Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action undetermined by past events. There are many definitions and perspectives on free will from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and other fields. Some key points discussed in the document include: - Determinism suggests human actions are completely determined by prior causes, inconsistent with free will. Compatibilism holds free will and determinism can coexist. - Experiments show brain activity occurs before a conscious decision, but these may not prove decisions are not made freely. Mental states and unconscious processes also influence behavior in unpredictable ways. - Reducing human behavior completely to brain physiology is difficult due to emergence and complex interactions. Believing in free will preserves

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4. Free Will
DEFINITIONS
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5. Free Will
• Self-determination, and freedom of choice (synonyms).
• Freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine
intervention (Dictionary interpretation).
• Free Will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action while the
outcome has not been determined by past events (Philosophy definition).
• Free Will means that we can consciously make decisions that are not determined by the
physics and biology of our brains (Psychology definition).
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6. Other Definitions
FOR UNDERSTANDING MORE ABOUT FREE WILL
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7. Consciousness
• The normal state of being awake and able to understand what is happening around you
(Dictionary interpretation).
• The state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within
yourself (Dictionary interpretation).
• It’s refers to your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings,
sensations and environment at a certain time (Psychology definition).
• Note: your conscious experiences are constantly shifting and changing with time.
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8. Sub-consciousness
• The subconscious is a part of consciousness.
• But it’s not in focal awareness.
• It refers to anything in the mind that cannot be consciously processed in that moment, but
can be recalled, like making a phone while walking to home.
• By training.
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9. Unconsciousness
• The unconscious mind consists of the processes in the mind that occur automatically and are
not available to introspection and include thought processes, memory, and motivation.
• The division of the mind containing elements of psychic makeup, such as memories or
repressed desires that are not subject to conscious perception or control but that often affect
conscious thoughts and behaviors (Medical definition).
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10. Awareness
• It is the state or quality of being aware of something, or Knowledge or perception of a
situation or fact.
• It is defined as a human's or an animal's perception and cognitive reaction to a condition or
event (biological psychology definition).
• For example, Insects have an awareness that you are trying to swat them or chase after them,
but insects do not have consciousness in the usual sense because they lack the brain capacity
for thought and understanding.
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Explaining consciousness is still a dilemma!
An analogy presented by Daniel Dennett
Consciousness as Magic
From Lee Siegel’s book “Net of Magic”
“I’m writing a book on magic,” I explain, and I’m asked, “Real magic?” By real magic
people mean miracles, and supernatural powers. “No,” I answer: “Conjuring tricks, not
real magic.”
Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is
real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.”
Daniel Dennett, 2008
Philosopher and cognitive scientist

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William James said “If there is no Free Will, so why do you have to bother yourself
doing arguments and presenting reasons”
Hitchens said “I have no choice but to believe in Free Will”
William James, 1890
philosopher and psychologist
Christopher Hitchens, 2007
author and journalist One of the comments: it’s not your choice, but you have it!

13. Determinism and Compatibilism
• Determinism is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bounded by causality in such a
way that any state of an object or event is completely determined by prior states.
• It suggests that there is only one course of events is possible based on the available causes, which
is inconsistent with the existence of the Free Will.
• Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas.
• Some compatibilists even hold that determinism is necessary for free will, arguing that choice
involves a preference for one course of action over another, requiring a sense of how choices will
turn out.
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Think for a moment
A twin from the same mother and father, born at the same time and are living in the same
environment, and yet their actions are different.
Doesn’t that negate causality and determinism idea?!

15. Marshmallow effect
• An experiment that held for some kids to see their behaviours.
• Each one kept alone with a piece of Marshmallow.
• “if you don’t eat that piece of Marshmallow within the following 15 mins, you will get another
piece”
• The results that kids behaved in three different ways
◦ One group ate the Marshmallow immediately.
◦ The second group waited for a while then ate it.
◦ The third group waited for the 15 mins then took the second piece.
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The same conditions, but different behaviours
Human reactions are unpredictable, so they can't be based on causation only
René Descartes said about Free Will, “the ability to do or not do something”
and “the will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained”
Richard Feynman said “Yes! Physics has given up. We do not know to predict what would
happen in a given circumstance, and we believe now that it is impossible, that the only thing
that can be predicted is the probability of different events.”
René Descartes, 1648
Philosopher
Richard Feynman, 1965
Physicist

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Michio Kaku proposed an analogy with referring to Heisenberg law of electron’s
uncertainty
You cannot define the electron position at a certain time but you can determine the
probability of its existence at a certain position
Based on this analogy that
Human actions in a certain time cannot be determined, but we can determine the
probability of doing a specific action.
Mixchio Kaku, 2012
Physicist

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Libet et al. (1983) experiment,
Conscious decision usually takes time.
Subjects were fully aware of the choice that they are going to do.
Very simple binary decision with respect to complex without a clue of options’ situations.
The environment cannot be compared to the real and practical one.
There is no proof that this RP (readiness potential) represents a decision to move.
The brain activity measures have been primitive.
The action could be guided by the subconscious not the conscious mind (after training).
That lead to a biased and inaccurate results.
Benjamin Libet, 1975
Neuroscientist

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Jeff Miller and Judy Trevena experiment (Sound decision),
Take the decision to tap the key after an audio tone.
If Libet’s interpretation were correct,
The RP should be greater after the tone when a person chose to tap the key.
The RP signal was the same for both cases, which could mean that the brain is just paying
attention and doesn’t indicate that a decision has been made.
Jeff Miller, 2015
psychologist

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Second experiment
This time they asked volunteers to press a key after the tone, but to decide on the spot whether to
use their left or right hand.
Assumption, movement in the right should be related to the brain signals in the left hemisphere
and vice versa.
They reasoned that if an unconscious process is driving this decision, where it occurs in the brain
should depend on which hand is chosen.
But they found no such correlation.
Jeff Miller, 2015
psychologist

21. Determining someone’s behaviour is hard
• Reductionism is an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them
to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things.
• It is not easy to determine someone behaviour based on the idea of reductionism because
fulfilling the idea of emergence is hard to proof.
• Emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through
interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties
(philosophy, systems theory, science, and art’s definition).
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Because total is more than the sum,
Philip.W.Anderson (1972) said that “The main fallacy in this kind of
thinking that the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a
‘constructionist’ one: the ability to reduce everything to simple
fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and
reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle
physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less
relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of
science, much less to those of society”.
Philip W. Anderson, 1990
Physicist
Interaction! PNP jun.

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Sam Harris argues that:
You have no control of your thoughts.
Thoughts appear suddenly without your control.
Your brain decides first and you feel that you decide.
You just witness the decision.
You are the totality of what happens in your brain.
Sam Harris, 2014
Author, philosopher and neuroscientist

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Voluntary movement
Sub-voluntary
movement
Semi-voluntary
movement
Involuntary
movement
Aware decision
system
Unaware decision
system
Consciousness
Sub-consciousness
Unconsciousness
External and internal
feedback
Hypothetical diagram
Actions
Controlled by consciousness
Controlled by
unconsciousness/sub-consciousness

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You as a control mental system consists of Conscious, subconscious, and unconscious.
These three things are affecting your actions and behaviours, so basically, control your body.
All these three components seem to be perceiving all the time from the social interactions
and the surrounding environment
Each of them could perceive things in different ways.
That shapes and creates our actions, thoughts, beliefs… etc.
That could show us that sometimes movement could happen before we perceived the willing
to do this movement, which many researchers tend to use to prove that we don’t have Free
Will neglecting the fact we are the totality of the mentioned three components.

26. Free Will another definition
Michael Ghazzaniga also proposed another definition for Free Will and freedom
in his lectures saying that
“Human behaviour is the product of a probabilistically determined system
which is guided by experience.
Freedom and responsibility emerge from: group interactions and mental states
selected by the general milieu constrains the brain”
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Micheal Ghazzaniga, 2010
Psychologist and Neuroscientist

27. Mental state and Free Will
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• There is an experiment shows mental state changes our perceiving, so it changes our thoughts
and our behaviours, consequently our Free Will, and our responses are unpredictable.
• Experiment description:
◦ A researcher put an electrode on the olfactory sensor to stimulate it while making the subject in
different mental states.
◦ First, He asked the subject to remember something good that he loved, then he stimulated the olfactory
sensor.
◦ Second, He asked the subject to remember something bad that he hate, then he stimulated the
olfactory sensor with keeping all external conditions same.
◦ For the first case, the patient felt as if he is smelling a rose flower.
◦ For the second case, the patient felt as if he is smelling a rotten egg.
◦ So your mental state makes determining your actions hard, so that proves the existence of Free Will.

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The first impression of love, comfort, or hate that we experience when meeting
someone for the first time!
It creates our mental state which changes and shapes our responses towards this
person.
These reactions seem to be something unpredictable and not depend on causation.
But it seems that our unconscious sees something you cannot see consciously, then it
produces some feeling and thoughts at that moment which affects our actions
And that proof that we have Free Will because our actions are indeterminate 100%.

29. Could he have done it?!
Austin (1961) said about Austin’s putt “consider the case where I miss a very short putt
and kick myself because I could have holed it. It is not that I should have holed it if I had
tried: I did try, and missed. It is not that I should have holed it if conditions had been
different: that might, of course, be so, but I am talking about conditions as they
precisely were, and asserting that I could have holed it. There is the rub. Nor does ‘I
can hole it this time’ mean that I shall hole it this time if I try or if anything else; for I
may try and miss, and yet not be convinced that I could not have done it; indeed,
further experiments may confirm my belief that I could have done it that time,
although I did not.”, He needs to say that if the time has been back again, he could
have done it.
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John Austin, 1950
Philosopher

30. Free Will from moral perspective
• There is Free Will
• Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame.
• If there is no moral responsibility there is no meaning for life, following a religion, obeying
rules…
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31. That what could happen if there is no free will
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32. An engineering point of view of ‘morally
competent agent’ proposed by Daniel Danette:
• Is well formed (Knowledge).
• Has roughly well-ordered desires (No disabilities).
• Is moved by reasons.
• Is not being controlled by another agent (Secret manipulators).
• Is punishable (Not a robot).
• Could have done otherwise (Back to Austin’s putt statement).
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33. The value of believing in Free Will
• Vohs and Schooler (2008) proposed an experiment:
◦ Some people were divided into two groups.
◦ One group was told to read a book that relating to the importance of the causation and determinism
idea in an indirect way.
◦ The other group were asked to read a book that raises the positivity and beliefs.
◦ Then they were put in two different rooms and asked to play a game while providing a cheats book.
◦ They found that people that have read about determinism have done a lot of cheatings, but the other
group don’t.
• Conclusion:
◦ You have the Free Will to do anything.
◦ Second, believing in Free Will preserves moral responsibility and enhances practicing good behaviours.
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34. Conclusion
We can’t predict human’s behavior based on prior causes
We are the totality of three systems
We are just able to predict the probability of different events
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35. Questions for wondering ?!
When doing something you may have an interpretation, and it could be logic, but to be honest, it’s
what your unconscious mind wants you to know!!
do you think a dummy person has a deficient in his consciousness, sub-consciousness, or
unconsciousness?!
What could happen if someone partially lost his unconsciousness?!
In case of we are consists of these ((consciousness + sub-consciousness), soul (unconsciousness (not
the automated part)), and evil), how could we remove the effect of evil stimulations and
unconsciousness’ spontaneous unrelated thoughts?!
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