Freedom and Neurobiology by John Searle

Author:John Searle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

IV. Free Will and the Brain

I now turn to the main question of this chapter: How could we treat the problem of free will as a neurobiological problem? And the assumption that I am making is that if free will is a genuine feature of the world and not merely an illusion, then it must have a neurobiological reality; there must be some feature of the brain that realizes free will. I said earlier that consciousness is a higher-level, or system, feature of the brain caused by the behavior of lower-level elements, such as neurons and synapses. But if that is so, what would the behavior of the neurons and the synapses have to be like if the conscious experience of free will were to be neurobiologically real?

I have said that the philosophical solution to the traditional mind-body problem is to point out that all of our conscious states are higher-level or systemic features of the brain, while being at the same time caused by lower-level microprocesses in the brain. At the system level we have consciousness, intentionality, decisions, and intentions. At the micro level we have neurons, synapses, and neurotransmitters. The features of the system level are caused by the behavior of the micro level elements, and are realized in the system composed of the micro level elements. In the past I have described the set of causal relations between decision making and acting in terms of a parallelogram where at the top level we have decisions leading to intentions in action, and at the bottom level we have neuron firings causing more neuron firings. Such a picture gives us a parallelogram that looks like this:

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