Have you ever seen the movie Fallen where the demon keeps switching bodies? So I believe we have a will, but to agree with what you say here I definitely think that physical composition pulls & pushes at us in certain ways that can most definitely “Test” our will. That there’s an undertow of emotions underneath the surface of consciousness. If we could hop from body to body like in Fallen it would still be “Us” each time, however we would be subject to the mood swings/stresses/carefreeness of each body we hopped into. It wouldn’t be the same exact result for each body like in that movie.
It's a nice conceit, but that's not how it works - the evidence overwhelmingly tells us that 'you' (awareness, consciousness, sense of self, memories, preferences, opinions, morals, etc.) are all encoded in and enacted by
your brain in your body. Every facet of those elements can be altered by modifying the activity of specific parts of the brain. Consciousness itself can be switched off and back on without you even noticing.
It's just about possible that you might have the kind of experience you describe if your brain was transplanted to a different body.
I even think that an optimistic will could to a certain extent heal that body over time (look at the health of happy people vs sad people, all things being equal). You improve your health if you force yourself to adopt better moods.
There's certainly some evidence that cultivating a positive mood is generally beneficial to health - it reduces stress, makes you more likely to exercise and lead a healthier and more social life. But there's no good evidence I know of that it improves recovery or survival from serious disease cancers, heart disease, and so-on, although it might make you feel a bit better.
I recently saw but didn’t comment on a post that I didn’t agree with, the poster pretty much excused someone for going on a killing spree because he undeniably suffered a certain brain injury that is known to incline people towards violent behavior. I can not give that guy a pass, if your will hopped into his body you might just live out your days being miserable and rude to people. Or maybe you commit suicide. I’ve known many mentally ill people and there’s variation on how they allow it to control them.
The vagueness and ill-definition of social conveniences such as personal responsibility, and particularly moral responsibility, makes for tricky problems where edge-cases are concerned. Many people have obsessive and/or compulsive thoughts and behaviours that make their lives a misery but that they are unable to control, and brain injury or disease can lead to some very strange problems such as
Tourette syndrome,
alien hand syndrome,
monothematic delusions, paralysis denial,
hemispatial neglect, and so-on.
Society in general (with a few exceptions), and the law in particular, are not well prepared for the kind of edge-cases that can occur. It's usually thought that if an action is deemed voluntary, then the individual is responsible (implying culpability) and if not, they are not responsible - unless they were aware of reasonable steps they could take to avoid it.
One surprising case was the
Kenneth Parks case of criminal automatism (he killed while sleepwalking and was aquitted due to reasonable doubt that he acted voluntarily). A more troubling case was
Charles Whitman (the Texas tower shooter), who sought medical help for violent urges prior to his killing spree, and left a suicide note describing his confusion over those feelings, and asking for an autopsy to check his brain in case what he was suffering could be prevented in future. The autopsy found a brain tumour in an area associated with emotions and impulse control. We'll never know, but if the tumour was the reason, or part of the reason, for his homicidal urges, were they voluntary? was he culpable?
These considerations can apply for positive actions too - people may take action in the heat of the moment that saves someone's life, and are often praised for their bravery - but many of them say that they acted without thought, instinctively, on the spur of the moment; that if they'd thought about it they probably wouldn't have done it. Does this count as voluntary or involuntary?
Every individual is physically responsible for what they do, but the question of whether they are culpable or praiseworthy, whether they act voluntarily or involuntarily is not so clear, partly because the concept of 'voluntary' itself depends on ill-defined abstractions like 'will', which become nebulous under close scientific examination.
Ahh ok, interesting. I have a decent bit of material on neuroscience and biochemistry that I have been dragging my feet on and hopefully I will get to it soon. I definitely wanna get a better feel for the technical details and terminology.
I recommend Antonio Damasio's book '
Self Comes to Mind' for an overview of how consciousness and the self arise in the brain, and Daniel Kahneman's '
Thinking, Fast and Slow' for an entertaining look at how we think and the biases, shortcuts, and heuristics we're generally unaware of.
