I believe that free will exists.
While I do believe in the presence of the God, I’ll purposefully not mention the God in this post because as of current technology, the presence of the God is not a scientific fact. Unless we have major breakthroughs in sciences that will allow us to prove the presence of the God in a controlled experimental setting, mention of the God would be more appropriate in the theological or philosophical setting.
In this post, I am going to discuss the feasibility of the free will. While I do not have knowledge of all assertions that deny the existence of free will, I know two examples often used to assert the absence of free will.
First is the experiment which demonstrated that neuronal signal transmission occurs prior to the execution of an individual’s action. The experiment was conducted by a scientist Benjamin Libet. While I must acknowledge that the experiment is very interesting and well performed, I cannot agree with the notion that the result of the experiment “proves” that free will does not exist.
Neurons are wires. They transmit electrical signal so that the information in one position can move to another position. If so, isn’t it obvious that neuronal firing must precede the execution of the action? CPU sends electrical signal via wire to the monitor, but that doesn’t prove that CPU doesn’t have any processing power. Moreover, there is a possibility that neuronal firing is not the consciousness itself, but that there is some currently invisible process prior to it.
Some may assert that such an approach is unscientific. However, if neurons are the only source of consciousness, why is it that we still cannot solve the hard problem of consciousness suggested by the philosopher David Chalmer? While we cannot definitely conclude that there is some invisible process that serves as the true building block of human consciousness, it is also impossible to conclude that consciousness arises only from neurons because the hard problem of consciousness has not been solved.
Secondly, some may point out that an individual’s action is determined solely by the individual’s hormonal status, past experiences et cetera. That would make a person analogous to the automaton, operating accordingly to the environmental inputs and biochemical status of the body. However, I feel like this argument is missing a very important point.
We do not have the capacity to make our heart beat. Heart beats as a consequence of the transmission of action potentials. The action potential is spontaneously generated in the sinoatrial node so we do not have to consciously make our heart beat. That is why our hearts continue to work even when we are asleep.
However, that doesn’t really mean that we do not have control over our hearts. We can make the heart beat more quickly by increasing the metabolic demands of the body. We can make the heart beat more slowly by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, perhaps through the activity such as meditation.
Likewise, it is true that much portion of human consciousness, maybe up to 80% of the consciousness, is decided by hormonal status, environmental inputs et cetera. However, there still is 20% of consciousness that allows us to make a choice, especially on whether we will execute an action or not. I borrowed the numbers from the Pareto Principle.
Finally, some physicists may state that since our cosmos follows the physical laws, there is no room for free will. However, I believe that the claim may be too hasty, considering the fact that we still do not have the theory of quantum gravity, the theory of dark matter et cetera.
In essence, the claim that free will does not exist is not any less vague that the claim that free will does exist. Therefore, our objective should be to discover more about nature so that we can find out the answer.