Is free will even experienced? If not, can this be evidence for epiphenomenalism?

Question

Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events.

Many of the challenges to this view revolve around how it reduces us to nothing more than machines and goes against our experience of free will.

But do we actually experience free will? Actions come from decisions which are thoughts. But when do we choose our thoughts? It is not as if there is a basket of thoughts among which we pick one out of. Thoughts, instead, seem to pop out of nowhere as many careful meditators have claimed. Sam Harris argues that the entire concept is incoherent.

Some argue that free will is a fundamental component of experience. But if it was a fundamental component of experience, how could it even be doubted? We may not be able to doubt that we experience, but there is nothing preventing us from doubting that we experience free will. Lastly, it is not hard to imagine conscious experience without free will.

So if free will is not experienced, can this be evidence for epiphenomenalism?

Answer 1

A better argument against epiphenomenalism is that the human-influenced world becomes much harder to explain without free will. For instance, why would my fingers randomly type out this defense of free will if free will doesn't actually exist? It's too oddly specific of a pattern to be created randomly, so any satisfying argument for epiphenomenalism would have to explain not only it, but all the other oddly specific patterns of behavior my body experiences, and the way those cohere (for instance, driving a car, and stopping at the red lights, or eating at a restaurant, but ordering gluten-free rolls).

The concept that I'm a freely willed agent creating these words is simpler than any explanation that would somehow fake agency. And any such explanation would likely require a willed agent somewhere along the line.

For instance, if I watch a movie, I can get caught up enough in it that I think I'm the main character. I experience his choices as if I were actively making them, but in fact, I'm merely watching them. That is an epiphenomenon. However, that movie still required a writer, a director and an actor to intentionally bring it out about. It did not form itself randomly.

Answer 2

Actions come from decisions which are thoughts

Not necessarily. There are a ton of actions that do not come from conscious thought at all. Like currently I'm breathing without sparing a thought about breathing in and out and I still do it. Also I'm typing and while I think about the ideas, concepts, sentences and words, I spare not a single conscious thought on which keys I should hit on the keyboard, in fact I'm actually typing faster than the time that my mind would take to go through the different letters in those words. I can't even follow the movement of the fingers consciously unless I slow it down significantly. I'm certainly not consciously supervising these processes and with respect to breathing might not even have consciously set them in motion to begin with. It is not my "will" that I perform the bodily functions that keep my body alive like having my heart beat and so on.

I do not object to that and don't interfere with it (most of the time) but those are actions that "I" (the entity comprising body and mind) perform, but that are all "body" and not "mind", it's not "me", the conscious agent supervising the body to write these lines.

The process of doing so might even be controlled by the "brain" though not the "mind", so just because "brain" and "mind" are assumed to occupy the same physical space they do not necessarily refer synonymously to the same concept.

That being said, just because there are lots of actions that I do not perform consciously, there are also a lot of actions that I do perform consciously, like "writing" these lines (not the mechanical, but the thought process).

But when do we choose our thoughts?

Similar problem. Yes and no. There are lots of thoughts that you don't chose, because your body is constantly "perceiving" but your mind isn't constantly "listening" to that, so a lot of thoughts are subroutines coming to the surface of the consciousness, because they've reached a threshold of importance to become "emotions" about which we then develop "thoughts". So we don't choose them our bodies chose them for us. That being said just because you can close your eyes and lets thoughts pop up and fade into obscurity, you still have the ability to hold on to a thought, to concentrate upon it, to query your brain for more perception and data about it, to investigate it's connections, reasons and implications. So just because not every thought is conscious again doesn't mean that none is. And despite the fact that our thoughts are limited by our experiences, our thoughts are still quite free to mix and match everything that we've stored in memory. So that we can technically even imagine things vividly that do not exist and even cannot exist. Like do do you have a problem conceiving thoughts of aliens, monsters, gods, teleportation, time travel and so on? Probably not, have you ever seen them in real life? Probably not. But it's not difficult to combine idk a human or animal shape with the constraints of a horror movie, meaning that it should look scary, so idk sharp and metallic (invokes feelings of getting hurt easily by it)? blood red (invokes feelings of being hurt already or being about to as the threat is still present)? Gooey (also not pleasant and might stick and cause illnesses)? Maybe moldy in color and texture (natural aversion because of rotten food)? Dark (so that you can't make out the details and don't know what's hidden)? Or bright (so that you can't see anything)? Or some Cherenkov effect (that looks both marvelous and scary when you think of it's origin)?

So even if we are no gods that could think of a thing that we can't think about, there's still a lot of freedom and possibility in our thoughts and we can to a degree focus our attention or listen to the static.

Some argue that free will is a fundamental component of experience.

Well yes, experience is conscious experience, you can perceive things subconsciously, but you can't experience them subconsciously otherwise the memory would just a a vague indistinct feeling that you can't really comprehend consciously.

But if it was a fundamental component of experience, how could it even be doubted? [...] We may not be able to doubt that we experience,

You can doubt a lot of things. Like optical illusions and so on can make you doubt your perception and experience, or eating and suddenly feeling less angry might make you doubt your emotion of anger and might make you contemplate where it's coming from rather than directly reacting to it.

But I'm not aware of a way to switch off your mind without switching it off completely. You know you can knock your mind out, with physical force or drugs so that you're in a state of unconsciousness but then "you" don't exist, your body is just vegetating, but as long as you exist you are aware of your existence, right? Like you might not be aware of your body but you're nonetheless aware of your mind. And you can't really step outside of your mind. So can you really question your "self"?

Now the problem is that there is a connection between "me", everything occupying the physical space of my body, "me" the conscious mind that does the thinking, "me" the body that does the action and part of the thoughts and stores the memory, including the brain that is part of the body yet responsible for the technicalities of the mind/body interface and likely host to the mind, which is again me, which is host to an internal simulating unit and a will (to interact with the surrounding world) and if they are all interacting based on physical principles then this should be a human machine that connected inputs to outputs, meaning there is no place for a "me" in that picture, yet I am as certain as nothing else on earth that "I" do posses the ability to both act internally "thinking" and "externally" relatively free, that is constraint by the body, by the laws of nature, by my own experiences, but not in a predetermined way or one where things could only go one way, so for all intents and purposes yes, I would say that I do experience free will. But the thing is if that isn't it and things are predetermined than I could feel differently anyway, but this feeling would be the result of my environment, so for practical purposes it doesn't actually matter.

Answer 3

Absolutely free will is experienced. Two psychological manifestations of free will are cognitive dissonance and indecision. The first occurs when I am thinking two contradictory things and have to take responsibility for it. The more general experience, that of indecision, is the ultimate burden of free will. If I can choose, then I have to have a basis to choose. Blonde or brunette? Chocolate or vanilla? Reading philosophy or playing a first-person shooter? For a truly advanced mind, such paralysis by analysis may lead to an existential crisis. Such freedom of will may ultimately lead to embracing absurdism: after all, I'm free to think whatever I want as long I can choose. I should choose by thinking my way through it. I can't help but constantly thinking through it. I can't help but constantly choose anew. My free will is thus a prison.

Answer 4

I think you are very much coming at this from the Harris camp. And yes, he is very much arguing against the existence of free will. And yes, I would say that epiphenomenalism is simply Harris' stance by another name. I don't know whether he's ever used that term or would want to be associated with it, but as an outside observer, the two positions seem to go together quite well.

I think this is pretty much all your question is really, but let me add to this a bit more from my perspective. The free will divide—which is also very apparent in the answers here—is mostly a difference of what angle you look at the problem from, I believe.

If you look at it from "inside the box", then you do exhibit "free will" in the sense that you as a biological entity have a full range of possibilities to choose from at any given time. That is as opposed to a severely constrained entity which may be forced to make certain decisions against its instinct or better knowledge. In this sense, there are enough humans on this planet which do not have "free will", as they're very constrained by circumstances.

You could soften this definition a bit more to define "free will" as merely wanting to make certain decisions, even if you cannot carry them out because of external constraints. In this sense, the most constrained people out there may be the most free-willed of all of us, when they constantly experience the tension between what they want but can't have. I on the other hand could hop on a train right now to the airport and fly to the other side of the world on a whim. Is that "free will"? Or merely thoughtlessly acting on random impulses? Is it more free-willed to resist the urge to do this, because that is the wiser decision?

That is where the different angle comes in: looking at it from "outside the box", these decision making processes are going on inside your head somewhere. Harris and other meditators argue that if you really pay attention to that process, you truly have no idea who is coming up with these questions and who's weighing them and who makes the final decision. It just… happens. When you're thirsty, do you weigh the pros and cons of drinking a cup of water? No, you just act. That's a very innate response, almost a reflex. It's one of the many ingrained behaviours we have which are the reason we're still around today, as opposed to having died off as a species long ago.

Our brains make a lot more complex decisions than this all the time. They're complex enough that given strong enough reasons/neural connections/input, they can even override such innate behaviour as eating and drinking. You can voluntarily starve yourself to death. But only very few people in extreme circumstances ever form these extreme overriding connections that would cause that behaviour. Is that an example of free will? Or just of something having arguably gone haywire in the brain? People throwing themselves off of buildings aren't usually viewed as doing so as an act of free will; rather some mental illness is typically being ascribed to them.

Which is all a long winded way of saying: it's really hard to pin down what supposedly is or isn't "free will" in the first place, so the arguments against free will existing at all are there in my opinion. However, from "inside the box", "free will" is a useful shorthand to explain certain behaviour, which "outside the box" doesn't in fact exist. The divide of opinion on the matter is IMO either a difference of definition, or a lack of having glimpsed "outside the box".

Answer 5

"Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events."

Suppose my mental events include figuring out how to checkmate a chess opponent and then I carry out this plan successfully. As a result I win a chess tournament and use my prize money to vacation on a Caribbean isle, where I meet my future wife, with whom I eventually have a child who grows up to be a famous artist who sculptures what soon becomes a famous statue.

Wouldn't that quite obviously show mental events affecting physical events?

Answer 6

Epiphenomenalism means that mental events don't exist at all. If they don't have any effect upon any physical events, they cannot be observed, there is nothing to experience. Only physical events can be observed and experienced. All mental events, including observation and experiencing, are just responses to physical events

In reality, mental events do exist, they do have an observable effect on people's behaviour.

You have left free will undefined. I am assuming here that by "free will" you mean the ability to choose actions.

We can observe free will (by this definition) in action. Choices are made and their observable consequences can be experienced, suffered or enjoyed.

This does not necessarily mean that we actually make our choices ourselves. It is still possible that our free will is an illusion, a false experience. However, this doesn't remove free will totally, choices are still made with observable consequences. Someone must be able to make them anyway and project this illusion into our minds. A highly improbable scenario, as we have no evidence at all for the existence of such mind-controlling beings.

Answer 7

Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events.

If brain events can cause mental events, then vice versa is also possible: mental events must be able to cause brain events. The mechanism that goes from brain events to mental events is a physical mechanism, and hence it must obey the law of reaction. It cannot work only one way, it must work both ways. Epiphenomenalism makes no logical sense, therefore.

Note that nobody can point at anything that would demonstrably be an epiphenomenon. Such things simply do not exist.

And as pointed out by @PerttiRuismäki, if epiphenomena existed, nobody would know about them, by definition...

The concept of epiphenomenon is an oxymoron. It's like saying: "I can touch you but you cannot touch me".

Answer 8

It is not as if there is a basket of thoughts among which we pick one out of.

Perhaps this is exactly what is going on, but we are not or only dimly aware of what goes into the picking process.

(One helluva preposition-at-the-end construction, though.)