Chapter Title: Introduction

Chapter Author(s): Bernard Feltz, Marcus Missal and Andrew Sims

Book Title: Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience

Book Editor(s): Bernard Feltz, Marcus Missal and Andrew Sims
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvrxk31x.5

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

Brill is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Free Will,
Causality, and Neuroscience

This content downloaded from

191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Introduction
Bernard Feltz, Marcus Missal and Andrew Sims

What is the relationship between mind and body? Even in antiquity, the con-
trast between Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the relationship be-
tween soul and body anticipate this anthropological debate, which has recently
been taken up under the banner of a “naturalisation of consciousness.” In the
modern period, the dialogue between Descarte’s neo-Platonism and Spinoza’s
monism—and later, the Kantian critique—can be interpreted as a continua-
tion of these themes. The passionate discussions in the 20th century between
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty about phenomenological “Being-in-the-World” of-
fer a new approach to that which is specifically human. At the heart of all
these traditions, language and the capacity for meaning-making play a deci-
sive role. Paradoxically, it is at the very moment when philosophy discovers
the corporeal dimension of humanity—in dialogue with the natural sciences,
furthermore—that the ubiquity of language in all behaviour is freshly brought
into view. Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas are exemplary of such a position.
A human being is a corporeal entity but human behaviour is unintelligible in
abstraction from the role of language.
Recent developments in neuroscience have led to a fresh perspective on this
set of issues. The relationship between mind and body is not only a philosophi-
cal matter. A close dialogue with the experimental sciences is not only possible
but indeed also necessary. In recent decades, new methods for studying the
brain have produced important theoretical advances and led to the rapid de-
velopment of various disciplines, among which are neuroscience and the cog-
nitive sciences. The philosophy of neuroscience has itself grown considerably.
In this context, one influential line of thinking tends toward the thesis that free
will is pure illusion and that the principle of causation in all its rigor leads in-
exorably to the rejection of a concept of free will likely to contribute to an un-
derstanding of human behaviour.
This conducts us to propose two introductory developments : free will and
causality.

1 Free Will

There are several epistemological positions that yield different conceptions of

free will. Beginning from his work in cognitive psychology, Daniel Wegner

© bernard feltz, marcus missal and andrew sims, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004409965_002

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 License.
This content downloaded from
191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>
2 Feltz, Missal and Sims

(2002) constructs what he calls a “theory of apparent mental causation” which

explains the conscious experience of our own causal efficacy during action as
a post-hoc reconstruction. On the basis of Libet’s (1985) experiments, he ar-
gues that the conscious experience of acting is pure illusion. It is language—in
an a posteriori reorganisation— that inscribes a particular action in the auto-
biographical memory. The subject then acquires an illusory sense of herself as
the author of that action.
In the same line, in the course of a discussion of theories of self-­organisation,
decision theory, and cognitive models, Henri Atlan (2011) proposes a neo-Spi�-
nozist interpretation of human behaviour which is characterised by its total
determinism. For him there is a kind of freedom that is linked to the impossi-
bility of predicting behaviour, but this impossibility is purely epistemological.
Human behaviour is deeply determined and freedom consists in making this
determination our own. In this context, free will proper has no place and is
qualified as a “necessary illusion” in that, while we must act as if our decisions
were efficacious, this efficacy is fictive on account of the principle of total de-
terminism. Both of these perspectives just discussed are characterised by the
conception of a deterministic world and the conception of scientific explana-
tion in terms of causation. Free will is understood as calling into question a
principle of causal continuity that these conceptions imply.
This introduction is not the place for a detailed discussion of each of these
sorts of models. Simply put, our working hypothesis is that the concept of free
will remains pertinent without coming into conflict with any scientific prac-
tice that requires the concept of causation in its explanations. Language, as an
emergent process of brain activity, contributes to the development of behav-
iour which count as unified actions taking place over long intervals of time and
which makes it possible to conceive of an acting body which is both corporeal
and yet aptly described as “free.”
More precisely, intentional action in human beings is a function of both the
initial conditions of the distributed neural networks that are involved (that is,
the “brain state”: emotions, physiological state, autobiographical and implicit
memory) and the circumstances and events at some moment (rest, activity,
social interactions, etc…). The expression “free will” is used in order to describe
this situation of interaction between an agent whose nervous system reacts to
a prior set of events according to both its state at that point and according to
an intentional logic. Intentional action refers explicitly to an operation that
involves the capacity to represent a future state of the world. The concept of
free will refers both to behaviour that has this intentionality and for which it is
not entirely determined. Our hypothesis is that the use of language is an activ-
ity that allows such an operation.

This content downloaded from

191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>
Introduction 3

To defend this conception, we have to analyze more precisely the relation

with causality.

2 Causality

From the philosophical point of view, the study of the concept of causality start-
ed with Aristotle (384 bc–322 bc) who proposed four different types of causes
(material, formal, efficient, final; Physics ii and Metaphysics v 2). During the fol-
lowing centuries, the concept of causality has continued to be interpreted in
Aristotelian terms. David Hume initiated the modern approach of causality. He
recognized the importance of causal beliefs for human understanding. Howev-
er, he convincingly demonstrated that causality itself is not observable. Describ-
ing colliding objects, David Hume wrote: “When we consider these objects with
the utmost attention, we find only that the one body approaches the other; and
the motion of it precedes that of the other without any sensible interval”
(Hume 1739). The argument of David Hume seems logically impossible to con-
tradict: a necessary connection between events cannot be observed or mea-
sured. Only contiguity and succession can be observed. Causality seems indis-
pensable to human understanding but could not be founded rationally and
causal inferences are made on the basis of non-causal co-variations. If we follow
David Hume’s philosophy, the mind is a white sheet of paper and only learned
associations can form the base of human knowledge. Immanuel Kant consid-
ered Hume’s conception of causality as deeply unsatisfactory. In Kant’s ap-
proach, causality is an a priori category of understanding, a logical necessity for
the possibility of experience. Categories of understanding are a priori features
of the mind. Therefore, for Immanuel Kant, the mind is not a white sheet of ­paper.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell tried to clause the debate by declaring
the concept of causality obsolete: “The law of causality, I believe, like much that
passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the
monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm” (Russell
1912). However, we suggest that simply giving up the concept of causation at the
macroscopic level is unsatisfactory. More specifically, the concept of causation
is central to the notion of free will. Indeed, free decisions could cause behavior
if humans enjoy free will and this question is central in modern philosophy.
The modern concept of causality has been deeply influenced by physics and
psychology during the xxth century and has a deep impact on causality in
neurosciences.
According to the physicist Max Born (1949): “Causality postulates that there
are laws by which the occurrence of an entity B of a certain class depends on

This content downloaded from

191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>
4 Feltz, Missal and Sims

the occurrence of an entity A of another class, where the word ‘entity’ means
any physical object, phenomenon, situation, or event. A is called the cause,
B the effect.” The concept of “lawlike” necessity is important in the contempo-
rary approach to causation. Moreover, Max Born added that the cause should
precede (or at least be simultaneous with) the effect and that there must be
some sort of spatial contact between the cause and effect (even if it is by way
of a chain of intermediaries). Albert Michotte (1949/1963), profoundly influ-
enced by Immanuel Kant, considered the possibility that humans actually
“perceive” causality directly through the activation of an encapsulated spe-
cific brain detector receiving a particular pattern of spatio-temporal inputs
(Wagemans et al. 2006). Michotte used abstract visual stimuli, such as shapes
that moved and collided in various ways, and made detailed manipulations of
their spatial and temporal properties. His subjects responded with verbal de-
scriptions of the resulting “scenes,” and Michotte determined whether they
thought there was a causal percept (“object A caused object B to move”) or
not. Michotte concluded that humans perceive causality as a Gestalt, similar
to the way they perceive shape, motion, or other fundamental qualities in the
world.
Michotte’s results have been replicated in contemporary experiments (for
review, see Scholl and Tremoulet 2000). Whatever their interpretation, Mi-
chotte’s experiments and those of his followers clearly show the prevalence of
causal judgment in psychology and behavior (Badler et al. 2010; Badler et al.
2012). Suggesting that causality is an illusion is epistemologically counterpro-
ductive. Similarly, idea that causal beliefs are elaborated on the basis of passive
observations of covariations suffers from obvious limitations. Indeed, readings
of a drop of atmospheric pressure on a barometer covaries with storms occur-
rence. However, nobody will claim that manually changing the reading of a
barometer could cause a storm. Genuine causation must be distinguished
from spurious. The modern approach to causality inference that is emerging
can be thought of in terms of graphs and probabilities. The fundamental idea
is that a cause raises the probability of occurrence of an effect. Making causal
hypotheses is very similar to elaborating a scientific theory from experimental
data (Glymour 2001).
More recently, any works are specifically oriented to causality in neurosci-
ence. Craver distances himself from “law-like” necessity causality and defends
a mechanistic conception of causality. To explain is to show multilevel mecha-
nisms conducting the transition from state 1 to state 2. In the same line, Wood-
ward proposes an interventionist concept of causality where the articulation
between levels of organization in the brain is essential.

This content downloaded from

191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>
Introduction 5

These diverse conceptions of causality are present in this book. Each author
dialogues with one or other conception in order to think the possibility of free
will.

3 Content

The relation between free will and causality is an important focus of this book.
That is why we organize it into three parts. In the first part, “Intention and Con-
sciousness,”, the objective is to consider a priori theories of the meaning of in-
tentional action in light of our increasing knowledge about the architecture of
cognition, and to probe intuitive ideas about the relationship between control,
intention, and consciousness. The compatibility of intention with efficient cau-
sality is also analysed. In the second part, “Libet-Style Experiments,” while
­Libet’s famous experiments are generally considered as defending a causality
which reject free will, we would like to reconsider these experiments in light of
the variety of ways in which they have been instantiated as well as the sorts of
theories which they are intended to refute. The third part, “Causality and Free
Will,”, aims to clarify the ways in which language has an impact on human be-
haviour, and in the way that it allows a rich scope of flexibility and planning that
would otherwise be out of reach. The relation with causality is the main topics,
first in articulation with mental causation, finally in the context of emergence.
Specifically, in “Perceptual Decision-Making and Beyond,” Andrew Sims and
Marcus Missal extend models of perceptual decision-making in psychophysics
in order to elaborate a theory of intentional action that does not rely on the
propagation of content from abstract propositional attitudes to sensorimotor
representations in the concrete moment of action (e.g. Pacherie 2008). Instead,
this model conceptualises intentional action as a process in which quasi-­
perceptual representations bias the evolution of a “decision variable” into a
state space which represents the sensorimotor consequences of a particular
outcome. This is intended to be an alternative to the sort of causal theory of
action that links action to causation by propositional attitudes.
Markus Schlosser is more optimistic that the traditional picture of action
and control can be retained, and illustrates this by walking us through a chal-
lenge posed to that picture by dual-process theories of cognitive architecture.
In his piece “Dual-System Theory and the Role of Consciousness in Intentional
Action” he carefully distinguishes between various kinds of control and guid-
ance, and concludes that the traditional picture can be preserved given quali-
fications about the role of consciousness.

This content downloaded from

191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>
6 Feltz, Missal and Sims

Nahmias, Allen, and Loveall ask their participants the question: “When do
Robots have Free Will?” They do so in order to further probe the importance
that attributions of phenomenal consciousness have to ascriptions of free will.
Their guiding hypothesis is that phenomenal consciousness matters because
for an agent to be free and responsible requires that agent to care about one’s
choices and their consequences, and that care requires the capacity to feel
emotion. Their results provide tentative support for this hypothesis.
The second part of the book contains two chapters that revisit themes in the
empirical literature. In his “Free Will and Neuroscience,” Alfred Mele considers
Libet-style arguments against free will in light of recent updated instances of
these studies. He considers two specific arguments for the nonexistence of free
will that he takes to be refuted and concludes that recent studies do not do
anything to salvage them.
Then, in “Why Libet-Style Experiments Cannot Refute All Forms of Liber-
tarianism,” László Bernáth argues that such experiments are able to serve as
evidence against forms of libertarianism that do not make metaphysical dis-
tinctions between types of decisions. However, he claims that there are a class
of libertarian positions for which they are powerless: those that restrict the set
of free decisions in a way that rules out their testing in existing paradigms
(though he suggests ways in which those paradigms might be modified).
In “Actions and Intentions,” Sofia Bonicalzi argues that recent findings in
cognitive neuroscience militate against a proposition-style causal theory of ac-
tion. Instead, she claims, we are better off thinking of action as the product of
complex interactions between a number of different systems. Under such a
scheme, intentions are not plausibly context-independent, inherently causal,
discrete entities. On the basis of specific Libet’s experiment interpretations,
she suggests that neuroscience can play a constructive role with respect to ba-
sic concepts in the philosophy of action.
Finally, the third part of the book returns to the articulation of language and
causality in agency and free will in human beings. Anna Drozdzewska argues
that the problem of mental causation is of central importance in the free will
debate, despite the fact that it is often missing from discussions in the extant
literature. In “The Mental, the Physical, and the Informational” she suggests
that the right approach in this context will be to consider the causal role that
information can play in the brain. She motivates the view that this may provide
a new approach to the problem of causal exclusion.
Last, in “Free Will, Language, and the Causal Exclusion Problem,” Bernard
Feltz and Olivier Sartenaer address a similar theme, by considering the ways in
which the use of language might instantiate emergent causal powers that pro-
duce downward-causal effects. In doing so they bring recent ideas about

This content downloaded from

191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>
Introduction 7

d­ iachronic causation into contact with the neuroscience of learning and phi-
losophy of language.

4 Opening Perspectives

The question of free will admits of a diverse number of positions. Even in this
book, which brings together contributions by authors largely open to the pos-
sibility of free will, it would be hazardous to propose general conclusions to
which all could agree. However, in our role as editors of this book, we would
like nonetheless to propose some final thoughts on the relation between lan-
guage and causality with respect to the question of free will.
From a social point of view, it seems difficult to defend the idea that lan-
guage lacks causal power. We need just be reminded that science is language,
and that the products of science—technology—are unthinkable without the
causal efficacy of language. Law, economics, political science, rhetoric, all of
these are equally languages for which it seems superfluous to argue for their
efficacy. Now, if language has causal power from this social point of view, the
monist presupposition requires that we posit its efficacy at the individual level
as well. If one wonders about the causal efficacy of language at the level of the
individual, then in a certain sense the question is how to understand this effi-
cacy and not if there is any such efficacy. Language operates just as much on
the individual level as it does on the social.
On this point, the contributions on language in this collection demonstrate
that it is possible to think about the effect of language on the brain while re-
specting the principle of causal closure. Such a result is important since it al-
lows us to give language a decisive place in our thinking about free will and to
bring about a rapprochement between certain philosophers of language and
the experimental work of contemporary neuroscientists. In decision-making
processes, language is not epiphenomenal. It is perfectly coherent to defend
that language has a causal influence in decision-making processes.
However, this causal efficacy of language does not correspond to free will.
For example, some thinkers inspired by structuralism defended the idea that
language itself determines behaviour through the unconscious (in Lacan’s
(1966) “Return to Freud”) or determines collective behaviour through ideology
(as in Althusserian (1970) Marxism), and without the knowledge of the persons
concerned. So in order to intervene in the debate over freedom on the basis of
language, one needs to go beyond its efficacy.
In contrast with structuralism, Habermas (2007) develops the idea of a pro-
ductive language in culture that gives rise to meaning: this is what he calls

This content downloaded from

191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>
8 Feltz, Missal and Sims

“objective mind.” The human subject, by learning language, becomes part of

this cultural dynamics and becomes able to participate in social conversation,
becomes capable of inventiveness, creation, and novelty. The latter is what
Habermas calls “subjective mind.” For Habermas, then, language is not an
oppressive structure but an open and dynamic structure that allows each indi-
vidual within it to choose the meaning of her existence. To be free is to behave
according to the system of meanings that we have chosen and helped to con-
struct. Not only is language causally efficacious then, but it brings with it the
potential for novelty.
Habermas’s philosophy of language leads us to defend the idea that the
causal power of language allows for a wider efficacy of the processes that in-
volve the self-determination of human behaviour. Language, through which
the individual participates in objective mind, allows each person to construct
a system of meaning by which he gives sense to the world and orients himself
behaviourally. Neural plasticity and learning as implemented in neural net-
works are the mechanisms which allow to understand the effect of language
on the brain. These mechanisms bring us back to these processes themselves
as the conditions of possibility for the production of language. Such a perspec-
tive makes it possible to meet the difficulties related to the problem of causal
exclusion. It produces reconciliation between neuroscience and a conception
of the human being as free.

References

Althusser, L. (1970). Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (notes pour une recher-
che). La Pensée, 151, 3–38.
Atlan, H. (2011). Selected Writings: On Self-Organisation, Philosophy, Bioethics, and Juda-
ism. New York: Fordham University Press.
Badler J, Lefèvre P, Missal M. (2010). Causality attribution biases oculomotor responses.
J Neurosci. 2010 Aug 4;30(31):10517–25.
Badler JB, Lefèvre P, Missal M. (2012). Divergence between oculomotor and perceptual
causality. J Vis. 2012 Jan 1;12(5):3. DOI: 10.1167/12.5.3. Print 2012.
Born, M. (1949) Natural philosophy of cause and chance. Oxford: Clarendon.
Craver, C.F. (2007). Explaining the Brain. Mechanism and the mosaic unity of neurosci-
ence. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Glymour, C. (2001), The Mind’s Arrows : Bayes nets and causal graphical models in psy-
chology. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (2007). The language game of responsible agency and the problem of free
will: how can epistemic dualism be reconciled with ontological monism? Philosoph-
ical Explorations, 10, 13–50.

This content downloaded from

191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>
Introduction 9

Hume, D. (1739/1987). A Treatise of Human Nature, Ed 2 (Mossner EC, ed). Oxford:

Clarendon.
Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in volun-
tary action. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 8, 529–566.
Michotte, A. (1949/1963). The Perception of Causality, (Miles TR, Miles E, transl). New
York: Basic Books.
Pacherie, E. (2008). The Phenomenology of action: a conceptual framework. Cognition,
107, 179–217.
Russell, B. (1913). On the Notion of Cause, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
Volume 13, Issue 1, 1 June 1913, 1–26.
Scholl, B.J., Tremoulet, P.D. (2000). Perceptual causality and animacy. Trends Cogn Sci
4:299–309.
Wagemans, J., van Lier R., Scholl B.J. (2006). Introduction to Michotte’s Heritage in Per-
ception and Cognition Research. Acta Psychol (Amst) 23:1–19.
Wegner, D.M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Woodward, J. (2003). Making Things Happen, Oxford University Press.

This content downloaded from

191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>
 This content downloaded from
191.189.11.194 on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:52:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
<UN>