On the degrees of freedom worth having: psychedelics as means of understanding and expanding free will

Abstract

What do we mean when we talk of “free will?” What are the “varieties of free will worth having” (Dennett, 2003), and to what extent can we be said to possess such capabilities? While preferred definitions may vary across individuals and situations, we may perhaps find broad agreement that free will indicates a capacity for conscious intentions to meaningfully cause actions, which could be considered to be synonymous with agency (Safron, 2021). Free will may further be said to involve a certain open-endedness wherein agents can explore alternative possibilities and pivot based on novel information (Hills, 2019). In these ways, the meaning of free will is linguistically transparent as a capacity for both “willing” and “freedom.” Others may want a freedom of will in which conscious intentions may be said to be the sole determinants of action without additional causal factors. While this may appear to entail a self-contradictory metaphysics involving “uncaused causes,” one may even find support for this more “libertarian” free will as well if it is the case that action selection is influenced by forms of causation that solely exists at intermediate levels of organization at which selfhood and agency emerge (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2019; Safron, 2021), or perhaps even in terms of consciously-experienced intentionality being influenced by stochastic (in terms of limited predictability) processes. In what follows, I suggest all these forms of free will constitute real patterns that have been (and continue to be) selected over the course of evolution and development. I go on to describe how these mechanisms may overlap with serotonergic signaling pathways mediating the effects of psychedelic compounds, potentially helping to explain adaptive significances of these biophysical phenomena. Finally, I explore how this perspective on psychedelics (in terms of altering various degrees of freedom) may help to identify some of the most important sources of variation both across and within individuals.