Seven Views of Mind by Wallach Lise;Wallach Michael A.; & Michael A. Wallach

Author:Wallach, Lise;Wallach, Michael A.; & Michael A. Wallach [Lise Wallach]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1047079
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

CONSCIOUS INTENTION AS ILLUSORY CAUSE

The mind, almost everyone will now agree, depends heavily on the brain. But, there is the objection that this hardly means they are the same thing. It hardly means that mind and brain are identical or that mental states are brain states. For starters, though one may readily accept the idea that the state of one’s brain influences what one does, it is harder to buy the claim that the brain fully controls one’s voluntary actions. Are not those actions ultimately, after all, the result of choices and intentions?

Mind as brain advocates may reply that nothing they are saying runs counter to the significance of choices and intentions. These advocates may assert that choosing and intending are themselves simply (or not so simply) to be understood as brain processes. This is what the philosopher with whom we began the chapter (Flanagan, 2002) would say, and it is not far-fetched. Evidence in fact now exists that the experience of causing an action by conscious intention can be quite illusory.

Consider the following experiment that the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran and colleagues (Ramachandran et al., 1996) performed with “phantom limb” patients. These patients had an amputated arm that felt to them as if it was still there. A box was constructed with a left and a right hole. The patient places his good hand into one hole and positions his phantom hand by the other. Open at the top, the box contains a vertical mirror letting the patient view the mirror reflection of his normal hand as well as that hand itself, making it appear that both hands are seen when he really is seeing just one and its reflection. The patient then moves his good hand, and as a result it looks to him as if both hands are moving.

When patients tried or pretended to make bilaterally symmetric movements with both hands, observing the mirror reflection of their good hand moving gave them the experience that they were voluntarily moving their phantom. One patient, the first time he experienced this, “exclaimed, with considerable surprise, ‘Mind-boggling. My arm is plugged in again; it’s as if I am back in the past. All these years I have often tried to move my phantom several times a day without success, but now I can actually feel I’m moving my arm’” (p. 33). The feeling of causing his arm to move was present even though he knew the feeling had to be false.

There has also been research which strongly suggests that the conscious decision to perform an action comes only after the start of the relevant brain events. The neuroscientist Benjamin Libet and his collaborators (Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983) had participants make a finger or hand movement at a time of the participants’ choosing. They were instructed to note exactly when they decided to move, using a special “clock” on whose face a spot of light rotated much faster than a second hand rotates on a normal clockface. Meanwhile the

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