Neurons and free will

In another post in this blog I have described the four theories used by philosophers to try and solve the problem of human mind: What is intelligence? What is consciousness? What is free will? Are we actually free, or are we determined, just like meat machines?

At the end of last year, Javier Pérez Castells published a book where he addresses some of these issues from a scientific and philosophical point of view. Its title (in Spanish) is the same as the title of this post. In particular, chapter 8 of the book describes some of the models with which various scientists and philosophers have tried to explain how we make decisions more complex than those studied by the experiments performed by Libet, Fried and Haynes, which don’t go much further that pressing a button or raising a hand. These models are called two-stage, because they try to explain our decisions assuming that they are made in two phases: the first, more or less random, in which the brain generates the available alternatives, followed by a second phase, when we actually make a decision, after weighing those alternatives.

The dilemma determinism versus freedom

In one of my mystery novels (El Zahir de Quetzalcoatl) the protagonist must solve three riddles, as in the classic fairy tales. The third puzzle consists of three statements that cannot all be true or false. This enigma is what you might call a trilemma.

C.S.Lewis

A famous trilemma (usually called the 3-L) was formulated by C.S.Lewis to justify the divinity of Christ. Assuming that Christ affirmed his own divinity, Lewis posed the following alternatives: either Christ was a Lunatic, or a Liar, or he was the Lord. Of these three statements, only one can be true, as each one excludes the other two.

On the question of human freedom, whose reality is denied by deterministic philosophy, Brigitte Falkenburg proposes another trilemma, a little different, because in this case any two of the three alternatives can be true, but then the third must be false. This is her trilemma: