The Four Levels of Free Will - Seoul National Universitycogsci.snu.ac.kr/jcs/issue/vol17/no2/01+gillett.pdf · 3. Human existence and action occurs within a natural world subject

The Four Levels of Free Will

Grant Gillett and Sam Liu

University of Otago Medical School, New [email protected], sam1|2|3|@gmail.com

The problem of free will is expressed in a seemingly inconsistent triad arising because, as moral agents we consider ourselves unique among the creatures of the world and yet, as scientists (and more importantly cognitive neuroscientists), we study cognitive mechanisms in human beings as we do any other natural phenomena. The Free Will triad is as follows:

1. Free will is the link between the soul (or psyche) and human action.2. The soul is the aspect of a human being that cannot be explained in terms of physical or biological sciences.3. Human existence and action occurs within a natural world subject to explanations grounded in the physical and biological sciences.

Cognitive neuroscience does its work at the centre of this problem and therefore it is useful to construct an account of human action in which free (and morally significant) action can be understood in a way that embodies an interpretation of the Free Will triad within an orthodox construal of natural science. The philosophical debate, is often metaphysical structured by absolute dogmata about nature and what happens within it, and that does not always help but an Aristotelian theoretical framework supplemented by the evolutionary neurology of John Hughlings-Jackson and recent work in embodied cognition offers a different analysis in which cognitive neuroscience and the ethology of human adaptation to an objective, reflective, normative domain of activity suggest a way ahead.

Keywords: free will, reason-responsiveness, dynamic systems theory, autopoiesis, causation

Journal of Cognitive Science 17-2: 167-198, 2016Date submitted: 01/13/13 Date reviewed: 05/11/16 Date confirmed for publication: 05/17/16©2016 Institute for Cognitive Science, Seoul National University

168 Grant Gillett and Sam Liu

1. Introduction

Free will is a topic that, traditionally, has been debated in metaphysical terms but it has taken on a different aspect in the light of neuroscience, psychology, law, and even physics (Libet 1985; Glannon 2005; Kane 2005; Heisenberg, 2009) and thereby has shifted towards a more naturalistic philosophy not so wedded to metaphysical dogmata (Roskies, 2010). The resulting debates require an integrated account that clarifies what is at stake in naturalistic terms. That tends to sideline, as distractions from a productive investigation, some well-defined metaphysical positions such as dualism, and so to leave aside a question like, “Is there an inner mental agent who originates actions independently of the natural events preceding them? It ushers in other issues such as, “Does free will mean that human behaviour is not mechanistically caused?” Other debates are also defused somewhat such as, “Is quantum indeterminacy and the random, non-reactive, generation of behaviour relevant to free will?” A cognitive scientist, who takes seriously autopoiesis, non-linear brain dynamics, Continuous Reciprocal Causation, and developmental systems theory, might instead focus on the interdependence between an agent (as a reason-responsive, self-forming participant adapted to a discursive context) and features of that context thereby bypassing the mechanistic framework that motivates a deterministic focus on prior causes of human action.

The inconsistent triad underlying the traditional debate is best stated as follows within the new terms of analysis.

2. The Free Will triad.

1. Free will links the soul (or psyche) and voluntary human action.

2. The soul is that aspect of a human being that cannot be explained in terms of physical or biological sciences.

3. Human existence and action occurs within a natural world subject to explanations grounded in the physical and biological sciences.

169Free Will and Cognitive Neuroscience

The metaphysical debate tends to read 1 and 2 as requiring that human beings must have within them an ‘I’ or uncaused, causal origin of action. This metaphysical “I,” haunting treatments of free will (Harris, 2012), both fuels the debate and makes it intractable leading to demands for an account of free will framed by a causal deterministic interpretation of 3 and of natural phenomena in general. But that interpretation is finessed by a neo-Aristotelian (rather than Cartesian) conception of the soul and an autopoietic model of neural adaptation. In fact an Aristotelian account of the will proves singularly apt for cognitive neuroscience and embeds a conception of nature altogether more suited to understanding complex biological entities than the problematic (mechanistic/deterministic) metaphysics underpinning both compatibilism or incompatibilism.

Aristotle argues that the only important determinant of the will is whether or not an agent can translate his or her reasoning into effective action; an individual who cannot suffers akrasia – weakness of the will (1925, 1145aff). If that reasoning responds not merely to causes but also to arguments and meanings, then intelligent self-formation (autopoiesis), self-rule, and self-efficacy as part of one’s adaptation to a cognitive niche of embodied thinkers (Chemero, Clarke, Pinker) is its crux. It depends on an attention to truth arrived at through argument (Mercier and Sperber) in an Objective-Reflective-Normative domain (Tomasello, 2014) and is central to a set of cognitive and discursive practices that require a different (ethological) form of explanation (Harre and Gillett, 1994; Davidson, 1980) from that of mechanism. That shift in explanation parallels recent discussions of autonomy where debates about internal events and mechanistic causal chains are side-lined to devise criteria for free will based on a conception of an unencumbered autonomous agent in whom “biological drives, body states, and emotions, may be an indispensible foundation for rationality” (Felsen and Reiner, 2011, 8). Such an agent acts on his or her all-things considered best option, perhaps in terms of (Aristotelian) “second nature” even if not always through a “traditional rational, deliberative process.” A complex reflective, enactive, autopoietic and dynamic relation between thought, reasoning, and one’s actual effect on the world enables increasing mastery of the skills whereby thought is translated into deed by a top-down configuration of neural processes (enactment). Detailed events in


the brain may be fitted into the whole in such a way as they are irrelevant to the philosophical issue of agency (they are merely the means by which a thinker normally enacts an adaptive, reason-responsive project that may be frustrated by neural or subconscious states pre-empting conscious self-direction). The non-linear processes that give effect to higher level strategies honed in the ethological domain (ecological niche) of thought and agency in the control of behaviour displace any deterministic, linear causal chain from the heart of the account.

The Aristotelian re-framing finesses interpretations of the triad based on a mythical Cartesian agent or in terms of a mindless causal chain and suggests a hierarchy of action production (Felsen and Reiner, 2011, 10) analysable at four levels: (i) a neuro-biological analysis of the brain processes enabling voluntary action; (ii) a psychological but subconscious level at which human beings may be biased towards acting in ways that undermine conscious reasoning; (iii) a level at which reason shapes behaviour to achieve certain ends; and (iv) a level at which reason and argument are used to evaluate those ends (in some way). The last of these levels, for Aristotle, distinguishes mere cleverness from genuine phronesis (1925, 1144a 20ff).

An integrated model of these four levels addresses the cognitive neuroscience of action and critiques the assumptions inherent in some metaphysical analyses of the Free Will triad by acknowledging that the neural processes serving action integrate the potentially “chaotic” or dynamic complexity of unconscious processes and events by subsuming them within higher levels of neural coordination and integration (Hughlings-Jackson, 1887). Distinguishing higher mental processes and propositionising - (speech related) activity proper to the “space of reasons” (Sellars, 1997; McDowell, 2001) - from the brute contingency of natural causes, ushers in an understanding according to which human beings engage with norms of thought and conduct that shape how they act. Discussing action at these four levels (and particularly the fourth) generates a productive way for cognitive neuroscience to approach human free will. Taking this route does, however, refuse the abstract metaphysical debate created by the deterministic universe of Victorian physicalism and the “pure subject” of Cartesian (and post-Cartesian) libertarians and instead adopts a form of neo-Aristotelian naturalism.


3. The soul and human action

The Free Will triad (FWt) rests on the view that a human soul is a unique instantiation of the form of humanity – that which makes human beings distinctive creatures. If we reject the posit of a (Cartesian) thinking thing or point of conscious agency within each human being, the Aristotelian conception of the soul (or psyche) as a holistic set of human modes of being engaged with nature and also with a moral and interpersonal domain creates “second nature” a human mode of being in “the space of reasons.” That interpretation lays aside the traditional metaphysical problem of causal parts (some immaterial) within the soul to treat human beings as souls (Wittgenstein, 1953, 178) - mutually responsive beings who act on, react to, and affect one another in ways worth arguing about (P.Strawson, 1974).

The outmoded (deterministic) metaphysics, taken as an absolute basis for natural explanation, generates a syllogism linking Free Will and Brain processes (the FWB syllogism) worth exploring to identify and avoid its misconceptions.

1. Human action is produced by brain processes.2. Brain processes are deterministic and causal.3. Human action is deterministically caused.

That yields two broad philosophical positions on free will and human action - compatibilism and incompatibilism, a framework that is basic to this debate but becomes more problematic as we explore contemporary cognitive neuroscience. Determinism holds (i) that free will is put in doubt because every event is produced by prior events operating within a linear causal chain and (ii) that the nexus of physical events is closed under natural laws, thus: “There is no freedom, but everything in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature (Kant, 1787[1929], B473). Indeterminism accepts the framework but conversely holds that human actions are not determined either because of chance (James, 1956) or quantum indeterminacy (Eccles 1994; Heisenberg, 2009) yielding an anti-causal type of freedom. The chance invoked in that position runs it foul of Hume’s fork: that our free actions ought to be explained in ways that identify our causal agency in bringing them about (again with determinism


as a basic metaphysical assumption). Most libertarian indeterminists argue that free will implies that we are the ultimate authors and agents of our lives rather than being mere causal nodes in the midst of an all-encompassing nexus of natural events (Fischer and Thomashauer 1995; O’Connor 2002; Kane 2005). Kant, however, suggests an alternative. He concedes that the assumption of universal mechanistic causal determinism cannot yield any understanding of the normative space of reasons (and morality and law) even though it may be indispensable for science (1953). But he proposes that biology may require other principles – based in natural purposes, a view supported by developmental systems theory and non-linear modes of explanation supporting concepts of autopoiesis (Varela & Thompson, 2001; Freeman, 1994, 2007). This is not, therefore, a kind of compatibilism because it rejects the abstract structure of universal metaphysical determinism and adopts a more naturalistic understanding of human freedom as manifest in real life and understandable within cognitive neuroscience. Problematizing the metaphysics undercuts compatibilism, incompatibilism, and traditional libertarian arguments about free or morally significant action (Edwards, 2002) and opts for a view that agents generate their own behaviour such that human action is continuous with other natural processes but invokes modes of explanation that go beyond physical science and even some conceptions of neuroscience. Such an account undermines the FWB syllogism and focuses on (Aristotelian) concepts such as weakness of the will, strength of will, and the active intellect as the proper basis of scientific discussions of the will and free will.

William James provides an early example of a psychologist who attempts to work within the traditional metaphysical constraints. His hybrid position accepts a mechanistic causal nexus in nature and uses a two-stage model combining indeterminism (or randomness) in the generation of trains of thought from chaotic neural activity and deterministic elements related to character (Walter 2001) to explain behaviour in a way “not in conflict with physics” (Heisenberg, 2009, 165). His model is often used to support the compatibilist claim that “a person acts freely if he does of his own accord what must be done” (Heisenberg, 2009, 165) where the “must be” is given a causal (not rational or moral reading) within a temporal sequence of neural and psychological events within the agent. Random chance


(‘freely’) generates options and human decision making is then effectively determined by the causal effects of life experiences and a psychology based on biological mechanisms (Heisenberg 2009). But the ‘willing implicit in human action,’ seen in such terms (James 1880; Dennett 1978; Penrose 1990; Heisenberg 2009), does not seem to avoid Hume’s fork: “if it is a matter of pure chance that a man should act in one way rather than another, he may be free but he can hardly be responsible” (Foot, 1978, 63). The indeterminist step (the apparently chance initiation of thinking) in the production of an act can be critiqued as not what is needed to save the kind of free will or “up-to-me-ness” we are seeking (Harris, 2012). Despite its making room for character and psychology to do significant work, the result does not seem to satisfy our intuition that a conscious willing agent, recognised as somebody somewhere who is accountable for his or her actions, causes those actions rather than events (occurring within and without a human brain) being the cause (“my brain made me do it” after all).

Can we give an account of “agent causation or agent-causally generated activity” whereby “It remains up to the agent, … to determine which … tendency will be acted on” (O’Connor 2002). This form of “up-to-me-ness” implies an action is free if it is caused by the agent who performs it, and is often construed as requiring that no antecedent conditions (external to the agent’s own internal mechanisms) are sufficient for performing just that action. It is sometimes defended in terms of the “could have done otherwise” arguments but to give the results wanted it needs to ground the claim that an action that is free is done for some reason such that the agent’s holding the reason caused the action (where that implicates the agent) as a subject of conscious activity (not just a set of brain processes) who wills actions as a member of the kingdom of “ends” - intentional beings leading meaningful lives (Freeman, 2000).

The Cartesian view (the inner me/non-causal me) is not, however, the only way to satisfy the intuition that when I do something, it is I who causes it to be done and not merely something within me (such as a neural or unconscious state). In fact such a view is deeply problematic in that it rests on the idea that something other than my conscious embodied self - an event internal to myself or an inner entity, not included in cognitive neuroscience and its ontology - caused my behaviour (Taylor 1992). Agent


causation theory can, however, be interpreted otherwise than by invoking a homunculus within as a non-deterministic causa sui by noting that the agent could be an “embodied self”(possibly holistic) – a real person set in a broader (e.g. discursive) domain of explanation (Harre and Gillett, 1994; Gillett, 2008) where as a thinker one autopoietically generates decisions and actions. That whole person enacts the effects of argument and interpersonal responsivity – the highest level of human adaptation - into the layered neural processes explaining human activity (Gillett and Franz, 2013). Top-down causation by an emergent entity invokes the agent as more than a sum of physiological events and biological processes because of higher levels of integration and adaptation to a discursive and intersubjective domain. An agent causation theory of that type preserves the “aspects of our view of ourselves … threatened by determinism” (Strawson 2008, p. 346) but also underscores the latent problem in the FWt (FW links action and the soul + soul is non-physical + nature is physical). Explaining human action by recognising both top-down and bottom-up influences within neural networks yields a conception of a free agent who is not a (Cartesian) causa sui and yet acts as a whole not reducible to streams of physical events (Strawson 2008) and who is best understood as an inhabitant of “the space of reasons” or the ecological niche of thinking (Pinker, 2010).

Dynamic systems theory, continuous reciprocal causation between brain and environment, autopoiesis, and the shared circuits model of cognition jointly make plausible the claim that none of the traditional positions on free will, interpreted in terms of the metaphysics of absolute and universal causal determinism and its posited linear causal mechanisms, are adequate for the needs of cognitive neuroscience (a sub-discipline of real world evolutionary neuroscience) and instead focuses on the modes of explanation required at different levels of understanding of human action (or real world adaptation by neural integration).

1. NEUROSCIENCE must try and explain bodily movements in terms of physiology (in the light of dynamic systems, chaos theory, and non-linear brain dynamics);2. TRADITIONAL PSYCHOLOGY explains actions through agents’ desires, emotions, and the individual cognitive activity


enabling adaptation to a natural and social world. 3. DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY draws on broad cultural and evolutionary theory and an agent’s subjective position in a discursive domain to explain thought and action.4. THE SPACE OF REASONS (as in Aquinas’ Aristotelianism) explores our human engagement with thought and morality (Wolf, 1990; McDowell, 2001; Stumpf, 2010).

The relevant explanations locate a human agent within scientific theories of action by asking:

how the agent is able to do the right thing for the right reason … roughly analysed into two narrower abilities … first … an ability of thought … to know what is in accordance with the True and the Good … second … an ability of execution, the ability to convert one’s knowledge into action. (Wolf, 1990, 87-8)

This (Aristotelian) view can “easily accommodate the notion that ability is a matter of degree … if … some people are less able than others to act in accordance with the True and the Good” (Wolf, 87). It therefore (a) respects real world neural integration in which human agents control their behaviour; and (b) allows cognitive neuroscience to focus on an agent’s skills and capacity for conscious action and critical reflection. That yields a workable view of “up-to-me-ness” (where “me” = a moral agent who consciously enacts adaptations to an inter-personal world and is responsive to reason) if not of “ultimate” (metaphysical) freedom (as in G.Strawson, 2008, p359).

4. Four Levels of analysis of Free Will in human action

Brain activity during spontaneous voluntary movements (performed without compulsions or constraints) is often claimed to show that unconscious neural events preceding an act explain the action and that consciousness follows rather than initiates them (Libet 1985; Pesaran, Nelson et al, 2008; Soon, Brass et al. 2008).

This is freedom to act without coercions and constraints and it occurs


within patterns of more integrated brain function of the kind indicating conscious thought. Hughlings-Jackson speaks of “integration and coordination”(1887), Dennett of “fame in the brain” (2001), and Dehaene of a global cognitive workspace as the basis of conscious agency (2014), broadening the discussion far beyond the “self-initiated and adaptive” response seen in bacteria (Heisenberg 2009), and, potentially, engaging our actions with discourse or narrative (“the space of reasons” or level 4 as identified above).

LEVEL 1: NEUROSCIENCE AND CAUSAL DETERMINISM

The first level of understanding human action rests, in part, on the causal mechanisms that Kant (1953, p234) considered a necessary construct for all science and explains actions in terms of embodied neural states. If construed metaphysically and seen as the ultimate level at which mental/soul life must be understood, it leads us to conclude that free will is an illusion (Libet 1985; Strawson 1998; Claxton 1999; Hallett 2007; Pesaran, Nelson et al. 2008):

(i) action-producing states are neural states and “neural goings on have full descriptions in purely physical terms” (Strawson, 2008, 341)(ii) there are no physical events free from antecedent causal necessity (Strawson, 2008, p359 ff);

(iii) our decisions are sub-consciously determined (Strawson 1986; Strawson 2002; Hallett 2007; Bode, He et al. 2011).

This metaphysical view sees conscious awareness as an “epiphenomenon” (causally inactive) but it is now somewhat outdated (Dehaene, 2014). It overlooks the role of consciousness in weaving together a story of intelligently guided action and focuses on post-hoc justification or rationalization (Freud,1922; Wegner, 2002) such that free will is an illusion produced by proprioceptive awareness or unconscious prediction of self-initiated movements (Claxton 1999; Hallett 2007) combined with a guess about the connection between thought and action (Wegner, Sparrow et al. 2004). But our stories could be seen as adaptive devices that fit us into


the human world with all its benefits and opportunities (Dennett, 1991; Dehaene, 2014).

Reductive accounts often cite Benjamin Libet, arguing that actions are pre–determined by unconscious brain activity given that a voluntary action (a push of a button) and the time that subjects self–report a conscious intention to act both occur after a prominent frontal brain event apparently initiating the action (Libet 1985). But Libet’s protocol and claims have been criticised on the basis that (i) the timing of “conscious acts” is unreliable (Green and Gillett 1995) and (ii) its underlying model of neural and conscious events is flawed (Dennett 2005; Gillett 2008). His studies focus on a supposed inner event – either mental or neural – as the point of agent causation and assume that a free action occurs when the causal event produces an unforced or uncoerced action. They also focus solely on neural events as internal stimuli with bottom-up effects causing conscious experience whereas, in fact, conscious life involves a great deal of top-down “filling in” of situations according to what tends to occur around here (Dennett, 1991). Thus, when I have an effect on the world, I self-attribute the cause of the action, noting its relation between what happens and my preceding thought, and integrate the act into the account I give to myself and others of what I am doing and why (Dennett 1991; Gillett, 2001). The attribution can be accurate or inaccurate depending on how skilled I am at intervening in my domain of action. If I am effective, the neuro-cognitive processes reflect complex patterns of neural activity both responsive to sensori-motor coupling (Chemero, 2009) and to human discourse with its norms of reason and modes of connecting events in ways that enact my intentions (Davidson, 1980; Gillett, 2009, 349ff). That is evident when certain human actions can only be understood by relating them to history, culture, politics and forms of explanation not within the purview of physical science. Wolf’s account of two types of abilities – the ability to think certain thoughts appraised according to non-scientific norms and the ability to convert thought into action in fact approaches action explanations at this level. Thus one might ask, “His motor system effectively produced the action which spilt red wine over his friend’s shirt, but did he mean to or was it a tic?” or “His finger flexed but did he mean to shoot the archduke?” (Gillett, 2008) If either answer is yes then the agent has acted for reasons


of his own.In accounting for action, we can readily assume that a commitment

to neurophysiology as a base science licenses deterministic causal claims about the human life world but, given current developmental systems approaches, Continuous Reciprocal Causation (Clark, 2008), and autopoiesis, the interaction that adapts human beings to a socio-politico-cultural ontology of human life may override bottom-up causal connections in favour of an integrated holistic view that conscious agents alert to non-physical regularities (laws, symbolic significance, social expectations, and so on) play a part in structuring intentional action. Hughlings Jackson’s (1887) integration of neural function into whole organism patterns of activity is of this type and implicates what used to be called formal causation in explaining what happens to sub-parts of a system (as in embryology where the whole shapes the part). The predictive brain (Friston, 2010) invokes future oriented teleology (or entelechy) based on predictions about the environment (shaped by variation and historically situated selection of higher level neural patterns creating direction or purpose in human function) as the basis of action (Hull 1982). These approaches locate cognitive neuroscience among ethological rather than mechanistic modes of understanding where relevant variables are social, interpersonal, and discursive and a crucial factor is the situated, communicative, human individual (Harre and Gillett, 1994).

Therefore the question, “Are we mechanistic systems acting according to the outcome of sub-personal neural processes governed by the laws of neuroscience?” draws on a conception of neuroscience that is unrealistic, dated, and disconnects our actions from tour domain of adaptation because of ontological restrictions of Victorian physical science. Actions are not just physically specifiable and timed events of the type suited to micro-neural time scales and restricted locations in the brain (as in the FWt). Actions are connected to cognitive schemata, scripts, narratives and the top-down action structures which control motor circuits by hooking them into explanatory connections going wider into our thought and behaviour as participants in an Objective-Reflective-Normative domain of human meaning (Dennett, 2001, Gillett, 2008, 117ff; Tomasello, 2014). A metaphysics of discrete brain loci where posited moments and states of neural activity cause mental


events, possibly conscious (Kim, 2010), is thereby bypassed in favour of an ontology of top-down effects of the whole brain on neural events (Gillett & Liu, 2012) and action explanations relating a whole person and their behaviour to a story enacting a multi-layered human interpretation of a situation.

A move from explanation falling within a mechanistic scientific model to an ontology apt for understanding human beings on a broader canvas therefore goes beyond the “assembly line” metaphor for action production to a dynamic systems approach in which highly evolved organisms using both bottom-up and top-down processing show cognitive and behavioural plasticity constructed intersubjectively (Hughlings-Jackson, 1887; Clark, 2008; Hurley, 2008; Zahavi, 2005) in a discursive domain (Harre and Gillett, 1994).

Level 2. PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY: COGNITION AND ACTION

The second level of analysis concerns psychological (rather than neural) causation and can be theorised in various ways:

2.1 Functionalism as an account of the mental and reasons as causes in informational transactions based on cognitive-affective structures and states;

2.2 Conscious epiphenomenalism sees the narratives generated as outputs of such structures without a proper role in their production – i.e. as post-hoc public relations exercises;

2.3 Anomalous monism sees reasons as causes but allows irreducible connections so that mental explanation exhibits its own structure and regularities.

Each framework is problematic in terms of the cognitive neuroscience of the will because of the omission of the agent as a participant in reason-giving practices who is directly implicated in his or her acts of the will (even though anomalous monism has anti-reductive implications).


2.1 Functionalism exchanges causal interactions at the neural level for similar connections at the computational/psychological level whereby thoughts (or, more often, beliefs, desires, and intentions) are theorized as causally connected information states linked to perception and action by means of an inner neuro-functional calculus. That view characteristically uses the concept of representation by contrast with the shift towards embodied cognition whereby intentionality is realised in a messy, non-computational, human life-world and introduces ethological variables through the idea of the extended mind and dynamic systems theories (Clark 2008). Discursive norms (Gillett, 1992; Harre and Gillett 1994) shaping neuro-cognitive activity invoke a form of top-down imposition of adaptations of the whole organism onto its cognitive structure. On that view, bottom-up causal mechanisms are not the basis of mind and conscious discursive being plays a part in the work of self-making.

2.2. Conscious epiphenomenalism marginalises a person’s participation in an intersubjective world by undermining the psychological agent as having a causal role in relation to mental life and voluntary action. The conscious self is not a causa sui but merely a locus of causal mechanisms generating conscious experience and therefore the conscious agent is unfree because of the non-conscious inner causes involved.(G.Strawson, 2008)

The model accepts unconscious states and processes as being like those that operate in non-human animals with no effective role for the conscious reasoning agent. The complexities of neural processing may defeat “automaticity” (Hughlings-Jackson, 1887) and yield a construal of biological intentionality (Hanna, 2009) whereby “the laws of simply mechanistic causality do not suffice”(Kant 1953) but they fall short of an account of it being “up to me” – as a responsible agent who acts among others, within the space of reasons. However the apparent anomaly (in terms of mechanistic laws) of developmental systems theory undercuts the self-contained functionalist/ supervenient account of mental causation and provides a naturalistic construal of a cognitive niche where abstraction, reason, and interpersonal dependence mould human mental life (Pinker, 2010) .

2.3 Anomalous mental causation focuses on psychological or rational


norms of explanation rather than physical causal laws as the explanatory framework of thought and meaning (Davidson, 1980). Against that framework free action occurs as one gives effect to beliefs and desires explaining one’s choice of an option to which reason guides one. Human action is then located in the space of reasons and reason-giving – in a way congenial a kind of Aristotelianism (McDowell, 2001) that could be interpreted as compatibilism. Formulations such as ‘he can do otherwise in the same circumstances’ or ‘alternative possibilities for action’ (Frankfurt 1969; McIntyre 1994; Kane 2005; Widerker and McKenna 2006), are then offered but Strawson (2008) argues that the up-to-me-ness we want is still, in the linear causal framework assumed, logically impossible and an illusion. But in fact, Davidson’s arguments for the anomaly of the mental hint at a more profound problem in that they rest on the physical causality they defuse as the basis of mental explanation (Antony, 1989). A way is open to interpret anomalous monism naturalistically in terms of emergent ecological properties and holistic brain responses of a human being adapted to a discursively structured milieu of activity, but that is rejected by both Strawson (2008) and Kim (2011).

Up-to-me responsibility therefore needs a theory of action that reinstates a free and morally responsible being and allows a principled distinction between conscious self-control and “pathological” causes like impulses (as in conditions such as kleptomania where there is, intuitively, a lack of freedom because the inner causes are of the wrong type). However distinguishing between the credentials of different types of inner causes takes us outside descriptions of neural states and events (they are all effective causes) into something like the complex psycho-socio-cultural judgments that we negotiate within the frameworks of human understanding that appear when we make judgments about truth and psychological integrity by contrast with incontinence, mental disorders, and moral failures (Gillett, 2009b).

The arguments so far suggest that not only openness to options (where people can make irrational or even insane choices) but a sense of “up-to-me-ness” (not just an illusion based on subconscious causation) are linked to a robust sense of free will. We do not need to go as far as Klemm, for instance, when he argues: “Free implies a conscious causation in which an


intent, choice, or deci-sion is made among alternatives that are more or less possible … and are not constrained by either external or internal imperatives for the embodied brain”(2010). Staying within a linear causal chain usually interpreted in terms of bottom-up determination by unconscious or consciously inaccessible processes like priming, hypnotic suggestion, and prior conditioning does not yield the “up-to-me-ness” that “sheets home” responsibility for actions to an integrated, conscious self-directing agent or moral subject who should be able to give an account of him or herself in human discourse (Wegner, 2002).

Level 3. DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SITUATED AGENT

If we invoke Hughlings-Jackson’s non-automaticity arising from increasing use of complex and inclusive information to moderate transitions from sensori-motor responses (1887) to our conscious human life we access a theoretical neuroscientific framework that distinguishes intentional human behaviour from causal processes at lower levels of neural organisation. It incorporates Hurley’s Shared Circuits Model (2008) to embrace a holistic and autopoietic self (“Le moi est une coordination”) who uses “propositionising” or “the service of words” to structure action (Franz and Gillett, 2011). Such an agent acts in ways that reflect the results of argument (Mercier & Sperber, 2011) in their reasons for acting (Korsgaard & O’Neill, 1996; Wolf, 1990). The norms of the space of reason and communication and what they require (Davidson, 1984; Tomasello, 2014) thereby enter into mental explanation.

The use of reason and argument, or “propositionising” (Hughlings-Jackson, 1887), allows the creation of action structures to some extent autonomous of current context (Davidson, 1984, 113-4) to generate Frankfurt-like layers of articulation and distancing from the immediate in mental life. Human beings master and enact such techniques throughout their behaviour: for instance, if the bowels demand to be emptied while one is in an important meeting, one can suppress the gastro-intestinal tract (an example used by Hughlings Jackson) and act informed by the social norm. The multiplicity of levels of organisation of behaviour means that patients


with addictions may both be controlled by habitual responses and also repudiate their using on the basis of self-imposed norms. In that way inner drives and desires can be moderated by using skills of self-governance to overcome akrasia – weakness of the will, or incontinence (Aristotle, 1925). The relevant neuro-cognitive skills enable a human being to achieve control of behaviour through values, beliefs, and discursive norms and defuse the Free Will triad by linking the soul, or our engagement in culture and discourse as somebody somewhere as an identifiable agent, to a top-down, integration of neural function by a human being construed as “a member of the kingdom of ends.” (Harre and Gillett, 1994). Such a construal outstrips those aspects of a human being that can be explained in terms of physical or biological sciences but leaves human existence and action in a natural world subject to explanations grounded in sciences such as ethology and anthropology.

Therefore, even if processes within the neurocognitive system can adequately explain most animal behaviours, humans incorporate a dynamic form discernible through developmental systems theory within a unique ethology, that of a human life world and its discursive systems of rhetoric, symbolism, law and sets of moral norms. The resulting adaptation and self-integration embody norms of conversation, reason, and argument (Pinker, 2010) so we act on all-things-considered-best judgments (Davidson, 1980; Glannon 2005, 2011; Gillett 2009) and learn effectively to translate thought into action.

Some anomalies help fill out the picture. OCD patients (driven by over-valued ideas and rituals) illustrate the distress caused by a loss of such flexible volition and the skills of reasoned action (Glannon 2011) when they cannot give effect to their better, more balanced, thoughts. In other cases where conscious cognitive processes seem intact values are endorsed that seem seriously awry, as in Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) where an unbalanced conception of the body drives motivations and extended courses of action (such as serial cosmetic surgery) driven by the abiding preoccupation (Phillips, 2005). These are merely extremes that show a fourth level, beyond individual psychology (and its aberrations), where reason, argument, and transformative reflection are relevant to human freedom.


Level 4. THE SPACE OF REASON AND THE GOOD

The argument thus far suggests that thoughts express self-integration and propositionising and thereby our participation in argument, and abilities to follow instruction or advice from others (Wittgenstein, 1953; Hurley, 2008; Bloom and Keil 2001; Pinker 2010). The relevant skills arise through training and participation in the human life-world where as agents we give an account of our doings (Wolf, 1990) such that no physical causal chain adequately describes this process of developmental self-formation (Robinson, 1989). Frankfurt’s higher orders of desire in his account of free will and self-control can obscure the role of interaction with others in shaping the holistic coordinated subject and the shared circuits of cognitive control (Hurley, 2008) that create skills of self-formation and self-integration (Gillett 1993; 2008). Propositionising, offline cognition, and imagination, can be used to construct ideal worlds encompassing not only what is the case but also what is not the case (Wittgenstein, 1953, #95) and exploit a shared imaginary, symbolic and narrative order to shape our actions. Hughlings-Jackson refers to “Higher order” representation (and re-representation) that uses propositionising (including symbolism and narrative effects) to moderate lower sensori-motor connections (as in gestalt formation) so as to produce more evolved patterns of neural adaptation with the aid of human discourse (Luria, 1973; Gillett 2008) and its inclusive maps of the world in which we act.

Such a cognitive neuroscientific analysis of the conscious agent incorporates sub-personal processes (mirror systems, inhibitory and monitoring mechanisms, and the use of feedback, inter-personal resonance, and simulation) into schemata linking thought and action in ways shaped by argument (Mercier and Sperber, 2011). Thus social cognition, understood within a triadic engagement (Saxe, 2006) allows us to distinguish means-end reasoning, cleverness (Aristotle 1925, 6.12), or instrumental rationality (Aquinas 1948, p. 516) from modes of cognition that adopt the perspective of others and can be used to critically examine one’s life in relation to a wider sense of goodness or truth. That takes us beyond emergent goal oriented psychological processes to trace connections to a level of “rightly ordered thinking”(Aristotle and Aquinas) a level that generates a further


(?more “ultimate”) way of approaching the problem of free will and an analysis with far-reaching implications beyond a posited (unconscious) causal circuitry in the brain:

(i) Human action combines automaticity and conscious direction within a structure that dynamically unfolds in a situation (Luria, 1973; Wegner, 2002);

(ii) Human action aims (dynamically) at producing effects in the world rather than executing a stereotyped causally elicited motor pattern (Luria, 1973; Clark, 2008);

(iii) Human action is susceptible to unconscious motives but also to the demands of a narrative (Dennett, 1991; Wegner, 2002) and to argument and reason (Mercier and Sperber, 2011) in a public or shared objective and normative space (Tomasello, 2014);

(iv) Human action draws on imagination, symbolism, reflection and criticism within an emerging intersubjectively situated narrative (Harre and Gillett, 1994; Gillett, 2008).

These four features stretch current cognitive neuroscience but, one could argue, only at the behest of current human science and naturalistic philosophy.

The Free Will triad as it stands is inconsistent but it does not necessarily rule out up-to-me-ness even if it falls short of what Strawson (2008) calls ultimate freedom (U-freedom) - the origination of action by an object or event that is not part of the causal nexus. Modest up-to-me-ness could be thought to rest on a reason-responsive thinking subject who enacts the results of argument and who might favour a “higher calling” over self-orientation. Wolf remarks: “Actions of a person are free, if and only if she is able to form her actions on the basis of her values and is able to form her values on the basis of what is true and good” (Wolf, 1980, 1981). Such a conception of free will looks beyond neural causation, functional mechanisms (perhaps subconscious), and internal psychological economy to the intelligent ability to assess imperatives and judge whether they ought to be followed (in some supra-individual sense of ‘ought’). When an agent does that s/he integrates and coordinates neural processes to enact all-


things-considered best judgments, and to assess those judgments against an inclusive framework of reason. Up-to-me-ness, so analysed, rests on (Aristotelian) self-formation or autopoiesis (Robinson, 1989), and a “will to power” (Nietzsche) such that one is source and author of one’s own actions, in a world of reasons, arguments, and ongoing relationships of accountability (Kant 1929; Stump 1997; Kane 1998; Stapp 1999; Fischer 2007; Glannon 2011). Meaningful self-formation of that kind (Gillett, 2008; Sartre, 1958) rests on the shaping of neural states and assemblies in an evolved nervous system where “propositionising” (Hughlings-Jackson) and the participation of speech (Luria) engages the agent with argument and clearly distinguishes human beings from animals.

Responsiveness to argument within the space of reasons (McDowell, 2001), where judgments about goodness and truth are made, is part of human adaptation to an Objective-Reflective-Normative domain (Tomasello) commensurate with the Shared Circuits Model of cognition (Hurley, 2008). When cognitive neuroscience embraces such a framework, bottom-up (sensori-motor) and top-down effects (cortically based interactive perceptuo-motor cycles, emotion, memory) are melded with discursive theory and emergent modes of explanation.

For Aristotle, the active intellect, the core of the soul or psyche, comprises cognitive, appetitive and affective skills ((Aquinas, 1948, pp. 336; 373) and enables a person to respond to imperatives embodying the True and the Good (Aquinas, 1948, p. 349). Such imperatives arise at an “ultramoral” level (Nietzsche) where our neuro-cognitive powers outstrip mere survival motivations “given to the most unfortunate, the most delicate, the most transient beings only as an expedient to detain them for a moment in existence” (Nietzsche, 1973, p. 174). The “ultramoral” is creative and questioning within an existential framework which poses questions like: “Should human self-control be deployed only within a psychological economy subject to self-interested motives?” Such a critical orientation (Aristotle 1925, 6.12) scrutinises self-interest, may well find it wanting, and may lead to its revisiting in the light of modes of connectedness to others that go beyond the narrowly functional.

Propositional connections are grounded in an objective order and allow reflection, critique, and revision of thinking in the light of objective reality


and “sound reasons” (perhaps through dialogue or “wise counsel”). The self-critical stance involves, for Aristotle, skills whereby reason embraces an objective (or maximally intersubjective) framework of attitudes and arguments (including those from traditions other than one’s own). Such skills open us up to ‘other-originating’ influences, to the “therapy” of philosophical critique (Wittgenstein, 1953), and to open-ended effects on self-formation. That open-ness implies that a person’s neural networks might be re-configured (from top down) to potentiate actions not dreamed of in “the mechanical philosophy.” It is therefore instructive that Kane remarks (2007) that if, by effort, I can make it the case that I do what is admirable by working on my self-efficacy and thereby become able to obey an imperative that I ought to behave better than I do (Wittgenstein, 1965), then that is all that can be asked of freedom of the will or up-to-me-ness.

Strawson (G.) argues on the basis of universal deterministic causation, and the lack of a convincing account of emergentism or agent causality that we must abandon a robust conception of freedom of the will. But developmental systems theory, top-down causation in neural networks, and the integration and coordination of evolved neural function involved in higher mental processes, shows the freedom and unfreedom, of older mechanistic scientific naturalism to be a myth (Nietzsche). In quantum theory cosmology, ethology, and human psychology, a more dynamic and less Victorian science shows the weakness of old arguments about reduction, supervenience, and “vertical” metaphysical types whereby mental life is identified with states in a neural mechanism (Hanna 1998; van Fraassen 2008; Gillett 2012) That weakness undermines the claim that “actions and neural goings—on have full descriptions in ‘purely’ physical terms (terms which make no reference to the mental)” (Strawson, 2008, 341) and deconstructs The Free Will triad.

5. An alternative interpretation of the Free Will triad

Free will is the link between a human soul (or psyche) and voluntary human action where soul-talk denotes and engages with those aspects of a human being that cannot be explained in terms of physical or biological sciences. Human existence and action occurs within a natural world subject


to explanations partly grounded in physical or biological sciences but including discursive, interpersonal, cultural, and ethico-political analyses.5.1. The soul is a way of recognising our engagement in a discursive domain where moral reality realises norms governing culture, reason, and social and personal life. These norms structure human neuro-cognitive processes according to the rules operating within that reality so that human subjectivity is connected and engendered in ways that are not and cannot be the focus of biological and physical science and require other modes of inquiry.

5.2. Morally significant action means something within social and personal life, a discursive ethological domain that must be understood in terms of socio-historico-culturo-political connections and relations of engenderment.

5.3. Our neurocognitive processes underpin our engagement within the discursive domain.

The modified triad ushers in a different conclusion:

5.4. Our neuro-cognitive processes equip us in ways that can only be understood according to natural modes of explanation proper to a human ethological or discursive domain.

The alternative interpretation is borne out if we turn to a range of cases of human action and decision-making in which the full panoply of potential analyses are needed.

6. Integration and discussion: some thought provoking cases

The present analysis of freedom of the will engages the self as a creature adapted to a world of communication and expectations, a holistic coordination of processes, investigable by cognitive neuroscience, and potentially able to transcend (or not centre on) self and its interests. The control of behaviour using wider and wider sources of information, accessible by supra-modal associative networks or neuronal assemblies such as those of the pre-frontal cortex (Mitchell, 2009; Saxe, 2006), is central to the account. Human subjects, using re-re-representation (through re-entrant cognitive maps), combine reasoning, argument and imagination


implicating discourse and other subjects (Mercier and Sperber, 2011; Gillett, 2008) to develop social cognition networks critically mediated by activity in the Right and Left TPJs (Temporal Parietal Junction). Such cognitive assemblies draw on the ability to inhibit actions likely to cause distress or suffering to others (as detected and mediated within the amygdalo-orbito-frontal circuit), and a flexible capacity to shift response dispositions (as revealed by such things as the Wisconsin card-sorting test and probably mediated by more dorso-lateral frontal areas). Using those capacities results in skills of self-integration and impulse control that moderate internal states by linking them to “higher mental processes” showing non- automaticity (to use Hughlings-Jackson’s term) and not only those that are quasi-Machiavellian but also the other-regarding patterns of thought and behaviour that act through top-down effects on lower brain processes and their simpler adaptive activity.

The psychological level encompasses a range of options available in a structured neural network on the basis of links potentiated by speech/discourse (Luria, 1973). They include expectation, imagination, social role conformity, regard for the law, and a myriad other ways of acting as an integrated discursive being in the human life-world (Harre and Gillett, 1994). Continuous Reciprocal Causality (seen at a sensori-motor level in cerebellar cybernetic control of targeted voluntary movement but a principle operating at many levels), yields neuro-cognitive dynamics quite unlike a deterministic linear causal mechanism especially given intersubjective open-ness to others through shared circuits of responsive action control (Hurley, 2008). We could go even further and link the control of behaviour to public and historical critique of “the self-images of the age” such that linear physical-causal determinism seems remote from real world explanation, as can be illustrated by four cases.

7. Four Cases: Seeing it in practice

The four levels of analysis are illustrated in four different cases of human action.

1. Irene is startled by an unexpected movement seen out of the corner of the eye.


This is an automatic sensori-motor response and one could plausibly trace a (relatively linear) causal chain of neural excitations from the retina to the motor systems with considerable parity between fairly primitive organisms and human beings.

2.Joe reacts to a perceived personal attack in a workplace discussion by losing his temper and making an aggressive and angry remark directed at the speaker.

Here the physiological level is not adequate because a Joe makes a complex and mediated emotive response requiring comprehension and social cognition. Actions are generated that Joe finds variably conscious or cognitively penetrable and, to the extent that he has skills of self-control in such situations, reasons can moderate what he does. However, such reactive behaviours resemble those seen in akrasia (weakness of the will), OCD, impulsivity, or emotional incontinence - they are driven by “inner states” that are not subject to Joe’s will (Glannon 2011). That means that the integration (or lack thereof) between Joe’s cognitive maps affects his behaviour in this situation.

3. Jason works towards a high position in his law firm. He goes to the right events and places – conferences, plays, art exhibitions, a golf club, and so on. He even divorces his wife, quasi-amicably and subsequently marries a partner’s daughter.

Jason’s decisions are freely and rationally chosen and represent a high level integration of neural processes involving problem solving, social cognition, “Machiavellian intelligence”, emotional management, and an understanding of socio-political norms “around here” (thus implicating “higher order processes” plausibly mediated in Left Frontal premotor areas and Left TPJ). One might think that Jason’s Left hemisphere, self-oriented, processes dominate over his Right hemisphere other-related sensitivity and consideration but he acts freely and is clearly morally responsible for his choices as he endorses certain feelings and discards others in making what some would call “a good life” for himself.

4. Kate faces a similar choice to Jason; she is married to Leon, her high school “flame”. She is a senior litigant in a law firm


and would love to be a partner. She notices that the senior partner, who has recently broken up with his wife, assigns her to assist with all his briefs so that they often have to work late together. She realises that Leon, a professor of philosophy, is, in many ways, not the young man she married and that he has become less rather than more as she has scaled greater heights in her legal career. She mentions to him, as they are on their way to a performance of The Medea, that their paths seem to have diverged. That night she reflects on commitment, social advantage, the ties that bind, and what really matters in life. As they travel home she suggests to Leon that they might like to start a family and that, if they do have children, they could both talk about their careers and how they would share the load of parenting.

The third and fourth cases are necessarily more detailed than the first two and highlight a contrast that Aristotelians take to be relevant to arguments about the will - the issue of rightly ordered appetite. To make it more vivid, imagine that Jason learns that his first wife has become an alcoholic and drifted into a co-habitation relationship in which his two sons have both been abused. He then begins to think that his choice was a bad one - “At the time it was what I wanted but now I realise, as never before, what I have lost and what I have done to others.” His choice clearly reflected his freedom to choose but the freedom to act well (to rightly order his appetites under the ideal of The Good) is harder to clarify. What could be seen merely as alternative value choices, some would see as a contrast between less and more enduring values. These values link us to one another through a range of sacrifices and commitments we make for and to each other and align us with patterns of human relationship that discount self or personal advantage in order to preserve or integrate into one’s life other-regarding or even transcendent values (the kind of thing lauded by major faith traditions). Wolf and other neo-Aristotelians analyse “the True and the Good” in relation to the human life-world using this framework in which “striking down self-love” (Kant, 1788 [1956], 76) may be required by one’s “better self.” The question asked at this level is therefore, “Can


cognitive neuroscientists identify patterns of neuro-cognitive integration allowing a subject to address demands that transcend self-oriented needs and advantages?” It could, perhaps, be operationalized in several ways.

i. What parts of the brain are involved in agents being able to hold in mind objectively “good” or other-regarding reasons to act in the face of selfish distractions?

ii. Are there differences in brain function that signal a framework shift from in-group forms of cognition and attitudes to inclusive thinking?

iii. What detectable impairments of brain function, permanent or temporary, interfere with the capacities required for the tasks involved in other-regarding thought?

iv. What changes in functional brain activity occur when an agent learns to adopt broad and humanitarian all-things-considered strategies for action planning?

8. Conclusion

A conception of free will that addresses an enduring strand of philosophical thought and is also apt for cognitive neuroscience springs from a naturalistic theory of action as follows:

(i) Human action dynamically combines sensori-motor coupling and conscious direction within its structure;

(ii) Human action aims dynamically to produce an effect in the world rather than being a causally elicited motor pattern;

(iii) Human action is susceptible to multiple motives including shared-circuit resonance and responsivenesss to demands conveyed in human discourse;

(iv) Human action draws on imagination, symbolism, and skills of enacting thoughts honed by critical debate and reflection.

That model implies four levels of explanation applicable to human action, beginning with neurophysiological mechanisms and automatized


neural processes to dynamic cortico-subcortical patterns of associative integration within a complex dynamic systems approach to neural function. Propositionising (responsiveness to discourse) adds higher level re-re-representation of life situations to yield self-control, reason-responsiveness, and narrative structure to human activity. The reasons and arguments concerned are, at least potentially, widely inclusive and maximally intersubjective as part of human ethology and appear at the level of social cognition. At that level, our actions may be well or poorly integrated to include those connections (as in the evolutionary views of John Hughlings-Jackson), and locate us in an Objective-reflective-Normative domain (Tomasello) explored by philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Wittgenstein.

The current approach understands human beings according to a holistic view of our adaptation to communication and discursive reality and it draws on a dynamic, non-linear view of embodied cognition. At its highest level that goes beyond self-directed higher mental functions serving narrowly rational ends to an inclusive view of our real interests aligned with what we find in many faith traditions. The resulting idea of harmony in the organisation of thought and action re-focuses cognitive science on human freedom not construed according to Victorian metaphysical theses and mechanistic metaphors but in ways that include dynamic autopoiesis (self-formation) so as to relate the moral demands of human life to an inclusive context of evolutionary and culturally informed neuroscience. That focus engages with theoretical accounts of embodied interpersonal encounter as in contemporary phenomenologically informed accounts of action within a natural sphere of our dealings with one another and the truths gestured at in two great religious aphorisms:

Seeing that all things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons should you be?

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.


Acknowledgements

The grant funding is from Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded grant States of Mind: Emerging Issues in Neuroethics

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The Four Levels of Free Will - Seoul National Universitycogsci.snu.ac.kr/jcs/issue/vol17/no2/01+gillett.pdf · 3. Human existence and action occurs within a natural world subject