What did you do today?
Did you get up out of bed?
Did you kiss your partner goodbye?
Did you shout at that jerk who held you up in traffic on the way to work?
Whatever you've been up to, ask yourself this; how many of these things did you do because
you wanted to, because you mentally decided to?
Not because you had to out of necessity, but because it was your will?
The answer is none of them, according to some scientific studies anyway, as we're about
to find out in our list of four reasons why free will doesn't exist.
Number 4: It's a Trick The most obvious place to look for evidence
of free will is of course the brain, because you're not gonna find it in your ass are you?
In the years since we've been able to accurately study the workings of the human brain, there
have been many Neuroscientific investigations into this idea to determine whether or not
it exists.
But according to most of them, it seems that free will is an illusion, and it's our sneakly
old brains that are responsible for convincing us otherwise.
In the 1960's, a team of German Neuroscientists led by Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Luder Deecke
discovered that in the moment before your brain engages in conscious awareness it enters
a special state, one they called bereitschaftspotential - or readiness potential.
This was discovered when their subjects were asked to move their fingers, and EEG scans
conducted on them found that there was some significant activity in the brain's motor
cortex before the conscious part of the brain became active.
Kornhuber and Deecke's work was built on by Benjamin Libet in the 1980's, and he too found
that the human mind prepares itself to act before the conscious decision-making part
is aware of a task or threat - 0.35 seconds before to be precise.
It seems we are nothing more than our mind's meaty puppet, and recent fMRI scanning technology
has shown this bereitschaftspotential to be even more influential than we ever thought
possible.
Periods of up to ten seconds have now been noted between subconscious levels of the brain
making a decision and your conscious levels doing something about it.
It's a lot like your mom asking you what you want for dinner; you may think you've got
a choice, but this choice is an illusion, and there are only predetermined options available
for you to choose from.
It's Mac and Cheese again kid, deal with it.
Number 3: There's Too Much Noise How would you define the concept of free will?
Is it the ability to act independently of external forces?
Well that definitely doesn't exist, as every day you are subjected to a barrage of influences
from every one and every thing on the planet.
Every one of your life experiences has shaped you in some way or another, so even if there
is a part of your brain that is able to generate its own purpose and meaning from life, these
purposes and meanings will have been heavily influenced from the world around you.
For a start, think of all the various psychological manipulation techniques we've covered on this
channel before; confirmation bias that makes you seek out information which confirms your
beliefs, anchoring bias that gives undue precedence to the first piece of information you receive,
distinction bias, repetition bias, the deference principle.
There are so many ways to manipulate the human mind and so many people consciously and subconsciously
using these techniques every day, that there's very little room left for free will to have
any influence on your behaviours at all.
But if we are being influenced every day by other people's actions, then surely we're
guilty of doing this too, so is this not a form of free will?
Not really.
Many of these cognitive biases are psychological tricks played on us by our own brains in order
to make us feel better, and these processes are mostly subconscious.
For example, it's hard to hold two separate ideas in our minds at once, so the mental
stress of this cognitive dissonance is alleviated by our brains subconsciously choosing one
idea over another.
Just imagine how many times this might have happened in your lifetime; your brain might
have chosen one brand of cereal over another, one lover over another, one political belief,
one career, one philosophy or one whole life goal over another, and the crazy thing is,
your conscious brain had nothing to do with this decision.
Number 2: Emotions Let's play Devil's Advocate for a moment and
say that free will does exist, and that even within the maelstrom of events, people and
circumstances your brain has to cope with, that somehow it still manages to generate
and process independent thought.
Okay fine, but where do these thoughts come from?
Because the things we do, the things we desire and the actions we take to get them are entirely
driven by the chemical makeup of our brain.
As we discovered in our recent video on the four human emotions that control you, your
personality is defined by a series of chemicals, chemicals that generate fear, anger, happiness
and sadness in certain regions of the brain, regions which in turn determine your approach
to individual situations.
How you act and react is how we define your personality, and this unique identity is apparently
where free will is derived from.
However, the levels of your brain's chemicals can be manipulated, so how can free will exist
when our minds are so easy to control and subdue?
And since we know that your brain's chemical makeup can also be heavily influenced by your
genetics, this means that you're also living a life whose direction has been partially
decided by things that happened before you were even born.
And this would be true even if you were transplanted onto another planet light years away, because
your lifetime's desires and goals have been determined already by your genetics.
So if that is all that free will is, just a random assortment of chemicals and grey
matter, then surely what we perceive as conscious intentions and thoughts are merely a series
of outdated evolutionary responses to the world around us.
The only will our brains have isn't free; it's the will to survive, to fight, to feed
and to fornicate so that we and our species may continue.
That's not free will, that's just getting by.
Of course, your view of this point may be different if you believe that human beings
possess some sense of self beyond what we've observed in the brain.
There's no evidence for anything like a soul or other form of human essence existing; but
if it did, it seems that this would be the only way human free will could possibly exist.
Until we discover human souls are manipulated by dark matter or toasters or something.
Number 1: We Haven't Evolved If free will doesn't exist, then why do we
humans have consciousness at all if we're nothing but slaves to our biological makeup?
Why haven't we just evolved into zombies who shuffle around existing and nothing else?
I guess you could say that we have in a way, with our jobs, dinners and naptimes defining
pretty much everything we do.
But over time humans have broken this cycle and begun to think outside of our basic needs,
enjoying non-essential pastimes such as stamp collecting, line-dancing and the sharing of
dank memes.
So this presents us with a question; is free will a static concept, or is it fluid, is
it something human beings are developing gradually, much like consciousness?
This idea isn't mere conjecture, because when the concept of bereitschaftspotential was
discovered, Kornhuber and Deecke also found that humans have developed a kind of veto
on our subconscious decisions.
This has been confirmed in recent years, with a paper called "The point of no return in
vetoing self-initiated movements" revealing that humans have a certain cut-off point in
the decision making process, after which our conscious mind has little or no influence.
The study, which was published in the heftily titled Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences of the United States of America, concluded that human actions can only be cancelled
200 milliseconds or more before the onset of the movement.
Basically, there are a series of steps where your brain processes information and decides
what is best to do in any given situation, and while your brain may trick you into thinking
you've made this choice consciously, at the end of this process you do get to have your
say if you're sharp enough.
So it seems likely that some kind of learned awareness may be required to generate the
ability to overcome our subconsciously influential biological responses, and while we're currently
intelligent enough to conceive of free will, perhaps we're simply yet to develop brains
capable of enacting it.
So this begs the question; how are along the road towards true free will are we, and what
will we do when we find it?
And that's our list.
But if you're interested in learning more about the human mind and our purpose in the
universe, then take a look at our recent video on the five most puzzling questions of humanity.
And yes, we know some bozo spelt consciousness wrong in the thumbnail, but please forgive
us…we're only human after all.