Voluntary Action

Review of Voluntary action: Brains, minds, and sociality

As it is also the case with consciousness, we are all familiar with voluntary actions in a first person kind of way. We have, it seems to most people, a capacity to function as autonomous agents or subjects.

Simultaneously, however, nobody really knows what it is to have voluntary actions. For instance, we are at loss when confronted with questions such as when does an action begin? is there really a sharp distinction between voluntary and non-voluntary action? what does volition add to actions that are based on mere reflexion, etc.

Furthermore, some empirical third person evidence suggests that the subjective feeling of free will, oneself causing an action, is merely illusional. For instance, Benjamin Libet and colleagues (1983) has famously argued this. Simply stated, it seems from a first person perspective that we do – as the persons we are – control our own actions. The origin of our actions seems to be the will itself, as it is had and controlled by us as conscious subjects, and nowhere else. However, from a third person perspective, this assumed free will has no logical place at all. When looking at another person, we can scientifically describe how his or her brain generates impulses needed to carry out a certain action, and a report about wanting to do this or that does not seem to relate to anything over and above brain signals.

It is with the realisation of this paradox that the book Voluntary Action, edited by Sabine Maasen, Wolfgang Prinz, and Gerhard Roth (2003) sets out. The book gathers a number of the disciplines in which We are far frm having an established framework for how to study volition scientifically volition has been a focus of research. We are, arguably, so far from having an established framework for how to study volition scientifically that we do not even know from which perspective or what scientific tradition we are to begin. Accordingly, one could think that a multi-disciplinary approach could result in an emerging of a common ground of fundamental suppositions about the nature of volition, based on which future research could be executed.

The book is organised in five different sections, each dealing with a higher level of complexity of the problem of free will.

The first section discusses how psychology traditionally has handled volition, intentions and goals. Psychology is the one science that systematically has compared first and third person perspectives. Therefore, the gap between how actions are described in a first person approach compared to a third person approach has stood out as a problem more clearly here than anywhere else. The authors in the psychology section differ in their attitude to the very concept of free will and whether it should be completely abandoned. However, they all argue in favour of a third person kind of approach in which free will, at best, serves some functional purpose in a larger cognitive architecture. This view is most certainly different from the kind of central and executive status, we attribute to our own will in every-day life.

The second section deals with the neuroscientific aspects of the debate. The first author describes the pyramidal and the extra-pyramidal systems of the brain, where the first traditionally has been associated with controlled actions, and the latter with reflexes. However, he argues, no central system exists that The book represents a very good overview of existing arguments and research relating to the topic of free will controls action. Cortical areas, such as motor and premotor cortex, refer back to the basal ganglia to get permission to act. One author of this section is willing to attribute some functions to consciousness of action as a system that takes over when automatic behaviour is not sufficient, although as the others, he stays within the third person terminology.

In the following section, different philosophical approaches are presented, in which attempts are made to reconcile the everyday notion of voluntary action and the scientific approaches (as the ones in the previous chapters). In this way, this chapter represents radically different views than the previous ones, which took on physicalistic perspectives with no or little room for free will.

The section hereafter deals with perspectives from the social sciences. A chapter deals with the consequences of the little hopeful status of subjective free will in terms of criminal responsibility. The author concludes that even though free will is a dubious concept, we cannot dismiss the concept of responsibility in our selfunderstanding and in our thinking about others in order to exist in a functioning society. Another chapter discusses attachment theory in the tradition of Bowlby (1969, 1973), and how conflicting concepts (such as volition) play a role in the development of the child.

The book finishes with a chapter about the development of interdisciplinary consciousness studies (though little is said about volition).

Generally speaking, the book represents a very good overview of existing arguments and research relating to the topic of free will. Every chapter is unique and very much up to date. Therefore, for somebody interested in current opinions in the disciplines above, the book is a very good investment.

However, the book never rises above a presentation of views in the disciplines involved. The authors, all without exception, ally with a view that is classic and foreseeable when considering their discipline. The book can thus be criticised for being, in fact, four separate books in stead of one, multidisciplinary book, and the several appeals to consciousness studies expressed in the book underway are in many cases strange and misleading – especially in the first two chapters. When having decided for a scientific approach that consists of a clear and traditional third person perspective, why should one then pose ones problem for research in terms of the first person perspective, or of a conflict between the two perspectives? If one is to deal with such a problem, it seems strange to have decided for one of the two involved approaches as the approach with which one will give answer already to begin with. It seems hard to deny that this is a case of begging the question.

One could also argue that the attempt to go against a folk-psychological notion (free will as being literally free) is of little scientific value. Some, though not all, authors of the book aim to falsify a conception of will which probably no scientist and not even many laymen would argue in favour of in the first place. Obviously, most people would say, ones will is constrained by the environment one is in at present, in the past, and which environment one imagines to be in later on. Furthermore, few would argue against the view that states of the nervous system constrain our will and wishes. Therefore, the discussion does not deserve to be led in terms of are we robots or are we completely free and unconstrained agents? How to pose the question correctly may even prove to be the trickiest part.

© 2003 M. Overgaard

Author Information

Morten Overgaard
Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience
Aarhus University Hospital & The University of Aarhus
Building 30
Norrebrogade 44, 8000 Aarhus C

Email: overgard@pet.au.dk
Website: www.psy.au.dk/phd/morten

References

1. Bowlby, J. (1969): Attachment and Loss, vol. 1, The Hogarth Press
2. Bowlby, J. (1973): Attachment and Loss, vol. 2, The Hogarth Press
3. Libet, B. (1985): Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action, #Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 4, 529-566
4. Maasen, S., Prinz, W. & Roth, G. (2003): Voluntary Action, Oxford University Press

Book information

“Voluntary action: Brains, minds, and sociality”
Maasen, Prinz & Roth (eds)
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198527543

Book Description

We all know what a voluntary action is – we all think we know when an action is voluntary, and when it is not. First, there has to be some wish or goal, then an action designed to fulfil that wish or attain that goal. This standard view of voluntary action is prominent in both folk psychology and the professional sphere (e.g. the juridical) and guides a great deal of psychological and philosophical reasoning. But is it that simple though? For example, research from the neurosciences has shown us that the brain activation required to perform the action can actually precede the brain activation representing our conscious desire to perform that action.

Only in retrospect do we come to attribute the action we performed to some desire or wish to perform the action. This presents us with a problem – if our conscious awareness of an action follows its execution, then is it really a voluntary action?

The question guiding this book: What is the explanatory role of voluntary action, and are there ways that we can reconcile our common-sense intuitions about voluntary actions with the findings from the sciences? This is a debate that crosses the boundaries of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and social science. This book brings together some of the leading thinkers from these disciplines to consider this deep and often puzzling topic. The result is a fascinating and stimulating debate that will challenge our fundamental assumptions about our sense of free-will.