magazine issue 10 2009 / Issue 10

The Ghost in the System: Where Free Will Lurks in Human Minds

• written by Jay Michaels & Robin Vallacher
• edited by Hans IJzerman

Action systems, too, can be understood in terms of attractor dynamics. People act in accordance with goals, values, and personality traits that promote consistency across time and circumstance. These constructs, however, are not confined to rigid unchanging behavior. Rather, a goal or a trait is a relatively high-level identity for behavior that can be instantiated through a variety of lower-level acts (cf. Shoda, LeeTiernan, & Mischel, 2002; Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). In dynamical terms, the goal or trait functions as an attractor that stabilizes behavior at a superordinate level while promoting a flow of behavior on a moment-to-moment basis at a subordinate level. A dynamical system may have more than one attractor, each providing a unique organization of the system’s elements. In such a "multi-stable" system, the system’s behavior may display a sudden and qualitative (nonlinear) change in response to a seemingly trivial factor. In a mental system, for example, a person’s attitude regarding a personally important topic (e.g., relationship partner) may resist the influence of contradictory information (e.g., rumors of infidelity) until a threshold or "tipping point" is reached, at which point the system displays a dramatic change from one coherent state (e.g., liking, trust) to another (e.g., dislike, suspicion).

Dynamics and the Reality of Personal Freedom

If thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are constrained by attractors, why do people insist that they have free will? Why, in other words, do people believe they are free when their decisions and actions are essentially lower-level means of maintaining and expressing a higher-order coherent state? The general answer is that an attractor is rarely the object of attention but rather provides the boundary conditions within which people experience specific thoughts, feelings, and behavior that succeed each other in time. An attractor for thinking, for example, is not characterized by a single and static thought, but rather by a range of thoughts that converge on a common meaning or theme. Indeed, the higher-order state itself might not be expressed at all, operating instead as an implicit guide to mental process, its presence apparent only in the person’s pattern of thought, feeling, and action. On a moment-to-moment basis, where people spend most of their time mentally, the mind is dynamic, generating thoughts and emotions that seemingly arise out of nowhere in an almost whimsical fashion. The person thus feels in charge of his or her conscious thoughts, even though the succession of thoughts is directed by the underlying self-organization of mind and its attractors.

Because the specific mechanisms in service of the attractor operate outside of awareness, the person feels as if some global property of mind—his or her insight, perhaps, or conscious will—is the source of moment-to-moment thoughts and feelings. Of course, the person can introspect on the nature of his or her thought process, but doing so transforms the stream of thought, with the person’s focus shifting to the mechanisms of thought rather than their products. Such introspection, moreover, requires another set of mechanisms which are implicit in their operation. The person can then reflect on those mechanisms, but this again transforms the stream of thought and involves yet other tacit mechanisms, and so on, in an infinite regress that is as productive as chasing one’s own shadow. In short, the processes responsible for constraining the flow of thought in service of an attractor are tacit in their operation—people look through these processes, not at them. Because attractor dynamics are invisible during their expression, people feel as though they are directing the show and can willfully change course at any time.

Thought and behavior are not always in service of attractor dynamics, however. In an unfamiliar situation or when considering novel action alternatives, for example, the person may lack a coherent higher-order state that constrains the flow of consciousness (cf. Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). In the absence of an attractor, the person’s trajectory of thought and behavior follows one of two scenarios. On one hand, it may be under the control of the social or physical context surrounding the actor. This scenario reflects the “power of the situation” mantra that permeates certain quarters of social psychology. Sometimes, however, the context provides weak or conflicting guides for mind and action. In this case, the person’s thoughts and behaviors are unconstrained, capable of taking off in very different directions depending on slight variations in initial conditions (e.g., a trivial feature of the situation, a random thought, or a spontaneous lower-level action).