BY STUART T. DOYLE

The question of whether or not we have free will has been pondered by philosophers, psychologists, theologians, neuroscientists, and by many of us in our own conversations and thoughts. Nearly two thousand years ago, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus declared, “You may fetter my leg; but not Zeus himself can get the better of my free will.”1 But Epictetus also believed in a deterministic world where each event is determined by preceding causes. How can this apparent contradiction be resolved?

In the 1940s, Bertrand Russel saw no reason that human volitions would not also be determined in the same way that inanimate processes are determined. Further, he saw the determined nature of volitions as incompatible with a person being the true source of his own actions. Russell supposed that an evil scientist could, by use of psychoactive drugs, manipulate a person to perform certain actions. And this hypothetical manipulation did not seem to Russell so different from normal life, where people are manipulated to do what they do by natural causes outside their own control.2

Fifty years after Russell published his critique of the Stoic notion of free will, several other philosophers made the same argument.3, 4, 5

Today, the continued quandary contributes to a sustained lack of consensus on free will. According to surveys, most people—including most philosophers— believe in some form of free will, most under the rubric of compatibilism.6,7 Novelist and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer summed up the dilemma, “We must believe in free will, we have no choice.”

However, the debate still rages in the world of academic philosophy, in a broader audience reached by podcasts and popular books written by scientists, and among readers of Skeptic. Here I will try to convince you that free will is real and not an illusion. I’ll argue that far from being exemplars of rationality and skepticism, the main arguments against free will make unjustifiable logical leaps and are naïve in the light of cutting-edge scientific findings.

Throughout the philosophical literature,8 resolving the question of whether or not we have free will has often revolved around two criteria for free will:

1. We must be the true sources of our own actions.

2. We must have the ability to do otherwise.

I argue that humans meet both criteria through two concepts: scale and undecidability.

Scale and the True Sources of Our Actions

In an article in The Journal of Mind and Behavior,9 I argued that many of our actions are caused by our wills; that is, by our conscious desires and intentions. This is not disputed by most (what I’ll term) free will deniers. They more often dispute that our wills are free, not that we have wills and that our actions often follow from our wills. Sam Harris, one such determinist with a large general audience, has said that the subjectively felt intention to act is the proximate cause of acting. Harris makes the same basic claim as renowned scientist Francis Crick,10 philosophers such as Bertrand Russell2 and Derk Pereboom,4 and many others. They claim that in addition to the proximate cause (the will), our actions have ultimate causes lurking behind them that are the relevant causes to consider when judging whether or not our wills are free. The ultimate causes beyond and beneath the surface of our wills, they argue, make them unfree. What are these ultimate causes? Harris identifies genetics and environmental influences as “the only things that contrive to produce” his particular will.11 Molecules beyond DNA have also been offered as ultimate causes of our decisions. Biologist Jerry Coyne argued that, “Our brains are made of molecules; those molecules must obey the laws of physics; our decisions derive from brain activity.”12 Robert Sapolsky, a prominent neuroendocrinologist, is publishing a book this year, detailing many such mechanisms that, it is claimed, obviate the role of willed choices.13