 Public Lecture 
Ray Tallis
How can I possibly be free?
Sat 15 Dec: 2 - 5 at the Mary Ward Centre,
42
Queen Square, London
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- In this talk, I want argue for something that no one, in
their heart of hearts, really doubts: that we are free in the
sense of being the genuine, morally accountable originators,
of at least some of our actions. Anyone who wants to defend this
intuitive belief must face the challenge of determinism.
At its simplest, the determinist argument goes as follows. Since
every event has a cause, actions, which are simply a sub-category
of events, also have causes. Their causal ancestry, what is more,
is not confined to what we would regard as ourselves, if only
because we ourselves are the products of causes that lie outside
of us. More specifically, the very influences that make our actions
seem to be our own, and which make us responsible for them -
intentions, motives, emotions, propensities - seem to be the
effects of causes whose origin lies beyond us. For a determinist,
the intentions behind our acts are simply the means by which
the laws of nature operate through us.
These traditional arguments have recently been dressed up in
some very fancy clothes. Evolutionary theory, genetics, and brain
science have been invoked in combination to generate a new form
of determinism: biodeterminism. According to biodeterminist thinking,
our behaviour is subordinated to the evolutionary imperative
of organic survival: it is the unchosen result of the fact that
we, and in particular our brains, are so designed as to maximise
the chances of replication of our genome. It is our genes, especially
through their phenotypical expression in our brains, not we,
that are calling the shots.
In challenging these, now very widespread, beliefs, I shall clarify
the notion of (to use Dennett's phrase) 'a freedom worth having'.
Such a freedom requires only that individual humans are a genuine
point of origin so that they can be the arche of actions and
that these actions are expressive of what they, uniquely, are.
In short that they own their actions and they and their actions
may be judged as one. I shall develop an account of freedom that
does not require the (by definition unbreakable) laws of nature
to be broken, or magic processes by which events without natural
causes occur. It does, however, allow an individual to be a new
point of departure in the material world and to deflect the course
of events.
To deal with the determinist challenge, we need to clarify the
notion of freedom and to elucidate what we want it to be - why
it matters to us. I think we would settle for a version of freedom
in which our acts were truly expressive of what we were and in
which we have had a hand in bringing about the self that is expressed
in our free actions. Both of these requirements can be met by
an idea of freedom that links it with the developing self and
the collective transcendence that is the human world.
For the key to finding freedom in a deterministic world is the
transcendence of the human person. This begins with the intentionality
of perception and the assumption of one's body as one's self.
The self unfolds both individually and in conjunction with other
selves. The product of this 'collective transcendence' is the
human world which places us at a virtual distance from nature.
From this distance, within the folds of this massively elaborated
human 'outside', we can use the laws of nature to secure our
human ends, ends not envisaged in the material world. We are
able to 'obey nature in order to command her'. Our freedom, in
short, is underwritten by the joint creation of an 'outside-of-nature',
a vantage point from which we can suborn the laws to our own
purposes. It is within this human world that we lead our lives
rather exist as mere conduits for life, mere parishes of the
causal net. Free acts must be understood as part of a field of
freedom, the expression of a self in and through a world it has
appropriated as its own, as the theatre of its being.
I hope that, by the end of the afternoon, I will have persuaded
at least some of my audience that human freedom and moral responsibility
are compatible with physical determinism; and that freedom does
not require either that the laws of nature can be broken at will
or that our selves and our actions are mysteriously uncaused.
Raymond Tallis
Background References
This talk draws on arguments I have spelt out in more detail
in the following publications:
- 1.The Explicit Animal. A Defence of Human Consciousness (London:
Macmillan, 1991. 2nd ed 1999)
- 2.'The poverty of neurophilosophy' in On the Edge of Certainty
(London: Macmillan, 1999)
- 3. 'Human Freedom as a Reality-Producing Illusion The Monist
2003; Vol 86 (2):200-219.
- 4.Why the Mind is Not a Computer . A Pocket Lexicon of Neuromythology
(Exeter: Academic Imprint, 2004).
- 5. Tallis RC 'Trying to find conciousness in the brain' Brain
2004; 127: 2558-2563.
- 6. I Am. A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004)
- 7. The Knowing Animal. A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge
and Truth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005)
- 8. 'Not all in the brain' Brain (2007 , in press)
- 9. The Kingdom of Infinite Space. A Journey Round Your Head
(London: Atlantic, 2008, in press)
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- Admission free, all welcome.
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- For more information phone (020) 7635 8580
or email: secretary@pfalondon.org
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