The experiments of Libet (2004), which showed that neural activity associated with a decision precedes awareness of the decision, have been widely interpreted as challenging the notion of free will. The covert assumption here is that consciousness equates with the self or person, and so if the person is the chooser, then consciousness is the chooser. But the capacity to choose does not depend on consciousness doing the choosing. As argued here, it is more ideationally consistent to say that it is the whole system in context that chooses. Consciousness is the monitoring of a small subset of the selecting. Consciousness and decision-making are distinct phenomena, and ‘unconscious’ decisions are decisions nonetheless.
The values that have motivated humans to see consciousness as the agent of behaviour, as the controller rather than as the monitoring of personal experience, include the desire to see individual humans as self-determined, and the complementary fear that humans might be more determined rather than determining.
This fear came to the fore in the rejection of Behaviourism, the construal of ‘externally observable behavioural responses as functions of environmental stimuli’, with ‘mental states either ignored or redefined in stimulus–response terms’.[1] In the 1930s and 1940s, the experiments of Skinner demonstrated how rewards and punishments shape behaviour, challenging the notion of free will.[2] As Boden (1995: 149) put it, Skinner’s behaviourism implied that “the environment”, not “autonomous man” is in control (Skinner 1971: 21). By contrast, the model of behaviour presented here locates the rôle of reward and punishment within a larger perspective of choice and biological–semiotic co-evolution, elucidating some of the dimensions excluded by behaviourist models.
The unqualified belief that humans[3] have the “power” to choose freely serves an interpersonal function. By construing individuals as agents of their own behaviour, it fixes moral responsibility with the individual. On the one hand, this contributes to social stability, since agents of disorder can be identified and removed from society. But, on the other hand, it blames unequal individuals equally, and absolves the community from being responsible for those who “choose” to fail.
Footnotes:
[1] Macquarie Dictionary (1992: 157).
[2] See, for example, Slater (2004).
[3] Legal systems typically qualify this to adults “of sound mind”.