The idea that we lack free will is built upon a mistaken

Waspish behaviour
How Sphex came to be linked with free will 
is a long story. Charles Darwin was studying 
this wasp while working on his theory of 
evolution. We know from his notebooks that 
its behaviour had a big impact on him. He 
wasn’t aware that it would ceaselessly check 
its burrow – that discovery was made decades 
later by Nikolaas Tinbergen, the founder of 
ethology, the science of animal behaviour. 
What interested Darwin was what the wasp 
does once it has dragged a cricket into its 
burrow: it lays its eggs in the body of the 
immobilised but still living prey. When the 
larvae hatch they eat it from the inside out.
Darwin was so appalled by this behaviour 
that he cited it as one reason for his loss 
of faith. “I cannot persuade myself that 
a beneficent & omnipotent God would 
have designedly created the Ichneumonidae 
with the express intention of their feeding 
within… living bodies,” he wrote. Meanwhile, 
his theory wasn’t just undermining God. 
Some took it as support for the idea that 
humans are mere animals and that animals 
are mere machines, fanning the flames of 
a millennia-old debate about free will.
To Darwin, Sphex was emblematic of the 
cruelty found in nature. Tinbergen exposed 
it as emblematic of nature’s mindlessness. But 
it was the philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts 
University in Massachusetts, who coined the 
word “sphexishness” to describe the nature 
of human choices if we say they are like those
of other animals. In doing so, he highlighted 
a common misconception: that we must 
either reject the idea that biology influences 
our choices or reject the notion of free will.
This fallacy is the nub of the problem. 
Biology certainly influences our choices, as 
plenty of evidence shows. Perhaps the most 
famous example is an experiment on free
will done in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet. He 
showed that brain activity associated with an 
action occurs before the subjective feeling of 
choosing that action. More recently, Libet’s 
experiment was replicated with the addition 
of an functional MRI scanner. This time, the 
researchers were able to predict some actions 
from brain activity up to 10 seconds before
a conscious decision was taken. If the brain 
activity precedes the feeling of choice, some 
have argued, all choosing is just an illusion.
These results aren’t the great challenge to 
free will that they might seem at first. Their 
apparent force relies on misguided intuitions 
about what it means to have free will. We tend 
to think in terms of the self versus other causes. 
And we assume that the more of these other 
causes that are involved in the decision-making 
process, the less self-determination, or free 
will, is involved. The misconception arises 
because we have difficulty comprehending 
causation in complex systems. We tend to 
think about cause and effect as a one-to-one 
relationship: A causes B. In reality, it is always 
a set of things happening (or not happening) 
that cause another set of things to happen (or 
not happen). Discovering that A was involved 
in causing B doesn’t mean that other factors 
aren’t important too. 
Causality encompasses everything from 
your genes to your ideas about the future. As
we find out new facts about genes and brains, 
the space in which your self exists – your 
free will, responsibility and choices – doesn’t 
diminish. This is something I have been 
pondering for years. What really brought it 
home to me was interacting with a complex, 
chaotic system called a cellular automaton, 
and seeing that the simplest of rules can 
generate an endless, unpredictable set of 
behaviours. This is a grid world created on 
a computer with basic rules for changing 
each tile in the grid from black to white 
and vice versa. With the right rules and the 
right starting conditions, it can generate an 
infinite number of unpredictable patterns. 
Seeing, from so simple a beginning, endless 
forms being born, made me realise that the 
fear we are sphexish is baseless. There is no 
need to worry that something as complex as 
a human can be caught in a meaningless loop.
It was to explore these ideas and more, 
that I created The Choice Engine. You can 
find this interactive essay by tweeting 
@ ChoiceEngine START, and the bot will guide 
you, letting you choose your own unique 
path through the story, following the areas 
that most interest you. In it, I argue that 
our intuitions mean that the problem of 
free will never feels solved, but it is. The 
solution is that we are part of nature – we 
are complex machines. If you change your 
intuitions about what such a machine can 
do, and what those actions can mean, then 
you realise that we are free to make real 
meaningful choices. Yes, our thoughts are 
caused by our brains, our environment 
and our history, but this causal mix is 
unique to each individual at each moment. 
That explains why human behaviour is so 
difficult to predict.
My career researching the brain and how 
we choose has made me optimistic that we 
do have free will. Darwin’s theory of evolution 
gave us a fear of being mere creatures. I simply 
disagree with the word “mere”. There is enough 
tangled complexity in relation to the brain 
and mind that we can retain a meaningful 
view of free will and at the same time 
recognise our nature as living machines.
■
Tom Stafford is at the University of Sheffield, UK. 
To explore his Choice Engine on Twitter, tweet 
@ ChoiceEngine START
“ Simple rules can generate 
an endless, unpredictable 
set of behaviours”
The digger wasp can get trapped in inflexible 
behaviour, but does that mean it lacks free will?
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