Free Will is a Placebo Effect
Biology, language, and thought
Brain activity is inextricably tied to the functioning of sensory, digestive, and endocrine systems. The systems in our bodies are interconnected feedback loops. Since the brain is the body, every thought is a full-body experience. The thought that you just thought was the interaction between the many different sub-systems of the holistically embodied system that is you. This means that self-conscious thoughts like “I should really go soon” are full-body experiences structured by language.
Language instantiates in/through biology. That’s why children who learn a spoken language implicitly learn to move their tongues in certain ways, why we feel frustration when a speaker’s speech is nonsensical to us, and why dreaming in a new language is a good indication of increased fluency. Even linguistic silences are biological. Anxious feelings are often full-body experiences of not knowing what to say when something should be said. The nexus of language and biology also explains why the placebo effect is a thing.
A placebo effect is a subjectively good outcome instantiated in/through full-body experiences at a later time that is attributable to the thinking of linguistic thoughts at earlier times. Bad placebo effects are called nocebo effects. Placebo effects have been found to impact how people subjectively respond to every kind of disease and modify the efficacy of countless different treatments. Placebo interventions even work better than back surgery for many people struggling with severe back pain.
The paradoxical conceptual relationship between placebos and placebo effects reveals their continued mystery. A “placebo” will only turn out to have really been a placebo for you if it is implicated in a biologically instantiated outcome that can’t be reasonably explained without reference to a potential placebo. A placebo is therefore like the wind. You call the movement of the treetop a “wind effect” that is “caused by the wind” until you learn that someone is shaking its trunk. “Placebo,” like “wind,” is a theory about how/why something is happening that can be invalidated by new learning.
Placebos’ mystery is prolonged by a widespread failure to recognize that the mental is the physical. People still refuse to acknowledge this scientifically irrefutable reality because they fear its acceptance necessarily implies things that it most certainly doesn’t. They worry that it eliminates free will by equating human actions in the world with synapse firings, hormone productions, and other biological reductions. This concern is unjustified because it conflates the activity of a whole system with the activity of specific components within that system. It derives entirely from an obvious category error.
Human actions are not synapse firings because human beings aren’t brains. Human beings are embodied systems whose activity is produced through the simultaneous interaction of many different sub-systems. Your synapses wouldn’t fire the way they do if they weren’t interacting in real-time with visual information, hormones, gut microbiota, skin receptors, and a host of other embodied variables. People who conflate human activity with brain activity need to understand that the term “human brain” loses its meaning entirely if it is conceptualized as capable of existing and functioning apart from the many other sub-systems that collectively produce human activity. A “disembodied brain” isn’t truly a brain because it can’t do anything that real brains do.1
Conceptually integrating the physical and the mental casts placebo and nocebo effects as the manifestations of linguistically organized chains of subjectively meaningful thought. When the doctor hands you a pill and says something like, “Take this every morning for a while to heal the problem,” she communicates a linguistically organized thought. Depending on your expectations, this thought can become something that you repeatedly think yourself. If past experience has led you to trust your doctor’s judgment and the efficacy of prescription medication, then you leave the office thinking something like, “These pills will help solve my health issue.” You might tell your friend, “She gave me pills that will help!” When you take the pill the next morning, you experience hope, which is a regenerative full-body state. Now that you have what you linguistically think of as a “medical solution,” you are far more likely to experience/think/feel hope and relief about the future when symptoms emerge as opposed to frustration and despair. The subjectively positive interpretation is a full-body biological process that, by definition, impacts the human system in positive ways. This is why gratitude journals help diminish depressive symptoms that are, like all other types of symptoms, simultaneously mental and physical.
Say your symptoms subside dramatically over the course of taking the pills. If you later learn that the pills were actually sugar pills and not prescription medication, you would likely defer to a “new” explanation for your recovery that involves the placebo effect. You’d likely think that the mental/physical processes associated with your negative symptoms have been displaced by the mental/physical processes associated with your taking the pills.
However, notice that the exact same interpretation would apply even if the pills actually contained prescription medication. Even if the pills were prescription, the symptom reduction would still be explained with respect to processes associated with taking the pills that, like literally all processes of human activity, are simultaneously physical and mental.
The only difference between a “medication effect” and a “placebo effect” pertains to the clarity of the systemic mechanisms to which the symptom reduction can be attributed. If something is working, it must be working somehow. Your lack of knowledge about how something works does not in any way detract from its potential observable efficacy in your life. When you discover that the pills are sugar pills, you likely focus less on the pills themselves and more on the interaction between you and the pills. But the interaction between the pills and you exists regardless of whether you are focusing on it. The only difference between a “real effect” and a “placebo effect” is the relative emphasis placed on the interaction versus the object being interacted with.
A profound philosophical implication of this is that you can influence the way future-you experiences (thinks/feels about) existence through linguistic self-habituation. You can placebo a you that doesn’t even exist yet by intentionally saying/thinking linguistic thoughts that reflect how current you aspires to change. You do this intentionally when you keep a gratitude journal and unintentionally when you accept the doctor’s word that the (sugar) pills are medicated.
Your language shapes the thoughts that manifest in/through the holistic biological system that is you. By repeatedly linguistically thinking/saying that X is Y with intentionality, you can habituate your future embodied self to respond to X as Y. Psychotherapy works exactly this way. Patients create new life habits and improve their future experiences by repeatedly re-interpreting feelings in consistent ways.
Your name is linguistic. My name is “Marshall.” Whether and how I use language to habituate future-me makes “Marshall” mean what it will turn out to mean in the world. I can change my future by changing how I linguistically self-habituate. You can too! The equation of the mental and physical doesn’t eliminate free will, but it doesn’t provide it either. Free will is not a thing you have, but a way of living life. You exercise free will by intentionally using linguistic thought to structure who you will become in ways that reflect the impact you aspire to have on the world.
The conflation of an individual with a brain is not just totally scientifically and medically unjustifiable, it profoundly demeans the beauty and richness of human existence, which cannot possibly be captured in neurological terminology. It’s also just aggressively stupid because, to even discuss your brain, the possessive pronoun “your” must be invoked. If you literally are your brain, “your brain” would just be “you,” but it isn’t.