Preconscious Free Will

How Free Will is Normally Experienced

Within philosophy, free will is commonly thought of as “free” to the extent that its operations are not entirely determined by physical causal laws. However, freely willed actions are not usually experienced as being entirely free of determining factors. Rather, choices, decisions, and actions are normally experienced as operating, with some degrees of freedom, within complex mental, physical, and social constraints. Consequently, psychologists have typically focused their interest on the systems that enable humans to have the freedom to choose, decide, and act that they actually experience themselves to have—a form of constrained free will. Studies of voluntary action in humans have made it clear that such systems need to include inner needs and goals, a global knowledge store (based on previous interactions with the world), processes for modeling current inner and external states of affairs, alternative strategies for action, methods for assessing the likely success of alternative strategies in the light of existing physical and social constraints, and the ability to learn from experience. Although such systems follow deterministic principles, their operation can be partly self-organizing and flexible, and their complexity can allow sufficient degrees of freedom to accurately model the ability to make choices and decisions, within the available alternatives, that humans actually experience. Given this, there is nothing within current psychological understanding of the mind, viewed as a complex system, which rules out a form of constrained free will—a position known in philosophy of mind as compatibilism.

Distinguishing Free Will from Conscious Free Will

Free will does, however, have to be distinguished from conscious free will, because in principle, the operations of such decision-making systems do not have to be conscious. If the detailed information processing involved could be sufficiently well specified, it could, for example, operate equally well in a nonconscious robot. Neuropsychological findings have also cast doubt on the role of the conscious experiences associated with willing and deciding in the operation of the volitional processes themselves. [Page 612]It has been known for over 40 years that voluntary acts are preceded by a slow negative shift in electrical potential recorded at the scalp known as the readiness potential (RP) and that this shift can precede the act by up to one second or more. More significantly, the neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet found that, for simple spontaneous acts such as flexing the wrist or fingers, RP even preceded the experienced wish to flex the wrist or fingers by around 350 milliseconds, suggesting that the brain is preparing to act even before the conscious wish to act appears!

Given its radical consequences, this finding and the experimental methods used to obtain it have been the subject of considerable discussion and debate. The broad consensus, however, is that the findings are not just artifacts. They were confirmed, for example, by Patrick Haggard and Martin Eimer who went on to investigate the preparedness of the brain to act with either the left or right hand, indexed by the lateralized readiness potential (LRP), a negative shift in electrical potential in the cerebral hemisphere on the opposite side to the active hand, when compared to the electrical potential in the one on the same side. Again, as with RP, LRP occurred before the conscious wish to move a given hand, although in this case by around 100 milliseconds (ms).

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