A perennial debate in philosophy is whether, if our choices are caused by something (anything), we can still be said to possess free will. Hilary Bok, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, says many modern philosophers—perhaps most—believe freedom of decision is possible, but that of course neural processes lead to urges and actions. “The idea that your choice might be caused—including by something happening in the brain—occurred to us a long time before the neuroscientists started filling in the details of how it happened,” she says. Freedom doesn’t require a ghost in the machine; we might still have some sort of free will if it can be shown that our neural circuits give us the capacity to weigh options and choose the right ones. “I love these experiments and think they are really interesting,” she says, “but I’m less convinced whether they have shown anything crucial about free will.”
What’s really important about the experiments, she adds, is that they start to provide insights into human behavior. This could someday lead to therapies, but until then, insight alone can help. Consider the case of James Fallon, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, who discovered that his own fMRI scan bore similarities to those of known psychopaths (it indicated low activity in brain regions associated with self-control and empathy). Fallon has described how he now makes a conscious effort to modify his everyday decisions and behaviors—such as his tendency to want to defeat his young grandchildren at games. “When I think about freedom of the will, a part of what is required is that we have some ability to control our own actions,” Bok says. “It would be important to me to discover whether a psychopath who decides to use his or her narcissism to defeat that narcissism can actually succeed.”
Though it’s still at an early stage, *Kreiman’s work adds to this kind of understanding, says Patricia Churchland, a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego, who avers that neuroscience can illuminate old philosophical questions. Churchland believes that the experiments could be important in shedding light on whether decisions can be altered or urges held in check, and might help explain why some people have difficulty controlling their impulses after brain damage. “The explanations are far from complete, but a pattern of results is fitting together in illuminating ways,” she says. “Self-control is an entirely real brain phenomenon. Insofar as self-control is a key component of free choice, we do in fact have free choice. From a range of data it is becoming quite clear that there are significant neural differences between people who have the capacity to cancel actions or defer gratification and those whose capacity is diminished.”
Kreiman, too, sees practical potential in teasing apart the circuitry of decision-making but deflects my questions about how his work could lead to new drugs or therapies. “The main question at the scientific level is to understand the mechanism by which volitional decisions are made: where, when, and how they are orchestrated,” he says.
But it sounds like a cool book. If classical antiquity was my primary field, I'd probably read it.
