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What would it mean to lack free will? It might mean we are merely puppets, our strings pulled by forces beyond our awareness and beyond our control. It might mean we are players who merely act out a script we do not author. Or perhaps we think we make up our stories, but in fact we do so only after we’ve already acted them out. The central image in each case is that we merely observe what happens, rather than making a difference to what happens.

How might neuroscience fit into the story I am telling? Most scientists who discuss free will say the story has an unhappy ending—that neuroscience shows free will to be an illusion. I call these scientists “willusionists.”

There are several ways willusionists reach their conclusion that we lack free will. The first begins by defining free will in a dubious way. Most willusionists’ assume that, by definition, free will requires a supernatural power of non-physical minds or souls: it’s only possible if we are somehow offstage, beyond the causal interactions of the natural world, yet also somehow able to pull the strings of our bodies nonetheless. […] Based on this definition of free will, they then conclude that neuroscience challenges free will, since it replaces a non-physical mind or soul with a physical brain.

But there is no reason to define free will as requiring this dualist picture. Among philosophers, very few develop theories of free will that conflict with a naturalistic understanding of the mind—free will requires choice and control, and for some philosophers, indeterminism, but it does not require dualism. […] [S]tudies strongly suggest that what people primarily associate with free will and moral responsibility is the capacity to make conscious decisions and to control one’s actions in light of such decisions.

But willusionists also argue that neuroscience challenges free will by challenging this role for consciousness in decision-making and action. Research by Benjamin Libet, and more recently by neuroscientists such as John Dylan Haynes, suggests that activity in the brain regularly precedes behavior—no surprise there!—but also precedes our conscious awareness of making a decision to move.

[I]mproved brain imaging technology will likely provide increasingly precise predictions of future behavior. But here’s my prediction: the more complex the decisions and behavior, the more likely such predictions will be based on information about the very neural processes that are the basis of conscious deliberation and decision-making.

By understanding how the most complex thing in the universe—the human brain—works, we can better understand our capacities to make choices and to control our actions accordingly. On this telling of the tale, neuroscience can help to explain how free will works rather than explaining it away.

[F]ascinating research suggests that our conscious reasoning and planning is not pulling the strings as much as we tend to believe. We are subject to biases and influences beyond our awareness, and we sometimes confabulate or rationalize our behavior. But our stories are not always fiction. Other research suggests that our deliberations and decisions can have significant causal influences on what we decide and do, especially when we have difficult decisions to make and when we make complex plans for future action.

Free will is not all-or-nothing. It involves capacities that we develop as we mature, but that have limitations. Recognizing that people have differing degrees of free will can help us better determine when, and to what extent, people are responsible for their actions, and are deserving of praise or blame. Indeed, where it really matters—legal responsibility—it is most useful to understand free will as a set of capacities for reasoning and self-control which people possess to varying degrees and have varying opportunities to exercise.

In this respect, neuroscience and other sciences of the mind can play an important role by providing new insights into our capacities for rationality and self-control, as well as their limitations. We do not write our stories from scratch, but within the context of a complicated world of influences and interactions, our tales are not “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”