Who’s in Charge?

Written By: Karthik Sunil Mech | B.Tech. II

Are your decisions really yours? This has been one of the most confusing questions in philosophy. On the surface, it’s pretty obvious; our actions, if not coerced by external elements, are indeed ours. But determinism, the belief that everything works on a cause-and-effect relationship and nothing can occur in any other manner than it does occur, says otherwise. In a deterministic universe, your choices don’t matter because whatever you do, your future is not going to change (since it is already predetermined). Yes, that would mean that your choice to opt for engineering for a better future doesn’t matter if you weren’t ‘destined’ to have one. Wait, before we get all nihilistic, let’s look at what science has to say.

In the 1980s, scientist Benjamin Libet carried out an experiment where subjects could flick their wrist whenever they wanted to and had to time exactly when they had the conscious thought to do so. He attached electrodes to their heads to monitor brain activity. Libet found that there was activity in the subconscious part of the brain hundreds of milliseconds before the conscious thought had occurred. This meant that the brain made the decision initially and the subject became conscious of that decision later. If this was true, free will doesn’t exist, because your brain does what it wants and we’re just puppets that believe we are responsible for our actions. However, Libet’s experiment had flaws — one being that the subjects could not have accurately timed when they actually got the conscious thought. Another major flaw was that the brain activity he observed (also known as the readiness potential) didn’t directly correlate to the movement of the wrist. Studies showed that this readiness potential could also relate to only imagining movements and not actually performing them. So, the Libet’s experiment couldn’t disprove free will; but what if the universe is still deterministic?

The answer could be compatibilism, which says that any decisions we make internally (free from external factors) are free, but they are still influenced by unchangeable events in the past. For example, your choice to read this article can be considered free, but it was definitely because someone sent this magazine to you or you stumbled upon it — things you could not control. So, coming back to the question: is free will really an illusion? It very much is, but it doesn’t matter. Even if our decisions are completely governed by uncontrollable incidents in the past, if we make our choices believing they are unaffected by external factors, then they are our free choices. But if free will really is an illusion, why do humans want it so bad?

Brian Thomas, a retired steelworker from South Wales, had a history of sleepwalking since he was a child. It was this mental illness that changed his life during one vacation. During the summer of 2008, he strangled his wife to death, thinking there was a young biker assaulting her. Brian claimed that he woke up in the middle of the night to find the man on top of her, so he automatically charged at him and started strangling him. After a while, he snapped back to his senses only to find his dead wife in his hands. He immediately called the police and confessed to the crime. On that night, Brian experienced ‘sleep terror’, a phenomenon where the brain shuts down (except for the most primitive neurological activities) and there is no possibility of conscious intervention because the high cognition areas of the brain are shut down. Brian felt threatened during this sleep terror episode, so his primitive instincts decided to eliminate the threat. Ten months later, the judge returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict during his trial after a neuroscientist confirmed that Brian was asleep during the crime and didn’t consciously commit it. Did the judge make the right decision?

Brian didn’t really have a choice; his brain did what it thought was best for it. Even though he will regret his actions and live in guilt for the rest of his life, he still committed a crime and walked free because he didn’t consciously do it. Multiple murders and rapes have been committed during sleep terrors, but can they be held responsible? After all, the brain is what controls the body and if we don’t have control over our brains, what do we control? Maybe we don’t control anything but we need to believe we do. Humans need to be held responsible for their actions so that we can live in harmony. Free will is as important to us as food and water and we shouldn’t let anyone take that away from us.