The Brain Science Podcast had an interesting episode devoted to the subject of free will and I think it helped clarify for me some of the concepts. The variant of free will in question is a traditional and spiritually informed one, whereby our actions originate in some unassailable kernel of the self. Some people consider the workings of the frontal lobes to be free will, but that is a weaker notion.
The podcast helped me to conceptualize the issue in terms of causation. I’ll outline two different stances, one spiritual and the other materialistic. I won’t pretend to get either right. It’s interesting to note up front that historically there have been theological stances which do not believe in free will, Calvinism being one example. I think the issue partly being the difficulty in reconciling individual free will with the idea of God’s omnipotence.
When a conscious agent decides to take some action, how do you conceptualize the chain of causation that preceded that action? In the pro free will stance the chain ends in a kernel of free agency which one might call, alternatively, the self, soul, or spirit, and this kernel operates outside any physical laws that operate on the material world. In the Christian view the kernel was forged by God in His own image, and is usually considered to be immortal. The self becomes a well spring of action in the world that operates from outside the world. A kernel of agency unfettered by physical laws, but which is capable of generating a spark of action within the world. The first, uncaused node in a chain of causation. This freedom from the physical world adheres only in ones mental life, of course. In the attempt to exercise our will we are brought once again into the physical and material world.
Alternatively, in the scientific or materialist view, the chain of causation for every action essentially has one well spring… the big bang. Thoughts and decisions are synonymous with neural activity in the brain. The more rational the thought or decision, the more the pre-frontal cortex in involved, hopefully, but either way it all amounts to neural activity. This neural activity, in turn, was caused by outside stimulus, or perhaps internal biochemistry. It’s hard not to resort to the computer as an analogy here, and conceptualize the thoughts as algorithmic in nature. The algorithms and networks themselves are built upon templates ironed out over the course of evolutionary history. The experiential and developmental history of the organism fine tunes the algorithms, as well as creating a repository for data, in the form of memories, which might be used in making future decisions. Of course this explanatory path is no where near complete, scientifically, but in principle the chain of causation becomes a massively tangled web, winding it’s way back in time to the beginning of our universe.
This is a radically different notion of the self. One in which we are riders on a causal trajectory which started with the big bang. At the end of the podcast, Ginger, who seems to more or less agree with the materialistic notion of free will outlined above, makes a defense for the idea of personal responsibility, but I can’t help thinking that from within that framework such notions are simply useful fictions. At the very least, notions such as blame, praise, responsibility, guilt, etc… loose some of their gravity.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a different way of thinking about the world and the self. Different, but certainly not new. Diderot was already writing about these things in works like D’Alembert’s Dream way back in 1769.