Walter J.Freeman How Brains Make Up Their Mind

Phoenix 1999 pg 1 Chapter 1 Self-control and Intentionality Who is really in charge: you or your brain?  And if it isn't your brain, who or what are you that you should have this power?  The philosopher Rene Descartes conceived of the body, which includes the brain, as a machine piloted by the soul.  According to this view, whether you call yourself a soul, the spirit, a free agent, or something else, you control your brain; or at least, you could or should if you have the knowledge and strength.  But recent developments in the brain sciences have called into question whether you or your brain actually have any control at all.  Neurogeneticists claim that your genes determine not only the shape and colour of your body, but also your level of intelligence, you moods, your modes of sexual expression, and the frequency with which you use violence to achieve the goals assigned to you buy your forebears, who blindly passed on their own genetic make up. Neuropharmacologists see brains as chemical machines run by neuromodulators (hormone-like chemicals in brain that modify and fine-tune brain cells, the neurons).  Having a mood disorder and turning to a neuropsychiatrist for helpl is like having a broken down car and not knowing how it works, and getting repairs from an expert whom you don't fully trust.  At least these clinicians offer a scrap of liberty by admitting that you can choose whether or not to take their prescribed medicines.  Even that small dignity is taken away by sociobiologists, who claim that if you take the pill, you are following the path of docility laid down for you in your early education, but if you refuse it, you are taking the fixed reflex path of rebellion against a tyrannical parent. These doctrines of genetic and environmental determinism lie at the heart of the nature-nurture debate, that long-standing dispute over whether you behave the way you do because you were born that way or because you were raised that way.  The problem with this argument is that it excludes the possibility that you can make your own contributions.  It assumes that all your decisions are forced on you by your given inherited circumstances.  This deterministic reasoning is reminiscent of the theological doctrines of the predestinarians, who believed that their eventual disposition to heaven or hell had already been determined when the world began.     Choices The fact is that we do make choices, even if it is only to avoid the opportunities to do so ought to explain them away.  We are not merely buffeted by circumstances like stones rolling downhill, as the philosopher Benedict Spinoza claimed in the 17th century.  For every choice we make is deeply personal, arising in the entire past experience within each of us, not as a static collection of memories, but as the fabric of interlocked influences, desires, detestations and talents that constitute the meaning of everything we do.         Causes, Determinants and Rationales We all try constantly to clarify this flux and emphasize features that give the appearance of order and intelligibility to our turbulence, and we identify salient aspects as causes, determinants and rationales.  We use reason to search for what we believe are the meanings of the objects, events and actions in our lives.  It is very important to us that we explain our perceptions and actions in this way, so we can learn what to change in ourselves, our behaviours, and the world around us, and attain our personal goals more effectively. Choices are chains of branch points by which each of our lives progresses, whether to a flowering realisation of possibilities, ought to a dreary dead-end in the jail, have failed marriage, or a suffocating job.  Looking back, if we succeed, we can praise ourselves, and if we do not, we can blame others.  In looking forward to every choice, we try to understand what it is within ourselves or our brains by which we make decisions, either to go along an easy route or to defy predictions and shake off the dead hand of the past.   Self-determination and Action What is at issue is the nature of self-determination.  The problem boils down to the question of how and in what sense brains, with their cells, the neurons, can create actions and thoughts, which we experience as our minds and ourselves, and whether on our experiences can change or influence our brains and their neurons.  What does it mean to say that one causes the other? What is...a proper understanding of brain dynamics..that...supports and explains the biological capacity to choose.  In order to do this, I have to meet three conditions: 1 One condition is that we comprehend the brain mechanisms through which neurons construct the opinions from which we choose. 2 Another condition is that we must explain what is happening in the organisation of neurons in our brains at the moment of choice. 3 And the third condition is that we must explain in neural terms the nature and role of awareness and how states of awareness are linked in the sequence that provides the contents of consciousness. In other words, a foundation must be laid to understand and take charge of the functions of brains, in terms that are readily compatible with the facts of neuroscience and with the intuitions, thoughts and qualia by which we live our daily lives and make choices.   Brain Imaging Nonlinear Brain Dynamics Even ten years ago, an attempt to allay such a foundation was impossible.  Since then, though, we have seen the emergence and flowering of two new scientific fields: 1 One of these new fields as brain imaging, by which the activity patterns of fields of neurons can be observed and measured during the course of normal behaviour.  The images of the whole brain are dominated by activity patterns in the cerebrum, also known as the forebrain, and its outer shell, the cerebral cortex. Contributions also come from massive collections of neurons buried deep in each hemisphere, the basal ganglia, and from the brain stem, which connects the cerebrum to the cerebellum and spinal cord. The other new field is nonlinear brain dynamics, including those areas dealing with self organisation in complex systems that are being studied by physicists, chemists and biologists, and with the endlessly new activity patterns to which they give rise.  We now recognise these patterns as manifestations of chaos, which looks like noise but has hidden order and the capacity for rapid and widespread changes, just as our thoughts do.

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