I HEART CHAOS

For thousands of years, even when mankind honestly was trying to make sense of the world in the most scientific ways it knew how, even in modern times as hard science dominates our age, philosophers and religious and spiritual thinkers have hung onto free will as the ultimate proof of a meaning beyond our component parts. And now science is taking aim at that as well.

The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes’s outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.

“The first thought we had was ‘we have to check if this is real’,” says Haynes. “We came up with more sanity checks than I’ve ever seen in any other study before.”

The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.

But this goes beyond just pushing buttons. It may seem obvious that if you’re craving a certain type of food, it’s because your body is telling you that you need some chemical or protein or something that it’s slightly lacking. Yet even in seemingly more ambiguous tasks like going one direction or another down a sidewalk, holding one belief over another, is nothing but chemical reactions in this meat bag we call a sentient body.

It’s sort of a depressing thought in a way, that for absolutely everything, we’re nothing but a collection of our chemical balances and imbalances and afflictions, with no “me” underneath at all. Reducing it down that far, we’re nothing more than a variety of genetic sequences hell-bent on our own genetic survival and nothing more. But to us, which is what really matters, we are more– we’re what we make of this existence.

Philosophers aren’t convinced that brain scans can demolish free will so easily. Some have questioned the neuroscientists’ results and interpretations, arguing that the researchers have not quite grasped the concept that they say they are debunking. Many more don’t engage with scientists at all. “Neuroscientists and philosophers talk past each other,” says Walter Glannon, a philosopher at the University of Calgary in Canada, who has interests in neuroscience, ethics and free will.

There are some signs that this is beginning to change. This month, a raft of projects will get under way as part of Big Questions in Free Will, a four-year, US$4.4-million programme funded by the John Templeton Foundation in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, which supports research bridging theology, philosophy and natural science. Some say that, with refined experiments, neuroscience could help researchers to identify the physical processes underlying conscious intention and to better understand the brain activity that precedes it. And if unconscious brain activity could be found to predict decisions perfectly, the work really could rattle the notion of free will. “It’s possible that what are now correlations could at some point become causal connections between brain mechanisms and behaviours,” says Glannon. “If that were the case, then it would threaten free will, on any definition by any philosopher.”

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