Brains with Minds of Their Own?

Brains with Minds of Their Own? Free Will and the Self

Neuroscience and psychology have fuelled heated debate about the implications of their research results for the free will debate. Benjamin Libet claims to show that the activation of neural pathways leading to action precedes a subject’s conscious awareness of having made a decision by a large margin. Daniel Wegner has argued that subjects’ assessments of their own mental causation are deeply flawed. Others have argued that the sheer amount of unconscious action runs counter to common notions of a free human agent. In short, free will is said to be an illusion. In the philosophical literature, some have drawn the further conclusion that our social practices, e.g., of responsibility attribution, need to be revised to take account of this fact.

While the implications drawn by Libet and Wegner and others have also met with extensive critique, on both scientific and philosophical grounds, it is beyond dispute that there are many unconscious processes shaping our thought and action. Is it possible to acknowledge these findings and still regard oneself as a free agent?

One important part of this research project is to assess the viability of a present-day Kantian approach to this question. Kantianism defends determinism, also at the psychological level. It rejects approaches that try to find a place for freedom in nature by defending either a weaker notion of freedom (as in standard compatibilism) or a weakened or limited version of determinism. It reconciles a strong notion of determinism with a strong notion of freedom of the will by distinguishing between two perspectives: One may well allow that one’s actions can be given a causal explanation, but insofar as one takes oneself to deliberate and choose in light of normative standards, from a different perspective, one must take oneself to be acting for reasons. Such a ‘two perspectives’ or ‘two standpoints’ account raises a number of difficult questions that need to be addressed: questions regarding the unity of the self; the defense of and relationship between the observer and agent standpoints; and the impact, on one’s self-understanding as an agent, of empirical knowledge of how one’s actions are caused.

The project thus involves a careful study of the empirical work that is said to show that free will is an illusion, examining the underlying assumptions regarding the notions of free will and agency; a study of the philosophical debate in this field; reflection on how the empirical results of studies of moral agency might (or might not) be incorporated within the agent perspective and how this affects one’s self-understanding as a (free) agent.