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The idea suggested by Benjamin Libet that what we call free will is not the popularly assumed ability to decide all our seemingly deliberate (as opposed to instinctive) actions but consists of the more limited ability to either let the predetermined action be completed or to veto it may be unsatisfying to some but its implications are worth exploring in case it turns out to be true. What this model says is that I have no control over what I decide to do in any given situation but I do have control over whether that decision is actually carried out. In other words, I cannot control my thoughts and decisions but I can control (within a limited range) my actions.
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People who are determined to keep the Ghost in the Machine alive still have a few options. Ironically, although it was Libet’s early experiments that cast doubt on the idea that we have free will, he himself was disturbed by that implication and has sought to find ways to salvage it. In his many publications, he repeats his belief that his experiments did not rule out free will and suggests ways in which it could still operate.
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In 1983, Benjamin Libet and his associates did some experiments that were similar to the 1963 Grey Walter experiment but with the added feature that the patients could observe the equivalent of a clock and thus note when they made the decision to act. This enabled a more objective determination of the time when they first had the conscious thought to carry out the action and not depend upon a possibly misleading feeling of surprise to infer the ordering of events.

One of the key original papers was published in the journal Brain (Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act, vol.106, p. 623-642, 1983) which does not seem to be available online but you can read online a later review published by Libet in 1999 (Do we have free will?, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 6, No. 8–9, 1999, pp. 47–57) where he summarizes his findings and its implications for free will.
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In post #6 in this series, I discussed the 1963 Grey Walter experiment in which patients who had electrodes implanted in their brain’s motor cortex that could send a signal to advance a slide were surprised that the projector seemed to anticipate their decision to advance the slide. Does this mean that their unconscious neural activity had decided to advance the slide before telling the conscious brain that it had decided to do so? If so, it seriously undermines the idea of free will. In his book Consciousness Explained (1991, p. 167) which discusses the experiment, Daniel Dennett warns that it is premature to accept this conclusion because it is based on the articulated sense of surprise reported by the patients, and the brain is not the most reliable of historians.
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In the previous post, I provided a schematic description of two models of how the brain works, one with free will and the other without it. The traditional brain model with free will is given by

(D)                                    GES
                                        ↓
will → conscious thoughts → unconscious neural activity → action

Our genes (G), environment (E), and the inherent randomness in the laws of nature (S) all contribute right up to the present instant to the brain’s structure and unconscious neural activity. But in this model, there is a separate branch in which our (uncaused) free will makes decisions first which manifests itself as a conscious thought. In this model there should be a definite temporal sequence in which the act of will occurs first, followed by conscious thoughts, then unconscious brain activity caused by that conscious thought, and finally the action.
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It is time to look at specific models of how the brain works.

In the previous post, I pointed to a paper by biologist Anthony Cashmore which argues that our brains are the product of genes (G), environment (E), and stochastic (i.e., random) processes (S). This GES combination influences the unconscious neural activity in our brains, which in turn gives instructions to the motor neurons that control our actions. So the causal and completely physiological chain goes like (A):

(A) GES → unconscious neural activity → action

The directions of the arrows signify the causal relationships. Our bodies are in a state of constant activity, with hearts beating, blood flowing, digesting food, breathing, secreting chemicals, producing new cells and disposing of old one, and so on, all of which take place without us being aware of it. I think everyone (except those religious people who can’t bear to see god not taking part in every single activity) will accept that our brains control and moderate all this unconscious behavior. What is in dispute is what gets added on to this basic model.
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The possibility of the existence of Lucretian random swerves that destroy determinism received a boost in the early twentieth century with the advent of quantum mechanics and its associated uncertainty principle that eliminated strict classical determinism.

Believers in free will seized on the inherent randomness built into these newly discovered laws of nature to argue that free will could exist and manifest itself at the quantum level. However, as our understanding of quantum mechanics has increased, few scientists seriously accept this possibility anymore because of the many problems such a model has. After all, random processes are, well, random, meaning that they are not subject to being controlled. If indeterminancy at the quantum level is what undermines determinism, what we would have is not free will but what we might call ‘random will’, in the sense that we would be acting according to the random outcomes of quantum level phenomena over which we have no control. Furthermore, while individual quantum events may be completely indeterminate, they do obey laws that enable us to accurately predict statistical outcomes, so these events cannot be truly free. Free will as popularly conceived does not consist of random or statistically predictable behavior but of the ability to deliberate and determine specific outcomes. No mechanism has been proposed to suggest how that might occur.
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Defining what is meant by free will is not easy. In a loose sense it implies a denial of strict determinism, in which all our actions are completely determined by the past and the immediate environment we find ourselves in. The philosopher John Searle describes free will as the belief “that we could often have done otherwise than we in fact did.” In other words, although I am currently sitting at my desk typing, I think I could just as easily stand up and sing or hop around the room or do any other seemingly spontaneous act. My decision to not do so and continue typing seems like a conscious, freely chosen decision that is not entirely pre-ordained. The catch is that it is hard to reject the alternative hypothesis that all the options I considered were already determined by my history and the external stimuli of the moment, as was also my decision as to which option to choose.
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The philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) didn’t think much of Rene Descartes’ idea of a disembodied mind, using its free will, acting as some kind of captain of the body, and coined the derogatory term ‘the Ghost in the Machine’ for it.

There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be described as the official theory… The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the doubtful exception of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being is both a body and a mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to exist and function. Human bodies are in space and are subject to mechanical laws which govern all other bodies in space… But minds are not in space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws…

…Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.” (quoted by Stephen Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 9)

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It’s been awhile since I inflicted on this blog’s readers a long multi-part series of posts but I have decided to look at the question of free will, something that I have not addressed before, and this is such a weighty and controversial subject that it requires a somewhat lengthy discussion.

It used to be thought that what distinguished living things from inanimate matter was the presence of some mysterious life force, an élan vital. Modern biology has dispelled that myth of a vital essence, replacing it with the understanding that biological systems are nothing more than the working out of the laws of physics and chemistry on atoms and molecules. But there are some forms of vitalistic thinking that are still extant because people tend to want to cling on to the idea that there is something special about living things, especially human beings.
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