Compos Mentis

Schrodinger says he has no mind

Despite the title, the gentleman whose writings led me down this stream of thought, while also austrian and crazy haired, was a coke addict at one point. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking about Sigmund Freud.
Everyone thinks they know something about what Freud said, but the aspect I want to consider is his idea of the three conflicting parts of the subconscious, or, more abstractly, the idea that there are things going on inside our minds that we don't know about. Freud put a lot of emphasis on this idea; he thought most of our actions are controlled by subconscious processes usually dealing with painful past situations. Now, today, we know that we don't submerge painful memories into the subconscious (if there even is one) because, really, we don't remember painful memories with any real accuracy at all, and they are not submerged and forgotten, they are replayed in our minds over and over. So Freud was wrong about that, but he might have been correct in principle. How often do we do things without thinking about it? Think of driving a car. You hardly ever consciously keep track of everything that goes on. In fact, you couldn't. Your brain can only keep track of around seven new items at once, and there is a lot more than that on the road. Much of what we do is like that: we do things often enough that we have them down as schemas in our minds, and so don't consciously figure out everything. It's done by rote, as it were.
The question this brings up, at least to me, is: what part does consciousness play in the nature of free will? The general concesus among philosophers is that consciousness is the carrier of free will; that is, consciousness can override our natural, instinctive, unconscious predilections in order to sustain free will. Now I can understand that. Think of fasting: no animal voluntarily gives up food unless forced to, but we can choose (consciously) to do so. But what about ordinary life? As I said before, we wouldn't even want to have complete conscious control of all my actions: I'd have to remember to breathe, and to beat my heart.
The general solution to this is given by Erwin Schrodinger, the brilliant physicist, in his biological paper "What is Life?" where he outlines much of the view of the mind used by modern cognitive scientists (also in his paper "Mind and Matter"). The view says that 'Mind' is what the brain does. If this is true, then we have the further problem that the brain works under physical rules, including quantum mechanics, which means the molecules which make up our brain could be changing randomly. This seems bad for free will, which seems to require something outside physical reality in order to will things that go against nature. Schrodinger says that such an outside presence is not needed, though, because even if these physical laws are changing your brain, it's still physically a part of you. You, as a physical unity have free will because it's your mind making these decisions, even with molecular prodding.
I'm still working on the answer here guys, so I'm going to put it to the masses of people who read my blog, all three of you. Can you have free will while having mental processes that are defined by nature? Keep checking this space!

posted by Emmett @ 21:45