Soul Dust by Humphrey Nicholas

Author:Humphrey, Nicholas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691138626
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism. . . . [Thus] the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata, endowed with free will in the only intelligible sense of that much-abused term—inasmuch as in many respects we are able to do as we like—but none the less parts of the great series of causes and effects which, in unbroken continuity, composes that which is, and has been, and shall be—the sum of existence.8

Yet, of course this is not how you yourself see it. For Nature, in designing your mind, has contrived that the chain of causation is largely invisible to you. You as a subject do not have mental access to the events in the brain that precede your “deciding to act.” The result is that the first you know of your decision is when it is in front of you. And naturally enough, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, you credit your “I” with being the prime mover in choosing this action or that.

No wonder then if you see this as further evidence of the nonphysical status of your conscious mind. As I wrote earlier, everything else in the world joins up in physical space-time—except for phenomenal sensations that are essentially private. Now you find that everything else in the world is the product of preceding material causes—except for your wishes and intentions, which are essentially undetermined.

What do you make of this? What is it like to be an uncaused cause? Do you suppose, like Descartes, that you must have a bit of God in you? Do you imagine, as a modern physicist might, that you are your very own big bang? Probably most people’s speculations are nothing quite so grand. Yet I do not doubt they are still grand enough to make you reassess your cosmic status. If you have free will, if you can do what you like, your life is yours.

I said earlier that human beings can be philosophers in the crib. Here is a little girl of twenty-one months, Emily, engaged in what psychologists have actually called “crib talk”—a private monologue just before falling asleep. Emily is thinking about the realpolitik of physical causation.

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