by Paul Singh
Our ability to notice important similarities between our memories of what it was like to be our earlier selves and our present impressions of what it is like to be us now surely depends on continuities between the past and the present. Continuity of memories, not identity, is all that is required, and all that is actually given in experience. Consider an analogy, using the example of a well-preserved ship built in the 1700s. You can stand on its deck today because it has been preserved for a maritime museum exhibit. You will be told that only some of the decking is original from its construction long ago, because much of the decking was damaged or wore out, and needed to be replaced with similar wood. In fact, perhaps only a tenth of the entire ship, from its bottom hull to its topsail, is exactly as it was when the ship was built. Nevertheless, you are standing on the same ship that was sailing three hundred years ago. Each time a little of the ship had to be altered the continuity of the ship, that same ship went unquestioned. Over time, the ship remained the same ship despite minimal occasional changes. There is no need to posit a transcendent essence or identity to the ship to account for its remaining the same ship over time. So why should we think it necessary to posit a transcendent self to account for our own self-identity?
When I now have recollections of earlier selves, it isn’t the case that I first know how that earlier self is identical to the self I am now, and then notice similarities between the two selves. Instead, I notice the continuities, the important commonalities, between myself at present and the memories of that earlier self, and then conclude that there is a shared self-identity connecting them. But that “identity” isn’t a perfect or unchanging sameness, because nothing has really stayed quite the same. Memory is essential to self-continuity, but not because it must be first assumed that the remembered person and today’s person are identical. Understanding how the brain’s memory systems are both impressive and fallible is the key to understanding the way that an earlier self seems familiar, yet oddly different.
Proponents of a transcendent personal identity wildly exaggerate the “identity” they wish were real, at the expense of understanding the personal self. What holds together the personal self over time is nothing other than the persistent patterns of brain activity which allow that self to exist at all. Talking only about “identity” makes it sound like the self has some sort of guaranteed substantiality and permanence which it can’t really possess. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux gets down to fundamental matters when he speaks of the “synaptic self” in his book of that title:
Synaptic connections hold the self together in most of us most of the time. Sometimes, though, thoughts, emotions, and motivations come uncoupled. If the mental trilogy breaks down, the self is likely to begin to disintegrate and mental health to deteriorate. When thoughts are radically dissociated from emotions and motivations, as in schizophrenia, personality can, in fact, change drastically. When emotions run wild, as in anxiety disorders or depression, a person is no longer the person he or she once was. And when motivations are subjugated by drug addiction, the emotional and intellectual aspects of life suffer. That the self is synaptic can be a curse—it doesn't take much to break it apart. But it is also a blessing, as there are always new connections waiting to be made. You are your synapses. They are who you are.18
The simpler explanation for both the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, to being a personal self over time is that this enduring yet fragile self is nothing but very complex kinds of brain activity.
The necessary limitations of any brain help to produce the characteristic limitations to what it is like to be us. The third factor involved in being a self that can enjoy the subjective experiences, is also more easily explained by its dependence on the brain. To be subjective, the passing events in one’s conscious mental life must be exclusively yours and yours alone. Objective knowledge, in contrast, can be duplicated and shared among anyone sufficiently intelligent. What is objective isn’t dependent on anyone in particular; what is subjective must be dependent on just one single self at a time. If a singular self is nothing but the ongoing neurological activity of an individual brain, then subjectivity is easily accounted for. No other brain is this particular brain. Nowhere else in the universe is that brain’s ongoing activity occurring. Therefore this brain’s self must be subjective. Brains must produce subjective experience. What is special about the human brain is that it can deploy science and gain objective knowledge about how subjectivity is generated by brains.
Proponents of the transcendent self refuse to see that a finite brain is responsible for producing subjectivity. They constantly claim that nothing subjective can be objectively explained, but claiming something—no matter how often—is not the same thing as offering any evidence that what you are saying is true. And, the fact is, they never do offer any evidence that their claim is true. One wonders if we are still trapped by the ancient Greek mantra that “only like can explain like,” as if experimental science had never been born. In fact, subjectivity can be objectively explained; the previous chapter and this chapter offer many such explanations. But that sort of explanation by no means proves that subjectivity was never real in the first place. Subjectivity is shown to be all the more real within nature because it is entirely woven into the way that natural brains should function.
Patricia Churchland, a prominent neurophilosopher, puts the point this way:
If, as seems increasingly likely, dreaming, learning, remembering, and being consciously aware are activities of the physical brain, it does not follow that they are not real. Rather, the point is that their reality depends on a neural reality. If reductionism is essentially about explanation, the lament and the lashing out are missing the point. Nervous systems have many levels of organization, from molecules to the whole brain, and research on all levels contributes to our wider and deeper understanding.19
The key factors to our personal sense, self-identity, and mental subjectivity aren’t threatened at all by neuroscientific explanations. Only exaggerated and unnecessary notions about a mysterious transcendent self are threatened by good explanations that only require a natural brain. More and more, that transcendent self is proving to be just a myth.
Notes
1. J. R. Anderson and G. G. Gallup, “Which Primates Recognize Themselves in Mirrors?” PLoS Biology 9(3) (2011): e1001024.
2. Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Macmillan, 2009), 14.
3. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 192. See also J. M. Kilneremail and R. N. Lemon, “What We Know Currently about Mirror Neurons,” Current Biology 23 (2 December 2013): R1057–R1062.
4. Gregory Hickok, TheMyth of Mirror Neurons (New York: Norton, 2014), 24–25.
5. Ibid., 178.
6. Ibid., 181.
7. Ingar Brink and Rikard Liljenfors, “The Developmental Origin of Metacognition,” Infant and Child Development 22 (2013): 91.
8. See H. Gweon, D. Dodell-Feder, M. Bedny, and R. Saxe, “Theory of mind performance in children correlates with functional specialization of a brain region for thinking about thoughts,” Child Development 83(6) (2012): 1853–68. Also consult J. Benson and M. Sabbagh, “Theory of mind and executive functioning: A developmental neuropsychological approach,” in Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience, eds. P. D. Zelazo, M. Chandler, and E. Crone (New York: Psychology Press, 2010), 63–80.
9. Denis Bouchard, The Nature and Origin of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 7.
10. Ian Apperly, Mindreaders: The Cognitive Basis of “Theory of Mind” (New York: Psychology Press, 2010), chap. 2.
11. Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 96–97.
12. Ibid., 295–96.
13. William Hirstein, Brain Fiction: Self-deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006
). See also Hirstein, “The contribution of prefrontal executive processes to creating a sense of self,” Brain, Mind, and Consciousness 9(1) (2011): 150–58.
14. Bruce Hood, The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 235.
15. Andrea Nightingale and David Sedley, eds., Ancient Models of Mind: Studies in Human and Divine Rationality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
16. Lynne Rudder Baker, Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 148.
17. Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 103–4.
18. Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002), 323–24.
19. Patricia S. Churchland, Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves (New York: Norton, 2013), 262.
Further Reading
Balconi, Michela, ed. Neuropsychology of the Sense of Agency: From Consciousness to Action. Berlin: Springer; New York: Psychology Press, 2010.
Call, Josep, and Michael Tomasello. “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later.” Trends in Cognitive Science 12(5) (2008): 187–92.
Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Random House, 2010.
de Waal, Frans, and Pier Francesco Ferrari, eds. The Primate Mind: Built to Connect with Other Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Frith, Chris. Making Up the Mind. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Gallagher, Shaun. The Oxford Handbook of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Harter, Susan. The Construction of the Self: A Developmental Perspective. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
Klein, Stanley. “The Self and its Brain.” Social Cognition 30 (2012): 474–518.
Leary, Mark R., and June Price Tangney, eds. Handbook of Self and Identity. New York: Guilford Press, 2005.
Martin, Raymond, and John Barresi. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Since consciousness has no existence of its own, and is just an emergent quality of the nervous system and nothing at all like a substantial self, notions of free will requiring consciousness or a self are already refuted. Many theologians, philosophers, and some scientists who are defenders of free will take the liberty of running this inference in reverse. Free will must be quite real, they insist, so whatever is required to permit free will, such as consciousness or a self, must also exist, no matter what the brain sciences may say. Unable to admit that voluntary choices due to brain activity could count as freely willed choices, free will advocates won’t seek it in the nervous system, or the entire body, or anywhere in the physical world. They worry that the world of natural energies and forces must be inhospitable to the ability for people to decide for themselves what to do, and how to do it.
Advocates of free will are typically unable to agree with naturalism’s position that the physical world is the only world, as far as we can tell. Supernaturalism won’t follow science on free will, but supernaturalism doesn’t guarantee that people do have free will. Religions around the world disagree about how much free will people can have. Even within Christianity, theologians have taken contrary views about whether free will is real. Popular Christianity, expressed by authors who can compose soothing platitudes for laypeople, never fail to praise God for bestowing free will on His children. One of the most beloved Christian apologists, C. S. Lewis, makes it sound all so simple to understand:
God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
Such are the thoughts on freedom capable of being understood by ordinary Christians for many centuries. But the real story of Christian theology is hardly so simple.
Christian theologians have vehemently disagreed with each other over free will. Saint Augustine denied that the human will has much freedom, since our wills are invariably drawn to want to sin, though they do so freely. Saint Thomas Aquinas did credit the human soul with the freedom to choose to control one’s passions. Martin Luther and John Calvin ridiculed the idea of free will, because God alone may control whether a human soul can willingly choose anything other than sin. Protestantism has accordingly emphasized predestination and the inability of humans to control their fates; Catholicism, by contrast, has defended free will to explain how people choose good or evil, and to guarantee that people can be held fully responsible for their choices. There is, thus, no reliable connection between upholding free will and being religious. Non-naturalists can’t assume that a religious worldview will guarantee the kind of free will they desire.
Non-naturalist positions cannot avoid a confrontation with science and scientific evidence, however. That is why it is futile to define free will in a way that automatically requires contradicting science. Anti-naturalists prefer anti-scientific definitions of free will, so that their convictions favoring free will lead directly to their preferred world view. Neither science nor naturalism should agree to such biased definitions of free will, since they can have nothing to say about them. Staunch denials by science against unscientific notions of free will can only reinforce the anti-naturalist contention that science is indeed incompetent to understand free will. Anti-naturalists don’t take scientific advice in any case, no matter how robust the scientific evidence becomes. Nevertheless, there is ample scientific knowledge forbidding free will.
Freedom to Do Otherwise
Common sense tells us that we cannot freely do something unless we could have done something else. Indeed, if one’s body has been compelled to make a movement or one’s mind has been deluded into doing something unexpected, little or no responsibility is assigned. Understanding when to relieve a person from responsibility isn’t the same thing as knowing how to award responsibility, however. In ordinary situations, we don’t ponder whether we could have done otherwise, since we are pleased that we did exactly what we did. In fact, if you started to think that you might do otherwise than what you want to do, you’d worry that something is very wrong with you. What we mean by “being able to do otherwise” is simply “doing otherwise by deciding to do that instead.” We certainly don’t mean “ending up doing something else other than what was decided.”
What we expect is liberty to do what we decide to do, without worrying about something else. Free from theological or mystical notions of human freedom, modern philosophers usually respect this commonsensical point. For example, David Hume agreed with common sense on this starting point:
By liberty, then we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.
The sufficient evidence that we do what we will is that we promptly do it; if we haven’t done it, then that must be because either we hadn’t willed it yet, or we willed it but some other outside power thwarted us.
Free will, according to common sense, is demonstrated by the way that a person’s actions are as he or she wills their actions to be, and not otherwise. This basic concep
tion of free will is the one built into our moral and legal systems, as we hold people responsible for their freely willed actions. If you are able to rest content with this common sense conception of free will, then you can continue to speak of “free will” as something real and sensible, without worrying about science someday refuting it. The sciences, and especially the brain sciences, will undoubtedly discover a great deal about how we think about and settle on our deliberate decisions and execute them in muscular actions.
All that knowledge will explain how we think we freely make our voluntary actions and determine the conditions under which we often perform less than voluntary actions as well.
Scientists familiar with that growing body of knowledge often express their hesitancy to relegate free will to a regrettable illusion, but rather than assuming that free will must be inscrutable to science and necessary for moral responsibility, wouldn’t it be smarter to define free will only in terms agreeable to scientific knowledge? That way, as philosopher Alfred Mele has put it, science hasn’t disproved free will.
Where should we set the bar for free will? That’s an interesting question, to be sure, and one that philosophers have argued about for a very long time. The point I want to make is that the higher one sets the bar, the more likely one is to see free will as an illusion. Here are two different high bars: 1) having free will requires making conscious choices that are entirely independent of preceding brain activity, and 2) having free will requires being absolutely unconstrained by genetics and environment (including situations in which we find ourselves). Now, there is excellent scientific evidence that our conscious choices are never entirely independent of preceding brain activity and that we are not absolutely unconstrained by genetics and environment. But this evidence threatens the existence of free will only if the bar for free will is set absurdly high. [Alfred R. Mele, Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 88-89.]
