Interesting. Reminiscent of Augustine's philosophy on the nature of truly free will, except she seems to have got the "free" part better.

I'm reminded, though, of a comment by Alfred North Whitehead:

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate
the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the numbers of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."

On reflection, she hasn't really done much better than Augustine after all. She's just using a somewhat more liberal version of the playbook. If you replace your blind obedience to instinct with a blind obedience to a book or preacher, then you're not moving up much. I'll grant that it's an improvement, but if that's the best humans can do as a race then we're pretty darn pathetic.

I'm with Tony on this. The more operations we can automatize and still obtain good performance on, the more other things we can do. About 25 years ago, some psychologists trained people to listen to a voice giving dictation over headphones and simultaneously type out what they heard. At the same time, they also had to look at a book and read the text out loud. So, auditory input was mapped to manual output and visual input was mapped to oral output. At first, the people doing these two tasks at the same time were terrible - slow and error prone. Within about six weeks of regular practice, they got to be very good - fast and relatively error free on both tasks. The tasks in this study, of course, were chosen for convenience, and the study makes the point that with regular practice humans can auotomate some pretty sophisticated cognitive processes. That leaves controlled, or conscious, processing free for other things.

A reasonable rule might be that familiarity breeds skill on a task, skill leads to automation, and automation frees up resources for exploration. That exploration produces worthwhile new ideas and opportunities and the cycle begins again. But each time through the cycle, you become more capable overall. Just as in ballet, discipline gives you ability, and lets you be more expressive.

An argument can be made that free will - vs. automatic operation is a continuum, with important moral decisions at one end and things like keeping your heart beating at the other end. Your nervous system keeps your heart beating, but you didn't have to automate that process. Evolution did that for you. But no-one would claim that because our heartbeat is automated we should be classed as 'un-free.'

Patrick & Tony - while your points may be valid for many actions, are they equally sound when it comes to making moral choices? For that is the narrow scope S.Y.R. is discussing.

It seems to me that moral choices are exactly the kind of 'decisive moment' wherein one needs to be maximally aware and mindful.

Joe,

"It seems to me that moral choices are exactly the kind of 'decisive moment' wherein one needs to be maximally aware and mindful."

It's an interesting question. The science isn't conclusive on this. Following on my earlier comments, one of the things that mandates controlled, conscious processing is unfamiliarity. Automatic processing works best when you're working on a familiar task in familiar surroundings. But it seems likely to me that important moral choices will involve unfamiliar situations and stimuli. So mindfulness will be necessary to the extent that accurate perception of the situation and the players is necessary.

The American psychologist George Loewenstein argues pretty cogently against what he calls the 'consequentialist' position that we decide by evaluating all known, relevant circumstances and variables, leading to a computation of the right thing to do. He argues instead for the strong efficacy of feelings, including a sort of body-sense or visceral feeling, in decision-making. One of his papers is called simply "Risk as Feeling."

Other people invoke what is called embodied cognition, which starts with the supposition that our ability to mean things and to understand meanings depends upon our experience of having a physical body. A simple example of this sort of thinking is the phrase, "I can't stand it!" The argument is that our understanding of that phrase, which is metaphorical, comes from our experience of standing in resistance to a physical force, such as wind. "I can't stand it" used in response to something like a bad joke or the latest drivel from Kos ;-) is a metaphor based on the experience of having a body.

And just today I came across a paper that argued positive emotion has a role in helping us get the right balance between being able to concentrate without being fixated and being alert to important new information without being distractible. People in whom positive affect has been induced do better on tasks that test for that balance.

Put these ideas together and you get a picture of humans for whom feelings and body sense are a large part of cognition even though they may never be truly focal, truly the object of our awareness and computations.

Is this different for 'moral' choices? I don't know. And it's worth pointing out that I'm not arguing that moral choices could be made automatically, rather that there is likely to be a significant contribution from processes that are neither automatic in the traditional sense nor involving mindful cognition. Perhaps we could call these 'bodyful?'

The American psychiatrist Bennett Simon has a lovely book called Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece in which he analyzes the development of the concept of mind by looking at Greek drama from Homer's time on. In Homeric Greece, the modern conception of mind was unknown, and the causes of behaviour were found not just in messages from the gods but also in the body, in interactions among internal organs. There are residues of these ideas in our language today - "he doesn't have the stomach for it," "he's full of bile," "he's gutless," and so on. So, there are and always have been interesting proposals that feelings and bodysense constrain action.

But more consistent with your view might be reports from chess grandmasters playing blindfolded chess or correspondence chess. They often say that their mental imagery is not really visual, that it is abstract. In other words, they keep the chess board in mind and follow the progress of the game using an abstract representation - no black and white squares or pieces, but something like trajectories of movement for various pieces. This is certainly the opposite of embodied cognition, something approaching 'pure thought.' I leave it to wiser heads to decide whether this approach is more useful for moral choices than the bodyful approach referred to above. Sorry to go on so long!!