Embodied Freedom and the Escape from Uncertainty

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 (but scientifically wrong) identification of causality with necessity and predictability. To claim the principal predictability of the world (and thus to remove anxiety), they invent arguments denying the freedom of voluntary actions. Boris Kotchoubey Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology University of Tübingen, Germany The notion of free will presents a double interest for a psychologist. At the psychological level properly, the point is the behavioral and psychophysiological organization of voluntary actions. At a metapsychological level, we are interested in people’s beliefs on this and related topics. As I hope to show here, the two levels are, albeit logically separable, less independent of each other than it might be assumed. The Obstacle, Which Does Not Exist Because free will is a mystery, and quantum mechanics is a mystery, they should somehow be related to each other. An unknown but frequently cited author There is a long-lasting controversy between incompatibilists (who insist that we must choose between the two mutually excluding notions of free will and determinism), and compatibilists (who believe that freedom and determinism, if understood properly, are 1 [email protected] Psyche, Volume 16, number 1