My Brain Made Me Do It

We are creatures longing for free rides one way or other (albeit it's explicit only economically) and given the explosive growth in neuroscience, this blame game is something inevitable. The new book My Brain Made Me Do It: The Rise of Neuroscience and the Threat to Moral Responsibility by Eliezer J. Sternberg captures excatly that. Great review - Here:

"Keep some grains of salt handy as you are reading. The tone Sternberg takes to the possibility of widespread acceptance of neurobiological determinism is of the sky-is-falling variety. With over 40,000 practising neuroscientists, it isn't hard to find juicy quotes dismissing the existence of free will, but it is inaccurate to characterise this as the general attitude of the field.

Sternberg addresses two related problems throughout the book. The first concerns the wide range of influences on our actions that we are unaware of at any given moment. If an action I take is triggered by unconscious sensory input, am I employing free will?

The second, known as the "causal exclusion problem" in philosophy, is the one that really disturbs Sternberg. You, in the grand sense of "you" - your thoughts, emotions, volition and moral reasoning - depend on neuronal processing in your brain. If the firings of any neuron are enough to cause the next neuron to fire, your brain runs all on its own. There is no extra place in which you, as a higher-level, conscious being, can direct proceedings and assert free will. This clockwork determinism undermines any causal role we could have in our own actions - and, by implication, our responsibility for those actions.

So what is Sternberg's answer to the problem of free will? Emergence. This concept can be roughly summed up as "the whole is more than the sum of the parts". Just as temperature emerges from a collection of molecules even though it does not exist at the level of individual molecules, free will, Sternberg argues, emerges from otherwise deterministic processes at the level of neurons."

But what about neural plasticity?