Journal of Philosophical Investigations

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی- پژوهشی

نویسنده

Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross

چکیده

Human “free will” has been made problematic by several recent arguments against mental causation, the unity of the I or “self,” and the possibility that conscious decision-making could be temporally prior to action. This paper suggests a pathway through this thicket for free will or self-determination. Doing so requires an account of mind as an emergent process in the context of animal psychology and mental causation. Consciousness, a palpable but theoretically more obscure property of some minds, is likely to derive from complex animals’ real-time monitoring of internal state in relation to environment. Following Antonio Damasio, human mind appears to add to nonhuman “core consciousness” an additional narrative “self-consciousness.” The neurological argument against free will, most famously from Benjamin Libet, can be avoided as long as “free will” means, not an impossible event devoid of prior causation, but an occasional causal role played by narrative self-consciousness in behavioral determination. There is no necessary incompatibility between the scientific and evolutionary exploration of mind and consciousness and the uniquely self-determining capabilities of human mentality which are based on the former.

کلیدواژه‌ها

عنوان مقاله [English]

Self-, Social-, or Neural-Determination?

نویسنده [English]

  • Lawrence Cahoone

Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross

چکیده [English]

Human “free will” has been made problematic by several recent arguments against mental causation, the unity of the I or “self,” and the possibility that conscious decision-making could be temporally prior to action. This paper suggests a pathway through this thicket for free will or self-determination. Doing so requires an account of mind as an emergent process in the context of animal psychology and mental causation. Consciousness, a palpable but theoretically more obscure property of some minds, is likely to derive from complex animals’ real-time monitoring of internal state in relation to environment. Following Antonio Damasio, human mind appears to add to nonhuman “core consciousness” an additional narrative “self-consciousness.” The neurological argument against free will, most famously from Benjamin Libet, can be avoided as long as “free will” means, not an impossible event devoid of prior causation, but an occasional causal role played by narrative self-consciousness in behavioral determination. There is no necessary incompatibility between the scientific and evolutionary exploration of mind and consciousness and the uniquely self-determining capabilities of human mentality which are based on the former.

کلیدواژه‌ها [English]

  • mind
  • free will
  • self-determination
  • Damasio
  • Libet
  • Dennett
-      Brentano, Franz. 1973. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. trans. A.C. Rancurello, D.B. Terrell, and L. McAlister. .London: Routledge.
-      Burge, Tyler. 2010. Origins of Objectivity. Oxford: Oxford University.
-      Chalmers, David J. 1995. “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2 (3): 200-19.
-      Damasio, Antonio. 2012. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Vintage.
-      Dennett, David. 1997. Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness. New York: Basic.
-      Dennett, David 2004. Freedom Evolves. New York: Penguin.
-      Dretske, Fred. 1988. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
-      Globus, Gordon, G. Maxwell and I. Savodnik. 1967. Consciousness and the Brain: A Scientific and Philosophical Inquiry. New York: Basic Books.
-      Hobson, R. Peter. 2004. The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking. London: Pan Macmillan.
-      Hinton, Geoffrey E. and Tim Shallice. 1991. “Lesioning an Attractor Network: Investigations of Acquired Dyslexia.” Psychological Review. 98, 1: 74-95
-      Humphrey, Nick. 1999. A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness Copernicus.
-      Humphrey, Nick 2006. Seeing Red:  A Study in Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
-      Juarrero, Alicia. 1999. Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. Cambridge: MIT.
-      Libet, Benjamin. 1985. “Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 8: 529-66.
-      Libet, Benjamin 1999. “Do We Have Free Will?” Journal of Consciousness Studies. 6. No.8-9: 47-57
-      Lorenz, Konrad. 1973. Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Janovich.
-      Mayr, Ernst. 1974. “Teleological and Teleonomic: A New Analysis,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 14, pp.91-117.
-      Mead, George Herbert. 1962. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Vol.I. Ed. Charles Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago.
-      Nagel, Thomas. “What is it Like to be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review LXXXIII 4 (October 1974): 435-50.
-      Panksepp, Jaak. 2005. “Affective Consciousness: Core Emotional Feelings in Animals and Humans,” Consciousness and Cognition 14:30-80.
-      Searle, John. 1992. The Rediscovery of Mind. Cambridge: Bradford.
-      Sperry, R.W. 1976. “Mental Phenomena as Causal Determinants in Brain Function.” In Globus et al. 1976. pp. 163-77.
-      Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
-      Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
-      Tomasello, Michael and Josep Call. 1997. Primate Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University.
-      Velmans, Max. “Preconscious Free Will.” Journal of Consciousness Studies. (10) 12: 42-61.
-      Warnock, Mary. 1978. Imagination. Berkeley: University of California.
-      Wimsatt, William. 1976. “Reductionism, Levels of Organization, and the Mind-Body Problem.” in Globus et al. pp.199-267.
-      Wimsatt, William 2007. Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. Cambridge: Harvard.
CAPTCHA Image