In a previous post I examined the problem of will power and unconscious processes. I took the position that free will is real and that we can choose where we place our conscious attention though we cannot necessarily control what our underlying mental and brain processes do with the material that reaches them. As I understood it the academic consensus was pretty sceptical of the whole idea of free will seeing the “illusion” of choice as reducible to automatic brain functions with nothing left over.
This flies in the face of subjective experience, a sense of moral responsibility and most religious traditions including the Bahá’í Faith.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s advice about how to meditate clearly presupposes that we can choose where to direct our attention.
The meditative faculty is akin to the mirror; if you put it before earthly objects it will reflect them. Therefore if the spirit of man is contemplating earthly subjects he will be informed of these.
(Paris Talks: page 176)
Moreover he unequivocally believes that all our conscious thoughts are within our control and we can decide what to do about them:
I charge you all that each one of you concentrate all the thoughts of your heart on love and unity. When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace. A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love. Thoughts of war bring destruction to all harmony, well-being, restfulness and content.
(Paris Talks: page 29)
It is therefore not surprising that I was very pleased to discover a book dealing with a wealth of research that is exactly in line with these intuitions.
The Mind & the Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley tackles the complexities of the issue in a most accessible style and marshalls the evidence in an engaging and persuasive way.
Modern neuroscience is now demonstrating what James suspected more than a century ago: that attention is a mental state . . . that allows us, moment by moment, to “choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work, [to] choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense . . .
(page 18)
The authors discuss in detail various models of mind, highlighting the problems problems with reductionism:
The basic principles of evolutionary biology would seem to dictate that any natural phenomenon as prominent in our lives as our experience of consciousness must necessarily have some discernible and quantifiable effect in order for it to exist, and to persist, in nature at all.
(page 40)
They introduce us to Chalmers‘ notion that consciousness can be regarded as a “non-reductive primitive,” a “fundamental building block of reality” (page 47).
It would be impossible to describe all the evidence they adduce to support the claim that volition is real and its exercise can change the brain, i.e. mind alters matter in this case and it cannot be explained as one part of the brain working on another part.
Crucially, they draw on Schwartz’s work with patients suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder who had agreed to combine the therapy with regular brain scans. This work showed (page 90) that “self-directed therapy had dramatically and significantly altered brain function.” His model involves four stages. He concludes:
The changes the Four Steps can produce in the brain offered strong evidence that willful [i.e. willed], mindful effort can alter brain function, and that such self-directed brain changes – neuroplasticity – are a genuine reality.
(page 94)
In case we miss the full implications of this work they spell them out:
The clinical and physiological results achieved with OCD support the notion that the conscious and willful mind cannot be explained solely and completely by matter, by the material substance of the brain. In other words, the arrow of causation relating brain and mind must be bidirectional. . . . And as we will see, modern quantum physics provides an empirically validated formalism. that can account for the effects of mental processes on brain function.
(page 95)
That last idea is something that will have to wait for another post, when I have read the whole book, rather than just the first half of it. I am simply too excited by the ideas expressed to wait until then to share my enthusiasm for what they are saying.
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