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Free Will and Cognitive Neuroscience: Neural Mechanisms and Cognitive Capacities

June 21, 2014

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In broad discussions of the concept of “free will,” a reductionist note is often sounded whenever a physical pathway is found which can provide a plausible explanatory mechanism for a given behavior or psychological process. This phenomenon occurs even in texts purporting to be “cognitive” in nature and content—the primacy and greater soundness of a physical explanation for a behavioral occurrence is taken as a sine qua non of scientific orthodoxy and the function of cognition itself is minimized. However, psychology, as an academic discipline as well as a clinical profession, rests upon the presupposition that there exists some manner of causation rooted in information processing. As many in psychology and the neurosciences have put it, “the mind is what the brain does,” and it is widely assumed that the brain is engaged in some manner of information encoding, processing, manipulation, storage, and retrieval. The non-psychiatric mental health professions function largely within the non-reductive framework of assisting individuals achieve more “adaptive” functioning by either manipulating environmental contexts or by addressing the informational framework(s) via which life events are interpreted. These approaches stand in marked contrast to contemporary psychiatry, which increasingly sees mental disorders as disorders of the brain, roughly comparable to the disorders addressed by neurology. How to consider both the “software” of information processing and the “hardware” of neurological circuitry will be discussed using the concept of “free will,” addressed not as a metaphysical concept but as a cognitive capacity requiring information processing done by different brain regions devoted to different types of input and sensory processing. The main argument of this paper will be that reductionism to biological mechanisms is counterproductive, given that active and conscious processing is necessary for proper human functioning.  The paper will draw upon research from cognitive psychology, the cognitive and behavioral neurosciences, as well as Christian moral philosophy and anthropology, especially those teachings derived from the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

Keywords:
Reductionism; Brain; Mind; Behavior; Memory; Choice