Free Imagination The deep roots of creativity, freedom and meaning in the human brain and mind

by Tse, Peter Ulric

• ISBN13: 9780198901181
• ISBN10: 0198901186
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780198901198, 9780198901204
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2024-11-22
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

Free Imagination argues that the brain's capacity to imagine is the fundamental basis of human Free Will. Laws of physics need not apply in our internal simulations, so virtually anything is possible there. And since some of our actions can follow from that which we imagine, especially from processes of deliberation that involve imagining possible scenarios and outcomes, our actions inherit the freedom of our imaginings. The creative power of the human imagination may have evolved as a consequence of the demodularization of neural circuitry associated with volitional attentional operations over operands downloadable into a mental workspace where, virtually, anything could be combined with anything else. This new cognitive architecture gave rise to the danger of psychosis. Our schizotypal form of imagination, arising from the promiscuous, generative and iterative combination of disencapsulated operators and operands in a mental workspace, may have evolved only in humans by exapting from existing motoric and other operations involved in volitional hand dexterity to a domain of premotoric simulation.

What we imagine into existence can be used for good or evil. Imagination is therefore our greatest tool and weapon. When applied to ourselves, it allows us the possibility of reimagining and then transforming ourselves in light of second-order desires. This gives us the ability to choose to become a new kind of chooser in the future. Other animals lack this second-order Free Will; although they can do otherwise, they cannot want to become otherwise than they are, making them amoral. This book explores the idea that because humans, in contrast, have second-order Free Will, they can be moral or immoral.

Table of Contents

Section 1. The Birth of our Free Imagination1. What is imagination?2. Human imagination is like sexual selection3. A primer on human evolution5. Evidence of imagination from artifacts5. Learning from skulls6. Mental modularity7. What is volitional attention?8. Symbolic thought and a premotor theory of imagination9. Human imagination from brain demodularization10. Analogy, Music, Abstraction and Madness from Demodularization11. First-order and second-order desires and Free Will12. Automatizing Good CharacterSection 2. The Birth of Good and Evil in our Free Imagination13. How should we freely choose?14. What makes us moral beings?15. Where does Morality come from?16. Where does human evil come from?17. Where does human goodness come from?18. The Vacuum of Meaning caused by Science19. Attempts to Fill The Vacuum of Meaning20. The Future of Science and Religion