Free will and the functions of consciousness

Attention and Free Will in Experimental Psychology: An Unexpected Analysis of Voluntary Action by William James and Theodule Ribot

This article aims to highlight the difficulties encountered by the experimental psychology promoted by Ribot, at the end of the nineteenth century up until the beginning of the twentieth century, with regard to the question of free will as part of his analysis of voluntary attention. It also aims to shed some light on William James's possible role in Ribot's subtle change of opinion in regards to the power of attention, as a mental effort somehow revealing the possibility of a top-down voluntary activity. In most of Ribot's work, at first glance, the will is understood as a determined product of our idiosyncratic character, of our affective and physiological tendencies-rather than as an autonomous faculty of self-determination. But what might look like Ribot's commitment to determinism calls for some nuance. Some uses of the term "voluntary" in his work, particularly to describe the phenomenon of attention, seem to refer to a form of free will looking a lot more like an autonomous faculty than like a mere illusion induced by an epiphenomenal conscious state. We end the paper with remarks about the current state of studies of consciousness and voluntary action in relation to Ribot and James's accounts of attention and will.

Conscious intention and human action: Review of the rise and fall of the readiness potential and Libet's clock

Is consciousness-the subjective awareness of the sensations, perceptions, beliefs, desires, and intentions of mental life-a genuine cause of human action or a mere impotent epiphenomenon accompanying the brain's physical activity but utterly incapable of making anything actually happen? This article will review the history and current status of experiments and commentary related to Libet's influential paper (Brain 106:623-664, 1983) whose conclusion "that cerebral initiation even of a spontaneous voluntary act …can and usually does begin unconsciously" has had a huge effect on debate about the efficacy of conscious intentions. Early (up to 2008) and more recent (2008 on) experiments replicating and criticizing Libet's conclusions and especially his methods will be discussed, focusing especially on recent observations that the readiness potential (RP) may only be an "artifact of averaging" and that, when intention is measured using "tone probes," the onset of intention is found much earlier and often before the onset of the RP. Based on these findings, Libet's methodology was flawed and his results are no longer valid reasons for rejecting Fodor's "good old commonsense belief/desire psychology" that "my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching.".

I Am Conscious, Therefore, I Am: Imagery, Affect, Action, and a General Theory of Behavior

Organisms are adapted to each other and the environment because there is an inbuilt striving toward security, stability, and equilibrium. A General Theory of Behavior connects imagery, affect, and action with the central executive system we call consciousness, a direct emergent property of cerebral activity. The General Theory is founded on the assumption that the primary motivation of all of consciousness and intentional behavior is psychological homeostasis. Psychological homeostasis is as important to the organization of mind and behavior as physiological homeostasis is to the organization of bodily systems. Consciousness processes quasi-perceptual images independently of the input to the retina and sensorium. Consciousness is the "I am" control center for integration and regulation of (my) thoughts, (my) feelings, and (my) actions with (my) conscious mental imagery as foundation stones. The fundamental, universal conscious desire for psychological homeostasis benefits from the degree of vividness of inner imagery. Imagery vividness, a combination of clarity and liveliness, is beneficial to imagining, remembering, thinking, predicting, planning, and acting. Assessment of vividness using introspective report is validated by objective means such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A significant body of work shows that vividness of visual imagery is determined by the similarity of neural responses in imagery to those occurring in perception of actual objects and performance of activities. I am conscious; therefore, I am.

Time and the observer: The where and when of consciousness in the brain

We compare the way two models of consciousness treat subjective timing. According to the standard “Cartesian Theater” model, there is a place in the brain where “it all comes together,” and the discriminations in all modalities are somehow put into registration and “presented” for subjective judgment. The timing of the events in this theater determines subjective order. According to the alternative “Multiple Drafts” model, discriminations are distributed in both space and time in the brain. These events do have temporal properties, but those properties do not determine subjective order because there is no single, definitive “stream of consciousness,” only a parallel stream of conflicting and continuously revised contents. Four puzzling phenomena that resist explanation by the Cartesian model are analyzed: (1) a gradual apparent motion phenomenon involving abrupt color change (Kolers & von Grünau 1976), (2) an illusion of an evenly spaced series of “hops” produced by two or more widely spaced series of taps delivered to the skin (Geldard & Sherrick's “cutaneous rabbit” [1972]), (3) backwards referral in time, and (4) subjective delay of consciousness of intention (both reported in this journal by LIbet 1985a; 1987; 1989a). The unexamined assumptions that have always made the Cartesian Theater so attractive are exposed and dismantled. The Multiple Drafts model provides a better account of the puzzling phenomena, avoiding the scientific and metaphysical extravagances of the Cartesian Theater: The temporal order of subjective events is a product of the brain's interpretational processes, not a direct reflection of events making up those processes.