|
The Responsible Brain. Free will and personal responsibility in the wake of neuroscience| old_uid | 1759 |
|---|
| title | The Responsible Brain. Free will and personal responsibility in the wake of neuroscience |
|---|
| start_date | 2006/11/14 |
|---|
| schedule | 17h |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| summary | The ideas of free will and personal responsibility function as social fundaments. All human societies presume that adult, healthy individuals are morally, socially and legally responsible for their actions, provided that they have acted freely and not under constraints. Free will is also a fundamental structure of human experience, a transcendental neuronal structure, like space, time and causality. The experience of free will has been considered “illusory”, e.g., by virtue of being (1) a brain construct, (2) causally determined, or (3) non-consciously initiated. In line with the informed materialism presented in the previous lecture, and as an extension thereof, a neurophilosophical model of free will shall here be suggested in which an act of will can be “free” in the sense of being “voluntary” even though it is a brain construct that is causally determined and influenced by non-conscious neuronal processes. Contingent causation is compatible with free choice, a model for which the neuroscientific variability theorem offers empirical support. Behaviour that is contingently caused by non-conscious neuronal processes can qualify as “voluntary” on the assumption of mutual influence between conscious and non-conscious volitional neuronal processes. Both conscious and non-conscious volition can be voluntarily influenced; accordingly, both can entail responsibility: we may carry personal responsibility for the influence we exert both over conscious and over non-conscious neural states and processes and are, in that sense, responsible for some of the things that our non-conscious makes us do. In this account, non-conscious volition is not in principle exempt from moral responsibility. Given a certain level of maturity and health, the volitional human brain embedded in its cultural, social and historical context is a responsible organ. |
|---|
| responsibles | Fagot-Largeault, Changeux |
|---|
| |
|