Does Free Will exist?

“Do people have Free Will, or is this universal belief an illusion?

That’s honestly a pretty terrifying question. Like, what if we’re really just robots programmed by our environments? Of course it’d be terrible if we realized we didn’t have any free will at all!

So, without further ado, here are arguments for and against Free Will.

Argument against Free Will

Psychologist Vasily Klucharev sheds doubt upon the notion of Free Will, first by illustrating with Libet’s clock study that humans only realize that they made a choice after having decided. “A couple of hundred milliseconds before we become aware of our intention,” Klucharev adds “, we can predict the decision by brain activity.”

Klucharev himself believes that neuroeconomics reveals that we have an illusion of free choice. He further supports this with the psychological idea of “choice blindness”. In the classic experiment, the human makes a choice for a certain photo, despite the photos being switched post-choice, the human tendency is to rationalize the choice even though it wasn’t their actual choice.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio would say that it is emotion that moves one to make a decision, showing an experiment where people’s emotional brain centers were damaged and could think rationally about things, but could not make any decision.

I think that the emotional centers of the brain, say the amygdala and the non-prefrontal cortex are what allows the human to execute a decision. Recently I rejected a job offer, because a friend warned me not to enter the industry, as he had cases where acquaintances of mine in that industry were miserable. This warning held a lot of weight because I feared becoming miserable. Rationalization and instinct can be very strong factors in decisions, which is why there is the argument against free will.

Argument for Free Will

Paul Glimcher, the father of neuroeconomics, himself said in a Vox interview that “ I don’t want to [lose] the thing I like most in life: my opportunity to exercise my free will” in response to having lesser choices as a result of increased big data over time about the human condition.

Stephen Covey, author of the self-help classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People mentions that there has been a single paragraph from a book that influenced majority of his life: “there is a gap between stimulus and response, and that the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use that space.” He called it a revolutionary idea, that a human can become aware of the various stimuli in his environment and choose a careful response.

Philosopher Danil Razeev would probably add upon that idea with: “There are about a 100 milliseconds between awareness of our urge to move our fingers and the muscle activity. It is during this very short time frame we can exercise our conscious free will.” There is a very small time frame, so very small indeed, a tenth of a second. If our brain makes a decision, we have “free want”, that is, we can veto the decision made by the brain.

Conclusion

Danil Razeev states: “Neuroeconomics has yet to establish a new paradigm for understanding free will.” There are more aspects to the notion of Free Will that Neuroeconomics does not have the answers to: like the phenomenon of urges, distinguishing intentions and actions. The question then is, how to effectively measure these in the field of neuroscience?