Well, let me trot out one of my recent favorites
which I devised to jangle the nerves of neuroscientists
who've been going around saying that neuroscience
shows that we don't have free will.
I think their reasons for saying that are
ill considered and moreover that what they're
doing is apt to be mischievous and doing some
real harm.
So I concocted a little thought experiment.
A little intuition pump to suggest that.
So this is the case of the nefarious neurosurgeon
who treats a patient who has obsessive compulsive
disorder by inserting a little microchip in
his brain which controls the OCD, the obsessive
compulsive disorder.
Now there is such a chip.
It's been developed in the Netherlands and
it works really quite well.
That's science fact.
But now here comes science fiction.
So the neurosurgeon, after she's operated
on the guy, sewed him all up.
"So I've got - your OCD's under control now
you'll be happy to learn.
But moreover our team here will be monitoring
you 24-7.
And we're going to be controlling everything
you do from now on.
You'll think you have free will.
You'll think you're making your own decisions
but really you won't have free will at all.
Free will is an illusion that we will maintain
while controlling you.
Goodbye, have a nice life."
Sends him out the door.
Well, he believes her.
She had a shiny lab and lots of degrees and
diplomas and all that.
So what does he do?
Well, he -- thinking he doesn't have free
will anymore he gets a little self-indulgent,
a little bit aggressive.
He's a little negligent in how he decides
what to do.
And pretty soon by indulging some of his worst
features he's got himself in trouble with
the law.
He's arrested and he's put on trial.
And at the trial he says, "But your honor,
I don't have free will.
I'm under the control of the team at the neurosurgery
clinic."
They say, "What's this?"
And they call the neurosurgeon to the stand.
They say, "Did you tell this man that you
were controlling his every move, he didn't
have free will?"
She says, "Yeah, I did.
But I was just messing with his head.
That was just a joke.
I didn't think he'd believe me."
Now right there I think we can stop, take
a deep breath and say, "Well, she did something
really bad.
That was really truly harmed him.
In fact, her little joke telling him that
actually accomplished nonsurgically pretty
much what she claimed to accomplish surgically.
She disabled him.
By telling him he didn't have free will, she
pretty much turned his free will off and turned
him into a morally incompetent person.
Now, if we agree that she did a bad thing
-- if nobody recommends people play jokes
like this -- what do we just say about the
neuroscientists who are telling the public
every day, we've shown in our neuroscience
labs that nobody has free will.
I think if the neuroscientists recognize that
what my imaginary neurosurgeon did was irresponsible,
they should think seriously about whether
it's irresponsible of them to make these claims
about free will.
And it's not just a fantasy.
Vohs and Schooler in an important paper which
has been replicated in several different ways
set up an experiment really to test this with
college students who were given two texts
to read.
One was a text -- they were both from Francis
Crick's book, The Astonishing Hypothesis.
And one was not about free will and the other
was about free will and basically it said
free will is an illusion.
All your decisions are actually determined
by causes that neuroscience is investigating.
You don't have free will, that's just an illusion.
All right, so we have two groups.
The group that read that passage and the group
that read another passage from that book of
the same length.
After they've read the passage they're given
a puzzle to solve where they can earn some
money by solving it.
And the experimenters cleverly made the puzzle
slightly defective so there was a way of cheating
on the puzzle that was, oops, inadvertently
revealed to the subjects.
And, guess what, the subjects who read the
passage where Crick says free will is an illusion
cheated at a much higher rate than the other
ones.
In other words, just reading that passage
did have the effect of making them less concerned
about the implications of their action.
They became -- were negligent or worse in
their own decision making.
I think that's an important and sobering thought.
