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In “How Brains make up their Minds”, Walter J Freeman set out to tackle the ancient issue of free will, but he also addressed many of the other fundamental issues about consciousness and thought. The book has an unusually even balance of neurology and philosophy, with similar ideas coming into play in both fields. Freeman uses some familiar terms from philosophy in rather unusual ways. For him, intentionality does not mean “aboutness” in the way it generally does to contemporary philosophers. Instead, it means the property of being directed towards some object or goal. So in his eyes, the food-seeking behaviour of simple organisms displays intentionality even though there is no question of their having plans or acting deliberately. In his view, this is Thomas Aquinas’s original meaning, and a key foundation for consciousness. Aquinas is credited with a number of important insights which Freeman has incorporated into his own views.
‘Meaning’ also has a special
sense in Freeman’s account, quite distinct from simple information.
Freeman speaks of meaning in what sound at first like worryingly poetic or
metaphorical terms, but the point is really a matter of context. Meaning,
in Freeman’s sense, is given to mere information when it is set in the
context of an individual mind, with all its multiple life experiences,
history and characteristic quirks. This matches his views about the
neuronal operation of the brain, where rather than discrete bits of data
working their way through a program, he sees a mathematically chaotic
pattern of activity in which the whole system comes to bear. Each brain
has its own individual pattern of basic activity which provides a unique
context in which meanings develop. It follows that meanings are,
strictly, unique to particular individuals, and in stark contrast to
Putnam's famous doctrine, meanings are only in the head.
Consciousness is the high-level pattern which brings the whole thing
together, and emotional and moral self-control may well be a matter of how
closely overall consciousness binds lower and more partial patterns of
activity. | |||
In Freeman’s view, the process
of perception and action is not a two-way matter of inputs and outputs,
but a one-way street of action on the world. Many people would agree that
perception is an active business, not just a passive reception of
impressions, but the idea that it consists entirely of action on the world
sounds bonkers, and in fact Freeman does allow the outside world to
influence our behaviour – the point is that all the ideas and
interpretations bubble up from inside, and merely survive or fail to
survive the impact of external reality. This is rather reminiscent of Edelman’s views and his
analogy with the immune system, but Freeman draws from it the rather bleak
conclusion that we are all, in a sense, in a state of solipsistic
isolation from the world. | |||
This creates a special problem for Freeman: how is it that we ever manage to overcome our isolation and communicate with each other? He sees social interaction as playing a mediating role, with processes rather similar to those which go on in the brain operating in the wider social sphere - though not so similar that society itself becomes a conscious entity. Freeman has a number of ideas about signalling and communication to offer, but I'm not sure he really manages to deal with the underlying problem, and it remains a weak spot in the theory. | |||
What,
then is the answer on free will? At times Freeman seems to assert free
will, while at others he seems to deny it: in fact he ultimately considers
the question an ill-formed one. We see actions in terms of freedom or
determinism because we are wedded to linear causality, even though we know
that it does not provide an adequate view of the world, and that circular
causality and more sophisticated perspectives are often more appropriate.
For the swirling chaotic patterns of the brain, dynamic analysis is a more
appropriate tool than those based on linear causation, and when we apply
it correctly, the old opposition between free and determined is no longer
an issue. | |||
There’s
something in this, undoubtedly, but it doesn’t dispel the sense of mystery
which has made the old debate such a long-running philosophical staple.
There does seem, intuitively at least, to be something uniquely odd about
the causality of our minds, but if the problem arose entirely from a lack
of dynamic analysis, we should surely find some of the causality of the
normal world more mysterious than we do? | |||