Is Free Will Just a Bunch of Noise?

I almost had to put free will in scare quotes in the title above. Like a whole lot of people who surround themselves with science, I think it's just kind of a null concept, a way of explaining the increasingly transparent black box of thought and, critically, the variables of thought, while dodging a bunch of uncomfortable notions about, you know, the meaningless of it all. A National Institutes of Health study out Monday in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience went ahead and used those quotation marks in its usage of the term, but it also offered both a more precise definition of what free will even is, and a novel suggestion for how it works.

First, the definition. Decisions do not arrive as neurological singularities; it's actually old news that thoughts generate in the brain well before they reach your high-level awareness. You decide before you decide, in other words. Free will then, as a neurological mechanism, would be when you act contrary to that pre-thought build-up. It's not just behaving irrationally; it's behaving unexpectedly. If you were a computer, this version of free will would cause an irrecoverable fault, a blue screen. Fortunately, the human brain seems better prepared.

The NIH study, conducted by a team at the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis, uses an experiment derived from the work of Benjamin Libet, the neuropyschology pioneer who helped craft the notion of this kind of pre-thought thought in the very first place. In his famous experiment, Libet put study participants in front of some signalling mechanism along with a switch. They were told to flip the switch in one direction or another in response to different signals, while having their brain waves monitored via EEG, to see how unconscious processes in the brain affected their choice.

In the new study, the reaction time between the signal and the switch was removed. Instead, the subjects were instructed to focus on the center of a blank screen and then make a decision to either look right or left in response to a signal when it appeared. With this setup, the researchers argue that the brain waves they're observing at the moment of the signal correspond to a naked decision, with no pre-thought buffer. But they found that they could still predict which way the participants would look based on whatever activity was going on in their brain just beforehand.

"The state of the brain right before presentation of the cue determines whether you will attend to the left or to the right," explained Jesse Bengson, the paper's lead author, in a UC Davis press release. At this moment, the brain is unbiased. It's random, at least in terms of the upcoming decision. "This shows how arbitrary states in the brain can influence apparently voluntary decisions."

This "arbitrary brain state" can be thought of in simpler terms using the concept of background noise. Not all of the electricity sailing around the human brain at a given moment is focused, and a lot of it is functionally just junk. But, when the brain has to make a decision with no preparation, that junk is all there is. Because of the random signal timing, "we know people aren't making the decision in advance," Bengson said.

This is likely an unsatisfactory version of free will, I know. What we really want is transcendence, not pre-thoughts and noise. But that's the contradiction, isn't it? True free will could be nothing but noise, no causes and no effects, or else we're back in the cold clutches of determinism. So, be glad the noise is there at all. The alternative is pristine blankness, the blue screen.