Do we have a free will or not?

and this is connected with the question about consciousness

I want to try to explain why I think that we have a free will and thus that we have a full responsibility for our actions.

The evolution of life on our planet

It is necessary to understand how life did evolve in order to understand how our brain has been developed and for which purpose.
At first let me say that I do not agree on the distinction between inorganic and organic molecule and thus I do not agree about the usual definition of "life".
In my opinion we should acknowledge that at a very low level everything is just chemistry. Out of the mixture of substances in the primordial soup, we can find certain molecule which have the property of replicate themselves, out of simpler constituents which of course must be present in a sufficient number.
If those molecule can reproduce themselves, then the concentration of them increases, which create a new situation out of which a more complex substance can be generated.
This mechanism is nothing else then a correct interpretation of the second law of thermodynamic, which stated that the entropy of a system have to always increases. This is a wrong interpretation, as this second law just express a "probability" of entropy's increase.
This means that, given the appropriate conditions, the entropy can be lowered!
A better way to understand this probability is to know that
nature always try to find a stable state.
I define a stable state as the one in which there are fewer choices for the energy to reconvert in something else.
This means that in building more complex systems (molecules, assembly of molecules, complex molecules, complex bodies which can reproduce themselves, etc) nature bound the primordial energy, fixing it into something so that it cannot be used for something else.
You will understand the above if you think of the evolution of matter after the big bang: from the base elements of matter nature builds more complex structures, of which we are now the last element of the chain.
What is marvellous about this way of thinking is that this is not just a "probability" that this would happen: it is something that has to happen, which is a fundamental thinking in order to suppose life on other part of our universe.

The first steps toward complex structures

We should not consider the surface of our planet as a closed system:
we get energy from the sun and also energy from the inside of the planet.
Thus we have to consider two different places in which we can use energy to build more complex structures, and we need to have the possibility to store this new elements in order to have a higher density of them.
At the very beginning all this happens in water, and we also need the possibility to keep the high density somehow. Thanks to the moon we have high and low tide which may build some puddle (pool) in which some substances can concentrate.
The vents at the ocean floor are also places in which energy could be converted in complex chemical substances.
It is not my goal here to explain the whole evolution from some basic substances to the first cells and more complex structures.
But I just want to emphasis how the whole evolution is based on chemical reactions. By the way just think about the big step forward when the first membrane was build: now we have an inside and an outside! Thus we can enhance the concentration of some substances.
You see how the old definition of life does not really describe what happened long ago. For me there is not a definite line: all is explained by some chemical reaction.

The first chemical behaviour of unicellular beings

Let make a big step in the evolutionary story of our planet by considering a world with many unicellular beings. Let for instance think of an amoeba which is just a bag with sensors at the surface and which move itself around a possible "food" taking it in its inside. All is triggered by chemical reactions and relatively slow.
Let make another big step ahead: now think of the first communities of cells which stick together. One of the problems for such a construct is the passing of information along a chain. If the information is only a chemical signal then we can suppose that it is quite slow.

The transmission of information in a first simple system

We will have to wait till a more complex being will appears in which there is a differentiation between the cells which then will have a dedicated function. So finally we will see the appearance of cells which are responsible for the transport of information.
But information alone is not useful, and we need something which elaborates the information received and then gives orders! We recognise the beginning of a central nervous system.

The evolutionary advantage of vision

Let go ahead with a big step: the eye! Some of the dedicated cells can react to light and finally there is the possibility to have a kind of pixel picture of the environment. This has been an huge advantage in the evolution, and the proof is that all the animals of the planet have a similar structure of the eye, which means that the first being which developed an eye has such an evolutionary advantage that only its descendant survived. Well, of course we have few different kind of eye, from the one similar to our to the composite eye of some insects.
But the fundamental idea is the same.
Now we have a new powerful source of information and this requires a certain amount of "computer power" to elaborate and interpret the new signals.

The new structure which elaborate the information

We can figure out what nature will create for the sake of survival:
to make this new "utility" (the vision) useful we need a memory to store good and bad experiences and a capability for pattern recognition in order to identify pictures and then the ability to compare new and past "experiences" and out of all this we need to take decisions and act correspondingly.
In my opinion the goal of brain development can be understand as the building of a computing programme which try to figure out what could happen just in the next moment.
Let call it a simulation programme which is able to elaborate a huge number of informations and find many possible outcomes to many possible actions.
We can imagine that a better "programme" will be an evolutionary advantage giving a better survival chance.

The building of dedicated brain regions

I don't want to explain the whole brain structure, but it is well known that we have different regions which are dedicated to a specific task.
There is an immense number of publications on this topic, I just want to give a sentence as an example of those articles:
From an article by Maxi Becker (https://mnemology.org/team/maxi-becker/):
... when a participant noticed a hidden object, brain activity increased in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC), a region responsible for recognising visual patterns in the environment; the amygdala, which processes both positive and negative emotions; and the hippocampus, a deep-brain structure involved in handling memories.
As you see, for each kind of detector (skin sensors about pressure, temperature and touch, sensors in the tongue, audio and equilibrium sensors, visual sensors, etc) the brain has a dedicated region which elaborates the inputs. The logic dictated that all those informations must be weighted and presented to a coordination part of the brain.
I think that all those sensor's information coming from the "outside" contribute to the building of consciousness: the feeling of "myself" versus "all which is outside me", thus the world.

The merging of all informations

What is important now is what the brain is supposed to do with all this information.
If we remember that the main task is survival, we easily recognise that our brain will try to figure out what is going on, simulating a few future situations, explore the memory for similar situations and finally decide what to do.
What I wrote above sound simple and straightforward, but in reality it is far more complex. The added complexity is what distinguish mankind from other animals: we have a region of the brain which allow us "to think"! And the result of all this thinking will be a contribution to the decisions taking unit. And not just "a" contribution, but a very heavvy one, which can also override the previous results of the "simulation section" of the brain.

The building of a "will"

Let us think of a simple example: you were supposed to do some gymnastic exercises, but your body feel tired, may be you would like to do something more interesting. But then you decide that you should do your exercises, and your will override all others feeling.
This is only a very trivial example, but you can find others yourself.
The "decision making" part of our brain need to filter and to give a weight to each inputs and finally "decide", which means that the strongest (impulsion, argument) will take the overhand.
It is now important to understand another law of physics, which is the one of the "big numbers". Let go back at the time of the steam machine: science was trying to find ways to improve the efficiency of the steam machines.
Obviously, it was not possible to apply the known physic's laws to each single steam molecule. But thanks to the work of Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), who developed the statistical mechanic, we know better. I copy here from Wikipedia: Statistical mechanics is one of the pillars of modern physics.
It describes how macroscopic observations (such as temperature and pressure) are related to microscopic parameters that fluctuate around an average.
It connects thermodynamic quantities (such as heat capacity) to microscopic behavior, whereas, in classical thermodynamics, the only available option would be to measure and tabulate such quantities for various materials.
With this citation I want to emphasis that if we are confronted with a huge number of something, as for instance "inputs", we cannot rely on the calculation of the single ones, but we should rely on a statistical approach. This give us the possibility to override the more deep "automatic" impulsion from the brain, which have been created by the evolution. The part of our brain which "think" can send a stronger command to the decision taking part. I should show now, that this "thinking" part of our brain does not work in a deterministic way. In order to do this I should explain another law of the physic which usually is less known.

The mathematical modelling of "reality"

The processes that we try to describe and calculate in the real world have a mathematical description with partial differential equations of the second order. Example: The Maxwell's equations of the electrodynamic.
In order to be able to use them, we often work with "linear" equations. This has been enough for many technical problems. But the reality is not that simple: all those equations are not linear!
One special property of those non-linear equations is that they are very sensitive to the initial conditions. It is also nearly impossible that the same process repeat itself exactly as previously.
But the outcome may be similar for some time, and one day suddently the process jump to another state (level, strength, whatever the process is).
This behaviour is best described by the "chaos theory".
This means that all those processes which are depending from non-linear equations cannot be calculated in advance but have to be estimated with a certain probability. Of course we succeeded in calculating the magnetic field for non-linear magnetic materials, but the solutions did not always converge into a useful ones. We had to try in many attemps.
We often think to our solar system as something very stable. In fact life on our planet would not have been able to develop otherwise.
But we should be aware that this stability could one day be destroyed just by some small anomaly. I refer here to the butterfly story.
This should be a proof that the processes happening in our brain are not of deterministic nature. If not deterministic, then we have the possibility to influence the outcome and thus exerce our will.

We can learn and also change our opinions

Obviously our mind is full of "bias", but we know that we can learn and also change our opinions. It is a matter of chance if we had a good teacher, or if we had very critical friends and colleagues. All this gives a contribution to our ideas and opinions. And we can observe in ourselves how we can ponder the different aspect of a problems bevor answering a question. This is also a way to exert our free will.
In some literature you will find reference to the Libet-Experiment in which it has been proven that some decisions are taken some milliseconds befor our consciousness perceive them. But this is for us a logical result which come from our evolution: in order to survive our brain have to immediately decide to react, otherwise we would have been catch by some hungry lion. We should be able to differentiate between "automatic" reflex and intended decisions.
The Libet-Experiment is NOT a proof that we do not "think" or that we do not are able to take intended decisions.

Work in progress ... will never be completely finished

Back to chapter index
Back to book index