Do we have free will?

From today’s New York Times:

Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.

That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”

Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.

Comment: This is I believe an essential question for those of us at the Krasnow Institute trying to wrestle with the bear we call consciousness. Is there some aspect of consciousness that requires free will?

One other question: we clearly all have the ability (or at least most of us as adults) to say “no” to the dopamine reinforcement system of the brain. I think many would view such neurobiologically by understanding the no as an inhibition signal from frontal cortical areas. This raises the question of simply operationalizing free will to the underlying brain science. Perhaps a more tractable approach.

Jim