I had a really interesting conversation with a friend recently about some studies in the past decade which have tended to suggest that motor response precedes judgment in the brain—when moving in response to a prompt, the motor response is primed before the centers believed to handle decision-making have fired. In the popular press, this stoked the perennial speculation about whether human freedom was basically an illusion; sometimes this speculation proves corrosive to faith. Because I ended up writing quite a lot, I thought I’d post some of the material again, here. In what follows, I’ve edited together my side of the conversation, doing my best to elide the original context.
My first response, with the “defensive” moves:
- the actual studies only indicate that my interior verbalization of my intention is slower than my body’s preparation to act on that intention; that does not actually affect even a standard modern psychological account (much less a Platonic, Aristotelian, Augustinian, or Buddhist account) of the relationship between my essential being and my reflective self.
- indication that my whole body is together involved in my “thinking” does not actually move the needle very much from when some parts of my brain were involved in my thinking. We’re still embodied creatures, and our action-intention cycles always have been more complicated than the incorrect imagination that we are inactive/neutral, see options, evaluate them according to deontological ethical standards, then choose, from which action follows deterministically. In other words, I am no more or less concerned with determinism when I expand the “loop” from my frontal lobe to include some motor neurons.
So much for the “defensive” moves. Let me poke around for some articles to ground the next few moves, because I actually mention these studies to my students as evidences that modern neuroscience tends to confirm the realist (Aristotelian/Thomistic) model of humanity over against the radical voluntarism of pretty much everything from Descartes forward.
Later:
All right. First, to unconfuse a term I often confuse with this material: “Proprioception” strictly refers to what Aquinas would have meant by “the common sense,” that is, our total situational awareness—sense of body and senses as integrated, in modern usage specifically our positional awareness such that we can reach for a thing without monitoring the distance attentively (for example). [see http://brainblogger.com/2009/06/09/what-is-proprioception/ ] “Proprioception” research overlaps these motor-center sequence studies; but it’s not the same question, though I frequently confuse them.
Anyway, here is a study which makes the case for “motor centers fire before judgment centers,” from 2005; and here is a later, and somewhat different, discussion that gathers up the state of knowledge in that area by about 2009.
What those two make fairly evident is that the naive neutrality-reflection-intention-movement-feedback sequence is really far less complex than the actual sequence in the brain. What really happens seems to be more like this: something situational triggers both an expected action and an awareness that some decision is called for; the body primes for action and, if the action is simple or common enough, begins execution while the judgment centers are deciding on whether to inhibit the action; and once the action begins, other centers in the brain are continuously monitoring its effects and intensities (“did I squeeze the tomato too hard?”) and signalling adjustments, most of which only filter through peripherally as conscious or requiring judgment–again depending on how simple or common the action is. Hence “riding a bike” does not continue to be a constant series of conscious adjustments that rapidly overload our ability and cause us to fall and experience frustration, though it starts out that way for most of us.
In other words, I have a habit of drinking coffee, so my hand may reach for my coffee cup while I’m thinking hard about something else and diverting only enough attention to my coffee-drinking to have the internal dialogue equivalent, of “Oh, don’t mind if I do!” for thoughts. This does not mean that “I” am not “drinking coffee,” however, and if I had a similar habit of gunning down people who looked at me cross-eyed, it would still be my habit and would still involve my conscious decision-making (but if that habit had been drilled into me by a brainwashing expert, making me some sort of Manchurian Candidate, that would mitigate my guilt).
All my explanations are very approximate, of course, as I quickly get lost in the details of the scientific notation in these fields.
And all this is actually not only in keeping with traditional philosophical anthropology and moral theology, it actually argues that the much pooh-poohed metaphysical realism that dominated thought before the Enlightenment is precisely more realistic in its descriptions and prescriptions. What is vital is to leave behind the notion that moral agency requires, or can even be conceived as, a neutral position of choosing between options according to a deontological ethic. Rather, moral agency consists in the cultivation of a positive character that actualizes (fructifies) the potential of the sort of being whose habitual acts are subject to its conscious determinations. All of our acts depend upon habits, and actions build habits; therefore what acts we inhibit or promote consciously, what capacity we build for inhibiting prepared acts voluntarily (self-control), both builds and expresses a total character. This sort of thing cannot be done by reflection alone; it requires a dynamic balance of speculative and practical reason, of contemplation and action. All of which is classical, medieval, and totally in keeping with the latest neuroscience.
I make students read the IEP article on Aristotle’s Ethics regularly, because Joe Sachs does such a wonderfully lucid job of excavating “habit” from our depressing 20C addiction-speak and 18-19C vitalistic vs. mechanistic claptrap.
With that in mind, the Angelic Doctor’s discussion of habit and act, gleaned directly from his application of Aristotle to the arguments in moral theology raised in a primarily Augustinian (through Lombard, with Boethius) history, suddenly appears to be thinking through precisely the same evidence we’re trying to incorporate into our thinking, here:
In the appetitive powers, however, no habit is natural in its beginning, on the part of the soul itself, as to the substance of the habit; …because the inclination to its proper objects, which seems to be the beginning of a habit, does not belong to the habit, but rather to the very nature of the powers.
But on the part of the body, in respect of the individual nature, there are some appetitive habits by way of natural beginnings. For some are disposed from their own bodily temperament to chastity or meekness or such like.
In other words, the reasonable character of a habit–its adaptation to some final end that is a cooperation of the Creator’s intention and the creature’s will–is not already “natural” at the beginning, because it is of the character of such habits to become what they are [finally] intended to be. What is already “natural” to hunger is to be directed toward “stuff I can eat”; what eventually becomes “second nature” is eating “things which are both pleasing and good for me and pleasant to share” or some such complex reality which it takes practical experience, refined through reflection and experiment, to realize.
Now, with those things in place, we can sit down and try to parse this less helpful discussion of moral theology in Thomas.
This reading does not sufficiently include the Creator’s intention as making the “final end” to be already a personal, interpersonal, and reasonable “what and why” for a human creature; thus it misses much of the import of each individual’s becoming a participant in that intention not only with regard to that creature but to the whole of Creation as the “final cause” of all human action insofar as human action does not turn out to be irrational and dysfunctional (i.e., sinful). Thus this reader imagines Aquinas to be postulating something like Kant’s “synthetic a priori” as an end of moral reflection (a regulative concept). But while it may be true that efforts to pronounce a deontological ethic require us to make such a movement–and even that such efforts may be worthwhile, at least as exercises in moral reflection–they cannot be essential to human intention and action as such, or we would all be sociopaths and paralytics until we were properly programmed with Kant-stuff. Imagine the world full of Asimov and Philip K. Dick robots, and you have imagined the world if we were actually the creatures that Enlightenment moral reasoning predicts (hence the appeal of these irrational thinkbots).
OK, with that in view, I think we can begin to conceive of human intention/action more robustly. The simple image is that of riding a bicycle: I must habitually balance a variety of forces I do not control, and must respond to as much as exert, in an increasingly unconscious practice. I do so in order to grow to the point where the pleasure of moving, the increasing perfection of continuous movement, the capacity to stop or change direction rapidly, the utility of being able to move rapidly or steadily for longer and longer in any direction, knowledge of routes, even capacity to react well to catastrophic failure, have become thoroughly incorporated under the intention “ride my bicycle.”
And here we rejoin the dance of language, because it is when I am capable of being mostly unconscious of the habitual act “ride my bicycle” that I am most likely to be blessed/afflicted with the immortal Queen lyrics on the subject: