Volition in the Lens of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind

What does it truly mean to will something? When you decide to reach for a glass of water, resist an impulse, or commit to a life-changing choice, something more than mere reflex is happening. That something is volition – the cognitive process by which an agent commits to a course of action. Far from being a settled question, volition sits at the intersection of consciousness, causation, and the nature of the mind itself. Contemporary philosophy of mind has reopened this ancient debate with new tools: functionalist theory, materialist neuroscience, and the provocative emergence of artificial intelligence. What follows is an examination of volition through these modern lenses.

Defining volition: more than just “choosing” 🔗

Volition, also known as will or conation, is the cognitive process by which an individual decides on and commits to a particular course of action. It is defined as purposive striving and is considered one of the primary human psychological functions, alongside affect, motivation, and cognition. Crucially, volition is distinct from motivation. The psychologist Narziß Ach drew a boundary between the two: motivation is the desire or drive toward a goal, while volition is what kicks in when that desire crosses a threshold and becomes commitment to action. In short, motivation asks why; volition enacts the how and when.

It is also worth distinguishing between types of volitional states. When a person makes up their mind to do something, that settled state is called immanent volition. When they put forth a particular act of choice, that is called emanant or executive volition. When that settled state governs a series of actions, it becomes predominant volition. These distinctions reveal that volition is not a single event but a layered, ongoing process embedded in every aspect of deliberate human life.

The mind-body problem and where volition fits in 🔗

To understand volition philosophically, you need to grapple with the mind-body problem – one of philosophy’s most enduring puzzles. The problem centers on understanding how immaterial thoughts and feelings can interact with the material world, or whether they are ultimately physical phenomena. René Descartes famously held that mind and body are separate substances, which immediately raises an awkward question: if the mind is non-physical, how does it move the body? Ordinary experience demonstrates that volitions of the mind cause physical movements in the body, and that states of the body produce mental effects in return. Descartes never satisfactorily resolved this interaction problem.

Materialism dissolves the puzzle by insisting that the mind is entirely physical – there is only one kind of substance, and mental states are simply brain states. But this raises a new difficulty: if everything is physically determined, does volition – the sense of genuine choice – survive? This is where the tension between determinism and free will enters the conversation around volition most sharply.

Functionalism: volition without a fixed address 🔗

The most influential contemporary solution to the mind-body problem, at least within analytic philosophy, is functionalism. Functionalism is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. Introduced and developed in the 1960s largely through the work of Hilary Putnam, functionalism offered a way to be materialist about the mind without being crudely reductive.

The key insight is multiple realizability. Functionalism is not vulnerable to the objection that types of mental states are multiply realizable – realizable in different physical systems – because the former does not require mental states to map onto a single type of neural substrate. A volitional state, on this view, is defined not by which neurons fire, but by its causal role: it is the kind of state that takes in deliberation, weighs alternatives, and issues in action. Whether that role is realized in human neurons, animal brains, or theoretically in silicon, the functional description remains the same.

In contemporary theories applied to the mind, the functions in question are usually taken to be those that mediate between stimulus inputs and behavioral outputs. Applied to volition, this means that a volitional state is whatever internal state mediates between an agent’s desires and values on one side, and their deliberate actions on the other. This is a liberating framework – it allows philosophers to study volition scientifically and comparatively, across species and across types of systems, without being trapped by questions about the specific biological substrate.

Functionalism and materialism: uneasy allies 🔗

Though functionalism is officially neutral between materialism and dualism, it has been particularly attractive to materialists, since it explains how mental states can be causally real without being mysterious non-physical entities. For the functionalist materialist, volition is a real causal force in the world – not an epiphenomenon, not an illusion – but also not something that floats free of the physical brain. It is a pattern of causal organization, physically implemented and scientifically tractable.

This position neatly sidesteps the old Cartesian anxiety. With functionalism, the how-possible question about interaction between the mental and material simply does not arise, any more than it would for the software-hardware interaction in computers. The mind is to the brain roughly as software is to hardware – not identical to it, but not separate from it either. Volition, on this account, is a software-level process running on biological hardware.

Ayn Rand’s perspective: volition as a metaphysical fact 🔗

While functionalism approaches volition through cognitive architecture, Ayn Rand approached it through metaphysics and ethics. For Rand, the capacity for choice is not simply one interesting feature of minds – it is the defining fact of human existence. She describes man as “a being of volitional consciousness” whose only freedom is the mind’s freedom to think or not – the choice that controls all other choices and determines one’s life and character.

Within her philosophy of Objectivism, Rand locates the primary act of volition not in physical action but in the decision to focus one’s consciousness. Rand recognizes that physical action presupposes prior mental activity – one must first identify possible courses of action and what one wants to achieve. Hence, the primary choice, without which all other choices are impossible, is the choice to focus one’s consciousness. This makes the Objectivist account of volition uniquely epistemological: the will is fundamentally the will to think clearly and attentively, rather than to evade reality.

Rand’s account also grounds volition in the concept of life itself. Free will is, for Rand, the foundation of ethics: if man has no free choice in his actions, then he does not need a moral code of how to choose from a range of alternatives. Volition is what makes moral responsibility possible, and moral responsibility is what makes human life – as opposed to mere animal existence – coherent. In this sense, Rand’s view places volition at the center not just of psychology but of ethics, meaning, and survival.

Rand explicitly rejected determinism. Her Objectivist framework maintains that the individual, through the act of volition, is the ultimate source of their own choices – not a passive product of biological or social forces. This positions her against both hard determinism and compatibilism, insisting that genuine freedom of thought is the bedrock of human agency. According to Rand, attaining knowledge beyond what is given by perception requires both volition – the exercise of free will – and performing a specific method of validation by observation, concept-formation, and reasoning.

The ontological status of volition: what kind of thing is it? 🔗

The most technically demanding question in contemporary philosophy of mind regarding volition is its ontological status – what kind of thing volition actually is. Is it a discrete mental event? A process? A property? And does it belong exclusively to conscious beings?

The volitional theory of action, revived since the 1970s after decades of neglect following Gilbert Ryle’s influential critique, treats volitions as special kinds of mental actions – the bridge between deliberation, decision, and intentional bodily movement. On this view, a volition is a mental act that an agent consciously performs, not merely a causal event that happens to them. Critics like Ryle had argued that positing volitions leads to an infinite regress: if an action requires a volition, does the volition itself require a further volition, and so on? Defenders of volitional theory, however, argue that this objection rests on a misunderstanding: volitions are not themselves actions requiring prior acts of will, but the very form that intentional action takes at the mental level.

A more recent and empirically grounded approach comes from research on volition in both biological organisms and artificial systems. From the third-person perspective, human volitional behaviour is clearly on a continuum with volitional behaviour in other species. Many creatures, including invertebrates, behave in ways that are not totally constrained by the immediate environment – behaviour generated “from inside.” Humans differ primarily in the greater flexibility of their endogenously generated behaviour, especially in relation to novelty. This continuity across species challenges the idea that volition is an all-or-nothing property belonging uniquely to rational humans.

Volition as a graded property 🔗

This biological continuity maps directly onto a key functionalist insight: volition is not binary but graded. George Chadderdon’s influential work in Adaptive Behavior proposes that volition is a functional, aggregate property of certain physical systems, defined as the capacity for adaptive decision-making. On this account, volition can be measured on an ordinal scale – systems can be ranked according to their degree of volitional endowment rather than simply classified as volitional or not. A simple organism responding to its environment has a lower degree of volition than a human deliberating over a moral dilemma, but both possess the same fundamental capacity: internally-driven, goal-directed adaptive behavior.

This graded view has significant implications for how we think about artificial systems. Volition can exist without self-awareness – it is the decision-making process and execution of actions that constitute volition, not necessarily the felt sense of choosing. This opens the door to attributing at least primitive forms of volition to sufficiently adaptive AI systems, though the question of whether machine goal-pursuit constitutes genuine volition or sophisticated mimicry remains hotly contested. As the Communications of the ACM notes, the crux of the challenge is whether a computing system can genuinely want something, or whether it merely executes processes that are formally described using volitional language.

Volition, agency, and the first-person perspective 🔗

There is an important tension in how volition looks depending on your perspective. From the first-person view, our experience of volitional behaviour includes a vivid sense of agency – we feel that, through our intentions, we can cause things to happen and choose between different actions. Yet this felt sense is not infallible. Experiments in psychology and neuroscience have shown that our experience of initiating an action can lag behind the neural events that actually trigger it, raising uncomfortable questions about how accurately we perceive our own volitional processes.

One response to this challenge, drawing on Epicurus, reframes volition around responsibility rather than metaphysical freedom. Research on volition proves more tractable when approached in terms of responsibility rather than free will – the feeling that it was “us ourselves” rather than something else that caused the action, combined with the sense that we could have chosen otherwise. This pragmatic reframing allows philosophers and scientists to study volition without getting entangled in unresolvable debates about determinism, while preserving what matters most about volition for moral and social life: the attribution of agency and accountability.

For an experience to be considered voluntary, it must be accompanied by a “conscious feeling of volition” – the belief that one is acting deliberately, with personal choices in mind, while considering possible options, and with the sense that things “could have been otherwise.” This phenomenological criterion is what distinguishes voluntary action from reflex, habit, or compulsion – and it remains central to how both philosophy and law think about moral responsibility.

Bringing it together: what volition is (and isn’t) 🔗

Contemporary philosophy of mind converges on several important conclusions about volition. First, it is not a ghostly faculty floating above the brain, as Descartes implied, nor is it a mere illusion generated by deterministic neural processes, as some hard materialists have argued. Instead, it is a real causal process – a form of adaptive, internally-driven decision-making – that is implemented in physical systems and can, in principle, vary in degree across different organisms and artificial systems.

Second, the functionalist-materialist framework dissolves the old mind-body dichotomy by treating volition as a functional role rather than a special substance. What makes something a volitional act is not what it is made of, but what it does: it mediates between an agent’s desires, values, and beliefs, on one hand, and deliberate action on the other.

Third, Ayn Rand’s Objectivist contribution reminds us that volition is not merely a theoretical puzzle but a lived existential reality. The choice to think – to focus one’s consciousness rather than drift – is, for Rand, the primary act of will from which all human agency flows. This insight bridges the gap between abstract philosophy of mind and the concrete moral demands of human life.

Finally, the graded, spectrum-based ontology of volition – supported by both neuroscience and the study of adaptive behavior – suggests that the question “does X have volition?” may be less useful than “how much, and of what kind?” This reframing is especially consequential as artificial systems grow more sophisticated, forcing philosophers, engineers, and ethicists to think carefully about what adaptive decision-making really is, and when – if ever – it becomes something we should call genuine will.

What do you think? If volition is a graded property distributed across biological organisms and artificial systems on a spectrum, does this change how we should think about moral responsibility – and could a sufficiently sophisticated AI ever bear it? And if the primary act of will is, as Rand argues, the choice to focus one’s consciousness rather than evade reality, what does that mean for the countless decisions we make on autopilot every day?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volition_(psychology)
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3. https://pimaopen.pressbooks.pub/introphilosophy/chapter/4-1-mind-and-body/
4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/
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10. https://www.atlassociety.org/post/the-nature-of-free-will
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12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism
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15. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1059712308090535
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17. https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/whence-machine-volition/
18. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/volition