Biophysical Models of Human Behavior: Is There a Place for Free Will?

Abstract

This article proposes a recontextualization of the conception of free will in terms of social events rather than in mental experiences. My objective is to demonstrate that the behavior of human social groups composed of individuals freely interacting among each other exhibits well-defined patterns that can precisely be described by a physics formalism. Although not directly approaching the nature of the mental states involved in each individual behavior, I argue that the emergence of organized social behavior occurs under the influence of free will. First, I briefly introduce the concept of self-organized criticality (SOC) that is central to the understanding of my argument. Second, I review experimental data showing that normal individuals and patients with different mental disorders exhibit a social behavior pattern compatible with the presence of SOC. Third, a brief discussion about the functioning of free will in psychiatric disorders is presented. Finally, the implications for psychological and social theories of including free will in this kind of physical model are discussed.

Keywords:

• bioethics
• cognition
• culture
• free will
• neuroscience
• psychiatric disorders

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Prof. Ronald Ranvaud and Dr. Thales Rebouças for the valuable comments on this article.

Notes

Briefly, complex systems are physical systems composed of interconnected parts exhibiting global properties that are not evident from the properties of the individual parts. This concept is applied to the study of unexpected emergent patterns observed in many phenomena in physics, chemistry, biology, and economics, for example (see Gell-Mann 1994).

One famous example of this kind of mental disorder is koro, a syndrome characterized by a fear that the genitals or breasts will retract into the body and cause death (Buckle et al. 2007). Although considered a Chinese “culture-bound” condition, the koro phenomenon has been reported also among diverse ethnic and religious groups in Asia and Africa.

Brownian motion is the seemingly random movement of particles suspended in a fluid. This term can also denominate the mathematical model used to describe such random movements (Humphries et al. 2010).