WHAT REAL ACTIONS LOOK LIKE

Our critical examination in Section 1.2 of neurodeterminism and of experiments that supposedly demonstrated that we are the helpless puppets of unconscious processes in our brains was not entirely a waste of time. At the very least, it was an opportunity to remind ourselves of something not captured in the neuroscience lab: the nature of real actions in real life. Agency is not tacked together out of discrete movements, except insofar as those movements are part of something much bigger – as when, for example, I may raise my hand to vote at the end of a discussion. The exercise of the free will is typically to be found in large-scale actions that are interconnected with, or at least make sense in the light of, other actions.

Connected with this, and contrary to what some neurodeterminists seem to believe, free will is not a matter of trains of atomic urges resulting in twitches. While actions in the physiology laboratory may be teased apart into separate physical movements, they are irreducibly compound, being part of, indeed constituting, the ongoingness of our lives. A combined electromyographic and kinetic account of what is happening in and to my limbs would give no hint as to what I am doing, why, and how it fits into my present situation or long stretches of my life.

One way of putting this would be to say the free will is to be found in a field of volition. It is here that we will find the sense of ordinary voluntary activity, such as picking up the kids from school, making time to telephone a friend to offer condolences, or planning a holiday. Such actions weave together countless movements, requisitioned to serve a network of connected purposes. The field, or world, from which these actions draw their meaning is deep, wide, without a clear-cut boundary, and is often shared with others. In short, no action is an island. Nor is any agent. Voluntary actions are integrated with one another in our individual and communal hourly, daily, weekly, yearly, lives. They are woven into the complex embroidery of journeys that is a life.