Panagiotis Kormas

During the Hellenistic period the value of philosophical systems was to be judged by a meta-philosophical criterion, i.e., by their ability to lead practitioners towards the pursuit of good or happiness, albeit treating pain and sorrow, since all human beings are supposed to be able to reach the state of happiness via their own efforts. By emphasizing the role of thoughts or judgments, Stoics placed cognition in the intermediate phase between an event and the reaction that somebody has due to the event, rendering it both the cause and the cure of emotional disorders. This viewpoint is also fundamental in modern cognitive psychotherapy, although the parallelism goes beyond theory to the practical character in both approaches. Rational and non-rational aspects of human psychology cannot be isolated from each other, allowing thus adults to actively engage in their moral development by altering their beliefs. In this frame, cognitive distancing, the practice of awareness, attention to the present moment, and the Socratic dialogue become valuable tools in structuring emotional self-regulation.

Neuroplasticity, the capacity of the brain to induce changes in response to environmental stimuli, entails a continuous rearrangement of the neural network through a complex interaction between genetics and environment. Within this process, the plastic brain uses its internal representations to predict future conditions and proactively proceed to actions. It can be said that plasticity demands a rethinking of the concept of determinism as the process of coming-to-be is directly related to modifications produced by experience. Pure determinism and complete randomness are the two ends of a spectrum of positions relevant to the debate of the existence of free will. However, none conceptually supports free decision-making. How brain activity and the conscious experience of volition are related to one another has been a matter of significant research, with a plethora of findings indicating that early brain signals precede the self-reported time of the decision to act. The meaning of these findings, however, has been debated at both a theoretical and empirical level and the controversy is still ongoing. Consciousness is intertwined with free will along the dimension of time as it would otherwise be purposeless, taking place right at the next moment. Electrical activity of the brain is a measure of neurophysiological function and contributes to the understanding of processes that underlie high-order cognitive functions. A multidisciplinary approach in the study of free will could be designed in a way that philosophical concepts are connected to neural correlates by psychologically functionalizing them in terms of cognitive abilities. Such abilities are at the margins of conscious and nonconscious sensory information and are closely linked to brain processes of executive functions like attentional control and working memory.