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.
