THE BELIEF IN MATERIALISM ENDS AT THE TIP OF ONE'S NOSE:

Free will is not an illusion: The Enlightenment idea of conscious, freely acting individuals is worth defending against those who would reduce freedom to neuroscience. (This article is an edited version of a talk given by Raymond Tallis at a dinner held by the Manifesto Club in London on 13 September 2007)

Particularly in the century that has passed, there has been a counter-Enlightenment denial of the centrality of individual consciousness in human affairs. We do not walk, we sleepwalk; we do not act, we react, scarcely aware of that to which we are reacting.

Humanist intellectuals have argued that, far from being ‘independent points of departure’, we are in the grip of forces that are largely hidden from us. The historical unconscious of Marxists and their descendents; the psychological unconscious of Freudian and a dozen other psycho-analytical and deep psychological theorists; the social unconscious of various schools of sociology and anthropology; the linguistic unconscious of post-Saussurean schools of thought (structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist) – these are just some of the tributaries to the great river of anti-humanist pessimism that has flown through the collective conscious of academe in recent history. As for selves, they are either opaque at their heart, or misread themselves, or are fictions, overlooking that in reality, they are dissolved in a sea of symbols, of unchosen customs and practices, of unconscious habits.

From a huge variety of backgrounds, academics and popular writers tell the same monotonous story: we do not know what we are doing, we do not know why we are doing it, and disaster is waiting to happen. Civilisations, which are based upon the notion of humans as rational agents, are in fact pathological: rationality is an illusion, or unnatural and unbearable, and rational planning will lead to unforeseen consequences. All civilisation – usually referred to as ‘a veneer’ and a thin one at that – is headed for destruction.

While most of the counter-Enlightenment thought I have alluded to arises from the humanities, which seem to take pride in being anti-humanity, there is an increasingly prominent input from the very hope of the Enlightenment – the sciences. This is not perhaps as surprising as it sounds. Science has always been committed to identifying the general patterns of causation in the universe. Its standpoint is fundamentally materialist. The laws of nature are a secular version of moira, fate. Laplace, who completed the formalisation of Newton’s mechanistic universe, though he did so without Newton’s God, argued that a combination of the knowledge of the initial conditions and of the laws that governed the behaviour of the mechanical particles would enable every event in the universe, including human actions, to be predictable. As Einstein said in his address to the Spinoza Society in 1932: ‘Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.’ However, a recent spin on scientific determinism has brought it nearer home. Neuroscience has been invoked in support of kulturpessimismus.

There is now a significant population of neuroscientists, along with philosophers and others, who accept not only their findings but also the interpretations they place on them, who argue that because of advances in brain science ‘we now know’ that free will is an illusion. The attacks on free will from this direction are particularly powerful because they encompass both material and cultural determinism; for the brain is not only a piece of matter causally wired into the material world, it is also brain-washed in a laundry made of a collective of other brains. This is a powerful double whammy for our notions of freedom and of the self as an independent point of departure.

There are several strands of thought woven into neuro-determinism. The first is that we are essentially our brains: our consciousness, our belief in ourselves as free agents, and so on, is neural activity in certain parts of the brain. Secondly, these brains have evolved in such a way as to maximise the likelihood of our genetic material being able to replicate. Brains are about somatic survival to the point where genetic replication is possible. This is not something on our conscious agenda but it is the true and only business of the brain. Thirdly, for a brain to work effectively, it is not necessary for us to be aware of what it is doing. Cognitive psychologists have, over the last few decades, particularly since the advent of neuro-imaging which reveals activity in the living brain, shown how we are unconscious of many things that influence what is going on in our brain and, it is inferred, the perceptions we form and the decisions we make. Our consciousness has, it seems, a huge black hole at its centre. What price freedom, then, which at the very least depends on consciousness?

Another strand of the neuro-determinism story underlines how, given that nerve impulses are material events, our consciousness, even at its most self-conscious and deliberative, is wired into the material world: it is simply part of a boundless causal nexus that stretches from the Big Bang at the beginning of time to the Big Crunch at the end. Another strand notes that there is no privileged place within the nervous system corresponding to the freedom of the will, or even a point of initiation or a new departure. There are inputs of activity, throughputs of activity, and outputs activity but no points corresponding to where, say, action could be considered as starting. The brain, the body, our life – these are just conduits, like any other loci in the universe, for causes as inputs and effects as outputs.

Colin Blakemore, an eminent neuroscientist, captures all of these views in the claim: ‘The human brain is a machine which alone accounts for all our actions, our most private thoughts, our beliefs… All our actions are products of the activity of our brains. It makes no sense (in scientific terms) to try to distinguish sharply between acts that result from conscious attention and those that result from our reflexes or are caused by disease or damage to the brain.’

These very general arguments have been supplemented by millions of specific observations, the greater bulk of which may be summarised in two lines as follows: that experiments, and natural disasters such as head injuries, have shown that holes in the brain are closely correlated with holes in the mind and in our capabilities. In summary, you are the activity in your brain; your brain has evolved to optimise the chances of survival; and the brain is wired biologically, materially, causally into the biosphere, the material world, and the causal nexus. We now have a neuro-Laplacean universe in which the laws of nature operate undeflected by agency through your life. Or, as former CIA boss George Tenet said about finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: ‘It’s a slam dunk.’

I choose my words carefully. Tenet’s slam dunk was self-evident and wrong. Neuro-determinism, though seemingly self-evident, is also wrong.

Mr. Tallis is, of course, actually arguing against the Enlightenment, as he recognizes between the lines.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 28, 2007 12:00 AM