How we choose: Do we have free will?

I'm a determinist. In philosophy, determinists believe there's no free will.

"But I make decisions, Dui!" you say in protest. "I choose to do or not do. I make choices all the time."

If that's not free will, then how do we choose?

This is a small exploration of determinism for non-philosophers.

Choosing to drink, and to stop drinking

I stopped drinking several years ago.

I always struggled to reconcile wanting to live the best life with alcohol's health and cognitive downsides. So I thought about stopping before, many times.

But drinking with friends was fun, and drinking helped take the edge off after a stressful day.

As the years passed from my drinking age, my body got attuned to these cues for drinking – like with most drinkers:

1) I'd get together with friends, we order a pizza or sit at a bar, and then we drink, because that's what you do among friends at a bar.

2) Or it's been a rough day at work, my body is feeling the stress, and I get that craving to drink to help lower that uncomfortable feeling.

So, when those cues happened, and I chose to drink, how much was I choosing? Was I fully exercising free will?

I distinctly remember one particular day. I had just stopped drinking for about 5 or 6 days, and at the time, had just decided to take a 30-day break. I got in a restaurant, and they had this big Heineken advertisement, and I thought for a moment, "Should I get a beer?" until I remembered I was on a 30-day break (which I eventually extended forever).

Now, were I not on a break, I'd be more likely to order a Heineken that day because of the advertisement. But how much more likely?

If I would have chosen a Heineken that day after seeing the advertisement, but wouldn't have chosen a Heineken if I hadn't noticed it (say the ad wasn't there), then did I really choose to drink? And if not, who did?

I think drinking is an excellent example of choice because of alcohol's addictive nature. Our motivations are affected by how dopamine and other neurotransmitters affect our brain, and those, in turn, are affected by our surroundings and previous behavior.

So if this visual stimulus creates a dopamine response in my brain, which in turn, due to the effects of past alcohol consumption, makes me crave drinking, did I choose to drink? How much was it my choice?

And if not from the automatic response in my brain from that dopamine release caused by the alcohol craving, then where did my choice come from?

We can't choose to choose

From a determinist's perspective, choice has to come somewhere from the brain, but this something has to be caused by something else, which has to be caused by something else, and so on...

So, to freely choose something, you'd have to have your brain do something based on no cause explained by any factors – which is impossible.

If any one factor in the brain caused it to act in a particular way, and the absence of that factor would have you behave a different way, did you choose to act that way, or was it a determined reaction you had to that factor?

In the book Free Will, Sam Harris explores the difficulty of defining where choice comes from and when this happens. You intend to do something, but where does the intention come from?

It's produced by your brain through causes outside your control.

But where intentions themselves come from, and what determines their character in every instance, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. [..]

How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t. To say that “my brain” decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and that this is the basis for my freedom, is to ignore the very source of our belief in free will: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about.

Harris, Sam. Free Will (pp. 25-26). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

Another way to think about it is that just like our body decides to beat our heart in a way, to produce red and white cells another way, it also causes our brain to act in this or that way based on different contexts around you.

And it feels a lot like you are choosing to do it when it happens.

Seconds to Minutes, Minutes to Days, Days to ..

In Robert Sapolsky's terrific book Determined, inspired by his previous book Behave, which goes into more detail on this aspect of our motivations, he breaks down the influences in our behavior in several areas going back from the last second to past centuries:

• Seconds to Minutes before: Neurotransmitters
• Minutes to Days before : Hormones
• Weeks to Years before: Gut Bacteria
• Adolescence: Frontal Cortex Maturation
• Childhood: Parenting, Environmental Influences, etc.
• Womb, Genes, Culture, etc..

Some interesting "Seconds to Minutes" examples: Our insula

Ask a subject, Hey, in last week’s questionnaire you were fine with behavior A, but now (in this smelly room) you’re not. Why? They won’t explain how a smell confused their insula and made them less of a moral relativist. They’ll claim some recent insight caused them, bogus free will and conscious intent ablaze, to decide that behavior A isn’t okay after all.

Minutes to Days: Testosterone

The [Testosterone] hormone also distorts judgment, making you more likely to interpret a neutral facial expression as threatening. Boosting your T levels makes you more likely to be overly confident in an economic game, resulting in being less cooperative — who needs anyone else when you’re convinced you’re fine on your own? Moreover, T tilts you toward more risk-taking and impulsivity by strengthening the ability of the amygdala to directly activate behavior (and weakening the ability of the frontal cortex to rein it in—stay tuned for the next chapter).[*] Finally, T makes you less generous and more self-centered in, for example, economic games, as well as less empathic toward and trusting of strangers.[12]

Weeks to Years:

As a burgeoning new field, the makeup of the different species of bacteria in your gut over the previous weeks will influence things like appetite and food cravings . . . and gene expression patterns in your neurons . . . and proclivity toward anxiety and the ferocity with which some neurological diseases spread through your brain. Clear out all of a mammal’s gut bacteria (with antibiotics) and transfer in the bacteria from another individual, and you’ll have transferred those behavioral effects. These are mostly subtle effects, but who would have thought that bacteria in your gut were influencing what you mistake for free agency?

Yep, you can transplant appetite and ferocity between two mammals by transplanting gut bacteria.

If that's true, how much of choosing to eat or aggressively push back on an opinion is your own free choice?

Determinism is a challenging perspective

Determinists are few and far between. Many brilliant philosophers strongly believe there is free will and that determinism is incorrect (although in a nuanced way that I won't expose here).

Even if determinists are wrong, though, and there is free will, the way the external facts outside our control lead to our behavior is an essential point of reflection for everyone.

For example, judges make harder judgments the longer they are judging, from ~65% parole to 0%.. and returning to 65% after a break! Under this circumstance, how much of the choice for parole is the judge's choice, and how much is not?

Among other topics studied that influence judges' decisions on paroles is whether the local sports team has won the previous weekend!

So determinists understand that these factors influence our decision and believe that, added together, they define our choices: when you add neurotransmitters, hormones, neuroplasticity, gut bacteria, brain formation, genes, culture, etc.. what is left? What is the exact way that a choice is made inside our brains that's not caused by any of these external factors and is a "pure" choice, chosen by us?

Hard to say.