Back to Economic Basics: Understanding the role of human action
Lately I’ve landed in discussions about whether there is such a thing as human action. I’m not kidding. Some educated people have their doubts.
Just to be clear from the outset, human action, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out, is purposeful behavior, as opposed to the reflex that occurs when the patellar tendon is struck. Someone decides he wants to accomplish an end (anything from sitting down to hunting quarks). He selects means that he believes have a good chance of achieving the end. Then he uses the means to try to achieve the end. “Action is will put into operation,” Mises wrote.
In other words, as Thomas Szasz reminds us, people’s actions have reasons, not causes. A person sits down because he wants to rest or read or watch television. He didn’t have to do it. Even if a gunman orders him to sit down, he still chooses it (rather than being shot; but this doesn’t exonerate the gunman). In contrast, a billiard ball moves because it is hit by another. Given the conditions, it had to move. It can’t decide not to move this time because it’s tired.
Nevertheless, pop science today regards human beings as highly complex billiard balls rather than as persons.
Neurochemical Processes
In my recent discussions, my interlocutors stated that modern neuroscience has shown, or undoubtedly will soon show, that what we call “the mind” and all its activities are really just neurochemical processes. Notice what this means. The brain is a physical organ. As such, it follows the laws of biology, chemistry, physics, quantum physics, and of any other hard science we have yet to discover. The brain cannot make choices. It is not free. So when someone says that mind is nothing but brain, he is saying that the things we associate with mind—choosing, preferring, thinking—aren’t real.
In philosophy this is called epiphenomenalism. It’s hardly a modern view. Thomas Henry Huxley used the term in 1874 in his paper “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata.” In his view, consciousness is thought to be an “epiphenomenon of molecular changes in the brain and hence all mental events to be the effects of physical events but never the causes of either physical or other mental events.” I guess Huxley never had a thought that made him laugh or set his heart pounding.