Is this evidence against free-will?

Over the past decade or more, neuroscientists have found strong evidence that we start to act before we’re consciously aware of our own actions. This is a problem to those who believe in free-will in the sense of a power of an autonomous agent. It isn’t much of a problem to one who accepts the views about moral nature which were taught by St. Thomas Aquinas. I’ve discussed this Thomistic view of man as an intentional moral creature in various entries which can be found under the category of mind including my discussions of How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the brain-scientist Walter J. Freeman who has adopted much of Aquinas’ teachings about human moral nature. A more limited set of entries which includes the entries discussing Professor Freeman’s book can be found under the category of brain sciences.

There have been recent articles on various Internet science sites about a new set of experiments which haven’t really introduced anything new but they did tighten up the acceptable results, making it a little more certain that we act as organisms and not as bodies under the control of an independent soul or free-will or whatever. It seems pretty clear that at least for those simple decisions which can be tested under laboratory conditions — such as decisions to move a finger — the regions of our brain associated with consciousness don’t become active until the decision has been made by other brain regions and the action has started.

An article summarizing these recent experimental results can be found at Brain-scanner Predicts Your Future Moves. (Warning: I don’t know if this is a permanent link.)

These new experimental results are important for technical reasons but don’t really matter to those who have been following earlier experiments and the speculations based upon the results. Scientists are just tightening up results and closing possible loopholes. There are some interesting issues which need to be explored but Thomistic intentionality can easily form a framework for such explorations and for rational understandings of human moral nature.

What good is consciousness when it doesn’t control our actual physical actions? Some of the less rational sociobiologists had proposed many years ago that we’re fooled by our’selfish genes’ into rationalizing our unconscious actions which are supposedly geared almost entirely to the reproduction of those ‘selfish genes’. Professor Freeman provides the rational proposal that our consciousness can act as a censor upon our actions, being able to stop actions started by our unconscious selves. In addition, and in line with the Thomistic understanding of ‘intentionality’ (which is not that of modern subjectivists and feel-gooders), I would say our conscious selves play a major role in shaping our future selves, that is, our future actions. We can evaluate our own actions in context and work to change the way we act in that same context in the future. As a simple example: a young father might work to change the way he speaks when he’s with his young children. I’m not speaking about eliminating obscenities but rather about the need to speak to young children in a way that nurtures their development, including their moral development.

Thomistic intention is less our vague goals of raising children to be competent and loving adults and more those first steps to discipline the relatively free behavior of a bachelor so that it becomes the self-sacrificing behavior of a father.

This leads to another good quote from the collections of quotes on history, as a field of study and contemplation, provided regularly by Clyde N. Wilson. (See Chronicles Magaine website: Clyde Wilson’s blog.)

The value of history . . . is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is. -R.G. Collingwood

History tells us what man is not by documenting his noble aspirations or claims to noble feelings. History tells us what man is by telling us what man has done. At the same time, we have to remember:

Mere facts are meaningless. History requires that facts be organized into a coherent story, a morally ordered narrative.

The moral order of a narrative might be defective, but it must be present for that narrative to make sense to the human mind and it makes sense by by helping to shape that mind, that is, the sense comes in the process of reshaping our minds to moral purposes and not by the understanding of something by a pre-existing mind of an autonomous agent. Such is true also of our understandings of our family and individual stories. We must learn what our ancestors once knew and what many still know if they’re lucky enough to grow up with some intact traditions: our attachments to family and culture and language are not mere accidents but part of our moral beings. In knowing these various histories and biographies, and knowing them in a properly human way, we shape our minds and prepare the way to shape our future actions towards more clearly defined moral purposes.

Professor Collingwood was right. What man does tells us what he is. Moreover, that’s true of human societies. We need our legends and sometimes even our idealized views of our past and our leaders but we must understand what we’ve actually done, as nations and as families and as individuals. Our honest but respectful understandings of our ancestors form perhaps the dominant part of our moral characters. We modern Americans are falling into moral disorder and one of the major reasons is our lack of concern for our histories which is a lack of concern for who we are and a corresponding lack of love for our ancestors and our own selves.

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