A Darwinian Account of Self and Free Will (original) (raw)

2011, Evolution 2.0: implications of Darwinism in Philosophy and the Social and Natural Sciences, ed. by Weinert, F. and Brinkworth, M.H. (Springer), pp. 43-63.

A Darwinian account can reinterpret Llinas’ and Dennett’s neurobiological claims against the existence of the self, as well as several experiments by Nielson, Walter, Libet and Wegner that conclude that free will, like the self, is an illusion. For Llinas there is no centralizing “organ” in the brain, no tangible self. The self is a form of perception, ultimately an invention of the brain. For Dennett the self is an abstract center of narrative gravity. Both Llinas and Dennett assume that the self, if it exists, should be a Cartesian, conscious self. Nevertheless, since most of the brain’s cognitive functions are unconscious, the self should also be mostly unconscious. To survive, any organism needs to demarcate self from other. In more complex organisms, meeting that need requires the coordination of external information with information about the internal states of the organism. Such coordination, to be useful, must take into account the previous experience of the organism, as well as its genetic inheritance in the form, say, of basic emotions that will guide it to survive, reproduce, etc., as Damasio argues. Experience must be interpreted on the basis of what the organism takes itself to be, a mostly subconscious task assigned mainly to the brain. The brain has evolved, then, to function as a self. The issue of free will is not about having a little “prime mover” in residence but, as Watson argues, about whether our selves determine our actions. And since free will would be merely the means by which the mostly unconscious self determines its own actions, our free will should be rooted in unconscious processes as well. Now, if consciousness of the self is a sort of internal perception, then we should expect certain perceptual illusions (which can be explained by a Darwinian strategy of adaptation).