The Nature of the Physical World

Answers

• Q05AUTOMATON

  Can human choices be fully explained by physical causes?

  No. physics no longer shows choices to be fully determined. Quantum physics has withdrawn strict causality from the physical world, so physics no longer requires the complete determinism of mind that would rule out volition.

  There can be no fully deterministic control of inorganic phenomena unless the determinism governs mind itself. Conversely if we wish to emancipate mind we must to some extent emancipate the material world also. There appears to be no longer any obstacle to this emancipation. Let us look more closely into the problem of how the mind gets a grip on material atoms so that movements of the body and limbs can be controlled by its volition. I think we may now feel quite satisfied that the volition is genuine. The materialist view was that the motions which appear to be caused by our volition are really reflex actions controlled by the material processes in the brain, the act of will being an inessential side phenomenon occurring simultaneously with the physical phenomena. But this assumes that the result of applying physical laws to the brain is fully determinate. It is meaningless to say that the behaviour of a conscious brain is precisely the same as that of a mechanical brain if the behaviour of a mechanical brain is left undetermined. If the laws of physics are not strictly causal the most that can be said is that the behaviour of the conscious brain is one of the possible behaviours of a mechanical brain. Precisely so; and the decision between the possible behaviours is what we call volition.

  OCR corrected

  Ch. XIV, 'Causation', section 'Volition' · Downloaded the Gutenberg Canada HTML; ch. XIV 'Causation' has a section headed 'Volition' beginning 'From the philosophic point of view it is of deep interest to consider how this affects the freedom of the human mind'.