13 Things That Don't Make Sense (21 page)

I have to admit, watching Haggard move my finger strained my sense of self to the limit. That digit seemed to me like somebody
else’s finger. Nevertheless, it was instructive: it showed me something more about the Libet experiment. Whatever my problems
over the phrase “aware of the will to move,” there is a big difference between a movement that comes from your own conscious
intention and a movement that comes from—well, seemingly, nowhere at all. It’s not a reflex, like ducking a low-flying pigeon
in Central Park or straightening your leg after a doctor taps you below the kneecap. It’s not like hitting a fast-moving baseball.
All those things feel like human capabilities; I might not know how I do them, but at least I know it is me doing them. This
was different. It wasn’t me. Being Patrick Haggard’s puppet was quite a revelation; I became ever more convinced that I don’t
have free will.

The neuroscience literature attacks the free will delusion from another angle too: neuroscientists have shown time and again
that when it comes to intention and control, we are astonishingly self-deceiving. We might be convinced that we have free
will, but we should treat any and all such inner convictions with a large dose of skepticism.

Daniel Wegner and Thalia Wheatley proved this in 1999 with a customized version of what they rather entertainingly called
an “ordinary household Ouija board.” The pair were based at the University of Virginia at the time and decided to test psychology
students’ beliefs about their control of their hand movements. The students gained a course credit for taking part; the researchers
gained a much-cited classic result.

The experiment involved deception from the start. Each student arrived for the experiment at the same time as someone who
was in on the trick. The student believed this insider was also a naive participant, and proceeded to work alongside that
individual.

The Ouija board was a computer mouse with a square piece of board glued on top; the pair were to place their fingertips on
the side of the board closest to them. They were then instructed to move the mouse together, in slow sweeping circles that
moved a cursor around a computer screen. The screen showed fifty small toy objects: a swan, a car, a dinosaur, and so on.
Every thirty seconds, they were to stop moving the mouse and individually rate how much it was
their
intention to make it stop there.

The scam was complex, involving covert instructions to the insider, but the result was clear. Though all the cursor movement
and all the stops were due to the insider, the students reported that the stops were their intention. They believed themselves
to be making the decisions when it was clear to everyone else that they weren’t.

Wegner also carried out related experiments that asked students to “read the unconscious muscle movements” of their student
partner. In these studies, the students were under the impression that they and their partners both heard simple questions
such as “Is Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States?” The students had their fingers on top of their partners’
fingers and had to “feel” their partner’s response, then press the appropriate key: yes or no.

In reality, the partner—an insider again—heard nothing and thus made no response. The students got the answers right 87 percent
of the time—but attributed the answers to the influence of their partner 37 percent of the time. In other words, the correct
answers were often produced automatically, without conscious contribution. An expectation of their partners’ unconscious movement
was enough to undermine the experience of conscious will.

The conclusion? Our perceptions, actions, and intentions are dangerously malleable. We are like small children sitting in
front of an arcade race game; even if no money has been put in, and the cars on the screen are racing in demo mode, they grab
the steering wheel, move it back and forth, and believe they’re driving. Wegner and Wheatley think these kinds of phenomena
lie behind the skills of many stage entertainers. “Believing that our conscious thoughts cause our actions is an error based
on the illusory experience of will—much like believing that a rabbit has indeed popped out of an empty hat,” they wrote in
the July 1999 issue of
American Psychologist
.

It is likely that shows involving hypnosis, mind-reading, and illusion all utilize our shaky grip on the real nature of conscious
free will. Set things up right, and you can trick people into thinking they are causing something to happen. Alter the setup,
and you can trick people into thinking someone else is controlling their behavior. Or that they have carefully watched every
part of a sequence of events. Theaters across the world provide the laboratories that prove this idea: under the supervision
of showmen and illusionists, thousands of people have moved a glass around a Ouija board with no awareness that they are doing
it themselves. Proof of just how extraordinarily resistant to reality we human beings are comes with the knowledge that for
almost the whole time that illusionists and fraudsters have been profiting from this phenomenon—a century and a half now—we
have had a perfectly good, rational, and spirit-free explanation for it:
ideomotor movements
. These are tiny unconscious motor movements that arise and are amplified through concentrated expectation of movement. They
were first identified as the “influence of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement, independently of volition”
in 1852 by the psychologist William Benjamin Carpenter. The result is large movements that the subject has no awareness of
causing.

The psychologist and philosopher William James, brother of novelist Henry, took Carpenter’s baton and ran with it, carrying
out experiments to show just how easy it is for us to bypass our volition. In 1890 he laid out his findings in
The Principles of Psychology
, where he stated that “every mental representation of a movement awakens to some degree the actual movement which is its
object.” If there is nothing to stop it, he said, the movement grows.

James was the first to realize that not all of our delusions of control are quite as otherworldly as the Ouija board effect.
He pointed out that something as simple as getting out of bed in the morning can be similarly problematic. In fact, James
considered the action of getting out of bed to “contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition.”
Perhaps it takes a rather unconventional mind to see getting up as so laden with meaning. James was certainly unconventional;
he used drugs such as amyl nitrate and peyote in his study of mystical experience (and contended that only under the influence
of laughing gas did he ever understand the philosophies of Hegel). His observation of how hard it is to get up in the morning,
however, is rather insightful.

We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within
us protests against the ordeal … now how do we
ever
get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle
or decision at all. We suddenly find that we
have
got up.

It is a startlingly obvious, yet almost universally ignored, example of a lack of conscious control over actions. We’ve all
had the experience: it’s 7:15 a.m.; rise-and-shine time. You’re lying under the duvet, listening to some radio announcer telling
you that it’s a beautiful day out there and the traffic over the harbor bridge is running smoothly. There’s no reason to stay
in bed. You tell yourself to get up. It doesn’t happen. Then, miraculously, thirty seconds later, you find you have done it.
You don’t remember reissuing the command, but there you are, standing by the window, gazing bleary-eyed out into the sunshine.
You routinely operate without conscious control.

THE
idea of free will goes to the center of our sense of self, our autonomy as human beings. Strip us of it, and we are nothing
more than animals. This, perhaps, is what is most disturbing about the fate of Alex, the narrator in Anthony Burgess’s novel
A Clockwork Orange
. For all the “ultraviolence,” for all the rape and theft and bloody beatings he doles out, it is his punishment that is most
unsettling. Alex undergoes conditioning, reprogramming, so that he responds to violence with unbearable nausea. He winds up
unable to perform the sadistic acts he enjoys; he no longer has the choice of whether to do good or evil. The prison chaplain
has deep misgivings about the process. “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man,” he says. “Does God want woodness
or the choice of goodness?”

Writing in
American Scientist
with Sukhvinder Obhi, Haggard put it another way: questioning our free will risks a “philosophical firestorm.” Haggard knows,
however, that the philosophical firestorm will be nothing compared to the legal firestorm that is coming.

Brain scanning is becoming extremely sophisticated. It is no longer about finding which area processes vision or which area
controls the motor functions. Neuroscientists are now identifying the seats of attributes we associate with the person, not
the organism. Guilt, shame, regret, loss, impulsivity—they are all measurable entities. The anatomy of personality and experience
is being reduced to electrical signals. If we find some people are hard-wired for impulsive behavior—and we are beginning
to get there—how long before it is cited as a legal defense? How long before neuroscientists testify that someone cannot be
held responsible for the way his brain circuits are connected? Haggard has yet to testify in court. He has been asked, but
he has never felt he could offer a “clear, valid, and useful” contribution to the case. No one wants to wander casually through
this territory, it seems.

David Hodgson certainly doesn’t. Hodgson, a legal philosopher based in Sydney, Australia, argues, like Libet, that free will
is too essential a part of humanity to let our limited scientific understanding remove it at this stage in the endeavor. Hodgson
thinks that, though we have some evidence to the contrary at the moment, future experiments may well confirm our free will.
Henry Stapp, a physicist based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, cites quantum theory as a source
of doubt on the experimental evidence of the Libet experiment. In quantum theory, the act of observation can change the experimental
conditions, so the results of any experiment that involves self-observation cannot be taken at face value.

Such skeptical viewpoints are certainly in the scientific minority. They are based on the scientifically indefensible premise
that we simply
must
have free will, and that any experimental results that show otherwise must be flawed. On the other side of the fence, the
British psychologist Guy Claxton thinks clinging to free will is akin to denying that the Earth goes around the Sun. Yes,
a heliocentric universe is somehow a less comforting worldview; yes, it makes us feel less special. What’s more, yes, you
can live quite happily without it, as people did for millennia. The only time it really doesn’t work is when you want to do
something complex, like leave the planet.

Similarly, Claxton says, it is only OK to believe you have free will if you don’t try to do anything complex like control
everything in your life. Studies show that neurotic and psychiatric disorders are more common among those who attempt to keep
conscious control of life and suppress its unwelcome quirks. Sanity, paradoxically, may lie in accepting that you are not
in control.

It’s easier said than done. We are ill-equipped to live ultrarational lives; psychologists have repeatedly shown that our
ideas of “rational” decision making are often self-delusion. In one of the most-cited papers in psychology, for example, Richard
Nisbett and Timothy Wilson showed that we are unable to explain even why we choose to buy one particular pair of socks over
another. Wilson also showed that decisions we think long and hard about are the ones we end up less happy about. So it’s likely
that thinking long and hard about free will and making a “rational” decision about it based on the evidence is not even a
great idea. If you’ve got this far in the chapter, you’re probably not going to be happy whichever side of the fence you come
down on. It might be best to continue with the wishful thinking you began with; the best advice, after all these arguments
and demonstrations, must surely be: do nothing. Free will may be the one scientific anomaly that humans would be wise to ignore.

For all practical purposes, it makes sense to retain the illusion. Human consciousness, our sense of self and intention, may
be nothing more than a by-product of being the enormously complex machines that are our big-brained bodies, but it is a useful
one, enabling us to deal with a complex environment. What’s more, our human cultural arrangements have evolved in parallel
with our consciousness, and they rely on the naive view that we are able to direct (and are thus responsible for) our own
actions. Philosophers will continue to discuss the implications of the scientific facts with sangfroid, but coldly conceding
we are brain-machines and giving up on the notion of personal responsibility will most likely remain too dangerous a move
for those having to deal with real-world situations. There is surely too much at stake—too many unforeseeable consequences—to
risk dismantling our societal norms for the sake of scientific “truth.” Taking the ultrarational option might get us nowhere—and
that would most likely be the best result we could hope for. More likely, the destruction of our legal and cultural frameworks
in the light of scientific revelations would take us somewhere we really don’t want to go. It is possible that if invoked
in legislation, our scientific efforts could undermine some of the foundations on which human society has been constructed.
The Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker probably put it best. “Free will is a fictional construction,” he said.
“But it has applications in the real world.”