Probing Into The Philosophy Of Free Will And Neurobiological Foundations In A Stand Of Non-reductive Physicalism

One goal of this article is defeat of causal reductionism. That is, we need to show that there are systems that act as causes in their own right-not merely as an aggregate of micro-level causal processes. We shall argue that this top-down causation functions by means of constraining the behavior of its parts.The key to a shift in perspective is to turn attention from things to systems. The components of systems include processes. Processes become what they are (i.e., perform their function within the system) due to the way they are organized, related to other component processes. Systems are stable structures of processes that create their own components by constraining the degrees of freedom of processes so as to coordinate them with other processes. The coordination requires not just matter and energy, but also information. Thus, escaping the modern reductionism paradigm requires something like a Gestalt switch that recognizes, in addition to mechanisms, the existence of dynamical systems.On our account, meaning is fixed by action in the social world. Morally responsible action is enabled by both rationality and sophisticated symbolic language, and first appears in the human species when it becomes possible to direct higher order evaluative processes toward one’s own cognitive and lower-order evaluative processes, influenced by the environmental scaffolding of moral language. Free will we interpret as a matter of an agent’s capacity, as a dynamic system, to redesign her own character through many instances of responsible action.