Does Free Will Exist? | Alfred Mele | Big Think

Does Free Will Exist?

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The question of human autonomy, the alternate universes that our choices can open up, and the problem of measurement awareness.

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ALFRED MELE:

Alfred Mele is an American philosopher and the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He specializes in irrationality, akrasia, intentionality and philosophy of action. He is the author of several books, most recently "Effective Intentions," published in 2009.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Do human beings have free will?

Alfred Mele: Yes. Yes they do. But it turns out that not everybody understands the expression “free will” in the same way. And there are lots of different ways of understanding it. Unfortunately, that makes it hard to just say, “Yes, this is true that isn’t.” One thing philosopher’s spend a lot of time doing is trying to sort out the possible meanings of an expression like “free will,” and the history on the literature on free will is a couple of thousand years old. So, when I talked to the general public, one thing I say about free will is, you can think about it on a sort of gas station model, service station model, So, when you go to the gas station and get regular gas, or the mid grade gas, or the premium. And maybe we could simplify things by thinking of like regular free will. Well, regular free will would be the sort of thing that is presupposed in courts of law when somebody is judged guilty of an offense. So, just that you understood what you were doing, you’re sane and rational, and nobody was forcing, or compelling you to do it, and you didn’t have any medical condition that forced or compelled you to do it. That would be enough to be acting freely. Now, that’s regular free will.

Yeah, okay, so now how do we understand this being able to do otherwise, everything being the same up until that moment? And by everything, I mean the entire history of the universe and all of the laws of nature. So, one way to picture this ability to do otherwise is as follows. If I could have done otherwise at a given moment, then there’s another possible universe. You don’t have to suppose that this universe actually exists. Another scenario where the entire universe is the same up until that moment, and even so, I do something else instead. So maybe what I did was decide to call a taxi, but at that very moment, everything being the same up until then, I could have decided to take a subway instead, and then started heading down the stairs.

Okay. So, some people require that kind of ability for free will. Now, if we’re going to have it, then the brain has to work in such a way that everything being the same up until a given point in time, although I did one thing, I decided to call a taxi. I could have decided to take the subway. And we don’t have good evidence that the brain does work that way, but also, we don’t have good evidence that it doesn’t. Right? So, this is a question that is empirically open. And it could turn out that the brain doesn’t work this way, and then if it doesn’t, then we’re not going to have free will at this mid grade level, but we could still have regular free will.

So, I’m convinced we have regular free will, the mid grade thing, I’m not convinced we have because we don’t have the empirical evidence that we need. But we don’t have it either way.

Question: What is the main experiment that’s driven this kind of free will?

Alfred Mele: So these were originally done starting in the early ‘80’s. They are still being done today. The technology today is better, but it’s the same kind of experiment. What you have are subjects seated in a chair like the one I’m sitting in, and they have this task. To flex the wrist whenever they want. They’re watching a fast clock. There’s dot on the clock and it makes a complete revolution in less than 3 seconds, and they’re hooked up to two machines. One is measuring EEG, electrical conductivity on the scalp. And the other measures a muscle burst on the wrist, it’s an electromyogram. Okay? So, they’re supposed to flex whenever they want and watch this rapidly revolving spot on the clock and then after they flex, they’re supposed to indicate where the spot was on the clock when they first became aware of their urge, intention, decision, to flex. And they indicate it by moving a cursor to that spot on the clock. Okay, is that clear?

All right. Now, when these subjects are regularly reminded to be spontaneous and not to plan in advance when to flex, what you see is that...

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