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Muses, Spooks, Neurons, and the Rhetoric of "Freedom"

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.2005.0030

1080-661X

Harold Fromm,

Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

Muses, Spooks, Neurons, and the Rhetoric of “Freedom” Harold Fromm (bio) For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. . . . If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. . . . He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me. —David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, 1739 I. Muses, Spooks, Neurons In the beginning, the ancients talked about the Muses; later on, John Milton spoke of the Creator Spiritus; while W. B. Yeats had us rolling on the floor when he spoofed us with spooks, who brought him images for his poetry through what he called, more aptly than he realized, automatic writing. But all of them were onto something: they realized they hadn't a clue as to where their creativity came from; it all seemed so magical, so implausible, so involuntary. For how could a self freely will ideas, metaphors, images or anything else into existence? To will them, it would have to know them, to hold them all in an omnipresent memory—or at the very least hold them in a mega-index, a veritable Google, of all the brain's contents, which it would need to know by heart—and experts report there are at least fifty billion neurons—and maybe 150 billion—storing the data of our lives. But "we" don't choose the items in our so-called stream of consciousness anyhow—they come unbidden, they "enter our mind," so what good is an [End Page 147] index? As for the self, forget about anything more than a virtual self or a self effect, unless you can entertain the idea of a spooky homunculus dwelling in the pineal gland, a "central meaner," to use Daniel Dennett's derisive term, who watches the movies, the stream of consciousness, being shown in the brain's Cartesian Theater, and pulls it all together into meaningfulness.1 An organizing center of consciousness, moreover, would make the rest of the brain superfluous, since the center, the "I," would already be a brain unto itself, knowing everything we attribute to the myriad other faculties, for how else could it request their data? So a self would entail an infinite regress of explanations to account for its knowledge, a pre-self that tells the self what it knows, and a pre-pre-self to inform the pre-self, and so on. And the free will that supposedly animates the imaginary self? It can only be an oxymoron. How could a purely virtual self, empty of motivations, no more substantial than the projected image of a movie onto a screen, make choices from the blankness needed to be "free" of predispositions? "Choices" stem from unchosen motivations, and the "self" may already have fifty billion of them. (Do "we" choose who will arouse us sexually, what foods will stimulate our appetites, what thoughts will enter our heads?) Without motivations, there wouldn't be any behavior at all. Why get up and cross the room for no reason at all? Why express a thought that just presented itself? Why go into a rage when nothing has happened to send you into one? Daniel M. Wegner, in The Illusion of Conscious Will, has a great deal to say on this subject: The fact is, each of us acts in response to an unwieldy assortment of mental events, only a few of which may be easily brought to mind and understood as conscious intentions that cause our action.2 We perceive minds by using the idea of an agent to guide our perception. In the case of human agency, we typically do this by assuming that there is an agent that pursues goals and that the agent is conscious of the goals and will find it useful to achieve them. All this is...