News Release: Addiction illuminates concept of ‘free will’Hyman looks at process by which humans choose among many goals
Harvard News Office
Whether humans possess free will or whether their actions are determined by something outside their conscious control is one of the most persistent problems in philosophy.
In a lecture May 9, Steven E. Hyman warned his audience that he would not attempt to resolve the issue of free will in an ultimate sense. He did, however, have some fascinating insights regarding a special instance of the free-will dilemma — namely, the neurochemical mechanisms that result in the loss of free will when a person becomes addicted to drugs.
“Drug addiction has been used as a yardstick for reward-based behavior,” said Hyman. “With addiction, there is a narrowing of life focus in that drug-seeking crowds out all other motivations and goals.”
Hyman, University provost and professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, has also served as director of the National Institute of Mental Health and was the first director of Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative. His talk was titled “Compulsion and the Brain: Subverting the Concept of Self-Control” and was given as the first Provostial Lecture, sponsored by the Humanities Center.
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Source: Addiction and Recovery News
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