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01-03-2012 | Review

“I” and the brain

Auteur: Beatrice Longuenesse

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 2/2012

Abstract

Many philosophers as well as many biological psychologists think that recent experiments in neuropsychology have definitively discredited any notion of freedom of the will. I argue that the arguments mounted against the concept of freedom of the will in the name of natural causal determinism are valuable but not new, and that they leave intact a concept of freedom of the will that is compatible with causal determinism. After explaining this concept, I argue that it is interestingly related to our use of the first person pronoun “I.” I discuss three examples of our use of “I” in thought and language and submit a few questions I would like neuropsychologists to answer concerning the brain processes that might underlie those uses. I suggest answering these questions would support the compatibilist notion of freedom of the will I have offered in part 1.

vorige artikel The convergent evolution of neural substrates for cognition

volgende artikel The mental number line electrified: brain potentials in a numerical flanker task

See Levine (1983), cited by Chalmers (1996), p.47.

See e.g. Nagel (1974), Chalmers (1996) and Block (2007).

See Nagel (1979), Chapter 13: “Panpsychism”.

As an example, see the discussion in Wegner (2004).

Baruch Spinoza, Letter to Schuller, October 1674, in Spinoza (1995): 283–286.

See Libet (1985).

See Wegner (2002, 2004) and also Rösler (2011), p. 404–406.

See Frankfurt (1988), Chapters 1–5, esp. Chapter 2. See discussion in Longuenesse and Rösler (2008), esp. p.252.

According to Frankfurt (1971), both the willing and the unwilling addict are persons, in that for both of them there is an actual issue of endorsing or condemning their first order volition: freely willing what they want is always in question, although only one of them indeed acts of his own free will. In contrast, an individual might be driven by her first order volition to act one way or another without its being a question at all, whether she endorses or rejects her first order willing, i.e. whether her second order volition is in agreement with her first order volition or not. For such an individual Frankfurt coins the term wanton. Many non-human animals as well as very young children are wantons in this sense: they may have freedom of action (they do what they want to do, their first order volition determines them to act or to move one way rather than another) but whether they act of their own free will is not a meaningful question, because whether they want to want what they want, whether they endorse their own want, is not in question. I will say more on this in part 4 of this essay.

See Wittgenstein (1958), p. 66–74.

See Perry (1979).

Of course in (1) the process of reasoning is applied to an abstract proof, whereas in (3) it is applied to a concrete situation. The point here is that as far as the consciousness of myself as implicated in an activity of reasoning, the consciousness is of the same kind. In (3), however, we need in addition a kind of self-consciousness (consciousness of myself as embodied) that is similar to the self-consciousness supporting (2); and a third kind of self-consciousness I will consider below.

On this point, see Longuenesse (forthcoming).

Shoemaker (1968).

de Vignemont (2007) argues that the sense of body-ownership depends not just on one sensory mode (e.g. proprioception or somatosensory information), but on the mutual influence of several different modes, including the influence of vision on tactile experience. Among the experimental studies she cites in support of her thesis is Röder, Rösler and Spence (2004), on the influence of visual information on tactile experience for determining the overall representation of the spatiality of one’s own body.

See the description of Koffka’s patient Schneider, in Merleau-Ponty (1962), p. 103–112.

Damasio (1994), p. 223–44, esp. 238–39.

Kant (1998), A346/B404; B422. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is cited in the standard way, by reference to the pagination in the first, 1781 edition (indicated by A) followed by reference to the pagination in the second, B edition (indicated by B).

Block, N. (2007). Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience. Behavioral and brain sciences, 30, 481–548.PubMed

Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. In search of a fundamental theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error. Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: G.B. Putnam.

Frankfurt, H. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. Journal of Philosophy, lvxiii(1), 5–20 [Repr. as Chapter 2 in Frankfurt (1988)].

Frankfurt, H. (1988). The importance of what we care about. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 354–361.

Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Science, 8, 529–566.CrossRef

Longuenesse, B. (2011 forthcoming). Two uses of ‘I’ as subject. In S. Posser & F. Récanati (Eds.), Immunity to error through misidentification. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Longuenesse, B., & Rösler, F. (2008). Neurone vergeistigen. Geist und Gehirn im Gespräch. Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Jahrbuch 2006–2007. Berlin: Heenemann u. Helm.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, Transl. Colin Smith, London: Routledge.

Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450.CrossRef

Nagel, T. (1979). Mortal questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Perry, J. (1979). The problem of the essential indexical. Noûs, 13, 3–21 [repr. (with a postscript) in Perry, J. (1993). The problem of the essential indexical and other essays. New York: Oxford University Press: 33–52].

Röder, B., Rösler, F., & Spence, C. (2004). Early vision impairs tactile perception in the blind. Current Biology, 14, 121–124.PubMed

Rösler, F. (2011). Psychophysiologie der Kognition. Eine Einführung in die kognitive Neurowissenschaft. Heidelberg: Spektrum.

Shoemaker, S. (1968). Self-reference and self-awareness. Journal of Philosophy, 65, 555–567 [repr. in Shoemaker, S. (2003). Identity, cause and mind. New York: Oxford University Press: 6–18].

Spinoza, B. (1995). The Letters, translated by S. Shirley, Introduction and Notes by S. Barbone, L. Rice, and J. Adler, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett.

de Vignemont, F. (2007). Habeas Corpus: the sense of ownership of one’s own body. Mind and Language, 22(4), 427–449.

Wegner, D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wegner, D. (2004). Précis of the illusion of conscious will. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(5), 649–659 [with discussion: p. 659-79, and Wegner’s response: 679–92].

Wittgenstein, L. (1958). The blue and brown books. Oxford: Blackwell.

Titel: “I” and the brain
Auteur: Beatrice Longuenesse
Publicatiedatum: 01-03-2012
Uitgeverij: Springer-Verlag
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 2/2012
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0382-z

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