There are disparate views regarding what consciousness is and what the boundaries of free will are.
The contention is primarily between a more traditional view, favouring a high degree of free will and conscious control over behaviour, and a more recent perspective that contends that free will is limited and behaviour is more automatic than previously thought.
Not only are the definitions not clear, but there is a tendency to align one's view with a political or social belief.
For example, someone who holds a ‘right wing’ perspective is more likely to agree with the idea that individuals have strong free will and are consequently responsible for their actions to a large degree.
However, someone who holds a ‘left wing’ perspective is more likely to agree with the idea that an individual’s behaviour is strongly influenced by their experiences and their environment and that they are less personally responsible for their actions.
These differences are significant and have far-reaching implications. It is important that as a society we have a collective and accurate understanding of free will in particular.
If it were true that behaviour was simply the result of a choice by an individual, who could just as freely choose one behaviour over another, then it would make sense to have a punitive penal system and harsh sentences. An individual could, in a straightforward and rational way, consider the cost and benefit of an action, then make an informed choice at the time.
If, however, there was little choice, or free will, exercised at the time a behaviour was ‘chosen’. If the wheels and levers were in fact set in motion much earlier, with only scant likelihood that any other choice would be made, then a punitive penal system and harsh sentence for that behaviour would make little sense. Penalising someone for something they have little control over is not reasonable. It would be like penalising someone for being too tall, or too short.
Free will and rational thinking are related. Having strong free will implies that an individual can rationally appraise a situation and make a decision accordingly. Spock would understand this.
Irrational thinking does not lend itself to free will. If our decisions are driven by our emotions or impulses, then we are not exercising much free will.
So how rational, or irrational, are we?
Consider smoking, alcohol and drug consumption, eating, exercising and partner choices.
Are rational decisions made regarding these?
If so, surely no one would smoke, drink or use drugs in a harmful way, eat to the point of obesity or drive somewhere when there was time to walk. I strongly suspect my wife would have made a different partner choice - if she chose rationally.
There is plenty of evidence that at least some of our decision making is irrational and not strongly suggestive of free will.
Let’s consider some things that are more evidently not reliant on free will:
Our heartbeat, breathing and general bodily function. They all happen quite reliably when we are sound asleep.
Soundness of mind, intelligence, sexual / gender orientation. There is little debate remaining about the degree of choice we have with these, most people accept that these things are simply part of the way someone is.
However what about:
Smoking, harmful drinking / drug-taking.
Recidivist offending.
Eating disorders and compulsive behaviours.
Are these things that people wilfully choose? Why can’t a smoker simply choose to stop?
Well, they could if willpower was available and was directed by conscious thought. However seemingly this is not the case.
Consider the experiment where subjects were asked to solve a simple puzzle, which was in fact unsolvable... (How did that get passed the ethics committee!)
The subjects spent on average around twelve minutes trying to solve the puzzle, before giving up.
However, when first asked to eat six radishes (which is hard work and requires a lot of willpower), subjects spent about half the amount of time attempting to solve the puzzle. Their will power had been diminished, consumed.
When further subjects were asked to eat six radishes in the presence of chocolate (the chocolate could not be eaten and therefore consumed even more willpower) then the time spent attempting to solve the puzzle fell even further.
This tells us that willpower is limited and exhaustible.
Willpower is limited for a good reason. Unlimited willpower would allow us to override millions of years of evolutionary refinement.
Actually, willpower could be a bit risky from an evolutionary perspective. Imagine if a migratory bird decided to skip the trip this year, or a rabbit decided to stand up to a fox. Our predetermined, wired in behaviours are often in place for a very good reason and have been earned over time and at great cost - to others thankfully.
Our evolutionary programming flows to our consciousness in the form of feelings and this is what drives much of our behaviour. For example, we may feel hungry, frightened or in love.
Our behaviour is more strongly driven by how we feel, our emotions, than by what we know.
Our conscious mind is all we know about. We don't know what is happening in our subconscious mind unless it floats through to our consciousness.
Our senses, such as touch, sight and hearing are not wired to our conscious mind. It feels like they are, but they are not.
Take for example touch. It seems as if our sense of touch is directly available to our conscious mind.
Consider a pickpocket who puts their hand on our shoulder and says, ‘Excuse me, did you drop this?’ We will most likely be so distracted that we never feel them lifting our wallet from our pocket.
If a patient watches a needle going into their arm during vaccination and thinks about what is happening, then they will tend to rate the pain much higher than if looking away and being distracted during the vaccination. Studies have shown that some patients were unaware that the vaccination had even been performed if their opposite arm was unexpectedly squeezed at the time of injection.
So why is this? Do we literally not feel some stimuli in the presence of others?
Well, we don’t feel them consciously, but we still feel them. What happens is that only some information floats through from the subconscious to the conscious mind. The decisions as to what information is available to the conscious mind are made in the subconscious.
What we experience consciously is a curated version of what we experience in total. Only the subconscious mind gets the full picture.
An experiment that illustrates this is as follows. A subject sits in front of two computer monitors, with a partition between the monitors that runs right up to the subjects face. The result is that the subject's left eye can see only one monitor and the right eye only the other monitor.
One monitor then displays a sequence of faces which are presented at a relatively slow rate.
The other monitor shows a red square that erratically moves around at a relatively fast rate.
So what is the subject aware of? Well, they only report seeing the red square.
The reason is that the relatively faster moving red square triggers the orientation reflex. Put simply a ‘What’s that?’ response. The moving red square is unexpected, it needs to be focused on in order to make sense of it.
A choice is made in the subconscious not to float up the images of the faces, as this would be a distraction.
However, most curiously, when the subject is presented with a list of faces and asked to pick out the ones that feel familiar, they will pick out the ones they saw on the monitor, rather than faces they have not seen. So the faces have been seen and remembered, but there is no conscious awareness of this. The subject will not know why these faces seem more familiar.
Look up ‘Monkey Business Illusion’ on YouTube. I won’t ruin it for you by describing it here. It is another example of when only some information is passed through to conscious awareness.
Information passed through to the conscious mind is not only curated, it is delayed.
Astonishingly, our subconscious knows what decisions we are going to make before we are aware of them consciously.
Using a functional MRI (fMRI) machine researchers are able to observe the decision making processes inside a subject’s brain.
An experiment was constructed where the subject was presented with choices on a computer monitor and a button in each hand. They simply had to make a choice and press the corresponding button.
At the same time the experimenters, who could not see the subject, but could see the fMRI output, endeavoured to guess what decisions the subject would make.
What was most intriguing about this experiment was not just that the experimenters could reliably determine the decision the subject made, but they knew this before the subject did!
The experimenters could see the subject's decision-making process and press the corresponding button before the subject passed that information to their conscious mind and pressed their corresponding button.
So decisions that we feel we are making consciously, are actually made in our subconscious and passed to the conscious mind after they are settled.
Indeed consciousness, as we experience it, is an illusion. Albeit quite a nice one.
If you spend some time reflecting on your thoughts, when deciding what to have for lunch, whether to smoke that cigarette or have another drink, you will start to see gaps in the curtain and become more aware of what is really going on.
Consciousness and free will being an illusion is more than a curiosity. This understanding should trigger a significant rethink of how we view crime and the penal system at least.
How much control do people have over whether they engage in anti-social behaviour?
If not much, then why would we punish them for being unlucky or different?
How we feel, our emotions, drives our behaviour. If we have no control over our emotions, then there is little hope of controlling our behaviour.
For many people, problematic emotions stem from much earlier experiences. It could be exposure to alcohol, or methamphetamine, in the womb. It could be exposure to violence and abuse as a child. Even adults exposed to trauma can be left with troubling emotions.
If we are one of the lucky ones who can get through our days without having to resist the urge to do something harmful to ourselves or others, then simply we are lucky.
We did not as adults choose not to be harmed in utero, to have a calm and nurturing upbringing or even choose our innate temperament.
These are choices that are made for us, indeed mostly by luck.
A better response to anti-social behaviour, than reflexive incarceration, would be to understand the pathway to that behaviour and implement interventions to shut those pathways down.
There will always be a need for incarceration. Some folk are just too harmful to have loose in our communities.
Our challenge, as a civilised society, is surely to incarcerate the bare minimum of offenders. Our primary focus should be on eliminating the pathways to antisocial behaviour and where possible rehabilitating those who offend.
At a personal level perhaps we should cut ourselves some slack when we make a poor choice. Our energy might be better directed at understanding and refining the pathways that lead to our own choices.
It is clear, in general, we do not understand what drives our behaviour. Entire industries are built around this, for example, gyms that offer enticing discounts for twelve-month memberships, knowing full well that few people will last a month. A great example of willpower being exhausted!
A strategy to bolster our willpower is to have a strong ‘why’ behind what we wish to do and to burn this into our subconscious mind. Generally, we have an understanding of ‘what’ we wish to do (fit last year’s beach outfit) and an understanding of ‘how’ this could be achieved (suffer in the gym). What can be missing is the ‘why’ we are doing what we are doing. It might be so that we feel better about ourselves.
If the why, the reason, is not clear, then maybe we won’t get up early on those cold winter mornings, or push past a little discomfort.
Once we know our ‘why’, we can tip the odds in our favour by reinforcing this message. We could tell others about it, we could write down the ‘why’ and put it somewhere we will see every day. We could also focus on the ‘why’ each night before we go to bed and let our subconscious dwell on it while we sleep.
The more strongly we can embed the ‘why’ into our subconscious, then the stronger the emotions that propel us to achieve our goal will be.