Recently I was having an interesting discussion on the origins of volitional consciousness with a fellow myspacer. This particular question has been a popular one in the circles of philosophy and science. What, exactly, is the origin of volition in a sentient being? It is easy to imagine what the origin is in a non-sentient being, such as a bacterium. In these creatures very particular stimulations of the environment trigger very specific reactions and combinations off different reactions. There is no origin of thought, there is only reaction and response, a well conditioned tiny machine. However, in a sentient being, an action is directly linked to a thought and is not always caused by an external stimuli. The source of the action can not be a loud noise or a bright light, it must be some internal mechanism. Thus the problem in philosophy arises, what is the source of this action. How can inanimate non-sentient matter combine in such a way as to be capable of animation and action caused by thought alone? To put it simpler, as one of my professors of religion described it, when you move you arm it moves because your nerves have sent a charge differential into the muscle, causing a cascading effect that is muscular contraction. Your brain sent the impulse to your nerves, but where and how exactly did the brain impulse originate? If we imagine the charged pulse going backward in time up the brain stem and into the brain, through tens of millions of neural connections, where does it stop, or rather start? What triggers that initial action? What is it’s origin? Does a nerve, of it’s own accord, suddenly activate? How do other nerves, which themselves require activation, cause the activation of other nerves?
In other philosophical circles this problem ends up being very similar to the Prime Mover, that is all actions and motion in the universe are caused by previous actions, the Earth orbits the sun because it coalesced out of a spinning dust disk, the consequence of a conglomeration of generations of dead star matter and heavy elements and the natural way that large sparse dynamic gravitational systems tend to imbalance and form pockets where more matter happens to collect. The clouds of dust were spread out and formed through previous generations of stars, going back to the big bang. What started this motion? Many theologians like to insist that god started the motion, that he is the prime mover, ignoring the fact that they are explaining a mystery by presenting an even larger one; what started god moving? If he started himself moving then it is simpler to presume the universe started itself as well, since if we are going to arbitrarily add entities to an explanation then we can arbitrarily add an infinite amount of them and never change the question and never have any more real information.
Given that and looking at bacteria and simple animals, it’s clear that most of their actions could be considered to originate in the first cause as well, assuming there was one. If a bacterium swims toward the light, it does so because a photon hits a proton which unfolds and triggers a nerve which triggers a reflexive swimming response. But that photon originated in the sun, the sun originated in the formation of our galaxy, the galaxy originated in the formation of the universe, etc. etc. The point being mechanistic responsive behavior is irrelevant to the question of the origin of volitional behavior, unless one believes in a deterministic universe and that all volitional behavior only appears to be volitional and was actually writ in stone at the moment of the formation of the universe, just as this article must have been. So presuming the universe is not deterministic, and I feel it irrational to consider it to be, what is the origin of volitional behavior?
One of the most influential Christian philosophers of all time, Thomas Aquinas, originated this argument as the argument from efficient cause, though it had its roots in Aristotle. It is an argument that is often confused with that of the Prime Mover, and superficially they are very similar. However the argument from efficient cause, if you consider the universe non-deterministic, can be thought more of as billions of Prime Mover dilemmas that occur all the time. As a person that embraces a non-deterministic universe, this obviously presents a great dilemma. Hume’s counter arguments to the efficient cause argument are mostly the same as a rational person would present against the prime mover as god argument. Immanuel Kant’s counter arguments were much worse, and none these philosophers seem to recognize the role that efficient cause plays as a fundamental in a non-deterministic universe.
Thus we are back to our original problem. What is the trigger for action, for thought? Where does it originate? How can a nerve trigger it’s own activation? There have been many studies with MRI’s and PET and CAT scans which show us how some of the these origins of choices operate and what general regions of our brains are used, but we won’t find our answer there yet; the scale is too large. It occurred to me today when contemplating the functioning of computer system that there is a problem which is identical to the efficient cause problem and might help, conceptually, to explain the origins of volition in sentient beings. To find our answer for now, we have to look to computer programming. Consider a computer program, or more specifically a computer program reading another program. How does a computer initially gain the ability to read programs? Or, essentially, how do you program a program to read programs? It’s a catch 22, you can’t program a computer unless the computer is able to read programs, but the computer can not read programs unless you program it. Just as a nerve can not initiate itself to fire, so a computer program can not tell a computer how to read it (I speak here in the most fundamental sense of a computer program, not a new file format which includes a module to convert it) In both cases we have a physical device which is operated by a change of a state, coincidently in both cases it is electrical charges. If this catch 22 is resolved in the physical operation of computers, it can clearly be solved inside the brain over billions of years of evolution. So how is it solved?
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