Critical psychology and brain: Rethinking free will in the legal context

The article draws from critical psychology to discuss the rising debate on brain determinism and free will in the legal domain. As free will also corresponds to the context and culture, it can have both the public and private space of expressions. The rise of neuroscience and its influence in the legal domain offers a holistic and sociocultural meaning of responsibility. Even one becomes entitled to take free will as a ‘necessary illusion’ in order to be in the zone of ‘moral as well as legal-social life forming activities’. In the criminal justice system free will is not taken as any kind of necessary illusion but the conscious will and action of the person. This further throw light on how self-regulation directs oneself to the wilful control of illegitimate acts and the role of brain.

Knowing your choice before you choose

In 1980s, neuroscientists joined philosophers and psychologists in the investigation of volitional actions and freedom of will. In a series of experiments pioneered by Benjamin Libet (1985), it was observed that some neural activities correlated with volitional action regularly precedes the conscious will to perform it, which suggests that what appears to be a free action may actually be predetermined by some neural activities, even before the conscious intention to act arises. Shortly after publication of that study, Libet’s findings and interpretations were started to be criticized on philosophical and methodological grounds. In this study, the legitimacy of the criticisms directed to Libet’s and his successors’ experiments is discussed by taking recent neuroscience studies on volition into account and it is argued that these criticisms are not sufficient to eliminate the doubt that these experiments casted on the freedom of the will.Keywords: Free will, Benjamin Libet, neuroscience, unconscious intentions.

Consciousness and Action

In its classical form, epiphenomenalism is the view that conscious mental events have no physical effects: while physical events cause mental events, the opposite is never true. Unlike classical epiphenomenalism, contemporary forms do not hold that conscious mental states always lack causal efficacy, only that they are epiphenomenal relative to certain kinds of action, ones we pre-theoretically would have thought consciousness to causally contribute to. Two of these contemporary, empirically based challenges to the efficacy of the mental are the focus of this chapter. The first, originating in research by Libet, has been interpreted as showing that the neural events initiating voluntary actions precede our conscious willing of them, meaning the conscious will cannot be what causes them. The second challenge, originating in studies by Milner and Goodale, consist of instances in which the content of visual consciousness and motor action dissociate, casting doubt on the intuitive view that visual consciousness guides visually based motor action.

Preserving the everyday: Pre-political agency in peacebuilding theory

Quite a lot of recent peacebuilding scholarship has deployed the concept of ‘the everyday’. In an extension of the local turn’s emphasis on agency and resistance, much of this scholarship interprets the everyday as inherently a site of politics. It does so either by interpreting every act (no matter how motivated) as an agentic political act, or by equating agentic political acts (at the local level) with the quotidian activities which define the everyday. This article argues, however, that representing the everyday in this way interprets both forms of activity in ways which have critical implications for peacebuilding theory, because both moves inadvertently strip everyday acts of the emergent creativity and innovation inherent to ‘everyday-ness’. Alternative understandings of and engagement with different forms of agency would encourage peace scholars to acknowledge the overtly political nature of peace projects and so to reserve ‘the everyday’ label for pre-political forms of action which may contribute to peace, but in a more unintentional, organic or emergent fashion. This is not to argue that everyday acts are a-political or non-political, but only that they do not have political motivations and are not themselves products of conscious will to power, or even to peace itself.

Causal Efficiency of Intentional Acts

Willusionists claim that recent developments in psychology and neuroscience demonstrate that consciousness is causally inefficient [Carruthers, 2007; Eagleman, 2012; Wegner, 2002]. In section 1, I show that willusionists provide two types of evidence: first, evidence that we do not always know the causes of our actions; second, evidence that we lack introspective awareness of the causal efficiency of our intentional acts.In section 2, I analyze the first type of evidence. Recent research in the field of social psychology has shown that irrelevant factors affect human behavior. For example, it has been shown that pleasant smells make a person more helpful toward strangers [Baron, 1997], whereas images of eyes that a person sees on a poster reduce the likelihood of cheating [Bateson, Nettle, & Roberts, 2006]. I argue that minor influences do not necessarily lead to something more sinister, and the contrary has not been empirically proven so far.In section 3, I analyze the second type of evidence that Daniel Wegner [2002] provides in favor of willusionism. Wegner claims that conscious will is usually understood in one of two ways: (1) «as something that is experienced when we perform an action» [Wegner, 2002, p. 3] or (2) «as a force of mind, a name for the causal link between our minds and our actions» [ibid.]. According to Wegner, it is a conceptual truth that for something to count as an instance of conscious will it must both be (1) felt as voluntary, and (2) causally efficient in bringing about a certain effect. Wegner claims that what satisfies (1) can fail to satisfy (2), and vice versa. The major part of Wegner’s book is the review and analysis of diverse psychological phenomena: automatisms, hypnosis, illusions of control, influence of unconscious factors on human behavior, as well as some neuroscientific data. I briefly review the data provided by Wegner, and come to the conclusion that, although they show that there is a double dissociation between consciously willed processes and the acts that are supposedly caused by these processes, they do not justify further conclusions made by Wegner.According to Wegner, the feeling of conscious will is just an indicator of unconscious processes which, in fact, cause our behavior. I argue that the data considered by Wegner do not provide direct information about the neuronal processes that underlie conscious intentional processes. Moreover, double dissociation can only show that one process neither a necessary nor sufficient cause of another process. It cannot show that one process is not among the causes leading to another process.In section 4, I argue that the experimental data discussed in the article are important for philosophical theories of intentionality.

The Chevalier’s Secret: Emma Hardinge Britten and the Dawn of American Occultism

In 1876, prominent spiritualist medium and writer Emma Hardinge Britten published two books written by the Chevalier Louis de B., arguably a pseudonym she used to disguise her own opinions about the nature of the soul and the power of the occult will. As American spiritualism fell into disrepute—dogged by cases of fraudulent mediums and a culture of excess—occultism, typified at the time by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, rose up to replace it. Britten saw the potential that Blavatsky’s views on the development of the conscious will, the existence of a spirit hierarchy, and training with skilled adepts could have for spiritualism’s much less structured approach to supernaturalism, but she worried over occultism’s dismissive attitude toward a unified concept of the soul. Blavatsky tended to fracture the self into several parts in her writing, dismissed the prospect of human spirit communication, and challenged the notion that all human souls were immortal. I argue that Britten created the Chevalier in order to challenge spiritualist orthodoxy while maintaining her identification as a medium who believed sincerely in the spiritualist concept of the soul. I discuss three major areas in which Britten sought to negotiate a space between spiritualism and occultism: the consequences of mediumistic passivity, the existence of non-human spirits, and the predominance of a secret Indian brotherhood at the head of an occult hierarchy.

Navigating the Mechanics of Secondary Imagination in the Select Works of Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter

The phrase “Science and Imagination”, in the most modern usage, has beckoned the interest of many critics across the globe to dwell on the many possible connections between the two conflicting concepts evoking myriad responses from social commentators. There are those who would dismiss the role of reason in imagination as the infringement of ethics in creative writing. Aesthetic imagination in creative writing perhaps demands going one step beyond the contours of reason to achieve what is artistically termed as the miraculous representation of reality. The juxtaposition of Science and Imagination is well explained in the words of Coleridge in Biographia Literaria as “To make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature_this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts”[223]. The confluence of science and imagination breaks down the seemingly opaque barrier between the heart and the head leaving the path open for the meeting and merging of intellect and emotion. The present paper works upon the ways by which the writers or artists of absurd literature, especially of drama, have used secondary imagination to recreate the experiences of their conscious will. The proposed paper titled “Navigating the Mechanics of Secondary Imagination in the Select Works of Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter” tries to explore the nuances of secondary imagination in Amedee or How to Get Rid of It and Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco and The Birthday Party and The Caretaker by Harold Pinter. The paper further intends to focus on how authors of absurd literature, like Ionesco and Pinter, reflect the futility and absurdity of human existence by making use of Secondary Imagination in their work