Temporal Naturalism, Free Will, and the Cartesian Myth: Time Is NOT Illusory and We Are NOT ‘Talking Heads’

So when we are balanced between danger and opportunity and the future is unknown, how do we think usefully about the future? … If we imagine ourselves living in the cosmos in which novelty is an illusion, agency is an illusion, will is an illusion, there is a demoralization that takes place. There's an alienation that takes place between our aspirations and our view of the universe we live in. If we imagine ourselves living in the universe in which everything changes and everything evolves, and in which novelty is a real possibility, in which the imagination of human beings is an organ that takes advantage of the natural capacity to invent novel phenomena, and for novel regularities to arise, then we may get a moral lift. We may think to ourselves, “maybe—even if we can't see how—it's possible that we have the agency, the imagination and the will to invent our way out of the problems that face us.” (Smolin 2013).

Time is inclusively real. Time is not an illusion, as the more radical versions of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world represent it to be, nor, as many of our established ideas about causation and the laws of nature imply, does it touch only certain aspects of reality. It holds sway over everything; nothing is exempt from its influence. (Unger 2014, 127)¹

Words! Words! Words!

I'm so sick of words!

I get words all day through;

First from him, now from you!

Is that all you blighters can do?

Don't talk of stars burning above; If you're in love,

Show me!

Tell me no dreams filled with desire. If you're on fire,

Show me!

—Alan Jay Lerner (from the song “Show Me!” from the musical “My Fair Lady”)²

I must preface this brief editorial with a basic caveat and confession: I will highlight the limitation of language in the description of dynamical processes constituting volition that play out over a temporal continuum—vis-à-vis the question of free will in the context of the interpretation of the experiments of Benjamin Libet—using the same communication tool that I critique. I will maintain that language produces snapshots of “being” statically through the sundering effect of the nominalistic nature of language—the breaking apart of continua and whole functional entities, including living organisms, into discrete component pieces, much as we would do to analyze the workings of a machine. The implications are profound, including the suggestion that time is an illusion, potentiality is mind dependent and not real, and that process itself, that is, “becoming,” does not unfold on a temporal continuum, but instead bumps along in discrete steps (Deely 2001; de Waal 2010). Language undoes or fractures the continuous flow of dynamical processes and, consequently, introduces “contra-diction.” It denies the possibility of what Merleau-Ponty termed “the flesh”—a singular organismic substance fusing both subject and object—the “touching” and the “touched”—with their dynamic, contextually bound responsive entanglement playing out on a temporal continuum (Merleau-Ponty 1968; Evans and Lawlor 2000). Language thus denies the relational realm, much like a proposition severing a subject from its object. Because of this, free will defies conceptualization in language even though, experientially, it is a deeply felt feature of organismic existence.

As Benjamin Libet, himself, in the end, recommended:

Given the speculative nature of both determinist and nondeterminist theories, why not adopt the view that we do have free will (until some real contradictory evidence appears, if it ever does)? Such a view would at least allow us to proceed in a way that accepts and accommodates our own deep feeling that we do have free will. (Libet 2005, 156)

Phenomenologically, we are intuitively aware that we are free agents, capable of choosing between potential alternatives, giving us the right to hold each other morally accountable. Free will has to do with the process of actualizing choice: the active construction of self and identity. The neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein called this process “self-actualization,” which is the fundamental activity of the organism (Goldstein 1995). Life unfolds as experience on a temporal continuum, not in quantized chunks. This is the deep message of Zeno's paradox: The moment the temporal process is sundered or plunged into abstraction, the moment temporal continuity is broken, is the moment that submerged paradox surfaces, and when free will, as a manifestation of temporal continuity and the reality of time, is no longer logically explicable.

I am restricted in demonstrating these concepts utilizing the medium of text, which is perhaps the underlying message here. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, the message is conditioned by the medium: “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes quite a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964, 1). Language is both the most powerful tool available to our species for the conveyance of meaning, and a nominalistic booby trap separating us from reality and the rest of nature.

Saigle et al. (2018) have performed a significant scientific service by carrying out a thorough review of the literature related to the Libet paradigm. Given that this paradigm has been explored extensively, their summary is valuable. In all of this, however, there seem to be more questions raised than answered. In straddling the neurophenomenological gap between recordable brain activity and first-person verbal report, dependence on the medium through which the subject's instruction and report occurs is inescapable. Whether there is evidence for or against the presence of free will when brain-based manifestations of volition are evident prior to the point at which the subject reports awareness of an impending movement (W) remains controversial. I would like to suggest why such controversy continues to exist.

In examining the philosophical foundations of free will, an alternative approach from Libet's recognizes the conscious free agent as an environmentally embedded, embodied, extended, and enactive organism—an approach taking its cues from neurophenomenology, embodiment, and pragmatism—rather than the assumed “talking head” of the skull-bound mind of Cartesian cognitivism or what Gallagher has labeled “cognition-in-the-head” (Gallagher 2017, 1). If we assume that preverbal conscious awareness of the volitional process can occur via an initial affective impetus to the impending movement before one can communicate this awareness verbally (Damasio 1994; 2010; Solms 2013), then the volitional process would be expected to be well underway before such reporting is on line. In fact, there is every indication that language capability is a latecomer in the microgenetic process on the behavioral time scale underlying the emergence of spontaneous action (Brown 1985; 1988), much as language-based communication is a late phenomenon to appear on the nested temporal continua into which the microgenetic time scale is embedded: the phylogenetic timescale of speciation and, within that, the ontogenetic time scale of development (Brown 2015). Linking back to the Libet paradigm, Solms (2013) addresses the differentiation between the primary “subjective self” constituted through affect and the subsequently constructed re-representational “declarative self” of language in the following way:

Witness the famous example of Benjamin Libet recording a delay of up to 400 ms between the physiological appearance of premotor activation and the voluntary decision to move. This is typically interpreted to show that free will is an illusion, when in fact it shows only that the verbally mediated, reflexive re-representation of the declarative self initiating a movement occurs somewhat later than the affective (primary) self actually initiating it. Such confusion would be avoided if we recognized that the self unfolds over several levels of experience. (Solms 2013, 16, italics added)

The cognitivist interpretation is based on a model in which the talking “active homunculus” in the head—the re-represented language-produced “declarative self”—sits at controls pulling levers that initiate action rather than being a late “add-on” in the emergent process that constructs the active consciously aware self. This is the pervasive nominalistic “Cartesian myth” that privileges language over experience, and cognition over affect, viewing the human as the unique “talking head,” the thinking machine, rather than the processual affective organism that shares existential context—the “global commons”—with living organisms throughout the rest of the natural world. The observation that there is recordable brain activity appearing before the point of reportability does not imply that there is an “unconscious initiative” (Libet 1985) but implies that conscious awareness is actively constructed through an emergent process arising out of an affective core.

Returning to the problem of free will in the context of the experiential, there is a requirement for temporal continuity as the foundation. Free will involves a deep paradox. Free will emerges through a fusion of indeterminism through which alternative possibilities are generated—the “free” part—and “adequate determinism” through which a selection among offered potentialities is causally made—the “will” part. This implies a singular underlying process that integrates the paradox between generative indeterminism and selective determinism, yet another complementarity that can only be resolved dynamically on a temporal continuum.

Robert Doyle (aka “The Information Philosopher”; Doyle 2011; Doyle n.d.) argues that a key issue underlying free will is temporal structure in that, given the purportedly fixed laws of nature and a closed fixed past preceding the moment of decision, where do the alternatives feeding into the selective aspect of the free-will process come from? The difficulty is in the temporal discontinuity between a fixed immutable past and an open indeterminate future inherent in the idea that time must “collapse” into this discontinuity at the exact moment of decision. Here is another situation where nominalism and the notion of temporal continuity and the recognition of the fundamental reality of time (Unger and Smolin 2015) come into direct conflict. Charles Sanders Peirce recognized nominalism as a deep and fundamental problem and developed an evolutionary metaphysics based on the notion of continuity—what he termed “synechism”—as a mediating factor. (Parker 1998; Foster 2011) Peirce recognized that nominalism dismantles continua, including the processual temporal continuum, rendering time illusory, and leaving in its wake a multitude of unresolvable paradoxes along with a distinct distaste for vagueness or imprecision. Peirce recognized this as the main problem with modern Western philosophy and culture with its connection to the Cartesian myth posing thought rather than experience as the existential primordium (cf. McGilchrist 2009; Bergson 2001).

I contend that the central issue in understanding “free will” is the nature of time and the dynamical resolution of paradox through temporal continuity. It is this issue that differentiates real experience from textual description. Language introduces discontinuities, prioritizes substance over the processual, and introduces unresolvable paradox. This undermines a pragmatic, phenomenological understanding that is fundamentally experiential and existential. We know from experience that we have free will and we can choose what we wish to actualize from among alternative possibilities. The experiential perspective repairs the disconnectedness imposed by nominalism. As good as it can get in conjunction with the imagination of the reader, language is inherently inadequate in describing continuously unfolding experience.

The problem of free will hinges on a deep paradox in a unitary process. It is fundamentally experiential and emerges out of an affective core. It must involve elements of both chance and choice. It can therefore only be fully comprehended in a realm in which paradox can be resolved through the dynamical mediation of complementary mutually entangled processes. That context necessitates temporal continuity—the reality of time—in the larger context of a fundamentally processual temporal naturalism based on the reality of temporal continuity (Unger and Smolin 2015).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author expresses his thanks to Steven M. Rosen, who provided encouragement and valuable comments in e-mail exchanges with respect to the general challenge of naturalizing phenomenology, and also to Deborah Minden for the ingenious connection to the Alan Jay Lerner lyric. ▪

Notes

1. The Religion of the Future by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

2. SHOW ME (from “My Fair Lady”), Words by Alan Jay Lerner, Music by Frederick Loewe, Copyright © 1956 (Renewed) Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Publication and Allied Rights Assigned to Chappell & Co., Inc., All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission of Alfred Music.