“For any materialist vision of consciousness, the crucial stumbling block is the question of free will.”
“the fact of our being entirely material, hence subject to the laws of cause and effect, introduces the concern that our lives might be altogether determined. Is it possible that our experience of decision-making—the impression we have of making choices, indeed of having choices to make, sometimes hard ones—is entirely illusory? Is it possible that a chain of physical events in our bodies and brains must cause us to act in the way we do, whatever our experience of the process may be?”
“Tim Parks: Riccardo, how is it that we can constantly decide to do this rather than that, or just to look at this rather than that, if as you suggest, mind and object of perception are one?”
“Riccardo Manzotti: The question is: When we choose to do something, could we in fact have done otherwise?”
“Manzotti:”
“maybe the really pertinent question is, When we choose to do something, what are we, what is the thing that is the cause of our actions?”
“Manzotti:”
“Crick and many other neuroscientists are convinced that we are our neurons and that these neurons, which are of course physical things, somehow make our choices. The problem is that when we use modern microscopes to look at our neurons, we don’t find any evidence of this. All we see is a passage of electrical charges and complex chemical changes.”
“We don’t feel an identity with our neurons and we do feel we are responsible for what we do. So, again, the question is, What are we?”
“Manzotti:”
“I hope we’ve established in our previous conversations that the objects that become our experience are not “absolute” but “relative”; they are as we know them because our body with the causal structure of its perceptive system carves them out thus from the mass of atoms and photons round about. The object, whether it be a button we are about to press or a mouth we are about to kiss, is relative to our body and only as such is our experience. We are identical with that experience, not with our bodies or brains.”
“Parks: Well, it’s easy to accept that any object I’m attracted to must have some part in my decision to buy it, or grab it. But aren’t we merely repeating Steve Jobs’s truism that people don’t know what they want until you show it to them?”
“Manzotti: No. We’re going a step further. We’re saying people don’t know what they are until you show it to them. Once we are shown the iPhone, say, once our body with its sense apparatus carves out that fantastic object, we are changed. We become the object our senses allow to exist, in this case the phone. So it is with all our goals. Showing people things is very powerful. Hence the world of advertising!”
“Manzotti:”
“You are the cause of your actions and inactions; but that “you” is not an invisible ghost in your brain but the relative world your body has brought into being.”
“Parks: I guess your point is that we always do what we want at that instant of doing, perhaps despite other pressures, other experiences, that in another moment might dominate. And if we didn’t want it, we wouldn’t do it.”
“Manzotti: Right, but let’s not imagine this exempts us from our responsibilities. Rather, it reveals what we really are. We are the causes of the things we do, and our actions are the effects of the things we are. We are that collection of experiences/objects that, given the prevailing circumstances, do what we do. If we lie, we are liars. If we fight, we are fighters. If we love, we are lovers. The cause is defined by its effects. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.””
“Manzotti: We often confuse freedom with arbitrariness, as though freedom were tantamount to doing something in a random way. But we are only really free, or rather we savor our freedom, when what we do is the necessary expression of what we are. Someone choosing to come out as gay doesn’t do it lightly. They do it because they feel they have to. They have reached a point where there is no alternative. Yet, it is in this necessity to come out that freedom is achieved. Freedom is to be one and the same with oneself, with the accumulation of one’s world of experience. This is what we mean by identity.”
“Parks: We still have the issue that Libet raised, that neural activity anticipates conscious decision.”
“Manzotti: Libet’s work, and indeed all of neuroscience, fits perfectly with the model I’m suggesting. Imagine an action as a dam bursting and leading to a new object, a flood. Obviously, the cause of that flood is not uniquely the dam breaking, but the heavy rain, or perhaps years of erosion and poor maintenance, that came before it. In the brain our neurons are affected by all kinds of external causes over time. Hence many separate experiences are building up a readiness to act. But it’s only when the dam bursts, or the body acts, that the cumulative effect results in us making a decision. At that point what we do seals what we are.”
“Parks: As always you are moving experience outside the head. So here, you are seeing the experience of decision making, which I presume you don’t deny, not as a negotiation or even conflict between “warring networks of neurons,” as Eagleman describes it, but as a coming together of different external objects/experiences pushing us in different ways.”
“Manzotti: No, not quite! Those objects experiences are not pushing us, they are us. They are pushing our body. It is the relative car that is your experience, not an absolute car, that finally moves the hand to the wallet. It is the world relative to our body, our perceptive faculties and accumulated experience, that is the cause of our action. The situation is complex and can’t just be described as external factors determining our action.”
“Parks:”
“I have an inner world that determines how I organize the outer world. I don’t just act as consequence; I decide how to act, coherently.”
“Manzotti:”
“The world acts on the body, but before the body is going to translate that cause into an effect, an action, a simply enormous, though of course necessarily finite, number of causal events may take place, inside the body and outside. What’s more, unlike the car, which is a fixed object when it comes out of the factory, your wonderful body can change in response to the world, it is teleologically open—so that, to give the simplest example, when you see a face a second time, the experience is different from the first time, because the first experience is still causally active in your brain, hence we have the sensation of recognition. So with this fantastically complex object, the body, we cannot conceive the whole causal chain that precedes an action (this was a favorite observation of Spinoza’s) and hence we cannot predict what action will be taken. As a result of this conceptual impossibility, we slip into the habit of inventing an intermediate entity, the self, to which we attribute a causal power. We say that I, or my self, caused this to happen. But as David Hume said, we never meet or see a self; we meet ideas, or, as I would say, objects. The self, this elusive intermediate entity that initiates action, is a shortcut, an invention, a convenient narrative to explain our complex experience.”