Free will

Much of the best biological work in decision-making has been carried out in bacteria and insects because the genetics of these organisms is better understood and they provide the most physically accessible nervous systems. With the advent of modern imaging and neurophysiological techniques, however, decision-making by human and non-human primates has become a bustling area in the early stages of development. This work has focused largely on the important problem of valuation — the way that nervous systems assign differential value to available behavioral options. And it's this valuation step that appears to provide human decision-makers with an especially developed capacity — the ability to use abstract ideas to control our behavior. It is this capacity that resembles, but is not equivalent to, the older ideas about will. Is there any mechanism or capacity in the human nervous system that resembles will? It's well known that abstract ideas can commandeer a person's behavior and often in odd ways. For example, humans routinely go on hunger strikes based on political ideas and can inhibit their drive to take in food — even to the point of death. The capacity for abstractions to veto survival instincts can be seemingly arbitrary and the abstraction does even not have to possess any basis in reality. One need only remember the 1997 mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult based on the idea that there was a spaceship hiding in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp waiting to take believers 'to the next level'. The ability to make choices inconsistent with survival is a potent ability to choose and one that brings potential physical danger to its possessor. Does the capacity to make choices inconsistent with survival demonstrate that humans possess something like free choice? The dramatic examples above appear on the surface to resemble the old philosophical idea of free will — choosing a course of action against all biological imperatives. As we illustrated above, humans do not possess the traditional notion of free choice; however, they do possess a capacity for flexible choice. One way to understand this flexibility is by hypothesizing that these 'pathologies' What is free will? Free will is the idea that we make choices and have thoughts independent of anything remotely resembling a physical process. Free will is the close cousin to the idea of the soul — the concept that 'you', your thoughts and feelings, derive from an …