4: Free Yet Determined and Constrained

Lecture abstract

"With our new concept of the distributed self, the concept of free will is even more odd and, I have always thought, a misnomer.

As Dan Dennett once asked, "Free from what?" We parents work all of our lives to raise our children not to be random, sporadic and impulsive, but to be directed, controlled and mature. We want their automatic brains to be well experienced in assessing the likely outcomes of behaviors. We want them to accumulate scenarios of how to behave in a moral and ethical way so that when they are given a new challenge, they have a context for a proper response. We want their decision-making brain to call upon a life's-worth of experience and training to do the right thing. We surely do not want our children to suddenly be free of all of this experience and education and to choose some wacky course of action that leads to personal disaster.

So what does free will mean? It has become a catchall term and means several things. In many ways the concept is fundamental to human thought and societal institutions. For example, our system of justice is built on the idea that we are all practical reasoners, working in a normal brain environment to produce coherent and ethical behaviors. We are held to be personally responsible for those decisions. Questioning the core concept, free will, necessitates rethinking many cherished notions of human institutions.

Understanding how choice works in the brain and acknowledging the likelihood that the age-old notion of free will may be miscast does not necessitate abandoning the conviction that we have some degree of control over our actions. Instead, there remains the possibility that mental states may influence an agent’s actions via downward causation, or, that is, the potential for the whole to have an impact on the action of its parts. It is tempting to think (or hope) that downward causation means the mind mysteriously alters neuronal firing patterns or neurotransmitter release at the synapse, but making such a claim would be tantamount to reinserting the homunculus back into the equation.

Instead, I argue that downward causation is a far more nuanced brand of causality that cannot be cast in terms of simple neural function. The mind constrains the brain, interacting with the environment in such a way that a limited repertoire of neural states may be called up for duty. Downward mental causation means control via constraint. The implications of this sort of causation are far-reaching. Indeed, most of those who argue for downward causation, and there have been many, feel the idea is central in the battle against the competing idea of exclusively upward causation, which is the basis of the simple minded determinism of modern reductionists.

Certainly though, downward causation does not mean our mental life is unconstrained by the physical world or that a free-floating self authoritatively and invisibly guides the intricate workings of the brain throughout each waking moment. Again, it does mean the inferences, appreciations, values and human desires we possess as a result of heredity or experience can interact in the mind and constrain neural function in a way that eludes description in purely neural terms. Within this context, mental causes have merit. Decisions about challenges from the environment can be executed in full force and constrain the upwardly causal impulses when necessary."

Lecture video