What Is Free Will?

The question of whether we have free will–or whether our actions are determined by factors we don’t know about and can’t control–is an ancient one. It probably won’t be resolved any time soon.

Nevertheless, in my new book, Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live (November 1, 2022), I argue that free will is likely fact indeed, that it may be inescapable, given the kinds of problems our brains have evolved to solve.

The book relies on the definition of free will proposed by philosopher Christian List in his 2019 book Why a free will is real. List argued that free will merely require three related abilities: the ability to think up multiple possible alternatives for action, to pick one of them, and to start doing it.

I love this definition because it removes the free will question from philosophy (where it has so much complication and baggage) and puts it squarely into psychology–and indeed, into the very branch of psychology where I’ve spent my whole research career.

My research asks, how do people decide on what goals and initiatives to pursue, and then how do they go about enacting them? Brain function research shows that generating and deciding between options is a very advanced capability within the brain.

This capacity lets us imagine and simulate various possible futures we might approach, select the one we most prefer, and then get to work. Indeed, this ability to imagine multiple possible actions (and even worlds) may be the main reason the human brain exploded so much in size and sophistication early in our species’ history. We are erstwhile controllers of reality, trying to impose our preferences upon the quantum flux, and we can do a surprisingly good job of it.

Fans of determinism are unlikely to accept List’s definition of free will because they think it must mean that our intentions are “uncaused”–that they appear from nowhere and give us magical powers unfettered by the past or our underlying condition and brain state. Let’s be clear about the obvious. Our choices don’t emerge from a vacuum–they are grounded in and constrained by an incredibly complex array of machinery, which must work correctly for us to choose well.

And our choices are also much influenced by conditions lower in our body (are we hungry, scared?) and out in the world (is somebody pressuring us?). But my view is that our choices can never be fully predicted in advance (sorry, the science of psychology!) because there is so much happening in the present, much of it involving our spontaneous and self-directed thought processes.

Were our thought processes always going to occur in just one way, no matter what? There is good reason to doubt it, not least because we’d have to be able to exactly predict peoples’ situations before we could exactly predict their response to those situations.

More importantly, in the book, I show that believing in hard determinism requires believing that:

1. Everything people think and do is already fixed, way back in the big bang (this is called a predetermination).
2. The only science we really need to understand behavior is the most basic one, namely, atomic physics (reductionism).
3. People’s experiences of exercising agency are entirely illusory (this is called epiphenomenalism).

The extremity of these beliefs suggests that hard determinism is much more science fiction than science fact–it certainly hasn’t been proven in any rigorous way. And worse, as shown by decades of self-determination theory research, it is fiction that would disempower people if they actually believed it.

Free Will Essential Reads

How and Why We Use, Downplay, or Ignore Evidence

Are We Puppets of Our Brain?

So, our decisions and choices are caused; they don’t appear from nothing, like the whims of a god. Nevertheless, our self-experience and mental intentions play a critical part in the causal process. We notice things. Then we ask ourselves questions, get further information, and then ask further questions.

Thus bidden, possibilities begin showing up in our minds until we pick the one that appears most optimal at that moment. Why did we pick it? Because we wanted it or thought we wanted it. Why did we want it? That is the most interesting question, well worth scientific investigation. It requires understanding the very top level of brain activity, where our self resides, rather than looking down into physics and chemistry or back into the distant past. It requires accepting that behavior can never be fully predicted in advance, tendencies can be identified, and best guesses can be made, but these predictions will always fall short.

In sum, it may be that we can’t help choosing, like it or not–just as the existential psychologists have long claimed (“Man creates his own essence,” said John-Paul Sartre, and “Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself,” said Fromm). We might not like it because choice can be very scary, with unpredictable consequences.

A belief in determinism is one defense against these consequences–a person can say, “I couldn’t help it. I had to do it. I know my feeling of choosing is only a delusion, and I have no power.” But don’t such excuses sound kind of pitiful? Maybe it’s better to embrace the likelihood that we create our own lives via our decisions. At the very least, believing helps make it so.