A Naturalistic Account of Free Will (I)

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A Naturalistic Account of Free Will (I)

Journal Title: Filozoficzne Aspekty Genezy - Year 2013, Vol 10, Issue 0

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to argue that naturalism is consistent with free will. Many philosophers claim that if determinism is true, and thus we are not really free agents, then we are not morally responsible. This „problem of free will” would then seem to be particularly pressing for naturalism, since naturalism considers human beings to be arrangements of matter, and therefore many scholars expect it to be consistent with determinism. Several scientific writers who have touched on the subject, including Francis Crick and E.O. Wilson, have tried to explain the phenomenology of free will (our feeling that we are free agents) on biological terms, while arguing that the human brain is so complex that the predictability of individual human action is practically impossible. Such solutions fail, however, because determinism and predictability are not the same thing. Chaotic phenomena, for example, may be unpredictable, but they are still deterministic. So the most these interesting scientific proposals can show is that free will is an illusion. But if free will is an illusion, so is moral responsibility. This paper will also explain why appeals to quantum indeterminism, which underlies presumably deterministic science, are not much help either. Nor can the problem be dismissed as Hobbes, Hume, Schlick and others have tried to do, by pointing to a linguistic confusion between the practical inevitability of natural law and the compulsion of social laws, nor by some further „linguistic analysis”. This paper develops Gary Watson’s suggestion that the question of free will is rather whether our actions can be determined by the self. The self, it will be seen, turns out to be (largely) the brain, and the brain does indeed determine the individual’s actions. Even though the laws of physics and chemistry apply in the brain, and even though all sorts of external influences leave their imprint on the brain, each brain is sui generis and has its own set of emergent „laws” that pit the organism as an independent entity vis-à-vis the world. This is enough independence from the world, in any event, to justify the conclusion that the brain (the self) does determine its own actions, and thus that, under normal circumstances, the individual is morally responsible. The most important of the reasons discussed in the paper is the existence of „strong emergence” in brain processes. The first level of emergence is the well-known fact that the components of a brain process (e.g., electrical pulses sent by the retina to the brain) do not guarantee a particular experience. The stronger level of emergence is that the brain networks affect the individual components of the networks (e.g., synaptic weights). Thus a neural state is emergent in the sense that the weights of the synaptic connections that constitute it are not sufficient to determine it, and also emergent in the sense that those weights are also partially dependent on the neural state itself.

Authors and Affiliations

Gonzalo Munévar

Keywords

Free will evolutionary naturalism Determinism predictability self-determination quantum indeterminism Deterministic chaos strong emergence

EP ID EP88353
DOI -
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