The other night, the championship game for my rec basketball league got fairly heated, and during a play late in the game I reacted in a less than ideal way. One of the more talkative players on the other team and I were both chasing down a loose ball, and as I grabbed it his momentum carried him into me at nearly full speed. I was crouched down to grab the ball, so he ended up on top of me, which prompted me to force myself upright (knocking him off) while shouting, “Get off me!” We exchanged a few more words, then after shooting my free throws I made my way to the bench to cool down (and later apologized). Upon reflection, what stood out to me was that I couldn’t remember making a conscious decision to force the other player off or to shout at him. In the heat of the moment, those actions had been essentially automatic.
Automaticity is at the center of the free will debate, with the main argument against resting on the idea that everything we do or think is automatic, driven by the interactions of lower level particles, leaving no room for us to have any influence. My view is that this argument supposes a nonexistent distinction between a person and their particles, with our influence being one and the same as that of the particles (just observed and experienced at different levels). However, at the end of the day, the argument really comes down to the definition of free will. Some seem to define the term as “the ability to act differently than dictated by the interactions of particles”, and given this definition, it’s clearly incongruous with our universe. If we instead define it as “the ability of an agent to make choices”, we introduce all sorts of thorny questions about the definitions of “ability”, “agent”, “make”, and “choices”, but at least leave open the door to discussion on the topic.
Returning to the basketball incident, it felt to me like I had far less of a choice about my actions at that point than I did after the game when I apologized. Physiologically, my brain recognized a stressful situation and my “fight or flight” response activated (fight, in this case), disengaging the more rational tendencies of my prefrontal cortex and leading to an automatic reaction. Whether or not it’s accurate to say I actually had less of a choice depends on the definition of “I”. Am I my rational tendencies and prefrontal cortex, or am I my whole brain, including the parts responsible for the automatic response? While it doesn’t feel to me like I had ownership of the actions, it’s my rational tendencies writing these words and claiming not to have ownership, so perhaps this part of myself can’t be trusted to know the whole me.
If the above paragraph makes one thing clear, it’s that this topic can quickly stretch the limits of our lexicon. However, it hopefully also illuminates some of the themes that should play a more prominent role in the free will discussion. The question is typically treated as a binary one, but it’s more interesting when considered along a spectrum. How much does activation of the fight or flight response impact our default decision making capabilities? To what degree can someone who’s drunk be held responsible for their actions? How about someone who is sleepwalking?
These types of questions have been and will continue to be considered in the legal realm, but are often viewed as orthogonal to the free will discussion. However, it’s through providing insight into questions like these that the topic can have real world implications and move beyond a debate about definitions.