The 'Free Will' Concept Deconstructed

In this blog post I’ll be analyzing the concept of ‘free will’.
First of all, I want to demonstrate the meaning of this term and why free will is questionable in the first place. If we look at the dictionary definition of free will, it means:

‘The apparent human ability to make choices that are not externally determined.’

It has to be said that there is not yet any clear, definitive evidence of free will from a scientific standpoint.

Let’s take a look at the current understandings of brain science. Neuroscience tells us that we are made up of a combination of both conscious and unconscious neural activities. The neuroscientist David Eagleman uses an excellent analogy to explain his point about this statement in his book titled ‘Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain’. He says that the conscious areas of our brain act as the CEO of a company whereas the unconscious subroutines which we have no direct, conscious access to are the workers doing all of the repetitive, mundane tasks in order to keep the organization maintained. The CEO guides the company, organizes and sets long term goals, occasionally being called into action when something sudden or surprising occurs in the company, whereas the workers beneath the hierarchy manage to keep the productivity and working activities running as efficiently as possible without our direct conscious awareness.

A second point that neuroscience conveys is that the brain is a vast, interconnected network of neural activities. If you choose one area of the brain to study, it is inevitably influenced by other activities in other parts of the brain. It is all one big, complex load of biological processes for lack of a better term. Bearing this in mind, free will is assumed to be some ‘thing’ that is the so-called ‘uncaused’ causer – meaning it is not influenced by external factors, not even physical neural activities – so where does free will slip into all of this neural machinery beneath our skulls? The assumption of free will is incredibly flimsy, to the point where it has no physical referent and unfortunately an idea or concept which lacks physical referents means that it cannot be measured or quantified scientifically.

Dismissing the notion of free will is not to say that we are just unconscious biological machines. This is of course not true at all. We are capable of conscious thought. So far, brain science reveals that higher levels of conscious activities in the brain sit in the prefrontal cortex – this is the area which is often considered to be our ‘social’ brain, whereby art, music, cultural norms and many other complex human interactions are mulled over. Other animals out there have a much smaller prefrontal cortex, limiting their capacity to have full, conscious control in certain circumstances they find themselves in; often relying upon unconscious subroutines already equipped. The fact that we have a large cerebral cortex, which is the outermost layer of the brain, a huge area which other animals cannot compete with in size and efficiency, means that a lot of our behaviors have more conscious elements to them as well as a higher capacity to learn new behaviors and burn them into the circuitry of the brain. So, in short – we are not just unconscious biological machines – however, if an offender in society is not shown how to consciously take control over impulsive behavior, and is not shown how to critically think about certain problems they may encounter in life, the prefrontal cortex where the conscious mind primarily sits is not being utilized to its fullest extent, thus meaning that impulsive behavior has a higher likelihood of occurring, which can often be influenced by unconscious subroutines in the brain. We need to be able to exercise our conscious mind, so to speak, especially from our youngest years onwards. This needs to be coupled with a socially and scientifically relevant education.

To conclude, when we’re born, we’re not given the choice over either our genes or the environment we grow up in – so doesn’t this automatically call free will into question as well? An offender could go through their youngest years without any exposure to culturally defined ‘moral’ values yet when they are called in front of the judge for committing a crime, they are assumed to be vehicles of this flimsy concept called ‘free will’ where they should know better and should have acted more responsibly. It takes education and awareness in order to cultivate responsible behavior from individuals to make way for a more sustainable future for society.