Culture & Society

Do We Really Have Free Will?

William Klemm has reached some conclusions that he thinks will help clear up some confusion caused by multiple experiments on free will in the last few decades and includes them in a new book.
By Keith Randall, Texas A&M Marketing & Communications April 28, 2016

Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will.The concept of free will – that in the absence of external constraints, people are free to choose from among alternatives whether it’s good or bad – and how humans react to it is a topic that a Texas A&M University neuroscience professor has written about from a scientific perspective.

William Klemm has reached some conclusions that he thinks will help clear up some confusion caused by multiple experiments on free will in the last few decades and includes them in a new book, Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will.

Klemm says that his reason for penning the book is to clear up some beliefs regarding free will, and he believes that the formal research used to gauge it in the past has been flawed. Many other scientists claim that free will is an illusion.

Free will has been debated for thousands of years, literally as long as man has been around, Klemm explains. It has its basis in religious doctrine in most countries. In Christianity, for example, it is believed that God told Adam and Eve not to eat the apples from a certain tree, but using their free will, they did it anyway – the first case of free will and its results, namely that actions have consequences.

“We are supposed to judge people by their character because we think humans control their character development,” Klemm says.

“We send criminals to jail because we think they should have controlled their behavior. But some scientists claim that human behavior is driven by unconscious forces, meaning that we can’t do anything, that we are just observers – sort of like a movie goer who watches but can’t influence the movie.”

The subject of free will is often used in the courtroom.

“We all know that defense lawyers try to emphasize extenuating circumstances,” Klemm notes. “The prosecution might call these ‘excuses’ and argue that the defendant does not have the mental capacity to make free-will choices that are expected of most citizens.”

Klemm agrees that the consequences of believing in free will are mostly unacceptable as evidence for free will one way or another.

But his book documents a wide range of evidence to show that all people have varying degrees of free will. Scholars opposed to free will claim that though consciousness is by definition necessary for free will, consciousness can’t do anything, much less generate free will, he says.

They regard consciousness as just an “observer.” But Klemm asserts that consciousness “enables the brain to do things in ways otherwise not possible. Among these is some degree of freedom such as patience, value judgments, language, working memory, planning, will power, creativity, and others.

“Critics will argue that these actions could be made subconsciously. But this view has no credible supporting evidence,” he adds.

He goes on to offer some theories to explain how the neural networks in the brain have self-organizing capabilities that might generate free will and suggests some ways to test this experimentally.

Does it really matter what we believe about free will? “Absolutely,” Klemm says. “For example, teaching a child about free will can be very important.”

“The best way to teach children about this is to teach them self-discipline,” he believes.

“I think children need to be held responsible for their choices and have the opportunity to discover that they have the power to influence their own lives, hopefully for the better. They need to learn that they are not helpless, while at the same time they are being taught what the good life should be all about.”

A prolific writer, Klemm has now authored 20 books and hundreds of academic articles and papers, many of them focusing on memory and how to improve it.

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