On Determinism and Freedom 9781474469296

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On Determinism and Freedom

Other books by Ted Honderich published by Edinburgh University Press After the Terror (2002; paperback 2003) On Political Means and Social Ends (2003) On Consciousness (2004)

On Determinism and Freedom

Ted Honderich

Edinburgh University Press


C Ted Honderich, 2005

Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11/13 Palatino and Futura by TechBooks India, and printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1841 4 (hardback) The right of Ted Honderich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

1

Introduction

1

What Effects Are

8

1 2 3 4 5 2

4

10 13 20 24 27

Determinism and its Consequences for Us

32

1 2

34

Mind and Brain, Actions Compatibilism and Incompatibilism, and Moral Responsibility Real Consequences of Determinism

39 44

The Will, Reasons, Determinism’s Incoherence

49

1 2 3 4

51 53 57 63

3 3

Causes, Conditions, Causal Circumstances Causal Circumstances as Necessitating What Necessitation Comes To Objections Other Necessary Connections, Laws, Dispositions

Doctrines Summarized Rational as against Natural Powers Reasons Compatibilism, Connected Freedoms, Punishment

Is the Mind Ahead of the Brain? Behind It?

71

1 2 3 4 5

73 75 82 85 88

Some Experimental Findings about Experiences Statements of a Hypothesis Inconsistency, Delay-and-Antedating Mind and Brain, Free Will, a Conjecture, Contradiction The Later Research

vi 5

Contents Mind the Guff 1 2 3 4

6

7

Consciousness as Biological Subjectivity on Two Levels Etc. The Consciousness of Deciding and Acting Gaps Again, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism Free Will with Neural Indeterminism

96 97 103 109 113

Determinism True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism False, Another Problem

118

1 2 3 4

Quantum Theory as Interpreted Origination and the Philosophy of Mind Consequence Argument, Hierarchy Argument Attitudinism

119 126 129 133

After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism – and Attitudinism?

138

1 2 3 4

Experience, Quantum Theory, Determinism Compatibilism, Incompatibilism and Attitudinism One Last Time Attitudinism and Affirmation Trouble, and Two Ideas

140 144 147 149

Acknowledgements

156

Index

159

To John and Kiaran

Introduction

David Hume, to me and to others the greatest of philosophers in the English language, said in the 18th Century that there was no great problem, indeed hardly a problem at all, about determinism and freedom. In particular there was no problem about how they could go together. . . . to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science; it will not require many words to prove that all mankind have ever agreed in the doctrine of liberty as well as in that of necessity, and that the whole dispute . . . has been hitherto has merely verbal.1 He had been preceded by Thomas Hobbes of the 17th Century, also in the pantheon of philosophy and an earlier founder of the same reconciling tradition of thinking on determinism and freedom. Hobbes was as definite in his conviction that the problem could be put to rest early. For . . . what liberty is there can no other proof be offered but every man’s own experience, by reflection on himself, and remembering what he useth in his mind, that is, what he himself meaneth when he saith an action . . . is free.2 The same real or seeming confidence of these philosophers is to be found in their adversaries and detractors in another philosophical tradition, quite as strong. Bishop Bramhall was resolute and declamatory in his words on the conception of freedom assigned by Thomas Hobbes to us all, and said to be readily available for our inspection.

2

On Determinism and Freedom

Judge then what a pretty kind of liberty it is which is maintained by T.H., such a liberty as in little children before they have the use of reason, before they can consult or deliberate of anything. Is not this a childish liberty, and such a liberty as in brute beasts, as bees and spiders . . . ? Is not this a ridiculous liberty? . . . T.H. appeals to every man’s experience. I am contented. Let everyone reflect upon himself . . . 3 Immanuel Kant, greatest of German philosophers, was not so confident as the bishop, and did not agree with him in rejecting determinism. He did not share anybody’s idea that determinism and freedom make up a simple problem with a simple solution. Still, he was like Hume, Hobbes and Bramhall in confidence. He was confident in his judgement against Hume and Hobbes in their method of reconciling a man’s freedom with his subjection to necessity or determinism – essentially the idea of taking a free decision or action merely to be one with its cause within the agent. It is a wretched subterfuge to seek an escape in the supposition that the kind of determining grounds of his causality according to natural law agrees with a comparative concept of freedom . . . that of which the determining natural cause is internal to the acting thing.4 John Stuart Mill in his way adopted the subterfuge of the compatibility of determinism and freedom, and thus of determinism and morality, and was not reluctant to use it against a critic. Mr. Alexander draws a woeful picture of the pass which mankind would come to if belief in so-called Necessity became general. All ‘our current moralities’ would come to be regarded ‘as a form of superstition’, all ‘moral ideas as illusions’ . . . A formidable prospect: but Mr. Alexander must not suppose other people’s feelings, about the matters of highest importance to them, are bound up with a certain speculative dogma, and even a certain form of words, because, it seems, his are.5 To come forward to the 20th Century, there was F. H. Bradley, more or less the last of the English metaphysicians and still less inclined to mince words than Mill. He replied to Mill and thus to Hobbes and Hume. Like Bramhall, and in a way Kant, he did not think determinism went nicely with freedom, or that there was any need for doubt in the matter. When you speak to us plainly, you have to say that you really understand a man to be free in no other sense than a falling stone, or than running water. In the one case there is

Introduction

3

as little necessity as in the other, and just as much freedom. And we believe that this is your meaning. But we know that, if these things are so, a man has no more of what we call freedom than a candle or a coprolite, and of that you will never succeed in convincing us. You must persuade us either that the coprolite is responsible, or that we are not responsible; and with all due respect to you, we are going to believe neither.6 Moritz Schlick, a founding father of Vienna’s Logical Positivism, that hammer of metaphysics, religion, moral truth and the like, carried on the refrain that the problem had long been resolved and was in no need of further attention. . . . it is really one of the greatest scandals of philosophy that again and again so much paper and printer’s ink is devoted to this matter, to say nothing of the expenditure of thought, which could have been applied to more important problems (assuming that it would have sufficed for these).7 A little later, in 1943, in his period of confident existentialism, long before his discovery of science, Jean-Paul Sartre was of something like Schlick’s mind in this respect if in few others, as indicated by his first sentence. It is strange that philosophers have been able to argue endlessly about determinism and free-will . . . I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free . . . man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.8 And, to come away from that challenging proposition to this new millennium in which we are, there is the embarrassment expressed, maybe on behalf of Sartre and certainly not on behalf of Hobbes and Hume and their regimental line, by the all-American John Searle. The persistence of the traditional free will problem in philosophy seems to me something of a scandal. After all these centuries of writing about free will, it does not seem to me that we have made very much progress. . . . Why is it that we have made so little advance over our philosophical ancestors?9 One theme of these various philosophers of greater or lesser achievement also has support from many of their fellows who now labour more anonymously in departments and faculties of philosophy in Scotland, England, Ireland, Germany, France, Germany, the United States and elsewhere. Many of them are as confident

4

On Determinism and Freedom

as Hume, Hobbes, Bramhall and the others mentioned in supposing both that the problem of determinism and freedom has easily been solved, and perhaps that the solution is about to be improved by them, and that it is not to the honour of philosophy that this has not already been generally agreed. The problem, some say, is an old chestnut. Someone has said that it is a dead problem. One explanation of the refrain is of course the ordinary habits of dispute of philosophers and others, say the fortifying of the defence of a proposition by the claim of its obviousness. Another habit is the seizing of the intellectual high ground, often more effective than the strategy elsewhere of seizing the moral high ground. Yet another explanation is also a general one, applying as much to other philosophical problems. This is just that the problem of determinism has gone on a long time, and in the same form. It was not new when Hobbes in about 1650 told his readers to pay attention to themselves and their talk. It has been on the syllabus a long time. There is too much of it on the world wide web. Are there special reasons for the attitude to freedom and determinism that its solution is evident and that it is puzzling or worse that this is not evident to more people, notably one’s colleagues? Well, you might conjecture that we or at least some of us certainly need answers to the problem or problems to be clear and defensible, since we already act on them. Judges send men and women to jail, even have them killed, importantly on the basis of some proposition or other about their freedom in their acts. The same proposition has roles in the self-justification of those who have soldiers killed, and others. But forget the judges and politicians – we ourselves do things to other people, daily, on the strength of the same proposition. So philosophy comes up against life, and, you might say, life must win. We must take it that the theory is there, that things are OK. It needs remembering, in the course of looking at this superiority about a problem, that the superiority needs more than qualification. Something else is true. The problem of this book, whatever the discernible attitudes to it, is of absolutely proven grip and size. It is about as capturing and great a problem as the natures of reality, truth and consciousness. It is not much less of a problem than that of what to do – what is right.The proof is that it has demanded and had the interest of more or less all reflective persons for about as long as there has been reflection. It continues to have this interest, which fact is not to be confused with, say, its American popularity on account of American religion.

Introduction

5

This interest could not be not raised by any avoidable and small question. If further explanation is needed, I suspect that part of the story is that the problem has a source in our own uncertain senses of our own lives, not least our senses of our own hopes. The problem is perhaps the most personal of philosophical problems. It needs remembering too that the two traditions in view in the earlier quotations, if not explained there, are alive, kicking, productive, and seemingly not infertile. Maybe the best defence ever written of one of them is a very recent one, Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves.10 See also the profusion of reflections in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, edited by Robert Kane.11 Having said all that, I do indeed share the impatience and more that is a main theme of the words of the quoted philosophers. It is owed in my case, however, not to the conviction that one of the two traditions of solution is correct – all the mentioned philosophers but Kant are in one or the other. Given only the personnel on both sides of the dispute, Hume above all, it has long been clear that neither side would show the other to be uniquely mistaken, confused, imperceptive, dim-witted or the like. My own impatience, indeed my agreement that determinism and freedom has been made into a dead problem, is owed to the conviction that there is no hope of solving it in accordance with either of the two traditions. That is because the problem itself, the problem they face, is mistaken, mistaken in a particular way. What has gone on between philosophers, now boring, has not been a dialogue of the confident deaf so much as a dialogue made hopeless by a false presupposition. It has also been a dialogue that has become institutionalized in philosophy, taken over an agenda, got stuck on the syllabus. That is the sort of thing that can happen mistakenly, as the rest of life readily demonstrates. The wearying declamation you have heard can be escaped. That declamation can be escaped, whatever the capability of philosophy to throw up more in another cause. If this book is right, as I think it is, things can change. There are or anyway may be signs that things are changing. Determinism and freedom, further, may turn out to be a problem of the future, not the past, in more ways than one. It is at least possible that there is work to be done, new thinking, work that is no more than contemplated uncertainly towards the end of this book. That general line of argument, beginning with the falsehood of a presupposition and ending with the future, is the largest but not the only concern of what follows in this book. Another is the stating of

6

On Determinism and Freedom

a determinism clearer and truer to the demands of a general logic than the determinisms of Freud, say, and of some current neurobiologists and the like. Another subject attended to, one from which philosophers have tended to stand further back than seems to me necessary, is the truth of a conceptually adequate determinism. The book does not consist in papers about the philosophers at which we have just glanced, except in one case. It is not historical, but it does have the history glanced at as its background or indeed setting. The papers have been sufficiently revised, cut and added to as to make for an orderly progress in inquiry. They offer the stuff of argument as it exists in lectures, philosophy journals, addresses to conferences, and talks to philosophy societies – internal philosophical life as against its later presentation in books. There is a good deal of truth-seeking by way of hand-to-hand combat in this. If the revising of the papers has made them more conversational, they may not have not lost all their cutting edge. They do not transform what is said in previous books of mine, or recant much of it, but they do add to those books. They are another approach to or rendition of the truth by my lights, another expression of it. They bring to mind again that there is no quick and easy distinction between style and content. Three of the seven papers did not get much attention in the content of either the too-large book A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes (later divided into a pair of paperbacks) or the abbreviation of it, How Free Are You?.12 Another paper, although closer to the content of the books, has not been published before.

Notes 1. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford University Press, 1963, originally published 1748), p. 95. 2. Thomas Hobbes, ‘Of Liberty and Necessity’, in his Works, ed. W. Molesworth (Bohn, 1839–45, originally c. 1650), pp. 275–6. 3. John Bramhall, ‘A Defence of True Liberty’, in The Works of John Bramhall (John Henry Parker, 1844, originally 1676), pp. 651–2. 4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck (University of Chicago Press, 1949, originally 1788), p. 99. 5. John Stuart Mill, Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (University of Toronto Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, originally 1865), p. 457. 6. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 25.

Introduction

7

7. Moritz Schlick, ‘When is a Man Responsible?’, in Problems of Ethics, trans. David Rynin (Prentice Hall, 1939), pp. 143–4. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (Methuen, 1956, originally 1943), p. 433. 9. John Searle, ‘Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology’, Philosophy, 2001, p. 491. 10. Allen Lane, 2003. 11. Oxford University Press, 2002. 12. The first of these was published by Oxford University Press in 1988. The paperbacks are Mind and Brain and The Consequences of Determinism, 1990. The abbreviation How Free Are You?, of which there are many translations, came out in a revised edition from Oxford University Press in 2002, with a new last chapter.

Chapter One

What Effects Are

Theories of determinism are about our decisions and actions being just effects. Theories of freedom are about their being something more or something else than effects. So you can no more make up your mind on determinism and freedom without thinking a little about causes and effects than you can get a hold on horse races without thinking a little about horses. But that is not all, or indeed the main reason for spending some time on causation. The standard idea of an effect is simple enough – an effect is something that was made to happen by something. But, like just about everything else of interest to us, there is complication in the idea and some disagreement about it. You can’t have confidence, can you, in a large use made of such an idea, or enthusiasm for it, or apprehension about it, or reaction against it, unless you have a sense of what is contained in it and of what questions arise about it? Even if all you may need for a conclusion one way or another is a standard idea of something, you need to be confident that a closer look sustains the standard idea. That is the main reason for spending some time on causation. Here is another reason, a little more speculative. Is any reality simple? Is gravity, growth, a machine, consciousness, truth, love, or fairness simple? It is possible to think that real things, maybe as distinct from this or that idea about them, this or that abstraction, are never simple except at bottom. Reality is rich. An idea of causation that made it into something in no need of analysis and reflection would not be an account of the real thing, would it? We can be reassured, if this is right, by a little complexity.

What Effects Are

Do you say that many philosophers and scientists have thought and written about determinism and freedom without getting down to the nitty-gritty of cause and effect? You’re right, they have. Some have thought and written without getting anything clear. It has to be allowed, too, that the persons attracted to the problem of determinism and freedom have included persons of religious, spiritual or feelingfully humanistic turns of mind, not at home with analysis. The problem of determinism and freedom, you can think, needs both turns of mind. Many philosophers, however, have looked at causation. Hume did, and based his famous conclusion about determinism and freedom on what he saw. So did Kant with a more notorious conclusion. Quite a few lesser lights have done the same. Some have played fast and loose with causation and thereby got to conclusions about freedom that suit them. They include contemporaries. Have a look at that best collection of papers, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will.1 Would those philosophers who have been frightened off causation, or not struggled with it, have been as comfortable with their conclusions about determinism and freedom if they had looked into the conceptual sinews or indeed the very stuff of determinism and the motivating concern of ideas of freedom? What follows here in this first paper is a moderately diligent inquiry into causation. It is not aimed at excitement, as some may unkindly say. I say it is not aimed at the excitement of speculation. It is aimed at reassuring you that the material of determinism, a subject-matter in itself, can be got clear. Causation can be got clear partly by not importing into it or imposing onto it something else – say unnecessary metaphysics about possible worlds, or formal logic and its interpretations, or probability theory, or physics and interpretations of it, or pieces of philosophy of science. It is informed by experience of the world we all live in and reflect about, and by most of science, all of science that does not slide over into philosophy, as interpretations of Quantum Theory do. The account is not brand-new, which perhaps should also reassure you. Also, although the paper that follows here is a reworking of others – see the Acknowledgements – and has not been in a book before, its contents will be no news to readers of several books. I include the paper here for the convenience of

9

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On Determinism and Freedom

those who have not been enlightened by those several works – in order to have a full story of determinism and freedom in this book. Also, some things may actually be clearer in this account of causation, maybe because of getting neither too prolonged nor too brief attention.

1

Causes, Conditions, Causal Circumstances

Jamming on the brakes made the car stop. The match lit because it was struck. Sulfonylurea medication causes the pancreas to release more insulin, and that lowers blood sugar. It’s the gates in the transistors that block the current or let it pass. Last night was the effect of our being out of the sun. What are these ordinary facts of cause and effect? What is it for an event to be a cause? What is it for something to be an effect? Or, as we can as well ask, what is it that we believe about the world when we believe that two things are cause and effect? That is really our question, even if we think that in fundamental ways our language gets the world right, that there are what we mean by ‘trees’, ‘bachelors’ and so on. In each of the ordinary facts of cause and effect, if we make an ordinary assumption, we believe that if the first thing hadn’t happened, the second wouldn’t have. If the driver hadn’t stepped on the brakes, the car wouldn’t have stopped that way. Or, to say this differently, if the car stopped that way, in the situation as it was, he jammed on the brakes. In brief, the first thing was required for the occurrence of the second. This is not to say, of course, that this cause or any of mentioned causes would have been required for the thing in question whatever the situation had been. Suppose, to take an unnecessarily fanciful example of the kind to which philosophers of causation are attracted, that someone is being taught to drive by a prudential teacher, whose car has two brake pedals, one for him and one for the pupil. Pupil and teacher step on the brakes simultaneously, with the same force, and the car stops. Neither the teacher’s braking nor the pupil’s braking was required for the stopping. It’s not true of either of them that if it hadn’t happened the car wouldn’t have stopped. Admittedly, one really good book on causation is so committed to the intuitive idea that all causes are required for their effects that it denies that the teacher’s braking caused the stopping and also

What Effects Are

11

denies that the pupil’s braking caused the stopping.2 That is pretty breathtaking. We do believe, don’t we, that each person’s braking caused the stopping? We certainly believe that each person’s putting on the brakes was a cause of the stopping. Neither would be said to be the cause, but this does not make it not a cause at all. It does seem to be a fact for which argument isn’t needed that each action can properly be said to have caused the stopping, or anyway to be a cause of it. If you want an argument, however, there is one. Suppose that the teacher and the pupil had each been seized by the wild idea, quite independently, of making the annoying driver of the car behind run into them, thereby getting him into trouble with the law, and it happened that they put on the brakes simultaneously and with the same force. If we really believed this, we would not hold each of them half-responsible, but just responsible. We would not regard each as like a conspirator whose plot was a success only because another conspirator also did his bit. To say the least, the idea that we would just hold each of the teacher and the pupil responsible hangs together with the idea that each caused the car to stop. Of course we can also say something different of the case, which is that what caused the car to stop was the teacher’s braking and the pupil’s braking taken together. This split event caused the stopping. This is all that is allowed by the mentioned good book. But if we say this, we have a cause of two parts, neither of which was required for the effect. We have an odd cause, one different in kind from any of the ones we began with. This is so since we naturally take it that each of the five causes was wholly required for the effect, or required in all its parts. It is better, I think, just to give up on the idea that all causes are required for their effects. Of course, it is not as each braking in the example was not required in any way at all for the stopping. There is a simple fact about them. What is true of each of them is that it would have been required in the absence of the other one – which other one, however, was present. Each one, as you can say in brief, was alternatively-required for the stopping. To pass on towards a larger matter, it obviously is not only causes that are required or alternatively-required for their effects. In each of the examples we have glanced at, an effect resulted not merely from its cause, but rather from its cause and a number of other conditions. We know the match wouldn’t have lit when it was struck if it was wet, and so on. The cars wouldn’t have stopped that way on a sheet of ice. Let us speak of a set of conditions-and-a-cause as a causal circumstance. The idea in question, of a certain set of things, which

12

On Determinism and Freedom

set ordinarily is required for the occurrence of an effect, is explicit or implicit in ordinary thinking about the world and of course science. There are situations, evidently, where it is reasonable to say that two or more causal circumstances exist. In the case of the car with the two brake pedals, there is the circumstance that includes the teacher’s braking, and the circumstance, which shares some conditions with the first one, that includes the pupil’s braking. We come to the idea, then, that causal circumstances are in a way like causes. They are required or alternatively-required for their effects. Let us then sum up so far. Take C and E to have been just particular events. If C also caused E, then C satisfied one of two requirements. In the situation C was required for the occurrence of E. If the first hadn’t happened, the second wouldn’t have – if the second did happen, so did the first. This is the ordinary case. Or, C and one or more other events occurred. In the situation if all but any one of C and the others had not occurred, that remaining one would have been required for E. Take CC to have been just a set of events including C. If CC was also a causal circumstance for E, then one of two things was true of CC. It was required in the situation for the occurrence of E – the more ordinary case. Or CC and one or more other circumstances occurred, and in the situation if all but any one of CC and the others had not occurred, that remaining set of things would have been required for E. One general caveat cannot be left out. Our conclusions so far about causes and causal circumstances are not to be taken as entirely general. Consider those causes and effects, as they are sometimes called, where the effects are the decisions or choices of persons. The thought that probably there are no parking spaces left, we may say, a little uncomfortably, caused a man to decide to give up the idea of going to the party and to go home to bed instead. It may seem less than clear that we take the thought actually to have been required or alternatively-required. So with any causal circumstance in the case. There are points here about which there can be argument, but let us avoid the argument. Let us simply take our conclusions to apply to cases where we speak of effects that are other than decisions, choices and like mental acts. I shall call these cases of standard cause and effect. In addition to that general caveat, it may be worth announcing something else. As rightly assumed so far, we take causes and other conditions, and effects, to be events, which is to say things that happen in space and time. They may go on for quite a while, indeed a long time. More carefully speaking, what are events? We

What Effects Are

13

can understand events in a certain way, although nothing will depend on exactly this understanding. We can say that all events, and thus causes and other conditions and effects, strictly speaking, are individual properties of ordinary things for a time. That is not to say that the cause of something is a general property, a sort of thing attended to by philosophers in the past. If two things are indistinguishable in some respect, say weight, there is indeed some sense in saying there is one general property in question. But there are also two individual properties. There is the weight of this cup of coffee right here and there is the weight of that one over there. Suppose the two cups of coffee weigh the same – they share a general property. But it’s still not the general property in all of itself, whatever it is, that is holding down the piece of paper under the cup of coffee here, doing that causing. The other cup of coffee isn’t making any contribution in any way, however it gets into the story of a general property. So causes and other conditions are individual properties. Circumstances, strictly speaking, are sets of such properties. Talk of causes and other conditions as events, things, facts and so on, while easy, is loose, and to be translated by the careful into talk of ordinary things having properties. The fact of the loose talk is to be explained by such considerations as that we commonly take the whole for the part, not only with causation – we say the college is on fire when only part of it is. As for the distinction between a cause and other conditions, it seems to be that the cause is the somehow interesting condition of an event. This is because it is a human act, or an abnormal condition, or as yet not clearly known, or interesting for some other reason. Maybe there is more to the distinction than that. Anyway, it is a part of the meaning of the word ‘cause’ and the many related terms and usages, however one may choose to describe meaning and its parts and aspects. It is not that we call one condition a cause because it is different from other conditions in any respect having to do with the more fundamental fact of its being required or alternatively-required for an effect. Conditions are exactly as required or alternatively-required as causes.

2

Causal Circumstances as Necessitating

What we have got so far is that conditions and causal circumstances are required for or alternatively-required for their effects. We now come

14

On Determinism and Freedom

to a larger matter, indeed the largest matter. It is what is most important about causation to determinism. The first of two principal questions here is this one. If jamming on the brakes caused the car to stop that way, or the medication made somebody’s pancreas release more insulin, was there also some causal circumstance such that it’s true in some sense that since it happened, so did the effect? In general, if C caused E, is it somehow the case that if or since CC happened, so did E? That was that. Or, to put it the other way, is the case that if E hadn’t happened, neither would CC have happened? That is, is there some way in which those conditional propositions are true of CC and E? Is that the way the world works? To make use of another abbreviating label, are causal circumstances not only required for their effects but do they also necessitate their occurrence? There is at least a very strong inclination on all our parts to say of the driver’s jamming on the brakes that there was some circumstance or set of conditions such that since it happened, the car stopped that way – if the car hadn’t stopped, it wouldn’t have happened either that the set of conditions occurred as they did. But if there is an inclination to this view of causal circumstances as necessitating, there is also an inclination against it. Certainly it is an inclination of philosophers and other people thinking about their freedom, worried about what may follow if they admit something about effects in general. But isn’t there more to the inclination against saying that causal circumstances guarantee their effects? Let us look at three supposed reasons for the inclination. To say that the circumstance that included the striking of the match and its dryness made the match light is surely to believe that other absolutely identical circumstances will also be followed by lightings. To say that since CC happened so did E, that CC necessitated E, although we have not yet settled the exact meaning of this, and won’t for a while, is surely to say something that entails the existence of a generalization about circumstances like CC and events like E. Indeed, just to take it that C caused E, without further reflection on the word, is surely to take it that there was some circumstance CC such that all circumstances like CC are followed by events like E. So it seems – but it has been denied. It has been said that the statement that C caused E has no such entailment. So there is this fact against the idea that in saying C caused E, we say or commit ourselves to saying that CC necessitated E. You cannot establish the essential premise of the argument, that to say C caused E is not to say something that entails the existence of

What Effects Are

15

a generalization, by pointing out that often we do not actually know the relevant generalization. Philosophers seem to have supposed this, but it doesn’t work. Without knowing exactly what it is, we may nonetheless be committed, logically, to the existence of a generalization.3 Certainly there is no mystery about saying this. We believe that there is a possibility that a certain general truth be discovered and stated, because the world has a certain feature. If I know that it’s the gates in this transistor that in certain situations block the current or let it pass, I can believe there is some general truth about the operations of all such gates. As I say there is no mystery about this sort of thing, which in a way has nothing special to do with causation – I know there is a true generalization that all the adults in Somerset are over a certain height, but I don’t know what it is. Here is another supposed reason, maybe better, for holding that the statement that C caused E doesn’t entail a generalization. Suppose a particular man says that turning the key caused his car to start this morning. He does believe, further, that any such turning of the key, along with other conditions like those that existed this morning, will be followed by a starting of the car. He may be pretty hazy about the conditions, of course, which is to say that he does not really know the generalization that he does take to exist. Now consider a second man, who also says that turning the key caused his car to start this morning. But he is different from our first character. Instead of agreeing about the generalization, he says (1) that sometimes, like this morning, the key is turned, some set of conditions exists, and the effect of these things alone and nothing else is that the car starts, and (2) sometimes the key is turned, an identical set of conditions exists, all of them, and the car doesn’t start. So the second man denies the existence of the relevant generalization. However, we may be told he can still say in a perfectly ordinary way, when the turning of the key is followed by the car’s starting, that the two things were cause and effect. He can say this, we may be told, because he has a belief of a kind attributed to all of us by a redoubtable if Wittgensteinian philosopher – or anyway attributed to all of us save those influenced into error, as she mentions, by Aristotle, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Mill and Russell.4 The man says, when he turns the key and the car starts, that the turning together with the other conditions was ‘enough’ for the starting. Turning the key was its ‘source’, or that from which it ‘arose’ or ‘came’ or ‘derived’.

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On Determinism and Freedom

It needs to be replied, first of all, that these utterances in this context are pretty novel ones, since they must be understood in such a way that they are consistent with the man’s denial of the relevant generalization. To put the matter one way, we are to understand that while the circumstance was ‘enough’ for the starting, an identical car in an identical situation might perfectly well just not have started. Furthermore, this car might not have started. Right then it might not have started. Nothing might have happened at all. Since we have an identical circumstance on some occasion when a car doesn’t start, what does ‘enough’ mean? Remember too that to say that any such circumstance was ‘enough’ is to say something consistent with its being ‘mere hap’ that the car did or didn’t start. Presumably mere hap is mere chance or luck. Maybe some sense can be put on ‘cause’, ‘effect’, ‘enough’, ‘mere hap’ and so on to bring what has been said into some consistency or other. We might make it OK to say that an effect is mere hap. We might dwell on ‘enough’ as it turns up elsewhere, in connection with people rather than the wholly physical world. Certainly we may be said to have ‘enough’ reason to act, and not act. In the end, after all this work, a certain troublesome fact would remain. We would in part be attributing to our second man a denial of the relevant generalization and hence attributing to him a certain belief about the circumstance and the car’s starting. This belief in a certain way makes those two things exactly like another pair of things, say, the rotation of the earth and the car’s starting. What he believes about the type of circumstance including the turning of the key is that sometimes the circumstance obtains and the car starts, and sometimes the circumstance obtains and the car doesn’t start. Similarly, sometimes the earth is rotating and the car starts, and sometimes the earth is rotating and the car doesn’t start. We can conclude with some confidence that whatever he may believe when he says on some occasion that the circumstance caused the car to start, he does not believe what would standardly or ordinarily be meant by saying that. Another philosopher does rather better in much the same endeavour – let us say just the endeavour of undermining the proposition that when something caused something else, there was something that necessitated the effect.5 He tries to show that at least some causes are just required conditions, as we have understood them, and there is no necessitating causal circumstance involved. He asks us to consider an ‘indeterministic’ machine, say an indeterministic gambling machine. Putting in a dollar is a required condition for

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getting $50 dollars back – when $50 does come out, it would not have done so if $1 hadn’t been put in. But of course it often happens, however this is arranged by the casino, that the machine fails to produce $50 when $1 is put in. It is essential to keep in mind that this is not the operation of an ordinary deterministic machine, something to be explained in an ordinary way by how the machine works. We are not in Las Vegas, or Las Vegas as it is. We are not supposing that there is some circumstance, including putting in a dollar, that results in $50 coming out when it does, and there is not a full counterpart of this circumstance on the occasion when $1 is put in and $50 doesn’t come out. Rather, $50 not coming out is a matter of real and pure randomness or chance. So of course is the success of $50 coming out when that does happen. Or, if it is misleading to say that, since the $50 wouldn’t have come out if $1 hadn’t been put in, we can at least say that there was absolutely nothing that made it necessary that the $50 came out when it did. To come to the point, would we say of the latter occasion that putting in the $1 caused the $50 to come out? Our philosopher answers that he thinks we would. Our ordinary causal concept seems to require, he says, that where the $1 is put in, the mechanism operates, and $50 appears, and would not have appeared if a dollar had not been put in, the putting in of the $1 caused the appearance of the $50, despite the fact that given that the $1 was inserted, the $50 might just not have appeared. It is not to be agreed. Let us not slide past the fact that the machine really is indeterministic. It contains a mystery-mechanism, such that everything might have gone on just the same up to some instant, let us say the instant when the $50 appeared, and it might have happened instead at that instant that no $50 appeared at all. It is not that something, anything whatever, would have been different before that instant if the $50 had not appeared. Surely what leads one a little way in the direction of saying, despite this, that putting in $1 caused the $50 to come out is a certain fact: that putting in the $1 was indeed a perfectly ordinary cause of something, and something not a thousand miles away from the $50’s coming out. Putting in the $1 caused it to be possible that $50 come out. If that sounds a touch mysterious, it only sounds so. What we can say, unmysteriously, is that putting in the $1, like every other insertion of $1, turned on the indeterministic mechanism. But that putting in the $1 caused the mechanism to operate is no reason for saying that putting in the $1 caused the $50 to come out.

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On Determinism and Freedom

We can rather say that what there was not, exactly, was a causal link between the operation of the mechanism and the $50 coming out, and hence no causal link between putting in the $1 and the $50 coming out . The temptation to say putting in the $1 caused the $50 to come out can be explained by seeing it for the ordinary cause that it is, and of what it is the cause. A third and last objection to effects being necessary occurrences in some way has to do with something already noticed. Our earlier conclusion about causes being required for effects was not taken to apply to those effects, so-called, that are our decisions, choices and the like. It is now objected that this gives us more reason for saying that the proposition that causal circumstances necessitate their effects is not to be taken as having a general import. The objection is the fact that we do not suppose that decisions and choices are necessitated. We here have evidence, allegedly, of what is true of all our ordinary talk of cause and effect.6 The alternative view, which I have in fact been proposing, is that we may have two ordinary conceptions of causation, one for decisions and the like, and one for other things. This, it is objected, is unlikely. It is more likely that the simpler view is true. Here, simplicity is the way to truth. It seems to me that this argument against effects as necessary occurrences also fails – and that in failing it suggests an argument going in the other direction. Let us have the example more or less as before. Someone reports about a man that what made him decide to give up and go home to bed was the thought that probably there wouldn’t be a parking space. Suppose now, to add a bit of quite proper colour, that our speaker is not entirely delighted with the man’s decision. She is inclined to disapprove of his tendency to fail to get to places to meet her. Suppose too that it is proposed to her, by some wandering philosopher, that she speaks of decisions as effects, as she did a moment ago, and hence that she has no more reason to be critical of their makers than she has reason to be critical of cars that stop when somebody jams on the brakes. If she allows that she does use a causal notion in connection with decisions and the like, she will certainly also maintain that there are two causal notions, two uses of causal language. There is the standard use, which is in place with brake pedals, and there is another use, which we might call the personal use, where the effects are decisions and choices. The essential difference, she says, since it is a fact that we suppose that decisions and the like could have been otherwise than they were, is that effects of this second kind are not

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necessary occurrences. It seems that considerations of this kind are sufficient to defeat the presumption in favour of the simpler view that we have but one idea. Moreover, the objection actually suggests an argument for the conclusion that standard effects are somehow necessary. It is not a wholly independent argument, since it depends a bit on what has just been asserted. It depends, more precisely, on the premise that we take decisions and so on to be in a fundamental way unlike, say, the stopping of cars. If all events without exception are divided into two categories, having to do with what we call their genesis, then decisions and so on go into one category, and stoppings, taken as related to brake pedals, go into the other category, that of standard effects. There is also a second premise, which is that the woman in the example is typical of us all in having a conception of persons as agents, as makers of decisions and the like. What, then, can we conclude about our conception of standard effects? The answer must be that we take standard effects to be necessary occurrences. To repeat the argument, our view of people as somehow free, and our practice of not always using our ordinary conception of causation in speaking of their decisions and the like, confirms a fundamental fact about that ordinary conception. There is one last reflection for our several objectors to the idea that effects somehow happen necessarily. Suppose a thought can be said to cause a decision, and yet not be taken as required for that decision. That is perhaps not much less likely than the proposition about taking decisions as not necessitated. By parity of argument, our objectors are then committed to the view, surely disastrous, that we do not ordinarily take causes to be required conditions either. It seems clear enough that the onus of bringing forward arguments in this matter is on those who deny that causal circumstances somehow necessitate their effects, and that the arguments that have been considered here, which are the main ones, are inadequate. I shall have more to say that is relevant to this dispute, but it will be directed in the first instance to our other principal question – what necessitation comes down to, which we have still not settled. For the moment we can conclude that if a particular event C caused some event E, then a circumstance CC somehow necessitated E. In some sense it was true that if or since CC happened, so did E. We can add something about C itself, by the way. It is that C’s addition to certain other events or whatever necessitated E. That is, in the situation where all the rest of a certain causal circumstance

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On Determinism and Freedom

was on hand, it was true in some sense that if C was then added, E would occur.

3

What Necessitation Comes To

We certainly need to be clearer, however, about exactly what it is for a circumstance to necessitate an event. Conditional utterances, of the form if p then q, plainly can mean different things. We need to be clearer, that is about what it is for something to be a causal circumstance. This fact will be the main fact with respect to something’s being an effect. By way of one preliminary, our ordinary conception of causation is vague with respect to what can be called the extent of a causal circumstance. When do we have one circumstance for an effect and when do we have more than that or more than one? So let us understand, first, that a causal circumstance consists in just what necessitated an effect, no more than that. It had in it no more than something that was needed to necessitate the effect – to make it true, in some sense, that since the circumstance occurred, so did the effect. The point is not the earlier one that each part of a causal circumstance of the ordinary kind is required for the occurrence of the effect. That a causal circumstance was made up of some set of conditions required for its effect is not the same fact as that each part is needed for the necessitation of the effect. We can have the idea of an event that would not have taken place if it had not been preceded by some set of things, but which was not bound to take place as a result of those things. That is, the things were required but not necessitating. Antecedents of choices and decisions come to mind again, and the stock in trade of the objectors we have been considering. The second way in which the extent of a single causal circumstance is fixed is connected to the first and as natural. We shall of course not include within a single circumstance both a particular condition and its own preceding causal circumstance or a part of that circumstance, let alone still earlier circumstances and parts. This limitation can be stated a bit more clearly by way of the idea of a causal chain or causal sequence. The limitation, if we do not try for precision, is that a circumstance contains only one link of any particular causal chain. To come to our main business, how are we to understand the truth that a causal circumstance necessitated its effect, that if or since it happened, the effect happened?

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It is a good idea and not just traditional to begin with the philosophers Hume and Reid.7 Hume said, wonderfully simply, that to say that CC necessitated E is just to say, mainly, that all circumstances like CC are invariably followed by events like E. We earlier took the view that to say CC necessitated E is certainly to be committed to a generalization about other circumstances like CC and events like E. The generalization is entailed. Hume is well-remembered for saying that talk of necessitation just comes to no more than the assertion of the generalization. To say CC necessitated E is to say that all things like the first are followed by things like the second – the two things were an instance of a constant conjunction – an instance of pairs of things that always go together. Certainly it was a strikingly economical idea. The main trouble with it, although not the only one, is the one which can easily be expressed by way of Reid’s famous example of a day and a night. Take yesterday, a specified period of light on a specified surface of the earth, say the Boston face, and last night, a similar period of darkness. It is true that whenever a circumstance like yesterday occurs, an event like last night follows. So on Hume’s idea, yesterday caused last night, which is false. There have been a goodly number of attempts to amend the Humean idea, and so to escape the unhappy consequence that it was yesterday that necessitated and caused last night. It seems to me that all the amendments fail in their purpose, but they will have to go without consideration here. They have been attempted, I think, mainly because there has seemed to be no clear and strong alternative to Hume’s view of necessitation, but only obscure ideas or images of causal powers and mysterious connections. Reid started that. Putting aside yesterday, what was the circumstance that did in fact necessitate the occurrence of last night? What circumstance was it of which we can say that had last night not happened, this circumstance would not have existed either? Well, we can say, more or less explicitly, that the circumstance was a set of conditions having to do mainly with the earth’s Boston face being out of the sun. The circumstance was a set of conditions having to do with the earth’s Boston face being away from the sun for a certain time, and the absence of any light source like that of the sun in the right position for the right time. What we believe of the set of conditions is that it made necessary a certain effect, a period of darkness in Boston and thereabouts. Let us refer to the set simply as the solar conditions. The solar conditions and last night certainly comprise an instance of a constant conjunction. Similarly, as we know, yesterday and last

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On Determinism and Freedom

night are such an instance. What is different about the connection between the solar conditions and last night? In saying that the solar conditions and not yesterday made last night necessary, to what is it that we refer? To what fact of the world do we refer in saying that if last night hadn’t happened, then the solar conditions wouldn’t have existed either? Or, better, that since or given that the solar conditions happened, last night happened? The answer, fundamentally, is simple enough. Yesterday and the solar conditions were very different. If certain events had taken place in the universe, along with yesterday, last night would not have happened. But, no matter what other events were taking place, along with the solar conditions, last night would still have happened. That is what we mean, more precisely, by saying that since the solar conditions happened, last night happened, or that the solar conditions made last night necessary. To expand on this a little, we can readily conceive of certain possible events such that if they had come about, yesterday but not last night would have come off. A great new light source in the right place at the right time would have done the trick. So would an end to the earth’s rotation at the right time. And so on. It is important that these imagined event-changes are logically consistent with the occurrence of yesterday. That is, what we have is that we can entertain speculations that do not contradict the proposition that yesterday, a period of light, did occur. Imagining changes that contradicted that proposition we are thinking about would be pointless. If we turn to the actual circumstance with respect to last night, the solar conditions, we find something different. We cannot, and this is the crux, conceive of any change in events or conditions, consistent with the existence of the solar conditions, such that last night would not have happened. We can, of course, enter into suppositions about changes that would have prevented the occurrence of last night, say a great new light source. Such changes, however, would have been inconsistent with the existing of our solar conditions. Our conclusion, then, is that to allow that something was made necessary by a circumstance is to allow that no thing but the circumstance mattered. The universe might have been different at that time in any way, so long as the circumstance was unimpaired. To think that last night was the effect of a certain circumstance is to grant that last night would still have happened, given that circumstance, whatever events had accompanied the circumstance. This, although it has generally been unnoticed by many philosophers, is the natural understanding of the statement that the conditions

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necessitated last night, or that since the conditions existed, last night happened. John Stuart Mill had the right idea, although he did not make it explicit, took it too far, and seems also to have had conflicting ideas. Necessity, he wrote, is not merely a matter of invariable connection but of ‘unconditionalness’. The necessary occurrence of an effect, given a causal circumstance for it, is a matter of unconditionalness. It is not conditional on anything else. ‘That which is necessary, that which must be, means that which will be, whatever supposition we make in regard to all other things.’8 The fundamental argument for this view of necessitation to which we have come is that it fits the facts. It fits what we actually take to be causal circumstances and effects, and only those. Still, there are objections to be considered, and there are also further arguments for the view. The further arguments rise out of the objections. Before turning to these things, and hence to more about our Boston night, let us attempt a somewhat more general and explicit statement of the view to which we have come. Suppose a particular circumstance CC caused an event E in the ordinary way. That is to say, of course, that no other causal circumstance for E also existed. Then it was true that given CC, whatever other events were accompanying it, E would still have followed, everything in CC being essential to this. Or, to put it differently, given that E occurred, it would still have been preceded by CC no matter what other events accompanied CC – save, of course, what has already been ruled out in this case, some other causal circumstance for E. That gives the general idea but is not quite right as it stands. It is the result of thinking of the last causal circumstance for an effect. But, as remarked before, there are causal chains or causal sequences. A simple one consists in causal circumstances for each of the conditions in a later causal circumstance, and then the effect of that later causal circumstance. If we now think of the set of earlier circumstances, it was like the later circumstance in necessitating the effect. Each of them did that. So we need to say of an ordinary causal circumstance that given that it occurred, whatever other events accompanied it or its links with its effect, the effect still occurred. We could go further, complicate things in various ways in order to rule out various misconceptions. What we have might be expanded into something more general, and hence also cover extraordinary situations, where each one of a number of existing circumstances for an effect is what we called alternatively-necessary. The statement just

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On Determinism and Freedom

given could also be improved in one part. That part, for easier grasping, does of course involve a kind of circularity. There is mention of a causal circumstance – another causal circumstance – turning up in what is in fact a definition of a causal circumstance. It can be got rid of easily enough. Rather than refer to ‘some other causal circumstance for E’ we can speak of a circumstance that would necessitate E, as CC does, and as explained in the first part of the account. As for the matter of everything in the circumstance being ‘essential’, this is of course to be understood in terms of the two limits placed on the extent of a causal circumstance earlier. Finally, it will be clear enough that a further account can be given of causes along the same lines. Roughly speaking, if C caused E, what we have is that given the addition of C to certain other existing conditions, then whatever other events were occurring, E would still have followed, all conditions being essential to this. Or, given that E occurred, it would still have been preceded by C and the other conditions whatever other events accompanied them, save some other causal circumstance for E.

4

Objections

To turn now to objections, let us suppose that somebody doubts, with respect to any effect, that there was some circumstance such that whatever else were happening, the circumstance would still be followed by the effect. He doubts, then, with respect to last night, that there was some circumstance such that whatever else were happening, it would still have been followed by last night. To repeat, he doubts that there was any circumstance such that whatever else were happening, the circumstance would still have been followed by last night. He is not merely doubting that we have a good start on describing that circumstance in what we called the solar conditions. If that were his position, we would not have an objector at all, insofar as our fundamental account of the nature of causation is concerned. He would just be quibbling about what is in a circumstance. What our objector must maintain, if he has something relevant to say, is something along these lines – that our chosen set of conditions might have been followed by the non-occurrence of last night, and, if so, the non-occurrence of last night would not have resulted from the absence of some further condition. Hence, what he maintains is that what we identify as the causal circumstance might have existed as it did, the rest of the universe might have been just as it was, and last night might have failed to occur.

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It is important to allow that he may be right about one thing. That is, we could have had a mystery on our hands, and a shaky future. Things might conceivably have happened just as he may be taken to be maintaining. Causation or some of it might have come to an end with twilight yesterday. We are not engaged, in these reflections on causation, in defying the universe to behave oddly. Rather, we are examining one of our fundamental conceptions of the universe, which might not be true of all of it, or might cease to be true of all or some of it. Certainly we have good reason to think that that in fundamental ways our language gets the world right, but that is not a guarantee of all of what we have to say. What our objector is wrong about, if he says the relevant thing, is that last night was nonetheless an effect even if what he says is true.9 Last night, if he is right, was a random or chance event. It was precisely not an event that necessarily happened. It does not matter if our objector allows, as no doubt he will, that it was highly probable that last night would occur. It is also true, on his view, for all this probability, that it might not have. On his view the fact that it ceased to be only a probability, and did occur, is something that was not necessary. There is a closely related but separate point. It depends on the proposition that effects, in virtue of the fact that they are made necessary by something, can be explained. What cannot possibly be explained is certainly not a standard effect. On the objector’s view, last night was something that cannot possibly be explained. This is plainly true since what we are supposing is that everything could have been exactly as it was except for the non-occurrence of last night. Hence there is nothing that explains what did in fact occur. There is nothing that could explain it. The objection we have been considering is likely to bring to mind other considerations, of which I shall mention but one. There is of course a sense of ‘could’ such that a causal circumstance, a whole causal circumstance, could fail to be followed by its effect. That is, this is a logical or conceptual possibility, something that can be conceived without contradiction. But our account of causation is certainly not that there is such a logical connection between a causal circumstance and its effect. What our account commits us to is something else – that as a matter of fact the circumstance could not have occurred without the effect. That is, as a matter of fact the circumstance would still have been followed by the effect, whatever events had accompanied the circumstance and any links. Let us now pass on to a second sizable objection to this account of necessity, an objection that is predictable enough given the views

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On Determinism and Freedom

of a number of philosophers.10 Consider another example, a house fire, whose cause we take to have been an electrical short circuit. It will be said that if we set out to state the causal circumstance of which the short circuit was part, we face a serious difficulty. If we are to have a circumstance that necessitates in our sense, do we not have to include the absence of a leak in a water pipe in just the right place at just the time of the short circuit? Do we not have to include the absence of an earthquake, and the earth’s not being destroyed by a nuclear explosion? Do we not have to include within the causal circumstance for the house fire the whole state of the universe at or during a time? Or to be a bit less wild, do we not anyway have to include what we can call a very great deal of the environment? If so, something has certainly gone wrong. We often come close to giving a specific description of a causal circumstance. It happens a lot in science. Sometimes the job is completed. This would presumably be impossible, or as good as impossible, if necessitation amounted to so much as is being supposed. An account of causation that comes close to having the consequence that we cannot ever give a specific description of a causal circumstance is surely mistaken. This objection, I think, is a matter of confusion. In specifying a causal circumstance for our house fire, it is roughly true that we do not need to look outside the house, and not at that much inside. Let us say that our causal circumstance included the short circuit, the location of inflammable material in contact with the relevant wire, and the presence of oxygen. One thing to be said of this good start, in connection with the objection, is that conceivably a reminder is necessary. To describe a part of the world in some way is to exclude, logically, certain other descriptions of it. One’s description is certainly not incomplete in virtue of not mentioning these exclusions. Although some philosophers seem to have slipped into thinking otherwise, I have not failed to describe the short circuit fully by failing to remark that it was not a sheep. The main thing to be said is different. Certainly each of the conditions in our mentioned circumstance was dependent on other things. The presence of inflammable material in the right place was dependent on there being no sudden leak in a water pipe and no earthquake. It is a confusion, however, a confusion on which the objection mainly depends, to think they must then be part of our causal circumstance for the fire. To see this clearly, we need but recall our understanding of a causal circumstance. The important point, put one way, is that a causal circumstance does not include both a given condition and an earlier circumstance for that condition or a part of it. There is no reason whatever for thinking that it should.

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Let us finish up by comparing our view of causation with two others, or two sorts of views.11 They are favoured by the objectors we have been considering. We are offered, on the first sort of view, what can be called a contributing circumstance. That is something that is followed by a certain event only if something else is also the case. This other thing may be called the usual background. A contributing circumstance is not so named by those philosophers who introduce it into discussion. They call it, alas, a sufficient set of conditions, or a sufficient condition. Sufficient, of course, is exactly what it is not, since it needs the help of something else. This fact is recognized by some of the philosophers in question, who allow that they are not speaking of something that is ‘genuinely’ sufficient for an effect. What is to be said of this view of causation, briefly, is that it is consistent with our own view. It may be that sometimes when we call one event the cause of another, in the ordinary way, we are also inclined to have in mind a contributing circumstance. Certainly we always could try, if we wanted, to pick out something that counts as a contributing circumstance, by distinguishing it from a ‘usual background’. There will always be this possibility, presumably. But this truth is entirely consistent with the proposition that for each standard effect there is a causal circumstance. There is something, whatever had been happening consistent with it, that would still have been followed by the effect. Philosophers who deal in contributing circumstances do not speak of causal circumstances. One gets the impression that they believe they have given a complete account of the nature of effects. Some say so. Effects are what follow on contributing circumstances, although of course not invariably. Of two identical contributing circumstances, one is not followed by the usual effect if the usual background does not obtain. As will be apparent, any view of effects that actually includes a denial that they are made necessary in the given way by causal circumstances seems mistaken. This, with the denial included, is the second sort of view different from our own.

5

Other Necessary Connections, Laws, Dispositions

It will be useful for our coming reflections on determinism and freedom to notice some corollaries of the account we now have of necessitation and hence of effects. At the heart of the account are whatever-else connections in the world, connections described by a certain kind of conditional

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On Determinism and Freedom

statement.12 Such connections are not unique to causal circumstances and their effects. In fact causal circumstances and their effects are one of two species of the genus of whatever-else connections. The genus as a whole can also be spoken of as consisting in necessary or nomic connections. It breaks down into causal circumstances and their effects as against necessary or nomic correlates. Causal circumstances, as we have been implicitly understanding, come earlier in time than what they are connected with – their effects. This is not true of all necessary connections. Causal circumstances, as we can decide, and indeed have decided in passing, have another feature. A given causal circumstance is a thing such that something else not in the same causal sequence might also have necessitated what was necessitated by the given causal circumstance. It can happen that somebody is killed by two bullets with no shared history. In contrast, a nomic correlate may not have a counterpart. Causal circumstances and their effects, like all necessary connections, are naturally and rightly taken to have to do with something so far unmentioned, natural or scientific law. Does something have to be added to the story we have of causal circumstances and effects to take this fact into account? There have been attempts to explain, say, causal circumstances and effects, that have come to grief in a certain way. These attempts have proceeded, in sum, by saying of a causal circumstance or a like thing, maybe called a causally sufficient condition, that in some sense if or since it happened, something else did as well. This was also our procedure. However, these other accounts have proceeded to try to make things clearer not by clarifying what must be meant by the conditional statement but by another means. They have proceeded to try to make things clearer by adding that if or since the first thing happens, the second does as well as a matter of law. They need then to say what a law is, or, to speak properly of the world rather than language, they need to say what it is for two things to be in lawlike connection. The question has sometimes gone unanswered.13 Our own account has not failed to deal with this matter. It gives an immediate and clear account of laws and lawlike connection in its basic proposition. Two things are subject to a law or in lawlike connection when it is the case, roughly speaking, that given one of them, or either of them, whatever else had been happening, the other would also have occurred. As you might expect, an adequate account of causal connection is not apart from but contains an answer to the question of the nature of lawlike connection. Indeed necessary connection is as well named as lawlike connection.

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There are other well-known ideas and conceptions that are given clarity by the view we have of causation and of necessary connections generally. One is the ordinary idea of a disposition, capacity, power, or capability. We have very many beliefs about ordinary things having dispositions or the like to bring about other things. Commonly these beliefs are expressed by saying that the ordinary thing can do the second thing. Jamming on the brakes can stop the car. The match is capable of lighting a candle. A medication has the capacity or disposition to lower blood sugar. What is a thing’s disposition or capacity or whatever? You can be puzzled about that. Our account of causation provides a clear and surely the right answer. To say one thing has the disposition or power to do something is evidently not to say that it is doing it. To say one thing has the disposition or power to do something is to say just this, that it has properties that together with other things make up a causal circumstance for something. To say jamming on the brakes can stop the car that way is to say, exactly, that jamming on the brakes, when the car is not on a sheet of ice and so on, results in the car stopping in a certain way. These remarks on various necessary connections and on laws and dispositions bring us to the end of this inquiry. We now have an understanding of causation and of some related facts. It is not a world away from other understandings, all those arguable ones that give some decent account of the necessitation of events. What follows about freedom and determinism in this book does not depend on exactly the understanding we have. The understanding we have does show, I think, that our ordinary idea of an effect – something that was made to happen by something else – remains all right when you have a closer look at it.

Notes 1. Oxford University Press, 2002, edited by Robert Kane. 2. J. L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation (Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 47. 3. Donald Davidson, ‘Causal Relations’, Journal of Philosophy, issue, pages 1967. Reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford University Press, 1980). 4. G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Causality and Determination’, Inaugural Lecture in the University of Cambridge, 1971, p. 7. A version of the lecture is reprinted in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. 2 (University of Minnesota Press, 1981).

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5. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe, pp. 40–3. Professor Anscombe in her lecture espouses the given argument with less hesitation than Mr Mackie, and affirms its conclusion in an unmodified form. 6. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe, p. 43; Raymond Martin, ‘The Sufficiency Thesis’, Philosophical Studies, 1972, p. 206. 7. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford University Press, 1888, originally published 1739); Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, ed. Barch Brody (MIT Press, 1969, originally 1788). 8. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (Longman, 1961, originally 1843), Bk 3, Ch. 5, S. 5. Such a view has been implicit in the comments, pro or con, of subsequent philosophers. See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), and John Hospers, Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956). The idea was arrived at independently and made explicit by Peter Downing, from whom I may first have heard of it. His view of causation, however, is certainly different from mine. See his ‘Subjunctive Conditionals, Time-Order and Causation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1958–9, and ‘Are Causal Laws Purely General?’, Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1970. 9. Professor Anscombe holds something like the objector’s view. What she would call a non-necessitated effect could have failed to occur although nothing prevented the so-called effect from occurring. A necessitated effect, so-called, could also have failed to occur, although only if something prevented it, which might happen on any occasion. She arrives at the conclusion that this is our conception of effects by way of many arguments. There is (1) the argument already noted about generalizations, and (2) the argument already noted about indeterministic processes. There is (3) what appears to me to be the running-together of the issue of the analysis of our conception with issues of fact. See the transition from the first section of her lecture, which is about the issue of analysis, to the second section, which is about whether all events are in fact necessitated. By way of a related example of running these things together unsatisfactorily, an example that can be given here quickly, we are in effect told (p. 7) that causation does not involve necessitation because the question of whether any circumstance necessitated E does not have to be settled before we can know what we mean by speaking of event C as having caused E. Certainly the question doesn’t have to be settled beforehand. But this true proposition, that we don’t have to settle the question in order to know what we mean, must not be confused with the false proposition that we don’t have to settle the question in order to know what we mean (by speaking of C as having caused E) is a fact. Professor Anscombe’s conclusion depends on the false proposition. If it were true that we didn’t have to settle the question of necessity in order to settle the question of causality, that would of course show that causality does not involve necessitation. (4) Finally, there is the argument about the extent of a causal circumstance, still to be considered here. We shall be back in the neighbourhood of her doctrine, by the way, when we look at Anthony Kenny’s thinking in Chapter 3.

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10. Bertrand Russell, ‘On the Notion of Cause’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1912–13, reprinted in Mysticism and Logic (Allen & Unwin, 1917, p. 187); J. R. Lucas, ‘Causation’, in Analytical Philosophy, ed. R. J. Butler (Blackwell, 1962), pp. 57–9; Michael Scriven, critical study of Ernest Nagel’s The Structure of Science, in Review of Metaphysics, 1964, p. 409; J. L. Mackie, ‘Causes and Conditions’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1965, p. 250; cf. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe, p. 145; Anscombe, Inaugural Lecture, p. 11. 11. Mackie, ‘Causes and Conditions’, p. 250, but also The Cement of the Universe, Chapter 2, especially pp. 40–3, p. 49, pp. 57–8; Lucas, ‘Causation’, pp. 57–9; Scriven, review of Nagel, p. 409; Anscombe, Inaugural Lecture, p. 1, p. 12, p. 23. Mackie’s view is in several ways more complex than the others. 12. They get more attention in my paper ‘Causes and If P, Even If x, Still Q’, in Philosophy, 1982, and in Chapter 1 of A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes (Oxford University Press, 1988), which is also Chapter 1 of Brain and Mind (Oxford University Press, 1990). 13. Cf. Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, Chapter 1.

Chapter Two

Determinism and its Consequences for Us

Determinism is not one thing. Quite a few kinds of it can be distinguished, theories with different subject-matters. They take different classes of events, larger or smaller classes, to be effects of certain sequences of causal circumstances. Or, if they are concerned with the same effects, they may give some priority to different sorts of causes, for whatever reason or out of whatever motivation or fascination. Universal determinism, like so much else, had an inchoate existence in ancient Greek philosophy, and came into greater clarity with the rise of modern philosophy and science in the 17th Century. It asserts that all events without exception, of whatever sort, are standard effects. That is to say, of course, that all the predecessors of any effect are also such effects. A second determinism, physical determinism, asserts that all physical events without exception are standard effects. It may understand physical events in terms of things taking up space and time, or as whatever events that are countenanced by science. It may include the further claim that all causes and conditions of physical events are themselves physical events. Determinism as most commonly understood in philosophy generally – as distinct from the philosophy of science – is human determinism. It is the theory that our lives consist in effects. More particularly, all of the antecedents of our actions, say contemplating possible alternatives, coming to have a forwardlooking intention, choosing how to go ahead, actively intending the action and supervising it, are subject to the rule of cause and effect, and so are the actions themselves. Finally, there are also lesser determinisms, almost all of which have a special concern with special classes of causes or causal circumstances as against effects. One of these is Sigmund

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Freud’s, associated with psychoanalysis, which concentrates on childhood sexual episodes and related matters later. Putting aside other more or less therapeutic enterprises, there are the other lesser determinisms that assign special causal powers to economic and social circumstances or history, religious or other upbringings of children, sides or aspects of evolution rather than evolution and heredity generally, just genes, items in only neurobiology, sorts of personalities, fate half-conceived as something other than causality, and the stars. The lesser determinisms, including the therapeutic ones, have never had significant attention from philosophers. Rather, it is mainly human determinism that has been a large, persistent and troubled subject in the history of philosophy. It has for the most part been considered in a schematic or general way. That is, it has been understood as not much more than the proposition that actions are effects, effects of such causal chains as to raise a question about their freedom and about responsibility for them. As you have heard, this proposition has had the attention of most of the greatest of philosophers and very many others. Has its inexplicitness also contributed to the disregard of the problem of determinism and freedom by other philosophers? In any case, it is clear that there are three problems about human determinism. The first is its formulation, the large problem of getting to a conceptually adequate theory of it, one that is clear, consistent and complete. As has become plain, or plain to some, this must now be an endeavour within, or at least fully informed by, that main and flourishing part of philosophy that is the philosophy of mind. The next problem is that of the truth of the theory. That is not settled. Thirdly, there is the problem that remains when a theory of determinism is taken to be conceptually respectable and also true. Determinism as understood, for good reason, is not itself the view that we are not free. Nor does determinism as understood include that proposition. Rather, it raises the question of whether we are free and responsible, the question of what follows from it, its consequences for us. There is disagreement about that, and so there is reason not to write a denial of freedom into a definition of determinism. The following paper is a summary of a worked-out human determinism. It deals with or anyway has something to say of the three problems. Certainly it does not resolve them. They are considered further in each of the other chapters of this book,

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which make up a kind of progress with respect to them. This paper here, not published before, was read out to the philosophers of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, as part of the English mission of bringing light to the philosophically dark continent. It had the success of giving rise to a vigorous discussion.

1

Mind and Brain, Actions

This paper is a sketch of a deterministic philosophy of mind and of its consequences for one part of our lives. In fact the theory affects a lot – life-hopes, personal relations, claims to knowledge, holding people responsible and crediting them with responsibility, the rightness of actions, the moral standing of people over periods of time or their whole lives, and practices of punishment and reward. This sketch, however, will be traditional in restricting itself to the consequences of determinism, holding people responsible and crediting them with responsibility. The theory itself, it is right to say, presents our human actions and their antecedents as just effects. It presents our human actions as effects of certain causal sequences. In these sequences there occur the antecedents of the actions – decisions and intentions and also the neural events that go with them – all of which conscious or mental and neural events are themselves effects of yet earlier parts of the causal sequence. Some of these yet earlier parts are environmental, and others are bodily events in the life of the individual.1 This would not be a determinism in an interesting or traditional sense if it involved a loose idea of an effect. There have been a number of such ideas, the most recent being of an event made no more than probable by antecedents. Here what causes something else does no more than make it probable. An effect of this kind, however probable it was, was in the end a chance event, an inexplicable event. It was inexplicable because given the world exactly as it was, the event might as well not have happened, as you have already heard. We do not here have our standard idea of an effect. Whether or not there are mysteries, standard effects are not mysteries. A standard effect is something that had to happen, the only thing that was possible. It was a necessitated event, an event necessitated by a causal circumstance. This deterministic philosophy of mind consists in three hypotheses. It is best to take first what is temporally the middle one. This

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hypothesis concerns all conscious or mental events – I use the two terms synonymously – and in particular decisions and intentions, the antecedents of actions. The hypothesis presupposes a certain realistic view of the nature of mental events, and then explains how each mental event is related to a simultaneous neural event. The view of conscious or mental events is realistic in that it allows that they have a nature different from that of merely neural events. They are subjective. Thus they have a character over and above their causal roles. In the doctrine of functionalism, by contrast, the character of conscious events is exhausted by or comes to no more than their causal roles. On what I am calling the realistic view, differently, each conscious event may be taken to have within itself two interdependent elements, a subjective element and a content. That mental events have this character does not necessarily remove them from the physical realm, the spatio-temporal realm, but it does make them non-neural. Each mental event is related to a simultaneous neural event in that the two items are in what is spoken of as necessary, nomic or lawlike connection. This is not to say that one is a causal circumstance and the other an effect, partly because neither precedes the other in time. But it is to say that they stand in the fundamental relation in which causal circumstances and their effects also stand. What their connection mainly comes to can be expressed in two propositions. (1) Given a neural event of a certain kind, whatever else had been happening, there would still have occurred a simultaneous mental event of a certain kind. (2) If the mental event had not occurred, whatever else had been happening, neither would the neural event. Partly in virtue of this nomic connection, a mental event and a simultaneous neural event constitute what can be called a psychoneural pair. Such a pair is a single effect of antecedents. It is also a cause of subsequent events. This account of the relation between simultaneous mental and neural events is distinct from most theories of mind and brain that are known as physicalisms, identity theories, monisms, reductionisms, naturalisms and neuralisms. But the account has the same recommendation as those theories. Or rather, it actually does have what are wrongly supposed to be two recommendations of many such theories. It recognizes the fact of psychoneural intimacy, the intimate relation of a mental and a neural event, which neuroscience can be taken to have confirmed. It is no more dualistic than almost all contemporary identity theories of mind and brain, all but the 17th

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Century or eliminative materialism that takes mental events to have only neural properties. Secondly, this account of the psychoneural relation has the recommendation of giving a place to our conviction that both mental and neural events have causal roles with respect to our actions and also subsequent mental events. Thus it avoids the absurdity of epiphenomenalism – the doctrine that our conscious or mental events are no part of the explanation of our actions – or later conscious events.2 So much for what can be called the Hypothesis of Psychoneural Nomic Correlation, which relates simultaneous events. The second hypothesis is the heart of the theory of determinism. It gives a certain account of the explanation of the occurrence of psychoneural pairs, of course in terms of what preceded them. It explains, say, the pairs that consist in a decision and a certain neural event, or what can be called an active intention or perhaps a volition and a certain neural event. The Hypothesis on the Causation of Psychoneural Pairs, as it can be called, involves the ordinary idea whose occasional denial seems to me to involve confusion. It is the ordinary idea that causation is transitive. That is, it involves the idea that if A necessitated B and B necessitated C, then A necessitated C. Thus the initial elements of a causal sequence, which may occur at different times, necessitated the final effect. The hypothesis, simply stated, is as follows. Each psychoneural pair is the effect of a causal sequence whose initial elements were of two kinds. These were either neural or other bodily elements just prior to the very first mental event in the existence of the individual in question, whenever that was, or they were direct or last environmental elements then and thereafter. A direct environmental event is one such that it affects an individual without the help of an intermediate environmental event. The hypothesis conflicts with a number of traditional views of the mind that may be described as asserting free will, in a particular and traditional use of that term, for a particular kind of freedom. The traditional views in question attempt a fundamentally different account of the explanation of mental events, or such mental events as decisions. The governing aim of these views is to give an account of an individual’s decisions such that he or she can in a certain strong way be held morally responsible for them. Thus it is said of an individual’s decision at a time that he could have decided

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otherwise than he did, given all things as they then were, and given all of the past as it was. It is no longer the case that these traditional views can ignore the brain and neuroscience, but they take account of it in a particular way. Some may accept the Correlation Hypothesis, the proposition that neural events necessitate simultaneous mental events. But they somehow deny that mental events and actions are merely effects. They may make use of a certain common interpretation of Quantum Theory, thereby drawing the conclusion that the mentioned mental or conscious events are merely made probable and not necessitated by antecedent events. These views cannot stop with an indeterminist account of these events, of course. If they did, such events would be or would be too near to chance events. These by their nature are events for which an individual could be in no sense responsible. Thus these views have at their centre another kind of explanation of decisions. Decisions are originated by the individual or some part of the individual – say the Self – or a strange event within an individual. What this comes to, looked at in what is perhaps the best way, is that a decision is not an effect, not necessitated, but nonetheless has a source in the individual or something within him such that he is responsible for it in a certain strong sense – of which I shall have more to say in due course. An alternative idea, that the decision is an effect, but that its cause is not an effect but originated, faces the same and perhaps more difficulties. One hope of such views must be to give a respectable positive account of the fundamental relation of origination or free will. This would go beyond what was reported above, that the views take it that I stand to my decision in such a way that I could have made a different decision given things as they are and have been, and that I am in a strong way responsible for it. That clearly is not to define or characterize the relation as fully as can be wished. However, it is not necessary to agree with a philosopher or two who take these views to be nonsensical or actually contentless at this crucial point.3 The third hypothesis of the theory of determinism is as simple as the Hypothesis on the Causation of Psychoneural Pairs. The Hypothesis on the Causation of Actions involves a general definition of our actions, of course including speech-acts. Actions are bodily movements or stillnesses somehow owed to active intentions – which active intentions also represent or perhaps picture the bodily sequences. The Hypothesis on the Causation of Actions is in part as follows.

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Each action is an effect of a causal sequence one of whose initial elements is a psychoneural pair which includes the active intention that represents the action. This is the least controversial of the three hypotheses of this determinism, or most uncontroversial. Many philosophers have discussed such a determinism without committing themselves to its truth. There has generally been discussion of the consequences of such a determinism for morality. If such a determinism is true, what follows for morality? We shall be considering this question, but let me pause to explain that I myself am indeed inclined to take the antecedent as true – that is, to take determinism as true. A lesser reason, already implied, is that a determinism allows for an explicit and articulated philosophy of mind. Accounts of decision in terms of free will are accounts that do derive from very fundamental attitudes we have, of which I shall have more to say. Still, they are accounts that have been thought to raise difficulties. Peter Strawson, prince of English philosophers, went so far as to speak of accounts of free will in terms of ‘obscure and panicky metaphysics’, and his judgement influenced decades.4 Certainly these accounts at their crucial juncture are conceptually thin. We shall be looking into this large matter in the following three chapters of this book – each of them has to do with a theory of free will. A larger source of my belief in determinism has been neuroscience. The great body of research is what I have in mind, not bits of spare-time theorizing, neuroscience on holiday. It has seemed to me to provide overwhelming evidence. A third source is my not being impressed by the common interpretation of Quantum Theory mentioned earlier. Quantum Theory consists in a formalism and an interpretation of that formalism. There is the mathematics, and there is a view of what the mathematics is about, the referents of the numbers. The referents are commonly said not to be necessitated, but to be a matter of indeterminacy or randomness. Thus it can be supposed that the brain is indeterministic. No agreement has been achieved on the nature of these referents, let alone a persuasive account. That in itself is remarkable. What I wish to note, however, is that if one looks at the writings of physicists, one is told that the referents are, among other things, epistemological concepts, propositions, possibilities, features of a calculation, mathematical objects, probability waves, theoretical entities, and waves of no real physical existence. What these have in common is that they are not spatio-temporal events. But since all causes and effects are such

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events, it is only such events that determinism is concerned with. There is at least the possibility, then, that what Quantum Theory is taken to say is undetermined or unnecessitated is something that determinism does not say is necessitated. Determinism may be as untouched by Quantum Theory as it is by the fact that a number or a proposition is not an effect. This is not the place to take further the issue of the truth of determinism, or to defend what may seem to be a philosopher’s audacity or even impertinence in having a view of the import of Quantum Theory. Let us turn to the issue of what follows with respect to morality if determinism is true.

2

Compatibilism and Incompatibilism, and Moral Responsibility

There is a venerable tradition in philosophy named compatibilism, which flows from Hobbes and Hume.5 It was in view earlier (pp. 1–3). It is dedicated to the idea that if determinism is true, each of us may nevertheless be held morally responsible for actions, and be credited with responsibility for actions. Moral responsibility for an action does indeed presuppose that the action was freely chosen, but an action can be freely chosen even if determinism is true – freedom and determinism are logically compatible. This is so, we are told, since freedom consists in voluntariness. Many definitions have been given of voluntariness. Their central idea is that a voluntary choice is one that is according to the desires and the nature of the individual, which is to say not forced upon her by something external, notably other persons or a constraining environment. Again, a voluntary choice may be regarded as a matter of embraced desires as distinct from reluctant desires. Indubitably freedom of this kind is consistent with determinism, since it can amount to choices having a certain sort of causation rather than no causation. There is another venerable tradition named incompatibilism. Some of Kant’s reflections on freedom are within it but a less complicated and more single-minded exponent of the view in question was Hobbes’s great adversary, Bramhall.6 It is dedicated to the idea that if determinism is true, none of us can be held morally responsible for our actions, or be credited with responsibility for them. That is because moral responsibility for an action presupposes that the action was freely chosen, but free not only in being voluntary.

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A free choice, we are told, is also one which was originated. The philosophers of this tradition, as I have already remarked, have succeeded in giving only a thin account of origination. One clear thing, however, is that origination is logically incompatible with determinism. An originated choice is disconnected from antecedents – or, to speak more carefully, not connected with them in the way that is true of an effect. It has long been supposed that one of these two traditions must give us the truth about the consequences of determinism for moral responsibility. Indeed this has seemed to be a logically necessary truth. Freedom either is or is not consistent with determinism. It has been my view, which now has more support, that the logically necessary truth, to put the matter one way, has a false presupposition. The real facts about the relation of determinism to freedom are not at all conveyed by the necessary truth. It seems that we can approach the matter by getting clearer about the matter of holding people morally responsible for actions or crediting them with responsibility for actions. There is an advantage to be had from not peering further at the word ‘free’ and not attempting to devise still more proofs of its content, but instead looking directly at what might be called the human reality of the problem of determinism and freedom, or rather one part of that reality. What does holding people responsible for actions and crediting them with responsibility for actions come to? This ascribing of responsibility is not to be identified with judging actions to be wrong or right. That what I did was wrong is indeed presupposed by my properly being held responsible for it, but it is not the same fact. So with my being credited with responsibility and my being judged to have acted rightly. They are not to be identified. I can do wrong without being held responsible for the action, do right without being credited with responsibility. Nor is holding someone responsible for a particular action the same as judging her to be a bad or inhuman person, where that is to make a judgement that pertains to much more than one action, indeed to character or a pattern of life or all of a life. So with crediting someone with responsibility for an action and judging her to be a good or human person. It seems evident that to hold someone morally responsible for an action is to disapprove of them morally with respect to that action. To credit someone with moral responsibility is to approve of them morally with respect to an action. If holding someone responsible is not the same as judging an action to be wrong, or assessing a person over time, perhaps a lifetime, it is also distinct from what may

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follow on holding the person responsible, which is an action of blaming or punishing her. The latter is clearly distinct from the former. So with crediting with responsibility and an action of praising or rewarding. Suppose a man, foreseeing his coming divorce, contrives to divert a large part of the couple’s joint money and property to his children. He does so in order to deprive their mother of her share of them and to win away the affection and loyalty of the children. Unless the situation is extraordinary, we shall certainly hold him responsible. What does this particular fact come to? It is clear that my holding him responsible, my disapproving of him morally with respect to the action, does not come to just a belief, something true or false, about what can be called the initiation of the action, how it comes about in terms of a decision or the like. More than just a proposition is in question. I have an attitude to him with respect to the action. If this attitude has such a belief within it, it also involves much more. It is no easy thing, by the way, to give a general definition of an attitude – covering moral approval and disapproval, personal feelings, hope, and so on. Let me say here that an attitude is an evaluative thought of something, feelingful, and bound up with desire, the mentioned feeling being feeling in a narrow sense, somehow similar to or even bound up with sensation. Different attitudes, say resentment as against hope, call for different particular descriptions. In the case in question, what does my attitude of holding the man responsible come to? It is of absolutely fundamental importance to the question of the consequences of determinism, in my view, that it may on different occasions come to different things. To hold him responsible is to be engaged in or subject to one or another of at least two different attitudes. Each of us engages in or is capable of both these attitudes. We do or can move back and forth between them. One attitude partly involves certain feelings, feelings in a broad sense. These are feelings of repugnance for the man with respect to his vicious or dishonourable desires to deprive his wife and to win away the loyalty of the children. It is my tendency to withdraw from him and from his desires. These feelings are distantly related to aesthetic ones. Also and very differently, and more importantly, this first attitude involves feelings that may be expressed in a number of ways. I may say, in vernacular English, that the situation is to be laid at his door, or that he should not get away with it, or

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indeed that the wife should get satisfaction. This second set of feelings in my attitude, in a general sense, consists in desires – at bottom the desire to act against the husband. These are in the category of retributive desires, desires for the distress of another person, and they are satisfied by just that distress as distinct from any good or other consequence of it. The husband should have, at the least, the discomfiture of knowing that others disapprove of him. On what do my retributive feelings rest? Or, as we can as well say, what belief do they incorporate about the initiation of his action? Well, it may be that they will diminish and in fact collapse under certain conditions. If so, we can see what they rest on if, on the other hand, they do persist. They will collapse, as it seems to me, if I come to believe that determinism was true of the husband’s first desire to take the step in question, and his forming of the intention, and his acting on it. Certainly this is a speculation, since it is a fact that we do not often, if ever, succeed in believing determinism in the sense of such an explicit theory of it as was sketched above. Our culture is against it. Still, the speculation about a collapse of feelings seems to me a persuasive one. It is supported by, among other things, our resistance to pleas of inexplicit determinism on behalf of those of whom we are morally disapproving. The speculation rests on our human nature as it is. If my retributive feelings would collapse if I came really to believe that determinism was true of this episode in the life of the husband, it seems clear that what they rest on when they persist is a certain conception of the initiation of the decision and the action. I take a particular thing to be true, or more ordinarily have images that tend in a certain direction. That is, I somehow take it that the decision was originated. Its happening was not fixed by the state of the world when he took it, or preceding states of the world. He could have decided otherwise given things as they were and as they had been. If our resting retributive desires on an assumption of origination is a contingent fact about human nature, or even a fact that will not be with us to the end of time, it remains a fact. So – we can do something that is naturally called holding another person responsible for an action, holding him or her responsible in a strong sense, and doing this is inconsistent with determinism. I have not done greatly more here than assert this fact of inconsistency, but certainly more can be said to show it to be a clear and strong fact.7 Suppose we think of this particular way of holding people responsible, this particular attitude, and, perhaps more importantly,

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think of the analagous way of crediting ourselves with responsibility, morally approving of ourselves. If we think of this, and we also contemplate that determinism is true, our response is likely to be one of dismay or an anticipation of dismay. In short, our response may be that determinism wrecks what might be called our practice of assigning moral responsibility. It enters into a lot of life. Above all determinism wrecks an image we have of ourselves as estimable agents of a certain kind. However, if it is possible that in holding the husband responsible I take the given attitude to him, with the given upshot in connection with the contemplation of determinism, it is just as possible that on another occasion I take another attitude, with a different upshot. None of us is immured in the first attitude. Again this is not just a matter of my having a certain true or false belief. I have, again, feelings of repugance for him. But my attitude, in its second part, has to do with my perception of the harm done to the wife and very likely also the children. My attitude in its second part may be said to consist in a desire to affect him in such a way that matters are rectified, or, if that is not possible, to affect him in such a way as to reduce the likelihood of such actions or related actions in the future. These are, in a brief phrase, desires to affect his motivations and perhaps those of others in order to prevent harm. If my attitude to the man is importantly directed to the future in this way, what conception does it involve of his initiation of his action? Well, I would not have the given attitude to him that I have if, as must be unlikely in this case, he succeeded in acting in ignorance of what he was doing. If that really was true, I would or might have no rationale for trying to change anything but his state of knowledge. Nor should I have my desire to affect him if, as again must be unlikely, he was compelled by someone else to act as he did. There would be no need to change him. Nor should I have my desire, at any rate exactly as I do, if he had a real but finally unsuccessful desire not to have the low desire that did issue in the diverting of the monies. Nor of course should I have my attitude if I took him to be insane or radically immature. In these latter cases, so to speak, he would not be a suitable object of intentions of the kind in question. My holding him responsible or morally disapproving of him, in this second way, does indeed involve a conception of the initiation of his action. It is not a conception of the decision as originated, but only of the decision as voluntary. In brief, to revert to something

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like the too-general description of voluntariness mentioned earlier, I take it that the decision flowed from his own unconflicted desires and capable nature. Suppose we think of this second way of holding people responsible, and again contemplate that determinism is true. The fact of the matter is that the attitude in question, including its beliefcomponent, is perfectly consistent with determinism. We may thus make a different response in the matter of moral responsibility and determinism, a response different from dismay. It can be called intransigence. It is to the effect that determinism can be put aside, that it does not wreck the assigning of moral responsibility but leaves it as it is. We need not be troubled at all.

3

Real Consequences of Determinism

This story of two attitudes, or at least two attitudes, has been very schematic. What has been provided are stark models, not any nuanced or complete pictures of our feelings. But perhaps you have been persuaded at least of the possibility that there are at least two different things that fall under the description ‘holding someone morally responsible for an action’. Both of them support responsive actions on our own part, although not necessarily the same actions. What is important is that the first attitude, which of course has variants, involves conceiving of the initiation of an action in terms of origination as well as voluntariness, and the second attitude, along with variants, involves only voluntariness. To speak differently, one attitude involves one conception of freedom as a reason or part of a reason for responsive action and the other attitude involves another conception. It may be worthwhile putting these claims into a nutshell, or a smaller nutshell. Suppose it happens that your son, for no good reason, perhaps the colour of his skin, or a bit of independent style, is attacked in the street and badly injured. You may have a vengeful attitude that centres on the thought that his assailants, whatever their histories, and with things just as they were, could have acted differently there and then. They could have stopped themselves. You may also have an attitude that has to do with improving the future and focuses on the vicious desires of his assailants. You may move between these attitudes, both of them ways of holding someone responsible. You may as a result make different responses to determinism.

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We are now in a position to draw the first of two conclusions about the consequences of determinism. It is that both of the long-running traditions, compatibilism and incompatibilism, are false. The first, as I remarked, is that freedom is voluntariness, and the second that freedom is voluntariness together with origination. They are alike in sharing the view that all of us have a single shared conception of a free decision. In fact we do not, but have two. Certainly, if freedom were one thing, it would necessarily be true that either it is or it is not consistent with determinism. But freedom is not one thing. Freedom, and in particular the freedom that enters into or is presupposed by our holding people responsible, is two things. In place of saying freedom is or is not consistent with determinism, which utterance has a false presupposition, we need to say that one freedom is, and one freedom is not, consistent with determinism. Let me add one argument here. Those who agree with Hobbes and Hume must give some explanation of why their opponents over centuries up to the present day have persisted in their different view, their supposed error. The explanation given, in short, is three or more centuries of linguistic and philosophical confusion about a single shared idea. The party of Bishop Bramhall must also provide what can be called an error-theory – an explanation of why those who think like Hobbes have persisted in their view of a single thing that we are all supposed to know. Bramhall and his party talk of weak empiricism and word-play. Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, speaks of Hume as muddled.8 These explanations seem to me near to absurd. What explains four centuries of dispute is not that we all have a single shared conception of freedom – which one side or the other does not have the persistence or wit to analyse clearly. What explains the dispute is that each of us, in place of having a single shared conception of freedom, has two sorts of attitude, containing different conceptions. With respect to disagreements generally, the absence of convergence or agreement is often hard to explain when what is at issue is only a matter of fact. It is not hard to explain with attitudes, let alone attitudes that in ways conflict in a single breast. My second conclusion about the consequences of determinism, which must be brief, has to do with what has seemed to me to be our right response to determinism. I have said that if we have in mind the first way of holding people responsible, and crediting people with responsibility, and bring this together with determinism, our response is or may be dismay. We have been mistaken in an

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attitude – and also, of course, in acting on it. I have also said that if we have in mind the second way of holding people responsible and giving credit to them, and bring this together with determinism, our response is likely to be intransigence. What we really need to do is recognize that each of us has or is capable of the two sorts of responsibility-attitudes, and see clearly the effect of determinism on us. What it comes to is that determinism neither wrecks moral responsibility nor leaves it untouched. We must give up something but we can also keep something. We can keep the attitude to others and ourselves that has within it a picture of actions as voluntary. Further, what we can keep is worth having. I remain capable of moral credit for my actions. I can have a kind of moral credit which has to do with wholly human or exemplary desires and intentions.9 The subject of this paper, insofar as it has concerned the consequences of determinism, has been moral responsibility, and so, as remarked earlier, I have in a way been true to another tradition. It is a philosophical tradition that brings together consideration of both compatibilists and incompatibilists and supposes that determinism is most important with respect to its consequences for moral responsibility. Arguably this is mistaken. Determinism is most important in human terms, surely, for its consequences for what can be called our life-hopes. These are an individual’s principal hopes for his or her future. As in the case of moral responsibility, we have or are capable of two attitudes here – one involving the conception of an unfixed future, one involving a future of voluntary actions. We have or are capable of having two kinds of life-hopes. Determinism, to my mind, also has consequences for what can be called personal as distinct from moral feelings or attitudes.10 Resentment and gratitude are examples. It is possible to think that these consequences too are more humanly important than the consequences for moral responsibility – and, as can be added, related consequences in connection with attitudes having to do with right actions and good persons. Determinism also has consequences, as already implied, for what we do as a result of holding persons responsible. Punishment is central here, but far from the only such fact. Also, determinism has consequences with respect to our claims to knowledge, our confidence of laying hold on truth. In all these areas of consequence, as I see it, the situation is the same. We have or are capable of two sorts of attitude having to do with freedoms, and thus we may respond to determinism with dismay or intransigence. But we can also attempt to respond in

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another way. We can attempt to change our feelings. We can see what we must give up, and what we can keep, and the value of what we can keep. This can be called the response of affirmation. It is a response to what has seemed to be the real problem of determinism, a kind of practical problem. To look back, the propositions advanced and to some extent defended have been as follows. There is a philosophy of mind consisting in three hypotheses, free of ancient and modern mystery. It is determinist in character. It or something like it seems to me true. Since we do not share a single settled conception of a free decision, it is pointless to assert, with compatibilists, that freedom is consistent with this determinism. It is exactly as pointless to assert, with incompatibilists, that freedom is inconsistent with determinism. The problem of determinism and freedom is in a sense not an intellectual or conceptual problem. We have different attitudes, and what we must do, if we accept determinism, is to seek and keep and value those in which we can rationally persist. It was Schopenhauer’s view, perhaps, that our existence is to be mourned, that we would decline the gift of life if we could anticipate its nature beforehand.11 Nietzsche, in his way also a determinist, said differently, that we may affirm life.12 It is Nietzsche with whom we can and must agree.

Notes 1. The theory and consequences were originally elaborated in my A Theory of Determinism: The Mind. Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes (Oxford University Press, 1988) and the two paperback books into which it was divided, Mind and Brain and The Consequences of Determinism (Oxford University Press, 1990). Theory and consequences were much abbreviated in How Free Are You? (Oxford University Press, 1993; revised edition 2002). 2. The psychoneural relation is fully considered in Chapter 2 of each of A Theory of Determinism and Mind and Brain, and considered in How Free Are You?, Chapter 2 in the first edition, Chapter 3 in the second. The psychoneural relation is also much of the subject of On Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). The particular view of it sketched here, the Union Theory, is elaborated in Chapters 3 and 4. A determinism with a disability is laid out and discussed in Chapter 2, ‘The Thinking of Some Neuroscientific Friends’. 3. Galen Strawson regards indeterminist views of the mind as in a way incoherent. See his Freedom and Belief (Oxford University Press, 1986). 4. Peter Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in his Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 211.

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5. Thomas Hobbes, Of Liberty and Necessity and Leviathan in Works, ed. W. Molesworth (Bohn, 1839–45, originally c. 1650); David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford University Press, 1888, originally 1739), An Enquiry Concerning Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford University Press, 1963, originally 1748). 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp-Smith (Macmillan, 1950, originally 1781), p. 477; Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck (University of Chicago Press, 1949, originally 1748), pp. 97–8; J. Bramhall, ‘A Defence of True Liberty’, in his Works (Dublin, 1676). 7. That we have an attitude of this kind, inconsistent with determinism, can be shown by other means than the thought experiment. In A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes, and The Consequences of Determinism (Oxford University Press, 1990) and How Free Are You?, as remarked below, I also consider the consequences of determinism for life-hopes, personal feelings, knowledge, and so on. Arguments for an attitude of the given kind in connection with life-hopes, personal feelings, knowledge and so on can be transferred to the matter of holding people responsible. 8. The Open Universe, ed. W. W. Bartley (Hutchinson, 1982), p. xix. See also Popper and J. C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (Springer, 1977), the most numbing of speculations about free will. 9. For remarks on what is called semi-compatibilism by John Fischer and others, pertaining to moral responsibility and distantly related to the view that we have two conceptions of freedom, see p. 154, note 10. 10. This was first made clear by Peter Strawson in his compatibilist paper noted above, ‘Freedom and Resentment’. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (Routledge, 1883, originally 1818); The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, ed. R. Taylor (Doubleday, 1962, originally c. 1840). 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufman, (Viking, 1954, originally c. 1880); Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufman (Random House, 1968, originally c. 1880).

Chapter Three

The Will, Reasons, Determinism’s Incoherence

So far you have heard of our existence, in particular our deciding or choosing and our acting, in terms of cause and effect and mind and brain – or rather consciousness and brain. Choosing and acting have been conceived as being or being a matter of events of consciousness. The mind, rightly or wrongly, has not been to the fore. Deciding and acting have not always been thought of in these ways. They were not thought of in these ways by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle or by the mediaeval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. No doubt they were thinkers as great as those who have come after them. In some good part they were concerned with matters about which they were not much more ignorant than we are. It is possible to feel the impulse that philosophy, like science, should abandon its past, that the history of philosophy should concern living and working philosophers only about as much as the past of science concerns scientists. Not much. It is also possible, however, to be affected by the fact that past philosophy continues to have the attention of acute philosophers of this day, and they do not take themselves to be only in archives, only doing history, but advancing the subject. It should be as possible to be affected by a third thing, that philosophy should be as independent as the best science of all considerations other than truth. The true is certainly not necessarily the new. Furthermore, the past for us is never just the past. We bring the present to it, bring the present to bear on it in consideration of it. A decent philosopher convinced of the usefulness and fertility of the categories of thinking of Aristotle or Aquinas is certainly not a mere scholar. In no very serious sense is he more in the worlds of Aristotle or Aquinas than ours. It can happen, indeed, that a principal advocate of their

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categories of thinking can also be a principal exponent of the reflections of that philosophical figure so indubitably located in 20th Century Vienna and the University of Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Anthony Kenny was trained in scholastic philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, and was at first a Catholic priest. No doubt he was at least as much formed by this beginning and the childhood before it as any determinist of your acquaintance was formed, say, by an early and commonsensical engagement with bicycles and tools and then by the example and instruction of teachers more inclined to anatomy than the anatomy of the soul. Both Kenny and the determinist can add argument, evidence and invention to conviction. They can also add later discoveries or seeming discoveries. Some ideas and inclinations made use of by Kenny are in fact indeed owed to the influence of Wittgenstein. What follows here is a revised and shortened version of a critical notice in Mind. That journal of philosophy is still the principal one in England. A critical notice is an examination of a book or books more extensive and relentless than a book review. The two books examined in this case, being by Kenny, are by the principal Catholic philosopher of this age. This is itself a recommendation to anyone persuaded of the value of large intellectual traditions of whatever kind, so long as they do not inhibit you too much. The two books were not written yesterday. That this account of them appears here, in place of an account of some related book that was written yesterday, is partly explained by the fact that this account existed and the second did not. To that truth can be added another, more reassuring. It is possible to think that the two books considered below are the fullest pieces of advocacy of what must be the core of opposition to determinism. To my knowledge there is nothing like them save for the strong and ample works of Robert Kane, say The Significance of Free Will, and even they are not so single-minded.1 That core opposition to determinism is not bits and pieces, even ideas of effects as merely probable and the like, but a view of what can indeed be called the mind, maybe a kind of grip on it. The proposal and defence of this core requires not a proof that origination quickly defined is indeed inconsistent with determinism, or a proof that it is not, but an actual exposition of what is taken to be this fact of origination in our lives.

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The two books contain a plethora of propositions and arguments. There is an overview of them in the first section below. They call for a diligent attention. It is needed too for a judgement on my judgement of them.

1

Doctrines Summarized

The mind consists not in activities but in capacities. It consists fundamentally in the capacity to acquire certain other capacities involving the creation and use of symbols, above all language, but also in those acquired capacities themselves. In the main, as we can also say, the mind consists in the will and the intellect, the will being abilities to do things voluntarily and intentionally. The will, further, is the capacity to act for reasons, which reasons are certain states, some of them expressible in fiats, these being sentences of an imperatival character. They make up one of two great species of sentences. The other species has in it sentences of an assertoric character, associated with the intellect. So, to repeat, the mind consists in two great capacities, perhaps what have been called faculties of the mind by others. A capacity is not to be confused with what is called its vehicle, which is what it is of or in, or with its exercise, which is its use or what it issues in. So the mind is not to be confused with the brain, or neural events or states of the brain, or with activities of feeling and thinking and presumably behaviour. The particular capacity which is the will is best understood as rational power. This is power that may or may not be exercised – issue in something – when all the necessary conditions of its being exercised obtain. It thus is quite unlike a natural power, which is such that it is exercised when all the necessary conditions of exercise obtain. This same fact of rational power is one part of what is described by saying that often we can do things, in a certain fundamental sense of the word, the other part being that we also have opportunities for action. Our reasons for actions, bound up with the will as rational power, are not in causal connection with the actions. On the whole they are not even things that could possibly be causes of actions. Their connection with actions is that of practical reasoning, which above all is defeasible, and hence different from theoretical reasoning. That is to say that in practical reasoning there are premises that give rise

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to a conclusion by way of a valid argument but may cease to do so if a consistent addition is made to them. Causal connection between two events is very different, certainly. But it is not what it has sometimes or often been thought to be. Causal connection between two events is indeed such that it is logically possible for each to exist without the other, and there is an empirical generalization to the effect that events like the first are followed by events like the second, as usually supposed – but the generalization is only true to the extent that there is no interference. Given these propositions about reasons and causation, and hence about the will as rational power or the power to act for reasons, or indeed given other propositions in the doctrine we are looking at, it follows that all psychological determinisms are actually incoherent. Psychological determinisms are in fact those very ordinary theories of human determinism that assert causal relations between terms of which one or both are mental events or states, one of which has been sketched for you. Such mental events or states may of course be within psychoneural pairs. Neurophysiological or physiological determinism, on the other hand, is determinism whose laws are about only bodily and neural events and mention no mental events at all.2 It is coherent, and may or may not be true. Surprisingly, neurophysiological determinism is consistent with rational power as well as the existence of opportunity for action. Hence neurophysiological determinism is consistent with what is called, in an ancient or mediaeval usage, liberty of indifference – free will as traditionally conceived. Neurophysiological determinism is consistent, that is, with what has subsequently been spoken of as the origination of decisions and the like and thus actions. This is in a way fortunate for some of the philosophers who are compatibilists about determinism and freedom – some of the philosophers who espouse, again to use an ancient or mediaeval term, liberty of spontaneity, which is what one has in doing a thing because one wants to. This is evidently the freedom subsequently known as voluntariness. The particular compatibilist philosophers in question are those who are also neurophysiological determinists. They will be surprised to hear that their determinism is consistent with origination, having thought themselves limited to freedom as voluntariness. But if or since voluntariness entails origination, they can be relieved that their determinism is really consistent with origination. They are thereby rescued from self-contradiction. What are the consequences of all this for the criminal law and punishment? We should stick to judging the responsibility of people for

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their actions rather than engage in any other attitude to them. We should make use of conceptions of mens rea or a guilty mind, and of the distinction between intending something in one’s action and foreseeing something as a consequence of one’s action. The intending, whatever it is, is what should guide us in attributing responsibility. To stick to these traditional ways in law and punishment, however, is to serve the end of deterrence rather than retribution, deterrence being the justification of punishment. These are Anthony Kenny’s principal views in the books Will, Freedom and Power and Freewill and Responsibility. Both are admirable books. They do what is more often attempted than done, which is to make you think again. This is so partly because they subject their subject-matter to a succession of categories, as already indicated, partly because they are books that expound a very great deal, are explicitly reasoned, and are both audacious and ingenious. Occasionally they are also a bit carefree. There are a few plain inconsistencies, as when the mind is defined both as only the capacity to acquire intellectual abilities,3 and also as that which consists in the will and the intellect, these being abilities to act in certain perfectly ordinary ways.4 It must also be said that effort is not spent on relating the various ancient families of categories to which the idea of the mind is subjected, and by which it is sometimes overwhelmed. You can occasionally find yourself wondering if, and wondering if it has been asked if, item X is T under a new name, or an aspect of U, or V and W in a new bundle, or Z before its time. The picture is then somewhat uncertain. What of the principal propositions, taken by themselves, and the arguments for them? They, or variants of them, are the stuff of a tradition of strong philosophers, and go some way toward defining it.

2

Rational as against Natural Powers

What is a natural capacity or power, say of whisky to make me drunk? Answers of a kind are given – we are told what a natural capacity is not. But it seems to me we are not told enough when we are told, as we are, that the whisky’s power to make me drunk is other than the alcohol in it, or my becoming drunk, or a transcendental thing, or nothing at all. It is not enlightening enough, that is, to deny that the power is its vehicle, or its exercise, or ‘something in

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its own right’ and occult, or that to which it is reduced by some kind of addled sceptic.5 What of the plain idea of a capacity of which you heard earlier (p. 29), that to say that A has the power to produce X is to say that certain of A’s attributes and certain other attributes of other things together constitute a causal circumstance, an actually sufficient or necessitating condition, for X? To take this plain view, clearly enough, is not without qualification to identify the power with its vehicle, taken to be properties of A, since A might have had the properties and not have had the power to produce X. This would have been so if the world actually lacked other things with the right properties, with the result that there was no causal circumstance for X including properties of A. This plain idea of a natural power rightly does not make a power into any thing whatever, or indeed any properties taken alone or without respect to anything else. If someone presses the question of what a thing’s power is, the answer is that it is its contribution to a possible kind of causal circumstance, a kind of causal circumstance that turns up in the world. We are told a bit too firmly by our instructor, who certainly does not specify the plain idea or seem even to tolerate its simplicity, that our capacities are of our bodies, but, as you have heard, that these capacities are not to be reduced to the structural parts and features in virtue of which we possess those capacities.6 A natural power, we are also told a little more positively, in one place, is that which is exercised when the necessary and sufficient conditions for its exercise obtain.7 You may agree that we do not learn a lot from that. We are also beckoned in other ways towards understanding that to say a thing has a power is to say something other, or something more, than that properties of the thing and properties of other things constitute a certain causal circumstance. Does this elusive and somehow metaphysical idea of a natural power pretend to a significance it lacks? Well, I have to admit I don’t get the message about what an ordinary capacity or power is, really, if it is other than or more than what is conveyed by the plain idea. Can the plain idea of a natural power shed useful light on the different idea of rational power? We are told that rational power is twoway. That is to say that when all the necessary ‘external’ conditions for the power’s exercise are realized, it may or may not be exercised, without their being a want, a desire or any other ‘variable’ whatever that explains the exercise or the absence of one.8 The so-called necessary conditions, then, are evidently not causal conditions. The

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happening or non-happening, of course, despite what has just been said of wants and the like, has to do with reasons. As I say, does the plain idea of a natural power help with this? The plain idea of a natural power, and any clear part of the metaphysical idea of a natural power, derive from an adequate idea of causal connection. Is the idea of a rational power more than the denial of such connection together with a gesture of putting something in its place? Does that gesture come to something? Will sense be made of the nature of this power by naming it ‘rational appetite’ and setting out details of its exercise or upshots in practical reasoning?9 What is surely lacking at the moment, you can think, is anything on how the power issues in the actual decisions, choices and actions on the occasions when it does issue in them. What we need to know about is its relation to its products, not relations between its components or ingredients. What we need to know about is whatever it is that is so different but which takes the place of causal relations. We need to know about this different kind of initiation or generation. It may be supposed that we are provided with another and different idea of a natural power that is somehow enlightening in connection with rational power. Here a natural power involves the fact that certain of A’s properties and certain properties of other things together make up a certain item: a circumstance that is conjoined with an upshot except when there is interference. This idea of a natural power, different from the plain idea, therefore makes use of the rather novel conception of causal connection between two events mentioned in the beginning – an effect is what happens unless there is interference. It is what generally goes together with something unless there is interference. We will come back to this matter of interference, but you may get the feeling now that this conception of causal connection is either mistaken or incomplete. Sometimes, you can feel, we are presented with a mistake and sometimes, it seems, the other thing.10,11 As for the mistake, it is hard to resist the idea that if we suppose that event E’s having been an effect of event C is only and merely that C and E were an instance of something less than even a Humean constant conjunction (p. 21), we have a mistaken and curious conception of cause and effect. The so-called effect is in fact a mystery, whatever might be added about probability. What must be true, rather, if E really was an effect of C, and C satisfies the requirement just mentioned, is that there is more to the story. There was something else that included C, a circumstance

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or set of conditions that necessitated E. Just this is suggested in a way, if suggested only vaguely, by mention of interference, if not by the contradicting and strange proposition that all causal uniformities may fail because of interference. But when the curious conception of causation is properly completed, it appears that it does not produce a notion of natural power that is significantly different from the plain one, or one that is of any more help with rational power.12 It seems to follow from all this that insofar as the mind is characterized in terms of rational power, the mind is not much characterized. The mind might more usefully be taken to consist, if only in part, in natural powers or dispositions plainly conceived. This idea could consistently be added to the hypotheses on consciousness and the brain that make up a theory of determinism. These powers or dispositions would be certain neural as distinct from mental attributes. The resulting view would not be an eliminative materialism or the like, of course, since the capacities in question do issue in facts of consciousness or mentality. Such a view wholly abandons rational power. What we have instead are other thoughts on the will that does not put it in a flood of light. It is said for example that the will, that rational power, whatever it is and however it does it, issues in volitional states, not events. Hence we are enabled to escape from a well-known objection to defining a voluntary action, say the action of having one more olive, as an action that proceeds from a previous action of a kind, an act of will. An event of a kind requires a prior event. The objection is that by parity of reasoning the required voluntariness of the act of will requires a prior act, and so on. A vicious regress. States of will are said to let us off the hook. This is not clear to me – whatever these states may be. It is allowed, for good reason, that such a volitional state or state of inclination must itself be ‘non-compelling’.13 Of what is it, however, that it is non-compelling? Since it would be fatal to supply another internal act, it might be the ordinary action of having of one more olive. In that case we would effectively have the familiar definition of a voluntary action as an unconstrained one, something one wants to do. So far as I can see, this would have nothing to do with the will as rational power and all that. If we were to say this, we would not need the will. We would have departed entirely, if quietly, from anything that might have troubled a determinist. But let us leave this and persist with the will in another way.

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3

57

Reasons

The will issues, in some way, in reasons for actions, somehow intimately related to the states at which we have just glanced.14 There are said to be two large difficulties in the way of regarding reasons, in the sense of actual wants, beliefs and the like,15 as causes of actions, one difficulty being about the separateness of causes and effects, the other being about causal generalizations. From these difficulties we get the large conclusion that basic psychological determinism – ordinary determinism – is incoherent.16 The first large difficulty in the way of regarding reasons as causes, we are told more particularly, is that reasons and actions do not have ‘the separate identity, the logical separability’, that is so necessarily and obviously the case with cause and effect.17 They are not ‘distinct existences’.18 Four propositions of a Wittgensteinian kind, in need of some disentangling, are offered in support of these considerations. (1) To say that someone did something because he wanted to is not to say that a mental event caused the action. The word ‘because’ is not used to indicate a causal relationship.19 Well, this first proposition may or may not be true. But suppose it is true that by a certain ordinary utterance with the word ‘because’ in it we do not mean that a separate want caused an action. That is no very good premise, is it, for the conclusion that a want and its related action are not two separate things, which of course they have to be, for the purposes of cause and effect – or not cause and effect for some other reason? The premise is just about usage and ordinary belief, but the conclusion and its denial are not. Reality could be different from our talk. According to our talk, the sun rises. (2) It is evident, we are told, that in most cases there is no reason for the action distinguishable from the action itself, no item of biography distinguishable from what it explains.20 Pangs of hunger, pricks of lust, and sudden impulses to pick flowers are suitably separate mental events or states. But the same cannot be said of long-term purposes and the like, which guide one’s conduct without being items of consciousness, or of certain intentions to adopt means to ends, which intentions are not in one’s stream of thought. Nor are there suitably separate mental events or states to be found in ‘consents’, such as my consent to the squashing of minute organisms when I walk on the grass in the ordinary way.

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With respect to this second proposition, as indeed the others, there is surely but one question to be kept in mind in connection with talk of the separability, the separate identity and so on of cause and effect. At bottom this is the idea that cause and effect are two things, that causation is a relation between two things. Are the wants and the like distinguished from pricks of lust and so on ever identical with their actions or indeed any actions, one thing? They are not, and in fact generally we are not told exactly that they are. It would take a nerve to do so. On the contrary, the truism that wants are not identical with their actions is implied by our instructor saying, as he does, that they explain actions. In the relevant sense of ‘explain’, which certainly is not that of ‘characterize’ or ‘describe’ or ‘identify’, A cannot be explained by A. The simple non-identity of reason and action, to repeat, is precisely the fundamental condition of their being cause and effect which we are considering. It does not matter, in this connection, that my long-term purpose of becoming an engineer, or my intending not to drop my cup of tea as a means to having it to drink, are more or less out of mind. That does not make two things into one. ‘Consents’ as understood, by the way, say to squashing the minute organisms, have perhaps made it – they are out of mind – and so must be wholly irrelevant. (3) Next is the proposition that actions are not made voluntary by suitably separate reasons, or by being caused by them, even when there are such reasons.21 This too seems to me not to touch the issue having to do with cause and effect being separate. It may be that our conception of a voluntary action is, say, of one in accordance with reasons rather than caused by them, or owed to a want rather than caused by it, but it does not follow that wants are not independent of actions, or of course that they do not cause them. (4) Many actions are not identifiable in themselves, but are identifiable only when they are seen as proceeding from certain desires and beliefs.22 Well, it may be that whether or not a witch-doctor’s action counts as killing someone turns on whether or not the witch-doctor believes that a certain potion kills only witches, that a person is or is not a witch, and so on.23 Let us suppose everything possible: that nothing is identifiable in any way as an action before we suppose that someone had certain beliefs. It just doesn’t follow that reason and action are not two things.24

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So much for the first difficulty in the way of reasons being causes and thus ordinary determinism being coherent – the difficulty that reasons are not separate enough from actions to be their causes.25 There is said to be another large difficulty in the way of taking determinism as coherent. It is that there can be no true lawlike generalizations connecting reasons and actions. Here again various propositions, in some need of sorting out, are offered as persuasions or proofs. No fewer than seven. (1) We are told that the thesis that there are such generalizations is something that needs to be ‘shored up’ by ‘gratuitously’ introducing the idea of ‘interference’.26 The fact that I don’t always scratch when I have an itch is accommodated by a somehow unwarranted or self-defeating recourse to the idea that sometimes something interferes. This first proposition requires that we imagine a distinctly unalarming determinist. He first says, in effect, ‘There is a true lawlike generalization connecting having an itch, by itself, with scratching.’ He then ‘shores up’ his position by moving to a less vulnerable generalization that takes into account that an itch by itself is obviously not a causal circumstance for scratching. Here, and still more so in what follows, it is essential to be clear about ‘interference’. This takes a little attention but not much. Suppose, to keep things simpler than they are, that my itch below my waist, and my being by myself, in solitude, would be a causal circumstance for scratching the itch. Suppose too that my itch and something else, my being onstage, would be a causal circumstance for definitely not scratching. Then, plainly, being onstage is ‘interference’ with respect to the itch and scratching. So is being all alone by myself ‘interference’ with respect to the itch and not scratching? In general, suppose conditions C1 and C2 would make up causal circumstance CC1. It would necessitate E1. C1 again, and C3, would comprise another circumstance, CC2. It would necessitate E2. C3 is then ‘interference’ with respect to C1 and E1. So is C2 interference with respect to C1 and E2. Thus interferences are simply parts not in common between two possible causal circumstances for different effects. It follows, to return to proposition 1, that virtually no half-serious psychological or ordinary determinism could fail to take interference into account. It is an unexciting fact, pretty boring, and it is taken into account warrantably and from the start, indeed from before the time when there is anything to shore up. It is part of ordinary

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and ground-level thinking about causation. It is part of the business of arriving at true lawlike generalizations. (2) We are also invited to consider something else, a piece of practical reasoning, involving the reasons R1 and R2, and a conclusion C, and another reason R3. The reasoning is: (R1) I’m to be in London at 4.15, and (R2) if I catch the 2.30 train I’ll be in London at 4.15, so (C) I’ll catch the 2.30 train. The conclusion, a fiat for an action, is satisfactory, but will not remain so if we add a further consistent premise – (R3) that the 2.30 is always terribly crowded and that it would be a good thing to work on the train. An argument that somehow was valid becomes invalid.27 Practical reasoning is defeasible. Suppose, however, to continue the story, that it is R1 and R2 that occur to me, and I do catch the train. Could there be a true lawlike generalization connecting reasons and action here? To have one, we should have to make use of the notion of interference, suggested by the fact that if R3 had occurred to me, I would not have taken the train. However, to speak sensibly of an interference we need to have an idea of what is interfered with, and this we cannot have. We cannot in advance give an account of the action of the causal agent if not interfered with. The case is different from that of practical reasoning, incidentally, where we do know in general what the premises issue in if there is no addition of an invalidating premise. We have it, then, that there cannot be true lawlike generalizations connecting reasons and actions. Let us take this together with the following proposition in support of there being no such generalizations. (3) When in practical reasoning a new premise is added, say a new want, there remains the possibility of a conclusion that satisfies all the premises. Causation is different. When one ‘causal tendency’ is interfered with by another, neither is fulfilled.28 These propositions 2 and 3 about practical reasoning are said to be the fundamental ones of Will, Freedom and Power. Very many replies might be made to them. Two may be enough. One reply derives directly from what has just been said of interference. In claiming that there is some causal circumstance for E1, I most certainly do not have to specify an upshot for each of several parts of it. I do not have to engage in some operation like the operation of reflecting on conflicting reasons and so on. If I want to try to give the tendencies of ‘interfering parts’ and ‘interfered-with’ parts, I must of course do just that, and I can, all of which is essentially irrelevant to the question of whether I can specify the circumstance.

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There has sometimes been thought to be a general difficulty about specifying causal circumstances, one having nothing whatever to do with reasons and actions in particular.29 It too is surely an unreal difficulty, and it is not relied on by our instructor.30 My other reply with respect to propositions 2 and 3 against determinism is just that we can look at each of the items X, Y and Z, say, both as reason and cause, and then say different things of them. For example, we can say that each is ‘satisfied’ and that all are ‘fulfilled’. The essential point is that no ground is given for thinking this to be inconsistent. What is said is that the two things, the reasoning story and the causal story, are different. That in no way refutes the causal story or supports the claim that X, Y and Z cannot enter into a true lawlike generalization. (4) If defeasibility is one way in which practical reasoning is ‘loose’, we are told there are also three others. (a) One set of beliefs and desires, set out as premises, can license incompatible conclusions, such as taking a bus and taking a train. (b) A given conclusion, such as ‘I should open the door’, can be acted on in different ways, say kicking it open and so on. (c) A conclusion may not be acted on at all, as in instances of weakness of will.31 These three loosenesses conflict with the possibility of true lawlike generalizations between reasons and actions. This thinking seems to fail for equally clear reasons. All that is shown by the fact that a given set of reasons can have different upshots (something common to weakness of will and the other two cases) is that those reasons by themselves cannot be the whole antecedent of a lawlike generalization with a certain consequent. Those reasons by themselves are not all of a causal circumstance. That is not to say that they cannot be causes of actions, or, to stick to the precise point, that reasons and actions cannot come together into certain generalizations. (5) Another objection to generalizations is that it is not possible to identify the ‘interfering’ factors, and this is surely an essential feature of such generalizations. And, if it is said that we can think instead of different intensities of desire, there is the fact that it is impossible to measure the intensity of desire. And, if it is now said that the day will come when we can, this does not give us a reason for accepting that there are true lawlike generalizations connecting reasons and actions.32 This argument 5, again about interference, apparently has the weakness of proposition 2, and also its own special failing. The

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argument issues in the end in the proposition that there is no proof yet available of certain lawlike generalizations. But the argument is supposed to be one for a quite different conclusion. That is the conclusion, you will not need reminding, that ‘we do not seem to be able to state . . . generalizations’, that such things are unstatable or ‘incoherent’.33 (6) When we say someone did something for a certain reason, we don’t mean that there is a certain true generalization. ‘I scratched only to get rid of the itch’ doesn’t entail ‘Whenever I have an itch, I scratch’ or some related generalization.34 I think this fails for another reason already noted, that psychological or ordinary determinism is not a thesis about concepts or usage, and cannot be defeated by such facts. There is confusion, I take it, in sometimes identifying psychological determinism, properly, as the issue of ‘whether a man’s reasons or wants or beliefs are determining causes of his action’ or the thesis ‘that reasons are causes’,35 and sometimes as the thesis that we as ordinary speakers so use the term ‘reason’ that it is equivalent in meaning to ‘sufficient antecedent condition’, and hence that certain entailments hold.36 (7) Finally, the generalization-thesis is mistaken because, if we want to decide the claim that someone acted in a certain way because he wanted something, we do not proceed by testing a generalization.37 This calls for the same sort of reply as in argument 6, among others. There you are. There was no shortage of propositions supplied in order to make us give up on any hope of there being a decent theory of determinism that takes causal connections to hold between mental events, or between mental and physical events. The propositions having to do with the separateness of cause and effect did not work. Were the reasons having to do with generalizations any better? It seems not. It is not easy to come to an overview of this section about reasons and the previous one about the will and rational power, both of them having to do with causation. Maybe a bird’s-eye speculation is worth thinking about, a speculation about someone in our instructor’s intellectual circumstance. What it comes to is first the unavoidable acceptance that there are ordinary realities – physical and other things – including neural events, and reasons in the sense of conscious things that actually move us to actions, and actions themselves. These realities

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are plainly causes and effects. That may be troubling or worse, something that goes against religious convictions or human insight or humanism or a direct sense of what is true of us or whatever else. You can attempt to improve the situation by trying to rewrite causation into something looser, more satisfactory in terms of your motivations, but this is not easy. You may not persuade yourself by this. So if causation as we have it cannot really be turned into something else, and if our lives still need to be seen differently, there is another strategy. You can see our lives as involving more than the ordinary realities. They may be seen as a matter of extraordinary capacities and powers, extraordinary reasons and the like. The trouble is that now you do not only leave cause and effect behind. You do indeed also leave ordinary reality behind. That is not comfortable, a high price to pay, and in fact not possible. Another trouble is that you simply do not know what relates the extraordinary things. It needs to be remembered that if they are not ordinary realities, they are realities. They include deciding to leave home or to shoot someone, intending to do such things, and leaving home and shooting. They are events that need actual explanations of some kind.

4

Compatibilism, Connected Freedoms, Punishment

If psychological or ordinary determinism must go, we are told, then so of course must that particular doctrine of compatibilism that combines precisely that determinism with a certain conception of liberty of spontaneity or voluntariness – doing something because one’s wants cause one to do it.38 In place of such a compatibilism, which might in this context be called the lower compatibilism, there is a superior one offered to us by our instructor, involving what is called a different liberty of spontaneity.39 It is very different. According to the higher compatibilism, we have a different liberty of spontaneity and we also have liberty of indifference or origination, which liberties are in fact mutually dependent – at least we have these freedoms at the introspectively psychological or human level, certainly a real level, so to speak. If you think it odd to speak of this as a compatibilism at all, since it includes the proposition of origination, there is a kind of reply. It is about the level of neurophysiology.

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There, determinism may be true. That is to say that all of one’s nonmental activity may be determined via neurophysiological states of the brain and central nervous system.40 Each physical action, that is, may be the effect of a certain physical causal sequence. Neurophysiological and physiological determinism in our lives is consistent with all the freedom ever aspired to by us, or by others for us, consistently with an indubitable rejection of psychological determinism.41 The different liberty of spontaneity consists in doing what one wants to where that is definitely not a matter of causes, but specifically and surprisingly a matter of nothing other than rational power. This picture is unaffected, we are to understand, by what is allowed, the existence of ‘translation’ of a kind between determined physical movements and actions, the fact of actions somehow ‘consisting’ in the caused movements. The liberty would be affected by the existence of lawlike connections between the brain and reasons for action, such as wants, but we have it there are no such connections. It is a little baffling. Let us have an example that may enable us to consider the view clearly. Suppose Green wanted to vote Democrat and in fact punch his ballot in the right place. We can specify details of this episode. Neural event N occurred, as did his want W. Then there was M, Green’s subsequent movement at time T, and also A, his action. This action consisted in M. And M was the effect of a physical causal sequence in which, as we can of course add, neural event N figured. Green’s liberty of indifference consisted in his having the ability or the rational power, and at T the opportunity, both to perform A and not perform A, to vote Democrat or to vote otherwise.42 The want W was what gave rise non-causally, whatever this may mean, to the occurrence of the action A. That Green had the ability not to do A is said to have been consistent with A’s having been an effect in another way. That is, the power not to do action A which was part of his liberty of indifference was something Green had despite the fact that the movement in which action A consisted was caused to happen, the effect of a certain physical sequence.43 What we are given in this picture, which involves many questions and difficulties, is surely best regarded as a kind of denial of neurophysiological determinism reasonably conceived. What we are given, fundamentally, is nothing other than the doctrine of origination, free will or liberty of indifference. The so-called neurophysiological determinism of which we are hearing, and which is consistent with power and opportunity, and whose truth is said to be an open question, involves a physical causal sequence for a movement that

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is also an action that has a beginning in a non-physical fact, W, which itself is a matter of rational power.44 The only and different neurophysiological determinism whose compatibility with freedom would be interesting is one that takes movements or actions to be effects of wholly physical causal sequences that do not have rational power, states of will and so on among their initial items. Obviously origination has not been shown to be and is not compatible with this.45 It is part of the higher compatibilism that liberty of spontaneity entails liberty of indifference. These two liberties are somehow logically tied together. Are they? That is, does voluntariness entail origination? The question is of independent interest, indeed great interest. It arises, for example, for anyone attracted by the three hypotheses of a real determinism, that (1) simultaneous mental and neural events are in lawlike connection – they form psychoneural pairs, (2) these pairs are the effects of certain causal sequences, and (3) actions are effects of causal sequences involving the psychoneural pairs. Determinists and others have traditionally thought they could have some liberty of spontaneity or other without the embarrassment of liberty of indifference. That the two are inseparably linked, indeed two sides of the same coin, appears to be claimed in the books we are considering on the basis of a conceptual connection that is not made explicit.46 We are told, simply, that wants or desires to do X, as opposed to tendencies to do X, can be attributed by us only to agents of a certain kind. We can attribute them only to agents able both to do X and not to do X. There is also a more explicit argument for linkage. It is that wants, as volitions, are bound up with practical reasoning, whose defeasibility brings in liberty of indifference.47 It is indeed true that liberty of spontaneity or voluntariness is conceptually connected with ability somehow conceived, agents of a certain kind. Roughly, ‘He did X because he wanted to’ entails that his wanting was a non-logical necessary condition of his doing it, or at least a necessary condition. That in turn entails that he did not wholly lack the ability not to do X, since that lack would have been sufficient in itself for his doing X. But what ability? Perhaps one that turns on no more than absence of constraint, the idea fundamental to liberty of spontaneity. Certainly we have no reason to think that it is liberty of indifference in its obscurity that is entailed.48 As for the explicit argument about practical reasoning, one thing to be said of it is that defeasibility has not been shown to entail a want of causal connection, let alone liberty of indifference – rational power

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plus opportunity. It will be evident enough that there is nothing remotely like a proof of liberty of indifference or origination to be had from defeasibility. Nor, of course, with respect to the question of whether we have liberty of indifference, is there much help in simple declamation: ‘Since we know we are free agents, . . . ’49 To turn now to another consequence of ‘neurophysiological determinism’, the determinism with origination in it, it is that nothing needs to change with respect to punishment and the like. What is said here is also of independent interest, partly because it pertains to a proper determinism. The retribution theory of punishment is found to be incoherent. The theory, we hear, reduces to the proposition that punishment is just – a matter of justice – because harming an offender is an end in itself, a good in itself. But seeking the harm of another as an end in itself is the paradigm case not of a just but of an unjust action.50 There is no consideration of the fact that this discovery of incoherence has to do not only with the morally alarming as well as great Kant, who said that a society going out of existence and so without concern for future members has as its last obligation the execution of the last murderer in jail, but with most contemporary theories of punishment. These avowedly depend in part on considerations of retribution, partly in order to prohibit the punishment of the innocent. The main thing to be said, however, is that it was always unlikely that the retribution theory must be taken to amount to a moral absurdity. In fact there is a much better understanding of it, having to do with the satisfying of grievance, and with equalities, and with economy of distress.51 The actual justification of punishment, we are told, is deterrence.52 Indeed it is offered as a conceptual truth that what is not deterrent is not punishment.53 That is rather unlikely. It is taken without reflection that the law as it stands is such that we are justified in punishing people to deter them from breaking it. This obscure moral conservatism appears to take the status quo not only as defensible but also in need of no defending. That punishment does actually work as a deterrent, by the way, is supported by the novel proposition that the Prohibition Laws in America made people change their drinking habits.54 It also didn’t stop drinking. Supposing that we do want to have people govern themselves by just the norms of the law as it stands, and we want to use punishment to that end, how are we to proceed?55 To some considerable but

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undefined extent we should punish only those people who are in ways responsible for their actions.56 We can and should embrace, perhaps to a greater extent than we do, the principle of mens rea to the effect that an act does not make a man guilty unless his mind is guilty too.57 We should resist or anyway think hard about the increase of strict-liability legislation and interpretation,58 and have no truck with any supposedly enlightened proposal that an offender’s degree of responsibility for an act should be irrelevant to whether he has broken the law and to what happens to him.59 It is a familiar and well-supported proposition, of course, that one good way of altering behaviour is by influencing those who have been somehow responsible for their behaviour. However, there are other ways, those involving strict liability and the like, and they are at least acceptable enough to be a growing part of the law. They are not to be confused with the singlemindedness of the supposedly enlightened proposal. There is then a large question having to do with the balance to be struck. Something is said in favour of going by responsibility, but there is little or no inquiry into the recommendation of the other thing.60 In connection with going by responsibility, and its own problems, there is consideration of some legal cases, and an attached argument about paying attention to intention in framing the law, as distinct from only foresight of consequences.61 It is recommended that murder should be defined as intending – in part having as means or end – the killing of someone or the serious risking of death, and that killing or risking death which is only foreseeable as a consequence of one’s act should be manslaughter or whatever. It is not clear to me that this application of the doctrine of double effect,62 rather than an alternative involving only foresight, is called for by a commitment to deterrence.

Notes 1. Oxford University Press, 1998. See also Free Will and Values (State University of New York Press, 1985). 2. For such a theory of determinism, and what seems to be its problem, see Chapter 2, ’The Thinking of Some Neuroscientific Friends’, in my On Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 3. Will, Freedom and Power (Blackwell, 1975), p. 2. 4. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 3–4, 9. 5. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 125.

68 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

On Determinism and Freedom Will, Freedom and Power, p. 11. Freewill and Responsibility (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 30. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 53, 124, 129, 130, 142. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 22, 27, 69. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 110. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 115. See Chapter 1, p. 29. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 27. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 27. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 107–8. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 24. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 117; cf. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 27–8. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 119. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 25–6, 106, 118, 120, 142; cf. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 26. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 119. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 118, 120, 148; Freewill and Responsibility, p. 27. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 12. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 12–21. It is notable that virtually this same defence of psychological determinism is asserted elsewhere against the anti-causal argument the other way on, from the premise that wants are identified by the actions in which they issue. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 117–18; cf. Freedom and Responsibility, p. 11. There is more on this in my ‘A Conspectus of Determinism’, Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1970. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 114. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 70, 97–8. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 91–6, 101–11, 115–17, 94–5; Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 28–9; cf. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 114–15. See Chapter 1, pp. 25–6. There is no need here for more on defeasibility, as it is called, and hence on so-called practical reasoning generally (Will, Freedom and Power, Chapter 5), but it is hard to resist making several insufficient remarks. Clearer sense could surely be made of ‘practical reasoning’ by sticking to the obvious idea that it is in a way enthymematic – argument in which some premise is not explicitly stated. R1 and R2 are helped by (R) ‘I’m to do what effectively and economically serves my ends.’ Still, since the conclusion is still not necessary, there is no real point in talking of a ‘valid’ argument. It would be better, for most instances of ‘practical reasoning’, to take the major premise as roughly ‘Consider effective and economical means . . . ’ and the conclusion as ‘Consider . . . ’. This makes clear, however, that the province of ‘practical reasoning’ is small indeed. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 101–8, 114–15, 22–3. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 109–13.

The Will, Reasons, Determinism’s Incoherence 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

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Will, Freedom and Power, p. 117. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 112–13, 109, 120. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 111. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 113; cf. p. 109. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 111–14. This is not exactly the compatibilism identified by me in the second section of the last chapter, the view that freedom is voluntariness, which is a decision’s being according to the desires and nature of the individual, but it is very close. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 148–9; Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 25–6. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 25–6; Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 148–9. The idea that purely neurophysiological determinism or what is called purely physical determinism – see also Note 2 above – can consistently go together with a denial of a determinism of decisions, choices and actions is of course contentious. For argument against this sort of thing, see my ‘A Conspectus of Determinism’, Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1970, which in some other respects certainly needs correcting. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 151–2; cf. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 122, 149–50. That Green had the opportunity not to do the action A, despite the fact that what A consisted in was the effect of a physical sequence, is explained by the proposition that if want W had not occurred, then some part of the sequence, say neural event N, would not have occurred either. W in some non-logical sense was a necessary condition of N. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 151–2; Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 31–2. Cf. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 153–4. As remarked above, such a determinism is considered in ‘The Thinking of Some Neuroscientific Friends’ in On Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Freewill and Responsibility, p. 26; Will, Freedom and Power, p. 143. Will, Freedom and Power, p. 144. Cf. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 26. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 33. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 73. This view is expounded in my Punishment, The Supposed Justifications, forthcoming in further edition from Pluto Press. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 75–6. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 76. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 78. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 67–8. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 9–10. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 84–5. Freewill and Responsibility, p. 93. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 3–5, 8–9. Freewill and Responsibility, pp. 8–9, 79–80, 85–93.

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61. Will, Freedom and Power, pp. 67–9; Freewill and Responsibility, Chapter 2. 62. For some critical thoughts on double effect – excusing people from or justifying them in what they knew would be effects of their actions, but in some sense did not intend – see the 2nd edition of my After the Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 172–4.

Chapter Four

Is the Mind Ahead of the Brain? Behind It?

In moving from ancient and mediaeval propositions on our rational power to what you are now about to read, it is easy to say you move to another world. You move to propositions of Californian neurophysiologists, got by using small electrodes to stimulate the brains of patients during surgical operations and asking them questions about when they feel things. However, you move to propositions taken to have the same importance. The propositions are advanced to support the existence of freedom of origination or free will, and hence the falsehood of determinism. The most scientific, speculative and copious thinking on free will in the past three decades or so is in The Self and Its Brain, by Karl Popper and the neurophysiologist J. C. Eccles. This large book has the recommendation of assuming that a serious exposition of free will has to be within a philosophy or maybe a science of mind, or at least informed by such a thing. Certainly the book does expound a philosophy and science of the mind. It expounds what is called, but not enlighteningly, a dualism of mind and brain. The label is not informative for the reason, first, that there are many of what can be called dualisms, some with as much reason called physicalisms.1 It is also misleading to speak of dualism for another reason. Many dualisms, including the historical doctrines that were given the name, explicitly have three things as their stock in trade: brain, mental or conscious events, and something other than the brain that gives unity to, is the subject of, experiences, initiates, originates the mental or conscious events. In the case of Popper and Eccles, not as reluctant as others to declare themselves, the third thing is what they speak of as the self-conscious mind.

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Their doctrine includes not only a denial of necessary or lawlike connection between brain and mind – between neural and mental events and between neural events and self-conscious mind – but also a kind of ascendancy of the mind, well indicated by the title of their book. Certainly the mind, in overseeing and running the brain to the considerable extent it does, has the freedom of origination. Determinism is false. All this depends as much on the Californian neurophysiologists as anything else. This is research in two periods by Benjamin Libet of the University of California at San Francisco and his various collaborators. The several propositions drawn from this research by Libet and collaborators and by Popper and Eccles also have a wider relevance. They can be contemplated as giving striking support to more or less any account of thought and action that propounds a freedom of origination. They can be contemplated as supporting more restrained thinking than that of Popper and Eccles, and indeed of Libet.2 A relevant admission on my part is needed. If high reasoning on determinism and freedom uninformed by science cannot now be reassuring, nor is there reassurance in the idea that science is uniquely placed to decide the questions. It is somewhat less uniquely placed than philosophy. I include the piece below in this book partly in order to illustrate that general point for those in need of the illustration. They include quite a few workers in the flourishing industry of the science of consciousness.3 Will you say that the piece sticks out like a sore thumb in the book? Maybe it does. Anyway it sticks out like a piece from The Journal of Theoretical Biology, which mainly it is, in the middle of much philosophy. Still, it has that standard aim of philosophy which is to make sense of something, to see what something comes to. This, in the first period of Libet research, is what is announced as a single hypothesis about the time of such a conscious experience as a sensation in a hand. With respect to the second period of research, what needs thinking about is a brain process that precedes a free action, say flexing a wrist.4 The piece has been revised a little with the aim of making its burden plainer to those readers not at home with evoked potentials in somatosensory cortex, subcortical stimulation trains, skin stimuli and so on. They will not lose all understanding if they skim a paragraph or two.

Is the Mind Ahead of the Brain? Behind It?

1

73

Some Experimental Findings about Experiences

Benjamin Libet and also Libet and collaborators claim to advance a single hypothesis, with important consequences, about the time of a conscious experience in relation to the time when there occurs a certain physical condition in the brain. This condition is spoken of as neuronal adequacy for the experience, or, as we can as well say, neural adequacy.5 This finding has been taken to throw doubt on theories that take neural and mental events to be in necessary or lawlike connection, and also on certain identity theories of mind and brain, as well as determinist theories generally. The hypothesis derives in part from many previous findings.6 Karl Popper and J. C. Eccles use it as evidence for an ambitious view that asserts a kind of surveillance and control of the brain by ‘the self-conscious mind’, despite some acting of the brain on the self-conscious mind.7 What is maintained by the experimenters derives from two sets of experimental findings pertaining to certain neural activity and to the time-order of a subject’s pairs of sensory experiences, and also from a finding having to do with some electrical activity in the part of the brain that is the somatosensory cortex. These findings are the set 1 to 3 below, and then the set 4 to 7, and then 8. Very roughly, findings 1 to 3 are to the effect that there is a certain delay after an earlier event in the occurrence of something associated with a sensory experience. But finding 4 apparently conflicts with this. Others of the findings are used to give an explanation of the apparent conflict. (1) Experiments on neurosurgery patients, with their agreement, and in conjunction with surgical operations, are said to have established a fact. It is that after the beginning of a small electrical stimulation applied directly by inserted electrodes to part of the brain, the postcentral cortex, there is a considerable delay, up to about half a second (500 milliseconds – 500 msec.) before something happens. That is electrical activity in the cortex reaching ‘neural adequacy’ for eliciting a certain conscious sensory experience on the part of the patient. What is said to be delayed, to repeat, is precisely the condition of ‘neural adequacy’, about which we are not told much, as distinct from the conscious experience itself, whatever is to be said of its time of occurrence. (2) There is said to be a very similar delay in conscious experience, again up to about half a second, with respect to direct stimulation

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of another part of the brain – direct stimulation trains to the subcortex. (3) There is also said to be the same delay of about 500 msec. in consciousness with a single pulse of electricity to the skin of the hand – peripheral stimulation. As against these delays, there are other findings, the first being crucial. (4) If the skin of the hand of a patient is stimulated later than the beginning of a certain stimulus direct to the brain, you would expect to hear from the subject that the conscious skin-experience came after the other conscious experience. More precisely, if a singlepulse stimulus to the skin of the hand at just above threshold level is applied 200 or 300 msec. after the beginning of a stimulus train direct to somatosensory cortex, you would expect that subjects would report that the conscious experience for the skin stimulus began after conscious experience for the cortical stimulus. This would also be expected on the basis of findings 1 and 3. Reports of tests, however, very remarkably, were predominantly of experience for the skin stimulus beginning before experience for the cortical stimulus. (5) There is no such surprising order of conscious experiences reported with subcortical stimulation. If a skin stimulus is applied later than the beginning of a subcortical stimulus train, subjects report that the sensory experience owed to the skin stimulus began after sensory experience owed to the subcortical stimulation. When it should have, so to speak. (6) Similarly, if the beginning of subcortical stimulation is simultaneous with a peripheral stimulus to the skin of the hand, subjects report simultaneous sensory experiences. (7) Similarly again, if a skin stimulus is applied before the beginning of subcortical stimulation, subjects report that experience of the skin stimulus came before experience owed to the subcortical stimulation. (8) And finally, peripheral stimuli and subcortical stimuli very quickly elicit some other electrical activity in the brain. This is a relatively localized ‘primary’ evoked potential in somatosensory cortex, owed importantly to a certain system in the brain – the specific (lemniscal) projection system. The onset of this electrical activity, also referred to as the arrival of a fast projection volley, is only about 15 msec. after a stimulus to the hand. Very quick. However, a stimulus train applied direct to somatosensory cortex does not elicit a similar type of response.

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So the first set of findings 1 to 3 are to the effect that neural adequacy for any sensory experience is achieved only after a certain delay, about half a second. But finding 4, which is indeed crucial, appears to conflict with this. That is, the ordering by subjects of their experiences is this: conscious-experience-owed-tolater-skin-stimulus came before conscious-experience-owed-to-earliercortical-stimulus. This suggests that the experience of the peripheral stimulus occurs considerably sooner than about half a second later. This is also the case with subcortical stimulation, but not with cortical stimulation, as indicated by findings 5, 6 and 7.

2

Statements of a Hypothesis

The two sets of findings, together with (8) the finding of some early electrical activity, are said by Libet and collaborators to issue in what will concern us a lot more, a single hypothesis with significant consequences. In itself, it is about about the timing of conscious sensory experiences owed to peripheral and subcortical stimulation. We are also given an explanation of what is postulated in the hypothesis. The explanation of what is postulated has to do in part with something of which you will eventually hear the little bit more that is necessary – the early electrical activity in finding 8. In fact some statements made by the authors are of one hypothesis, or suggest it. Other statements are of, or suggest, a different hypothesis. It will be necessary, partly for fairness, to quote extensively. The following statements S1 to S5 are somehow to this effect: a conscious experience occurs at a certain time but is ‘antedated’ to the time of the early electrical activity, the ‘primary’ evoked potential having to do with the specific (lemniscal) projection system. (S1) ‘[The hypothesis] postulates (a) the existence of a subjective referral of the timing for a sensory experience, and (b) a role for the specific (lemniscal) projection system in mediating such a subjective referral of timing.’8 (S2) ‘(1) Some neuronal process associated with the early or primary evoked response, of SI (somatosensory) cortex to a skin stimulus, is postulated to serve as a ‘time-marker’. (2) There is an

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automatic subjective referral of the conscious experience backwards in time to this time-marker, after the delayed neural adequacy at cerebral levels has been achieved (see Fig. 2).9 The sensory experience would be ‘antedated’ from the actual delayed time at which the neuronal state became adequate to elicit it; and the experience would appear subjectively to occur with no significant delay from the arrival of the fast projection volley.’10 (S3) ‘The results obtained in these experiments provide specific support for our present proposal, that is, for the existence of a subjective temporal referral of a sensory experience by which the subjective timing is retroactively antedated to the time of the primary cortical response (elicited by the lemniscal input).’11 (S4) ‘The specific projection system is already regarded as the provider of localized cerebral signals that function in fine spatial discrimination, including the subjective referral of sensory experience in space. Our present hypothesis expands the role for this system to include a function in the temporal dimension. The same cortical responses to specific fast projection inputs would also provide timing signals. They would subserve subjective referral in such a way as to help ‘correct’ the subjective timing (relative to the sensory stimulus), in spite of actual substantial delays in the time to achieve neural adequacy for the ‘production’ of the conscious sensory experience.’12 (S5) ‘. . . for a peripheral sensory input, (a) the primary evoked response of sensory cortex to the specific projection (lemniscal) input is associated with a process that can serve as a ‘time-marker’; and (b) after delayed neural adequacy is achieved, there is a subjective referral of the sensory experience backwards in time so as to coincide with this initial ‘time-marker’.’13 These statements are certainly not all clear – I do not refer to their technicalities – but their burden is that such a conscious experience as that of a stimulus to the skin of the hand occurs only when neural adequacy is achieved, but the experience is somehow ‘antedated’ or ‘referred’ to an earlier time. That is, despite what is said of the experience’s involving ‘subjective referral backwards in time’, the experience itself occurs only about half a second after the beginning of stimulation. The experience does not occur at the time to which it is ‘referred’. This is also what is conveyed by the experimenters, as will be worth noting, in one of their diagrammes and several other

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passages. Their figure, reproduced here as Figure 1, has to do in the main with the early electrical activity, the ‘primary’ evoked potential. (S6) It is stated of the figure in part: ‘Diagram representing the ‘average evoked response’ (AER) recordable on the surface of human primary somatosensory cortex (SI) in relation to the . . . hypothesis on timing of the sensory experience. Below the AER, the first line shows the approximate delay in achieving the state of ‘neuronal adequacy’ that appears (on the basis of other evidence) to be necessary for eliciting the sensory experience. The second line shows the postulated retroactive referral of the subjective timing of the experience, from the time of ‘neuronal adequacy’ backwards to some time associated with the primary surface-positive component of the evoked potential.’15 Presumably ‘neuronal adequacy’ is not taken as necessary for eliciting what has already happened, earlier in time. The experience, at the later time, is merely ‘referred’ to the earlier. (S7) It is stated that the hypothesis in question ‘deals with the problem of a substantial neuronal time delay apparently required for

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the ‘encoding’ of a conscious sensory experience, by introducing the concept of a subjective referral of sensory experience in the temporal dimension.’16 Finally, there is what is said of a quite different idea, owed to Donald MacKay. MacKay’s idea ‘accepts our proposal that there is substantial delay in achieving neural adequacy with all inputs, peripheral or central; but it would argue that, in those cases where there is apparent antedating of the subjective timings of the sensory experience, the subjective referral backwards in time may be due to an illusory judgement made by the subject when he reports the timings . . . For example, it could be argued that during the recall process, cerebral mechanisms might ‘read back’ via some memory device to the primary evoked response and now construe the timing of the experience to have occurred earlier than it in fact did occur.’17 An amendment of this idea from MacKay is contemplated, one that is said in fact to turn it into the hypothesis of Libet et al.: (S8) ‘. . . if any ‘read back’ to the primary timing signal does occur, it would seem simpler to assume that this takes place at the time when neuronal adequacy for the experience is first achieved, when the ‘memory’ of the timing signal would be fresher; such a process would then produce the retroactive subjective referral we have postulated.’18 So – the burden of all that has been reported here so far, in statements S1 to S8, is the delay-and-antedating hypothesis. Such a conscious experience as that of a skin stimulus occurs only at the time when ‘neural adequacy’ has been achieved, about half a second after the beginning of stimulation, despite the fact of ‘antedating’. By way of a headline, the mind is not ahead of the brain, despite the mind’s antedating capability. On the other hand the following statements S9 to S15 are different. Some have to do with the authors’ figure reproduced here as Figure 2, pertaining to the crucial finding 4, about the subjects’ surprising ordering of experiences. It could hardly be clearer in its quite different import. (S9) In the figure the S-experience (experience of a skin stimulus) is specified as ‘actually before C-experience’ (experience owed to cortical stimulation). It is shown as occurring only a few msec. after the stimulus-pulse (S-pulse). (S10) In the note to the diagramme it is stated: ‘If S were followed by a . . . delay of 500 msec of cortical activity before neural

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adequacy is achieved, initiation of S-experience might . . . have been expected to be delayed until 700 msec of C [stimulus train to somatosensory cortex] had elapsed. In fact, S-experience was reported to appear subjectively before C-experience. . . . ’ The note, although perhaps less definite in its intention, thus accords with the diagramme. (S11) What the crucial finding 4 established, it is said and implied, is that conscious experience of certain stimulation did not occur at the time of neural adequacy. ‘If the subjective experience were to occur at the same time as the achievement of neural adequacy in the case of either stimulus, one would expect the subject to report that the conscious sensory experience for the C stimulus began before that for the threshold S pulse (Fig. 120 ). . . . However, the pooled reports were predominantly those of sensory experience for the C (cortical) stimulus beginning after, not before, that for a delayed threshold S pulse. . . . ’21 (S12) It is stated, of the crucial finding 4, that ‘the subjective experience of the skin stimulus occurs relatively quickly after the delivery of the S pulse, rather than after the expected delay of up to about 500 msec for development of neural adequacy following the S input.’22 That is, the skin-stimulus experience itself occurs earlier, rather than after the expected delay. (S13) It is flatly stated that ‘subjective experience of a peripherallyinduced sensation is found to appear without the substantial delay found for the experience of a cortically induced sensation.’23 (S14) Very importantly, it is noted that findings 1, 2 and 3 above, about delay in achieving neural adequacy, are not to be taken in a natural way, as asserting or implying that the experiences in

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question are subject to the given delay. That is left open. ‘The two timings, for subjective experience vs. neural adequacy, might not necessarily be identical.’24 (S15) It is stated that the hypothesis in question introduces ‘an asynchrony or discrepancy between the timing of a subjective experience and the time when the state of “neuronal adequacy” associated with the experience is achieved.’25 (S16) It is stated that there is ‘a dissociation between the timings of the corresponding ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ events.’26 The burden of all these statements (S9 to S16), although some phrases might be taken as ambiguous, is not the delay-andantedating hypothesis but what we can call the no-delay hypothesis. A conscious experience occurs earlier rather than later, i.e. before about half a second after the beginning of stimulation rather than about half a second after the beginning of stimulation. By way of a headline, and one is certainly needed for the news, the mind is ahead of the brain. As remarked, Popper and Eccles use the hypothesis of Libet and collaborators, whatever it is, to argue for the existence of ‘the selfconscious mind’. Eccles states the hypothesis a number of times. Compare (a) and (b) with (c) and (d). (a) ‘The experiments of Libet on the human brain . . . show that direct stimulation of the somaesthetic cortex results in a conscious sensory experience after a delay as long as 0.5 sec . . . although there is this delay in experiencing the peripheral stimulus, it is actually judged to be much earlier, at about the time of cortical arrival of the afferent input. . . . This antedating process does not seem to be explicable by any neurophysiological process. Presumably it is a strategy that has been learnt by the self-conscious mind . . . the antedating of the sensory experience is attributable to the ability of the self-conscious mind to make slight temporal adjustments, i.e. to play tricks with time . . . ’27 (b) ‘. . . Libet developed a most interesting hypothesis, namely that, though a weak single (SS) just threshold single skin stimulus requires up to 0.5 sec of cortical activity before it can be experienced, in the experiencing process it is antedated by being referred in time to the initial evoked response of the cortex. . . . ’28 (c) ‘The . . . experimental design tested the supposition that a justthreshold single skin stimulus (SS) was effective in producing a

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conscious sensation after the same incubation period . . . as a justthreshold train of cortical stimulation (CS), which is as long as 0.5 sec. If that were so, when the SS was applied during the minimal CS train, the SS should be experienced after the CS; but it was usually experienced before!’ 29 (d) ‘There can be a temporal discrepancy between neural events and the experiences of the self-conscious mind.’30 Passages a and b are to the effect that the experience is later (that is, about half a second after the beginning of stimulation) and is somehow antedated. Passages c and d say otherwise. The experience is earlier (that is, not nearly so much as about half a second after the beginning of stimulation). There is the same inconsistency suggested by two parts of a diagramme reproduced here as Figure 3. Part D has to do with tests whose details are not all relevant to the present point. What is relevant is that a just-threshold single skin stimulus (SS2 ) is shown as giving rise to an experience whose ‘actual time’ is about 600 msec. later. There is ‘antedating’, somehow involving ‘ER [evoked response] time’, which is not further

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explained. Consider part B of the diagramme, however, which pertains to the crucial finding 4 above. CS is cortical stimulation. The SS experience is shown in the diagramme as actually occurring earlier rather than later. The diagramme specifies ‘SS experience before CS [experience]’.

3

Inconsistency, Delay-and-Antedating

We need to come to a first conclusion. There is an inconsistency involving two hypotheses in the work of Libet et al. and Popper and Eccles – and, incidentally, in other reports of the work of Libet et al.32 The inconsistency is worth noting for itself. Not both the hypothesis that there is delay in experience but antedating, the delay-and-antedating hypothesis, and the hypothesis that there is no such delay, the no-delay hypothesis, can be true. That conclusion carries corollaries, of course. One is that there must be doubts about the putative findings. Certainly if the delayand-antedating hypothesis is true, then if there are putative findings that entail the no-delay hypothesis, those findings are false. The like corollary has to do with taking the no-delay hypothesis to be true. Any putative findings that entail the delay-andantedating hypothesis are then false. It is not within my competence, however, to examine these findings in detail, notably the crucial finding 4. The inconsistency itself and hence the fact that there are two hypotheses in question are important, partly for further conclusions of mine. But it can confidently be said that it is the delay-andantedating hypothesis to which the authors, at bottom, are committed. It is certainly the hypothesis to be preferred. In my view, the authors’ failure to notice, despite their commitment, that there are two inconsistent hypotheses in question, has had a certain effect on their understanding of the consequences of the delay-andantedating hypothesis, consequences for the mind-brain issue. It is my suggestion that failing to notice the inconsistency, and hence that there are two hypotheses on hand, has been significant in enabling Libet et al. and Popper and Eccles33 to come to certain conclusions about lawlike connection between simultaneous mental and neural events, about identity theories, and about the self-conscious mind and free will.

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To consider another matter first, however, how are we to understand the preferable hypothesis, the one that does not put the mind ahead of the brain? It is in part that an experience is somehow ‘antedated’ or ‘retroactively antedated’ or ‘referred back’ to a ‘time-marker’. What does that come to? Very little account of the supposed phenomenon itself is given, as distinct from what is supposed to explain it. The central idea appears to be that a subject has a conscious sensory experience including or involving or accompanied by the belief or impression that it is not then happening. He may have a conscious sensory experience, reportable as ‘sensation in skin of hand’, which conscious sensory experience occurs about half a second after stimulation, and after another sensory experience. His experience of the skin sensation includes or involves or is accompanied by the belief or impression that the sensation occurred significantly earlier than about half a second after stimulation, before the other sensory experience. There seem to be very great difficulties in this idea – which, it must be remembered, is crucially different from Mackay’s simpler idea noticed earlier. It is true, surely, that the actual having of any conscious sensory experience includes or involves or is accompanied by the belief or impression that the experience is present. That is, it is now. It is happening. Further, it might be said that there is the belief or impression that the experience is after another experience, immediately prior in time. The having of any experience, that is, somehow brings in a belief or impression as to a temporal property (presentness) and perhaps also a temporal relation (after another experience).34 But then the supposed phenomenon of a conscious sensory experience we have been considering, the phenomenon of ‘antedating’ or ‘referring back’, involves imputing something very like certain self-contradictory beliefs to subjects. It involves, more precisely, imputing something like simultaneously-held, fully explicit selfcontradictory beliefs. This is quite distinct from the common sort of self-contradiction where the conflicting beliefs are not brought together. The supposed phenomenon, by way of a kind of summary description, is the phenomenon of a conscious experience which a subject might describe in the words ‘present-sensation past’ or ‘now-sensation then’, or perhaps ‘later-sensation earlier’. Libet et al. say that the processes in referral or antedating are to be regarded as ‘unconscious and “automatic” in nature and . . . not

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distinguishable by the subject’.35 What processes are in question is not entirely clear. However, we cannot choose to regard a conscious sensory experience as something of which the subject is unaware. It seems, to repeat, that a conception of presentness and perhaps of a temporal relation enters into the having of any sensation. Are there really certain experiences such that the involved belief or impression as to presentness is, so to speak, simultaneously denied? On the assumption that a belief or impression of a temporal relation enters into the having of any sensation, can it be that there are certain experiences such that the belief or impression is simultaneously denied? As illustrated above in statement S4, it is said that the supposed antedating phenomenon is related to something else, another fact also owed to the specific (lemniscal) projection system. . . . the concept of subjective referral in the spatial dimension, and the discrepancy between subjective and neuronal spatial configurations, has long been recognized and accepted; that is, the spatial form of a subject sensory experience need not be identical with the spatial pattern of the activated cerebral neuronal system that gives rise to this experience.36 Also, ‘The newly proposed functional role for the specific projection system would be additional to its known role in spatial referral and discrimination.’37 In fact, however, there is no relevant analogy whatever between ‘temporal referral’, of the kind with which we are concerned, and the given obvious ‘discrepancy’ known since the beginning of neuroscience between (i) spatial experience or things as experienced in space and (ii) neural spatial configurations. The neural bit for the tree on the left is not itself to the left of the neural bit for the tree on the right. The latter ‘discrepancy’ obviously involves no kind of self-contradictory experience, the simultaneous occurrence of contradictory beliefs or impressions. Libet remarks that hypotheses in general are the weaker for involving ad hoc assumptions.38 It is also said that hypotheses in general are the weaker for involving ‘added assumptions’.39 It is my own second and tentative conclusion here that the delay-andantedating hypothesis is open to objection along these lines. The delay-and-antedating hypothesis, being factitious and also obscure, is at least open to doubt. However, it is not within my competence to judge the findings that are put in question, or whose interpretation is put in question, if the delay-and-antedating hypothesis is rejected.

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Mind and Brain, Free Will, a Conjecture, Contradiction

To turn now to mind-brain theories, it is said that ‘on the face of it, an apparent lack of synchrony between the ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’ would appear to provide an experimentally-based argument against ‘identity theory’, as the latter is formulated by Feigl, Popper, and so on.’40 However, it is allowed that a certain reply to the argument is possible. The reply is not specified. It is then said, presumably about psychoneural lawlike connection, that a temporal dissociation between the mental and the physical events would further strain the concept of psychophysiological parallelism or, if one prefers, of co-occurrence of corresponding mental and neural states. It could thus have an impact on the philosophical interpretation of such parallelism or co-occurrence when formulating alternative theories of the mind-brain relationship. In a later article it is said, differently, that ‘dissociation between timings of the corresponding “mental” and “physical” events’ raises serious but not insurmountable difficulties for identity theories, but that the dissociation does not contradict ‘the theory of psychophysical parallelism or correspondence’.41 The seeming change of mind about these theories is not explained. In a still later article it is said that ‘the temporal discrepancy creates relative difficulties for identity theory, but . . . these are not insurmountable’.42 It is said, further, that the data are ‘compatible with the theory of ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ correspondence’,43 and that the data do ‘introduce a novel experimentally-based feature into our views of psychophysiological correspondence, with some interesting philosophical implications that merit analysis’.44 Further, it is said, without explanation: ‘What we are discussing is not any denial of correspondence between mental and physical events, but rather the way in which the correspondence is actually manifested’.45 I am uncertain what to make of what is said, so vaguely, of psychophysical ‘correspondence’. Can such ‘correspondence’ hold between events at different times? Does such ‘correspondence’ require only such a loose connection between the brain and the ‘selfconscious mind’ as posited by Popper and Eccles? It is clear how the findings as to the timing of conscious experiences may be taken to threaten the hypothesis of psychoneural

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lawlike connection, of which you heard earlier, or certain identity theories, or parallelist theories. Evidently a conscious experience cannot be identical in a real sense with a neural event if the mental and neural items have different temporal locations or durations. Consider the claim that a conscious experience was identical with the physical process that constituted ‘neural adequacy’ for it. The claim must be false if the experience and the processes occurred at different times. Again, the hypothesis of psychoneural lawlike correlation naturally takes the correlated mental and physical items to be simultaneous. That is part of the theory. Evidently, if the studies of Libet et al. did establish of certain mental and neural items that they were not simultaneous, this would indeed raise a difficulty for the given theory of psychoneural lawlike correlation. The same is true, evidently, of a parallelist theory denying psychophysical lawlike correlation but involving psychophysical simultaneity, the parallelism taken as simply inexplicable or somehow owed to ongoing divine intervention. It is a theory, perhaps, which has no contemporary defenders. Finally, if there were mental events separate in time from their neural bases, that might be taken as going some way towards supporting the theory of the self-conscious mind. Given what seems to me the obscurity of that theory, I shall not attempt to say more about why that might be true. A remark of Popper and Eccles in a passage quoted above (p. 80) carries the idea that something plays tricks with time, which thing is the self-conscious mind. There, admittedly, they are to be taken as speaking of the ‘trick’ of ‘antedating’. If there were mental events separate from their neural bases, by the way, that would not only affect precisely the hypothesis of psychoneural lawlike correlation in a theory of determinism and also the theory of the self-conscious mind. It would affect thinking about freedom more generally. Partly because of later work of his on determinism and freedom, it seems to me likely that Libet is of this attitude in the work we are considering. What this thought amounts to, put it one way, is that if the mind is ahead of the brain, there is a strangeness or mystery about the mind that does not sit well with determinism, or determinism as we naturally conceive it. There might conceivably be a determinism of or covering the mind in its very surprising independence, but it would be odd indeed. It would be a determinism separated from a determinism of the brain. It is clear, to sum up, that the findings as to the timings of conscious experiences may be taken to have these various consequences if the findings are taken as issuing in the no-delay hypothesis. That is one

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fact, about which I shall say a word more in a moment. Another fact, to repeat, is that clearly it is the delay-and-antedating hypothesis that is favoured by the authors, despite their inconsistency. It is my conjecture that the authors, not having clearly distinguished the two quite different hypotheses about timing, have supposed that the studies in question have somehow established the no-delay hypothesis, to the effect that certain mental and physical items are not simultaneous. That, fundamentally, is why they draw their conclusions about the mind-brain relation. However, they must choose one or the other of the two hypotheses, and the one they favour, the delay-and-antedating hypothesis, is not at all to the effect that certain mental and physical items lack simultaneity. The idea that the mind is ahead of the brain, if you could hold it, would indeed affect a good deal, but it is not the idea you can think about, or think much about. The experience of the skin stimulus, on the delay-and-antedating hypothesis, is simultaneous with the neural process that is taken to constitute ‘neural adequacy’ for it. The experience may indeed be of a strange self-contradictory kind. This in itself, so long as psychoneural simultaneity is preserved, is no problem whatever for the proposition of psychoneural lawlike correlation or identity theories. Nor, evidently, is a problem raised by the fact that the experience in one part somehow has reference to an earlier time. That in itself does not make the experience non-simultaneous with its physical process – no more than does the very different referring feature of an ordinary memory or recall-experience make that experience non-simultaneous with its ‘neuronally adequate’ physical process, or time-distortion in a hallucination make that experience non-simultaneous with the related physical process. It may be supposed, I have said, that both the hypothesis of psychoneural lawlike correlations and identity theories would be affected by the no-delay hypothesis, the idea to which the authors do not incline, but which appears to have influenced their thinking. Still, as you will indeed have anticipated, that is not all that is to be said about the idea. It would not only put two things at different times, thereby threatening the mentioned mind-brain theory and some others. The no-delay idea, to remember, is as follows. Neural adequacy for a certain experience is achieved only about half a second after the beginning of stimulation, but the experience occurs before then. What is this “neural adequacy”? It appears to be neural condition that is a kind of sufficient condition for the emergence of the

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experience. There are certain quite general philosophical problems here,46 but it must appear that the mind-ahead-of-brain hypothesis is in fact false because self-contradictory: it asserts or very strongly implies both that something cannot occur before a certain time – before an explanatory sufficient condition occurs – and that it does. It is true, as allowed above, that if the studies of Libet et al. did actually establish of certain mental and neural items that they were not simultaneous, this would raise a difficulty for, say, the theory of psychophysical lawlike correlation. But it must be false that a mental item occurs before the physical item on whose later existence it depends and which explains it.

5

The Later Research

There have been, so to speak, two periods, tranches or lines of research and theorizing by Libet and his collaborators. In the first, as you have heard, to revert to the philosophically relevant headline, what does the work is an idea, not brought out of a confusion, that the mind is ahead of the brain. In the second period, things are very different, and the consequences for freedom and determinism are made more explicit. In this case, what will be provided is an overview leaving out almost all experimental details and the like.47 The research of the first period had to do with the brain and with sensory experiences – such experiences as a feeling in the skin of a hand. The experiments of the second period, also carried out on consenting neurosurgery patients, had to do with what are yet more directly relevant to determinism and freedom – what are named voluntary actions. These are said to be actions wanted or initiated by the person and also not prompted or cued in any way by anyone else, or anything external to the person. The patients were asked to perform a simple voluntary action, a flick of the wrist, whenever they wished during a period when their brain activities were being recorded. They might do so forty times. What was confirmed by the experimenters was that a certain electrical change in the brain, a neural process named the readiness potential or RP, occurred about a half-second before the wrist muscle was activated – an average of about 550 msec. before. When did the conscious wish or intention or willing to perform the action occur? Before or at the time of the brain process? ‘In the traditional view of conscious will and free will,’ according to Libet, ‘one would expect conscious will to appear before, or at the onset

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of the RP, and thus command the brain to perform the intended act.’48 A good method of enabling the subjects to report the clock-time of this event of willing was developed, tested and used. The willing, intention or wishing – the subject’s first awareness of it – was in fact not before the brain process but about 350 or 400 msec. after it started. So the mind is behind the brain. ‘The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!’ But a question is immediately asked. ‘Is there . . . any role for conscious will in the performance of a voluntary act?’49 Libet’s answer is that there can be, that there is in some cases. The mentioned conscious willing 350 or 400 msec. after the brain process RP is still about 150 msec. before the wrist muscle is activated. So there is time for some more conscious willing. ‘Potentially available to the conscious function is the possibility of stopping or vetoing the final progress of the volitional process, so that no actual muscle action ensues. Conscious will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes. Conscious-will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.’50 There is a bit of indirect evidence, we are told, to support this. A question arises, of course. As Libet asks, does the conscious veto, like an earlier conscious wish, intention or willing to flick a wrist, itself have its origin in a preceding unconscious process? The answer: I propose, instead, that the conscious veto may not require or be the direct result of preceding unconscious processes. The conscious veto is a control function, differently from simply becoming aware of the wish to act. There is no logical imperative in any mind-brain theory, even identity theory, that requires specific neural activity to precede and determine the nature of a conscious control function. And, there is no experimental evidence against the possibility that the control process may appear without development by prior unconscious processes.51 That is not quite all. There is, we are told, a deeper question. Think again of the story of the brain process RP in advance, the later conscious willing, the conscious veto if that happens, and the flicking of the wrist. Is all of that subject to determinism or not? Or rather, could it be that ‘our consciously willed acts are fully determined by natural laws that govern the activities of nerve cells

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in the brain’?52 In response to the question, the indeterministic interpretation of Quantum Theory is mentioned, but it is concluded we cannot really answer the question. We can say indeterminism is at least as good an option, scientifically speaking, as the determinism. And that there is almost universal experience that we make free, independent choices, which is ‘a kind of prima facie evidence that conscious mental processes can causatively control some brain processes’.53 So there you have it. In the earlier period of research, what led our researchers and commentators to their conclusions about the mindbody problem and freedom was the proposition, existing in a kind of confusion, that the mind is ahead of the brain. In the later period of research, what do we have?54 Well, the mind is sometimes or usually behind the brain – as where the brain process RP is followed by the conscious wish to flick the wrist and then the flicking. But sometimes, when there is a veto, the mind really is ahead of the brain. This theory is to be compared with the determinism sketched earlier. In that determinist theory, a conscious or mental event such as an active intention or willing is in necessary or lawlike connection with a simultaneous neural event. There are no active intentions or other mental events that are without neural correlates. Each psychoneural pair, like any resulting action, is the effect of a causal sequence that almost certainly has in it other psychoneural pairs. That is, there are phases of the sequence that are both neural and mental. Also, there can be and are likely to be phases that are wholly neural and/or wholly bodily. Furthermore, the sequence consists in causal circumstances, as explained earlier (p. 23). As in the case of any causal sequence, therefore, there are many causal circumstances for the effect – each, whether earlier or later or with elements at different times, necessitates the effect. As against this, with respect to the second period of Libet research in particular, we seem to have vagueness, difficulties and questions. This has partly to do with the fact that the research involves no good grip on causation and explanation. The verbs in the passages quoted above indicate this clearly. What is it for something to command, initiate, have a role in, stop or block, affect, require, be the origin of, have as a direct result, control, determine, develop or causatively control something else? And what does all that talk come to if it is taken as consistent with indeterminism, the truth of an indeterminist interpretation of Quantum Theory and so on? Further, it is notable that we are left uncertain, despite the use of the term ‘voluntary action’, whether the freedom in question at several points is

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voluntariness or origination as we have understood them. We could also go back to the first period of research, incidentally, and wonder about something’s being neurally adequate for something else, but let us not. Also, in the theory we are now considering, how are the conscious events related to what is going on in the brain itself, generally speaking? Can it be that what is assumed is an interactionism of mind and brain, something that seemed to have receded into the past? The idea of a mental process going on with no neural correlate at all, precisely a ghostly or free-floating thing, but then causing a neural process, and also the other way on?55 Further, as you will have noticed about the theory under consideration, there is also a problem of whether determinism is consistently understood. It sometimes seems to be the proposition that mental or conscious events and also our actions are somehow effects of only neural sequences, which proposition includes epiphenomenalism. Sometimes, on the other hand, determinism seems to be the proposition that mental or conscious events and actions are somehow effects of both neural and mental sequences. It is my impression that the theory under consideration might not have come into being if matters of these several kinds had been considered. Still, could the Libet theory be put into better shape by attention to these matters? Might it be saved? Well, there are some particular questions and difficulties. We first hear that for each voluntary action there is a neural event, the readiness potential, about half a second before, not accompanied by anything conscious. This is taken to put in doubt that the subsequent action of wrist-flicking is significantly a matter of conscious will or free will. Implicit in this, evidently, is the other proposition that there was no relevant conscious event of choice, decision, inclination, impulse or the like before the neural event – before the readiness potential. No evidence is provided for this proposition. So it could be, despite the RP, that the wrist-flicking was actually originated by a conscious act of will or something of the sort. The wrist-flicking could be voluntary too, of course, in our own defined sense, in virtue of the earlier choice or of course a choice, decision, inclination or the like in favour of the wrist-flicking after the RP. What is most important here, however, is that what has been provided so far is no evidence whatever against any decent determinism, as is allowed. We now hear, however, of the possibility of the vetoing, that second piece of conscious willing. Are we to understand, as it seems we

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are to understand, that such a conscious event is not only not owed to a previous brain process – its own readiness potential – but also is independent of what is then going on neurally in the brain? That would, I take it, be an extraordinary claim. It is surely unbelievable either that there was no neural correlate of the vetoing, that it was free-floating, or that the conscious vetoing by itself was a causal circumstance for no wrist-flicking. Certainly no evidence whatever is offered for either of these propositions – either of these ways in which it could be said the mind is ahead of the brain. But the short story here is that this speculation as to a subject’s changing his mind about an action that was contemplated or in some sense begun is a speculation that is again no ground at all for doubt of determinism. The speculation is given no significant support at all by the neurophysiological findings, notably the spare 150 msec. left over for a change or mind or the like. There is no reason whatever given for describing such an episode in terms of origination or free will. As for the indeterminist interpretation of Quantum Theory, and the proposition that we are all aware of making free and independent choices, let me leave these items for consideration in another context. It is hard to resist a word, though, on a sample opinion you have heard about mind and brain, that ‘conscious mental processes can causatively control brain processes’. What does it mean? If it means that a conscious process unconnected with any brain process is a causal circumstance or the like for a brain process, is it not safe to say that the whole of the rest of neuroscience is against the specuation? In the determinism sketched earlier, the mind and the brain go together, neither ahead or behind. It is my view that the two bodies of research we have been considering do nothing to disturb such a view. It would be remarkable if they did.

Notes 1. See my On Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 5, 16, 19, 46, 150, 204, 206. 2. The propositions have also been looked at, for example, by Daniel Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne, in ‘Time and the Observer’, in The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997), edited by Ned Block, Owen Flanagan and Guven Guzeldere. See also Alfred R. Mele, ‘Decisions, Intentions, Urges and Free Will: Why Libet has not Shown what he Says he has’, in J. Campbell, M. O’Rourke and D. Shier,

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

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eds, Explanation and Causation: Topics in Contemporary Philosophy (MIT Press, forthcoming). See, for example, the contributions to The Volitional Brain: Towards a Science of Free Will, edited by Libet, Anthony Freeman and Keith Sutherland (Imprint Academic, 1999), which also has much comment on Libet’s later findings in it. As for the philosophy and science of consciousness, it is certainly not the case that consciousness should be thought about only by the first. Both are needed; see my On Consciousness, p. 1 and thereafter (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). For a kind of overview, see Neurophysiology of Consciousness: Selected Papers and New Essays by Benjamin Libet (Birkhauser, 1993). Libet, ‘Neuronal vs Subjective Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, in Cerebral Correlates of Conscious Experience, ed. P. Buser, P. and A. Rougeul-Buser (Elsevier, 1978); Libet, ‘The Experimental Evidence of Subjective Referral Backwards in Time’, Philosophy of Science, 1981; Libet, W. Wright, B. Feinstein, and D. K. Pearl, ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, Brain, 1979. Libet replied to the original version of the paper you are reading. See ‘Subjective Antedating of Sensory Experience and Mind-Brain Theories’, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1984. See also my ‘Mind, Brain and Time: Rejoinder to Libet’, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1986. Libet, ‘Cortical Activation in Conscious and Unconscious Experience’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 1965; Libet, ‘Brain Stimulation and the Threshold of Conscious Experience’, in Brain and Conscious Experience, ed. J. C. Eccles (Springer, 1966); Libet, ‘Electrical Stimulation of Cortex in Human Subjects and Conscious Sensory Aspects’, Handbook of Sensory Physiology, vol. 2, ed. A. Iggo (Springer, 1973); Libet, W. W. Alberts, E. W. Wright, L. D. Delattre, G. Levin and B. Feinstein, ‘Production of Threshold Levels of Conscious Sensation by Electrical Stimulation of Human Somatosensory Cortex’, Journal of Neurophysiology, 1964; Libet, W. W. Alberts, F. W. Wright and B. Feinstein, ‘Responses of Human Somatosensory Cortex to Stimuli below Threshold of Conscious Intention’, Science, 1967; Libet, W. W. Alberts, E. W. Wright, and B. Feinstein, ‘Cortical and Thalamic Activation in Conscious Sensory Experience’, Neurophysiology Studied in Man, ed. G. G. Somjen, Excerpta Medica, 1972; Libet, W. W. Alberts, E. W. Wright, M. Lewis and B. Feinstein, ‘Cortical Representation of Evoked Potentials Relative to Conscious Sensory Responses, and of Somatosensory Qualities – in Man’, in The Somatosensory System, ed. H. H. Kornhuber (Georg Thieme, 1975). K. R. Popper, K. R. and J. C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (Springer, 1977). Libet, E. W. Wright, B. Feinstein and D. K. Pearl, ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, Brain, 1979, p. 193. This is Figure 1 in the present paper by me. Libet, E. W. Wright, B. Feinstein and D. K. Pearl, ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, Brain, 1979, pp. 201–2. Cf. Libet, ‘Neuronal vs Subjective Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, in Cerebral Correlates of Conscious Experience, ed. P. Buser and A. Rougeul-Buser (Elsevier, 1978), p. 75.

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11. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 217. 12. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, pp. 220–1. 13. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 222. 14. From Figure 2 in ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 201. 15. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 201. 16. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 221. 17. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, pp. 219–20. 18. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 220. 19. From Figure I in Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 199. 20. That is, my Figure 2. 21. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, pp. 199–200. 22. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 200. 23. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 222. 24. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 200. Cf. Libet, ‘Neuronal vs Subjective Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, in Cerebral Correlates of Conscious Experience, ed. P. Buser and A. Rougeul-Buser (Elsevier, 1978), p. 75. 25. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 221. 26. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 222. 27. Popper and Eccles, The Self and Its Brain, p. 364. 28. The Self and Its Brain, p. 259. 29. The Self and Its Brain, p. 257. 30. The Self and Its Brain, p. 362. 31. From The Self and Its Brain, Fig. E2–3, p. 258. 32. C. W. Cotman and J. L. McGaugh, Behavioural Neuroscience (Academic Press, 1980), pp. 806–7. 33. The Self and Its Brain, pp. 531, 565. 34. T. Honderich, ‘Temporal Relations and Temporal Properties: Time and the Philosophies, ed. P. Ricoeur (UNESCO, 1977). 35. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 220. 36. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 221. 37. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 222.

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38. Libet, ‘Neuronal vs Subjective Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, in Cerebral Correlates of Conscious Experience, ed. P. Buser and A. Rougeul-Buser (Elsevier, 1978), p. 74. 39. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 220. 40. ‘Neuronal vs Subjective Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, p. 80. 41. ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience’, pp. 221–2. 42. Libet, ‘The Experimental Evidence of Subjective Referral Backwards in Time’, Philosophy of Science, 1981, p. 196. 43. ‘The Experimental Evidence of Subjective Referral Backwards in Time’, p. 182. 44. ‘The Experimental Evidence of Subjective Referral Backwards in Time’, p. 183. 45. ‘The Experimental Evidence of Subjective Referral Backwards in Time’, p. 195. 46. T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and LifeHopes, or Mind and Brain (Oxford University Press, 1988), in both cases pp. 40–9. 47. Libet, ‘Do We Have Free Will?’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1999, reprinted in Libet, Anthony Freeman, and Keith Sutherland eds, The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will (Imprint Academic, 1999). What I have to say is based on this summary article, which is also reprinted in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2002), edited by Robert Kane. The article contains references to various research reports. 48. ‘Do We Have Free Will?’, p. 49. 49. ‘Do We Have Free Will?’, p. 51. 50. ‘Do We Have Free Will?’, pp. 51–2. 51. ‘Do We Have Free Will?’, p. 53. 52. ‘Do We Have Free Will?’, p. 55. 53. ‘Do We Have Free Will?’, p. 56. 54. There is very effective criticism of several parts of the story by Al Mele in ‘Decisions, Intentions, Urges and Free Will: Why Libet has not Shown what he Says he has’ mentioned above in Note 2. 55. For a discussion of interactionism, see my A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes, or Brain and Mind, in both cases pp. 151–4, 161–3.

Chapter Five

Mind the Guff

You have heard the complaint that determinism and freedom cannot be well treated independently of a philosophy of mind – an account of how mind and brain are connected, of how mental things come about, and how ensuing actions come about. Mostly the thing is just missing from thinking on determinism and freedom. Very occasionally, however, a philosophy of mind is on hand but does not recommend itself – and does not recommend whatever conclusion about determinism and freedom is bound up with it or depends on it. It can happen that the philosophy of mind, furthermore, is put into some doubt as a result of the unkind thought that it has been put together in order to facilitate some conclusion or conviction or desire or hope about freedom – or conceivably determinism. It has been said before now that there are deep desires for orderliness or regularity in the breasts of determinists. The diagnosis has been offered by lesser physicists and others in the case of Einstein, a little impertinently in my opinion. Ideas of freedom surely offer all of us more. Certainly there is a philosophy of mind on hand with respect to contributions to our subject by the redoubtable and rightly celebrated philosopher John Searle. They can hardly be detached from it. Does this philosophy of mind and brain, which can have the name of being biological subjectivity on two levels, recommend itself as a means of dealing with our subject? That is one question answered in the article below. There are other questions on the agenda as well. What does our common experience of feeling free in our choices and the like, whether trivial or consequential choices, give us in terms of evidence for or against determinism? It is said that we experience a gap between what precedes a decision

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and the decision itself. Do we find new enlightenment on the nature of our minds here, a new consideration against determinism? To turn to the problem of the human consequences of determinism, what of the tradition of compatibilism as a response to it? And, to go back to the propounded philosophy of mind, is it persuasive to add to it an indeterminism derived from a suitable interpretation of Quantum Theory? The article below is mainly is about one by Searle in an issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which gives the gist of other publications by him.1 The issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies carried the title ‘Mind the Gap’. Persons who have not had the satisfaction of riding on the London subway may not know that that title is an echo – of the awful instruction by loudspeaker to passengers stepping off the train at some stations where there is an empty space between the train and the platform. My piece also appeared in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and its title, not academically genteel, gives another warning. The piece has been somewhat revised.

1

Consciousness as Biological Subjectivity on Two Levels Etc.

No one has been stronger and clearer-headed than John Searle in resisting the illusion of functionalist philosophy of mind and cognitive science – cognitive science when it is gone philosophical in a certain way. The illusion is that consciousness is yet less than ghostly stuff – just functional relations, which is to say causal or logical relations expressed in computer programmes and less formal propositions of this or that philosophical theory. Or, very different but still hopeless, consciousness is only neural, silicon or like events in such relations.2 His paper ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’ in the recent ‘Mind the Gap’ issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, however, offers us other ideas.2 Let us think about them in terms of an example of a typical sequence of experiences: (1) You see the dining room as you come in. (2) You then consider reasons for and against making your customary little speech at the end of the dinner. (3) You form the inactive or forward-looking intention not to make the little speech – that is, you decide against. (4) Later you remember seeing the room as you

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came in, the look of it. (5) When the moment comes for a speech, you actively intend to remain seated, and do so. (6) You go on in this active intention, concentrating on your pudding, until it is too late. (7) You take in some more of what the guests to the left and right of you have to say, and you also have some more feelings.3 Searle starts out his paper by telling us again that each of these various conscious experiences, like all of consciousness, is a real biological phenomenon, an ordinary part of the physical world, but that it also has the character of being subjective, qualitative, and unified.4 These possibly conflicting descriptions of consciousness do not answer the question they prompt us to ask, and the question most of us want answered anyway. It is whether consciousness has only neural or electrochemical properties, and in particular whether neural functionalism, which is functionalism applied to humans and other animals but leaving out computers and the like, could conceivably be true. Is consciousness in us just neural events in certain input and output relations? Searle’s possibly conflicting descriptions do not give us a view or argument about that, as can readily be shown. It is no help being told, for example, that consciousness is subjective in the sense that it has a first-person ontology, that it exists only as experienced by some ‘I’, some human or animal that has it.5 If an ‘I’ is a person or the like as standardly conceived in cool philosophy, which is to say a persisting body and/or an internally-related sequence of conscious events, then conscious events can clearly be wholly neural events. This is so since these events with only neural properties can have exactly the given dependency. If on the other hand the ‘I’ is something on the way to a Cartesian ego, or any other sort of thing beyond our usual ken, a matter of some traditional dualism socalled, then the dependent items will presumably have some nonneural nature. But the main point is that until we really hear about the ‘I’, we are left not knowing what character of subjectivity these conscious events are supposed to have. Is what we have so far not too close to empty talk? Certainly it burkes rather than answers questions.6 Searle does no better by telling us again in his paper what is still more relevant to his view of determinism and freedom, that conscious events are higher-level brain events caused by and realized in lower-level brain events.7 There is a little uncertainty introduced by the lower-level items being described in a down-to-earth way as ‘neuron firings’ or as ‘neurobiological’ and the upper-level items described a little more airily as ‘features of the system of neurons

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that constitutes the human brain’. But you have to suppose that the message is the familiar one drummed in by him in the past about levels, by way of several examples, not about two kinds of things in any other sense. Certainly no other kinds are mentioned here, let alone clarified. So our two kinds of events, the conscious ones and the ones down below, are to be understood as like the liquidity of water as against the molecules, the solidity of the piston as against its molecules, the rolling of the wheel down the hill as against its molecules, and the running of the engine as against movement of the piston. The trouble with that, one large trouble, is that very many wholly neural events are exactly higher-level effects of lower-level neural events. Any textbook of neuroscience illustrates the fact endlessly. Larger brain episodes, say in vision or in having strokes, are higherlevel with respect to smaller. Even neuron firings are higher-level events with respect to various lower-level events. So this talk about levels in characterization of consciousness does not distinguish conscious events. It does not let us know whether conscious events are wholly neural events or not. As in the case of the possibly conflicting descriptions of consciousness as physical and biological but also subjective and so on, you can’t actually decide whether this is really the reductionism or materialism, including neural functionalism, to which Searle says he is profoundly opposed, or really the property-dualism to which he says he is also profoundly opposed, or something merely inchoate. Or maybe a determination not to get involved philosophically – involved logically with certain questions that are real but not open to commonsensical answers? He is surely being hopeful, by the way, in thinking that his doctrine of the mind is controversial only because it isn’t materialism or dualism, and so doesn’t satisfy expectations.8 There might be another reason or two. The levels idea is not so short on content, however, that it is not open to a refutation. It seems to me that before it is filled in, if that happens, you can already see it will be wrong. We have it that there is something called higher-level activity of the brain, also known as consciousness, and there is also something called lower-level activity, also known as neuron-firings and the like. So think of the particular bit of higher-level activity that is item 1 in our example above – your consciousness of seeing the dining room as you come in. It goes with a causal circumstance or sufficient cause for it, some simultaneous lower-level activity – say L1 for short. Think also of some other lower-level activity later on, L4, causing its simultaneous bit

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of higher-level activity, (4) your remembering seeing the room as you came in. The unbelievability of epiphenomenalism threatens when, predictably enough, it’s added in that L1 or rather something wholly neural including L1 is also a causal circumstance for the later L4 – this later event, as just remarked, being the cause of the simultaneous remembering. The earlier conscious seeing of the room is left out of the story entirely. That perceptual experience, bizarrely, is no part at all of a full explanation of the remembering. To deal with this epiphenomenalism, you may be tempted traditionally to declare, as Searle always has, that the earlier L1 and the visual experience are one thing – like the molecules and the water and all that – and so to declare that the earlier consciousness does cause the later after all. No dualism and so no epiphenomenalism. But giving in to the temptation overlooks something, the large proposition about the mind-body relation firmly asserted in this theory, and of a general sort that is certainly needed. The proposition is indeed that the earlier L1 causes the simultaneous perceptual consciousness that goes with it. So with L4 and the conscious remembering. In which case they certainly can’t be one thing. Causation, whatever else it is, is a two-place or dyadic relation. No account of causation does or can say otherwise. It doesn’t matter, of course, that each of these effects is also said to be ‘realized’ in the cause, or within the stuff of the cause, or in any other secondary sense ‘one’ with the cause. The commonest cases we have of one thing realized in another are such that the realized thing (say temperature) is an effect of and therefore numerically different from the other thing (say a lighted match). So this two-level monism or identity theory of consciousness and its relation to the brain seems to be a contradiction. You can’t have the left-right or across-time causation you want and try to save the theory from epiphenomenalism by declaring it to be a monism – and then also have the down-up causal connection at a time. That would also produce a dualism, of course. You get the same disaster if you think not of seeing a room and remembering the seeing, but of (2) considering reasons for and against making a speech and (3) deciding against. It has seemed to me that if biological subjectivity on two levels is what is emerging as the conception of consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science and neuroscience,9 we better all give up and go bird-watching. Is the theory saved from the contradiction by something now added to it in the paper we are considering? This is that the talk of an

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upper and a lower level is of course not to be taken in a paralyzingly literal way – the upper level being above the lower in the sense that the paint is on the surface of the table. ‘Consciousness is no more on the surface of the brain than liquidity is on the surface of the water. Rather the idea we are trying to express is that consciousness is a system feature. It is a feature of the whole system and is – literally – at all the relevant places of the system . . . ’10 Is the intended proposition that consciousness is pervasive or ubiquitous in the brain the same proposition that it is a systemfeature? Consider first just the proposition that it is pervasive or ubiquitous. Does that save us from the contradiction? No. If there is a causal connection, there are two of something, which remains true if they occupy the same space, as do certain common properties of a multitude of things. Take now the utterance that consciousness is a system-feature of the brain, where that expresses something other than the pervasiveness proposition. In this connection we get the example of a rolling wheel, spoken of as a system, and the molecules in it – the molecules in which the system entirely consists. There is ‘system causation’, about which you will be hearing more later, which is the system’s effect on a molecule of it. Whatever else is to be said of this, it will be clear that it is no help with the contradiction. It is explicitly asserted here that there is causal connection between a higher level or system-feature, also known as consciousness, and a lower level or element-feature – in which case there are two things where another part of the same theory says there is only one. In passing, and without reference to the contradiction, notice that the addition of the description of consciousness as a system does not help us at all with the question of whether we are being told that conscious events are wholly neural events. Putting aside the vagueness of ‘system’, it is evident, partly from the wheel analogy, that this talk does not distinguish between a wholly neural system and something else. The whole doctrine of biological subjectivity on two levels, as we first have it,11 is a kind of fundamentalism in Searle’s paper on determinism and freedom, but several things happen to it, or somewhere around it, the main one having to do with causation and a denial of it. But for the moment let us glance at something else. We are reminded that all of our consciousness at a time, called our conscious field,12 can be divided into parts or bits, and that neuroscience does this, and then looks for the neural correlates. There is only slow progress here, we are told. So neuroscientists and the rest

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of us should start thinking of all of somebody’s consciousness at a time as a unity, and concentrate on just the differences between the conscious brain and the unconscious brain – presumably absolutely general differences in consciousness between anytime when he or she is conscious and anytime when he or she is not. That is, with respect to consciousness itself, we should take ‘the unified field approach’. Well, you might say it would be a pity, particularly at the moment, if neuroscience gave up much of its main endeavour, neural localization with respect to parts of consciousness. It’s doing pretty well, except maybe in one or two Californian mystery-labs. So you can wonder if it really should spend more time – in effect it spends a lot already – on the neural situation for any consciousness. But you might also wonder, a lot more, about something else. Are we to suppose there is something new and different for philosophers in this unified-field approach to consciousness? It seems so. It was announced to a good conference in Tucson before the ‘Mind the Gap’ paper and then also in a Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture.13 The approach, on reflection, is in fact the assumption that consciousness has a general nature you can think about. The approach cannot be just the reminder, of course, that the bits of our consciousness at a time come together or bound up together, not in separate theatres or whatever. That the taste of the coffee is somehow in the same show with the feel of the shirt on your back. Indeed that obscure old Kantian fact isn’t an approach in the relevant sense. But the assumption that consciousness has a general nature is already an assumption made by almost all philosophers now at work on the subject. So isn’t the unified-field proposal to philosophers just talk about what they are doing already? You aren’t put off that disappointing thought about the proposal, certainly, when you hear that the unified-field approach to consciousness is such as to have a certain consequence – that you may become completely conscious when you wake up from a dreamless sleep, even if you’re not thinking or feeling much in particular, not conscious of various bits and pieces. What has that consequence is just that consciousness has a general nature. Am I maybe missing out some further content in this unifiedfield idea – some proposal or advance, some move beyond a recommended concern with the general nature of consciousness? Is there something of an actual conception of that nature on offer? Something of use with determinism and freedom? Could be. It might be in some additional sentences you can’t miss. There is a metaphor we

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are advised to take seriously, something that goes beyond what we have on hand, the more or less literal talk of a conscious field. We are to think of consciousness not as a house made up of separate bricks, but as a great open field, pre-existing, with bumps or hillocks or ravines coming and going. There may be some homespun poetry in that, but it’s not a lot of help to me. It doesn’t do more for me than those other images of consciousness – the stream, the proscenium arch, the bottomless pit, the space behind the eyes, and so on. Nor does the metaphor do anything to deal with the earlier obscurity in the doctrine of biological subjectivity on two levels. It does not individuate that doctrine, make it something different and definite, any more than the literalness of the unity-of-conscious-field addition did. No doubt Professor Dan Dennett and his reductionist forces as well as other true materialists can accommodate into their theories a bump or two and a couple of hillocks.14 It is worth adding, too, that the literalness of science is a condition to which philosophy should aspire whenever possible. Is there help for us in sentences to the effect that the unity and the subjectivity and the qualitativeness of consciousness are not distinct features of consciousness but different aspects of its one essential feature, the very essence of consciousness?15 OK, but I’d actually like some unwrapping. I’d like to know what that essence is – or what this talk comes to. Isn’t that what philosophy is supposed to do? The Holy Trinity can properly remain a mystery, but can consciousness in a philosophy of consciousness and freedom? You will gather, in short, that in my opinion biological subjectivity on two levels is not a philosophy of mind that recommends itself as a setting for reflections on determinism and freedom. For one thing, it doesn’t produce enough conviction to do so. But that is not the end of the matter. Do those reflections, to the extent that they can be detached from their setting, perhaps rise above it? Do they take things forward?

2

The Consciousness of Deciding and Acting

From the unified-field approach to consciousness, and the field with the bumps coming and going, and the three-part essence, we are led on by our guide to a supposed big difference between two things.16 One is perceptual consciousness, as in (1) seeing the dining room. The other is the consciousness of considering reasons for an action,

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deciding on it, initiating it, and carrying it out – say (2), (3), (5) and (6). With this consciousness of deciding and acting, the interesting point and a fact of which we are informed by our guide is that there are ‘gaps’.17 There is a gap between certain stages of consciousness. In terms of the example, there is a gap between (2) reasons and (3) decision, and between the decision and (5) the active intention or volition, and between the active intention and (6) carrying on forward. That is to say that whatever the facts really are, we ourselves do not experience the prior stage as being or being part of an ordinary causal circumstance or causally sufficient condition for the later. We do not ‘experience the causal relation’ that way.18 We feel, on the other hand, that we or our experiences or our efforts are in some other sense causing the later stage – we have a choice in this causing, the later stage is up to us, we are active rather than passive. This, as some other philosophers say, is the phenomenology or felt nature of the thing. In perceptual consciousness, on the other hand, there are no gaps. What it is that we see, maybe a room, is experienced by us as standardly causal with respect to the experience. So with (7) hearing things and having some feelings. This account of the felt nature of deciding and acting, we are told, has been taken by one philosopher to raise a question about the explanation of decisions, intentions and actions.19 Indeed it has been so taken, by many philosophers. It has been taken to raise a question, of course, because if the supposed felt experience is true to the facts, then decisions, intentions and actions do not have ordinary causal explanations. They do not have explanations of the standard kind assumed so far in this paper and which seemed to be an unquestioned part of biological subjectivity on two levels in the past. We are now told by our guide, however, that the gaps story, the seeming absence of ordinary causal explanations, can be true consistently with there being perfectly adequate explanations of decisions, intentions and actions – perfectly adequate explanations of another type. This other type of explanation involves reasons. It involves, secondly, something called a self in a person.20 A self is certainly more than a Humean bundle of impressions, and indeed more than an agent, since it thinks before it gets into action. This other type of explanation, thirdly, involves what you heard of a moment ago, a kind of causation other than the ordinary kind.21 To bring these together, the explanation of why you decided against a speech, didn’t

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stand up at the right time, and went on with your pudding, is of the following form. A self S performed act A because S was acting on reason R.22 More questions are raised by this story of an explanation of our deciding and acting than our guide supposes. The largest question is best introduced by a brief reminder of our ordinary or standard account of causation. The match was struck and it lit. The striking was the cause, a required or necessary condition for the lighting, and the striking together with other things was a causal circumstance for the lighting. That is, the circumstance made the lighting happen or necessitated it – if the match hadn’t lit, we would have concluded that some bit of an assumed causal circumstance was missing. The main philosophical problem about this standard causation is exactly how the relation of necessitation is to be understood. Hume said the circumstance was related to the lighting only in that all things like the first are followed by things like the second. Other views have improved on this, usually by explaining necessitation in terms of conditional connections.23 I introduce this reminder only to set aside clearly what Searle is not saying. He claims there is an explanation of the occurrence of a decision or action, an adequate explanation, without the explanation being a matter of standard causation. What does that claim come to? Well, it can’t come to the truth, as some of his words might suggest to an innocent reader, that when you decide or act, and also afterwards, you know why you did so, know what reasons moved you. Of course you knew and know your reasons. You know what those mental events were. That is common ground – all theories of thought and action, all philosophers of mind, agree on this. The question is whether being moved by these reasons can be made sense of without making use of cause and effect – standard causes and effects. The claim that there is a non-causal explanation also can’t come to the truth, as you might suppose, that when we decide and act, at least typically, we take ourselves to have good or adequate or good reasons, or anyway reasons better than those for not so deciding or acting. Of course we do this. A reason that moves somebody to decision or action is by definition what he or she takes to be a good one, or anyway better than some other one. A mental event carrying the idea that doing X will be an unmitigated disaster, or just produce a less good upshot, doesn’t move anybody. All this is common ground too. The question is whether being moved by adequate reasons can be made sense of without making use of cause and effect.

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The claim that there is a strange kind of explanation of the event of your deciding something or acting also can’t be the familiar truth, maybe separable from the ones above, that your reasons led you to decide and act, that they were what made you act as you did, that it was the reasons that issued in the decision and the action. We all know that too. What we want to know is what is said by a philosopher if he says the leading and making doesn’t come down to ordinary causation. There is also something different that has to be got out of the way – as it has had to be got out of the way since this kind of discussion started a long time ago among philosophers. The claim that there is a strange kind of explanation of the two events – the deciding and the acting – cannot be the claim that there are reasons in another quite different sense that evidently get into the story in some way. So far we have been concerned with reasons that are mental events, the sorts of thing that can also be called real or psychological reasons. Certainly there are reasons in another ordinary sense. They can be called propositional or abstract reasons. They are not events. The proposition ‘He’s my father’ is a reason in this sense for the proposition ‘I’m his son’. The first is a very good reason for the second in the sense that it logically entails it. The proposition ‘He’s my father’ is also a good premise for the inductive or factual inference that it was he who did something for me. The proposition ‘He’s my father’ may also support, in the way that the premises of moral arguments do, the feeling or judgement that I ought to ring him up. There are no mental events mentioned there, and no relations between such events. Mental, real or psychological reasons are a different sort of thing, in time and space. Also, you can have a propositional reason as part of the story of some mental episode or sequence of consciousness – whatever it is to be part of the story – and still not have a mental, real or psychological reason at all. Somebody can have in mind the proposition ‘He’s my father’, think about it for a while, and in fact have no reason at all for deciding or doing anything. So the claim that there is some kind of unusual explanation of the event of a decision or action can’t be this truth that we all agree on, at least when we think about it, that there there are reasons that aren’t events and that never cause or in any other way actually give rise to decisions and actions. We knew that before. The preceding chapters of this book are full of such reasons, often mentioned by name.

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Do we get some light shed on the elusive kind of explanation of decisions and actions when we are told it is in some way causal? That this kind of explanation has a causal component? Well, another thing can be granted here – if it is separable from something mentioned above. It is that we talk of decisions and actions being caused by things without thereby meaning that the decisions and actions are effects of causal circumstances. That came up earlier (p. 12). It has to be granted that we talk of decisions and actions as effects and we don’t mean standard effects. But we’re not just talking now, engaging in ordinary talk, but asking what a philosopher is supposing when he says there is an explanation of a decision or action that isn’t a matter of standard causation. Maybe he thinks he can get it out of thinking about our ordinary talk. Fine. Let’s have it. There is not much reason to hope that a satisfactory account of funny causing will be forthcoming. The whole history of several large parts of philosophy has failed to produce one. That particular part of the philosophy of mind that has told us of a self and its activity has certainly failed to produce one. Popper was not only being light-hearted but was pretty true to his and Eccles’s stated views when he said that sometime in the early life of a person, or in the existence of an embryo, a self might choose what hemisphere of a brain to light on and make dominant.24 He did not say anything of the causation involved. In the philosophy of determinism and free will, a long line of philosophers has spoken of a self originating decisions and never been able to explain satisfactorily. The objections to any traditional idea of a self itself, a somehow causal self, if you can separate it from its activity, are too plain to require rehearsal. We do have a kind of image of something elusive about us and of its activity, maybe important with respect to the matter of determinism and free will, but an image is not philosophy. The philosophical idea of a self as an entity in a person, seemingly a person in a person or a homunculus, has been a nonsense for several centuries, since Descartes. Is it purely neural, or of some different stuff of all consciousness, or is it some third kind of thing, as with Popper and Eccles? For Searle, for several reasons, it does seem to be a third kind of thing, if a thing at all. It is something more than bound up with our conscious experience of freedom in deciding and acting, of which you have heard and of which you will be hearing more. A self is also bound up with our having reasons for decisions and actions. ‘. . . the self is not some extra entity, rather, in a very crude

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and oversimplified fashion, one can say that conscious agency plus conscious rationality = selfhood.’25 This is not the place to try to deal with all that, the nature of this self, but there is room for a question about the activity of the supposedly causal self, its going into action. If an act of a self is not the result of a last condition completing a causal circumstance, why, as you might ask, does it go off ? Also why does it go off then? Searle responds to a nearby and old claim by adversaries of such ideas as his, by the way, that they reduce our deciding and acting to randomness. He writes of his explanations involving reasons, a self, and no causal circumstances: ‘Is there an element of chance or randomness in any such explanation? Not at all. It is a traditional mistake to suppose that where you do not have causal sufficiency, you have randomness’.26 This confuses matters. If ‘random’ means ‘standardly uncaused’, the ideas evidently do make decisions and actions random. Their proponents do of course allow this if they are clear-headed. ‘Random’ can also mean ‘without explanation’. It is arguable that the ideas do make decisions and actions into things without real explanation. Someone who levels a charge of randomness against Searle is best understood as challenging him to explain how on his theory decisions and actions do really have an explanation. In that challenge there is no mistake, traditional or otherwise. The simple sum of all this, looked at one way, is that what we are being told is that there can be a decision and then an action, involving reasons and a self, and the decision can be taken as caused in some sense, an effect in some sense, and all that can make for an adequate explanation of the decision and the action – but everything could have been just the same up to the moment of the decision, and there could have been no such decision and no such action. What does that come to? What it seems to come to is that there was no explanation in any ordinary sense of the decision. There wasn’t any such thing because everything in the world could have been just the same and there could have been no decision. There is literally nothing to look for by way of an explanation. It’s no good going on insisting that there is some explanation that is not standardly causal and is not simply a propositional reason and that it works. Giving in to insistence, responding to bluff invitations to leaps of faith, however embedded in reflections on the logical structure of reasons, elusive selves and whatever else, are not proper parts of philosophy. They remain invitations to believe we-knownot-what. Admittedly, there is a way in which you can say what

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you’re talking about – you can say that the explanation you have in mind of a decision or action is an explanation such that the person in question is to be held responsible for the decision or action in a certain way, or to get credit for it in a certain way. There is that much sense in talk of an adequate explanation. But to say this, obviously, doesn’t tell us why the decision or act happened, how it came about. One postscript here on deciding and acting. Searle declares that consciousness is essential to it.27 Presumably he knows this is agreed by all unconfused parties. How could it be otherwise? So he is really declaring instead that consciousness somehow conceived is essential to deciding and acting. The question, unanswered by him, is what consciousness is. That real gap in what he says of biological subjectity on two levels deprives him of an actual proposition here, as it does elsewhere.

3

Gaps Again, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism

As reported earlier, we are informed that the remarkable fact we can discover about our experience of deciding and acting is that there are ‘gaps’ between its stages. We are said not to experience a prior stage as being a causal circumstance for a later one. Indeed, I think, we are said to experience a prior stage as not being a causal circumstance for a later one. It is these supposed gaps that we have to mind if we are to make progress towards solving the problem of determinism and freedom. It is hard to resist saying a word for the whole regiments of philosophers who have minded the gaps. That in considering the problem of determinism and freedom we need to mind the gaps, reflect on our own experience of deciding and acting, will come as no surprise to a student who makes use of a decent reading-list for an essay to write. Bramhall said so in the 17th Century to Hobbes,28,29 who agreed about the need for the reflection but not about the bishop’s conclusion. Since then there has certainly been no gap in the line of agreement by the philosophers of determinism and freedom on the need for the reflection. Hume joined theologians in thinking about it,30 and concluded differently from them. Scores of pairs of philosophers said after them that when you move your finger to the right, you feel you could have moved it to the left – feel that you could

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have done otherwise. It is very informative to spend some time with the two volumes of Mortimer Adler’s The Idea of Freedom.31 The latest introductions to the problem of determinism and free will could not possibly leave out our supposed consciousness of freedom.32 It is admirably discussed by Kevin Magill.33 In short, what is recommended by our new guide to the problem of determinism and free will is mainly a terminological advance. My fellow-workers over a couple of centuries have not missed something out, as indeed Searle quickly indicates in passing when he is not seeming to unveil reality to us.34 As for the question of whether our alleged experience tells us the truth, Searle slides towards assuming this in the paper we have been considering. He slides further in ‘Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology’. I realize that a lot of people think that psychological determinism is true, and I have certainly not given a decisive refutation of it. Nonetheless, it seems to me we find the psychological experience of freedom so compelling that it would be absolutely astounding if it turned out that at the psychological level it was a massive illusion, that all of our behaviour was psychologically compulsive.35 It is not reassuring that the passage runs together the proposition that all of our behaviour is caused with the proposition that all our behaviour is compulsive – that is, that in it we are compelled by something, that it is somehow against our desires. That causation is not compulsion is the stock in trade of compatibilists. But as for the proposition that in our experience we are aware of not being caused, that has been denied by every determinist since Hobbes, to go no further back. It is possible that our alleged experience is an illusion of human nature, like many well-known ones. It is possible that the experience is an illusion contributed to by the dominant culture in which philosophers of our tradition have grown up. It is almost certain that the question will not be settled by peering at the experience itself but by the wider considerations of philosophy and science. That is not all, or indeed the main reply, but let me delay saying more on the experience and its content for a bit. Searle says our supposed experience of deciding and acting, whether it is true to the facts, and what is then to be said of the brain, is the problem of determinism and freedom. It is the interesting problem.36 The subject of moral responsibility, taken in its relation to determinism, is not of interest. It is in fact a red herring,

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as he let us know in his Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture. He would say the same of the connected subject of the justification of punishment taken in relation to determinism. So too of the subject of our personal standing in a more general sense.37 In his lecture he also said the same of ‘predictability’ – by which he may have meant the subject of our feelings about the future, and in particular our personal hopes. He would of course add other red herrings: the relation of determinism to gratitude and resentment and other personal feelings, discussed by Peter Strawson,38 and the relation of determinism to our confidence that our beliefs constitute knowledge, and its relation to moral principles and indeed political commitments. This is remarkable. Our interest in our experience of deciding and acting, the supposed gaps, would be of a different order, indeed by comparison minimal, if it did not connect with the red herrings. That the problem of determinism and freedom has persisted for at least three centuries has mostly certainly not been owed to a little conflict between our alleged impression about our deciding and acting and our large conviction of naturalism. Given the fact that determinism seems in ways to threaten moral responsibility and so on, and the doctrine of origination seems in ways to preserve moral responsibility and so on, there has been every reason for philosophers of determinism and of origination to concern themselves with these matters. In the first place, as remarked earlier, these matters give content to the thin idea of our origination of our deciding and acting. Against the objection that no adequate content has been given to talk of a decision’s coming about non-causally but non-randomly, it can be said that it comes about in such a way as to preserve a certain moral responsibility of the agent. With respect to these matters – the red herrings – philosophers have of course divided into compatibilists and incompatibilists. The first are said to maintain that determinism is logically consistent with freedom, as indeed they may as a result of defining freedom as voluntariness, this being acting in accordance with an agent’s own desires, personality, character and so on. Incompatibilists are said to maintain that determinism is logically inconsistent with freedom, as indeed they may by defining freedom as including origination. In fact the two regiments are greatly better characterized as restricting or committing themselves to different families of attitudes – holding people responsible and crediting them with responsibility in one way rather than another and so on.

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Searle says that compatibilism simply misses the point about the problem of free will.39 If he quickly qualifies this into the humdrum proposition that it misses the point about the problem of free will as he has defined it, the impression remains that compatibilism is yet another red herring, as indeed it was announced to be in the Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture. Searle is of course a simple incompatibilist, and strongly inclined to be a simple free-willer – that is, somebody who asserts not only that freedom is inconsistent with determinism but also asserts we have that freedom. He has fallen into the line of philosophers descended from Bramhall and no doubt predecessors. What is the content of Searle’s dismissal of compatibilism as missing the point? You need to ask what point. It has to be the proposition that determinism is inconsistent with origination, inconsistent with our existence if our gap-feelings are true. The impression is given that here we have a fact, and to consider something else is irrelevant. This is surely bluff. It is quite as open to any of his compatibilist adversaries to declare that incompatibilism misses the point. What point? The proposition that determinism is compatible with voluntariness, compatible with our existence as it seems to be in the light of general neuroscience and despite any gap-feelings. The proposition of consistency is precisely as much a fact as the previous proposition of inconsistency. Will someone suppose that the point the compatibilist is missing is that there is this particular argument for indeterminism and free will – our supposed gap-impressions in our deciding and acting? No doubt, but mistakenly. Moreover, to say a last word on our shared experience, indeed the main thing about it, there are two sides in this introspection-contest. Many compatibilists have of course said, with John Stuart Mill,40 that in fact we have no experience of ‘gaps’ in our deciding and acting – supposed absences of causal circumstances. That is not the content of our experience at all. What we have is experience that our deciding and acting is up to us, in accordance with our own desires, personality, character, and so on. We experience not a gap in the given sense but an absence of compulsion, constraint, or any such ‘external’ causation, including inner compulsion. That absence, of course, is distinct from an absence of causation. The compatibilists might have added something else in analysis of our experience. It is that we take our deciding or whatever, say (3) in the example, to have the distinction of being the cause in the set of conditions that makes up a causal circumstance for something. This is what is special about deciding and acting as against

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perceiving. This, together with the absence of compulsion, is what lies behind our confidently giving our reason, the reason we had,41 in explanation of why something happened. We do not need Searle’s alternative. Nor do we have to agree that in thinking about whether determinism is true, we should pay a lot of attention to our ‘consciousness of freedom’ as against, say, neuroscience. It is my report that our guide must try harder. Better must be done about determinism and freedom. To my mind, and now to the minds of other philosophers, both compatibilists and incompatibilists are demonstrably mistaken.42 It is clear enough that each of us has or can have attitudes of the kinds mentioned above that are consistent with determinism, and also attitudes of these kinds that are inconsistent with determinism. There is what amounts to a behavioural proof of this. It may be that the attitudes inconsistent with determinism are in some way deeper, and that we also ned to think about other related attitudes or matters. It cannot be that what needs to be said about this is the very little indeed that has been said in the line from Bramhall to Searle. It may be that what needs to be said will be said in connection with some new and very different conception of consciousness, not Searle’s or the like, or in connection with something else, maybe another fact about causation.43

4

Free Will with Neural Indeterminism

Come back now to the matter of explaining decisions and actions, and the account we have been considering. We are given additional thoughts having to do with free will on the explanation of what happens when we ordinarily consider reasons for something, decide what to do, get an action going, and carry it through.44 Let us consider them in terms of the example with which we started. Item 2 is a bit of higher-level activity of the brain also known as consciousness, specifically your considering reasons for and against making a speech. L2 is a bit of simultaneous lower-level activity, also known as neuron-firings and the like. L2 causes the simultaneous consciousness. Later on there is (3) your consciously deciding against a speech, along with the simultaneous lower-level activity L3. L3 causes the consciousness. Searle, having now considered the consciousness of deciding and acting in particular, as distinct from perceptual consciousness and presumably any other part of consciousness, is belatedly struck by the epiphenomenalism objection, and seemingly not reassured by

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the policy of identifying the consciousness with the neural activity. Why the objection is not taken to apply in connection with perceptual experience, remembering, and of course all of consciousness, is entirely unclear, but forget that. He contemplates that there is his reasons-and-self explanation of (3) the deciding, but rightly sees that this cannot save the picture from epiphenomenalism. This is so because there remains a full explanation of the deciding that leaves the reasons out. This is the explanation that L2 without the aid of 2 standardly caused L3, and L3 standardly caused the deciding. So our guide now reluctantly prefers and recommends something different. Maybe he does so also because it turns his philosophy of mind into a definite and complete doctrine of free will, anyway as complete as such things are. He regards his new hypothesis as at least an empirical possibility. It gets even better billing in the paper ‘Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology’. In any case, it is the most salient item in his thinking about determinism and freedom. It has prompted the selfless labour of this response of mine more than anything else. The new hypothesis just subtracts from the picture the standard causation of the neural L3 by the neural L2. However, it keeps the standard causation by the neural L2 of (2) the simultaneous consciousness that goes with it, and the standard causation by the neural L3 of (3) its conscious partner. This is how we escape epiphenomenalism. To repeat, there is a causal circumstance or sufficient causal condition in the neurons for the simultaneous considering of the reasons, and, later on, a causal circumstance in other neurons for the simultaneous deciding, but there is no causal circumstance in the earlier neurons for the later neurons. So we have down-up causation but not left-right causation. To my mind this hypothesis is not merely intellectually unattractive, as Searle admits, but just about fantastic. Certainly a conviction mentioned by Searle about the evolutionary advantage of consciousness couldn’t commit you to this. The hypothesis is as good as a factual and empirical absurdity. Searle mentions, of course, the customary indeterminism-interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as entering into the story of the absence of the left-right causation at the neural level. Whatever may be added to it, this is the idea of true randomness. So what we have got in the brain is Quantum Mechanics working from left to right but not from down to up. Quantum Mechanics doesn’t work upwards, just sideways. The neurons and consciousness constitute a kind of machine at any time or over any period of

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time, but over no period of time are the earlier and later neurons such a machine. Is that theoretical courage, or theoretical suicide? There is another reason for thinking it’s not intellectual courage. Return again to the example of an ordinary sequence of experiences. Here and elsewhere, we are to distinguish the experience or consciousness of deciding and acting from other experience or consciousness – say remembering your seeing something, or hearing something and feeling something. So while there is no left-right causation but just Quantum Mechanics between various related neural events having to do with deciding and acting – 2 and 3, and 3 and 5, and 5 and 6 – there is left-right causation and no Quantum Mechanics between the other related neural events 1 and 4, and between various events and what goes with (7) the understanding and feeling. The neural story of remembering, and of understanding and feeling, is dramatically different from the neural story of deciding and acting. It is hard to resist wondering whether this is dreamland. Will someone who read the degree in philosophy, politics and economics in Oxford in about 1960 now ask what canons or principles of inductive or scientific proceedings justify a speculation about theoretical suicide? It seems to me there is a good answer. We get those principles from clear cases of good and bad inductive or scientific practice. It is bad practice to suppose that with a kind of experience, deciding and acting, the brain is causal in one direction (upwards) and not causal in another (rightwards). It is bad practice to suppose that in a sequence of experiences the brain jumps back and forth between being left-right causal and not being left-right causal. In the elaboration of the new hypothesis, further, a striking addition is made to the down-up causation of which we know. It is up-down causation – the system-causation mentioned above (p. 101). Maybe this gives us another direction in which Quantum Mechanics doesn’t work. The elaboration of the hypothesis is associated with some neuroscientific research that purports to prove, against neuroscience generally, that the mind gets ahead of the brain. You have heard of that. I leave the reader to reflect on the possibility of avoiding contradiction with respect to both down-up and up-down causation, and of thinking further about Libet’s surprising research.

Notes 1. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2000. See also ‘Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology’,

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2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

On Determinism and Freedom

Philosophy, 2001, and the book Rationality in Action (MIT Press, 2001), Chapter 3. See Minds, Brains, and Science (Harvard University Press, 1984); Rediscovery of the Mind (MIT Press, 1992); The Mystery of Consciousness (New York Review Book, 1997); ‘Consciousness’, Annual Review of Neuroscience 2000. The distinction between (i) the two kinds of intentions, inactive and active, of which the second is what used to be called a volition, and (ii) the active intention that begins a movement and the intentionality involved in carrying it forward, is laid out in my A Theory of Determinism or Mind and Brain (Oxford University Press, 1988), Chapter 4 in each case. Except with respect to causation, there seems to be no disagreement between Searle and me on these matters of deciding and acting. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, pp. 3–4. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 4. That about a dozen other characterizations of consciousness by Searle are as indeterminate is argued in Chapter 5, ‘Consciousness and Humble Truths’, in my On Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). The chapter is derived from ‘Consciousness, Neural Functionalism, Real Subjectivity’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1995. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 4. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 3. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 3. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 16. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, pp. 3–4. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, pp. 4–6. A version of the lecture is given in ‘Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology’ – see Note 1 above. Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown, 1991). ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 6. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 12. Incidentally, is the big difference between the two things a good reason for precisely not getting too serious or single-minded about the unified-field approach? ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, pp. 6–8. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, pp. 6–7. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 116. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 8. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 7. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, pp. 8–10. See Chapter 1 above, or, for a full account, Chapter 1 of either my A Theory of Determinism (Oxford University Press, 1988) or Mind and Brain. The Self and Its Brain (Springer, 1977), p. 507. ‘Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology’, p. 511. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 9. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 9. J. Bramhall, Works (John Henry Parker, 1844). The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 5, ed. Thomas Molesworth (Scientia Aalen, 1839–45, originally c. 1650).

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30. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford University Press, 1902, originally 1748). 31. (Doubleday, 1958), vol. 2, pp. 316–27, pp. 446–53; vol. 1, chs 20–5. 32. G. McFee, Free Will (Acumen, 2000); L. W. Ekstrom, Free Will (Westview Press, 2000). 33. Freedom and Experience (Macmillan, St Martin’s, 1997). 34. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, pp. 7–8. 35. p. 496. 36. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, pp. 11–12. 37. See Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1996). 38. ‘Freedom and Resentment’, Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (Oxford University Press, 1968). 39. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 11. 40. Examination of the Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton (Longmans, Green, 1878), pp. 578–85. 41. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, p. 9, p. 10. 42. See A Theory of Determinism or Mind and Brain, Chapters 7 and 8. For a summary, see How Free Are You? (Oxford University Press, 2002). Semicompatibilists, so-called, are remarked on below on p. 154, note 10. 43. Cf. my Philosopher: A Kind of Life (Routledge, 2001), pp. 397–9, and see the final sections of Chapters 6 and 7 below, and the introduction to Chapter 7. 44. ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, pp. 13–21.

Chapter Six

Determinism True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism False, Another Problem

It is fortunate for some of us that science is not much better at philosophy than philosophy is at science. Science is not much better, that is, at dealing with subjects that traditionally have been within philosophy. If it were not for this pretty plain truth, we determinists would be more discomfited by talk of Quantum Theory than previous mentions of it in this book indicate that I am. Certainly the interpretation of Quantum Theory depended on by free willers is of a philosophical nature, and in any case calls out for consideration by way of that general logic that is the stuff of decent philosophy. The paper below first returns to the subject of the common interpretation of Quantum Theory, and gives it more attention than it has had so far. The paper then passes on to an oddity that deserves more thinking about. It is that our subject of determinism and freedom, so far as the philosophy of mind is concerned, can seem to exist in an enclave, purdah, ghetto or woodshed. It is a loneliness, perhaps, like the loneliness of provers or disprovers of the existence of God insofar as moral philosophy and metaphysics is maintained. Should this give pause to advocates of free will in particular? The subject that follows, like Quantum Theory, has also been in view earlier. This is what has certainly been the main dispute about determinism in philosophy in the English language. It is not the formulation of determinism or its truth but rather the upshot for us if it is true. If you need a little philosophical self-respect in order to make a proper response to the use the mentioned part of physics has been put to, is it arrogance that is needed in order to maintain that both of two whole philosophical traditions, opposed and seemingly formidable traditions, have overlooked the most obvious fact of relevance

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to them? Can it be that both regiments of philosophers, including Hume and Mill, and Berkeley and Sartre, have been wrong? So it seems to me, and there are now more philosophers who do not sign on with either of the regiments. Some of them are Professors Double, Fischer, Mele, Pereboom, Smilansky and Weatherford.1 In any case, more reason for independence of mind is supplied below. It has to do with the principal arguments recently employed by incompatibilists and compatibilists for the conclusion that we all have one idea of freedom and it is theirs. The arguments have been much discussed in the enclave. The simplicity of the proposition that we do not have one idea of freedom, but rather two ideas in two attitudes, however, is not quite the last thing to be hazarded by your present guide. There is a little complication. What it comes to is that if you actually think about your own life, your life can stick its nose into your philosophy.

1

Quantum Theory as Interpreted

An event is something in space and time, just some of it, and so it is rightly said to be something that occurs or happens. For at least these reasons it is not a number or a proposition, or any abstract object. There are finer conceptions of an event, of course, one being a thing’s having a general property for a time, another being exactly an individual property of a thing – say my computer monitor’s weight (19 kg) as against the weight of yours (maybe also 19 kg). None of these finer conceptions can put in doubt that events are individuals in a stretch of time and space. What is required for an event to have an explanation, in the fundamental sense, is for there to be something else of which it is the effect. That is, for there to be an answer to the fundamental question of why an event happened is for there to be something of which it was the effect. A standard effect is an event that had to happen, or could not have failed to happen or been otherwise than it was, given the preceding causal circumstance, this being a set of events. In more philosophical talk, as you have heard, the event was made necessary or necessitated by the circumstance.

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Of course there are finer conceptions of what it is for an event’s having been made necessary by a circumstance. Some say that since the circumstance occurred, so did the later event. They give a simple logician’s account – disambiguate that to your taste, reader – of such a conditional statement. This reduces to David Hume’s story of causation, where the particular causal circumstance and the particular event were just an instance of a constant conjunction. Others are impressed by the difference between a causal circumstance for an event and an invariable but non-causal signal of that coming event. To exclude the signal from being the causal circumstance they say, maybe in terms of the idea or locution of possible worlds, that what a circumstance’s necessitating an event came to is that since the occurrence occurred, whatever else had been happening, so did the event. Evidently there is a little room for this difference of opinion – our conceptual and other experience does not immediately rule out one of these views. Our experience does rule out other contemplated accounts of what is needed for an event to have an explanation in the fundamental sense – of its being necessitated by a causal circumstance. Clearly we do not understand an event’s having had to happen as being only that it was more probable, maybe just more probable than not, as a result of the circumstance. That is not what we believe either, you bet, when we say the event could not have failed to happen. It is yet clearer that we do not take an event’s having had to happen as being that it might well not have happened despite there having been something on hand that was ‘enough’ for it. In my life so far I have never known a single event to lack an explanation in the fundamental sense. No doubt your life has been the same. No spoon has mysteriously levitated at breakfast. There has been no evidence at all, let alone proof, of there being no explanation to be found of a particular event. On the contrary, despite the fact that we do not seek out or arrive at the full explanations in question, my experience and yours pretty well consists of events that we take to have such explanations. If we put aside choices or decisions and the like – the events in dispute in the present discussion of determinism and freedom – my life and yours consist in nothing but events that we take to have fundamental explanations. Thus, to my mind, no general proposition of interest has greater inductive and empirical support than that all events whatever, including the choices or decisions and the like, have explanations. Offered as exceptions to the latter proposition, without begging the question, are certain items distinct from the ordinary or macro

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events of our lives. They are indeed spoken of as events. They are, we hear, a certain sub-class of micro or atomic and subatomic events. They are the quantum events of Quantum Theory. They, like all micro events, are far below the level of spoon movements and, more importantly, far below the neural events associated with consciousness and conscious choices or decisions in neuroscience. The first thing to be noted of these supposed quantum events, events of true chance, by anyone inclined to determinism, is that there is no experimental evidence in a standard sense that there are any. There is no such evidence within physics. There is no such evidence, moreover, three quarters of a century after Heisenberg and Schrodinger developed Quantum Theory. In that very long time in science, including the recent decades of concern with Bell’s Theorem, there has been no direct and univocal experimental evidence of the existence of quantum events. A second thing to be noted of these items has to do with a prior issue of which you have had a hint from my sceptical usages. What are these items if they do exist? How are they to be conceived? How is the mathematics or formalism of Quantum Theory to be interpreted? How are we to think of these items that are supposed to turn up in our heads and, as some say, leave room for traditional free will? Well, standard accounts of them by physicists bravely say they are baffling, weird and wonderful, self-contradictory, inexplicable, and so on. These events so-called do not involve particles as ordinarily understood and defined, and the special use of the term ‘particle’ within interpretations of the mathematics cannot be satisfactorily defined. So with uses of ‘position’ or ‘location’ and so on. The situation can be indicated quickly by noting a well-known collection of physicists’ own speculations as to what quantum events in general, this bottom level of all reality, comes to. It comes to: observer-dependent facts, subjective ideas, contents of our consciousness of reality, epistemological concepts, ideal concepts, propositions, probabilities, possibilities, features of a calculation, mathematical objects or devices, statistical phenomena, measures and measurements, abstract particles, probability waves, waves in abstract mathematical space, waves of no real physical existence, abstract constructs of the imagination, theoretical entities without empirical reality, objects to which standard two-value logics do not apply. It was remarked above that physics has not provided any direct and univocal experimental evidence of the existence of events that lack standard explanations, events that are not effects. The noted

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collection of speculations about the nature of quantum events shows more than that. It remains a clear possibility, indeed a probability, that physics has not started on the job, even seventy-five years late, of showing that there are events that lack explanations. This is so, simply, because it remains a probability that quantum events, so-called, are not events. They are not events in any of the senses gestured at in the first paragraph above. In brief, it is probable that they are not things that occur or happen, but are of the nature of numbers and propositions, out of space and time. They are theoretical entities in a special sense of that term, not events. Someone inclined to determinism, and a little tired of a kind of hegemony of physics in a part of philosophy – the part having to do with determinism and freedom – may be capable of saying more. They may even remain capable after considering relevant and admirable contributions by the leading philosophers of science.2 As the above collection of speculations by physicists indicates, even without the addition of some wholly inconsistent and ‘realist’ speculations, the interpretation of the mathematics of Quantum Theory is not merely baffling, weird and wonderful, and so on. It is a mess. That is what would be said of any such enterprise of inquiry that did not enjoy a general hegemony, in more than the mentioned part of philosophy. This is a matter to which we will revert briefly in the end. What we have, then, is that the proposition that all events have explanations has unique inductive and empirical support in our experience, that there is no experimental evidence in a standard sense for quantum events, and that Quantum Theory’s failure to provide experimental evidence for them may be the result of its confused concern with theoretical items other than events. A fourth thing to be contemplated about the supposed quantum events goes flatly against all this, but not against determinism as often conceived for philosophical purposes, and as it is conceived here. Let it be assumed that quantum events so-called, despite the collection of speculations by physicists lately noted, are to be conceived as events. Let it be assumed, against our experience, that they do exist. They are right there among other micro events, at atomic and subatomic levels, as distinct from macro events. They are events that simply lack explanations, events of true chance. These events of true chance may have been very probable, of course. They may have had a probability of 95 per cent, whatever this talk of probability is taken to mean. But to the question of why they actually occurred, their having had a probability of 95 per cent

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is clearly no answer at all. To assign them a probability of 95 per cent is precisely not to claim they had to happen or could not have failed to happen. It is precisely to hold open the possibility that they might not have happened. In fact, on the assumption about true chance being made, there is no answer to look for as to why in the fundamental sense they happened. To the question of why in the fundamental sense they actually occurred, there is no relevant fact to be known, no relevant fact of the matter at all. This is dead clear because, ex hypothesi, everything might have been just the same without their occurring at all. You can miss this little proof of the absolute exclusion of explanatory fact, but it is not a good idea to do so. Let us understand by determinism the family of doctrines that human choices and actions are effects of certain causal sequences or chains – sequences such as to raise the further and separate question, as traditionally expressed, of whether the choices and actions are free. The choices and actions in this determinism, then, are not effects of special sequences beginning a little while before in what can be called originations or acts of free will. These are the stock-in-trade of free will or libertarian philosophers. These items, whatever else they are, and you will be hearing some more about this, are not effects. Determinism so conceived is a matter of only macro events. It remains so if it is developed, as certainly it has to be, into explicit philosophies of mind that take into account the relation of choices and actions to the brain, to neural events. The latter, the stuff of neuroscience, as already remarked, are as much macro events as choices and actions themselves. It is clear that anyone inclined both to the existence of true chance or quantum events and to determinism as defined is not at all forced to choose between them, but can have both. She is not stuck with the levitating spoons. Her essential idea will be that quantum events in our heads do not translate upwards or amplify into macro events that also lack explanations. The quantum events in this respect may cancel out one another – or something of the sort. Given the entire absence of events of real chance within standard neuroscience, this is perhaps the easiest theoretical position for those who want their philosophy, no doubt for some good reason, to be in accord with science as it is now rather than with whatever it will be, the paradigm now rather than some paradigm to come. This macro determinism, determinism as defined, raises exactly the traditional problem of freedom despite being married to micro indeterminism. It leaves exactly where it was the question about

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determinism most attended to by philosophers, that of its consequences for our lives – our freedom in choosing and acting. A fifth remark about determinism and denials of it is that physics including Quantum Theory, as already implied, is deferred to by many as basic or ultimate science. This has importantly to do with its absolute generality, and the idea that all other science can somehow be reduced to it. Certainly this deference, despite difficulties raised by the rest of science, is open to anyone who simply denies that all events have explanations, and in particular denies determinism. However, there are other personnel to be considered: the free will philosophers. They assert the existence of originations or acts of free will in their small philosophies of mind – these originations being non-effects, whatever else they are, and either causal predecessors of choices and actions or the choices themselves. These philosophers take from physics the proposition that certain events are without explanations in the fundamental sense. They then add that these originations have other very different but real explanations that leave or put them and their effects within the control of the person in question, leave or make the person in question responsible for them and their effects in a certain way. This amounts to more than contradiction in just spirit. Physics and in particular Quantum Theory as interpreted by physicists do not amount just to the proposition that certain events are not effects but in fact have or may have other explanations, mysterious but somehow just as real or good as standard explanations. Physics does not take itself like a car dealer who needs to allow that there are other car dealers in town. Plainly physics does not tolerate the other real but mysterious explanations of choices and the like when the choices are taken, as they are by most contemporary philosophers of mind, to be just as physical as spoon-movements. Physics itself, whatever physicists on holiday or in retirement say, is no more tolerant of choices non-physically conceived, along with conscious events generally, despite the blur of non-physicality. Thus the position of the philosophers of origination is exactly what is resisted or disdained by Quantum Theory’s conventional defenders – a hidden variable theory, something that absolutely undercuts Quantum Theory as interpreted.3 The philosophers of origination cannot have it both ways, comfortably or uncomfortably. Can this conclusion be resisted by supposing that there is some non-mysterious way, perhaps even consistent with Quantum Theory, in which originations as true chance events can nonetheless have explanations? Something to do with the dark battleground of

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probability? Well, there can be no way in which it can consistently be asserted that the actual occurrence of an origination has a fundamental explanation. It is going to have to remain a total mystery – with no possible fact anywhere in existence to dispel the mystery. But, it may be said, there is surely some sense in which an event is explained if it is established as having been very probable. This needs to be granted, but not for a reason that gives a helping hand to the philosophers of origination. What is it for event A to have made it 95 per cent probable that event B would occur? If we put aside more mystery, and theories of probability that do not attempt to give its nature or reality, there seems to be only one answer to the question. It is of course that in 95 per cent of the situations in which an event of the type of A occurs, there is precisely a causal circumstance for an event of the type of B. We have good evidence for that, even if we don’t know, or know exactly, what is in the circumstance. What this non-fundamental explanation of B comes to, then, in fact presupposes the possibility of a fundamental explanation of B. It presupposes precisely the existence of a causal circumstance, as yet unspecified, for B. It presupposes that B was a necessitated event. Non-fundamental explanations, as might have been expected, are dependent on exactly the existence of possible fundamental explanations. That is why non-fundamental explanations do indeed count as explanations of a kind. Whether or not these derivative explanations can be said to fit into interpretations of Quantum Theory, they evidently do not fit into the views of the philosophers of origination. To allow a derivative explanation of an origination would be precisely to deny that it is an event of real chance.4 There is a seventh respect in which the philosophers of origination are in more than trouble. Their doctrine suffers from another inconsistency that must stick in the craw of anyone not also on a mission to rescue our freedom. Say my wife writes to ask if I have been to bed with someone else, and I then form the intention to lie, and then I do lie. In order to save my freedom and responsibility as understood by them, my rescuers insert a quantum event between the question and my intention. In order to complete the rescue, however, or rather to defend it from itself, they need to exclude a quantum event between the intention and the lie. Otherwise I shall be doing some random lying – neither freely nor responsibly. How can they consistently do this? Does Quantum Theory as interpreted have some clause, hitherto unheard of, that its random events occur only in such places as to make us morally responsible in a certain sense? This objection of inconsistency, perhaps, is less

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effective with some uncommitted philosophers because they do not really take the philosophers of origination seriously. If it really were accepted as true that a random event could get in between the question and the intention, with great effect, then it would have to be accepted that one could get in between the intention and the lie, with as much effect. Any attempt to exclude the possibility is bound to be fatally ad hoc.

2

Origination and the Philosophy of Mind

Let us now try to leave the question of the truth of the proposition that all events have fundamental explanations, and the truth of determinism in the narrower sense specified. Let us try to leave the question, at any rate, insofar as certain other things can be separated from them. One of these, which in fact should come first, is the question of the conceptual adequacy of determinism and of the opposed family of doctrines, those having to do with origination. It is possible to overlook or forget the fact, but both families do indeed and need to consist in philosophies of mind – accounts or anyway intimations of the nature of consciousness and mental activity, of how they come about, of mind and brain, and of the connection between mental activity and behaviour or action. It is a remarkable fact that when we put aside the little philosophies of mind expressly concerned with the further question of whether choices and actions are free – the literature on determinism and freedom – what we find is determinism and hardly anything else. That is, in the philosophy of mind itself, we find only philosophers who assume or explain that human choices and actions are effects of causal sequences or chains of the sort that are taken in the literature on determinism and freedom to raise the further question of our freedom. When philosophers are concerned with consciousness and mental activity and so on, in and for themselves, in the real philosophy of mind, they have nothing to say of origination. Thus in the philosophy of mind’s autonomous existence, its history since Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind in 1949, there is nothing at all about what, if the philosophers of origination are right, is the unique fact of our consciousness and mental activity and so on. In monisms and dualisms, in functionalism and in the philosophy of action, in assertions and accounts of our subjectivity, in conceptions of a person, and above all in various doctrines of the general explanation of our behaviour – in all of this, at least half of it not scientistic

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or ‘materialistic’, we find nothing of what is supposed by its supporters to be what actually sets us aside from the rest of the world: our originations. Are a couple of qualifications in order? Well, there has been some support for the mysterious idea that reasons are not causes – what are they supposed to be, then? – but it has not gone so far as embracing origination. There is also Donald Davidson’s Anomalous Monism, which denies the existence of lawlike or nomic connections between mental events, so-regarded, and physical events. There are no such connections between mental events and their physical antecedents – as there are no such connections between mental events and either simultaneous neural events or such later physical events as actions and their effects. Well, it is also part of this extraordinary doctrine that the mental events regarded as physical, which indeed they must be, are effects of their physical antecedents.5 Of what relevance to the truth of determinism is the nearly complete absence of the opposing family of doctrines from the orthodox philosophy of mind? That particular question of truth has the interest of standing in connection with the matter of orthodox science and a certain presumption of truth – although not one into which I myself enter with full confidence. Let us leave it, and note instead that origination’s absence from the philosophy of mind can indeed be taken to suggest that there is no tempting conception of origination in existence. Otherwise it would certainly have been made use of in general explanations of behaviour. Origination’s absence from the philosophy of mind also reinforces the question of whether there is an adequate conception of it. What has been said so far, to recall, is that an act of origination (1) is not an effect, (2) is either a causal predecessor of a choice and action or the choice itself, and (3) has a special explanation such that it and therefore its effects are within the control of the person in question and such as to make her responsible in a certain sense for them. Is this adequate? That it is not has for some time been contemplated by the more-or-less determinist party in the philosophy of determinism and freedom. The idea was famously expressed by Peter Strawson, as remarked earlier, when he spoke of panicky metaphysics.6 It is indeed difficult to see what can be added to the conception we have so far of origination in order to have more to put in place of the standard account of the occurrence of choices and actions in terms of fundamental explanation and causation. It can be asked, certainly, how the special kind of explanation and thus personal control comes about. In answer, if talk of probability is given up,

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recourse may be had just to ordinary verbs of our human activity, such as ‘to give rise to’, or indeed ‘to cause’. But these, as we understand them elsewhere, are a matter of fundamental explanation, of standard effects. ‘Give rise to’, ordinarily used, is as much a matter of standard causality as ‘push’. It is wholly obscure what remains of the verbs of human activity when their backbone of sense is taken out of them. They do not have a backbone put back in, either, when it is said that A’s having caused B was just A’s having been ‘enough’ for B, which was consistent with B’s not happening. No sense has ever been given to the ‘enough’.7 Quite as plainly, there can be recourse to talk of reasons of a kind in trying to explain choices and actions without the aid of fundamental explanation. There can be recourse, that is, to logical or conceptual relations of an essentially normative kind. But that I had good reason eventually to confess to my lover, in terms of whatever value-system, including my own morality, gives no explanation of why I confessed. There may be the explanation that I was caused to confess by my good reason in a more robust and a standardly causal sense – where my reason clearly was something more than an abstract entailer or other premise – but this, of course, is exactly what origination is supposed to replace. Let us leave open for a while the question of whether there is an adequate conception of origination – conceivably the question of whether we have one in what has been said already. Also the question of whether there is another use for what some will see as the irrelevance or indeed the philosophical low blow of pointing out that the stock-in-trade of origination-philosophers never gets attention in the philosophy of mind. Let us turn now to the question of what is taken to follow from determinism – the question not of its truth or the prior question of its conceptual adequacy, but its consequences. This does of course bring in the linked question of the consequences of origination. Here we encounter those two traditions that began in the 17th Century or before and are still with us, one with knobs of modal logic on it and the other encrusted with hierarchies of desire – the traditions of incompatibilism and compatibilism. The first is to the effect that if determinism is true we are unfree and are not morally responsible for our actions, since determinism and freedom are logically incompatible. The second is to the effect that even if determinism is true we remain free in many of our actions and hence morally responsible for them, since determinism and freedom are logically compatible. What the two traditions evidently agree about,

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and typically declare, is that our freedom is one thing, or would be one thing if we had it, and hence that we have this one concept of it – or at any rate one freedom or one concept of freedom is fundamental and somehow the only important one.

3

Consequence Argument, Hierarchy Argument

In the last couple of decades, a good deal of diligence has gone into a certain incompatibilist line of thought. Plainly stated, it is that if determinism is true then my action today, perhaps of complying or going along again with my unjust society, is the effect of a causal circumstance in the remote past, before I was born. That circumstance, clearly, was not up to me. So its necessary consequence, my action of compliance today with my hierarchic democracy, is not up to me. Hence my action today is not free and I am not responsible for it.8 This line of thought is dignified by having the name of the consequence argument for incompatibilism. It is worth noting in passing that in its essential content, its logic, the argument has nothing to do with our being unable to change the past. It is that the past had in it no act of origination and in particular no relevant act of origination. It had in it no act of origination that had the later action of compliance as content or object, so to speak, and as effect. Instead it had in that remote causal circumstance and a causal sequence from it leading up to the action of compliance. If the past did have such a relevant act of origination in it, although I still couldn’t change it and the rest of the past, things would be OK. My action of compliance could be up to me. It is also worth noting that the argument has nothing essential to do with a causal circumstance in the remote past. To repeat, what the incompatibilist supposes would make my action today up to me, make me free and responsible, is an act of origination relevant to today’s action of compliance. Suppose that the act of origination for the action of compliance would have had to be in the last five minutes – originations wear out, so to speak, if they do not issue in actions within five minutes. If they are to work, they have to be renewed. We do indeed believe something like this. If so, for the incompatibilist, my action’s having been the effect of a causal circumstance just over five minutes ago would make the action not up to me. Suppose on the other hand, absurdly, that a previous embodiment of me did perform a relevant act of origination. That might cheer up the incompatibilist, even if it was so remotely in

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the past as to be just after the Big Bang, and even if that event was immediately followed by a causal circumstance, certainly remote, for my later action of compliance. Thus what is crucial for this line of thought is a relevant act of origination. And hence, to mention one thing, the argument has as much need of giving an adequate account of origination as any other argument of its ilk – any incompatibilism. What in fact has happened in connection with the line of argument, however, is a lot of reflection, aided by modal logic, on something else. We could transform it into reflection that makes the essential content or logic of the argument explicit, talk about a causal circumstance just over five minutes ago, but there is no need to do so. The reflection has been on whether it does really follow, from the fact that a remote causal circumstance was not up to me, that its necessary consequence, my action today in going along with my society, is not up to me. The reflection has included variations on the plain version of the line of thought, and also objections to and supposed refutations of both the plain line of thought and the variations. It is not easy for me to see that this has been philosophical time well spent. Does it not seem clear that in an ordinary sense of the words, it does indeed follow that if the remote causal circumstance was not up to me, neither was what was connected with it by an unbroken causal sequence – my action today? Will anyone say that there is no sense of the words in which it follows that if the remote circumstance was not up to me, neither was its necessary consequence? No fundamental or important sense in which lack of control is transitive? Might you join me in saying that if modal logic were to prove that there is no such sense of the words, or no important sense of the words, so much the worse for modal logic? Now consider the other side in the traditional dispute – some compatibilist struggle in the last couple of decades, or rather two such struggles. Both are attempts to defend this tradition’s fundamental conception of our freedom. That conception, at its most simple, is of a choice or action that is not against the desire of the person in question. Freedom consists in choice or action flowing from the desire of the person in question – or, a little less simply, from embraced rather than reluctant desire. Freedom is this absence of constraint or compulsion. Freedom is voluntariness – quite other than origination. An unfree decision or action by contrast is one made as a result of the bars of the prison cell, or the threat to one’s life, or the compulsion of kleptomania.

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Against this idea as to our freedom, it may be objected that we could be free in this way and yet not be in control of our lives. This voluntariness is not control. Exactly this was a complaint of incompatibilists. It gave rise to a struggle in response by our compatibilists. It is plainly a mistake, we still hear from them, to suppose that if I was free in this sense today in my action of social deference, I was subject to control. What control would come to would be my being subject to the desires of another person, or something akin to another person, maybe within me. Given this proposition, evidently, it is not the case that determinism, which is indeed consistent with the compatibilist idea to our freedom, deprives us of control of our lives.9 So far so good, you may say, but clearly a question remains. Could what has been said by the compatibilists be taken as coming near to establishing that there is but one way in which we can conceive of not being in control of our lives, the way where we are subject to somone or something else’s desires? To put the question differently, and more pointedly, does this come near to establishing that there is but one way, the compatibilist way, in which we can be in control of our lives, which is to say one way in which we conceive of being free? That all we think of or can care about is voluntariness? There are rather plain difficulties in the way of this. There evidently is something very like another idea of self-control or freedom. Is it not against the odds, to say the least, that this dispute into which our compatibilist is seriously entering is between his own conceptually respectable party and a party that has no different idea at all, nothing properly called an idea or anyway no idea worth attention, of what our freedom does or may consist in? There is what has been said of origination. Let me mention yet more quickly the effort by some compatibilists to make more explicit their idea of freedom. It is at bottom the effort to show why the kleptomaniac and other such unfortunates, on the compatibilist account of freedom, are in fact unfree. Certainly it could be thought there was a problem for the account here, since the kleptomaniac in walking out of the department store yet again without paying for the blouses presumably is somehow doing what he wants to do, presumably is not acting against desire. Our compatibilist is indeed on the way to a solution if he supposes, a little bravely, that all kleptomaniacs not only desire to make off with the blouses, but also desire not to have that desire. By means of

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this idea of a hierarchy of desires, that is, the compatibilist is indeed improving his conception of a free action – it is, at least in the first part of the conception, an action such that we desire to desire to perform it.10 Suppose more than that – that the whole philosophical enterprise, this hierarchical theory of freedom, works like a dream, with no difficulties about a regress or about identifying a self with a particular level of desires or about anything else. Will that have come near to establishing that there is no other conception of a free action? Will it come close to establishing that we have operating in our lives only the hierarchic conception? Will it come close to establishing the lesser thing that this conception is fundamental or dominant or most salient or in any other way ahead of another one? Come to think of it, how could it actually do that? Are we to suppose that from the premise that one conception of freedom has now been really perfected it follows that there is no other conception of freedom or none worth attention? So that you do not suppose I have been partial, let us glance back at the incompatibilist struggle. Think again of me today, acting again in compliance with my unjust society, and take the action to be the effect of a causal circumstance in the remote past, before I was born. It does indeed seem, as was maintained above, there must be some proposition to the effect that if the remote circumstance was not up to me, neither was the action of compliance that was made necessary by the circumstance. But something else is surely quite as clear – and maybe more important than the previous point that the line of argument, like any incompatibilist line of argument, needs an adequate account of origination. There is, isn’t there, a clear sense in which my action, necessary consequence though it was, may well have been up to me – perfectly up to me. Suppose I was struck a month ago by Bradley’s utterance that to wish to be better than the world is to be already on the threshold of immorality. Suppose I had then consciously determined after a month’s serious reflection that henceforth I would consistently act on the side of my society. Suppose it had come about that a great desire drew me only to this – and of course that I desired to have the desire, and so on. In fact my whole personality and character now supported my action of deference. I could not have been more for it. Does not this conjecture, or any more restrained one you like, come close to establishing that it must be a very brave incompatibilist who maintains that there is no significant sense in which my action of compliance was up to me?

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4

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Attitudinism

So much for recent activity in the two hoary traditions. There is yet more activity, in particular with respect to origination, in papers given to a good conference.11 I commend it to you – but also the idea that a yet more direct approach to the two traditions is possible.12 It is as follows. We all have hopes for our lives – we all have a dominant hope in a particular stage of life, perhaps for more than one thing, perhaps a disjunctive hope. Like any hope, it is an attitude to a future possibility, at bottom a desire with respect to the possibility. Very likely indeed it is a desire with respect to our own future actions and their initiations in particular desires or whatever. To come to the crux quickly, such desires come in two sorts for all of us. One sort is for a future in which our actions will be voluntary, uncompelled and unconstrained. We won’t be in jail or victims of our fearfulness. The other sort of desires is for a future in which our actions are also not fixed products of our natures and environments. We will not just be creatures of them. Each of us has the two sorts of desires, or at any rate each of us is more than capable of having them. One contains ideas of our future actions as our own in being voluntary. The other sort makes them our own in also containing at least an image of our future actions as originated. There is the same plain truth, as it seems to me, with respect to the trampled ground of moral responsibility, of which incompatibilists in particular have had a too elevated notion. What determinism threatens here is also attitudinal. It is a matter of holding people responsible for particular actions and with crediting them with responsibility for particular actions. To do so is to approve or disapprove morally of them for the actions in question. We may do so on the contained assumption than an action was voluntary. Or we may do so, differently, on the contained assumption that the action was not only voluntary but originated. Different desires enter into the two sorts of attitudes – retributive desires are attached to the idea that the person in question, just as things had been and were, could have done other than the thing he did. What is more, we act and have institutions or parts of institutions that are owed to one assumption rather than the other. One good example of a general fact is preventive punishments, depending only on a conception of actions as voluntary, and retributive punishment, depending on a conception of actions as also originated. There is thus a behavioural proof of the existence and

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indeed the pervasiveness of two attitudes and two conceptions of freedom. What all this leads to is the real problem of the consequences of determinism – which is not the problem of proving something to be our one idea of freedom, or our only self-respecting one, or what you will along these lines. The real problem of the consequences of determinism is that of dealing with the situation in which we have both the idea of voluntariness and also the idea of voluntariness plus origination, and these two ideas run, shape or at least colour our lives, and the second conflicts with determinism. We may attempt to bluff, and to carry on intransigently in the pretence that what matters is only the first idea and what it enters into, one family of attitudes. This is a response of intransigence. On the other hand we may respond with dismay to the prospect of giving up the second idea and what it enters into, the other family of attitudes. It is at this point among others that the question of the adequacy of the idea of origination comes up. Some philosophers say there is no adequate idea of it. What it comes to is only some piece of nonsense, literally speaking, like the old nonsense of speaking of a thing’s causing itself. Hence, for one thing, it does not matter if determinism is true or false. If it is true, there is no more problem than if it is false, since there is no serious idea with which it conflicts. Also, compatibilism has the field of discussion to itself, since incompatibilism comes to nothing. The question of truth does not arise.13 This is a curious position that prompts speculation. Suppose I have no idea of why the petunias on the balcony need sun, but am persuaded they do, no doubt by good evidence. Despite the evidence, I have no acquaintance at all with photosynthesis, not even any boy’s own science of the matter. It does not follow, presumably, that I lack the idea that the petunias need sun. I could have the idea, too, in a prescientific society where news of the science of the thing would for a long time make no sense. Could I not also have the idea, in a later society, if all of many attempts to explicate the need had broken down in obscurity and indeed contradiction? At first sight, certainly, those who suppose that there is an adequate idea of origination are in just this sort of position. They speak no nonsense when they assert or offer for contemplation a certain thing. It is that there occur originations, these being events that are not effects, are in the control of the person in question, and render the person responsible in a certain way for ensuing actions – his being held responsible can consist in an attitude having in it certain

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desires, notably retributive ones. The friends of origination speak no nonsense when they depend considerably for their characterization of the events of origination on these consequences. The friends still speak no nonsense when it transpires that they cannot in some way explain how it comes about that there is origination, or would come about if there were any. They still speak no nonsense in what went before if their attempts to explain are themselves pieces of nonsense. No doubt more distinctions are needed here, but it remains my own view that determinism does threaten something important to us of which we have an adequate idea if not a tempting idea. The latter sort of thing, as you will expect, is an idea open to a kind of explanation, an idea of something along with some explication of it. My untroubled view, too, until very recently, has been that the true problem of the consequences of determinism is the problem of giving up something of which we do have an adequate idea. It is not as if that problem does not arise for the clear-headed. We can set out to try to deal with this problem of attitudes, at bottom desires. We can try to get away from the responses of intransigence and dismay, and oscillating between them, and make a response of affirmation. This, caricatured, is looking on the bright side. It is seeing the fullness and fineness of a life given much of its character by the attitudes consistent with determinism, and thus giving up the ones inconsistent with it. We can try this – but we may not succeed.14 As it has seemed to me, what stands in our way, and in fact obstructs real belief in determinism despite all that can be said for it, is a great fact of our culture. We are so formed, first of all by mothers, those first agents of culture, as to be unable to escape the attitudes. We cannot dismiss one kind of our hopes, and we cannot escape other attitudes, such as those having to do with responsibility, notably when they are directed by ourselves onto ourselves. Is this the only possible conclusion to the problem of determinism and freedom? For want of space, let me pass by some gallant work of originality and interest by Richard Double,15 and come on to something else, an idea of another alternative. Having lately engaged explicitly in autobiography, rather than the kind of it in which philosophy is sometimes said to consist, I have been newly taken aback by the strength of certain attitudes to myself. These have to do, let me quickly say, with my being somehow accountable for my past. They are certainly akin to attitudes inconsistent with determinism. On what do they rest? It is not easy to see that anything about a culture fully explains them. Do they have to

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do with an individual consciousness, maybe a consciousness that does something like form a life? Is the problem of determinism and freedom to be advanced by a new philosophy of mind? I have been taken aback too by the idea that an accountability may have to do not with consciousness but with a further kind of explanation of a life – picking out a cause within a causal circumstance and giving it special standing in connection with the effect (p. 13). This has attitudes in it, all too evidently, but it also seems a business of truth. I do not mean that the attitudes direct and mislead explanation, but that they can seem somehow to enter into its constitution. Thus a question has come up about attitudes of accountability.16 Could these too be owed not only to mothers and their successors in our culture but also have truth in them? Is that why they are so strong and durable? Will some dramatically different reconciliation of determinism and a kind of freedom, individuality or autonomy one day be achieved? Certainly it will not be another appearance of that weary warhorse, compatibilism. Will the elevation of causes as explanatory have something to do with a connection between desire and truth? Again the point is not about desires affecting our pursuit of truth or obscuring it, but about their entering into the constitution of it.17 The point stands in connection with two remarks earlier. One was about Quantum Theory having a certain hegemony despite its interpretation being a mess. The other was about the stock-intrade of origination-philosophers never getting noticeable attention in the real philosophy of mind. Can it be that attitude enters more into belief, some of it also knowledge, including Quantum Theory as interpreted and free will philosophy, than we have thought is possible or proper to suppose?

Notes 1. See Richard Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1991), John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Alfred Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (Oxford University Press, 1995), Derk Pereboom, Living Without Free Will (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Saul Smilansky, Free will and Illusion (Oxford University Press, 2000) Roy Weatherford, The Implications of Determinism (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991). Cf. the contributions in Robert Kane, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (Oxford

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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University Press, 2002) and Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke and David Shier, eds, Freedom and Determinism (MIT Press, 2004). I have in mind in particular John Earman, ‘Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know’, in Campbell, O’Rourke and Shier, eds, Freedom and Determinism. See David Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation (Routledge, 1998). Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1996). For discussion of Anomalous Monism, see ‘Anomalous Monism, and the Champion of Mauve’, in Chapter 1 of my On Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). P. F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in his Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (Oxford University Press, 1968). But cf. Carl Ginet, On Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1983). Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room (MIT Press, 1984). Harry Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, Journal of Philosophy, 1971; Necessity, Volition and Love (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Campbell, O’Rourke and Shier, eds, Freedom and Determinism. It is laid out more fully in the second edition of my How Free Are You? (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 91–121. There is a similar account in the first edition, pp. 80–106. For an exhaustive account, see my A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes, pp. 379– 487, or The Consequences of Determinism, pp. 11–119. Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief (Oxford University Press, 1986). How Free Are You? 2nd edn, pp. 122–41 1st edn, pp. 107–29; A Theory of Determinism, pp. 488–612, or The Consequences of Determinism, pp. 120– 244. Richard Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1991); Metaphilosophy and Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1996). The question gets some more attention in the introduction to the next chapter and at its end. Philosopher: A Kind of Life (Routledge, 2001), pp. 26, 390–1, 399, 414.

Chapter Seven

After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism – and Attitudinism?

Not a lot needs saying in introduction to this last chapter. The main propositions of this book have now been put before you, or, in the case of the last one, touched on. What remains is not so much an elaboration of them as another look at them all, particularly the last one, a concluding look that may persuade you further of their truth or anyway sense. Proofs in philosophy, like large confirmations in science, are not so impregnable as their owners would like. Maybe, though, the proofs and confirmations, by being made a little clearer, become a little better, result in more conviction. Certainly you have heard very little of the possibility or necessity of a final or anyway further stage of thinking about determinism and freedom. It is beyond the idea that we have two ideas of freedom and that we have to try to live with them. There is trouble with that position. There is trouble about thinking that it is the whole story. What this amounts to is not doubt about determinism. Nor is it doubt about our having both the idea of voluntariness and the idea of origination, and the ensuing practical problem. It is, as I say, doubt that this is the end of the story, doubt that this is the full story of the large side of our lives that is in question What it comes to is that it seems to me we have attitudes that survive or will survive belief in determinism. They are attitudes that are akin to those that attach to what has been given up or will be given up, belief in origination. They are attitudes to ourselves, to truths about ourselves that are also matters of what might be called feelings and desires of self-dependence – recognitions of our self-dependent identities that cannot but move us. It may be that we here come upon the fact or facts that have prolonged the dispute about determinism and freedom.

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Kant, as great a philosopher as any, was arguably a determinist. Certainly he was this in one of his defended conceptions of what there is. That he took us to put determinism onto reality, or a reality, rather than find it there already, as we also put other things onto the reality, does not make him less a determinist. But if he was this, he was certainly no compatibilist about freedom, as noted earlier (p. 2). . . . it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the common reasoning to argue freedom away. Philosophy must therefore assume that no true contradiction will be found between freedom and natural necessity in the same human actions, for it cannot give up the idea of nature any more than that of freedom. Hence even if we should never be able to conceive how freedom is possible, at least this apparent contradiction must be convincingly eradicated. For if the thought of freedom contradicts itself or nature . . . it would have to be surrendered in competition with natural necessity.1 It is hard to go where he went in his more than radical attempt to deal with his problem – to the discovery of two worlds with determinism in one and origination in the other, two contradictory worlds in one. Nor can he have our agreement in saying, if he does say exactly this in his own language, that there is no contradiction between freedom as origination and necessity or determinism. There is no possibility of that audacity. What it is possible to think is something related, that determinism is true, that origination is therefore impossible, but that we cannot give up ideas, some ideas or others, that are the material of feelings or convictions we have that are somehow close to or like those that have origination as their content. The thought here is that what we cannot give up, and have in a kind of ignorance or misperception attached to free will, and what in fact is no matter of free will, is something we actually have. There is a truth here, a truth that is surely bound up with the ascendancy of nature or natural necessity recognized by Kant. We are pressed, given determinism, to see more than the dissolution of the old problem of the consistency or inconsistency of determinism with freedom. Maybe we are pressed to do more, adjust feelings and so on, as in the case of that now superceded problem of inconsistency.

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Experience, Quantum Theory, Determinism

You can take determinism to be the family of views, a few of them clear and otherwise conceptually adequate, that our decisions and the like and also our actions flowing from them are the effects of certain ordinary causal sequences. These personal events are necessitated by initial and also by subsequent causal circumstances that make up the causal sequences. Has such a determinism, perhaps the one sketched at the start of this book, been shown to be false? Whether we actually experience such a determinism’s being false, which is to say become aware of its falsehood in the course of our deciding and acting, has been disputed. From the 17th Century up to an issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies of which you know,2 some philosophers have said that we do indeed experience the falsehood of determinism. We learn or somehow get the truth that at least sometimes our decisions and actions are not ordinary effects. That is, in deciding and acting we ordinarily have a certain idea of freedom, and we also somehow see that we do actually have this freedom – that we are having it in the course of the deciding and acting. It is part of our consciousness of pieces of deciding and acting that they could go the other way instead, given things exactly as they are and were. Rather than being ordinary effects, the decisions and actions are originated. To say they are originated is to refer to some special mental or neural generative activity that takes the explanatory place of ordinary and clear causation. Often an attempt is made by philosophers to describe this generative activity itself. It is described as being a matter of extraordinary or funny causes, even self-causes, or creative endeavours, or teleology, or something conveyed by ordinary English verbs oddly understood, or something sui generis, or reasons in a particular sense of the term where they are not only terms of logical relations, premises for conclusions, but events – although of course not ordinary causal events. Events of some kind are needed, of course, for the explanation of other events – the decisions and actions. All of these descriptions of origination are found unclear or factitious by other philosophers, unsurprisingly. But that is not the end of origination. To say decisions and actions are sometimes originated can be to say no more than that our decisions and actions come about in such a way, whatever it is, that certain attitudes to them on our part are in order. These attitudes include certain hopes having to do with the nature of our future actions and the particular

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moral approval that credits us with a particular kind of moral responsibility, and so on. To say the lesser thing is to say something perfectly intelligible.3 Nor does it become unintelligible if you go further and say that our decisions are somehow within our control or up to us, whatever that comes to, and hence that certain attitudes are in place. Against the idea that in deciding and acting we actually experience the falsehood of determinism, other philosophers have said or contemplated, from the 17th Century to other issues of the Journal of Consciousness Studies that what we ordinarily experience in deciding and acting is something quite different from an absence of effects. We have the idea that decisions and the like are effects but not effects of a particular kind – and we can know this idea fits the facts. That is, decisions and acts are not effects of compelling, constraining or inhibiting causal circumstances – causal circumstances in conflict with our desires, wills, personalities or characters. As we discern in these typical cases, there is nothing that is forcing our decisions on us. There is an absence of compulsion or the like. We know that in this clear sense the thing can go the other way. There is the freedom of voluntariness, as distinct from origination. Determinism is left perfectly possible by it. Whatever is to be said of this dispute about deciding and acting with respect to determinism, of which more in a minute, there is a truth about the rest of our common experience, including our actual experience in science – and in neuroscience most relevantly. It is that this wider experience leads us towards the view, a second sort of determinism, that all experienced events other than decisions and actions are effects of ordinary causal sequences. If this is so, we surely have good reason, a strong inferential base, for taking the same to be true of the decisions and actions. Certainly with nature as we encounter it in our lives, and also with machines, and most importantly and above all with our bodies, we do know of sequences of causal circumstances for the events in them. We have at least some evidence. At breakfast, no spoon levitates. At work, no keyboard or lever fails really inexplicably, truly randomly. No event in my central nervous system is such a real mystery, something of which there is no ordinary causal explanation to be had. We know enough of ordinary events outside of our deciding and acting to know – what indeed our very language of causation expresses – that they are effects of ordinary causal sequences. Do you still say that our experience of other ordinary events than our decisions and actions is one thing and our theory, particularly

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our Quantum Theory, is another? You may indeed, but without great effect on some of your hearers, particularly some of those who were on hand for Professor Earman’s admirable tour of the subject at an Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference.4 We are not all overwhelmed by science put to philosophical purposes, or science when it becomes philosophy. After nearly a century during which the indeterministic interpretation of Quantum Theory might have been proved, corroborated, supported by direct and univocal experimental evidence, or what you will along these definite lines, it has not been. This shouldn’t be overlooked with deference. Nor has anyone despatched the relevant proposition, annoying to practical-minded physicists, that two theories can both work even if they are inconsistent and hence one of them is false. There is a lot of the history of science to be noted here. It has not even been made clear, of the items in Quantum Theory as interpreted that are said not to be effects, that they are indubitably in the category of things said by determinists of the several kinds to be effects. That is, it has not been made clear these items are events, individuals in a stretch of space and time as distinct from abstract entities or whatever. No determinist with his head screwed on frontwards has ever said one end of an equation is the effect of the other, or that a figure’s having angles adding up to 180 degrees is the effect of its being a triangle. I persist in thinking, too, that it has become apparent that the indeterministic interpretation of Quantum Theory has a nature akin to that of a philosophical theory, or indeed just is a philosophical theory. I have in mind a theory that is at a certain distance from experience, and experimental data and also mathematics, and that aspires instead to the essence of philosophy. That is a kind of logic, which is to say greater conceptual adequacy than found in science – higher standards of clarity, consistency, completeness and so on. That a theory may fail dismally in the aspiration, first of all on account of being self-contradictory, as the indeterminist interpretation of Quantum Theory has so often been and admitted to be, does not remove it from the class of philosophical or would-be philosophical theories. About the truth of a determinism of decisions and actions, it is worth remarking again, too, that the supposed micro-indeterminism based on Quantum Theory would almost certainly not touch the matter if it really were a fact. It would almost certainly be consistent with the determinism of decisions and actions, a macro-determinism

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related to the macro-determinism of neuroscience. It would be as consistent as it would be with that determinism of the ordinary world remarked on earlier – the absence of levitating spoons and so on.5 For the purposes of the rest of this discussion, a determinism of decisions and actions will be taken as a reasonable assumption. We shall not assume, with the brave Professor Searle, that causation works upwards or simultaneously with brain and mind in deciding and acting, but does not work sideways or across time with respect to these activities. That is, we shall not assume that Quantum Theory as interpreted does not relate numerically different if simultaneous macro-events in choosing and acting, but does relate earlier and later ones. We shall not assume either, with respect to sideways relations in general, that our brains and minds jump back and forth between Quantum Theory as interpreted and causation, depending on whether we are deciding something or, on the other hand, just seeing or thinking something. All this, to my mind, is a dog’s breakfast. What most moves me to this unAmerican intemperateness, perhaps, is that there can be no doubt whatever, as we shall soon be seeing, that certain desires are in play with respect to determinism and freedom. They are the stuff of attitudes of hope, moral approval, confidence in belief, personal aspiration and pride, and so on. Something like this is rightly allowed by such open libertarians as Kane.6 They are deep desires, sometimes with religion in them. They are more in play than desires in some other parts of philosophy. To speak generally, we want a certain freedom and the dignity it gives us, and it seems we want them more as retirement approaches. When suddenly it turns out that an interpretation of Quantum Theory, until now supposed to be a perfectly general theory of reality, can be understood as operating in so friendly and local and inconsistent a fashion as to satisfy what is likely to be a philosopher’s deep desire, it is possible to wonder, to vary the metaphor, which is the dog and which is the tail. And let me remark on one other reason for my assumption of determinism and my intemperateness. Some philosophers, as you have heard, look into their experience of deciding and acting and see that it is uncompelled. Whatever introspection comes to, that is something they can actually do, as implied above. I am indeed aware that what is making me hand over my wallet is the man with the gun. But can I look into my experience and see that it is uncaused? Of course not. That fact, if it is one, is something outside

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the experience, presumably prior to it. Does more need to be said? Some other time.

2

Compatibilism, Incompatibilism and Attitudinism One Last Time

To turn now from the truth of determinism to its consequences or upshot for us, we have one regiment of philosophers, as you have heard, saying that in our consciousness of deciding and acting we have our idea of freedom and it is inconsistent with determinism. And we have the other regiment of philosophers agreeing that in our deciding and acting we have our idea of freedom, anyway typically, and it is consistent with determinism. The first regiment assigns to us the idea of origination, along with voluntariness of course, and the second regiment assigns to us only the idea of voluntariness. Each side says we have only their preferred conception. Or, both regiments hedge their bets, and, as recently, say that their preferred conception is the only one somehow important to us.7 These contentions can come to seem very remarkable. In moving and after moving my finger to the left rather than the right, or in and after voting for the Left rather than the Right, I can have either idea of freedom with respect to my experience. I can have it if I haven’t read or heard a word of philosophy. I can have either idea this very moment about moving my finger. So can you and anybody else. What could Incompatibilist Philosopher conceivably say to stop me having the compatibilist idea of voluntariness? It’s true of my moving my finger at the moment, certainly. What could Compatibilist Philosopher say to stop me having the incompatibilist idea of orgination? It’s intelligible if it doesn’t go too far, and it’s no contradiction, and it can come to me even if I take determinism to be true. For these ideas it’s a free country, isn’t it? Is Incompatibilist’s contention, or Compatibilist’s, actually the thriller that we have his idea more often? Does Incompatibilist’s contention reduce to the seeming philosophical scandal that his idea about us accords to us something he wants as a person, some ascendancy or elevation above nature or the rest of nature? Is Compatibilist’s contention really that the claim of our voluntariness is the only claim as to freedom that he in his conventional clearmindedness finds reassuring?

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That we all have both ideas of freedom and, so to speak, make use of them and are supported by them to about the same extent, continues to seem to me patently true. That is to say that both of incompatibilism and compatibilism are false. They are and always have been doctrines to the effect that we all have a single, settled idea of freedom. They have always agreed in that. Remember Hume, for a start, about all mankind agreeing about liberty (p. 1). That they are false is better confirmed, indeed demonstrated, by reflection on other things than our experience of deciding and acting. There are whole structures of our culture and social life that not merely give evidence of but are informed by either one or the other of the two ideas of freedom we all have. They provide a kind of large-scale behavioural proof that we have the two ideas. We have retributive punishment, based on an assumption of the origination of offences by offenders. Some of our societies kill offenders by way of this idea. But we also have preventive punishment, which requires no such assumption. What lies behind the two practices or impulses – and also various practices or impulses of reward – are other things that are as confirmatory in themselves of our all having both ideas of freedom. These are two kinds of moral attitudes in holding people responsible and crediting them with responsibility. When you insult or condescend to me and it hurts, I can disapprove of you morally for not having done otherwise given the past and present as they were. Almost all of us do disapprove of others in this way. But I can disapprove of you, differently, for being the person who willingly did that awful thing out of your very own character and personality and nothing else. All of us engage in this sort of disapproving. It is as true, to revert to the external rather than the attitudinal world, that social and legal structures of individual rights, of which we properly hear so much, ordinarily have to do with ensuring only the voluntariness of actions by individuals. What the framers of bills of rights have in mind, obviously, is to secure that we are preserved from certain constraints and compulsions – that we have the freedom of voluntariness. So with political freedoms generally. On the other hand, while we have no significant structures for the preservation of origination, since this is not within our power, we do in our lives give about as important a place to origination. It is one large assumption about ourselves that enables us to separate ourselves from the rest of conscious life, what used to be called the animal kingdom. Our assumption is a part of what explains

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our general willingness to engage in certain uses and treatments of animals against which a minority of us ineffectively protest. We do not allow that we can openly experiment on people in certain ways or kill them for commercial reasons.8 So it is to me inescapable that both incompatibilism and compatibilism are false. The supposed problem of consistency dividing the two regiments of philosophers collapses into nothing as soon as it is seen there is no single concept of ours in this neighbourhood about which a question of its consistency with determinism arises, but rather two concepts, one of which is patently inconsistent with determinism and one of which is patently not. Incompatibilism and compatibilism are answers to a question with a false presupposition, that we have but one conception of freedom or one important conception, and they themselves assert or presuppose that falsehood. Are you still as unpersuaded as an earlier reader of this opinion?9 Do you say something along the following lines? ‘Compatibilism is the thesis that determinism is consistent with the claim that persons often have moral freedom or freewill. Incompatibilism is the denial of compatibilism. How can they both be false? Doesn’t this conflict with the law of the excluded middle?’ The answer is that it doesn’t if there is no such thing as the claim that persons often have moral freedom or free will – which there isn’t – and one of two claims here is inconsistent with determinism and one isn’t. Being as stubborn as philosophers ought to be, do you now say something of the following sort? ‘Philosophers who work on moral freedom are concerned to provide an account of what it is for somebody’s actions to be up to him or something of the sort. Incompatibilists say one thing, compatibilists another about our shared belief of what it is for something to be up to him. It isn’t as if there is a prephilosophical or pre-theoretical notion of origination and a different pre-philosophical notion of voluntariness.’ Well, your third proposition there is exactly the conclusion you’re supposed to be arguing for. And your first two propositions also beg the question. What you need is an argument for the proposition that we have only one idea, or one important idea, of what it is for somebody’s action to be up to him. And I also remain convinced, by the way, that you get no such thing in concentrating on the consequence argument of incompatibilists – the thought that something can’t be up to somebody if it is the consequence of something in the remote past that wasn’t up to

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him. Or by concentrating on the compatibilist thought that somebody can be morally responsible for something even if in a sense they couldn’t do otherwise – what is called the argument from alternative possibilities. You will know my general reasons for saying the latter thing, but, for more about the argument if you want, you can look elsewhere.10 So exit a question about consistency with a false presupposition, the presupposition that we have one conception of freedom. And exit incompatibilism and compatibilism. What is right is attitudinism – that we all have two families of attitudes, one family containing one of the two conceptions of freedom. In which case, what is our real philosophical situation?

3

Attitudinism and Affirmation

Well, the two conceptions do indeed enter into and are indeed bound up with attitudes and practices with fundamental places in our lives. So there is a remaining problem of determinism and freedom. It has seemed to me to be the problem that results from taking determinism to be true, or from contemplating its truth, the problem of giving up or contemplating giving up what is inconsistent with it, the attitudes and practices bound up with the idea of origination, at bottom certain desires. The possibility can come to mind, incidentally, that this real problem has in fact been the concern of at least some compatibilists who have purported to be proving to us, one more time, that voluntariness by itself is our only idea of freedom or our only significant idea. One way in which you can try to give up an idea or belief and what goes with it is to try to persuade yourself that you don’t actually have the idea or belief. You are more likely to fall into the strategy out of an excessively intellectual orientation to our existence. In any case, the real problem of determinism has seemed to me the given kind of practical problem. It is the problem of how to do something, the problem of how to accept the frustration of deep desires, those bound up with origination. We want the content of certain hopes, as already remarked, which is to say futures in a sense open as distinct from being only a matter of agreeable necessity. We want the reassurance of certain moral attitudes. Also, we want a confidence that our inquiries of various kinds, our pursuits of knowledge, are in a way unlimited as well as unfettered.

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So with our non-moral attitudes to others – personal attitudes. By attention to these latter attitudes, Peter Strawson moved the philosophy of determinism and freedom towards an awareness of the various attitudes that have come to seem to be its actual subject-matter.11 The practical problem is not to be solved by a kind of collapse, a response of dismay to determinism. This, in short, is a kind of concentration on the particular kind of hopes, confidence in beliefs, personal feelings and so on that are inconsistent with determinism. For a start, there is no rationality in persisting in dismay when something else may be possible. Also this response will not be a settled one. Nor is the practical problem solved by another response to determinism, an intransigence. This is a kind of concentration on the kind of hopes and so on that is consistent with determinism. For a start this response is also unsettled, vulnerable to the other one. It has been my own proposal until recently that the best response to determinism is something called affirmation.12 This consists in perceiving and valuing the life consistent with determinism, perceiving and valuing certain attitudes, relationships, and structures of culture, and thereby giving up the life inconsistent with determinism. The response is usefully parodied as a case of looking on the bright side, and is indeed a part of a philosophy of life. This affirmation recommends itself, but it can be supposed that particular means or strategies can also be of use in connection with it. One is a kind of satisfying naturalism in other than the current philosophical sense – the satisfying naturalism that can be called taking up membership in nature, maybe Nature. Another means, requiring no sensibility or poetry, is contemplating escape from certain of the feelings inconsistent with determinism, notably the special guilt and failure associated with our images of origination in connection with our own actions. None of this is likely to be successful, essentially because of the strength of our desires. It has seemed to me that success in the project of affirmation will be owed, in the end, to nothing other than plain and settled belief in determinism. That remains rare, a lot rarer than contemplating the truth of determinism – taking it as something in need of being considered. It has seemed to me that we or most of us, and perhaps more of our successors, will succeed in the response of affirmation only when we really believe of the things we dearly want that we do not have them and cannot ever have them.

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Trouble, and Two Ideas

Thomas Nagel in an account of determinism and freedom remarks that he changes his mind about the subject every time he thinks about it,13 and others may at least be tempted to this carry-on, as I have been lately. A question can be raised in your mind, indeed something like a conviction, about such an attitudinal view as the one just outlined and the project of affirmation – or for that matter about compatibilism. But my concern is attitudinism and the project. The principal point is that a persistent question can be raised in your mind about attitudinism – mainly what is said of the role of the idea of origination – and about affirmation. A question can be raised about them by way of reflective attention to your own life. A question can be raised, that is, by indulgence in autobiographical thinking or writing, at any rate if it has had in it actions and so on such that you would think better of your life and yourself now if they were missing.14 It can seem impossible not to feel accountable or responsible in a certain way for what you have done. This is somehow to disapprove morally of yourself in a certain way, at bottom to have certain desires of several kinds. This disapproval is akin to the disapproval of which we know, the kind that carries in it an idea or image of the initiation of your actions that is inconsistent with determinism – origination. You are not saved from this self-doubt, self-accusation or guilt by the thought that you seem to be wanting your past to have been inconsistent with determinism. This is not retirement-indeterminism. Rather, you are stuck with the thought, aren’t you, that there is some fact about your past that enters into the disapproval? It is certainly relevant that the disapproval is unhappy and self-diminishing, not something agreeable. That is not the end of the story about autobiographical reflection, but only half of it. Very likely your dealings with your past are not all of them judgemental, not all of them concerned with moral or other disapproval or approval. Often, if you get started on this reflection, what you want is just to understand. The aim is explanation of what happened, not judgement on it.15 And, to come towards the point, the terrible and enlightening fact is that you can deal with your past life in this way and fall into no doubt whatever about determinism. No doubt whatever that everything that happened did have an explanation in the ordinary and indeed the only real sense. That stuff wasn’t random. It was

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ordinary effects. Indeed you can increase your conviction of the truth of determinism. That, at any rate, has been my experience. This is owed, presumably, to nothing arcane, but just to your coming to more knowledge about a subject-matter, maybe reading your diary and putting together facts. So, here is seeming contradiction. A kind of disapproval exists and seems to be based on some fact. The natural candidate is origination – but since determinism is the case, there is no origination.16 The seeming contradiction is something like the different and absolutely intractable one announced by Kant, also partly as a result of something about morality.17 Kant rightly did not respond in the compatibilist way of course, by just giving up the proposition of indeterminism and going on about freedom as being only voluntariness. Rather, he announced that he would have both of the determinism and the indeterminism, both of determinism and origination, by putting them in different places. Determinism in or for the phenomenal world, indeterminism in the noumenal world. This metaphysical compatibilism, entirely at odds with ordinary or mundane compatibilism, seems to me hopeless. It has seemed so to many philosophers. A distinction between two worlds is of course possible, and has a number of philosophical versions, several of them less metaphysical than Kant’s. But there seems no hope whatever of locating indeterminism and freedom significantly in only one of them, and certainly no hope for taking it out of the experienced world entirely. In any case, since what is undetermined and free must in some sense turn up in both worlds, it is impossible to see that the contradiction is actually escaped. Is it conceivable that some philosophical idea as radical as Kant’s can have a better hope of dealing with the seeming contradiction – between determinism and feeling like those attached to the idea of origination? In particular, to come to the crux, is it conceivable that we can by means of some idea persist in certain attitudes, close to the attitudes tied up with origination – persist in these attitudes without recourse to origination and consistently with determinism? Contemplate a couple of lines of thought. Both of them do indicate more of how radical it seems to me we need to be – it isn’t a matter of anything like more tinkering with origination. Both of them just might be of use, too, with the seeming contradiction. The first has to do with the nature of consciousness, the second with causation and explanation.

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What is it for you to be aware of this room now? More generally, on the assumption that consciousness divides into perceptual, reflective and affective parts, what is it for you to be perceptually conscious? Two sorts of general answer are given, and also given with respect to the other two parts of consciousness. One sort of answer, if you will allow a quick but enlightening parody, is that perceptual consciousness is cells. It is neural activity. This is the old physicalism about the mind of the 17th Century, a physicalism that now includes functionalism and cognitive science with philosophical ambitions. The other answer is only more disgraceful in terms of the physicalist conventionality of our current philosophy of mind. It is not often given openly, but is implied by the increasing resistance to the idea that consciousness is cells. This other answer, not much parodied, is that consciousness is non-physical stuff in heads. It is possible to be attracted, as many contemporary philosophers are, to a quite general physicalism – the view that all that exists is something close to physical. It is possible to be attracted too, likely by way of the fact of the subjectivity of consciousness, to the intolerable idea that perceptual consciousnessness is indeed funny stuff in heads. You might think this situation is rather like what we have been considering, attraction to both determinism and to something that so far has been sunk in indeterminism. It seems to me possible that the situation with perceptual consciousness will be resolved by a radical view of this consciousness. What is it, really, for you now to be aware of this room? It is for the room in a way to exist. That answer can be shown not to be merely a rhetorical, poetical or feelingful way of saying no more than that you are aware of the room. It is not a non-analysis. Rather, the claim that your perceptual consciousness consists in a kind of existence of a world consists in the claim that there is a certain state of affairs, certainly not in your head. This state of affairs is things, reasonably called chairs and the like, being in space and time and dependent both on another world, roughly speaking that of the relevant atoms, and also on your neurons in particular. The world in question is anterior to the physical world, the one dependent both on atoms and crucially on all of us, as perceivers and the like, at bottom our shared perceptual apparatus. A few words delivered on the wing cannot persuade you of this doctrine, Consciousness as Existence.18 My first and lesser aim, as you have heard, is to indicate something of the order of differentness of thought that seems needed if we are to make a better escape from

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three centuries of impasse in the philosophy of determinism and freedom. In the doctrine about perceptual consciousness, a general physicalism is in a way held onto, and the mystery of non-physical stuff in the head absolutely abandoned. But what attracted us to the stuff in the head, its recommendation, is delivered to us by other means. Above all, we are offered a real subjectivity, something clear on this elusive subject so often gestured at or reduced to something else. This is your world of perceptual consciousness, different from the shared physical world. Given the history and state of the philosophy of determinism and freedom, is it not clear that only so significant a departure from the cart-tracks, and maybe one’s own recent tracks, has a chance? So – might it be that we have a chance of dealing with the seeming contradiction involving determinism and certain attitudes by way of reflection on the nature of consciousness – and in particular on Consciousness as Existence? Searle thinks something like the first thing, and so, after all, if I may be permitted another moment of unAmerican philosophical activity, there may be one thing in his paper on freedom that is right. Surely no question of freedom could arise about just exactly a physical world – a world in which we are present only as conceived in the current physicalism of the philosophy of mind. To say a word now of a particular idea about consciousness and determinism, it is that the autobiographical feelings of some responsibility that persist despite determinism may be a matter of a certain self-dependence. If my feelings of this kind cannot rest on my having originated my life, so to speak, can they rest on the fact that my consciousness consists in what can be called the private ownership of some reality or anyway shared ownership? Consciousness as Existence does not leave me, so to speak, outside the world and merely its product. Rather, my being aware of things is my having a standing that in a certain sense is creative, at any rate constructive. A world of perceptual consciousness, a world anterior to the physical world and no more mental, actually depends not only on atoms but on me. Do I thus have a role or station that makes sense of feelings like those that have hitherto been assigned to origination?19 To finish up here, let me add, for all of us and particularly for the one or two open-minded graduate students of our age, another indication of the extent to which we should think of abandoning the philosophy of determinism and freedom as we have it and making

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a new start in this new millennium. This has to do with causation and explanation. A causal circumstance, as you know, is a set of events that necessitated an effect. We typically isolate one of those events and say it caused the effect, or indeed was the cause of the effect – as against another mere condition of the effect, another event in the causal circumstance. This could be the human action in the set, and will hardly ever be the presence of oxygen. In general it is the event that most interests us or the event that it is in our interests to isolate (p. 13). Suppose you now set about explaining something in a life, perhaps a pattern of it or a culmination of it, and you take that pattern or culmination to be the effect of a causal sequence, this being a past array of causal circumstances. You can now do the further thing of isolating a cause in each of the causal circumstances or maybe just some of them. This gives you what can be called a causal line within and from the beginning of the sequence to the pattern or culmination. It may be that this is much of what is had in mind by Alasdair MacIntyre and other philosophers who speak of a narrative in connection with a life.20 There is a problem about isolating a single condition in a causal circumstance and dignifying it as the cause. The problem, a paradox if you will, is that in a clear sense this cause is no more explanatory of the effect than any other condition in the causal circumstance. All are required or necessary conditions. But the cause seems to be exactly that – more explanatory. That is exactly what is conveyed by calling it the cause. Evidently there is the very same problem about a causal line. In a clear sense it cannot be more explanatory than any other chosen succession of items or states, say presences of oxygen. But it is more explanatory, isn’t it? What this comes to is that the culmination of a life, say, is a matter of plain determinism, but there seems also to be the possibility of some kind of explanation of it that is different in kind. Some kind of departure from the spirit of determinism, or at least an unexpected addition to it. At any rate there is a problem or paradox here. The putative explanation would be consistent with determinism, indeed within it, but different in kind. I wonder if the thing is worth reflection in connection with determinism and the attitudes in which we can find ourselves persisting, but I mainly offer it here as another indication of the extent to which we should start out anew with determinism and freedom.21 It may be that we shall get nowhere. If so, I myself shall go beyond compatibilism and incompatibilism only to attitudinism and the

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project of affirmation. Sticking to this will have to involve something like seeing that what presents itself as a certain moral attitude to oneself and one’s past is in fact moralism or something of the sort, indeed a kind of moralized self-abuse, and also a kind of self-pride – both of these owing something to mothers and culture. But this affirmation will not be perfect contentment.

Notes 1. Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. T. K. Abbott (Longman Green, 1909), pp. 75–6. The passage has been brought to more minds than mine by Donald Davidson’s use of it at the start of his ‘Mental Events’ in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford University Press, 1980). Readers will gather that I do not agree with his use of it, his trying to have something like both of determinism and no lawlikeness with mental events and actions. See ‘Anomalous Monism, and the Champion of Mauve’ in my On Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 2. Searle, ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2000, discussed in Chapter 5 above. 3. Peter Strawson, as you have heard a couple of times, spoke for many philosophers before and after him when he spoke of ‘the obscure and panicky metaphysics’ of origination. Galen Strawson takes the view, in brief, that we do not need to think about determinism since there is nothing intelligible in conflict with it in the talk of origination. Father right, son not so right. (P. F. Strawson, in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (Oxford University Press, 1968); Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief (Oxford University Press, 1986).) 4. The paper is ‘Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know’, in Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke and David Shier, eds, Freedom and Determinism (MIT Press, 2004). 5. These various sceptical thoughts about the indeterminist interpretation of Quantum Theory and its use in defence of freedom of origination are set out more fully, along with other thoughts of the same tendency, in my How Free Are You? (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 71–80, and A Theory of Determinism (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 304–34. 6. Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1996). 7. The Significance of Free Will. 8. You may remember the willingness of Britain to cure cows of an ailment bearable to them, and then said and thought by all to be harmless to us, by killing and burning endless numbers of them to keep up market prices. 9. Joseph Keim Campbell, editor with Michael O’Rourke and David Shier of Freedom and Determinism (MIT Press, 2004).

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10. Suppose (as in How Free Are You?, 2002, pp. 115–21) you are about to make up your mind. If you are going to decide on the good thing rather than the bad, a neuroscientist will affect your brain so that you decide to do the bad thing. However, you on your own decide to do the bad thing. So, it is said, you are morally responsible for doing it even though you could not have done otherwise. Such examples have led some philosophers to say that moral responsibility does not require freedom, that it is consistent with determinism. They add, however, that freedom itself is inconsistent with determinism. This is called semi-compatibilism, but plainly might as well be called semi-incompatibilism. More philosophical time not well spent, in my opinion. It is pointless to try to detach the given examples from voluntariness and origination, in terms of which they are easily explained. Any moral responsibility continues to include some kind of freedom. Above all, the examples do not come near to showing we have only one conception of freedom and one conception of responsibility. Nor, as is also said despite what you have heard, some conception of freedom for moral responsibility and another one for our personal dignity etc. See Laura Waddell Ekstrom, Free Will (Westview, 2000) and the cited works of Harry Frankfurt and John Fischer. 11. ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in his Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (Oxford University Press, 1968). 12. How Free Are You?, Chapter 10; A Theory of Determinism, Chapter 9. 13. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986). 14. Cf. my Philosopher: A Kind of Life (Routledge, 2001), pp. 395–9. 15. Cf. F. Richardson and R. Bishop, ‘Rethinking Determinism in Social Science’, in H. Atmanspacher and R. Bishop, eds, Between Choice and Chance (Imprint Academic, 2002). 16. Cf. How Free Are You?, Chapter 12. 17. Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. T. K. Abbott (Longman Green, 1909). 18. My On Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 19. How Free Are You?, pp. 147–51; cf. Philosopher: A Kind of Life, pp. 395–9. 20. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Duckworth, 1981). 21. How Free Are You? pp. 151–3; Philosopher: A Kind of Life, pp. 399–415.

Acknowledgements

Chap. 1, ‘What Effects Are’ has not been published before, but comes mainly from the first of three other papers: ‘Causes and Causal Circumstances as Necessitating’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1977; ‘Causes and If p, even if x, still q’, Philosophy, 1982; ‘Causation: Rejoinder to Sanford’ (Philosophy, 1987) (about David Sanford’s ‘Causal Multiplicity and Causal Dependence’, Philosophy, 1985). The paper also takes a thing or two from Chapter 1 of A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes (Oxford University Press, 1988), which is also Chapter 1 of Mind and Brain (Oxford University Press, 1990), and from How Free Are You? (Oxford University Press, 1993; revised edition, 2002). My thanks with respect to the first two papers are due to my colleagues at University College London, Dr John Watling above all, and also Dr Peter Downing – see Note 8 – and Dr W. D. Hart. Chap. 2, ‘Determinism and Its Consequences for Us’, not published before, derives from a talk given to philosophers of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in about 1990. It is a brisk summary of my large book, A Theory of Determinism. Insofar as papers go, it replaces ‘A Conspectus of Determinism’, Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1970, discussed in those proceedings by J. A. Faris, and ‘One Determinism’, in Essays on Freedom of Action (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), edited by myself. I am grateful to Prof. Peter Schaber, Prof. Elmar Holenstein, and others who improved an earlier draft of the paper by their comments. Chap. 3, ‘The Will, Reasons, Determinism’s Incoherence’ is a revision and shortening of a critical notice in Mind, 1980, of two books by Anthony Kenny, Will, Freedom and Power (Blackwell, 1975)

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and Freewill and Responsibility (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). My thanks to David Hamlyn for comments on it. Chap. 4, ‘Is the Mind Ahead of the Brain? Behind It?’ The fifth section of this paper, about the mind being behind the brain, has not been published before. The first four sections, about the mind being ahead of the brain, are a revision of ‘The Time of a Conscious Sensory Experience and Mind-Brain Theories’, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1984. I am grateful for comments on earlier drafts of the original paper by R. Audley, M. Budd, G. Burnstock, D. Colquhoun, J. Eccles, G. Falk, A. R. Gardner-Medwin, V. Glover, R. E. Rawles, P. D. Wall, an anonymous referee for The Journal of Theoretical Biology, colleagues who attended a seminar at the Centre for Neuroscience at University College London, and above all J. Z. Young. Professor Libet made a reply, ‘Subjective Antedating of Sensory Experience and MindBrain Theories: Reply to Honderich’ in the next issue of The Journal of Theoretical Biology. My rejoinder to his reply is ‘Mind, Brain and Time: Rejoinder to Libet’, in the same journal, 1986. Chap. 5, ‘Mind the Guff’ is a revision of the article of that name in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2001. The article with which it is concerned is John Searle’s ‘Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2000. See also his ‘Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology’, Philosophy, 2001, partly derived from the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture for 2001. I am grateful for comments by Anthony Freeman on a draft. Chap. 6, ‘Determinism True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism False, Another Problem’ is a slightly revised version of ‘Determinism as True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as False, and the Real Problem’, in Robert Kane, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2002). In fact on reflection, the revision of outlook in the last few paragraphs is more than slight. My thanks to Prof. Kane and to Ingrid Honderich for excellent comments on a draft. Chap. 7, ‘After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism – and Attitudinism?’ is a slightly revised version of ‘After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism’, in Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke and David Shier, eds, Freedom and Determinism (MIT Press, 2004). The paper was given to the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference for

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2001, on freedom and determinism, of the University of Idaho and Washington State University, and to a conference on determinism, chance and freedom organized by Freiburg University at the Max Planck centre to Ringsberg Castle in 2001. I am grateful to Harald Atmanspacher, Robert Bishop, Joseph Keim Campbell and Ingrid Honderich for comments on an earlier draft.

Index

accountability, 135–6, 138, 149–54 and causation, 152–4 and consciousness, 150–2 actions, 37 Adler, 110 affirmation, 46, 47, 148, 153–4; see also attitudinism, determinism: consequences of Alexander, 2 alternate or alternative possibilities, 147 animals, 146, 154 Anomalous Monism, 127 Anscombe, 15–16, 30 antedating of experiences see Libet Aquinas, 49 Aristotle, 15, 49 Atmanspacher, 155 attitudes, 41, 135–6, 138 attitudinism, 45–6, 47, 113, 119, 133–4, 135, 138, 147, 149, 153–4 Bell, 121 Berkeley, 119 biological subjectivity on two levels, 96, 101, 103; see also Searle Bishop, 155 Bohm, 137 Bradley, 2–3, 132 Bramhall, 1, 2, 39, 109 Campbell, 146, 154 capacity, 29, 51, 53 causation, 8–31, 55, 62–3, 100, 107, 119–20 and law, 28–9 causes, 10–11, 12–13, 153 causes and conditions as required, 10–11, 18, 20 causes as against other conditions, 13, 136, 153–4 circumstance, causal, 11–12, 14, 20, 26–7, 28, 119–20 conditions, causal, 11, 13, 153 constant conjunction, 14–15, 21–2, 55, 120

contributing circumstance, 27 effects, 1, 8; see also causation, necessitation effects as only probable, 34 generalizations, causal, 14–16, 52, 59–62 line, causal, 153 necessitation, causal, 13–14, 16–20, 20–4, 24–7, 28 sequence, causal, 20, 23, 36 standard causation, 8, 12, 13–14, 18–19, 20, 22–3, 28, 105 sufficient condition, causal, 27 chance, 15–18, 34, 108, 123–5 cognitive science, 97 compatibilism, 1–6, 39, 43–4, 44–6, 63, 111–13, 128, 136, 141, 144–7; cf. incompatibilism compatibilism, higher, 63–6 compatibilism, metaphysical, 150 compatibilism, semi see semi-compatibilism compulsion, 39, 43, 110, 112, 130 conditional statements, 20, 27–8 conditions see causal conditions consciousness, 35, 97, 101–3, 116, 135–6, 150–2 affective, 151 as existence, 150–2 free-floating, 71, 85, 91, 92, 107 perceptual, 151–2 reflective, 151 unified field of, 101–3 conscious veto, 89 consequence argument, 129–30, 146 constant conjunction see causation contributing circumstance see causation control, 130–1 correlation hypothesis see hypothesis could have done otherwise see freedom Davidson, 127, 154 dead problem see determinism deciding, 104 defeasibility, 51, 60, 61, 68

160

Index

delay-and-antedating hypothesis, 78, 82, 84; cf. no delay hypothesis Dennett, 5, 92, 103, 137 Descartes, 107 determinism, 5–6, 32–4 consequences of, 1–6, 33, 39–47, 52, 109–13, 128–36, 140–54; see also affirmation, dismay, intransigence dead problem, 4 human, 32 hypotheses of see hypothesis micro-, 123 neurophysiological, 52, 63, 64–5, 69 new problem of, 5, 135–6, 138–9, 149–54 psychological, 52, 57, 63 three problems of, 33 truth of, 38–9, 72, 119–26, 140–3, 148, 149–50; see also Quantum Theory universal, 32 dismay, 46, 134, 148 dispositions, 29 Double, 119, 135 double effect, 67, 70 dualism, 35, 71, 98, 99, 151 Earman, 122, 142 Eccles, 48, 71, 72, 73, 80–2, 85, 107 effects see causation Einstein, 96 Ekstrom, 117, 141 embraced desires, 39, 130 epiphenomenalism, 36, 91, 100, 113–14 experience of freedom see freedom explanation, 25, 34, 104–7, 108–9, 119–20, 123–5; see also causation explanation, impossibility of see freedom events, 12–13, 106, 119, 121–2, 142 feeling free see experience of freedom, gaps Fischer, 48, 117, 119, 154–5 Frankfurt, 131–2, 154 freedom, 36, 129–32; see also attitudinism, compatibilism, incompatibilism causes, so-called, 107, 127–8, 134, 140 could have done otherwise, 109–10 experience of, 96–7, 103–5, 140, 143–4; see also gaps explanation, impossibility of, 25, 34, 108, 124 free will, 36, 38, 52, 71, 82–3, 86, 114, 118, 124; see also origination origination, 40, 50, 52, 71, 91, 107, 111, 123, 126–30, 134, 138, 140–1, 150 voluntariness, 39, 43–4, 111, 112, 130, 141 up to me, 129–30 Freeman, 93 Freud, 6, 32–3 functionalism, 35, 97 functionalism, neural, 98

gaps, 96, 104, 109, 112 Goodman, 30 good persons, 40 Heisenberg, 121 hidden variable theory, 124 hierarchy argument, 131–2 Hiley, 137 Hobbes, 1–2, 15, 39, 109, 110, 119 hope see life-hopes Hume, 1, 9, 15, 21–2, 39, 109, 199, 120, 145 hypothesis of psychoneural nomic correlation, 35–6, 64, 72, 73, 82–3, 85–6, 90–1, 92 hypothesis on the causation of actions, 37–8 hypothesis on the causation of psychoneural pairs, 36 identity theory, mind–brain, 35, 82–3, 85, 100 incompatibilism, 1–6, 39–43, 44–6, 111–13, 144–7 indeterminism, 37, 38, 39, 90, 128; see also Quantum Theory inductive reasoning, 115 initiation of actions, 43 intentions, 104, 116 interactionism, 91–2, 95 interference, 52, 55, 59, 60–1 intransigence, 46, 134, 148 Kane, 5, 9, 50, 143, 154 Kant, 2, 9, 15, 39, 66, 139, 150 Kenny, 30, 49–70, 50 Knowledge-claims, 34, 111 language and reality, 8 law, natural or scientific, 28 levels of brain and mind, 98, 99; see also biological subjectivity on two levels liberty of indifference, 52, 63, 64; see also origination liberty of spontaneity, 52, 63; see also voluntariness Libet, 71–95, 71–2, 82, 115 antedating of experiences, 75–8, 83–4 delay-and-antedating hypothesis, 78, 82, 83, 87 mind ahead of brain, 80, 86, 88, 115 mind behind brain, 78, 89 no-delay hypothesis, 80, 82, 87 readiness potential, 88, 90, 91 stimulation to cortex, subcortex, skin, 73, 75 life-hopes, 34, 46, 133 lives, explanation of, 149–54 McFee, 117, 141 MacIntyre, 153 MacKay, 78 Mackie, 11, 16–18, 31

Index Magill, 110 materialism, 35–6 Mele, 92, 95, 119, 136 mental events, 35; see also consciousness, events micro–macro relation, 121, 123 Mill, 2, 15, 23, 112 mind–brain theories see Eccles, hypothesis of psychoneural nomic correlation, identity theories, Popper mind, the, 49, 53, 56, 71, 86; see also consciousness mind ahead of brain see Libet mind behind brain see Libet moral disapproval see moral responsibility moral responsibility, 39–44, 110–11, 133, 145; see also good persons, right actions Nagel, 149 narrative, 153 necessary connections, 27–8, 29, 128; see also causation, nomic correlates necessitation see causation, necessary connections neuroscience, 35, 37, 38, 112, 123; see also science Nietzsche, 47 No-delay hypothesis, 80, 82, 87 nomic connections see necessary connections nomic correlates, 28 origination see freedom Pereboom, 119, 136 philosophy, 49, 142; see also philosophy of mind philosophy of mind, 34–8, 96, 103, 126–7, 188 physicalism, 35, 71, 151 Popper, 45, 48, 71, 72, 73, 80–2, 85, 107 power, 29; see also capacity, disposition power, natural, 29, 53–4 power, rational, 51, 54–6 practical reasoning, 51–2, 60–1, 68 probability, 34, 37, 122–3, 125; see also causation: effects as only probable properties, 13, 119 psychoneural intimacy, 35 psychoneural pair, 35, 36 psychoneural pairs hypothesis see hypothesis punishment, 46, 52, 66, 145 psychoneural connection see hypothesis on psychoneural nomic connection

161

Quantum Theory, 9, 37, 38–9, 90, 97, 114–15, 118, 120–6, 136, 142–3 randomness see chance rational power see power readiness potential see Libet reasons, 51, 57, 104, 106, 128 Reid, 21–2 repugnance, 41, 43 required conditions see causes and conditions as required responsibility see moral responsibility retributive feelings, 42 right actions, 40 rights, 145 Richardson, 155 Russell, 15 Ryle, 126 Sartre, 3, 119 Schlick, 3 Schopenhauer, 47 Schrodinger, 121 science, 72, 93, 118, 122; see also neuroscience science of consciousness, 93; see also science Searle, 3, 96–117, 143, 152 self, 37, 105, 107–8 self-conscious mind, 71, 73, 82, 96 self-dependence, 152 semi-compatibilism, 48, 117, 154 Smilanksy, 119, 136 stimulation to cortex, sub-cortex, peripheral see Libet Strawson, G., 134–5, 141, 154 Strawson, P. F., 38, 47, 111, 127, 148, 154 subjectivity, 35, 98, 103, 152 unified field of consciousness see consciousness union theory, 36, 47; see also consciousness, Consciousness as Existence up to me see freedom van Inwagen, 129, 132, 137, 146 veto, conscious see conscious veto volition see intention; see also will voluntariness see freedom Weatherford, 119, 136 Whatever-else connection, 22–4 will, the, 51, 56, 57, 89; see also reasons Wittgenstein, 15, 50, 57