Freedom to act

David Papineau’s book Knowing the score shows that sport is a very relevant theme for philosophy. That’s why its subtitle is How Sport teaches us about Philosophy (and Philosophy about Sport). The world of sport is a kind of mini-society where everything happens what happens also “in real”. Therefore sport can be used as a kind of model world for learning about the wide wicked world. It is true both for team sports and for individual sports. This makes it important that everybody should spend some time on practising a sport (or preferably several sports) during a shorter or longer period; especially children should do. It’s a world where you can learn to cope with society at large. However, sport experiences need not only be positive. It’s not only about cooperation, comradeship, learning to set goals and accepting defeats and setbacks. In sport you find also much hate, jealousy and violence. Wasn’t it the outstanding Dutch football coach Rinus Michels who said “Football is war?” But besides that sport can be help to learn the practice of life, it can also be used for substantiating or refuting scientific and philosophical theories.

As for the latter, I think that the practice of training for a sport is a clear refutation of the philosophical view that says that there is no free will. Actually this view says that first you start to act and only after your act has started you confabulate a reason why you act this way. At least, I think that this is the essence of a common interpretation of the famous experiment by Benjamin Libet that showed that an action precedes the conscious decision to perform it with a fraction of a second. Libet discovered that the beginning of an action precedes the awareness of the decision to act with 200 milliseconds (a description of the experiment is easy to find on the Internet). On the basis of this experiment the psychologist Daniel Wegner argued that there is no free will but only an illusion of free will. We have a feeling that we decided to perform the action concerned, but since the decision comes after the start of the action it cannot be true that we took a decision.  It’s simply an illusion. Automatic behaviour controls our conscious decision making and not the other way round. Really?

I don’t want to deny that at the moment we act we mistakenly feel to act according the decision. But let me take an example from tennis. Say Roger Federer is playing against Rafael Nadal. At a certain moment Federer has to return the ball and he decides to hit the ball that way that it passes left of Nadal, which will make it impossible for Nadal to return. And so it happens. What would we see if we could look in Federer’s brain at the moment he hits the ball? Indeed: He first hits and then he decides to hit. However, although Federer may have taken the decision after the hit, nevertheless, he knew what he had to do in order to score and he could act according to this knowledge. How is this possible if Federer hit the ball automatically? Was it merely luck that he hit the ball in the right way and not a free action?

In order to investigate this question, let me assume now that Nadal wasn’t playing tennis against Federer, but against me, the author of this blog. It’s true, for a short period in my life I have been a member of a tennis club, but today I hardly know any longer how to hold a tennis racket in the right manner, let alone that I can return a ball if Nadal is my opponent and that I know more than the basics of the tactics of tennis. I simply don’t have the automatisms to hit and return a ball. However, hadn’t I stopped playing tennis after two years, but had I continued doing so for the rest of my life, and moreover, which is especially important here, had I invested a lot of time in training, then certainly I still wouldn’t have been able to beat Nadal even once in my life, but I surely would have possessed the automatisms I need in order to hit some balls with this top player. But it didn’t happen. I decided to stop playing tennis, and later I choose another sport. And Federer? When he was sixteen years old, he decided to go on with playing tennis and to become the best tennis player in the world (or so I assume for this example). Therefore, he invested very much time in training and in learning the automatisms needed in order to be able to react automatically in the best way when he had to return such difficult balls as in his match with Nadal just described. And that’s what makes that he is free (as a tennis player). Federer’s freedom is not that he returns the ball in the intended way at the moment he is playing, but he is free because he decided to learn to perform the automatic reactions he wishes to do at the moment he needs them to do. Actually the decision to hit the ball is not taken at the moment Federer hits but it has been taken already long before, namely during his training, and just because Federer is able to act automatically now he is free. Generally, it’s the planning, so the long term decisions, that makes us free, not the intentional momentary act itself. Being able to act automatically according our intentions makes us free. So if there is no free will, as many philosophers state, it’s not because we are not free to act but because we are not free to plan.