mele, a. 2012, another scientific threat to free will?

8/10/2019 Mele, A. 2012, Another Scientific Threat to Free Will?

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ANO THER S CIENTIF IC THREAT TO F RE E W IL L ?

The claim that neuroscientists have proved that or at least produced

powerful evidence thatfree will is an illusion has received a lot ofpress.

Here are just two exam ples:

Free will is not the defining feature of humanness, modem neuroscience

implies, but is rather an illusion that endures only because biochemical com-

plexity conceals the mechanisms of decision m aking.{Science News Dec. 6,

2008; Siegfried [2008])

Researchers have found pattems of brain activity that predict people's

decisions up to 10 seconds before the y're aware the y've made a cho ice. . . .

The result was hard for some to stomach because it suggested that the un-

conscious brain calls the shots, making fi-ee will an illusory afterthought.

{ScienceNOWDaily News

April 14, 2008; Youngsteadt [2008])

In

Effective Intentions: The Pow er of Conscious Will

(M ele 2009), I argue

that scientistsneuroscientists and others have not proved that fi-ee will

is an illusion and have not produced powerful evidence for that claim.

M anuel Vargas has suggested that in that book I ignore a serious scientific

threat to free will (2009). The alleged threat is identified in section 1. It is

the topic of this article.

Scientists who argue for the illusion thesis about fi-ee will arrive at

that conclusion by w ay of some pretty striking empirical propositions that

they infer from their data. For example, Benjamin Libet contends that the

brain produces unconscious decisions to act about a third of a second

before the person becomes aware of them (1985, 2004), and Daniel

Wegner argues that conscious intentions are never among the causes of

corresponding actions (20 02 ,20 04 , 2008). In

Effective Intentions

I review

the experiments that are claimed to support striking empirical proposi-

tions such as these and I explain why the propositions are not justified by


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ANO THER SCIENTIFIC THREAT TO FREE WILL? 423

sions about free will, if my arguments that the propositions are not

justified by the data hit their mark, they undermine the scientific

arguments at issue about free w ill. For example, it may be plausible that a

person whose conscious intentions never play a role in producing corre-

sponding behavior never acts freely; but if we lack good reason to believe

that our conscious intentions never play a role of

t is

kind, this particular

line of argument for the thesis that free will is an illusion is out of the

running (at least until powerful evidence for the claim about conscious in-

tentions is produced).

1.

Wh at Threatens Free W ill?

In a review o Effective

Intentions.

Manuel Vargas suggests that the

core threat to free will might arise not from the striking empirical prop o-

sitions that I discuss there , but instead from the bare fact that there are

neurological antecedents to conscious decisions. . . . What is really at

stake is whether our conscious intentions, even given some role in the pro-

duction of action, can be picked out of the causal nexus and treated as

special or 'fre e' (2009). He offers the following d iagnosis of what scien-

tists I disagree with might be thinking:

[They] are sometimes motivated by what the philosophical literature labels

as source intuitions the idea that for us to act with a free will we must be

the ultimate origins of strands of the causal nexus. On one way of putting

things, source theorists thitik that free acts catmot have causal antecedents

that extend back in time prior to the decisions o f the agent or the agent's free

formulation of the relevant characterological inputs to that decision. . . . A c-

knowledging that our actions have causal roots in pre-conscious brain

activity, as M ele

does,

just highlights the fact of our causal embeddedness. It

does nothing to block the basic worry of how we could be the kinds of beings

that stop the buck enough to count as free, or as deserving of moral praise

and blame.

I said that my topic in this article is an alleged scientific threat to free

will. The alleged threat is the one jus t reported.

Some scientists do seem to understand free will in such a way that,


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424 ALFRED MELE

must be created by nervous system activity. How else could they arise? Ideas

would have to arise without a physical basis. Nervous system activity must

always pre ce de . . . . I f

on

has the experience of 'w illing' the nervous system

to do something, the impression of willing must have been preceded by

nervous system activity. Otherwise there would be no source and we are in

the realm of the supernatural. (2001, 364-65)

Fish er ' s c la im seem s to be that bec ause al l m ental events are prod uce d b y

ne rvo us system ac t ivi ty, free wil l is an i l lusion that the Libet-style

thesis that free will is an illusion is entailed by the fact that all mental

events are produced by brain events.' He seems to assume that free will

has to be supernatural.

P.

Read Montague takes a similar position:

Free will is the idea that we m ake cho ices and have thoughts independent of

anything remotely resembling a physical process. Free will is the close

cousin to the idea of the soulthe concept that 'you', your thoughts and

feelings, derive from an entity that is separate and distinct from the physical

mechanisms that make up your

body.

From this perspective, your choices are

not caused by physical events, but instead emerge wholly formed from

somewhere indescribable and outside the purview of physical descriptions.

This implies that free will cannot have evolved by natural selection, as that

would place it directly in a stream of causally connected events. (20 08, 584)

Here Montague represents free will as something that depends for its

existence on the truth of substance dualisma view that includes a com-

mitm ent to the idea that associated with each hum an person, there is a

thinking thing . . . not composed of the same kinds of stuff as . . .

nonmental things (Zimmerm an 2006 , 115; Zimm erman describes the

thinking thin g as a soul, but some substance dualists prefer to use the

word m ind ). And, as I pointed out (Mele 2009, 67 -6 8, 110 -13), there

are similar dualistic elements in L ibet's and W egner's thinking about

fr

will.

As Vargas mentions, in

Free Will and Luck

(Mele 2006) and

elsewhere I defend a position on what free will m eans. My position is

thoroughly naturalistic. I certainly do not view free will as something that

depends for its existence on the truth of substance dualism. Furthermore,


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ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC THREAT TO FREE WILL? 425

mine in rebutting the scientific arguments I examined for the thesis that

free will is an illusion. Instead, I wanted to rebut those arguments by

showing that the striking empirical propositions I referred to earlier and

other propositions of this kindpropositions that play a pivotal role in

these argumentsare not justified by the data. This is something I could

do without arguing about what free w ill means. And that is a reason for

proceeding in the way I did: readers do not need to agree with me about

what free w ill means in order to see why the empirical propositions at

issue are not justified by the data.

2.Arguing with Scientists about What Free W ill Means

The following argument is suggested by some remarks I quoted from

Vargas (2009) in the preceding section and by the passages I quoted from

Fisher and Montague:

1. All conscious decisions have neurological antecedents.

2.

A conscious decision is freely made (or is an exercise of free will)

only if it has no neurological antecedents.

3.

So no conscious decision is freely made (no conscious decision is

an exercise of free will).

I certainly accept prem ise I. I do not see how a real human being (or

nonhum an animal) can make conscious decisions in the absence of neu-

rological antece dents. And I certainly reject prem ise 2. Philosophical

grounds for rejecting prem ise 2 are implicit in, for exam ple, my

Free Will

and Luck

(Mele 2006). Here I will take a more scientific approach to the

question how progress might be made in efforts to resolve disputes about

that premise.

As I mentioned. Fisher, Montague, and others understand free will

very differently than I do. For exam ple, they seem to understand free w ill

in a way that makes premise 2 true, whereas I do not. If I were to try to


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426 ALFRED MELE

There is evidence that lowering the subjective probability people

give to the proposition that free will exists increases bad behavior. In one

study (Vohs and Schooler 2008), people who read passages in which sci-

entists deny that free will exists cheat significantly more often on a

subsequent task than others do. (People who read pro-free-will passages

do about the same as those who read neutral passages.) In another study

(Baum eister et al. 2009 ), people who read anti-free-will statements

behave more aggressively than a control group that reads neutral state-

ments: they serve significantly larger amounts of spicy salsa to people

who say they dislike spicy food, despite being told that these people have

to eat everything on their plates Now , suppose that what such scientists

as Fisher and Montague mean by "free will" is very different from what

most people mean by it. As they themselves understand free will. Fisher

and Montague may be entitled to be very confident that free will is an

illusion; and they m ay feel entirely justified in going public with that new s

even if they leam that the news makes people's behavior worse. What

would they do if they were shown that most people understand free will

very differently? Perhaps they would try to convert people to their un-

derstanding of "free w ill." But they might instead try to look for evidence

about whether or not free will, as many people understand it, exists.

I have as much co ncem for tmth as most people, I hope; and I do not

advocate censorship about free w ill. But if, despite the evidence that there

is no free will as Fisher and Montague conceive of it, we lack good evidence

that there is no free will on a much more common conception of it, per-

suading scientists who share Fisher's and Montague's understanding of

free will that they are confused may prove useful. It may reduce the

amount of misleading and potentially harmfial free-will new s; and a better

understanding of what "free w ill" means may foster experim ents that have

more to do with free will than with substance dualism, for example.

How would I try to persuade scientists who take free will to depend

on substance dualism or on the existence of mental events that have no

brain events as causes that they are confused about the meaning of "free

will"? Well, scientists know that the simple fact that they are scientists


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ANOTH ER SCIENTIFIC THREAT TO FREE WILL? 427

that their understanding ofth at expression m ight jus t be an artifact of their

own personal upbringing and to consider the hypothesis that they are out

of touch with ordinary usage of firee w ill. In experiments with human

participants ( subjects, in slightly older terminology), scientists definitely

prefer to have a sample size larger than one person; and any scientist can

see that if the way he or she goes about determining w hat free w ill

means is simply to consult his or her own feeling or intuition about the

meaning, thento the extent to which it is important not to be mistaken

about the meaning of fi-ee will he or she should seek a better method.

There is an interesting body of work in psychology and experimental

philosophy on what nonspec ialists mean by free w ill. Attention to some

of it will prove useful. Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadel-

hoffer, and Jason Turner conducted survey studies about fi-ee will (2005,

2006). One of the studiesconducted with undergraduates who had not

studied free willfeatured the following story:

Imagine there is a universe that is re-created over and over again, starting

from the exact same initial conditions and with all the same laws of nature.

In this universe the same conditions and the same laws of nature produce the

exact same outcomes, so that every single time the universe is re-created,

everything must happen the exact same way. For instance, in this universe a

person named Jill decides to steal a necklace at a particular time, and every

time the universe is re-created, Jill decides to steal the necklace at that time.

(2006, 38)

In response to the question whether Jill decided to steal the necklace of

her own fi-ee will, 66% of the participants answered yes (p. 38). Very

similar results (ranging

fi om

68 % to 79%) were obtained for other stories

designed to portray actions in deterministic universeswhether those

actions were bad, good, or neutral (p. 39).

Eddy Nahmias, Justin Coates, and Trevor Kvaran conducted a study

designed to test, among other things, how the kind of causation featured

in a probe affects judgments about fi-ee will (Nahmias et al. 2007). In

some of the probes decisions are com pletely caused by the specific

chemical reactions and neural processes occurring in a person 's brain,


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428 ALFRED MELE

Bracketed material in the text below appeared in a parallel probe:

Many respected neuroscientists [psychologists] are convinced that eventual-

ly we will

figur

out exactly how all of our decisions and actions are entirely

caused. . . . If these neuroscientists [psychologists] are right, then once

specific earlier events have occurred in a person's life, these events will

definitely cause specific later events to occur. For instance, once specific

chemical reactions and neural processes [thoughts, desires, and plans] occur

in the person's brain

[mind],

they will definitely cause

th

person to make the

specific decision he or she makes. (Nahmias et al. 2007, 224)

Participants were asked to indicate their degree of agreement or disagree-

ment with the following statement: If

th

neuroscientists [psychologists]

are right, then people make decisions of their own free w ill (225). W hen

the probe featured causation by thoughts, desires, and pla ns , 82.9%

agreed with the statement; and when it featured causation by chem ical

reactions and neural processes, 38.3 % agreed (227). This is, of course, a

huge difference. But it is interesting that 38% of the participants count

even decisions that are entirely caused [by] specific chemical reactions

and neural proces ses as being made of the person 's own free will. Such

participants would seem to see no need for a nonphysical mind or soul to

be at work in the production of free decisions.

It also is interesting that w hen the setting is switched from the actual

universe to a possible universe and the probes involve an agent who

performs a good or a bad action, most participants regard the decisions as

being made of

th

person's own free will. The results were as follows (A^

indicates causation by chem ical reactions and neural processes and

P

indicates causation by thoughts, desires, and plan s ):

Of One's Own Free Will: Agree

Bad Good

59.8 57.4

P

66.1 61.1


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ANOTH ER SCIENTIFIC THREAT TO FREE W ILL? 429

were not on their syllabus. About half of them (33) were presented with

the following text:

First answer the question on page # I. Then turn the sheet over and answer

the question on page # 2.

W e're interested in how you understand free w ill. Please read the following

sentences and answ er the question by circling your answer.

In 2019, scientists finally show exactly where decisions and intentions are

found in the brain. Our decisions are brain processes, and our intentions are

brain states.

In 2009, John Jones saw a 20 dollar bill fall from the pocket of the person

walking in front of him. He co nsidered returning it to the person, who did not

notice the bill fall; but he decided to keep it. Of course, given what scientists

later discovered, Joh n's decision w as a brain process.

Question: Did John have free will when he made his decision?

On page 2, the participants read an expression of our interest in how they

understand deserved moral blam e, the same probe as on page 1, and the

following question: Do es John deserve to be blamed for what he does?

The other participants (36) were presented with the same material in the

opposite order. (Order did not have a significant effect.)

The results were as follows. Nearly 90% (89.85%) of the participants

answered yes to the question about free will and about 87% (86.95%)

answered yes to the question about deserved blame. Apparently, for the

overwhehning majority, viewing a person's decisions as brain processes

was compatible with regarding the person as having free will (and as

deserving b lame).

Part 2 of

the

study was conducted with another group of students in

basic philosophy courses at Florida State University. Again, free will and

moral responsibility were not on the course syllabi. Because the responses

to the questions about free will and moral responsibility in part

were so

similar, I decided to ask about jus t one this time free will. I used a version

of the initial probe that was augmented to include the idea that our

decisions and intentions are caused by other brain processes (see note 2).


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430 ALFRED MELE

part 3 of the study with that question in mind. Participants were another

group of Florida State Universify undergraduates (N = 90) taking a basic

philosophy course that did not deal with free will. This time I used two

stories. One is a version of the story used in part 2 in which I strengthened

the physicalist aspect by adding (at the beginning of the story) that in

2019, scientists finally prove that everything in the universe is physical

and that what we refer to as 'm in ds ' are actually brains at wo rk. (The

remainder of the story is the same as the story in part 2.) The other is the

following com pliance dru g story:

In 2019, scientists who work for a secret military organization finally

develop a fool-proof compliance drug. The drug is used to make people

decide to do various things. W henever they give a person the drug and then

suggest a course of action, that person is irresistibly caused to decide to take

that course of action. They make their suggestions through a tiny computer

chip that they implant in a person's brain.

These chemists gave the compliance drug to John Jone s, a very honest m an.

When John saw a 20 dollar bill fallfi omhe pocket of

th

person walking in

fVont of him, they suggested keeping it. John considered returning it to the

person, who did not notice the bill fall; but, of course, he decided to keep it.

After all, the combination of

th

compliance drug and the suggestion forced

John to decide to keep it.

The order of presentation was counterbalanced, and participants were in-

structed not to change their answer to the first question in light of their

answer to the second. (They answered the question on the front of the

sheet, turned the sheet over, and answered the question on the back.)

Only 21.11%ofth participants said that John had free will when he

made his decision in the compliance drug story, and

73.33%

said this in

the physicalist scenario.^ The strong no free will response to the com -

pliance drug story indicates that the great majority of participants do not

take a free-will-no-matter-what perspective on human decision making

(see Feltz et al. 2009, 16-1 9). And a scenario in which physicahsm is very

salient elicits a strong free will response.

Andrew Monroe and Bertram M alle conducted a study in which par-


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a surprisingly low proportion of

respondents:

(1)

agreed

with the statement

Humans have free will only because they have nonphysical souls (15-

25%);

(2)

agreed

with the statement Our power of free will is something

that is not part of our brain (18%); or

disagreed

with the statement It is

because our minds are the products of our brains that we have free will

(only 13% when the statement followed a description of our brains as

complex and unique, and still only 25% when the statement followed a de-

scription of the brain as mechanistic, govemed

y

physical laws, and soon to

be understood scientifically).

(2011,

n. 5)''

In a discussion of Daniel Wegner's work, Daniel Dennett writes:

Ifyouare one ofthosewho think that free will is only

reallyfr

will if it

springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting

arrows of decision into your motor

cortex,

then, given

whdXyou

mean y free

will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you

think free will might be morally important without being supematural, then

my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably

thought it was.(2003,222)

Dennett adds that, despite his admiration for Wegner's work, he sees

Wegner as the killjoy scientist who shows that Cupid doesn't shoot

arrows and then insists on entitling his book

The Illusion of Romantic

Lov (224). One moral to take away from this, as I pointed out in

Effective Intentions,

is that if one sets the bar for free will that is, for

the pow er or ability to act freely ridiculously high, the thesis that people

sometimes act freely should strike one as ridiculous (2009 , 110).

As I also observed inEffective In tentions,substance dualist views are

rarely advocated in contemporary philosophical publications on free will,

and, indeed, contemporary philosophers who argue for the existence of

free will typically shun substance dualism (2009, 67). Nahmias and his

coauthors have provided evidence that many nonspecialists are not

committed to a conception of free will according to which nonphysical

souls or minds need to be at work in the production of free decisions. The

study of mine that I reported provides additional evidence for this, as does

work reported by Monroe and Malle (2010). Now, even if philosophers


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432 ALFRED MELE

pression, those scientists have more of a burden than I do. How would

theydefendtheir position on what free wi ll means? If and when such a

defense is forthcoming, it can be evaluated.

3.

Another Experiment and General Observation

In


I examine a wide range of data that have been

used to support the claim that

fi ee

will is an illusion. The ScienceN OW

Daily N ew s article from which I quoted at the beginning of this article

refers to a study (Soon et al. 2008) that was published after the book was

in press. I discuss the study shortly with the primary aim of illustrating a

general point.

Some philosophical background is in order first. The claim that we

act freely only if substance dualism is true should be distinguished fi-om

the claim that we act fi-eely only if our conscious decisions or conscious

intentions are at least sometimes among the causes of corresponding

actions.5 The existence of effective conscious decisions or intentions

seemingly does not depend on the truth of substance dualism. Conscious

decisions and intentions might, for example, be physical items or

supervene on physical items. In


I examine alleged

evidence for the claim that conscious intentions and decisions are never

among the causes of correspond ing actions (2009, chs. 5 and 6). I will not

repeat the examination here. However, I will repeat an observation that

helps forestall confusion.

For the most part, scientists are not metaphysicians; and they should

not be expected to take a stand on metaphysical connections between

mental items and physical itemsfor example, on whether conscious in-

tentions supervene on physical states. (There is an enormous literature on

supervenience. For the uninitiated, I recomm end Kim [2003].) From a

physicalist neuroscientific point of view, proof that the physical correlates

of intentions are among the causes of some corresponding actions counts

as proof that intentions are among the causes of some corresponding

actions, and evidence that the physical correlates of intentions are never


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accepting the imagined proof about physical correlates, and the argumen-

tation would be distinctly philosophical (2009, 146).^ (For a discussion of

evidence that conscious intentions or their physical correlates sometimes

are among the causes of corresponding actions, see Mele [2009], ch. 7.)

Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze, and John-

Dylan Hajoies conducted an experiment in which participants were asked

to perform a motor-decision task while their brain activity was measured

using . . . fMRJ (2008, 543). W hen they felt the urge to do so, they were

to freely decide between one of two buttons, operated by the left and right

index fingers, and press it imm ediately. The study 's key question [is]

whether any brain region encoded the subject's motor decision ahead of

tim e (544). Soon et al. write: we found that two brain regions encoded

with high accuracy whether the subject was about to choose the left or

right response prior to the conscious decision. They report that The pre-

dictive information in the fMRI signals from a region of

th

frontopolar

cortex (BAIO) was already present 7 s before the subject's motor decision.

Taking into account the sluggishness of the BOLD responses, the predic-

tive neural information will have preceded the conscious motor decision

by up to 10 s. The second predictive region is in the parietal cortex.

W hen signals from the two regions jus t mentioned are combined, the

encoding accuracy is greatest; and even then the accuracy is only about

60%,

with 50% being chance, of course (see Soon et al. [2008], Supple-

mentary figure 6, Haynes [2011], 93). This study raises several questions.

I w ill pursue just two of them.

First, is it true that the brain regions at issue encoded the subject's

motor decision ahead of tim e (544)? Given that the encoding accuracy

was only 60 % , it certainly is rash to conclude that a decision was actually

made at this early time (7 to 10 seconds before subjects were conscious of

a decision), and it is less rash to infer that, at this time, brain activity was

occurring that made it probable (though not highly probable) that the

agent would select a particularbutton.The brain activity m ay indicate that

the agent is, at that point, slightly m ore disposed to press that button than


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434 ALFRED MEL E

a thorough survey of the various philosophical positions on what free

w ill means, but I will com ment briefly on two schools of thought about

this:

compatibilism and incompatibilism.

Compatibilism and incompatibilism are theses about the conceptual

relationship between free will and determinism.' Determinism according

to a standard definition, is the thesis that a complete statement of

th

laws

of nature together with a com plete description of the entire universe at any

point in time logically entails a complete description of the entire imiverse

at any other point in time. (Human beings are parts of

th

universe, and a

description of what we were doing an hour ago is part of a complete de-

scription of the universe at that point in time.)

Compatibilism

is the thesis

that free will is compatible with the truth of determinism. Owing to their

acquaintance with contemporary physics, the great majority of contempo-

rary compatibilists do not believe that determinism is true; but they do

believe that even if it were true, that would not preclude our having free

will. Incompatibilism is the thesis that free will is incompatible with the

truth of determinism. Most incompatibilists endorseUbertarianismthe

conjunction of incompatibilism and the thesis that at least some people

sometimes have free will.

Compatibilism can sound very strange to nonspecialists. Elsewhere,

I have fried to explain why the strange sound might be misleading and

why compatibilism should be taken seriously (Mele 2009, 153-55); I will

not do so again here.^ Recall Vargas's report that source theorists think

that free acts cannot have causal antecedents that extend back in time prior

to the decisions of the agent or the agent's free formulation of the relevant

characterological inputs to that decision (2009). Com patibilists do not

see even causal antecedents that sfretch all the way back to the Big Bang

as being necessarily incom patible with free will: they contend that as long

as the causal chain goes through the agent in an appropriate w ay, the agent

can exercise free will.

It might be claimed that if, in situations of the sort that Soon and col-

leagues discuss, people make decisions or have specific intentions

several seconds before they think they do, even compatibilists should


14/20


not make a decision about which button to press: instead they uncon-

sciously acquire an intention to press a certain button long before it seem s

to them that they intend to press it.' Should compatibilists be terribly

wo rried? No t at all. It is very difficult to reason persuasively from alleged

or imagined findings about cases in which, as the agents realize, they have

no reason to favor either option over the other to the conclusion that the

same sort of thing would be found in cases in which the agents are far

from indifferent about their options. Presumably, automatic tie-breaking

mechanisms are at work in many cases in which we are indifferent

between or among the available options, as I have observed elsewhere

(Mele 2009, 83); and it is rash to assume that what happens in situations

featuring indifference is also what happens in situations in which unset-

tledness about what to do leads to careful reasoning about what to do.

Even if some action-ties are broken for us unconsciously well before we

are aware of what we intend to do, it certainly does not follow from this

that we never make effective conscious decisions. (And, of course, com-

patibilists are not at all troubled by the observation that these decisions

have neurological antecedents. )

W hat about libertarianism? Libertarian theories about free will divide

into three kinds: event-causal, agent-causal, and noncausal. Typical event-

causal libertarian theories assert that agents never perform free actions

unless some of their actions are indeterministically caused. Whereas the

laws of nature that apply to deterministic causation are exceptionless,

those that apply most directly to indeterministic causation are instead

probabilistic. Tj^ically, events like deciding to help a stranded motorist

as distinct from the physical actions involved in actually helpingare

counted as men tal actions. Suppose that Moe 's decision to help a stranded

motorist is indeterministically caused by, among other things, his thinking

that he should help. Given that the causation is indeterministic, he might

not have decided to help given exactly the same internal and external con-

ditions. In this way, event-causal libertarians seek to secure the possibihfy

of doing otherwise that they require for free action, or for fundamentally

free action (that is, free action that does not derive its freedom solely from


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16/20

ANO THER SCIENTIFIC THREAT TO FREE WILL ? 437

To the extent to which the study by Soon and colleagues provides

evidence that all actionsincluding decisionsare caused and that brain

events are among the causes of all actions, any libertarians who restrict

the sphere of fi-ee actions to uncaused actions or to agent-caused actions

that do not have brain events among their causes are in trouble. I have no

sympathy for libertarian views of these kinds.

One point to be emphasized about the data reported in Soon et al.

(2008) is that they pose no threat to

fi ee

will on some leading philosoph-

ical accounts of what fi-ee will means. This is so even on the assumption

that all actions are caused and that all actions have brain events among

their causes. A second point to be em phasized harks back to the discussion

in section 2 of folk understandings offi eewill. That discussion suggests

that the data at issue also do not threaten free will as the majority of non-

specialists conceive of it.

I said that my primary aim in discussing Soon et al. (2008) was to il-

lustrate a general point. Here it is: Before we make a judgment about

whether particular data threaten the existence of free will, asking

ourselves how fi-ee will would need to be understood in order for the

threat to be a genuine one may often prove useful.

4 Conclusion

Undoubtedly, a number of things are among the causes of my persisting

in reading scientific work onfi eewill and in and vm ting about it. As I see

it, they include my belief that, as yet, there is no serious scientific threat

to free will, my belief that the false news that scientists have shown that

free will is an illusion is potentially dangerous, and my belief that I should

continue to try to counter that new s. (Another cause, in my opinion, is my

persisting curiosity about how decisions, intentions, and actions are caused;

and some scientific work on fi-ee will sheds valuable hght on these issues.)

The main moral of the present article is that scientific arguments for the

nonexistence of free will that depend on the premise that, in Vargas's

words, the bare fact that there are neurological antecedents to conscious


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438 ALFRED MELE

OT S

1. Libet himself believed that free will is possible in a limited dom ain. He asserts that

if the 'act now' process is initiated unconsciously, then conscious free will is not doing

it

(2001,

62; see 2004, 136). But he also claims that once we become aware of our

decisions or intentions, we can exercise free will in v toing them (2004, 137-49). Some

people follow him part of the way. They accept the thesis about when and how decisions

to act are made but reject the window of opportunity for free vetoing as an illusion

(Wegner 200 2, 55; Hallett 2007).

2.

This probe read as follows:

In 2019, scientists finally show exactly where decisions and intentions are found in the brain and

how they are caused. Our decisions are brain processes, and our intentions are brain states. Also,

our deeisions and intentions are caused by other brain processes.

In 20 09 , John Jones saw a 20 do llar bill fall from the pocket of the person w alking in fi-ont of

him. He eonsidered returning it to the person, who did not notice the bill fall; but he decided to

keep it. Of course, given what seientists later discovered, John's decision was a brain process

and it was caused by other brain processes.

The survey also asked whe ther students were taking their first philosoph y class after high

school. The breakdown was 58 yes and 28 no. This difference did not have a statistically

significant effect on their answers about free will. Abo ut 88 % of the first group and 82 %

of the second group answered yes to the question about free will.

3. Of the participants who saw the physicalist story first (N = 43), 79.0 7% answ ered

yes to the question about that story, and 25.58% answered yes to the question about the

com pliance drug story. The figures for those w ho saw the stories in the reverse order were

68.09%

vs. 17.02%. Students who were taking their first philosophy course (N = 53) and

those who were not (N = 37) gave very similar responses: grand averages for yes answers

were 71.70% vs. 22 .64% for the first-time students and 75.68 % vs. 18.92% for the others.

4. Also see Stillman, Baum eister, and M ele (20 11).

5. A comm ent on the expression among the cause s may be usefiil. Suppose I had

deleted am ong or among the from the following string of word s: our conscious . . .

intentions are at least sometim es among the causes of corresponding actio ns. Som e

readers would have inferred that I was entertaining the hypothesis that sometimes a

conscious intention is the only cause of a corresponding action. That is not a hypothesis

that I wish to entertain (see Mele 2009, 111).

6. Jackson 20 00 is an excellent brief critical review of various relevant ph ilosophical

positions that highlights the metaphysical nature of

the

debate.

7. Co mp atibilism and incom patibilism are often used as well to refer to views

about the conceptual relationship between moral responsibility and determinism.

8. I should add that I am officially agnostic about the issue that separates compati-

bilists from incompatibilists.

9. Freely dec iding to press a button is one thing, and freely pressing it is another. I


18/20


opinions expressed in this publication are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views

of the John Templeton Foundation.

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