Can neuroscience shed any light on questions of
free-will and agency? Does neuroscience tell us that we can’t act freely? Does
it show us how we are able to act freely? Or are such questions outside the
jurisdiction of the neurosciences? Can philosophy shed any light on such
puzzling phenomenon as obsessive compulsive disorder, anarchic (alien) hand
syndrome, and the pathologies of agency that accompany schizophrenia? There’s
certainly no shortage of material for a book positioned on the border of
neuroscience and the philosophy of free-will. I began this book with high
hopes.

Unfortunately, Neurophilosophy
of Free Will failed to meet those hopes. There is a lot of philosophy here,
and a lot of neuroscience, but not much philosophy of neuroscience, and what
little there is is rather undeveloped.

The central theme of the book is given by its subtitle:
from libertarian illusions to natural autonomy. Three conditions form the heart
of Walter’s concept of free-will: the alternatives condition, the
intelligibility condition, and the agency condition. The alternatives condition
holds that free will involves the ability to have done other than what one did;
the intelligibility condition holds that freely chosen actions must be
intelligible; and the agency condition captures the idea that a person
themselves is the cause – or originator – of their freely chosen actions. Each
of these conditions can be developed in different ways. Walter’s libertarian
demands a strong reading of each condition. According to Walter liberterianism
is an illusion because strong readings of the three conditions can’t be met. But
although a libertarian conception of free-will is untenable Walter argues that
something survives. He calls his positive view “natural autonomy”. Natural
autonomy is what you get when you conjoin weak versions of the alternatives,
intelligibility and agency conditions. According to Walter, the role of chaos
in the brain shows that there is a weak sense in which we could have done
otherwise than what we did. Second, we can make sense of intelligibility by
appealing to neural Darwinism and the role of language in shaping cognition.
Third, we can ensure that something of the origination condition is met by
appealing to the idea of emotional identification.

Given that this is the overall structure of the
book, one would have expected Walter to clearly sketch the various readings of
the three components, and show exactly how neuroscience enables weak readings
of each component to be met. Unfortunately, he does neither of these things.
Instead, he devotes large sections of the book – especially in chapter one – to
various notions of determinism, the relationship between determinism and
predictability, the relationship between free will and moral responsibility.
Exactly how this discussion is meant to bear on defending natural autonomy is
left quite unclear. Chapter two (pp. 75-152) is devoted to neurophilosophy and
suffers from a similar fate. Again, the discussion is wide-ranging. Topics
covered include mind-body identity theories, neurobiological constructivism,
eliminative materialism, supervenience, superdupervenience, reductionism,
connectionism, and mental causation. Chapter three (pp. 76-153) is similarly
broad, and includes an account of quantum effects in neural processing, chaos
theory and its application to accounts of cognition, the James-Lange accounts
of the emotions, Damasio’s somatic marker theory, teleosemantics, Edelman’s
neural Darwinism, the role of public language in the development of cognition,
Libet’s experiments on the timing of subjective experience, the role of the
frontal cortex, externalism about mental content, and (too) much more.

Walter attempts to bring it all together in the last
three pages of the book. It’s too little too late. At precisely the point at
which one look for a model – or even a hint of a model – Walter starts waving
his hands. Here, for instance, is the passage in which he comes closest to
putting it all together.

I want to summarize the idea of natural autonomy in
one [sic!] sentence. We possess natural autonomy when under very similar
circumstances we could also do otherwise than we actually do (because of the
chaotic nature of our brain). This choice is understandable (intelligible – it
is determined by past events, by immediate adaptation processes in the brain,
and partially by our linguistically formed environment), and it is authentic
(when through reflection loops with emotional adjustment we can identify with
that action. (299)

Let me address just two features of this account:
the idea that chaos theory shows how a weak form of the alternatives component
can be satisfied; and the idea that the emotions might provide an acceptable
account of the origination condition.

Walter
devotes a lot of space to chaos theory, but he says rather little about how it
bears on the alternatives conditions.

If deterministic chaos should, in fact, turn out to
be a ubiquitous phenomenon within the nervous system, that would explain why we
can make different choices in similar situations. It would explain why even in
comparable situations we do not always take the same path, explain how we keep
natural alternatives open and why our thinking is so flexible. It would also
explain why the subjective impression of being able to do otherwise seems so
irrefutable. (295-6)

Bold claims, but I don’t see where Walter makes good
on them. A chaos-based account of cognition may be able to make sense of why a
cognitive system will do otherwise in very similar circumstances, but I don’t
see that it is uniquely placed to do
so. Orthodox computationalists can also make sense of the fact that cognitive
systems in very similar states can act very differently. It all depends on what
“doing otherwise in similar circumstances” amounts to.

What is it to be the originator of one’s actions?
Walter begins his answer to this question by arguing that the standard
compatibilist answer is wrong. Compatabilists tend to appeal to higher-order
desires to account for what it is to identify with a desire: we identify with a
desire D (and hence the action that it generates) when we desire to have D.
Walter claims that this account simply pushes the problem upstairs, for we now
have the problem of what it is to identify with one’s higher-order desires (the
desire to have D). Higher-order desires are, after all, still desires. No
matter how complex a desire is, one can always take a step back from it and ask
oneself whether it is the sort of desire one should have. There is, I agree,
something of a regress here, but it’s far from obvious to me that it’s vicious.
I don’t think that Walter has shown that higher-order desire compatibilists are
unable to account for how it is that we actually
identify with our desires (when we do identify with them).

No matter; the central issue is with Walter’s own
account of identification. He appeals to two sorts of mental states in accounting
for identification and authenticity: emotions and bodily representations (298).
Unfortunately, this is about all he says by way of developing his account. I
share Walter’s conviction that an account of identification will make important
use of emotions and bodily representations, but I don’t even have a rough
idea – far less anything that could be
a called a model – of how emotions
and bodily representations generate a sense of identity. Nor, as far as I can
tell, does Walter. And any such account must do justice to the fact that we can
feel alienated from both our emotions and our bodily representations. Being alienated from an emotional state is,
I think, a rather common experience. One can feel a certain kind of distance
from one’s emotions, as if there’s a sense in which they’re not really one’s
own. Bodily-alienation is, perhaps, less common, but it is nevertheless a
well-documented phenomenon. Patients with extreme cases of neglect quite often
deny that certain of their body parts are their own. The fact that one can fail
to identify oneself with one’s body, or with one’s emotions, suggests that much
more needs to be said here. Here, as throughout the volume, there’s a
noticeable dearth of detail and substance.

 

© 2002 Tim Bayne

 

Tim Bayne
(PhD Arizona) is a member of staff in the Department of Philosophy, Macquarie
University, Sydney, Australia.  He specializes
in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, philosophy of
religion and applied ethics. He has published articles on these topics in such
journals as Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The Australasian Journal
of Philosophy, Religious Studies, Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Bioethics.
His current research is on the unity of consciousness and agency.

Categories: Philosophical