Emotional Certainty is Usually Wrong

Via our friends at Brandywine Books, a review of On Being Certain. The subject is that feeling of certainty that you have in your gut, which tells you that something "just feels right" regardless of the evidence.

That feeling is generally unreliable, the book finds. I trust this won't surprise you; but it does touch on another issue that we have discussed here from time to time. That issue is free will, given the prevalence of the subconscious mind in our thinking.

Another idea that I’d heard about before but gets replayed here is the notion that the brain understands and reacts to some situations before conscious perception can possibly intervene. Burton highlights this activity in two cases: baseball players hitting a fastball and piano players doing long, fast runs up and down the keys. In both cases, the movements involved are too fast for the conscious mind to intervene. (In baseball in particular, the body has to start moving before the perceptual process finishes alerting the conscious brain that a ball is on the way.)

Our friends at Arts & Letters Daily linked to a good article on contemporary neuroscience, and the questions it raises for advocates of free will.

"Part of what's driving some of these conclusions is the thought that free will has to be spiritual or involve souls or something," says Al Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University in Tallahassee. If neuroscientists find unconscious neural activity that drives decision-making, the troublesome concept of mind as separate from body disappears, as does free will. This 'dualist' conception of free will is an easy target for neuroscientists to knock down, says Glannon. "Neatly dividing mind and brain makes it easier for neuroscientists to drive a wedge between them," he adds.

The trouble is, most current philosophers don't think about free will like that, says Mele. Many are materialists — believing that everything has a physical basis, and decisions and actions come from brain activity. So scientists are weighing in on a notion that philosophers consider irrelevant.

I wrote about this problem There is no problem for free will here, not even for dualists; but it is free will of Aristotle's type. Indeed, the point about pianos and baseball players makes the point. Yes, the conscious mind cannot intervene in catching a speeding baseball; but the habits that permit such processing to produce the desired results were developed as a free choice, corresponding to a vision of beauty.

You did not become a baseball player in the same way that ice melts because the sun strikes it: that is, you did not become a baseballer because you were acted on by an outside force that drove you to practice day in and day out. Rather, you became a baseball player because you wanted it. You built the habits, and developed the necessary virtues, so that your body would execute them when you didn't have time to think about it just as it would have if you had all the time in the world.

That was Aristotle's picture all along. He understood that often you would not have time to reason, but this did not undermine his idea that your rational nature made you free. It was particularly important to him that a man with the virtue of courage be courageous when there was no time to think about it: otherwise, courage was of no use in the kinds of situations when it matters most.