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

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.

Peter Tse

Peter Ulric Tse is currently chair of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, USA. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1984 with a degree in physics/mathematics. Until 1992 he lived abroad, teaching schoolchildren in Nepal, then studying philosophy at the University of Konstanz. In 1992 he began his studies in cognitive psychology at Harvard University where he received a PhD under the guidance of Patrick Cavanagh and Ken Nakayama. From 1999 until 2001 he was a post-doc in the monkey fMRI lab of Nikos Logothetis at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen. He has been a professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth since 2001.