Time and Free Will

Answers

• Q05AUTOMATON

  Can human choices be fully explained by physical causes?

  No. free acts are not reducible to physical causation. Determinism treats conscious states as separate things in space; a free act comes from the whole self in real duration and cannot be predicted or explained by physical causes.

  But the theories of physical determinism which are rife at the present day are far from displaying the same clearness, the same geometrical rigour. They point to molecular movements taking place in the brain: consciousness is supposed to arise out of these at times in some mysterious way, or rather to follow their track like the phosphorescent line which results from the rubbing of a match. Or yet again we are to think of an invisible musician playing behind the scenes while the actor strikes a keyboard the notes of which yield no sound: consciousness must be supposed to come from an unknown region and to be superimposed on the molecular vibrations, just as the melody is on the rhythmical movements of the actor. But, whatever image we fall back upon, we do not prove and we never shall prove by any reasoning that the psychic fact is fatally determined by the molecular movement. For in a movement we may find the reason of another movement, but not the reason of a conscious state: only observation can prove that the latter accompanies the former. Now the unvarying conjunction of the two terms has not been verified by experience except in a very limited number of cases and with regard to facts which all confess to be almost independent of the will. But it is easy to understand why physical determinism extends this conjunction to all possible cases.

  Ch. III, 'The Organization of Conscious States: Free Will' · Project Gutenberg and archive.org records for the 1910 Pogson translation; Brock University Mead Project gives chapter III title.