Some Thoughts On Free Will

I recently read Annaka Harris's "Conscious" and her husband Sam's "Free Will." Both were enjoyable reads, but their views on (our lack of) free will differ from my own, but rather than a deep dive on the topic I'd like to contest a key point they raise.

Their cases against free will rest in part on neuroscience. In my view this is a category error. The reason is that modern science generally--and the Ben Libet experiments which both Sam and Annaka refer to specifically--rests on the assumption that things (the will, in Libet's case) can be explained in terms of what classical philosophers called "efficient" and "material" causes, while ignoring "formal" and "final" causes. The problem is, this is like trying to explain a poem by studying the ink (material cause) and the cause of its coming to be (efficient cause), but leaving out its meaning (formal cause) and why it was written (final cause). Of course, material and efficient causes are an important part of the explanation, but by themselves they are not a complete explanation. Hence the trouble with drawing conclusions about free will from neuroscience. Trying to find free will in the brain is like trying to find the meaning of a poem by studying the chemistry of its ink. One simply will not find it there. Thus, the idea that neuroscience can settle the issue of free will is not so much a scientific position as it is a metaphysical position posing as a scientific one.

Consider, for example, Libet's experiments. Libet asked participants who were hooked up to electrodes to record the time when they randomly decided to move their hand. The results showed that brain activity began some milliseconds before the participants were aware they had made their decision. Now, the Harris's conclude from this (and subsequent experiments like it) that science refutes free will. Trouble is, science can show no such thing. Indeed, the Harris's is just one interpretation of the data, but there are other interpretations that are consistent with free will. This is a point made in a book called "Free" by Alfred Mele. For example, Mele notes that Libet didn't count cases in which a patient refrained from acting, meaning that Libet was not able to determine whether the neural activity preceding conscious awareness could be the brain gearing up for an action that our conscious will later decides whether or not to carry out. Furthermore, Mele adds that the early neural activity could be likened to how sound registers in our consciousness: "Just as it takes some time for the sounds someone is making to travel to our ears and register in our brain and in our consciousness, it might take a little time for our decisions to show up in our consciousness. But it's not as though conscious reasoning was completely uninvolved in the decision-producing loop. The loop might just be a tad shorter than it seems." Another problem is that experiments like Libet's were designed around largely mindless decisions like flicking one's wrist, so it should not be surprising if it turns out that rote tasks like that scarcely register in our conscious awareness. But mindful acts, such as those that follow from the operation of the intellect, are different. Often intellectual decisions, such as 

This is because the intellect penetrates the conceptual order. Because there are always alternative ways to conceptualize a given set of physical things, the intellect can bring those items under a virtually infinite number of conceptual arrangements. Hence the ability to do otherwise is concomitant of having an intellect. 

In short, science cannot settle the matter of free will. This debate belongs to philosophy, and that's where it should stay.