The question of free will is a difficult and unsettling one, even for the person who believes that our possession of free will is axiomatic. Before we can address the nature of free will, we need to address the nature off will itself, the type of volition that man and the higher animals possess.
Simple organisms such as plants and bacteria act by tropisms. Stimulus, light, they follow it, threat, the bacteria "runs away" - yes or no, based on chemistry.
But humans face complex alternatives and situations where they are not driven to act. No external stimulus requires that we act in one of the myriad ways open to us. Yet, we act. We can choose to act even though no external stimulus forces us to act. At the banquet table, bacteria move toward sugar by chemical necessity. We could eat the beef, the fish, the fruit, the pasta, some or none or all. We could eat the salt or even look in the closet for rat poison. But we neither act of necessity - our beef receptors do not switch on, like sugar receptors driving a bacterial tropism - nor do we, like Buridan's ass, sit in indecision until we starve. Neither does Buridan's ass. We choose among possible alternative courses of action, even though no on-off switch forces us to act.
The ability to act when external stimuli are sub-determinative is volition.
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2 comments:
I'm not arguing for or against this following quote:
"The ability to act when external stimuli are sub-determinative is volition."
(and I should say that I enjoy this quote much - well put)
What I am wondering, however, is where you think this volition comes from? Say, the brain physically evolved the capacity for volition, or, say, something on par with a "soul"?
I personally think your description of "volition" is dead on. What I'm wondering is whether or not it actually exists. For instance, describing a concept accurately doesn't necessarily mean that the concept is true (or real). And without a cause for volition - say, a soul - then we are left with a physically evolved brain that sends messages in a certain way, which then causes and action (to eat beef or fish), but this could still be a mechanical (deterministic) process, whether or not it APPEARS as though it were volitional.
Thoughts?
(NOTE: I'm writing an undergraduate paper on "volition", this is why I'm inquiring. I'm not partial to one way or the other, as this is my first upper-division philosophy course)
Hi, Jorgen, sorry for the slow response, for some reason I didn't get email notification of your comment.
I definitely don't attribute volition to a soul, for the simple reason that using that word is the equivalent of giving a name to a phenomenon that we don't understand, and the acting as if naming the phenomenon is the same as explaining the phenomenon.
I would say the volition will ultimately be explained as an emergent property of complex biological systems. Volition is an aspect of consciousness of higher organisms. If you simply look at the way a single cell in the nervous system works, it will either fire or not fire based on an action potential. Whether or not it fires is determined by the strength of the outside stimulus and the internal state of the cell. The action of that cell is chemically "determined." By determined, I mean that one need not look to other factors other than the chemical state to explain the action - I'm not making a "determinist" argument in the philosophical sense.
Now, the internal state of the cell, its proclivity to fire under a given stimulus, is also caused by prior events. The chemical state is the result of prior events. Has the cell recently fired repeatedly? It will be refractory, and less likely to fire now. Are there stimuli from other excitatory or inhibitory neurons affecting this cell? Are there hormones in the bloodstream affecting its behavior?
Simple organisms, even single celled bacteria, can behave with simple on-off behaviors, such as moving toward or away from light or nutrients. These behaviors are very simple either-or states which are driven by the physical environment with very little feedback or modification by other cells going on. You can say that a protozoan or a bacterium really faces no "choice" in many actions. Its actions are sufficiently determined by immediate circumstance. But even then, more complex single-celled orgnaisms can show primed behaviour, where organelles and cell-membrane receptors interact to allow the cell to have a more complex or nuanced time-integrated response to stimuli.
Now when you look at a human's behavior, you are looking at the effect of billions of different inputs, each with effects that may be cumulative, or switch like (on/off) or stimulatory or inhibitory, and which, in most cases, are sub-determinative. You not only have the internal states of cells, and the strength of stimuli, but also the effects of cells upon each other, complex feedback systems within the nervous system and feedback between the nervous system and other organ systems. The range and subtlty of behaviors and options open to a complex organism like man is astounding.
And humans are able to use their conceptual faculty, which biologically is simply one of the effects of their complex nervous systems, to recognize that they face alternatives, and to choose whether to act on alternative A or alternative B or to postpone action or to think some more before acting. Now, whether we choose to do A or B or neither ultimately depends upon what our body does. We are our bodies. We are not some disembodied passenger with an existence separate from our bodies.
The mind is the relationship of the body to the environment which allows the body to assimilate the form of external realities without assimilating their substance. (This is an idea from the Scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages.) That is, when we are conscious of something we are assimilating its form as an idea, in a way analogous to how we assimilate the substance of something when we eat it. This is a very loose analogy, of course. we do not destroy something by assimilating its form mentally.
The assimilation is like harmony in acoustics. The brain is like a tuning fork that picks up sympathetic vibrations from its environment. The tuning fork is a substance - a thing - and the vibration of the tuning fork is an action - a harmonic relation. So consciousness is not a thing or a body or a substance like a brick or an atom or a brain. The mind is rather a relationship of the brain to its environment like the vibration of a tuning fork is a harmonic relation betweeen that fork and some outside stimulus.
Now, the brain is incredibly complex - a symphony of vibrations - some building up a melody, some working counter to that melody. There are all sorts of harmonies and disharmonies. A choice can be likened to the resolution of a melody. You can listen to a song, and it will go up and down and if it is cut short you will know it has not ended, that the melody has not been resolved. Coming to a decision is like hitting that final note that completes the song and satisfies us that a conclusion has been reached.
When we say that we are making a decision, what we are saying is something like the orchestra of our mind is tuning up, different cells are improvising certain tunes. these hamonies are feedinv back upon themselves, and either building or inhibiting each other. As we think, different mental modules in our brain are improvising a tune. As we come closer to a decision, and more clear about our thoughts we settle on one centarl melodic theme. And when that theme is resolved, we have made a decision.
I hope this is of interest, even if it's too late to help with your paper.
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