I wholeheartedly agree that the free will/ determinism argument isn't so easily reconciled but James's preference for free will to be justified on moral [religious] grounds isn't undermined merely because he wasn't able to confirm free will or determinism with science.
The fact that he couldn't achieve this scientific confirmation is not the same as proof free will isn't at play here.
No, of course not. But William James happened to have lived long before any notion of neuroscientific understanding of the brain - at least before any credible understanding, at least. His hesitance to embrace free will scientifically is simply a precursor to modern understanding. He didn't embrace it because he didn't have the ability to understand it scientifically, we now do - with various studies being performed.
One such study indicates that conscious decisions are precluded by subconscious brain function - our brain decides our actions half a second before we actually (and consciously) perform the action. I know this isn't likely to be the case in many real life situations, especially where decisions have to be made in less than half a second, but usually in these cases we have innate reflexes and reactions - some of which don't go near the brain at all. We have no free will over these whatsoever.
As to your last point, that of us being held hostage to our subconscious mind is a tricky one because the implication is predicated on the subconscious mind not being under our control.
Very much so - which I believe it is, or at least partly. I've learned that consciousness is an evolved phenomena which came about with our increasing social/group sizes, giving us a competitive edge. There are animals/beings who don't act consciously, or only have semi-consciousness (when compared to our own consciousness). Do they have free will without consciousness?
The thing with consciousness is that people assume their conscious selves to be completely them. They are the conscious entity and only the conscious entity, subconscious isn't something that is inherently part of their being but something that is owned as a property, much like the body. This problem is mostly brought about by Descartes' mind/body problem - he separated the two, one as a spiritual, infallible entity (the mind), and the other being mechanical and fallible (the body).
However, this is untrue. I'm in Daniel Dennett's camp. Our conscious self is simply an add-on to our original brain functions. Being aware of ourselves (and by extension, the awareness of others' awareness of self) is something that provides an evolutionary benefit within large social groups. The mind functions almost solely subconsciously, only making some 'data'/processes available to conscious awareness.
After all, if we are to impose control on anything, we presumably have to be conscious to do so ... but the implications of this are that all decisions are an emergent phenomenon of the subconscious mind merely mediated [or overseen] by our conscious mind.
Yes, very much so.
It would be this process that gives weight to people describing our belief in our own free will as illusory.
This does sound reasonable but there are many reasonable sounding aspects of humankind that can more accurately be described as unlikely, and this happens because we do not fully understand all the contributing factors or processes.
I don't think we are held hostage by our subconscious mind but I do believe the subconscious mind has some form of input to the process of decision making and human experience.
Held hostage perhaps isn't the correct description, but it is certainly responsible for almost all of our behavior. I'll take a section of one of my essays to describe Dennett's multiple drafts model of the brain:
The brain is presented as a federation of independently operating specialist modules with no dominant centre or master homunculus, with only very basic higher-order neurons providing minimal integration. Consciousness does not exist at any finishing line or organisational section of the brain, but instead information is in a continual process of editing and re-editing without ever being finalised (Dietrich, 2007). The metaphor used to describe this concept is that of several revisions of a draft of a text circulating the internet that never reaches a final form as it would in the print media. Only when one of these drafts is probed, either by asking yourself a question or by some external event demanding your immediate attention, does this information enter the conscious – not used in the sense that consciousness is used in Cartesian theory, but simply used to describe how the information becomes available for other processes in the brain, such as movement or speech.
So when you say that the subconscious mind has some input into conscious decisions, Dennett's view (and my own) is that it is the other way around. Consciousness is the one who sometimes actively inputs into subconscious processing, as the brain (and therefore the mind) functions seemingly without the need for consciousness.
There has been a lot of research done on the subconscious and its apparent effects on human decision making with no absolutes coming out of that research but what can be said is, there's an extremely subtle neuronal dance between our conscious mind and subconscious mind when decisions are thought about and subsequently made.
I'll dispute this, purely on a semantic level. There is no neural dance between our conscious and sub-conscious, since the two are the same within the brain. There is no section of the brain where consciousness can be seen to exist, no 'finishing line' has ever been found. The only thing that differs in terms of neural patterns in decision making is whether or not we are aware of it. As stated before, our brains make a decision half a second before we are consciously aware of it.
The fact we cannot directly attribute the degree of influence the subconscious has on any particular decision or action allows the back door to be opened and proposed probabilities that our conscious mind's belief we are in control as illusory .... One of the main reasons I think the conscious mind is the hierarchical superior to the subconscious mind is because the sub-conscious mind is affected by so many irrational factors.
Factors such as emotional disturbances, negative bad experience associations etc ... With the sheer amount of decisions we have to make in any one day, we just could not survive if the subconscious mind were in control.
This is where you are very wrong.
I don't prescribe to the Freudian notion of the subconscious being, ie: the one which stores all of our repressed negative experiences. I do love Freudian theory, but only because it is massively entertaining to apply it to real life. Subconscious simply refers to any brain processes that we are not consciously aware of happening, which is almost all of them, coincidentally. Almost all of our bodily regulations are performed subconsciously, almost all of our sensory processing, language, so on and so forth. Almost every process in the brain happens subconsciously.
The subconscious mind is in control, the fact you have awareness of some of it simply gives you the believe it is your consciousness that is in control, when in fact your conscious awareness is a result itself of subconscious processing.
I think whenever I come up against problems such as this, I try to let commonsense have its wicked way with me; just because we cannot nail down a particular process doesn't mean we have a green light to propose what seem to me to be 'less likely' ideas such as 'free will' being an illusion of our conscious mind.
What defines an idea as 'less likely' - judged by the current paradigm or by some other measurement? You have to remember that there was once a time when it was considered IMPOSSIBLE for the earth to be revolving around the sun (by those who were religious, coincidentally enough), but the questioning of the original commonsense knowledge allowed the paradigm to shift. Imagine if somebody said now that the sun revolves around the Earth...
It's not at all impossible for the conscious mind to be controlled by the subconscious, and for each of us to be in less control over our own mind than we thought - which is exactly why it's a hot topic and why so much research goes into this debate.
I've written this over a long time, so some of it may not make as much sense as it does from my point of view. I'll correct/adjust accordingly, but for now it's being posted
