The Social Trends Institute interviewed Luis Echarte, a professor within the School of Medicine and contributor to the Mind-Brain Group at the Institute for Culture and Society, in relation to an article published in the journal Sciencia et Fides. It analyzes the temporal dimension of human freedom and how, through this analysis, we can better understand why man is not a machine.

Your research is about the presence of teleological markers in the brain. What does this have to do with freedom?

Usually, when thinking about voluntary behavior we tend to believe that we always have introspective experiences about it, that is to say, that we know when we act freely. My hypotheses about teleological markers go deeper into another way of understanding freedom. From my perspective (shared by many traditional and contemporary philosophers), subjectivity is an essential condition at the origin of voluntary behavior but it does not necessarily accompany the action all along the way. In this context, I am highly critical of experiments, such as Benjamin Libet's or Chun Siong Soon's, in which the agent's consciousness is used as a main criterion to distinguish between free or determined behavior. What I do suggest is that, for this purpose, neuroscientists should focus their attention on seeking a very singular type of biological marker, one that is linked to the process of capturing or creating goals. Unlike subjective experiences, these teleological markers may be monitored throughout the entire voluntary process –either experienced or non-experienced.

Are, then, human beings somewhat similar to machines?

That is a tricky question to answer. If anything, I would say that machines are similar to human beings. However, I do not like this comparison because it leads to many categorical mistakes. Of these, the most important is to equate the whole with one of its parts. Machines exist because it is possible for us to replicate certain body processes. Yet, these processes may only be understood –make sense– inside the whole to which they belong. For example, in order to define an alarm clock, we must mention something that it is not in the machine: the user. In other words, machines are a set of particular human processes that have been conceptualized, reproduced and implemented in the same spatial extracorporeal location. That is why philosophers like David Chalmers claim that computers are, in some way, extensions of our mind. And because machines have an instrumental identity, in the strong sense of the term, we cannot reverse such a conceptual relation. The human mind does not need machines –nor external users– to be clearly explained. Also for this reason, the mind cannot be reduced to such a set of processes. It is something more. Indeed, the human mind makes possible the construction of computers in the same way that doors with locks make possible the manufacture of keys, but doors are neither keys, nor as keys are.

If a human being is more than a machine, then what is it?

For many philosophers and neuroscientists, the clue to that question has to do with how consciousness comes from the brain, that is to say, with the relation between phenomenological experience and neural activity –the mind/brain problem. However, I think again that this is not the best way to address the phenomenon of intelligent life. It is more fruitful to begin with the study of teleological behavior. What is the difference between goal-directed movements and non-goal-directed movements? It is a very old perspective: to understand our psyche we should first go back to the problem of the soul, namely, to study what gives the body life. Indeed, teleology is at the root of the human way of thinking and living –many people even find it the clearest evidence among all. It is not absurd to claim, then, that teleology is previous to mind, meaning that reality, at least the ensouled matter, enjoys a certain degree of outerness or, if one prefers, innerness –the main feature of subjectivity.

I am not suggesting that there are things and, in parallel, ideals, altogether linked in the Cartesian way. I like to describe such innerness as a temporal folding in which an entity's past and future are co-presented (intentionality) and because of which movement emerges (intention). It is in this context that intelligence receives its deepest meaning: being a tool for freedom. It seems to me that the evolution of intelligence, from basic organisms to human beings, is the evolution of mechanisms through which natural goals are progressively owned. The final form of ownership is the ability to create and adopt new goals. That is the main difference between Gary Kasparov, the chess Grandmaster, and Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer. Only the former knows why he is playing. We do not know how to design machines capable of giving themselves a reason to act, to move in this strange world. They only follow our dreams –work by our teleological markers. Mind comes to soul.

 

Read the full interview on the Social Trends Institute's website

Read Luis Echarte's article published in Sciencia et Fides entitled, "Teleological markers: Seven lines of hypotheses around Dennett's theory of habits"