A curious omission plaguing the philosophical literature, including the volume referred to above, is the scant consideration given to the nature of that Self, the freedom of whose 'will' is the whole point of the debate. Without a clear understanding, however, of what the concept 'self' is supposed to mean, the entire discussion is literally free-floating. I've pointed out elsewhere (Corner 1976) that the subjective experience of onešs Self, whether or not acting 'freely', is extremely fluid and may depend on a unique pattern of neuronal activity that is normally confined to those portions of the cerebral cortex that mediate consciousness of our bodily processes (see part II of this essay), i.e., that portion of the conscious field that is felt to be 'me' rather than the 'outside world'. Quite possibly testable empirically using modern brain scanning techniques, but not yet under investigation as far as I know, it would be extremely interesting to look for such a predictable pattern of brain activity (see below) in normal waking adults as well as during early development, dream-sleep, and pathological or clinically induced altered states of consciousness.

Especially in connection with volition, I would have thought that inclusion of introspective evidence - a la William James' Principles of Psychology - about how one's self is actually experienced when it is in a 'willing' state of mind would be an essential step in a philosophical undertaking such as this. It is as if authors shy tend to away from drawing the foregone conclusion that any 'will' which is SELF-determined (i.e., free from causal physical antecedents) must, almost by definition, lack any internal 'mechanism' responsible for whatever this Self happens to will. In that case, the universe would have to contain as many prime-movers/degrees-of-freedom as there are individual selves, souls, or whatever one wishes to call them. This anti-holistic deduction from the postulate of free-will (which can be characterized as the atomistic fallacy) unmasks the irreducibly dualistic presumption underlying the strict definition, and thus vitiates at the very outset any hope for a successful reconciliation with 'the laws of nature'. Unless, of course - and that appears to be the strategy followed throughout the rest of Dr. Walter's book, for example - the concept of 'free-will' is so to be reformulated that it can be made to seem more or less consistent with a naturalistic world-view (also see above: "the semantic fallacy").

The above-mentioned book concludes with a survey of recent neuro(bio)logical and behavioral developments which pertain to the free-will question. Suffice it to say that the author comes to the foregone conclusion that "libertarian illusions are compatible neither with determinism nor indeterminism" yet, incomprehensibly, he argues for a weakened version called natural autonomy based upon the unpredictability inherent in 'chaotic' systems, of which the brain is indisputably an excellent example. While this would appear to satisfy the criterion of "being able to do otherwise" (but what about the big 'IF ­ and only if - something had been different' that this requirement implies?!), it is far too general a mechanism to apply uniquely to the 'higher nervous processes' responsible for conscious, let alone specifically 'willful' experience. It is inconsistent, furthermore, with any criterion of 'intelligibility'. I'm inclined to come to Dr. Walter's aid here by pointing out that our experience of 'freedom to act as we wish' goes far beyond what we feel at the time to be rational decision making, or even are capable of successfully rationalizing later on (so much for the 'intelligibility' requirement). Indeed, our greatest experience of freedom from constraint and being in full control is when actions or thoughts are carried out so spontaneously that the question of choice doesn't even enter the picture.

I hasten to add, in addition, that it is a blatant but widespread misconception - let's call it the perceptual fallacy - to suppose that a sense of being 'free to choose' is at odds with a purely material/energetic world-view: failure to perceive the presence of something is NOT equivalent to perceiving its absence! In other words, our conscious experience is inherently one of unawareness of whatever mechanisms, processes or 'laws of nature' might in fact be operating under the surface. This experiential 'blind spot' is therefore totally irrelevant to philosophical deliberations about the nature of volition. Also, as was pointed out by Schopenhauer (On Freedom of the Will), the concept of 'being free' actually applies to the degree to which the will is free from constraints against doing what it wants to do, and not to the question of what factors could be causing it to want what it wants. Conversely, 'will' can also be said to be free when there are no forces compelling it to do what it doesn't want to do but, here too, the putative determinants of willing itself are not the issue. A quixotic situation arises when the self becomes tempted by seductive circumstances to 'freely' choose to do something against its own better judgment, and which it later regrets. In this case, however, it is the self and not the will whose liberty is in question: freedom from the 'tyranny' of its own desires! For these various reasons, I would have preferred to see the word delusion in the subtitle of the present essay, since Dr. Walter's "libertarian illusions" with regard to the Will turn out to be more a matter of poor reasoning than of distorted perception.

Enough is known about brain function to putatively identify the cerebral (neo)cortex as the direct substrate for conscious experience, a supposition whose plausibility is even greater now than when neurosurgeons such as Wilder Penfield and W.R. Hess (following C.S. Sherrington's lead in Man on His Nature) put forth the arguments in favor of such localization more than a half-century ago (also see part II of this essay). In a similar vein, the central role of cortical projection areas subserving bodily sensations for generating the experience of being 'me', and thus capable of 'having a will of my own', has recently been made plausible (Damasio 2003; and check out his book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness), while an abundance of introspective sources implicate selective attention as one of the key physiological parameters determining which parts, if any, of the field of consciousness will be experienced as oneself, and which as outside world (see part II; also Corner 1976). It seems clear, furthermore, from neurobiological considerations as well as from introspection, that volition is part of a gating system which monitors (and attempts to control) subconsciously generated 'spontaneous' actions, while at the same time constituting a 'global workspace' (see B.J. Baars' In the Theater of Consciousness, the Workspace of the Mind) for trying out - and then dictating - new additions to the brain's behavioral repertoire. A considerable body of information exists nowadays about brain mechanisms involved in attention, and (neuro)-philosophers would provide sterling service by starting to analyze how these areas of knowledge can best be expanded - perhaps by using brain scanning techniques in combination with 'automatic' introspective reporting - and then juxtaposed so as to coalesce into a coherent 'neuroscience of volition and the sensation of self'': see part II for a suggestion about how to get started.

Which brings us to the last of the three proffered criteria, viz., that of 'agency': the Self (however conceived) must 'itself' be the source of its voluntary acts and decisions. It shouldn't take too much reflection to realize that this self(!)-evident criterion is in conflict with 'laws' of nature only when self and nature are conceived to be in opposition to one another, but that the contradiction evaporates when they are seen to be two sides of the same coin (see Corner 1976). The unfortunate misnomer 'law', when applied to the physical world, does not in fact imply any external constraints or insistence upon obedience to a higher power, but merely entails a precise description of what a material/energetic entity, including you and me, does - 'freely', if you will - under a given set of circumstances on the basis of its 'inner nature', i.e., functional organization. The quest to believe ourselves free from such 'dictates' - the psychological fallacy - thus betrays a deep-seated alienation from the natural world which can even express itself as an outright a priori refusal to identify oneself with "that unappetizing overgrown blob of fatty substance", as someone once described the human brain. In my own case, despite ample intellectual preparation, it took a profound 'mystical' experience to fully cement the conviction that the dynamic holistic (unified field) world-view developed by modern physics applies equally well to psychological phenomena. A universe filled with individual 'souls, egos or (free) wills' was exposed as an outmoded 'Newtonian' atomistic conception of the world - viz., as an empty space containing distinct objects that mysteriously interact with one another at a distance ­ which is then projected (call it spiritual materialism!) into a hypothetical supernatural/animistic domain. For this reason, I submit that it is a serious omission in any neuro-philosophical treatise dealing with volition to omit consideration of the wide varieties of altered states of (self)-consciousness and their putative physiological basis (Corner 1976, 1996; and see part II)