The Mental, the Physical and the Informational

Abstract

One of the core experiences we share as human beings is the impact our intentions and decisions have on our life. We think that the decisions we make, from the major ones like getting married, to small ones, like taking a bottle of water from the fridge on a warm and sunny day, are what causes the actual physical overt actions. However, this shared conviction is problematic for a number of reasons, including questions like: do choices exist at all given the potentially deterministic nature of the universe; are our decisions causal in the action generation or rather the physical brain activations determine all our actions. Most of these questions are parts of a larger framework, the free will problem, which, rather than being a homogenous issue, is an umbrella term for a number of interconnected problems. In recent decades, two most popular angles, discussed in connection to free will, although this division should not be treated as exhaustive, have emerged: (1) is free will possible given the deterministic nature of the universe, and (2) can the conclusions of neuroscientific experiments truly show that our intentions are not causal in the processes of action generation, and therefore we are not free. In this chapter I will argue that these discussions often dismiss one, important component, not only needed for the possibility of free will, but, moreover, implicitly assumed by most of the positions, namely the causal efficacy of the mental. I will argue that, if mental, as mental, does not have a causal impact on the physical, free will is in dire straits or, as Fodor famously put it: