Greg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan (eds), Neuroexistentialism ***

 Neuroexistentialism: meaning, morals, & purpose in the age of neuroscience is a collection of academic papers about "third-wave existentialism."

Existentialisms are responses to recognizable diminishments in the self-image of persons caused by social or political rearrangements or ruptures ... What we call neuroexistentialism is a recent expression of existential anxiety over the nature of persons... [the] clash between the scientific and the humanistic image of persons.

The classic (second-wave) existentialism of Sartre and Camus emphasized the role of human will and rationality in establishing a life's meaning and purpose. Modern neuroscience raises doubts about the existence of an integrated self and about how rational our decision-making is. How can a person heroically imbue their life with meaning if there is no self and our choices are all predetermined by our brain chemistry and past experience?

I am most interested in the challenge of finding meaning in a purposeless universe, but most of the papers in this collection address the question of justifying moral judgments (and criminal justice) in a society where individuals possibly lack responsibility for their (purely determined) actions. In other words, a lot of ink is spilled on the question of whether we have free will. The last paper, by Stephen J. Morse, correctly notes that neuroscience "raises no new challenges in these domains" because we've been imagining determinism since at least Laplace's demon in 1814.

Many of the contributors drifted away from the question of how we might retain free will into laments about the dire social consequences if hard incompatibilists are correct. The two most notable exceptions were the papers from well-known authors of popular science books: 

• Brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga makes an analogy between brain/mind and hardware/software: "Software depends on the hardware to work, but is also in some sense more fundamental in that it is what delivers function. So what causes what? Nothing is mysterious here, but using the language of 'cause' seems to muddle it."
  
  
• Physicist Sean Carroll looks to quantum mechanics, not as the locus for the indeterminacy necessary for free will to sneak in (in fact, he explicitly rejects this approach) but as an example of a purely physical predictive theory whose contributions to the "emergent" layers of reality above it are not understood at all.

Both of these contributors note that we just don't know how entirely materialist elements really work together to construct reality, and both offer ways to think about the "really hard problem."