Embodied Freedom and the Escape from Uncertainty

PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 16 (1):99-107 (2010)
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Abstract

: Behavioral actions can attain their intended result either when all possible details and intervening factors are controlled in advance by the action plan, or when only the final outcome is taken into account while the rest is left for on-line correction. Both ways have numerous advantages and disadvantages. The former can be applied only in very simple instances and therefore, puts very strong limits on the complexity of behavior. The latter can be used for action plans of practically unlimited complexity. Such movements are free because they are determined not by their environmental conditions but by their future result. To perform them, however, the executive system must admit its principal inability to predict and control everything in advance. This produces high emotional load, that is, the anxiety to meet uncertain and uncontrollable environments. Humans avoid this feeling of uncontrollability by developing doctrines like Divine Providence or the modern neuroscientific determinism. Such doctrines are based on intuitively plausible identification of causality with necessity and predictability. To claim the principal predictability of the world , they invent arguments denying the freedom of voluntary actions

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References found in this work

Freedom of the will and the concept of a person.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1971 - Journal of Philosophy 68 (1):5-20.
The Illusion of Conscious Will.Daniel M. Wegner - 2002 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Consciousness Explained.Daniel C. Dennett - 1993 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4):905-910.
Consciousness Explained.William G. Lycan - 1993 - Philosophical Review 102 (3):424.

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