Consider the individual: A being capable of self-driven feats. When we think of independent human behaviours, we often reflect on the concept of free will - an ideology held strongly by fierce libertarians who believe full individuality and personal freedom are ultimate values that societies and mankind should consider their “raison d’être” - something to strive for and uphold. On the other hand, hard determinists carry the firm principle that human decisions are dictated or subject to external or internal factors where independent motion of choice simply does not exist, not without deterministic factors attached.

The human brain is a complex, enigmatic and often hard-to-decode organ. Yet at the same time, our decisions, habits, feelings and thoughts are dependent on our complex neural network.

When we approach behaviours through a cognitive/neural lens, the libertarian may argue that our experiences and past psychological profiles are what shape (not determine) our actions or interactions with the environment; that, in fact, humans are capable of making decisions such as tea or coffee without the attachment or restriction of deterministic factors (e.g. culture/biology). However, the determinist may combat this by bringing attention to the undeniable neuroscience of decision-making, arguing that our actions do not come from a simple free will model, but are rather contingent to an unconscious biological readiness to pursue actions well before we consciously determine to do so - linking genetic makeup, evolutionary factors, and pre-disposed decision tendencies to our immediate behaviours.

These questions have invigorated philosophers, ethicists, psychologists and scientists alike for years.

This article will briefly explore the ways in which neurodeterminism plays a role in explaining human behaviours through a neurocognitive perspective, fMRI and philosophical explanations, but also the ways in which neurodeterminism is a flawed view, and the alternative approach to such a concept, while acknowledging the ongoing debate surrounding this highly deliberated subject.

Libertarianist Free Will - What it is and its criticisms.

Though you may come across modified free will, commonly known as compatibilism, which suggests that past experiences shape your preferences and character, this article will focus on using libertarianism as a model for free will - the idea that humans have the power to evaluate their experiences and choose a completely alternate path, elevating the conscious in behavioural and moral agency. This view is defended by authors such as Carl Ginet (2014) and Robert Kane (2004)

The model of free will operates on an underlying principle (the Principle of Alternate Possibilities) that captures how acting freely means one could have acted oppositely if decided to do so. Essentially, for humans to be free, they must have been able to choose different paths.

Putting this into perspective: if you had chosen to wear a blue button-up this morning, there is a genuine possibility (according to libertarians) that, if time were turned back to the very moment of deciding what to wear, with the same brain and temperament, you could have chosen to wear a red button-up - no matter if conditions were pristinely identical. This is called the Principle of Alternate Possibilities.

This ‘could’ is typically interpreted as a conditional statement, one with possibility, i.e. you would have worn a red button-up if you wanted to. In essence, freedom is the capacity to explore possibilities [1].

A heavy libertarian perspective demonstrates that choices are not causally determined. The moment of choice remains the open window where any possibility can reside, and the only factor that influences this choice is the human mind. The person who acts must be the author of their actions and decisions – they must be the same entity [2]. A decision that is random is not considered free, as it must be rationally motivated since it would still be the subject of chance if random.

Even though humans can act on impulse and against their interests without full orientation and awareness of their actions, this does not refute free will in its view; it still allows people to act or not act in a certain way out of their own conviction despite external or internal factors. Put simply, you may eat a cake ravenously, but despite your liking for sweet foods, you still choose to eat it autonomously without limitations attached to your conviction - making you a free agent.

It is important to discuss what actually counts as a limitation. Limitations on liberty include those that stop you from acting within your own rights. Free will gives you these rights, but limitations are things that subvert those rights and halt action. Examples may include physical coercion (e.g. being locked in a room, being restrained, being blocked from something) and/or legal prohibitions (e.g. government regulations, laws, or prohibitions).

Environmental limitations include natural and biological laws (e.g. the inability to physically fly as a human, inability to move in a straight path with a mountain in front of you, unable to be legally employed because you were rejected).

Libertarian philosophy firmly rejects the influence of any natural or man-made laws on decision-making, suggesting that despite these factors, a human still has free will. So then the question arises: how can a person go forth with a decision if they have no circumstantial control or freedom over physical or environmental limitations? While external constraints limit this freedom, the focus is not on the outcome. It is focused on the internal mental decision-making, which is argued to be unconstrained by deterministic traits.

In accordance with simple libertarianism, desire or intention can cause a decision, but nothing will cause the mental event that occurs before the decision is carried out [3]. Philosopher Carl Ginet proposes that it is “conceptually impossible for a person to know what decision they are going to make before actually making it”, as previous events cannot cause mental events.

One could argue that choosing between options is a solid reflection of acting freely in the moment, as when we tie in all these libertarian principles together, this is what decision-making looks like:

Exploring the psychological depths of free will is tempting. However, it is a lengthy and rich debate. While this article aims to place an emphasis on scientific proof and explanation for neurodeterminism, free will has limited or negligible neurological basis/supporting evidence. In fact, deterministic counterarguments have found strong empirical proof to combat this ideology. There are indeed many flaws with this view; though subjective and highly debatable, it is important in neuropsychological research to present a balance of concrete and abstract models.

Criticisms of Free Will and an Intro to Neurodeterminism

Determinism, the hard opponent of free will, is the ‘philosophical doctrine’ that all human events including choices and actions are completely predetermined by past events and states, and fall in accordance with natural laws [4]. Essentially, determinism is the idea that every human behaviour is subjected to external/internal factors or laws, over which we have no agency or control over.

When we consider the human brain – a vast neural network riddled with complex neurochemistry, one may say that these neural processes are what drive our behaviour. Through analysing the pathway our neural impulses take, where most sensory experiences are picked up by receptor cells, sent down myelinated axons electrically and diffused across synapses to the next neuron chemically to provoke a response in our effectors, it is objective to say that our ability to produce responses is heavily reliant on rapid neural pathways. Without this stringent process, one is unable to produce a response independently. The human body has no other way of transmitting sensory information in such an efficient, streamlined manner, let alone at all, without their neural networks.

With this strong evidence intact, understood and taught in schools globally in basic biology/biopsychology, how can free will truly exist? The notion of mental processes occurring without neurological intervention is ultimately contradictory to empirical scientific study and understanding. The libertarian must understand that a human will never be truly free - a human will forever be dictated by something. It can be as superficial as exhaustion, human desires or personality, or something completely unpalpable to the individual, such as genetic makeup and indomitable biology. Though the moment of decision of action is something conducted with autonomy, it is an illusory autonomy. Your personal disposition is what makes you consider this action.

Let us reflect back on the libertarian’s Principle of Alternate Possibilities. The libertarian argues that what makes up free will is concentrated in the action and moment of performing a behaviour, and that the person always had the option to do it, or not to. However, this idea can immediately be criticised, as choosing to do otherwise would have meant:

A: The individual had a reason for doing/not doing something, which is inevitably dictated by their own inescapable disposition, personality or inner biology due to proven learning processes such as neuroplasticity, biopsychology, cognitive psychology, environmental influences and other innate tendencies that govern human thought.

B: They had no reason, labelling this incident as random, which cannot exist in libertarianism, as something ‘random’ is still the slave of chance and has no participation in the choice-making of the individual.

This paradox highlights free will’s excusatory nature in trying to uphold human free will. A person’s thought pattern may not seem like direct control, yet it acts as a multiplier that selectively increases the probability of an individual doing certain things that align with those predetermined factors.

Evidence for Neurodeterminism

An fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) study of focus that investigated the effects of belief in free will on third party punishment (Krueger et al.) [5] showcases something interesting about both libertarianism and determinism.

People’s belief in free will (BFW) was investigated through their punishment of hypothetical crime offences in low and high-affective cases, with low-affective cases involving non-emotional, non-violent or arguably calmer circumstances, and high-affective cases including visceral horror, gore, violent content, or extremely emotionally triggering content.

What the study found was that people with strong BFW punished more harshly in low-affective cases. Framed within the context of the libertarian-determinist debate, the divergence occurs because of a lack of emotional surge in low affective cases, creating that space and need to penalise the use of free will for crime as an autonomous choice that could have been avoided, and to place the blame more easily than determinists – as deterministic factors would have been used as a contextual reason for low-impact behaviours, leading to less punishment and more leniency in blame.

The effect of increased libertarian punishment was ‘mirrored by a stronger activation in the right temporo-parietal junction’ (rTPJ), a region of the brain presumed to be involved in temporary intentions and beliefs of others, theory of mind, perspective taking and attentional selection to salient stimuli. However, we see that for high-affective cases, both groups demonstrated similar punishment and showed higher activation in the right insula - typically activated during extreme norm violations.

This last finding demonstrates that, in situations of extreme overstepping of moral, ethical or emotional boundaries, the behaviour of those with high BFW and those with low BFW barely differs, meaning emotion dictates both almost equally. Both responses were equally driven by the emotional impact, suggesting that the innate tendency for human objection to aversive stimuli, or the inevitable cultural/ethical/social standards of the environment, have driven their decisions instead of their own agency of action. The ‘inevitable’ reaction would have been a strong, emotional response that can be explained in terms of brain activity.

Therefore, it could be interpreted that humans will usually evoke a standard, baseline, almost primal reaction to stimuli regardless of their BFW - lending weight to the determinist argument, that behaviours come from shared neural circuits that will activate and produce automatic, provoked behaviours that arguably they had no control over.

The last fMRI study discussed in this article (Koenig-Robert et al.) [6] reveals that our brains reveal our choices well before we consciously make them. Participants were asked to lay in an fMRI scanner, then asked to freely choose within 20 seconds between visualising two predefined gratings – a green/red horizontal line grating or a green/red vertical line grating. As soon as their decision was made, they were instructed to press a button with their right hand to remove motor-preparation confounds (association between motor actions and cognitive decisions that can distort fMRI neuroimaging data).

After deciding, participants were asked to press a button again to inform which grating they visualised - “Left for vertical green/red – Right for horizontal red/green” (depending on the pre-assigned gratings for the participant)”. Participants were finally asked to rate how vivid their visualisation was from 1-4. Each trial included a grace period of 10 seconds to avoid spillover effects from one trial to the next.

Findings from this method showcased that brain activity in the occipital lobe, frontal lobe, thalamus and pons could predict which image the participant was going to pick up to 11 seconds prior to the conscious decisions. However, another exciting result indicated that, upon comparison between the pre-choice brain activity and brain activity while looking at images of the gratings, and found through perception-imagery generalisation that the neural signals pre-decision closely overlapped with/resembled the true, real visual representations of the gratings, meaning that the visual area of the brain faintly ‘flickered’ or ‘hinted’ at the image the participants were going to pick before consciously deciding, and stronger neural signals meant a more vivid visualisation.

Figure 5 from Koenig-Robert et al.
Fig.5 from Koenig-Robert et al, demonstrating that the primary visual cortex primes decisions before they are made, while processing moves to higher level visual areas (V2 and V3) to generate and sustain the mental visualisation.

As we see from this evidence, another perspective of the determinist argument arises. This study indicates that something takes hold of our decision making before we can call it ‘conscious free will’, that our neural structures are drivers for the choices we make, at least to an extent – as due to the correlational nature of fMRI research in general, associations are typically assumed between brain activity and certain behaviours thought to be localised in certain regions. However, considering the scientific rigour of the methodology, it would be acceptable to consider the study a valuable explanation for predisposed/predetermined decision making.

Conclusion

The libertarian may continue to step on the pedestal of free will, championing for an autonomous decision framework without any strings. However, modern neuroimaging studies give us food for thought into approaching agency with at least a more tangible proof. The neuroscience of it all proposes an empirical challenge to the libertarian – whether it be through neural unity during severe moral deliberations, or the latent pre-conscious hints in visual areas that prime our voluntary visualisations well before we make them. Instead of looking into proving hard determinism, focus is placed on how the findings imply that our choices are continuously shaped by localised functions and neurointeractions well before our consciousness snaps into action. As peculiar as it sounds, our minds have a mind of their own, and perhaps this is a reality we ought to uphold. We are greatly captivating creatures through the perpetual inner conductors that take care of the choices we make. We are not any less individual in retrospect, and with all due respect to the libertarian, we are rather the vessels of choice, not the author.