The Mind and the Brain: Is Freewill an Illusion?

We can explain this problem in this way:

(1) Every event in the universe is necessarily determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

(2) Our thoughts and decisions are events in the universe.

(3) Therefore, our thoughts and decisions are necessarily determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

This is not some philosophical sleight-of-hand: these are the logical conclusions of naturalism. From the naturalistic point of view, our brains are fundamentally a cluster of chemical reactions, responding to the stimulation of their central nervous system and the five senses. Thus, under this view, we are not really controlling our brains; our brains are controlling us. As atheistic neurobiologist Sam Harris writes, “Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.”[1] He adds, “You are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world.”[2]

Does complexity lead to free will?

Some might point out that our brains are highly complex organs, comprised of billions of neurons. While this is surely the case, this does nothing to change the problem of determinism: After all, complexity doesn’t create free will. A collision of 100,000 dominos is far more complex than ten dominos, but it isn’t any more free. We can keep adding zeroes to the number of dominos, but this added complexity wouldn’t change the fact that these are determined.

Does ignorance lead to free will?

Atheist Michael Shermer admits that free will is simply an illusion in a naturalistic worldview. He writes, “I remain unconvinced that free will can ultimately be derived from determinism in any consistent logical way. The terms are incompatible.”[3] How does he deal with this difficulty? He argues that our ignorance of our determined choices makes it appear as if we have free will. Thus he continues, “What we are left with is a type of free will from ignorance, ignorance of all the determining causes in our lives, such that we are, de facto, free because when we make choices we cannot know all the causal variables.”[4] He later writes, “The enormity of this complexity leads us to feel as if we are acting freely as uncaused causers, even though we are actually casually determined. Since no set of causes we select as the determiners of human action can be complete, the feeling of freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes. To that extent we may act as if we are free.”[5]

If determinism is true, we might not know what human beings were determined to do, but we would know that they were determined to do it.

Does indeterminacy lead to free will?

Others argue that our brains are influenced by quantum physics, which are random fluctuations at the atomic level. But ask yourself, “Does it make me feel any better to think that my thoughts are random, rather than determined?” Random reactions in no way solve this problem, as many naturalistic thinkers freely admit (pun intended):

Susan Blackmore (atheistic psychologist): “The addition of truly random processes to a determined world, as in radioactive decay or quantum physics, does not provide a loophole for free will since these processes, if they are truly random, cannot be influenced at all.”^[6]

Sam Harris (atheistic neurobiologist): “To the extent that the law of cause and effect is subject to indeterminism—quantum or otherwise—we can take no credit for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will.”[7]

Kenneth Miller (biologist at Brown University): “The quantum state of an individual particle can directly influence the output of a computing device. By contrast, the warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain would not be an ideal place for quantum-level effects to have any noticeable influence on the workings of neurons.”[8]

Michael Shermer (atheistic founder of The Skeptic’s Society): “Even if it could be established that quantum uncertainties lead to random neuronal firings, that does not produce free will; it just adds another deterministic causal factor, one that is random rather than non-random.”[9]

Indeterminacy (of various stripes) simply does not bring about free will. After all, would it make you feel any better to think that your thoughts are random, rather than determined? Either way, your thoughts would not be within your control. Under naturalism, we do not have reasons; we only have reactions.

Naturalism renders free will illusory

Because of this logical conclusion of naturalism, many naturalists consider consciousness and freewill to be an illusion:

Stephen Hawking (atheistic physicist): “The molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets…. so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”^[10]

J.L. Mackie (atheistic philosopher): “We ordinarily have an illusion of the literally immediate fulfillment of some of our own intentions. This is even a useful illusion.”^[11]

Alex Rosenberg (atheistic philosopher at Duke University): “Ultimately, science and scientism are going to make us give up as illusory the very thing conscious experience screams out at us loudest and longest: the notion that when we think, our thoughts are about anything at all, inside or outside of our minds… Thinking about things is an overwhelmingly powerful illusion.”[12]

Francis Crick (atheistic Nobel Laureate): “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”^[13] In the conclusion to his book, Crick calls the human brain a complex machine that “will appear to itself to have Free Will,”^[14] and yet this is simply an illusion.

Susan Blackmore (atheistic psychologist): “It is worth taking seriously the idea that vision is a grand illusion… Our feelings of having conscious control must be an illusion.”^[15] Elsewhere, she writes, “I long ago concluded that there is no substantial or persistent self to be found in experience, let alone in the brain. I have become quite uncertain as to whether there really is anything it is like to be me.”^[16]

Jerry Coyne (atheistic biologist at the University of Chicago): “There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year’s resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you’ll have no choice about whether you keep them… We are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics… Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics. True ‘free will,’ then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works… We can’t impose a nebulous ‘will’ on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.”^[17]

Sam Harris (atheistic neurobiologist): “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have… Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.”^[18] After reflecting on why he chose coffee over tea, Harris writes, “The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.”^[19]

Tom Wolfe (atheistic science writer): “Genetics determine not only things such as temperament, role preferences, emotional responses, and levels of aggression, but also many of our most revered moral choices, which are not choices at all in any free-will sense but tendencies imprinted in the hypothalamus and limbic regions of the brain.”^[20]

Rita Carter: “The illusion of free will is deeply ingrained precisely because it prevents us from falling into a suicidally fatalistic state of mind—it is one of the brain’s most powerful aids to survival.”^[21]

Rita Carter: “At the emotional level we may continue to believe that we are more than machines, but that need not stop us from accepting the opposite on a rational level and adapting our customs to reflect that knowledge.”^[22]

Inconsistency of naturalism

Naturalistic thinkers simply do not seem to grasp the determinism that follows from their naturalism, speaking out of both sides of their mouths. Thus, atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins writes, “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly-programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”[23] Yet he later writes, “We are built as gene machines… but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”[24] So, which is it? Are we “blindly-programmed” or do we have “the power to turn… [and] rebel” against our programming?

Atheistic philosopher Daniel Dennett writes, “[The brain] evolved in much the way that our immune system or respiratory system or digestive system has evolved. Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.”[25] Can he not see that these other bodily systems are determined? Christian philosopher Mark Linville comments on Dennett’s earlier work Consciousness Explained (1991): “Consciousness has been ‘oddly absent’ even in twentieth-century works bearing such promising titles as Consciousness Explained. It is rather like picking up a title such as Europe Explored and ﬁnding that the author has serious doubts of the existence of that continent and devotes himself to explaining how putative Europeans might mistakenly think themselves to live there.”[26]

If freewill doesn’t exist, then we could never know if our knowledge of anything is true.

Reason implies that a personal agent can choose between one option and another, as well as evaluating the truth of each. But if determinism is true, then we could never know that we have arrived at the truth, because we would have been determined to do so. All we could ever say is that we hold it to be true (i.e. this is our current psychological state)—not that we think it is true (i.e. we have used reason to come to this conclusion). As C.S. Lewis once wrote, “If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?”^[27] Methodological naturalist Kenneth Miller writes, “Acceptance of behavioral determinism undermines not only itself, but all of science and perhaps the arts and humanities as well. It is stunning how few critics of free will seem to realize this and to appreciate the grim nihilism that flows from such ideas.”^[28]

If freewill doesn’t exist, then we should never try to argue someone into determinism.

This is both because we do not know whether our view is right (because we would be determined to hold it), but also because the other person wouldn’t be capable of changing their view (because they would be determined to hold their position). Nancy Pearcey writes, “Why are humans able to rise above the forces that supposedly created them? Can a puppet gain control over the puppeteer?”[29]

If freewill doesn’t exist, then morality does not exist.

A necessary prerequisite for morality is freewill. If we are really determined, then choosing between good and evil would be impossible. Thus when Coyne encourages us to “go about building a kinder world,” this is nonsense, because there is no one to build it in his view. When a man uses a chainsaw to severe someone’s head off, the Police always try to arrest the man, but they never try to arrest the chainsaw. This demonstrates that one is a personal being, and the other is a machine. But if determinism is true, both are just machines that were determined to perform their actions. This is a necessary consequence of determinism.

In addition to lacking a philosophical foundation for moral duties (in the absence of freewill), studies confirm how belief in determinism leads to moral decay. Of course, we might intuitively sense that determinism would have detrimental effects in the moral life, but in addition to this intuitive sense, in a 2008 study published in Psychology Science, Kathleen Vohs (University of Minnesota) and Jonathan Schooler (University of British Columbia) found that belief in determinism promoted cheating. They write, “Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves… These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.”^[30] In commenting on this study, Justin Bering of Scientific American wrote an article titled: “Scientists say free will probably doesn’t exist, but urge: ‘Don’t stop believing!’”

Our minds have the property of life-long identity that our brains do not.

Imagine if you remodeled an old car. You replace the brakes, then the engine, then the transmission, then the body, etc. Eventually, you replace all of the old parts of the car with new parts. Would you really be able to say that this was the same car? Of course not. This would be a different car altogether.

And yet, human beings regenerate their cells every several years. Our skin flakes off and our hair falls out. Every several years, you become a different you! And yet, we are still the same person, enduring throughout our life, rather than a million different persons enduring through millions of different physical states.

For instance, when you go to a high school reunion, you might still have feelings of affection or bitterness towards the people that you meet, lodged in your mind from high school. You may still remember the guy who stole your lunch money or the girl that broke your heart. But if physicalism is true, then the person you see at the reunion is technically not the same person that you knew (e.g. they gained weight, regenerated cells, grew grey hair, etc.).

We fear the future, and we regret the past. But, why? It wasn’t me who made those decisions, and it won’t be me who faces future ones. Moreover, if someone committed murder a decade ago, we do not say, “It wasn’t really them, because they were physically different.” Instead, we hold them responsible for their actions.

Is there any scientific evidence to prove the nonexistence of freewill?

Physicalists often argue that freewill doesn’t exist, because brain damage affects the way we think and act. For example, if a person drinks too much alcohol, this will clearly affect the way that they can drive. Likewise, if someone cracks you on the head with a baseball bat, this could have permanent effects on your ability to think clearly. Does this prove that the mind does not exist apart from the brain? We think not for a number of reasons:

First, these examples merely show that the mind is DEPENDENT on the brain, rather than IDENTICAL to it. Consider if a guitarist breaks one of his strings during a rock concert. This will surely have an effect on the music that he makes. The guitarist is separate from the guitar, but his guitar is essential to his music-making. In the same way, if our brain is not properly functioning, then our mind will have a difficult time using it to produce thoughts and decisions.

Second, the mind and the brain have different attributes, which demonstrate the fact that they are not identical. If we want to determine that two things are not identical, then we merely need to show that one has an attribute that another does not. Philosophers refer to this as Leibniz’s Law of the Indiscernability of Identicals. This law states that for any x and any y, if x equals y, then whatever is true of x is also true of y (and vice versa). This is just a fancy way of saying that if two things are identical, then they will have identical properties and attributes. Yet when we reflect on this, we quickly discover that our minds have different properties than our brains.

Our minds have properties like color or size that our brains do not. For instance, if I think about the Statue of Liberty, I am considering something that is a couple hundred feet tall. Yet nothing in my brain is a couple hundred feet tall. Likewise, when I think of the Statue of Liberty, I have a thought that it is green. And yet, nothing in my brain is green. Our thoughts have properties that our brains do not.

Third, even if freewill is an illusion, how could a non-conscious being observe it? An illusion can only occur if a conscious observer exists. So if freewill is a deep delusion, then who is having the delusion? Far from serving as evidence against freewill, even a perception of a delusion would actually support the existence of a conscious mind.

We might deny freewill with our lips, but not our lives

In her excellent book Finding Truth (2015), Nancy Pearcey details the tension of denying freewill in the practical landscape of life. While naturalists might deny freewill with their words, they cannot change the presence of freewill in the world. While they might disagree with the Christian worldview, they still need to live in the world created by the Christian God.

Daniel Wegner (from the Department of Psychology at Harvard University): “It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back… Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away.”[31]

Galen Strawson (philosopher at the University of Reading): “As a philosopher I think the impossibility of free will and ultimate moral responsibility can be proved with complete certainty. It’s just that I can’t really live with this fact from day to day. Can you—really? As for the scientists, they may accept it in their white coats, but I’m sure they’re just like the rest of us when they’re out in the world—convinced of the reality of radical free will.”[32] He writes, “Powerful logical or metaphysical reasons for supposing we can’t have strong free will keep coming up against equally powerful psychological reasons why we can’t help believing that we do have it.… It seems that we cannot live or experience our choices as determined, even if determinism is true.”[33]

Edward Slingerland (from the University of British Columbia) writes that no one “can help acting like and at some level really feeling that he or she is free.” We are “constitutionally incapable of experiencing ourselves and other conspecifics [humans] as robots.”[34] Yet he writes, “At an important and ineradicable level, the idea of my daughter as merely a complex robot carrying my genes into the next generation is both bizarre and repugnant to me.”[35] He writes, “There may well be individuals who lack this sense, and who can quite easily and thoroughly conceive of themselves and other people in purely instrumental, mechanistic terms, but we label such people ‘psychopaths,’ and quite rightly try to identify them and put them away somewhere to protect the rest of us.”[36]

Rodney Brooks (professor emeritus at MIT) states that humans are a “big bag of skin full of biomolecules.” He writes, “When I look at my children, I can, when I force myself… see that they are machines.” Yet he writes, ““That is not how I treat them.… I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis… I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs.”[37]

Marvin Minsky of MIT famously said that the human brain is nothing but “a three-pound computer made of meat.” Yet he writes, “No matter that the physical world provides no room for freedom of will; that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm.” We cannot “ever give it up. We’re virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it’s false.”[38]

In Chapter Two: Solving the Dilemma of Evidence Unseen: Exposing the Myth of Blind Faith (2013), I’ve also detailed a number of similar examples.

Conclusion

Denying freewill denies our direct experience of the world around us. Consider a number of questions to help discern what you believe in this regard:

Do you believe that you can ever discern truth from falsehood?

Do you think that people can ever change their minds?

Do you believe that torturers and rapists should be judged for their actions? Or are people just determined to do such actions?

Do you ever feel regret over your decisions that you’ve made? If you’re really not the same physical person who existed, then why do you feel that way?

Do you ever feel fear over events in the future? If you are not the same person that will be there, then why?

What do you find to be most plausible, given your direct experience of the world around you? How much evidence would there need to be for you to deny your direct perception of your own conscious thoughts? Why adopt a philosophical view that directly denies your most basic perception of the world around you?

APPENDIX A: What about studies in neuroscience that challenge freewill?

The Benjamin Libet study: This study (1985) showed a “ramp up” to making a decision, where 550 milliseconds before the choice, electrical activity began (i.e. half a second). However, subjects stated that their awareness began 200 milliseconds beforehand. Libet’s study has been critiqued on many grounds.

First, judgment times are unreliable—especially when we’re speaking of tenths of a second. Second, there’s no good evidence that the electrical activity at 550 milliseconds beforehand is not itself the ramp up to the choice. Third, merely flexing your wrist is a far cry from complex decision-making. Much of our reactions are biological reflex like this, but this does not relate whatsoever to complex thought and higher reasoning.

Atheist Daniel Dennett and methodological naturalist Kenneth Miller concur. Following Daniel Dennett in his book Freedom Evolves (pp.227-242), Miller writes, “The pathway from the retina to the visual cortex takes several milliseconds, and it may take even a bit loner for visual processing to present the image to the conscious self. These delays then have to be added to the time it might take for the brain to make the decision to push Libet’s button, and then to make a judgment as to which ‘snapshot’ of that moving dot was truly simultaneous with the decision. But then the perception of a decision may be further delayed by the time required to activate the motor cortex to send instructions to motor neurons to trigger muscular contractions that actually cause the finger to move.”^[39]

Chun Siong Soon study (2008): The media were very quick to claim that this study refuted freewill, because it was claimed “We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 [seconds] before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.”

However, many did not read the full journal article. On page 10, Soon (et al.) found that simple behavior could be predicted 60% of the time! Remember, the study only looked at a 50% decision as to whether the person would use the right or left hand, which is hardly statistically significant.

APPENDIX B: Couldn’t this same argument be used to prove that animals have souls?

After considering the evidence for a mind of soul, we might ask this question: Wouldn’t these arguments imply that animals have souls?

To answer this question, we need to begin with the clear portions of our knowledge, instead of the unclear portions. As in any field of knowledge, we don’t begin with the difficult portions of our understanding first, but with the clearest portions. If we believe that there is good evidence for a human mind or soul, we should start there, rather than starting with the unclear question of whether animals have minds. Of course, animal consciousness is confusing, but what is not confusing is that humans have minds, freewill, and consciousness. Since we do not have a first-person experience of what it is like to be an animal, this is far less certain. But claiming that animals are purely physical would not in any way invalidate our first-person, direct experience of having a conscious mind. How could it?

Perhaps an illustration is in order. When it comes to mathematical knowledge, it’s difficult for many to understand advanced Calculus. But what should we conclude from this? Should we throw out algebra, geometry, and multiplication tables because some portions of mathematics are confusing or unclear? Of course not! Instead, we should start with the clear portions, and move into the unclear portions with time. We should never trade what we don’t know, for what we do know about reality.

OPTION #1: Some philosophers of the mind believe that animals do indeed have minds and consciousness. However, they qualify this by noting that an animal’s mind is different than a human mind—just as animals are different from humans in other areas. Just as brains are different in various species of life, perhaps minds and souls are different as well. Hugh Ross refers to “soulish” animals. He notes that mistreating a beetle will not fundamentally change its behavior, but mistreating a dog will affect it substantially. Thus it’s possible that God endowed other life with other types or levels of minds. Animals have consciousness of their desires or instincts, but they lack consciousness of freewill. They cannot desire to change their desires.

OPTION #2: Other philosophers of the mind do not believe that animals have minds or consciousness. When we look at animal life, we may be committing anthropopathism. You might be familiar with the term “anthropomorphism.” This is where humans (anthropos) speak of reality in terms of human concepts or “forms” (morphe). Anthropopathism is where humans (anthropos) import human “emotions” (pathos) into non-human objects. For instance, any Disney cartoon usually includes anthropopathism, where animals speak, sing, dance, and feel the way humans do. Thus while we might believe that animals have minds in some sense, this could be a case where we are importing human experience in an invalid way.

Either way we understand this difficult question, it shouldn’t overturn our understanding of human consciousness and the mind. Since we do not know what consciousness looks like in the life of a dog or cat, we shouldn’t be dogmatic on this subject. On the other hand, this also would not in any way serve as a defeater of our clear perception of our own consciousness and freewill. For an excellent lecture on the differences between human and animal consciousness, see my friend and mentor Dennis McCallum’s lecture “Is Reason Reasonable Without God?”