Dr. Theodore Schwartz is a respected neurosurgeon at Cornell in New York City, and he has recently written an essay expounding his beliefs about the mind and the brain— beliefs that he has derived from years of training and practice:

If our sense of a coherent, unified self is an illusion, as brain surgery so convincingly reveals, what does this mean for our innate and powerful intuition that ‘we’ are in control of our actions? The idea that we have free will is fundamental to most of the world’s religions and our legal systems. Yet, simply put: how can I be in charge is there is no I? Brain surgery provides the answer to this as well: free will is also an illusion…

To support his view, Dr. Schwartz discusses the work of Benjamin Libet (1916–2007), a neuroscientist who did experiments on free will in the 20th century. But he is mistaken about Libet’s work— Libet confirmed the reality of free will, and he was quite emphatic about that. (I discuss his work here).

Dr. Schwartz is also wrong about free will in general. We most certainly do have free will. I say this for four reasons:

1) Everyone believes in free will. By “believes,” I mean that everyone lives life as if free will is real, which is what it means to believe something. We hold ourselves and others accountable for actions, we ascribe reasons and justifications for our beliefs (instead of ascribing beliefs to chemical brain processes), etc. Even Dr. Schwartz, who sees free will as an illusion, believes in it functionally— that is, he couldn’t function in life without it.

If free will weren’t real, Dr. Schwartz couldn’t ethically do elective brain surgery, because his patient’s consent to surgery would be invalid if the patient didn’t have genuine freedom of choice. If the patient were forced to sign the consent form because of the particular state of his brain chemicals at the time, rather than because of a free, reasoned choice to undergo the surgery, then Dr. Schwartz’ surgery is unethical and unlawful.

Imagine a plaintiff’s attorney in a malpractice case asking Dr. Schwartz in court, “So doctor, is it your professional opinion that your patient did not freely consent to surgery?” Surgeons are not allowed to operate on people (unless it’s a life-or-death emergency) unless the patient provides his free consent, which means the exercise of free will. A neurosurgeon who denies free will denies the ethical and legal basis for his surgical practice.

2) The very claim “there is no free will” is self-refuting, because to deny freedom of will is to deny the possibility of choosing a true assertion. If Dr. Schwartz’ will isn’t free, then he didn’t choose to claim that his will isn’t free— his choice was dictated by his brain chemicals, which have no claim in themselves to truth. We pay no attention to truth claims made by a chemistry set, even a chemistry set wearing a neurosurgeon’s scrubs.

3) The claim that free will isn’t real is implicitly based on the belief that nature is deterministic, in the sense that each state of the universe determines the state that follows it, without remainder. But that isn’t true. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect and other physicists who demonstrated that nature is not locally deterministic. That is, from moment to moment the state of a system is not absolutely determined by the properties that immediately precede it. Brain processes influence us, but they don’t absolutely determine our thoughts and actions. There is room for free will in human nature.

4) Free will, like reason, is an immaterial power of the human soul, which is a spiritual soul, created in the Image of our Creator.

The denial of free will is illogical, self-refuting nonsense, which no one, not even free will deniers, genuinely believes and practices. We have genuine freedom to choose based on reason and moral judgement, because we are created in God’s Image. This insight— that we are spiritual as well as physical beings with the genuine capacity for reason and free will— is borne out by the doctrines of the great religions, by logic, and by neuroscience.

Here’s my first response to the “split brain” question, from yesterday: Does surgically splitting the brain make one person into two? A prominent neurosurgeon writes of his “amazement” at discovering that the patient with a split brain is still a single individual. Unity of self after brain splitting is not surprising. Each of us is a physical creature with a single spiritual soul. It is immaterial and can’t be severed.