Free will is not an

illusion
The Enlightenment idea of conscious, freely acting individuals is worth
defending against those who would reduce freedom to neuroscience.

RAYMOND
TALLIS

27th September
2007
:
 Topics POLITICS

This article is an edited version of

a talk given by Raymond Tallis at
a dinner held by the Manifesto
Club in London on 13 September
2007.

The issue of human freedom lies at

the heart of the debate between
Enlightenment and counter-

Enlightenment. Behind
Enlightenment thought is active
hope (often fuelled by anger on
behalf of those who are currently
without hope) based on the belief
:
 that we can be masters of our
collective fate; that our future lies to
some extent in our own hands.
Underpinning this in turn is the
fundamental Enlightenment faith
that, to use Lucien Goldmann’s
phrase, a human being is ‘an
independent point of departure’.
Each person is a new beginning,
able to contribute to shaping the
future for good or ill. We are not
fated to act out a pre-ordained
script.

This Enlightenment confidence in

our individual and collective power
to change things is directly opposed
to the belief that we are
individually and collectively fated.

The immemorial sources of such

pessimism are religions which
variously preach doctrines of shame
and worthlessness, and assert that
our earthly lives are not worthwhile
:
 except as a preparation for death
and the next world. In di!erent
ways they tell a story in which the
pursuit of human self-betterment,
of salvation from misery without
God, is an hubristic aim that ends
in Nemesis. We hear echoes of this
story in the ‘I told you so’ from
those who reflect on History’s Age
of Hatred (as Niall Ferguson
described the twentieth century)
and from commentators on our
present planetary problems.

Even more depressing is the attack

on human freedom from within

secular discourse: the humanities
and the sciences. Particularly in the
century that has passed, there has
been a counter-Enlightenment
:
 denial of the centrality of individual
consciousness in human a!airs. We
do not walk, we sleepwalk; we do
not act, we react, scarcely aware of
that to which we are reacting.

Humanist intellectuals have argued

that, far from being ‘independent
points of departure’, we are in the
grip of forces that are largely
hidden from us. The historical
unconscious of Marxists and their
descendents; the psychological
unconscious of Freudian and a
dozen other psycho-analytical and
deep psychological theorists; the
social unconscious of various
schools of sociology and
anthropology; the linguistic

unconscious of post-Saussurean
schools of thought (structuralist,
post-structuralist, and
deconstructionist) – these are just
some of the tributaries to the great
:
 river of anti-humanist pessimism
that has flown through the
collective conscious of academe in
recent history. As for selves, they
are either opaque at their heart, or
misread themselves, or are fictions,
overlooking that in reality, they are
dissolved in a sea of symbols, of
unchosen customs and practices, of
unconscious habits.

From a huge variety of

backgrounds, academics and
popular writers tell the same
monotonous story: we do not
know what we are doing, we do
not know why we are doing it, and
disaster is waiting to happen.
Civilisations, which are based upon

the notion of humans as rational

agents, are in fact pathological:
rationality is an illusion, or
unnatural and unbearable, and
rational planning will lead to
:
 unforeseen consequences. All
civilisation – usually referred to as ‘a
veneer’ and a thin one at that – is
headed for destruction.

While most of the counter-

Enlightenment thought I have
alluded to arises from the
humanities, which seem to take
pride in being anti-humanity, there
is an increasingly prominent input
from the very hope of the
Enlightenment – the sciences. This
is not perhaps as surprising as it
sounds. Science has always been
committed to identifying the
general patterns of causation in the
universe. Its standpoint is
fundamentally materialist. The laws

of nature are a secular version of

moira, fate. Laplace, who completed
the formalisation of Newton’s
mechanistic universe, though he
did so without Newton’s God,
:
 argued that a combination of the
knowledge of the initial conditions
and of the laws that governed the
behaviour of the mechanical
particles would enable every event
in the universe, including human
actions, to be predictable. As
Einstein said in his address to the
Spinoza Society in 1932: ‘Human
beings, in their thinking, feeling
and acting are not free agents but
are as causally bound as the stars in
their motion.’ However, a recent
spin on scientific determinism has
brought it nearer home.
Neuroscience has been invoked in
support of kulturpessimismus.

There is now a significant

population of neuroscientists, along
:
 population of neuroscientists, along
with philosophers and others, who
accept not only their findings but
also the interpretations they place
on them, who argue that because of
advances in brain science ‘we now
know’ that free will is an illusion.
The attacks on free will from this
direction are particularly powerful
because they encompass both
material and cultural determinism;
for the brain is not only a piece of
matter causally wired into the
material world, it is also brain-
washed in a laundry made of a
collective of other brains. This is a
powerful double whammy for our
notions of freedom and of the self as
an independent point of departure.

There are several strands of thought

woven into neuro-determinism.
The first is that we are essentially
our brains: our consciousness, our
belief in ourselves as free agents,
:
 and so on, is neural activity in
certain parts of the brain. Secondly,
these brains have evolved in such a
way as to maximise the likelihood
of our genetic material being able
to replicate. Brains are about
somatic survival to the point where
genetic replication is possible. This
is not something on our conscious
agenda but it is the true and only
business of the brain. Thirdly, for a
brain to work e!ectively, it is not
necessary for us to be aware of what
it is doing. Cognitive psychologists
have, over the last few decades,
particularly since the advent of
neuro-imaging which reveals
activity in the living brain, shown

how we are unconscious of many

things that influence what is going
on in our brain and, it is inferred,
the perceptions we form and the
decisions we make. Our
:
 consciousness has, it seems, a huge
black hole at its centre. What price
freedom, then, which at the very
least depends on consciousness?

Another strand of the neuro-

determinism story underlines how,
given that nerve impulses are
material events, our consciousness,
even at its most self-conscious and
deliberative, is wired into the
material world: it is simply part of a
boundless causal nexus that
stretches from the Big Bang at the
beginning of time to the Big
Crunch at the end. Another strand
notes that there is no privileged
place within the nervous system
corresponding to the freedom of

the will, or even a point of

initiation or a new departure. There
are inputs of activity, throughputs
of activity, and outputs activity but
no points corresponding to where,
:
 say, action could be considered as
starting. The brain, the body, our
life – these are just conduits, like
any other loci in the universe, for
causes as inputs and e!ects as
outputs.

Colin Blakemore, an eminent

neuroscientist, captures all of these
views in the claim: ‘The human
brain is a machine which alone
accounts for all our actions, our
most private thoughts, our beliefs…
All our actions are products of the
activity of our brains. It makes no
sense (in scientific terms) to try to
distinguish sharply between acts
that result from conscious attention
and those that result from our

reflexes or are caused by disease or

damage to the brain.’
:
 These very general arguments have
been supplemented by millions of
specific observations, the greater
bulk of which may be summarised
in two lines as follows: that
experiments, and natural disasters
such as head injuries, have shown
that holes in the brain are closely
correlated with holes in the mind
and in our capabilities. In summary,
you are the activity in your brain;
your brain has evolved to optimise
the chances of survival; and the
brain is wired biologically,
materially, causally into the
biosphere, the material world, and
the causal nexus. We now have a

neuro-Laplacean universe in which

the laws of nature operate
undeflected by agency through
your life. Or, as former CIA boss
George Tenet said about finding
:
 weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq: ‘It’s a slam dunk.’

I choose my words carefully.

Tenet’s slam dunk was self-evident
and wrong. Neuro-determinism,
though seemingly self-evident, is
also wrong.

The first line of attack is to remove

the hype from the neuroscience of
consciousness and remind ourselves
how little we know. We
understand even less. There is at
present no adequate theory of

qualia (the actual experience of

things – such as the sensation of
yellow, the feeling of warmth, the
taste of wine); of the way di!erent
qualia are seemingly associated with
:
 activity in di!erent nerve pathways
– why optic nerves give the feeling
of brightness and the auditory
nerves the sound of sounds; of how
experiences cohere into the
meaningful unity of the present
moment and are more or less
coherent and self-sustained over
great stretches of time and in a
multitude of situations; and of how
things that are supposed to be
integrated into unities are also kept
apart, so that I can, for example
experience at the same time the
sensation of yellow and the shape of
a yellow object and a feeling of
warmth on my arm and worry
about a lecture that I have to give

or an operation that I am listed for,

without these simultaneous
memories and experiences being
lost in a general mush of awareness.

Most importantly, there is not even

:
 Most importantly, there is not even
the beginning of an explanation of
our fundamental sense that we are
subjects transcended by objects that
are ‘out there’, that exist
independently of us and have their
own intrinsic properties. From its
simplest to its most elaborated
forms, intentionality – the property
of consciousness of being ‘about’
something – remains mysterious.
We understand how the light
enters the brain by the usual causal
mechanisms, but not how the gaze
looks upstream back to the objects
that are its intermediate cause. All
material objects are ‘wired’ causally
into what surrounds them, but
none is aware, as I am, of the things

that impact on them and grants

them independent existence.
:
 Secondly, we should question the
focus on the stand-alone brain. The
world we live in is not one of
sparks of isolated sentience cast
amid a rubble of material objects.
We live in a world that is
collectively constructed. Our
consciousness is collectivised: we
su!er hunger pangs in isolation but
face scarcity collectively. What we
feel and experience has a public face
and this goes deeper than the fact
that it is articulated out loud in
words. Indeed, this public space is
the necessary pre-condition for
there being language in the sense
that humans uniquely possess

language. It is no use, therefore,

looking for human being, and its
free actions, in isolated brains or
bits of brain, notwithstanding that
having a more or less intact brain is
:
 a necessary condition of this. We
also need a body (which, too, lights
up in di!erent ways when we are
presented with stimuli); and that
body has to be environed; and the
environment consists not of bare,
material objects but of nexuses of
signification that have two kinds of
temporal depth – that which comes
from personal memory and the
explicit sense of our private past;
and that which comes from our
collective history, insofar as we
have internalised it. As Ortega y
Gasset said, unlike other animals
‘Man is an inheritor, not a mere
descendent’.

That public space is the depository

of much consciousness, either

spoken or implicit, as in artefacts.
This collective, public
consciousness is one in which many
things that are otherwise
:
 unconscious are made conscious –
including those very things that
cognitive neuropsychologists have
discovered are hidden from us by
our brains. And it is worth noting
at this point that the reason we are
surprised at the unconscious
influences on our perceptions and
decisions, made conscious by
neuropsychologists, is that we are
usually conscious of what we are
doing and why.

We seem to be doubly o!set from

nature – by intentionality and by

the multiple layers of shared,

explicit meaning, expressed in
multiple symbolic systems,
including natural language, in
knowledge, in the great scopes of
:
 civilisation, and the rituals and
institutions that belong to the
human world. This brings me to
my third line of attack: on the
notion that the laws of nature bind
us, tied into them through the bits
of the material world that are our
brains. It is perfectly obvious that
our freedom could not require us to
break the laws of nature. They are
by definition unbreakable. But,
while they are not humanly
constructed – just trying bucking
them and see how far you get –
they are humanly abstracted from
nature. That is why, as John Stuart
Mill pointed out, at any given time
many laws apply to a particular set

of circumstances. Our freedom is to

utilise them. We obey nature, as
Bacon one of the grandfathers of
the Enlightenment said, ‘in such a
manner as to command it’.
:
 This may provoke the response:
‘Do you mean step outside of
nature, to choose between natural
laws? How can you do that, except
by natural laws?’ Well, there is an
outside, and this is the collectively
constructed human world of
artefacts, knowledge, institutions
and so on. It is from this collective
standpoint that we get a purchase
on the material world as if from the
outside. If this seems fanciful, just
reflect on what collectively we have
achieved – how we have
transformed the planet to suit our
own needs; how we have forced so
much of the material world to adapt
to us. How we have deflected the

flow of events in a direction that

expresses our human needs – needs
that go beyond the physiological
and the appetites that flow from
them. This is possible because, as
:
 Schelling said, uniquely in us,
nature opens her eyes and sees that
she exists; and, one might add, the
laws that connect her events with
one another.

Which brings me to a general point

that goes beyond particular
arguments against neuro-
determinism. The di"culty many
people have in understanding how
freedom could be possible in a law-
governed material world, or how
freedom could subsist in individuals
who appear to be their brains that

are material parts of a material

world and subject to its natural
laws, results in part from the fact
that they focus on individual
actions or components of actions.
:
 The truth is freedom operates only
within an entire field. And this is
one of the most important
di!erences between the reasons that
govern our actions and causes.
Take my coming here tonight to
talk. This action required, among
other things, my getting to this
restaurant, which in turn depends
upon the making and unmaking of
cross-bridges in my leg muscles as I
walk. Those unconscious
physiological events are not things
that I do: they are mere
mechanisms.

As we ascend from the material

details of an action to its larger
purpose, several things happen.

Firstly, intention and consciousness

becomes more important. Secondly,
the action draws on more and more
of what I would regard as distinctly
myself. The arguments I have
:
 mobilised in this talk, the outlook
they express, my commitment to
the Manifesto Club, my ability to
find my way to a unique
destination in London for an
explicit purpose on the basis of a
verbal agreement several months
beforehand – all of this is located in
frames of reference that do not
belong to the material world, that
cannot be captured in a Laplacean
world picture, or by the laws of
nature, although they have to be
realised in the material world:
Laplace is not mocked, and the laws
of nature are not transgressed. I
need them for heaven’s sake to
stand upright, to be able to walk

along the pavement, and to get my

voice heard.

Which brings me to my
penultimate point. When we think
about freedom, we are thinking
:
 about freedom, we are thinking
about, to use Dennett’s terms, a
freedom worth having. A free act is
one for which we can justly be held
responsible; one of which we have
true ownership; one which
originates within us. My example
just now of giving this talk shows
this: the action has grown out of
soil that is uniquely mine. There are
many layers of me – my past
endeavours, my present convictions
– that are expressed in it. While
there was an initial point at which I
did not choose myself – when my
parents got together on some dark
night in 1946 – and there was
much of my early life in which I
seemed to be reacting rather than

acting, I have increasingly been

choosing myself and the events in
my life have come from within me.
With the help of my fellow men, I
am an independent point of
:
 departure.

Which brings me to my final point.

My invocation of the collective
human world as the means by
which we have a point d’appui on
the natural world may ring alarm
bells. Collectivism sounds close to
cultural determinism, which is no
great advance on biological or
material determinism. This is where
biology, or our bodies anyway,
come to the rescue. Yes, we are
distanced from nature by the
culture we have in common. But
we are distanced from culture by
our bodies. Our bodies have a
unique trajectory through the
material world and the cultural

spaces we have collectively created.

By this double distancing, we are
free – to be temporally deep,
elaborated selves that so many in
the humanities insincerely deny
:
 exist, and to be those independent
points of departure, that Lucien
Goldmann spoke of. We are
equipped therefore to act to liberate
ourselves from the yoke of nature
and the tyranny of custom, practice,
and despots; and, even, from the
unintended consequences of our
best intentions.

Raymond Tallis is professor of

geriatric medicine at the University
of Manchester. He is speaking at
the session My brain made me do it
at the Battle of Ideas festival in
London on 27-28 October. For
more information about the
Manifesto Club, a pro-human

campaigning network, visit the

Manifesto Club website.

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Topics POLITICS

Tags ENLIGHTENMENT

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