DID you freely choose to read this or was your decision predetermined? The question of whether we truly have free will is one of the oldest and most contentious of all. It certainly feels like we do, so it might also strike you as the worst kind of 鈥渁rmchair philosophy鈥� 鈥� an abstract intellectual pursuit, far removed from anything to do with real life.
However, the question has echoed down the centuries not only because it is an existential one, but also because it impinges on how we think about moral responsibility: if the freedom to choose our actions is an illusion, then there is no justification to reward or punish us for them.
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The standard argument against the idea that we have the capacity for deliberate, conscious decision-making is simply that the deterministic laws of classical physics rule it out.
But our thoughts and decisions appear to arise from the mind. The question then becomes whether the human brain, in all its complexity, can be reduced to the laws of physics. Who better, then, to take a fresh look at the conundrum of free will than biologists. In framing the question as one of psychology and neurology, rather than physics, they can apply a different set of tools 鈥� genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology 鈥� to put free will to the test, as we explore in our cover story Free will: Can neuroscience reveal if your choices are yours to make?聽
This new approach is welcome. Yet biologists should be wary of a common pitfall for those who take on this challenge, namely the temptation to seek out evidence that supports pre-existing views informed by the moral implications of one answer or another.
The idea that we must have free will or else we would be forced to abandon our long-standing code of ethics, for example, doesn鈥檛 make for a good scientific case.
Instead, given the importance of the free will question to our understanding of the human condition, we must pursue an evidence-based perspective, regardless of its consequences. In that sense, at least, we surely have the power to choose.