Identity and Free Will

4 Key excerpts on "Identity and Free Will"

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  eBook - ePub

  Issues, Debates and Approaches in Psychology

  • Ian Fairholm(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 Determinism and Free Will

  Do you have free will? Ask most people and they will probably say they do, or at least that they feel they do. In this chapter we will be addressing one of the trickiest and most long-lasting debates of all: whether humans are free to choose how they think and behave, or whether their thoughts and behaviours are determined by things beyond their control.

  This is a tricky debate, partly because it threatens something that nearly all of us experientially believe to be true – that our personal will determines the choices we make and the actions we perform. Many psychologists have questioned this notion and in this chapter we’ll address the basis for their arguments. But first we need to define some terminology.

    Definition of the problem – are we really free?

  We’ll start off by attempting to define free will, which is perhaps not as easy as it sounds. Free will is essentially the notion that humans respond freely, voluntarily and actively to events around them, that when they encounter or are presented with stimuli, choices or options they have the freedom to choose which to select, or in fact may choose not to select any of them at all. Ultimately it assumes that we’re free to select our own course of action, behave in unconstrained ways, make our own decisions and determine our own lives.

  One of the potential problems with this notion of pure free will is related to science. Science fundamentally looks for causes and as psychology attempts to promote itself as a science it needs to be able to identify causes for thoughts and behaviours. So what causes a person’s thoughts and behaviours? You might want to answer, ‘obviously the person causes them’, but that doesn’t help much because psychology acknowledges that people are complicated, so what aspect of the person actually does the choosing and what causes them to make a particular choice? Different psychologists tend to highlight different factors, as you might expect, and we’ll identify where the five main approaches covered in this book stand on this issue throughout the rest of the chapter.

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  Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology

  • Brad Piekkola(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Every day there were choices to be made about whether to give in, about what to think. People could still decide on their attitude toward their conditions, about their abusers trying to steal their inner freedom, and whether to keep fighting on the inside. One man did so by comforting others and gave them his meagre food; they could take his life but not his humanity. Others yielded to the fear of making decisions, of taking initiative, and gave in to their fate. They allowed apathy to take hold. Yet there were numerous cases of apathy being overcome or warded off by personal choice. People could still preserve their independence of mind and freedom of spirit. People can be robbed of everything but still retain that. What gives the person’s life purpose and meaning, their spiritual freedom, cannot be stolen but it could be lost. The person who lost faith in a personal future or was bereft of a reason to live was doomed. When they did Frankl tried to help them recover it, to find a reason to live, and to carry on. Whether one succeeded or succumbed, it rested on a personal choice which was free all the same. It was that phenomenon that Frankl witnessed and he contended that it challenges notions of universal or absolute determinism.

  Bandura (1989, 2006, 2008) further developed his position on the question of agency by proposing that humans have the capacity to exert self-control over their thoughts, motives, and actions. He believed that people can effect changes in themselves and in the circumstances they encounter through personal effort. Taking a compatibilist stance, he maintained that peoples’ actions are neither the mechanical effect of environmental influences nor are they completely autonomous. Most human behavior is under the guidance of forethought, the formation of goals, the anticipation of outcomes, and plans for action. Thought has a major role to play in exercising control over daily life.

  Thoughts to Bandura are rooted in higher brain processes and that means one has to distinguish between ‘biological laws’ and ‘psychological laws.’ Biological laws account for cerebral mechanisms and psychological laws explain how biological processes are enlisted in the service of differing purposes. With learning, humans become agents in directing their own activities, but that does not liberate them completely from determination. Freedom is not an absence of external constraints but an increasing capacity to direct activity within those constraints. One achieves that through knowledge of conditions. This is not a solitary endeavor. Human activity, historically, has produced social systems that aid in the organization and regulation of human life. People act on the environment, transforming it, recreating it, even destroying it; they have created society. That accumulates and is passed on to subsequent generations. Socialization creates humans with an emerging, increasing power for consciousness, self-awareness, and intent. Humans are more than mere mechanisms or automatons.

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  The Future of the Self

  An Interdisciplinary Approach to Personhood and Identity in the Digital Age

  • Jay Friedenberg(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  FIGURE 8 Organisms that are increasingly complex demonstrate more internalized control over their behavior and are less governed by external environmental forces. This can be interpreted to mean that they have more free will and that their behavior is less determined. After Dennett (2003). Images sourced from publicdomainpictures.net.

  According to this view determinism in humans is the result of suspending centralized control over our actions. It amounts to “letting go” and being influenced by factors that we could have suppressed or activated. Free will involves a conscious consideration of possible courses of action and an evaluation of their possible outcomes. We determine what each of these courses of action means for us, followed by a choice to actualize one outcome and an action to bring it about. This ability to anticipate what the world would be like “if” something were the case is unique to humans. We can hypothesize or construct what are called counterfactuals and pick one to guide our action. People who focus and perform this process are exercising free will. Those who don’t are not and hence become subject to other more deterministic influences. If we believe this view, then it is the self that can perform this thinking, with some people choosing to think before they act and others not doing so or doing so less often. An interesting question we can ask here is whether the suspension of free will corresponds to the suspension of self.

  The Illusion of Free Will

  A number of investigators argue that our concept of free will is illusory. Wegner (2002) says that the experience of willing an act comes from interpreting one’s thought as the cause of the act when in fact it is caused by other factors. He says there are three steps in producing an action. First, our brain plans the action and issues the command to start doing it. Second, we become aware of thinking about the action. This is an intention. Third, the action happens. Our introspective experience informs us only of the intent and the action itself. Because we are not aware of the subconscious planning and initiation, we mistakenly attribute the cause to conscious intention.

  Experimental evidence supports this idea (Libet, 2004). Brain activity to initiate an action actually occurs before we are aware of having initiated it, during the first of the above stages. This suggests that causal factors other than intention are at work: that is, the choice was determined by subconscious events and not the act of will we experience. In this view either there is no self to do the deciding or the unconscious aspect of our self decides for us, an aspect we have less control over. This is just the sort of outcome that people fear, given the research cited earlier.

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  Turning Psychology into a Social Science

  • Bernard Guerin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Self, identity, consciousness, and meaning as social actions in context

  Contextualizing the ‘self’

  When someone tells me about their self, their self-image, their identity, or how they see themselves, they have already told me all about the social relationships and resources in their world—even when they tell me that they do not have a ‘self-image’ at all.

  There are two parts of self-identity from a contextual analysis: what a person does , performs, and has accomplished, and how a person talks about themselves (and this includes thinking of course; see V4). These two can potentially have little or nothing to do with one another, but both are intricately bound up in our social and cultural contexts and how we obtain and manage our resource–social relationship pathways. You cannot make up the first, what you have done, but you can make up talking about it—I might never have played sport but can still talk about myself as a ‘sportsperson’—however, such fictitious talk still comes from my social and cultural contexts.

  This means that most (but not all) about our self or identity is constructed primarily with language use, to portray ourselves in certain ways to gain resources or relationships (or lose resources as well of course). Identity is how we talk to people about ourselves and present ourselves to others, and this will usually include what we have done or accomplished. But this is not done for fun (although it can be fun) but is strategic, to position ourselves for making our lives actually work—to get the resources and social relationships we need or want for ourselves and our families and communities.

  Unfortunately, ‘self’ as an everyday way of talking about ourselves has been appropriated by psychological theories (one of the three responses to Gestalt; V4.1), including Freud’s ‘ego’. These theories all purport that our inner self or ego makes us do what we do , as if it is a cause or a driving force. Contextually, however, whatever life resource–social relationship pathways have been shaped for us, they have shaped both

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