Changing Concepts of Consciousness and Free Will

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CHANGING CONCEPTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND FREE WILL* R. W. SPERRYf Introduction Two special properties of the brain not found in other natural systems , as far as we yet know, have always been notoriously difficult for science to deal with—even in principle. The first of these, of course, is conscious awareness, that will-o'-the wisp that science cannot find, cannot demonstrate, measure, or work with and, in most cases, somethingjust the basic nature of which we have been unable to conceive satisfactorily or even imagine. How the brain mechanisms generate subjective conscious experience continues to pose the number one problem for brain research and one ofthe most truly mystifying unknowns remaining in the whole of science. The second brain property that science finds particularly troublesome is free will. Science is concerned with causal relations and can hardly work out the natural laws, predictions, and understanding of a system that fails to obey the principles of lawful causation. One of the earliest rules for animal behavior stated that, when rigorous conditions are established in which all sensory input can be strictly controlled, one may predict for any measured stimulus that an animal will respond "as it damn pleases." This was widely referred to back in the 1930s as the "Chicago Law of Behavior"—or, in Chicago, as the "Harvard Law." It is curious and perhaps not entirely coincidental that these same two brain properties that science finds so unaccountable are commonly considered by practically all of us to be the two most important and most treasured of all our brain faculties. When we have lost consciousness, we have lost most of what makes everything worthwhile, and almost the same can be said for the ability to will our own actions, decisions, utter- *Adapted from a talk presented at York University, Toronto, November 1973, in the Gerstein Lecture Series. The work was aided variously by grant no. MH 03372 from the National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Public Health Service, the David Stone Foundation , and the F. P. Hixon Fund of the California Institute of Technology. tHixon Professor of Psychobiology, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, California 91125. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1976 | 9 anees and general behavior from moment to moment as we choose. To those of us who look to science for advanced insight and understanding, it always comes as something of a letdown to be reminded that the main strategy science has come up with for dealing with these two most valued and interesting of all the brain properties is, in both cases, simply to ignore or actively to renounce them—to the extent even of expressly denying that either consciousness or free will actually exist as real phenomena. Ever since the advent of behaviorism and adoption of the materialist philosophy in the early 1900s, the prevailing doctrine of twentieth-century science has been telling us that conscious mind and free will are little more than introspective illusions. According to neuroscience, all brain activity and therefore all behavior is causally determined; and the causal agents and forces are entirely material or physical, that is, biochemical, physiological, electrical, and so on and definitely not mental or anything like the phenomena of subjective experience. A fundamental premise of materialist science holds that a complete explanation of brain function is possible in principle in purely objective physiological and biophysical terms. This objective description and analysis of behavior has seemed to have no need and no place for the likes of inner conscious experience; neither does there seem to be any place apparent in the whole cerebral system where all neural operations are not at all times causally determined. Psychiatry informs us that our slightest slips of tongue, neurotic switches, and other mannerisms and even our dreams can all be shown to have their underlying causes—if one probes deeply enough. In studies with posthypnotic suggestion, it can be shown that actions assumed by the subject to have been carried out spontaneously, of his own free will, were actually in fact preinstructed in detail before witnesses, in a prior hypnotic session that the subject was then ordered to forget. In other words, in the world view of...

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