What conditions must be met to describe an action to free will?

Foundations of psychology
Chapter 7
The mind-brain problem, free will and consciousness

Introduction

Throughout history, humans have been impressed by their ability to reflect about themselves and the world around them.
Self: the feeling of being an individual with private experiences, feelings and beliefs, who interacts in a coherent and purposeful way with the environment.

Mind-brain problem: issue of how the mind is related to the brain.
Three main views

• Dualism
  The mind (or soul) is something independent of the body
• Materialism
  The mind is nothing but a by-product of the biological processes taking place in a particular brain.
• Functionalism
  The mind is indeed realised in a brain, but it could be copied in any other brain.
  Just like information on a computer can be copied to other computers

Dualism: the mind is independent of the brain

Mind: aggregate of faculties humans (and animals) have to perceive, feel, think, remember and want.
Dualism: view of the mind-body relation according to which the mind is immaterial and completely independent of the body; central within religions and also in Descartes’ philosophy.

Dualism in religion and traditional philosophy

Religion

Dualism is central to religions.
They are grounded in the belief that people possess a divine soul created by God, which temporarily lives in the body, and which leaves the corpse upon its death.
The soul is what gives people their purpose and values in life.
It usually aims for the good, but can be tempted and seduced by evil forces.
This gave rise to the demonologist view of psychopathology.
Demonologists view: the conviction that mental disorders are due to possession by bad spirits.

Plato and Descartes

Dualism was central in the philosophies of Plato and Descartes.

• Plato maintained that the soul exists before, and survives the body.
  Human souls were leftovers of the soul of the cosmos and travelled between the cosmos and the human bodies they temporarily inhabited.
  • Human souls had knowledge of the realm of ideas
• According to Descartes humans were composed of a divine soul in a sophisticated body
  The soul was immaterial and formed the thinking part of the person.

Cartesian dualism: theories in which the mind is seen as radically different from the body and as independent of the biological processes in the brain.

Dualism in philosophical writing does not focus to the mind’s fate after death.

Dualism in early psychology and lay thinking

Dualism in early psychology

In the second half of the nineteenth century a growing number of scientists began to question the dualistic view.

• They felt uncomfortable with the emphasis religion placed on the immortality of the soul, the connection of the soul to a divine entity, and its independence of the body

They were unwilling to reduce the human mind to nothing but brain tissue.
The distinction between mind and body was attractive to early psychologists because it provided them with their own study area that could not be invaded and taken over by brain scientists.

Dualism in lay thinking

Dualism nowadays still is the fundamental attitude people have about the relationship between the mind and the brain.

Dualism puts consciousness at the centre of human functioning and seems to give humans free will

Dualism has an intuitive appeal because it puts conscious information processing at the centre of our functioning and it gives us the feeling of being in control of our actions.

In dualist models consciousness is the core of human existence

Dualism in general gives priority to the mind.
Our conscious, deliberate thinking is at the centre of our existence and controls our actions.
Consciousness: word referring to the private, first-person experiences an individual lives through; contains all the mental states a person is aware of; part of the mind that can be examined with introspection.
Dualism puts consciousness at the centre of the person, because the mind (or soul) is the acting unit and the mind coincides with consciousness.
The actions of an individual are guided by the private, first-person experience of that individual.

Dualism and free will

Because in the dualist view consciousness is the centre of the mind, nothing happens unless it is licensed by the mind.
Free will: situation in which individuals can choose their course of action; choice is the outcome of an informed deliberation.
Three conditions must be met before an action can be described to free will:

• The agent must have been able to do otherwise. Free will only exists when there is a choice
• The act must originate in the agent, not in some external force
• The act must be the outcome of rational deliberation
  • Acts that are erratic and unpredictable are not seen as free

Problems with dualism

Although dualism strongly agrees with human intuitions, it has come under severe attack since the second half of the nineteenth century, to such an extent that it is no longer a viable approach within the philosophy of mind.

The interaction problem

How to explain the mechanisms by which an independent mind (or soul) can influence the body.
Similarly, how can a non-physical, spiritual mind control physical brain processes?

The existence of unconscious control processes

The discovery that many mental functions seemed to happen outside consciousness.
John Locke was the first to give rise to this issue.

• He wondered what happened to the mind when humans were asleep.
  If consciousness was the defining feature of human existence (as claimed by Descartes), did this imply that the human existence was interrupted during sleep?

Leibniz (1646-1716)
Thought that the human mind could not be limited to conscious thinking.

• There is in us an infinity of perceptions of which we are unaware because the impressions are either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they are not sufficiently distinctive on their own.

He compared the universe to a living organism.
The building blocks were not material particles, but energy-laden and soul-invested units, which he called monads.
Four types of monads

• Simple monads
  The bodies of all matter (organic and inorganic)
  Some type of unconscious and unorganized perception. They ware motivated by a tendency to keep in line with the existing, pre-established harmony of the universe.
• Sentient monads
  Present in all living organisms, but not in inorganic material
  Had capacities for feeling pleasure and pain, and for the voluntary focusing of attention.
  Lacked the ability to reason about their experiences.
• Rational monads
  Corresponded to the conscious minds of humans
  Possessed the capacity of apperception, the faculty not only to perceive but also to reflect upon what is perceived.
  Apperception was not entirely based on empirical evidence, but also on innate truths.
  Innate knowledge demonstrated by perception
• Supreme monad
  Controlled and motivated by all other monads
  Omniscient and omnipotent God of Christian religion

Human consciousness was not aware of the activity of the simple monads and, to a large extent, of the sentient monads.
Still, these monads could motivate human behaviour.

Kant also started to wonder how much wider human knowledge was than the part people were conscious of.
Kant thought of unconscious representations as dark representations.

Leibniz’s and Kant’s thoughts were music in the ears of the German Romanticists.
They saw evidence for the argument that rational thinking was but the tip of human potential and the most interesting part of the mind was active below the level of consciousness.
They urged their readers to strive for unconscious artistic productivity and intuitive aesthetic sense.

The study of unconscious processing gained further momentum from the nineteenth-century neuropphysiologic discovery that reflexes and bodily functions were controlled by the spinal cord and subcortical structures, not by the cerebral hemispheres.

The disappearance of mystery forces in the scientific world

A reason why dualism lost its appeal was that it needed the existence of an immaterial, mysterious, animistic ‘soul’.
Two prime examples of mysterious ‘substances’ that