The Volition Equation
Does laziness actually exist? Free Will, Motivational Salience, and how our neurochemistry defines decision-making.
You're sitting on your couch, playing video games, or watching hockey, or a TV show. You look over at the pile of recycling that you haven't taken out in ages. The rubbish needs to go out. The dishes need to be stacked in the dishwasher because you've run out of bowls and are down to your last fork. You've got a tax return to file, car rego to pay, and that water bill is way overdue. There's nothing seemingly stopping you from going and doing these things, which need to be done urgently, for many reasons. You're not missing any limbs, you're not severely ill (or ill at all), you got enough sleep last night, and you seem to be thinking straight. You've got all the money for the bills. You're aware of all the reasons why these things need doing, and you want to get these things out of the way so they no longer weigh on your mind. You actively want to get these things done, because life becomes more and more uncomfortable the longer this goes on.
Instead, you turn back to your video game, or the hockey, or your phone. It makes you feel bad. You see yourself as lazy and irresponsible. You hate how it feels, but for whatever reason, no matter how much you want to “take responsibility for yourself”, it just doesn’t happen. Somehow, we are procrastinating, without intending to, even though it’s all within our control, or so we’re told. If we really wanted it enough, we could do it, surely.
Is it really a matter of will, though?
In this post, I am going to speculate and simplify wildly. Like, moreso than usual. I know what you're thinking: "Wait, is that even physically possible?" Lets find out.
Wild speculation, hearsay and slander!
The justice system has long had a thing about free will. If you are considered of "sound mind", the actions that you take - committing crimes, lets say - were choices made to do the wrong thing when one could have chosen not to, or chosen an alternative course of action that was not against the law. Our entire idea of justice, crime and punishment relies on the assumption that we make our own decisions and take our own actions, and that when presented a choice between an action that breaks the law vs one that does not, that we can freely choose the latter.
When we break the law, we are choosing some personal gain by causing harm to others. I'm not going to be yet another of the legion of armchair lawyers on the internet and debate whether free will should be a thing in the justice system, because laziness isn't exactly a crime, but I do want to provoke some thought about this in you, dear reader, because it's a microcosm of the way we understand human agency. Legal penalties are - in part - simply a way of adding weight to the perceived cost of taking illegal actions, a kind of deterrence factor. So how does that get reflected in the brain itself?
Chemicals
The human mind is a byproduct of our neurochemistry. By changing the chemical balance of the brain, we can change the mind, sometimes in the most profound of ways. We do this all the time, both for health reasons and for recreational reasons. In fact, we know through much experimentation that you can change a personality, behaviour, beliefs, interpretations, motivations, preferences, even ones very subjective experience through chemistry alone. Given such evidence, it is safe to assume that we *are* what our chemistry makes us.
There are many factors that shape this neurochemistry and influence it throughout our lives and development. Experiences and genetics are key influences, and the wiring up of the brain changes and adapts to our experiences, along with nutrition and the makeup of our microbiome.
This neurochemistry also powers our calculus of choice. Choice doesn't occur in some ethereal extra-dimensional realm outside of our physical neurons. It's also part of this chemical machine, a result of a kind of computation according to the chemical and neurological circuits in the physical brain. Changing the chemical balance in the brain changes how these circuits work, and consciousness itself emerges from these circuits as well.
More specifically, we can understand choice as the salience of a value proposition, and there is special machinery in the brain designed for weighing up the options.
Balancing the Scales
Within the Basal Ganglia - a chunk of neurons deep in the middle of the brain no larger than a plum - is a nucleus. Specifically, the Nucleus Accumbens (my favourite accumbens, by the way). The Basal Ganglia is a hub made up of a large chunk of the brains dopaminergic neurons. The structures these neurons form provide vital capabilities: motor movement, motivation and incentive salience, action selection, working memory, and a few more.
The role of the Nucleus Accumbens, though, is a narrow, but extremely important one: value calculation.
When considering what action to take next, the brain always considers multiple options, and weighs them up according to perceived or predicted value or benefit in the short term, value in the long term, and other positive indicators; and then subtracts perceived or predicted costs in energy expenditure, delayed gratification time, and the potential for any negative outcomes.
Whichever option comes out of this process with the highest overall value after subtracting costs wins. This is how your brain makes decisions. We certainly can have influence on how our brain perceives certain factors, like boosting the long-term value add through our own fantasies of glory and achievement; or our anxiety can add to the cost factors by boosting our prediction of negative outcomes. The key point to understand is that each of these factors is a measurement made through brain chemistry. That means, anything which can change the balance of ones neurochemistry can change these measurements, and therefore the results as well. This also means that if we are born or develop an imbalance in that chemistry, it can fundamentally change our decision making.
The Volition Equation
Lets look at psychosis for a moment. For people experiencing a psychotic episode, they are often taking courses of action that are completely out of place, inappropriate, bizarre. Schizophrenia for example is believed to affect dopaminergic neurons in particular, which make up structures like the Nucleus Accumbens and provide the *positive* in those value calculations. In a psychotic episode, a major marker is the absence of inhibition. Choices which should be inconceivable, just by the sheer weight of cost - to ourselves, to our relationships, long term and short term - suddenly seem like totally good ideas. Like, say, stripping naked while on a packed train in peak hour. There are a million good reasons to *not* do this, but believe it or not, when you’re on a packed train in peak hour, technically this is an option that your brain might have to consider, and make a value determination on.
It is the “cost” mechanism - the thing that stops us from following every dumb idea that pops into our brain - that gets steamrolled by the explosion of positive value, due to the dopamine over-concentrations in the synapses of the Nucleus Accumbens. That sentence was kinda complicated to write. It’s like when you’ve pulled back the drawstring on a bow, your hand is preventing it from releasing its potential energy: this is the “inhibition” part of the equation, providing the “negative value”, which balances out the “positive value” of the drawstring’s pull. If the hand becomes weak, or the drawstring magically becomes way stronger while you have it pulled back, then you might not be able to stop it from releasing that energy and firing that arrow at whatever you happen to be pointed at.
On the other hand, sometimes we want to release that drawstring. If we’re always inhibiting it, then we’d literally never fire anything; basically, we’d be incapable of making any decision. We wouldn’t move, speak, or even think really. No voluntary action would be possible, because our volition would be incapacitated. This would be the opposite of psychosis: something resembling a major depressive episode.
What is free will, then?
Free will isn’t totally free, in the sense that we are completely tied in to how our brains generate Motivational Salience. Motivational Salience describes the urge to take a particular action as a result of the decision-making process. The action or choice that comes out with the highest perceived value is that choice every time. However, you might be thinking “Yeah but Nick, I take actions that are clearly not the most valuable of the options being considered, all the time”, and yes, so do I, but remember that the brain is not a perfect rationalisation machine, and there is so much more that influences the cost/benefit equation than just the things we might see as rationally important.
I’m talking about things like emotional state, memories of related experiences (even corrupted memories or dreams), other simultaneous motivating factors that can pull us in general directions, physical state (illness, or unusual fatigue), our bodily sensations at the time (you might feel nauseous or be in pain), and that’s not even mentioning mental illness and neurodivergence.
These things can change how much weight certain types of input carry when they’re factored in, and can even shut out other inputs completely. Like when you are so angry, you just want to punch that guy in the face, and it can take a few moments before you realise that your feud is probably not worth an assault and battery charge with time in lockup and court. Your emotional state can essentially block out many important cost factors that inhibit bad decision making. The regret you feel later on is because when your emotional state calms down, suddenly those cost factors all show up again, and you think “jeez, why’d I even do that?”
So, how can we influence our decision making?
A few ways. One is to actively try to avoid things which can spike your emotional state. If you are prone to such things - I know I am - it is critical to remind yourself of this, as often as you can. Once you get into that emotional state, it becomes incredibly difficult to escape until it has burned itself out, so the goal is to avoid it altogether. Another is to find ways to add value to those things which need doing but you just can’t motivate yourself to do: if you can find a way to make it fun, it is way more likely to achieve Motivational Salience. Some people think this is just a matter of willpower, like ol Granpappy: the “back in my day, I walked to school uphill both ways in the snow” types. No amount of “willpower”, whatever that even is, can change those calculations your brain is doing, so you have to be strategic and find ways to work *with* your brain, and not against it.
But yaknow what? Sometimes, you just gotta take it as it comes, accept those limitations for a little while, play those video games, watch that hockey, go with the flow, and then come back later and try again. Be kind to yourself, everything else can come later.