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KMID : 1025620130160020249
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Korean Journal of Medical Ethics
2013 Volume.16 No. 2 p.249 ~ p.260
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Free Will and Neural Determinism
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Choi Kyung-Suk
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Abstract
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The development of neuroscience and brain science makes people express the way of thinking based on brain centrism or neural centrism. Brain centrism or neural centrism may wrongly lead us to think that a brain is identified with a self in itself. Neural determinism is a strongest and most extended ver-sion of physicalism than a physicalist`s account that allows causation in neural activities and provides physical accounts for our behaviors. I argue against neural determinism and for the physicalism that al-lows free will and also makes neuroscience research possible. With the denial of the dichotomy between mind and body, I argue that free will can be understood to be a neural activities for decision making involving cognitive activities and the ability of volition. We cannot know what mental contents will oc-cur when we observe particular areas of brain activated. In addition, even if the same areas are activated across individuals, different mental contents will be made depending on an individual`s belief system as well as his/her past experience and memory. Therefore, there may be neural activities that physicalism applies and are explained by causation. But this does not imply that neural determinism is true. The possibility of causal explanation does not imply the denial of free will. Cognitive activities involving free will may be ones to recognize perceptive responses, to evaluate them, to form beliefs, to compare and evaluate beliefs and values, and to judge them. Thus, the outcomes of these activities are hard to pre-dict. In this respect, they are not deterministic.
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KEYWORD
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free will, neural determinism, physicalism, causation, brain centrism
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