Is there a ghost in the machine?(Freedom Evolves)(Book Review)

FREEDOM EVOLVES by Daniel C. Dennett Allen Lane, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 368 ISBN 0719559391

If, in a state of background quiescence, you momentarily decide to perform some small manual gesture--flicking, say, at a fly or assuaging an itch--this will, of course, have its neural cost. Circuits will be activated, synapses bridged, potential realised. Such events can now be recorded in the delicate filigree of an EEG print-out. We can calibrate in milliseconds the gradation of nervous activity before, during and after the muscular contraction realising the gesture. But how do such patterns of the actual work of the brain correlate with the subjective history of the event--your feeling of having decided, no matter how fleetingly, to break the circumambient stasis? The story can be written from the mind's eye no less than from that of the brain. Thanks to the ingenious system devised by the American experimental neurologist Benjamin Libet, the `moment of decision' can be pinpointed in a way which suffices, given statistical abundance, to establish that the decisive intentional input comes not at the start of the neurological undulation but almost halfway into its course. Faust was doubly wrong. In the beginning was not the deed, nor even the intention, but the activated circuit.

There is, then, powerful neurological evidence to suggest that the brain decides before the conscious mind. So if the self is to be identified with the perspective of consciousness, the `Cartesian theatre', it seems that the self must be the slave of the neurons. There is, no doubt, considerable wiggle room in this conclusion. We are talking here of a minimal gesture, almost a reflex--the situation may be very different with the complex deliberate and …