique mode of physical existence based on motility and mind: animate versus inanimate. Particularly with man, this distinction shows that mind and motility allows living things to react to cause and effect in unpredictable and capricious ways (compared to inaminate objects).

With life, humans reign supreme . . . or at least, unique. We possess self-aware intelligence: an absolutely essential component of free agency. Free agency is, essentially, the ability to exercise freewill. Being self-aware means understanding causality. We know who our parents are and that we will all die. We know the forces of nature and how to harness them. We know causality. But knowledge is not enough to establish freewill if we can't use it as we see fit.

If we're just a collection of molecules, how can we really do what we want – instead of what causality forces on us? If we are merely matter, like the rest of the universe, how can we rise above causality? Obviously, if we are merely matter, we CAN'T rise above causality.

Our flesh tears and ages. Our bones break. Our brains are subject to damage and disease. All our physical parts are subject to the inexorable tide of causality. But humans are NOT merely matter. We're also mind. "So what?", you may well ask. "The mind is entirely a product of physical brain activity, so it's also entirely subject to causality, just as the brain is. Right?"

That's an assumption which flies in the face of experience. We all live as if we have freewill. We work, play and plan as if we have freewill. The fact is, consciousness is still a mystery and can't be scientifically explained by a deterministic model which is not even falsifiable. I say free agency agrees with experience better than determinism does and explains our abilities and achievements better also. Free agency is implied in our language, by our achievements and by our behavior.

As I've argued thus far, mind, of itself, is not enough to loosen the grip of causality. Just because the mind is abstract doesn't mean it can avoid causality's tyranny. To do that, the mind would need a measure of independence: it would need to be able to direct the very brain which is its source. That seems unlikely, even incredible. But that's exactly what does happen. We exercise mind over matter (brain) by means of a feedback loop between mind and brain. We all have a feedback mechanism that enables freewill and free agency. With this feedback mechanism, we have a modest freedom from causality because the feedback mechanism, like the mind, is abstract -- not physical -- and operates (in at least a limited way) outside the physical realm of causality. In other words, the abstract nature of mind is a buffer from causality which allows us to intelligently use our own brains to exercise freewill, via a mental feedback mechanism which is, itself, an abstraction from an abstraction (mind).

Biofeedback machines demonstrate this mental feedback mechanism but don't explain it. I think that, with self-aware human intelligence, the mind/brain feedback loop, in a synergistic symbiosis, achieves a sort of critical mass that crosses a threshold endowing the mind with some control over the brain. The abstract mind is a product of the physical brain but the feedback mechanism (also abstract) may arise, as a state shift, from the mind. Just as music is a creative abstraction from an abstraction (mind), so is the feedback mechanism. I believe these layers of abstractions serve to buffer our intelligent minds from physical causality enough to give us free agency.

The Wikipedia description of mind, excerpted above, contains the following words:

In popular usage mind is frequently synonymous with thought: It is that private conversation with ourselves that we carry on "inside our heads". Thus we "make up our minds", "change our minds" or are "of two minds" about something.

These colloquialisms are all metaphors for the mental feedback mechanism. Such language tacitly recognizes our mental feedback – even if we’re not consciously aware of such a mechanism.

I know this theory of free agency is conjecture: but so is determinism or any theory of consciousness. However, (unlike determinism) my theory of free agency has the advantage of being falsifiable: if the mind does NOT have a feedback mechanism with the brain, then the whole theory is shot down in flames.

Because the mind – and the mental feedback mechanism it spawns – are both non-physical abstractions, they have no physical properties which causality can directly affect: they have no matter or moving parts or heat or light or gravity or inertia. The mind can only be indirectly affected by causality, via the brain and body (our 5 senses). If the mental feedback mechanism is truly a product of the mind – an abstraction from an abstraction – then it is doubly buffered from causality. I believe this is enough to grant us free agency and freewill.

FREE AGENCY IN A MATERIAL UNIVERSE


INTRODUCTION:


Humans are essentially conscious minds, bound to material brains and bodies, exploring a material world. The mystery of consciousness has remained a mystery despite all the best efforts of philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, neurophysicists and neurophysiologists. There are many theories of consciousness but no consensus.

Because we are self-aware and conscious of our choices, people usually assume we have freewill: that is, until they study the subject. At that point, they are faced with a seemingly inescapable scientific axiom known as causality (cause and effect). Causality is a foundation of physics and the rest of the natural sciences and convincingly supports the proposition that everything in the universe is predetermined: including us, our acts and our thoughts. Those who believe this proposition are called “hard determinists” or “absolute determinists”.

I’m a compatibilist. I believe that freewill is compatible with determinism. I don’t deny determinism but I do assert that humans have free agency and that this gives us a limited and subtle freedom from causality. Thus, determinism is not absolute (which we already know, because of the random, probabilistic, nature of quantum theory). Below, I will explain why I believe humans are different than the rest of the material universe in regard to causality and, thus, determinism.

Taking our modern understanding of the universe and man, 3 important stages, since the Big Bang, can be readily identified: I call them the inanimate stage, the animate stage and the human stage. It's interesting to note that the durations of these stages have, in succession, decreased dramatically.

THE INANIMATE STAGE:


About 12 to 15 billion years ago, the Big Bang sparked the birth of our expanding universe. The universe coalesced into stars and galaxies. Absolutely everything was physical (material or energy) and entirely inanimate. Everything that occurred happened according to the universal laws of physics and nothing moved or happened of its own accord. Causality ruled. This was the inanimate stage.

THE ANIMATE STAGE:


Then, about 3.5 billion years ago, life arose on Earth. Whether or not this was the first or only life to arise in the universe is still a mystery: all we know for sure is that Earth is the only place we know of with life. Even though early life forms were merely single-celled creatures, they were new and unique because they had a feature new and unique in the universe: motility. Life is animate. For the first time, after many billions of years, material was alive and moved of its own accord, without external cause.

THE HUMAN STAGE:


It was almost another 3 billion years before primates evolved. Homo sapiens didn’t arise until 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. That’s just a blink in cosmological time. We are on the cusp of an evolution that’s accelerating at breakneck speed. At the top of the evolutionary ladder, we possess a feature that facilitates ever-increasing change: self-aware intelligence. We’ve left all other life forms literally choking in our dust. The animate and human stages represent paradigm shifts in the ontology of the cosmos. Just as life introduced motility, humans introduced abstractions such as: data, creativity, invention, art, government, culture, mathematics and science. Causality is at the root of human change: not because we exert, or react to, physical properties but because we adapt to, anticipate and use causality to make change possible.

As (debatably) the only self-aware intelligent life forms, we are the only creatures capable of abstractions. Existence itself can be seen as an abstraction, projected by our brains, and perceived as mind.

To the extent that humans can level mountains, change the skyline, probe the solar system and uncover nature’s secrets, we are masters of causality. Our understanding of causality allows us to power our cities or, in an instant, destroy them.

This ability to use causality must come from somewhere. If all we can do is react – to only be an effect instead of a cause – then we wouldn’t have advanced as far or as fast as we have: we’d be just another lice-infested primate living by instinct. But we do have a cause; a purpose that drives us.

FREE AGENCY:


The mystery of human consciousness centers around freewill versus determinism. It’s one of the most fundamental and profound questions of human existence. How is it that, if the universe operates on inexorable principles of causality, we operate as if we have freewill? I believe the answer is: we don’t know yet . . . but, despite our rational surrender to 21st century physics, there’s a legitimate explanation for this apparent contradiction . . .

. . . Free Agency . . .

. . . We are free agents. But how? Our best understanding of physics says that the universe is a cascading chain-reaction of cause and effect. We are part of the universe, so we must be part of that chain-reaction, right?

Not absolutely. People tend to favor absolutes: good and evil, right and wrong, because they’re simple. But many, if not most, things are complex. There’s lots of territory between the extremes. Inescapable ignorance seeds and feeds our assumptions. We acquiesce to what we think we know and deny what we think we don’t know. Controversies arise because we don’t know enough.

The universe is expanding. Isn’t there something that explains why we send spacecraft (Pioneer 10, Voyager 1 and 2) out to probe our solar system (beyond the Oort cloud) without regard to the direction of universal expansion? Think about it. The universe is expanding – heading, inexorably, outward. This expansion is a consequence of the Big Bang and causality. Right? Gravity and inertia rule out in space. Then why are there probes heading in other directions, investigating those things we choose to explore, avoiding one planet's gravitational field while using another's like a slingshot? If we were subject to causality in the same way that the rest of the universe is, then why is it that the only “disobedient” objects in the universe come from us?

Recall, above, how motility is a new feature found only in living things. The motility of space probes is a direct consequence of human intelligence: they move the way we tell them to. They aren’t alive but the humans who control them are: and we’re using causality to give machines, billions of mile away, motility.

There can be only one explanation: our probes are directed by free agents – not universal causality. It is fair, here, to question if intelligence is bound by causality or if intelligence rises above causality (no matter how meagerly).

THE MENTAL FEEDBACK MECHANISM:


We don’t usually give thinking much thought. There’s almost always external stimuli being processed by the brain, resulting in our attention being directed to one stimulus or another (or perhaps multiple stimuli simultaneously). But by the same token one can choose to ignore the stimuli or let one’s subconscious mind handle them automatically while focusing, instead, on a specific task. It seems we can decide when and how we use our minds and respond to the external world. Determinists would say that’s an illusion. I say that’s just their opinion. I believe they can’t see the forest for the trees.

I think the reason free agency is so often overlooked is because it’s so subtle and sublime. We’re so inured to the mental feedback involved in thought, we don’t recognize the awesome power this process enables: free agency.

What power, says the determinist. What mental feedback?

Well, just what do you think self-aware intelligence is? If you think about it, “self-aware intelligence” is a paraphrase of “mental feedback”. Human intelligence is a complex phenomenon. It’s difficult to isolate something as intrinsic and integrated to thought as is mental feedback. Nonetheless, it’s been isolated by a device known as the bio-feedback machine. With a few readouts from live physiological data, you are able to control brainwave patterns and unconscious autonomous functions. Of course, bio-feedback is mental feedback. It’s demonstrable proof of a mind/brain feedback mechanism. It’s also proof of mind over matter (body and brain).

Mental feedback is a synergistic symbiosis between abstract mind and material brain that combines to give us true intelligence. I believe that intelligence needs the non-physical properties of the abstract mind to achieve independence (however limited or subtle) from the material brain and, thus, from causality and determinism also.

CONCLUSION:


As explained above, ontologically speaking, the universe has undergone 3 distinct stages with 2 paradigm shifts. We’re in the human stage. The key features of the human paradigm shift are: abstraction, intelligence and free agency, powered by a mental feedback mechanism that gives us modest control of our brains. We enjoy a subtle independence from causality; an independence that explains our achievements and promises greater things to come.