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Die kausale Relevanz des Mentalen — Illusion oder Realität?
Abstract
Seit geraumer Zeit kann man in den unterschiedlichen Disziplinen der Mind Sciences, aber auch in der offentlich gefuhrten
Debatte um die Veränderung des Menschenbildes durch die Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften die These vernehmen, dass bewusste,
mentale Zustände von Personen kausal irrelevant (epiphanomenal) seien im Hinblick auf das, was Personen letztlich entscheiden
und tun. Doch auf welche Argumente kann sich eine solche These stützen, welche empirischen Resultate werden zu ihrem Nachweis
angeführt? Und: Hängt eine solche These moglicher Weise von metaphysischen Voraussetzungen ab, die aber kaum je explizit gemacht
werden und die, erst einmal explizit formuliert, auch kaum jemand teilen möchte? Diesen Fragen soll im Folgenden in drei Schritten
nachgegangen werden: Zunächst wird anhand eines paradigmatischen Beispiels nachvollzogen, wie die These der kausalen Irrelevanz
des Mentalen empirisch zu begrunden versucht wird. In einem weiteren Schritt werden implizite Voraussetzungen einer empirisch
begründeten Argumentation für die These offen gelegt. Schließlich erfolgt eine Skizze dazu, wie sich die kausale Relevanz
des Mentalen auch vor dem Hintergrund einschlägiger empirischer Studien beibehalten lässt, wenn man nur von anderen theoretischen
Prämissen ausgeht.
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The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one's thought as the cause of the act. Conscious will is thus experienced as a function of the priority, consistency, and exclusivity of the thought about the action. The thought must occur before the action, be consistent with the action, and not be accompanied by other causes. An experiment illustrating the role of priority found that people can arrive at the mistaken belief that they have intentionally caused an action that in fact they were forced to perform when they are simply led to think about the action just before its occurrence.
A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism.
Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality.
Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory"—the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior—has been unable to account for the difference.
Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation—one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike—underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions—as historical narrative, not inference—follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility.
Bradford Books imprint
Nicht ohne ernste Bedenken habe ich es unternommen, der freundlichen und ehrenvollen Einladung Ihres Herrn Vorsitzenden Folge zu leisten und hier in der Ortsgruppe der Deutschen Philosophischen Gesellschaft über ein Thema zu sprechen, das ich im Laufe dieses Jahres schon zu verschiedenen Malen zu behandeln Gelegenheit hatte. Denn da sich seither an dem Stand des Problems der Willensfreiheit selbstverständlich nichts geändert hat, so werde ich nicht in der Lage sein, etwas sachlich Neues über dieses Thema vorzubringen. Und doch ist in gewisser Hinsicht inzwischen allerlei Neues hinzugekommen, das sind die verschiedentlichen kritischen Äußerungen teils zustimmender, teils aber auch ablehnender Art, die ich bezüglich des Inhalts und der Tragweite der von mir entwickelten Gedankengänge empfangen habe. Diese Äußerungen sind für mich selbstverständlich von großem Interesse und haben mir die Anregung zu einigen weiteren Überlegungen gegeben. Da kann ich eine Gelegenheit wie die heutige nur dankbar begrüßen, die mir die Möglichkeit gibt, diese Überlegungen vor einem größeren Kreise zu entwickeln, natürlich nicht, weil ich damit rechne, meine Herren Kritiker eines Besseren zu belehren, sondern weil ich hoffe, damit zur weiteren Klärung und genaueren Abgrenzung der einander entgegenstehenden Meinungen einiges beitragen zu können. Freilich muß ich ausdrücklich um Ihre Nachsicht bitten, wenn ich schon früher Gesagtes mit den nämlichen Worten wiederhole.
According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.
Bradford Books imprint
theory is a branch of philosophy that has relevance for anyone interested in human behavior (including buyer behavior) since its subject matter is the analysis of the whole process by which human action originates and how it is explained, whether in the social sciences or in folkpsychology. Some of the issues of interest are (1) marking the boundary between action and the rest of behavior, (2) the role of reasons as causes and explanations of action, and (3) the question of free will and individual responsibility. The bookoffers the reader an opportunity to question much that we take for granted in researching buyer behavior. Juarrero starts her bookby drawing on the frequently cited contrast (the “wink ” versus the “blink”) used to distinguish action, which, like the wink is voluntary, intentional behavior, from involuntary behavior like the blink. Action is voluntary
focuses on the role and functionality of conscious thought in producing action / notes that many of the contributing authors take a stand, at least implicitly, as to how intentional and consciously determined the effects they describe are / [use a] framework of the 3 possible causal roles consciousness may play—epiphenomenal, amplifying of unconscious impulses, or serving as the sole causal influence / classifies . . . positions on this central issue / highlights the importance of uncertainty feelings as a motivator of information processing / describes [the author's] program of research on chronic uncertainty motivation to illustrate his points about the role of conscious thought (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Voluntary acts are preceded by electrophysiological “readiness potentials” (RPs). With spontaneous acts involving no preplanning, the main negative RP shift begins at about—550 ms. Such RPs were used to indicate the minimum onset times for the cerebral activity that precedes a fully endogenous voluntary act. The time of conscious intention to act was obtained from the subject's recall of the spatial clock position of a revolving spot at the time of his initial awareness of intending or wanting to move (W). W occurred at about—200 ms. Control experiments, in which a skin stimulus was timed (S), helped evaluate each subject's error in reporting the clock times for awareness of any perceived event.
For spontaneous voluntary acts, RP onset preceded the uncorrected Ws by about 350 ms and the Ws corrected for S by about 400 ms. The direction of this difference was consistent and significant throughout, regardless of which of several measures of RP onset or W were used. It was concluded that cerebral initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act begins unconsciously. However, it was found that the final decision to act could still be consciously controlled during the 150 ms or so remaining after the specific conscious intention appears. Subjects can in fact “veto” motor performance during a 100–200-ms period before a prearranged time to act.
The role of conscious will would be not to initiate a specific voluntary act but rather to select and control volitional outcome. It is proposed that conscious will can function in a permissive fashion, either to permit or to prevent the motor implementation of the intention to act that arises unconsciously. Alternatively, there may be the need for a conscious activation or triggering, without which the final motor output would not follow the unconscious cerebral initiating and preparatory processes.
We investigated the relation between neural events and the perceived time of voluntary actions or the perceived time of initiating those actions using the method of Libet. No differences were found in either movement-related potentials or perceived time of motor events between a fixed movement condition, where subjects made voluntary movements of a single finger in each block, and a free movement condition, in which subjects chose whether to respond with the left or the right index finger on each trial. We next calculated both the readiness potential (RP) and lateralised readiness potential (LRP) for trials with early and late times of awareness. The RP tended to occur later on trials with early awareness of movement initiation than on trials with late awareness, ruling out the RP as a cause of our awareness of movement intiation. However, the LRP occurred significantly earlier on trials with early awareness than on trials with late awareness, suggesting that the processes underlying the LRP may cause our awareness of movement initiation.
Implicit Theories as Organizers of Goals and Behavior. S. 69-90 in: Bargh, John und Gollwitzer, Peter (Hrsg.): The Psychology of Action
- Carol Dweck
Automaticity in Action: The Unconscious as Repository of Chronic Goals and Motives): The Psychology of Action
- John Bargh
- Kimberly Barndollar
Verschaltungen legen uns fest: Wir sollten aufhören von Freiheit zu sprechen
- Wolf Singer
Wir sind determiniert
- Gerhard Roth
Automaticity in Action: The Unconscious as Repository of Chronic Goals and Motives. S. 457-471 in: Bargh): The Psychology of Action
- John Bargh
- Kimberly Barndollar
Verschaltungen legen uns fest: Wir sollten aufhören von Freiheit zu sprechen. S. 30-65 in: Geyer, Christian (Hrsg.): Hirnforschung und Willensfreiheit. Zur Deutung der neuesten Experimente
- Wolf Singer
- W. Singer
Unconscious Priming of Effect Anticipations Modulates “Free” Choices between Actions
- Juliane Wendt-Kurschner
- Thomas Und Goschke
- In Vorbereitung