section_path: Western philosophy/Other views/Free will and views of causality
section_name: Free will and views of causality
paragraph_text: Free will and views of causality
  
  In 1739, David Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature approached free will via the notion of causality. It was his position that causality was a mental construct used to explain the repeated association of events, and that one must examine more closely the relation between things regularly succeeding one another (descriptions of regularity in nature) and things that result in other things (things that cause or necessitate other things). According to Hume, 'causation' is on weak grounds: "Once we realise that 'A must bring about B' is tantamount merely to 'Due to their constant conjunction, we are psychologically certain that B will follow A,' then we are left with a very weak notion of necessity."
  
  This empiricist view was often denied by trying to prove the so-called apriority of causal law (i.e. that it precedes all experience and is rooted in the construction of the perceivable world):
  
  In the 1780s Immanuel Kant suggested at a minimum our decision processes with moral implications lie outside the reach of everyday causality, and lie outside the rules governing material objects. "There is a sharp difference between moral judgments and judgments of fact... Moral judgments... must be a priori judgments."
  
  Freeman introduces what he calls "circular causality" to "allow for the contribution of self-organizing dynamics", the "formation of macroscopic population dynamics that shapes the patterns of activity of the contributing individuals", applicable to "interactions between neurons and neural masses... and between the behaving animal and its environment". In this view, mind and neurological functions are tightly coupled in a situation where feedback between collective actions (mind) and individual subsystems (for example, neurons and their synapses) jointly decide upon the behaviour of both.