Professor Dr. rer. nat. Lutz Jäncke on neuropsychological phenomena: Is there a free will?

Lecture of the Europäische Akademie and the Ahrweiler Savings Bank (Kreissparkasse Ahrweiler):  

Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, 23. November 2009. – This year’s Lecture of the Kreissparkasse 2009 organised by the Europäische Akademie in cooperation with the Kreissparkasse Ahrweiler dealt with the human brain and its possibilities of behavioural control. Professor Dr. rer. nat. Lutz Jäncke from the Institute for Psychology, Universität Zürich, stated that the possibilities of control by the human brain were used unconsciously in most cases and are guided by learned information. Apart from latest neuro-scientific findings he also presented cognition-psychological findings and explained their importance for human decision-making.

Thus, Jäncke stated that the unprofessional philosophical view of the world was dominated by a more or less absolute concept of reason. Either one is “reasonable” or not. However, the psychological and neuro-scientific research reveals that in respect of the human decision-making there are hardly any constant and, thus, absolute values. Therefore, very often our perceptions and decision-findings are relative and determined or at least influenced by unconscious processes.

In connection with this interactive structure of unconscious, “unreasonable” and subjective processes two other phenomena which would be regarded as non-existent by many representatives of neuro-scientific research are of great importance, for example free will and consciousness, Jäncke said. As it were, the consciousness and the free will are the “last control bodies” which the human being has in order to find his way, if necessary, in the “bushwhack of unreasonableness and subjectivity”. In his lecture Jäncke presented the partly strange phenomena demonstrating the unreasonableness of the human being and set them in relation with evolutionary principles.

For the first time the 16th Lecture of the Kreissparkasse took place in the Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen. The subsequent discussion was moderated by Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Carl Friedrich Gethmann, the director of the Europäische Akademie GmbH.