Parkinson's and Free Will

From NWPF

Monday June 06, 2016

If anything should drive you into the arms of philosophy, it would be Parkinson’s Disease. Once you are diagnosed, all sorts of philosophical problems are in your face. Plus, you have lots of new time to ponder them. Like between steps as you shuffle from the refrigerator to the sink. Questions like the classics “Why are humans (and I might add, all but the simplest life forms) born to suffer and die?” or “ What is the purpose of life?” certainly come up in bold relief. But one that PD brings into especially sharp focus is “Does anyone have free will?”

Free Will has been a philosophical hot potato for centuries. But just lately the notion that we freely choose our actions, and thus are morally responsible for them, has been getting severely undermined by pesky neuroscientists and geneticists who are finding all sorts of factors that seem to be governing our behavior that are flat beyond our control.

They could have just asked anyone with Parkinson’s and gotten there faster. Ask a person who can’t stop shaking how much control they have over their body, no matter how much they will it otherwise. Ask a once surefooted hiker who now struggles to put one boot in front of the other how free they are. Ask someone with clinical depression why they can’t just choose to be happy. Any of these people would tell you  that they would be different if they could. They can’t. They have no choice. And without choice, there is no opportunity to act freely.

But there is bit of light shining through a crack here. The undeniable fact that Parkinson’s attenuates sufferers free will demonstrates that freedom of choice must exist for humans at least in some sense. Otherwise how could it be lost? To quote the learned professor Gregg Allman “ You can’t spend what you ain’t got, can’t lose what you never had.” 

This is not a merely academic question. A recent article in The Atlantic offers compelling evidence those who believe in free will handle life differently from those who do not. One researcher found, “When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more.” Your general approach to life is also colored by your perception of whether or not you have free will. According to the Atlantic article, “Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.”

So it matters whether you think the idea of free will is accurate or not, whether or not  your perception of that idea is itself accurate or not. 

With Parkinson’s, we seem to have less free will than others, less free will than our earlier selves. But there is that little bit of light showing through the crack. If that little bit of light is enough to allow us to be more creative, more willing to learn from our mistakes, and more grateful toward one another, we have a little more traction in our struggles with Parkinson’s and the other impediments in this world.

Peter Dunlap-Shohl

NWPF Blogger

https://nwpf.org/stay-informed/blog/2016/06/parkinsons-and-free-will/