[Before I begin, to anyone who’s interested, Graham Harman’s article on Manuel DeLanda, assemblage theory and realism has just been released in the journal Continental Philosophy Review.]
In one of his latest books, the short Freedom and Neurobiology, John Searle sets out to try and precisely frame the problem of integrating our conceptions of free will with our conceptions of how the world operates. We are faced, he says, with two opposing yet seemingly indisputable viewpoints of the world. On the one hand, we have the success of the natural sciences to suggest that (at least at our non-quantum level), the world is deterministic and in principle predictable. On the other hand, we have an intuitive sense of our own free will, i.e. a self-initiating cause. The two seem utterly irreconcilable, and indeed, Searle doesn’t attempt to resolve the tension so much as try to frame the issue in a potentially resolvable fashion.
According to Searle then, the significant fact of free will is that it involves a gap between conscious states (in contrast to a gap between the mind and body). At one moment, we may feel inclined towards a particular action, but there is nothing that sufficiently determines why we carry out that action in the next moment. There is, in other words, a causal gap between the two moments – we can give reasons, but not causes for our action.
But according to the neurological view, there is no gap – there is simply a seamless web of causal interactions amongst neurons. The gap between these two worldviews is readily apparent. From our phenomenal perspective, nothing determined our actions; yet from the neuroscientist’s perspective, there is clearly a deterministic sequence of causes. If we are going to save free will then, we need to discover some sort of correlative gap in the neurological foundation.
For Searle, the potential resolution to the problem lies in pointing out how emergent mental structures react back upon their neurological basis. In his helpful example, we can think of the brain/mind relation as akin to that between the molecules that make up a wheel, and the wheel itself. While the molecules themselves have no solidity, the wheel as a whole has the property of being solid. In rolling down a hill, the emergent property of solidity causes the molecules to follow a certain path – in other words, system effects can become holistic causes. The same thing happens with the mind, according to Searle. While there may be nothing but neurons involved, there are systemic properties that are irreducible to the neurons. The key emergent property for Searle, however, is rationality – a quality intrinsic to consciousness. It is the rational structure of explanation – and the subsequent gap in explanation manifested by free will – that reacts back upon the neurological base to determine how the mind and brain will proceed through time. “The state of neurons determines the state of consciousness. But any given state of neurons/consciousness is not causally sufficient for the next state. The passage from one state to the next is explained by the rational thought processes of the initial state of neurons/consciousness.” (65)
Beyond the assumption of intrinsic rationality, the biggest problem with Searle’s analysis perhaps lies in its reliance on what Ray Brassier, channeling Wilfrid Sellars, calls the ‘manifest image’. (The emphasis on rationality would merely be an outcome of the belief in this manifest image.) Simply put, the manifest image is the common sense, intuitive conception we have of ourselves – the model whereby we give reasons using desires, beliefs and intentions as the key causal factors in explaining human behaviour. It is the belief in this model, and it’s ensuing causal gap between reasons and action, that form the unstated foundation for Searle’s musings. The specific problem, therefore, is that Searle assumes the perfect validity of this model and then attempts to reintegrate its specific pecularities into the neurobiological framework. Now, as far as everyday occurrences go, the manifest image is functionally adequate. But the same goes for Newtonian physics given certain limitations. The true philosophical and indeed, scientific, question is whether the manifest image can adequately explain various bizarre psychological phenomena – things like blindsight where an individual can react to objects even when they aren’t capable of consciously perceiving them, and even mundane occurrences like the subconscious priming that can occur when words are flashed too quickly for consciousness to catch. It’s not clear in any way that the manifest image is capable of accounting for these phenomena, and as such, the ontological status of the manifest image should unflinchingly be put into question.
The only immediately apparent alternative, however, seems to not only be morally appalling, but also impossible to believe in. Epiphenomenalism, as the doctrine that consciousness has no causal efficacy and is merely a useless residue of neurological mechanisms, dispenses with any viable concept of responsibility and collective agency. It also appears to be impossible to coherently believe – if I try to truly believe that my mental states make no difference, then I become incapable of making any choice or initiating any action. In waiting for myself to be determined by my brain, I end up doing nothing. Most action, in other words, seems to require a belief in free will.
Another problem with the epiphenomenalist position is one that Searle cites – namely, that if it’s true, consciousness seems to be a wildly superfluous piece of useless waste. If consciousness is pure product, with no causal effect on the world, then what’s its purpose? It’s hard to understand how a totally useless appendage would survive for so long. Epiphenomenalism, if true, has to explain how and why evolution brings about consciousness.
In response, Thomas Metzinger opens his book Being No One with this claim: “Arguably, until now, the conscious self-model of human beings is the best invention Mother Nature has made.” (1) Against Searle, therefore, Metzinger is willing to confront precisely his main argument against integrating consciousness into the circuits of the material world. For Metzinger, conscious phenomena serve a variety of evolutionary purposes. They, for example, permit us to quickly and efficiently utilize mass amounts of information. They also let us integrate past experiences with present intuitions – so that we know not to eat rotten fruit when recalling our past experiences with it. This ability constitutes both a step beyond simple stimulus/response mechanisms, and a step towards agency as the faculty of choosing. “The essential transition in generating a genuine inner reality may then have consisted in the additional achievement of input decoupling for certain states” (48) where an interval is placed between the incoming stimulus and the outgoing response.
Yet strictly speaking, the problem we’re interested in lies elsewhere. The problem that Searle cites with epiphenomenalism is not that conscious phenomena are useless. Searle does phrase it in a way that leads to that conclusion, but in fact phenomena can serve causal purposes and still retain the problem of free will. It is quite possible that evolution has constructed neurobiological systems that employ mental states as integrated functions in their own system. This, in fact, seems to be one of Metzinger’s points so far – to see representation and presentation as functional aspects of a representing process carried out by neurological mechanisms. The problem, however, lies in the sense we have of being agents. As Metzinger will say, a voluntary action “only means that the [action] is itself typically being accompanied by a particular higher-order type of phenomenal content, namely, a subjectively experienced quality of agency.” (32) We can distinguish therefore between conscious states (which many animals presumably have) and the feeling of agency added onto these states. Given that mental states have causal efficacy, the important question to be asked is what does the supplementary sense of agency accomplish? Is agency a true instance of an ontological gap, or is it merely a phenomenal illusion born out of evolutionary pressures? Hopefully Metzinger will give some attempt to answer this question, but at the moment I’m only 100 pages or 1/6 of the way through his book. Up next, a look at Adrian Johnston’s work on the nature of freedom and how it might fit into the notion of a materialist agency…
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Thinking about your post while taking a walk, I was wondering whether a child’s self-attributions of internal mental states develop in an interpersonal context. Say a kid dumps his cereal on the floor or puls the cat’s tail. “Why did you do that?” demands the mother. The kid doesn’t know what she’s talking about. So the mother makes an inference: “I guess you don’t like that kind of cereal;” “you’re just being mean to the cat;” etc. Or the kid invents some half-assed explanation (“Kitty told me to pull its tail.”) and the mother rejects it. Eventually through give and take the child develops the ability to generate self-attribution statements that his mother accepts as plausible.
There’s something about violating expectations that triggers the need to generate explanatory statements regarding intentionality. Only when the intuitively obvious behavioral path is deviated from is there any reason to question one’s motives. It’s through social interaction that a child comes to understand what’s expected; eventually the child comes to expect this of himself. And so he learns to introspect about motivations even when nobody’s watching or asking.
At the same time, children learn to understand language by inferring the speaker’s intentionality. When the mother points to the mess on the floor and says “Look at this mess,” the child has to understand that the mother, through symbolic communication, is establishing a joint attentional frame that involves herself, the child, and the spilled cereal. The child then has to align his own attention with that of the (m)other in order to know what she’s pointing to and talking about. And he can almost surely infer from facial expression, and tone of voice that the mother’s affect regarding the cereal isn’t a happy one, based partly on prior encounters with her, partly on what he knows he feels like when he sounds like she does.
Of course none of this addresses the biological determinants of self-statements about internal mental states. I’m just thinking about the intrinsic intersubjectivity of even the most presumably intrasubjective self-attributions.
Speaking of blindsight, do you know the novel Blindsight by Peter Watts? It’s a scifi first-contact encounter where human self-awareness turns out to be maladaptive in the intragalactic environment. Watts is a Ph.D. ecologist who took to writing fiction full time, and in this book he devotes a lot of attention to exploring alternative forms of consciousness. Very stimulating.
Oddly enough, ya, I have a copy of that book. I think I picked it up after Shaviro reviewed it, but I’ve never made it through it yet (there’s always too much non-fiction to read for me to ever get to fiction unfortunately). I might have to move it up on my list of books to read though.
I think you’re right that intersubjectivity plays an important role in developing the ability to self-attribute. But to take Metzinger’s position as an opposing perspective, he explicitly states at one point that the “we” is dependent upon the “me” – logically, evolutionarily, and in individual development. The problem is that the substance to this claim is only going to be developed in the 2nd half of his book, i.e. the part I haven’t read yet.
But to suggest a way he might substantiate this claim, one of his key distinctions is 3 types of ‘global availability’ for a system – that is to say, the dispositions a neurobiological/representational system can take towards subsets of itself. Phenomenologically, this appears in the fact that we can focus on various aspects of our experience. For Metzinger, there are 3 variations, however: behavioural, attentional and cognitive. Behavioural means that we can react or act upon a stimulus, attentional simply means that we can focus our nonconceptual attention on it, and cognitive means that we can conceptualize it. (This is where blindsight is particularly interesting, because cognitively and attentionally, those with blindsight can’t focus on a particular visual area. But behaviourally, they still show the ability to grasp and use information from their senses.)
So to return to your example, it might very well be the case that the child can behaviourally and attentionally focus on their ‘self’ (as a product of neurology). But presumably it’s only with the resources provided by the linguistic community that it gains the ability to put those aspects into concepts. That being the case, though, there’s already been a nonconceptual acknowledgment of the first-person perspective being ‘mine’ in some sense.
But, to be sure, Metzinger has largely stayed away from any issues of intersubjectivity so far. In the first half at least, he’s focused almost exclusively on the neurobiological determinants of individual experience.
Perhaps you can clarify this for me. You mentioned Searle’s distinguishes between the properties of the molecules and those of the ‘emergent’ objects they embody. So we can say that, in the rolling wheel example, while the molecular structure itself does not have solidity, but the emergent structural object does have the property, and can thus react back upon the molecular structure.
I find this confusing: my hunch would be to say that of course molecules do not HAVE the property of solidity; but rather that a specific range of configarations IS the property of solidity itself. There is no ontological gap between the assertion that molecules do not have a property, and the assertion that all properties are sets of specifiable molecular configurations. If properties are just ‘folk semantical’ descriptions of molecular states, then the idea of non-molecular emergent properties reacting back is nonsensical.
Following this picture, nothing interrupts the molecular chain of causes: that at some point the molecular configuration was such that it became isomorphic to the description ‘to have the property of being solid’ does not entail that molecules are affected by something external like ‘emergent properties’, for the latter are nothing but configurations in perfect accordance to the laws of physics which preceded and caused the emergent property, and the effects/changes to follow from it.
Am I missing something here? I am much closer to Churchland and Brassier here in my spontaneous aversion to folk psychological notions, while of course remaining suspicious about naturalism/pragmatism as providing a sufficient metaphysics for these scientific developments.
I guess I should have said ‘folk physics’.