“I in no way believe in free will in a philosophical sense. Everyone acts not only under external compulsion but also according to an internal need. What Schopenhauer said “a man can do what he wants but he cannot desire what he wants” has been a true inspiration for me since my youth, a constant consolation in the face of the difficulties of my life as well as that of others, it has been an incalculable source of tolerance.”
-Albert Einstein
TOBefore getting into the matter, I think it is appropriate to make a minimum justification of why this ancient philosophical problem is of interest to Psychiatry. There is a widely accepted discourse, both in Psychiatry and in Law, which we can consider the default hypothesis, which states that human beings are free but that in certain circumstances we lose that freedom. Mental disorders, from this approach, are recognized as diseases of freedom, especially psychoses because a distortion of reality occurs in them. However, this discourse has been strongly questioned by the discoveries of neuroscience in recent years, and also by powerful philosophical approaches.
In this article I am going to defend that neither patients nor therapists (psychiatrists or psychologists) are free and that our belief in free will influences the way we understand and treat mental disorders. My position is that believing in free will is wrong and has social and individual drawbacks and that not believing in free will would have advantages at a social level and also in the conception and treatment of mental disorders.
The definition of free will that I am going to use is the ability to be able to do something else (given a given state of the world). It is called in philosophy the counterfactual definition. For most authors, a free will also implies:
- We are talking about a rational power, that is, the subject uses reason to evaluate a course of action and decides rationally. If someone decides without reasons, it is not supposed to be a free choice. It is usually accepted that animals do not have free will because they are not rational;
- A free will implies control, if things happen for reasons over which I have no control, they are not my actions and I could not be held responsible.
Free will is closely linked to moral responsibility. In fact, there is another definition of free will that says that free will is the power that a moral agent has for which he can be considered worthy of praise or punishment, that is, morally responsible. The judicial systems of all countries in the world are based on the belief in free will, it is considered that the person who has acted badly or committed a crime could have done something else, and therefore is responsible for his actions. .
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Before continuing, a clarification because every definition is imperfect. It has been discussed in philosophy whether the possibility of being able to do something else is really necessary for the existence of free will. Specifically, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt has presented some hypothetical cases as a thought experiment in which he argues that having alternatives is not necessary to consider that a person has free will and that he is responsible.
These cases follow the following scheme: A bad scientist, Jack, has put a chip in the brain of a person, Jones, so that when Jones is going to make a decision, say whether to vote Democrat or Republican, the chip can detect what will do. So, if Jones wants to vote Democrat he lets him continue but if he wants to vote Republican the chip changes Jones’ action and would make him vote Democrat. In this scenario, let’s assume that Jones really wants to vote Democratic. Although he cannot do anything else because the chip would not allow him the other alternative, Frankfurt proposes that Jones is responsible for his act.
These Frankfurt examples are actually variations of an earlier example from John Locke, which is the case of the man in the room. Locke gives the example of a man who is sedated and taken to a room. The man wakes up and doesn’t know that the bedroom door is closed. Despite this, the man wishes to continue in the room for his own reasons. For Locke, the man would be responsible for his decision, although in reality he could not have done anything else. What Frankfurt does in his examples is to move the limitation or coercion located in the external world (the closed door) to the internal world (a chip in the brain).
I think that people who are skeptical of free will can refute these examples quite forcefully because the problem of freedom comes before the door is open or closed or the chip comes into action or not. What we have to ask ourselves is the origin of the man’s initial decision to stay in the room or vote Democratic. The intuition of free will skeptics is that if we follow the causal history of that decision to be in the room it will always refer us to causes of that action that are not under the control of the person and therefore that decision (independently of chips and doors) is not free. We will see this next.
Although I am not going to deal with the topic in a philosophical way, but rather from psychological and psychiatric phenomenology, I think it is appropriate to briefly summarize the main philosophical positions regarding the problem of free will. The topic is very complex and there are almost as many positions as there are philosophers, the three large groups would be:
- Libertarians: They believe that the laws of the Universe are not deterministic (they do not recognize causal determinism which implies that every cause has a prior cause and so on until the origin of the Universe) and that we have free will.
- Compatibilists: They recognize that causal determinism is true (or can be) but believe that free will is compatible with a Universe where the laws are deterministic.
- Free will skeptics or hard incompatibilists (Pereboom): They are those who believe that free will does not exist. They consider that the laws of the universe are deterministic and that determinism is incompatible with free will. Both libertarians and free will skeptics are incompatibilists, that is, they believe that determinism and free will cannot exist at the same time. The difference is that libertarians believe that what does not exist is determinism while free will skeptics believe that what does not exist is free will.
According to surveys, the majority of ordinary people around the world think a) that our universe is indeterministic and b) that moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism. On the contrary, the majority position among philosophers is compatibilism. According to the study by Bourget and Chambers, 59.1% are compatibilists, 13.7% are libertarians, 12.2% do not believe in free will and 14.9% would fall into the “other” category.
Borges said that the future is a garden of forking paths. That is the intuition that we all have, that at many points in our lives we come to forks where we can choose one path or another, that we reflect and, after that reflection, in a rational way we choose.
From this point I am going to try to convince the reader that those bifurcations that we see so clearly are actually illusory, that they only exist in our imagination, and that the fact that we can imagine options does not mean that we really have them at our disposal. our scope.
I know that, having said this, the reader will think that my goal is impossible and that I am out of touch with reality, but I hope that, if you have the patience to continue with me, you will not reach the end with the same certainty that I am wrong as you do now. . For all the reasons that I am now going to analyze, I believe that it is not possible to support the idea that the will is free. In the end I will raise the drawbacks of the belief in free will for society and for Psychiatry.
Origin and control of our actions
“The decisions of the mind are nothing but desires, which vary according to various specific dispositions.” “There is no absolute free will in the mind, but the mind is determined by desiring this or that, by a cause determined in turn by another cause, and this in turn by another cause, and so on to infinity.”
-Baruch Spinoza
Human beings do not choose things as important as our intelligence, our sexual orientation, our thoughts, our desires, our beliefs, our personality, our emotions (who we fall in love with, for example), etc. Given that when choosing we choose based on our beliefs, desires, preferences, character, etc., it is evident that we cannot be held responsible for acting with faculties that we have not chosen and of which we have not had control. . This in the terminology of the philosopher Bernard Williams is called constitutive luck. Basically we are not responsible for being what we are.
Human beings do not choose things as important as our intelligence, our sexual orientation, our thoughts, our desires, our beliefs, our personality, our emotions.
I want to emphasize two of the things that I have said that we did not choose because they are quite contrary to common sense. One of them is that we do not choose our desires, our preferences, the things we like. When I eat cherries because I like them more than oranges, I have not rationally decided that I would like cherries and not oranges. Remember that in the definition of free will I said that it was a rational power. At no point do I find myself at a fork in the road where I rationally choose between liking Honky Tonk Women or liking La Macarena. There is a music or a fruit that I like and that is not at any time a rational choice. Likewise, I don’t decide who I fall in love with. To see it more clearly, look at the fact that small children, even months old, have preferences and like one food more than another and are not yet able to choose rationally. The same goes for animals. If I give my dog the choice between a piece of meat or an apple, it is clear that she has preferences.
Now let’s go to something much more interesting: we do not choose our beliefs. Let’s imagine that I am faced with homeopathy for the first time, I know nothing about it and I want to know what it is, what it consists of, that is, to know it and therefore form a belief about it.
Then I start reading and I find out that it says that if we dilute a supposed medicine it gains in potency, that at a certain moment there is not even a molecule of the original product left but that the water has the memory of the substance that it was in contact with. she, etc.
Given my skeptical nature and my knowledge of medicine and physics (not much either), the…