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The Disutility of Indeterminism

In their paper “Chance, Choice, and Control: Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe,” Henry Potter and Kevin Mitchell defend libertarian free will against the charge that indeterminism would undermine, not enhance, an agent’s control over their choices. Although they provide a useful suite of arguments against versions of the so-called “luck objection” to libertarianism, their view of libertarian agency doesn’t establish that indeterminism and a metaphysically open future make agents more responsible than under determinism. Indeed, their agent causal view requires that micro-level indeterminism must be constrained for macro-level, responsibility-entailing control to emerge. Their view rightly portrays naturally evolved agents as having robust causal powers, but indeterminism can’t make the exercise of those powers more up to the agent or make agents morally responsible in a way not available under determinism.

The Disutility of Indeterminism

Commentary on Potter and Mitchell

1. The prima facie conflict between control and chance

In Chance, Choice, and Control: Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe, Henry Potter and Kevin Mitchell (2025) defend libertarian free will against the charge that indeterminism would undermine, not enhance, an agent’s control over their choices. Libertarians, they say, hold that “free actions must be both undetermined and under the agent’s control.” An agent acts freely just in case they were not necessitated to act as they did even though they authored the act. Freedom from necessity means that in an imagined (counterfactual) replay of an actual choice, the exact same conditions external and internal to the agent prior to the choice might have resulted in a different choice. The future is metaphysically open, says the libertarian, allowing the agent to have done otherwise in an actual situation just as it transpired. But of course to control a choice requires that the agent determine it – necessitate it – so there seems a prima facie conflict between having control and any indeterminism (chance, randomness) involved in the agent’s choice: indeterminism is not under the agent’s control.

2. Is an open future worth wanting?

Taking a step back, why would freedom from determinism constitute a freedom worth wanting, to use a phrase popularized by Daniel Dennett (1984)? What’s valuable about having the capacity to have chosen otherwise than how one’s character, motivations, and deliberations actually determined a choice? This is to ask what’s valuable about having a metaphysically open future, one not necessitated by such determinants. The answer, I suspect, lies in the intuition that for an act to really be my doing, and not merely the working out of impersonal deterministic causation, I have to contribute something that isn’t fully traceable to the causal factors in play, such that I’m not necessitated in my choice. Only an open future would allow such a non-necessitated contribution, something for which I can be held deeply and ultimately responsible since I could have done otherwise but chose not to.

However, for a choice to be mine it has to be traceable to who I am, what I want, and my deliberations, were any involved in the choice. Such tracing would show that the choice was determined by – necessitated by – those factors, in which case ownership of action seems inconsistent with an open future in which chance played a role. Why would I rationally want the agential power or opportunity to act otherwise than what my character, desires, and deliberations determine in an actual situation? Such a power or opportunity would separate me from my choice, rendering it unintelligible as an action I caused and thus can be held responsible for. The supposedly agency-enhancing opportunity allowed by indeterminism in a choice situation, that which permits an open future, seems to conflict with maximally attributing a choice to an agent. It is this apparent conflict between attributable agency and indeterminism that Potter and Mitchell attempt to defuse in making the case for their version of libertarian free will...

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10/2025

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Opening Gambit: Could You Have Done Otherwise?

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Morality

Libertarianism

The Good Determinist

The Good Determinist is a Substack on pragmatic determinism and other topics, primarily consciousness, installments added at indeterminate intervals. The links below are in chronological order, the first the oldest and last being the most recent. Do read the Opening Gambit for an overview of what The Good Determinist is all about. Enjoy!

Why You Should Rationally Stick With Science

Disinformation About Determinism

You Can't Wait for Determinism to Happen

"Bound and Determined": The Ordinary Language of Determinism

Superagency: Sources of the Libertarian Intuition

AI and Authorship

The Mitigation Response

The Disutility of Indeterminism

Feels and Functions: On the Purported Identity Thereof

Plain Vanilla: On the Inevitability of Ineffables

The Content Hypothesis

The Eternality of Experience

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Review of The Blind Spot, Part 2: Can Consciousness Be Naturalized?

Tom Clark

Book Title:

The Blind Spot

Book Author:

Robert Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson

Category:

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The Blind Spot includes an extensive chapter on consciousness, claiming that it evades explanation in third-person terms because it's presuppsed by any such explanation. Various theories of consciousness are critiqued and found wanting because they wrongly suppose consciousness can be reduced to, identified with, or entailed by any objective state of affairs. In this review's second part, I contest these claims, arguing that consciousness may be naturalizable: explained in terms that don't themselves presuppose consciousness. I also dispute the authors' charge against our current scientific worldview: that it, not basic human nature, drives the political and economic systems responsible for the climate crisis.

Three cautions about consciousness

As noted in Part 1 of this review, The Blind Spot is right that as individuals we can’t step outside conscious experience in modeling reality: it’s the format in which the world presents itself to us. So in that sense consciousness – what they call “direct experience” – will always remain central to the human perspective on the world. But three points to keep in mind in what follows: First, the fact that one’s experience can’t be transcended as the format of a world model doesn’t mean it necessarily reveals deep truths about reality that should take precedence over the collective, more abstract conclusions reached by science. Experience isn’t epistemically privileged. Second, and relatedly, our conscious takes on the world, even when judged as reflecting a consensus reality, are a product of evolution and as such may have biological limitations. The authors recognize that human consciousness is embodied, which necessarily constrains the scope of sensory perception and perhaps even our cognitive capacities. The rise of very smart artificial intelligence suggests that embodied and culturally contextualized brains, complex though they be, are not necessarily the only, or even the ideal, platforms for modeling the world in the abstract terms favored by science.[1] Third, consciousness, albeit something we can’t step outside of in encountering the world, shouldn’t be granted any sort of ontological primacy. The concrete immediacy of experience doesn’t establish it as more fundamental to reality than what scientific theories describe as the basic constituents of the world.

Is consciousness immune from third-person explanation?

Given the ineliminable role of embodied experience in doing science, it’s no surprise that The Blind Spot includes an extensive chapter on consciousness itself – its nature, possible functions, and proposed explanations. The consciousness at issue is phenomenal consciousness, constituted by the subjective manifold of perception, sensation, emotion, and thought, most elements of which have a felt qualitative character, for example that of pain. Conscious experience is “direct” in the sense that it’s unmediated: we don’t observe or inspect it, it simply presents itself as the contents of awareness.[2] The authors adopt the phenomenological method of investigating one’s experience independently of any assumptions about the external world: the Husserlian “epoche”. Focusing attention on awareness itself highlights what the authors claim is the existential and cognitive primacy of consciousness: it’s the transcendental context within which the world appears and cannot itself be explained in terms of what that world contains:

Consciousness is not just another object of knowledge, but also, and more fundamental, that by which any object is knowable. For this reason, consciousness is irreducible to any object of domain of objects: any explanation of consciousness in terms of a specific object, such as the brain, or even a totality of objects, already presupposes consciousness as that by which objects are individuated and intelligible…[T]here is no way to step outside of consciousness and account for it exhaustively in terms of something else. (187-8)

This is a very strong claim: since the world and its objects only appear to us in terms of consciousness, consciousness itself can’t be explained in terms of those objects. But it isn’t obvious that being a precondition of human knowledge makes consciousness – a first-person phenomenon – immune from explanation in third-person terms, whether physical, functional, representational, or information-theoretic. The ontological status of consciousness is an open question. As noted above, the authors acknowledge that it’s an embodied phenomenon, dependent on the brain, even if such dependency “is inscrutable from within the horizon of first-person awareness” (188). We can’t step outside consciousness because we can’t step outside being brains in bodies, and this immediately suggests that consciousness is, at least in the human biological case, a system-level phenomenon. But the authors say this explanatory route is blocked by our being caught in a “strange loop”: the Husserlian life-world of human experience discloses the universe but is itself contained within the universe since we are embodied subjects. However, it isn’t clear why this mutual enfoldment necessarily prevents consciousness from being explained as a natural phenomenon that arises from non-conscious goings-on (see note 2 of Part 1 and “Privacy and the objectification of experience” below).

Theories of consciousness

In any event, much of the chapter is devoted to a critical examination of the current explanatory options, all of which except one are found wanting since it’s claimed they partake of the Blind Spot in one respect or another. Here I can only address a few of the authors’ many objections, some of which are well-founded, others less so. They first take issue with the so-called “hard problem,” what many empirically oriented investigators of consciousness see as the main explanatory challenge: why are the subjective, qualitative feels of sensory experience, such as the feeling of pain or taste of coffee, entailed by certain physical states of affairs, such as neural processes in the brain and body? The authors argue this is a mistaken quest to reduce or identify experience with abstract physical models. What would result

…is a picture of reality drawn in physicalist, reductionist, and objectivist terms, from which consciousness has been excluded by construction…Claiming that consciousness can be reductively explained by its abstract structural residues in physics or cognitive neuroscience inverts the whole procedure of generating scientific knowledge, which starts from and is forever beholden to direct experience. The move is absurd in principle because it tries to replace the subjectivity it excluded at the start with an abstraction cast in completely objective terms. It fails to recognize the ineliminable primacy of consciousness in knowledge. (195)

Here again the claim seems to be that consciousness, because it’s the untranscendable platform of human understanding, can’t itself be explained in terms that don’t presuppose or involve the characteristics of conscious experience: its mind-dependent subjectivity and qualitativeness. But this isn’t, as the authors seem to suppose, an a priori or logical truth. Minds that host experience, and thus experience itself, might be a function of conditions that aren’t themselves mind-dependent, which is how it currently seems. And indeed, the authors conclude the chapter by recommending we take a neurophenomenological approach to the neuroscience of consciousness, in which fine-grained first person reports of experience are used to help identify neurophysiological patterns in the brain and body (218-9). Understanding the architecture and function of neurophysiological patterns would presumably shed light on why it’s just those patterns, and not other sorts of physical goings-on, which somehow entail conscious experience as reported by subjects.

Although they call neurophenomenology a “radically different approach” to investigating consciousness, their description of it is in line with standard neuroscientific research methods used to evaluate the empirically based theoretical contenders, such as global neuronal workspace, predictive processing, and (more controversially) integrated information theory (IIT). None of these is in the business of “excluding consciousness by construction,” rather they seek to explain why it’s our window on the world in the first place. Whether that explanation ends up being physicalist, information-theoretic, representationalist, or something yet unforeseen is a completely open question, and the fact that consciousness is a participant in the explanatory process doesn’t shield it from explanation in non-conscious terms.

Unsurprisingly, the authors’ objections to physicalism, reductionism, and objectivism lead them to reject all the major explanatory approaches to consciousness, including the three mentioned above. They rightly observe that none of the extant brain-based theories have yet closed the “explanatory gap” between physical goings-on and subjective experience: of how consciousness could be generated, produced, or otherwise entailed by brain processes. Beyond that, they present a variety of arguments intended to show the essential futility of these approaches. One is that, as they put it regarding the predictive processing framework, “It takes an abstract and idealized third-person model of the brain to be the concrete phenomenon of the first-person perceptual experience of the world” (203). But of course, any scientific theory of consciousness, including neurophenomenology, must involve abstractions and idealizations, none of which need be, and usually aren’t, taken to be the phenomenon itself. The same charges of “surreptitious substitution” and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness are made against IIT:

…IIT’s core thesis, that integrated information is consciousness, confuses the map with the territory. It’s a striking case of surreptitious substitution – substituting integrated information for experience – and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness – treating integrated information, which is an abstraction from our knowledge of causal interdependencies, as if it were concretely real. (206)

But theorists generally don’t equate theories either with lived experience or the physical world. The claimed identity of consciousness with the integrated information hypothesized to be present in properly configured systems may or may not be true, and it may fail to gain sufficient empirical support, but it doesn’t violate any canon of good scientific or epistemic practice. It only asserts what proponents of IIT take to be the necessary and sufficient conditions a physical system must meet for it to host conscious experience. Science can’t and shouldn’t be barred from making identity claims that link two sorts of descriptions or concepts – one more abstract, one more concrete – as referring to the same phenomenon.

Privacy and the objectification of experience

Still, the identity claim in the case of consciousness runs up against what the authors argue is the essential privacy of experience, that on the face of it experiences such as pain only exist for the subject undergoing them. This makes it difficult to identify them with any publicly observable state of affairs, such as neurophysiological processes associated with reports of pain. In their brief against panpsychism, they argue that by positing consciousness as a basic constituent or perhaps the essential nature of matter, it mistakenly makes experience a public object, in principle available to observation:

The upshot is to objectify experience, to make it an object out there in the physical world. This is paradoxical, because experience is precisely that which is not an object. Experience is the horizon within which any object or collection of objects is specifiable…Experience escapes objectification, but the panpsychist argument treats experience as if it were a special kind of object. This is symptomatic of the Blind Spot.[3] (213)

Nevertheless, physicalists about phenomenal consciousness who are not panpsychists, of which there are many in the philo-scientific community, will reply that it’s hardly inconceivable that sensory experience is “out there in the physical world.” Pain and other sensations, physicalist philosophers such as David Papineau and Alex Byrne will say, are likely the very same thing as certain brain processes, perhaps those of the global neuronal workspace, or some that participate in the brain’s predictive processing network. Although physicalism shouldn’t be ruled out – we should remain metaphysically agnostic about sensations – such an identity has to be established by a settled theory of consciousness, which still eludes us. The fact that pains seem not to be observables, but their associated neurophysiological correlates are, casts prima facie doubt on their being the exact same thing with all properties in common.

This brings up what it would mean for consciousness to be objectified. Even if consciousness may not be physical (an open question), we conscious human subjects are clearly within the material world as described by science, so consciousness as an embodied phenomenon is at least tied to the physical. This means that objectifying it wouldn’t necessarily show it to be a public physical object, but rather to naturalize it by explaining why experiences like pain are necessarily private and qualitative, even though it takes a physical system to bring them into existence.[4] Such naturalization wouldn’t show consciousness to be generated or produced by neurophysiological processes as a further physical effect – a prospect the authors rightly deem unlikely – but perhaps some sort of non-causal entailment of being a cognitive system, e.g., being the contents of certain of its physically instantiated representational vehicles.

Such a possibility aligns with the authors’ rejection of physicalism but not with their seeming insistence that consciousness escapes objectification in the sense of being explicable in terms that don’t involve anything mind dependent. According to some explanations of consciousness, experience constitutes a behavior-guiding mental model that represents the world of which mind systems like us are a part.[5] If such accounts are on the right track, it means that the personally untranscendable representational reality of consciousness – “direct experience” – will be included in the world as represented by science, a represented reality. Nature, an undivided, mind-independent, physical manifold according to scientific representations of it, has via evolution created mind systems which host representations that seem to entail the sensory feels of phenomenal consciousness, such as pain. Should that entailment be substantiated, or another solution found to the hard problem, this will put consciousness intelligibly within the world as represented by science, aided and abetted by the philosophy of mind.[6] Since this eventuality can’t be ruled out, consciousness may not stand, as the authors contend it must, as a limit on objectivity properly construed, even though it will remain central to the human grasp of reality.

Saving the planet

The last chapter of The Blind Spot argues that the portrayal of science as essentially quantitative and reductionist, as exemplified by economics (the so-called "dismal science”), is a major contributor to our existential crises of meaning and climate change. By claiming physicalist objectivity as the only true picture, the current scientific worldview in effect de-animates nature, and so licenses its heedless exploitation, the effects of which are now upon us.

…numbers can’t reveal entities that exist outside the reductionist, materialist ontology of our economics…in a Blind Spot worldview where everything reduces to “nothing but” objectified physical entities, whether they be fundamental particles or rational actors, we are left without an account of what really matters. (244)

This worry is fairly characterized as fear of scientism: that science, if granted supremacy in all domains of knowledge, will become the dehumanizing technocratic handmaiden of thoughtless resource extraction and consumption, externalities be damned. But to lay all this at the door of our current scientific worldview both misrepresents it and grants it too much power. The humanities and human values aren’t about to be swallowed up by science, nor is scientific knowledge necessarily disenchanting. As Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and others have argued, appreciating the vast scope and complexity of the non-human natural world, and finding ourselves as natural creatures within it, can be awe-inspiring, not demoralizing. The current scientific worldview isn’t intrinsically antithetical to human concerns and aspirations, even if it finds human experience not to be fundamental, epistemically privileged, or beyond explanation. And it isn’t clear that reductionism and physicalism – abstract concepts – have been among the main drivers of the political and economic systems responsible for the climate crisis, instead of basic human nature: our tendency to discount the future in favor of personal survival and enrichment over the near term. Science has certainly enabled the ecologically disastrous consumption of our carbon resources, but a philosophically defective view of it – should that view even predominate – can’t be blamed for the predations of the fossil fuel industry and its political bedfellows.

Although they acknowledge that they don’t have a clear roadmap for worldview reform,[7] the authors suggest that developments within science itself, such as complex systems theory, relational quantum mechanics, and neurophenomenology, will vindicate non-objectifiable human experience as a constraint on scientific overreach. But even if this should come to pass, it’s doubtful that it would do much to reform the institutions and policies responsible for our collective predicament. What seems more likely is that the negative consequences of global warming will force behavior and policy change at the local, regional, and eventually global level, although not in time to avoid the major environmental change and social disruption already underway.

Conclusion

The advent of new scientific developments and new perspectives on science itself are to be welcomed, whether or not they end up being major players in solving global crises or establish human experience as a limit on objectivity. As it stands, it was the quantitative science of the mechanisms behind climate change that generated the widely ignored prediction of our current catastrophe, and the application of other sciences will facilitate our management and adaptation to the new reality. Advances in the science of human behavior might help us become better self-managers, perhaps with the assistance of artificial agents less subject to short-term and self-centered biases. Good science is clearly key to mitigating the hardships to come.

But all told, I’d suggest our current scientific worldview needn’t be reformed as The Blind Spot recommends; it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it. It already accepts that experience is our untranscendable window on the world: the sensory format of a biological, situated perspective that we shouldn’t suppose gets reality deeply right. The quest for scientific objectivity about consciousness – that is, the quest to naturalize it – doesn’t threaten either the centrality or practical, everyday utility of conscious experience as a world-model. Demonstrating its limitations and explaining it as a natural phenomenon isn’t to dehumanize us or de-animate nature. As argued in Part 1, we shouldn’t grant consciousness an epistemically privileged status that competes with science. The commonsense deliverances of direct experience need not take precedence over more abstract scientific understandings, nor can science displace consciousness as our primary world model. Nor, as the book’s subtitle would have it, is human experience as such being ignored, given the recent explosion of research into the nature of consciousness, addressing as it must the puzzles that arise when awareness studies itself.[8] Nevertheless, and to give the book its due, The Blind Spot’s detailed examination of the purported sins our current scientific worldview supposedly commits in marginalizing human experience (see Part 1) should put us on guard against any such commission.

A scientific worldview – what I’ve called worldview naturalism – places everything within nature since there’s no good empirical evidence that reality is divided between the natural and supernatural. The challenge such a worldview faces, beyond the fact that such things as consciousness, the origins of life, and the nature of the cosmos and its fundamental constituents are still far from understood, is resistance to the idea that we humans are fully included in the natural order, not exceptions to it. Such resistance is understandable given the widespread dualistic conception of ourselves as immortal souls or mental essences inhabiting perishable physical bodies. By denying the soul, science does indeed de-animate us in that respect – anima being Latin for “soul” or “spirit”. But it can hardly discredit our signal achievement: that we’ve constructed it using our purely natural capacity for conscious cognition.

Portraying consciousness as necessarily beyond scientific explanation, and human experience as having a special epistemic status, as the The Blind Spot seems to do, places an unwarranted restriction on the scientific worldview itself. As that worldview continues to gain in scope and plausibility, we need not fear the possibility that conscious experience and the minds that bring experience into being are discovered to be functions of systems whose parts are not themselves minded. Such naturalization would be a satisfying addition to the open-ended project of gaining a maximally objective picture of the reality we inhabit.

- Tom Clark, October 2024

Notes

[1] Whether or not systems such as LLMs “truly” understand or know anything (which depends on how one defines these concepts), they have proved themselves very capable research assistants and content producers. Being embodied seems unnecessary to exhibit some capacities that only humans used to have.

[2] On this point see Killing the Observer.

[3] However, they say later on in their discussion of neurophenomenology that “Experience is inherently intersubjective and shareable” (219).

[4] On this point see Locating consciousness: why experience can’t be objectified.

[5] For an extensive discussion of representationalist theories see here.

[6] My representationalist stab at the hard problem can be found in two papers, Locating consciousness: why experience can’t be objectified and Content: a possible key to consciousness.

[7] A follow up to The Blind Spot is reportedly in the works.

[8] On such puzzles, see Thomas Metzinger’s recent book, The Elephant and the Blind, reviewed here.

Review of The Blind Spot, Part 1: The Ideal of Objectivity

Tom Clark

Book Title:

The Blind Spot

Book Author:

Robert Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson

Category:

Purchase this book via:

The Blind Spot argues we need to reform our scientific worldview to return human experience - consciousness - to its proper, central place in science, and that the deliverances of consciousness stand as a corrective to untenable scientific ambitions of objectivity. "Direct experience" presents reality in ways that must take precedence over scientific abstractions. In part 1 of this review, I suggest that such reform is unnecessary since science and experience - different sorts of world models - are not inherently in competition, and that the ideal of trans-human objectivity remains a worthy goal of science even if we can't take a God's-eye perspective on reality.

The call for revolution

As a long-time advocate of a science-based worldview – worldview naturalism – I was intrigued to read this on the first page of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience:

We believe we need nothing less than a new kind of scientific worldview. (vi)

What new worldview is in order, and why? In this book, science grounds the naturalist conclusion about reality: there’s no empirical basis for positing a supernatural realm separate from the natural world that science shows to exist. But a particular view of science has, the authors argue, increasingly marginalized what they call “direct human experience,” that is, consciousness:

...that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. Things appear and become available to us thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world,” says Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot. (xi)

This blindness to the centrality of our conscious experience – what’s called phenomenal consciousness in the philosophical trade – is, they say, at the root of what they call “the crisis of meaning in our scientific worldview”:

According to that worldview, nature is nothing but shifting spatiotemporal arrangements of fundamental physical entities. In this perspective, the mind is either a derivative physical assemblage or something radically different from nature altogether. Most important, science gives us a literally true account of objective physical reality or at least of the totality of observable physical facts. This worldview of nature, mind, and science eventually came to underpin our political systems, our economic structures, and our social organization. But it is precisely that philosophical perspective, including its presence within scientific theories themselves, that is now in crisis, as evidenced by its inability to account for the mind, meaning, and consciousness that are the very source of science itself. (vii-viii)

So it isn’t science’s fault per se, but a hubristic, reductionist, and mechanistic philosophical view of science that the authors claim needs correcting – a metaphysical mistake of many parts. And it needs correcting because it’s the root cause of a host of planetary and existential evils, including the climate crisis. By splitting the knower from the known, abandoning direct experience, and privileging unmediated objectivity, this view

…menaces our project of civilization altogether. Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential threats, concretize this split by treating everything – including paradoxically, awareness and knowing themselves – as an objectifiable informational quantity or resource. It’s precisely this split – the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known – that constitutes our meaning crisis. The climate emergency, which arises from treating nature as just a resource for our use, is the most pronounced and catastrophic manifestation of our crisis. (ix)

The Blind Spot is thus an urgent call to philosophical action: we must revise our current scientific worldview or face dire consequences. After describing the history of its development, the authors present a detailed, carefully argued case against what they see as it faults: that it’s overweening in its explanatory ambitions (“triumphalist”), too reductionistic, too wedded to mind-independent realism, and too quick to claim perspective-free objectivity. These charges are made in separate chapters on time, matter, cosmology, life, cognition, consciousness, and, finally, planet Earth and its troubles. Each chapter critiques different aspects of the Blind Spot (capitalized throughout) in the context of its subject matter, one of which – the nature of time and duration - I’ll discuss below to illustrate their main complaints against the dominant scientific worldview. Whether or not one agrees with their general thesis (I do not), these are informative, well-referenced, and philosophically astute. The reader comes away with a useful overview of the scientific state of play in each domain, perhaps the one exception being the discussion of artificial intelligence, which has leapt ahead since the book’s publication. Overall, I recommend The Blind Spot to anyone interested in the philosophy and history of science, the philosophy of mind, and the influence of the scientific worldview on the wider culture.

Science vs. common sense: conflicting or complementary?

In several instances the authors mount telling challenges to what they see as overly mechanistic and reductionistic understandings of human behavior and cognition, championing what’s now called a “4E” view of intelligence and agency: that these capacities are embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended, not just confined to the brain-in-the-skull. We shouldn’t think of ourselves as mere molecular machines – the strong reductionist view – but as autonomous agents who actively construct our worlds just as much as we are shaped by our biological and cultural determinants (143). They question the computational model of the mind – brain-based algorithms operating over internal representations – as insufficient to ground “genuinely cognitive systems” like us (174) which flexibly respond to real-world contingencies using our “culturally configured and socially situated bodies” (177). Although their charges of rampant reductionism seem overstated – many scientists and philosophers accept that it's not just the micro-level that has causal powers – it’s good to have the non-reductionist, anti-mechanist view of ourselves so forcefully articulated.

That said, it isn’t clear that our scientific worldview must bow to “direct experience” as a corrective to what the authors claim is an untenable quest for objectivity. What is clear is that the practice of science can’t literally leave behind human experience, since the world appears to each of us individually in terms of consciousness. Our personal grasp of reality, primarily dedicated to ensuring our continued survival, is mediated by what the brain and body cook up in response to perceptual input as we behave in the world: a continuous stream of experience – phenomenal consciousness – that we now know is a rather limited, creaturely perspective. But it serves well enough, otherwise we wouldn’t be here to tell the tale of its limitations. It is only through this personal experiential lens that the broader view of science manifests itself to us, individually and collectively. If this much is uncontroversial, what then is the complaint against our current scientific worldview?

It’s that science, in its theories, is deemed capable of transcending our necessarily perspectival grasp of the world, delivering to us (or us to) a “view from nowhere” that leaves behind and in many cases contradicts what our senses commonsensically tell us. Such contradictions, the authors say, must always be resolved in favor of our human perspective for the simple reason that the ambitions of trans-human objectivity are unfulfillable. They want to return “experience to its proper centrality in science” (108) to counter what they describe as four major misconceptions: that science can replace “concrete and tangible phenomena with abstract and idealized mathematical constructs (the surreptitious substitution);” that by claiming such constructs are concrete reality it commits the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness;” that it holds abstractions are independent of human consciousness, when in fact they contain “distilled residues of experience;” and that, ultimately, science can leave consciousness – its “source and touchstone” – behind, what they call the “amnesia of experience” (195).

Time and the manifest image

All these play a role in their analysis of the conflict between the commonsense understanding of time and its scientific counterpart as derived from the physics of special relativity. A widely (but not universally) accepted implication of special relativity, that of Minkowski spacetime, describes reality as a four-dimensional block universe – three spatial dimensions, one time dimension – in which time doesn’t flow. Instead, all events equally exist along the time dimension (but not at the same time!) just as a 3-dimensional object equally exists in all three dimensions. Considered from a “God’s eye” perspective that we take up in our imaginations, the universe is a static block of events. But of course, we experience time as passing, with the present moment becoming a past moment, and the future becoming the present. It is the latter, human take on time that the authors say must hold (letters in superscript indicate points I’ll discuss below):

The block universe theory epitomizes the Blind Spot. How is it possible to formulate coherently a conception of the contemporaneous reality^A of all events in the block universe without adopting an impossible God’s-eye perspective^B external to the universe and the passage of nature? Besides being objectivist, the block universe theory bifurcates nature into objectively real space-time and illusory psychological time^C, surreptitiously substitutes space for time (spatialized time for duration), and treats an abstract mathematical representation as if it were concrete being^D (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness). The theory robs nature of passage and time of duration. It reifies space-time by turning the process of becoming into a thing.^E (122-3)

Duration, passage, flow of time: these are essential to how we experience the world. Science would be impossible without them. Any science that tries to attribute the flow of time to a subjective illusion induces an amnesia of experience and cuts away the ground on which it stands.^F To imagine that we can abstract away from the flow of time to attain an objective view of reality is to replace the passage of nature with a lifeless symbol.^G There is a crucial difference between how we can be misled by sensorial experience – which Einstein’s theories attempt to correct by focusing on observational invariants – and discarding experience altogether as being irrelevant to our description of reality.^H (124)

Here we see most of the complaints the authors have against objectivity and their corresponding insistence that the reality of human experience must take precedence over scientific pretensions to transcend it. But I'll argue that these worries are unfounded and overlook a basic scientific goal, which is, as far as possible, to step outside our specifically human perspective on the world in order to gain a more objective view of it. We can’t step outside conscious experience in modeling reality, but we can do our best to remove specifically human biases that might color that model. The way we generally do that in science is to develop mathematical abstractions, derived from observations and codified in theories, that we have good reason to believe any sufficiently advanced non-human cognitive system would understand.

The authors claim that such abstractions still contain, or are constituted by, ineliminable residues of human experience, so in doing science we’ve not accessed anything truly objective. But it isn’t obvious that mathematical constructs as we humans have developed them can’t float free of our brand of consciousness, and even if this were the case, the ideal of trans-human objectivity would remain. Keeping in mind that even our most abstract models might still reflect a specifically human perspective is a step toward greater objectivity: it draws attention to the possible parochialism of that perspective and finding ways to overcome it.[1]

But let’s parse the above passage a little further:

A. First, a correction. The block universe seen from a God’s eye perspective doesn’t make all events contemporaneous (occurring at the same time) but puts them in temporal order – past, present, and future – from a point of view within the block. There’s just no single, shared “now” that we (or God) can assign to them. The block universe – the collection of all events – exists outside of time, with the time dimension incorporated within it. So it doesn’t present a picture “in which time is an illusion” (121).

B. The fact that we can’t literally take a God’s-eye point of view doesn’t invalidate the intuition that the universe exists independently of any particular perspective that might arise within it. Nor should it bar us from doing our best, in our imaginations and theories, to picture it from no particular, especially human, vantage point. Special relativity was a triumph of empirically-based conceptual innovation that showed our perception of events to be perspectival (from our reference frame) but in a way that can be transcended by calculating space-time intervals that are the same for all observers – what they call at the end of the above quote “observational invariants.”

C. The block universe conception doesn’t “bifurcate nature” into something real (spacetime) and something illusory (our experience of temporal duration) since our experiences are real and clearly within the universe, however it gets conceived by science.[2] Our experience that time flows – part of what Wilfred Sellars dubbed the manifest image – may not line up with the scientific image of time presented by special relativity, but it isn’t as if science declares the experience itself to be an illusion. Nor do we have to choose between these images; we probably can’t since the non-conceptual feeling or perception of the flow of time, which serves us reasonably well, is not about to be displaced by a rather high-level conceptual scheme such as special relativity. Nor can special relativity be displaced by common sense about time, only by further scientific investigation.

D. The block universe idea is indeed an abstraction, as are all concepts, hypotheses, and theories, but these are not generally claimed as literally being the mind-independent physical world they model. The current scientific worldview, as far as I’m aware, does not as rule mistake abstract theory for the explanatory target (the thing in itself), nor does it aim to substitute the former for the latter.[3] It’s worth pointing out here that both science and our culturally modulated conscious experience are world models, the former couched in abstract terms derived from collective observation (see note 1), the latter in terms of the sensations and perceptions of concrete experience as well as everyday concepts and propositions, most of them not involving much math. The twist is that conscious experience (discussed in Part 2) can’t be put aside, as we might put aside math in favor of non-quantified takes on reality, so in that sense it’s prior to science. But recognizing its status as a model, not the world directly and unmediatedly presented in a way that competes with science, is an important step in getting a more objective grasp of the world.

E. “Becoming” is perfectly real on the block universe view since the series of events on a timeline incorporate change relative to what happened before and after just as much as on the presentist view where the future doesn’t yet exist. The worry about reification turning an “active process” into a “thing” suggests the contrast between living and dead, that science in its austere physicalism somehow disenchants the world by killing off change and novelty (see Part 2 on the fear of scientism). But describing the world in terms of an abstract model is not in contradiction with seeing (correctly) the world as active, alive (in the case of biological organisms), and wondrous.[4]

F. Recognizing that the manifest and scientific images might diverge when it comes to modeling time and duration (see C above) doesn’t make science a threat to the reality of our experience as our window on the world. Such divergence is simply to be expected as empirical observations and theories, always apprehended and understood from within our conscious standpoints, reveal aspects of reality that only appear using such cognitive tools. Conscious experience for us humans will always remain the basic context of cognition, so science can’t “cut away” consciousness; but common sense is rightly tutored by science and should welcome such instruction.

G. Here again the authors characterize the quest for objectivity as somehow deadening (see E above), as if the abstract and quantified scientific understanding of time (a “lifeless symbol”) threatens the experiential reality of duration we all know so well. But such displacement is not a possibility precisely because, as the authors themselves recognize, we can’t escape our embodied consciousness and its psychological deliverances. We can of course raise the question of how well our psychology tracks reality as described from a standpoint that does its best to minimize our innate perceptual and cognitive biases. But that investigation is enlightening, not deadening.

H. It’s not clear why the authors suppose science, or any philosophical view of science, aims to supplant experience altogether as irrelevant to our description of reality. It’s an unavoidable commonplace that scientific observations are filtered through our sensory-perceptual channels even when using the most advanced imaging and detection technologies. And of course conscious cogitation plays an essential role in the development of scientific theories, along with the spontaneous insights and hunches that arise unbidden into consciousness. So this worry seems a bit of a strawman.

Summary of Part 1

The bottom line, as I see it, is that our scientific worldview and its ambition of trans-human objectivity is not in need of correction by the common sense of direct experience, nor does common sense need to yield to science as we go about our business, unless such business depends on resolving a conflict between the two when it comes to matters of fact, as was the case when the heliocentric model of the solar system replaced commonsense geocentrism. The manifest and scientific images can for the most part happily co-exist even as science reaches conclusions quite at odds with intuition, so the current scientific worldview isn’t a threat to what the authors call “the primacy of experience” and the practical efficacy of our conscious world models. Likewise, consciousness isn’t in a position to challenge the scientific description of reality: the experience of duration can’t invalidate special relativity and Minkowski spacetime. However, to the extent portrayals of science or scientific practice are actually guilty of marginalizing human experience and its take on the world, the authors’ complaints should be heeded.

Having sketched some rejoinders to what I see as misconceptions about the scientific quest for objectivity and its relation to human experience, in Part 2 I’ll take up the authors’ discussion of consciousness as a possible target of scientific explanation. Does the nature of "direct experience" outstrip the project of gaining a naturalistic, objective understanding of the world? And is our current scientific worldview, by supposedly denying the centrality of consciousness, responsible for our "treating nature as just a resource for our use" and the resultant climate crisis?

- Tom Clark, October 2024

Notes

[1] The authors correctly describe objective knowledge as rooted in the intersubjective confirmation of empirical regularities. Discussing quantum mechanics they say: “Note that such knowledge is objective in the sense that two experimentalists can perform the same experiments and compare their results. If the experiments yield the same answers, then those answers constitute objective knowledge” (103). They also get it right about intersubjectivity: “Science is a collaborative effort to find, through our individual actions on the world and our verbal communications with each other, a model for what is common to all of our personally constructed worlds” (106). But they seem to have reservations about whether our personally constructed worlds are themselves potential explanatory targets of scientific collaboration – see Part 2 of this review.

[2] “The ‘bifurcation of nature’ happens whenever this procedure of abstraction is interpreted to mean that nature consists of two different kinds of things, the unperceived and fundamental constituents of reality and what appears subjectively in perception…. We bifurcate nature when we divide it into ‘two systems of reality’: ‘the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of the awareness.’” (p. 20, quoting Ian Hacking). This distinction can be recast as the difference between the reality of our representational schemes (representational reality, for example the reality of conscious experience conceived as a world model) and the reality of what they represent to be the case (represented reality, e.g., how the world is judged to be in terms of experience). Since we are embodied physical beings, the representational reality of conscious experience is clearly within the natural world as described by science: the represented reality of scientific theory. Since nature as thus represented includes both sorts of realities, it is not bifurcated by science, only engaged in representing itself as we humans deploy both the manifest and scientific images.

[3] About which see Ladyman and Ross’s 2007 book on structural realism, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, and the Wikipedia entry on model-dependent realism.

[4] See Richard Dawkin’s Unweaving the Rainbow for a rebuttal to the claim that science disenchants the world.

Why Qualia Aren't Like Unicorns: A Defense of Phenomenal Realism

Illusionists say qualia – the sensory qualities that seem to populate our conscious experience – are like unicorns: non-existent intentional objects of beliefs we might have about them. In response, I argue that qualities are real non-conceptual contents of consciousness and that Keith Frankish’s recently proposed reactivity schema theory might help account for them. We should remain metaphysically agnostic when seeking to explain consciousness lest the main explanatory target – phenomenal experience – be prematurely declared unreal.

(MS in progress, comments welcome to twclark@brandeis.edu)

1. Introduction

Unicorns are perfectly good mythical beasts – horses with a nice sharp spiraled horn – often brought up to illustrate the thesis that propositions can refer to things that don’t exist. Unicorns are the non-existent (on Earth at any rate) intentional object of beliefs, thoughts, statements, and other expressions of propositions referring to them. An occurrent thought you might entertain about unicorns, for example that they have horns, is a real, albeit transient bit of conscious content that partially constitutes your conscious experience as it occurs. The thought might present itself as an internal sub-vocally (silent) spoken sentence “Unicorns have horns” or as a visual image of the horned horse, or perhaps in terms of some other format. Such a conscious episode is real enough, as is perhaps (depending on your conception of what’s real) the proposition involving the concept unicorn, even though what’s referred to by that concept doesn’t exist.

Some theorists about consciousness, the illusionists, hold that qualia are like unicorns in that they don’t exist, and for essentially the same reason, to be explained below. By “qualia” I mean experiential qualities like pain or redness or sweetness that have a particular character or feel by which we recognize them. For now, please bracket any philosophical views you might have about their nature or how to characterize qualia, e.g., that they’re necessarily non-physical/physical, intrinsic/relational, ineffable/effable, or private/public. I simply mean to refer to experiential qualities prior to any theoretical commitments you might harbor. If you think the term “qualia” as a philosophical term of art necessarily refers to something intrinsic, private, ineffable, and therefore non-physical, then substitute “quality” for “qualia” in what follows. Illusionist Keith Frankish (2016), whose reactivity schema theory I will focus on below, adverts to “introspective qualitative properties,” the “quality of experience” and “intrinsic quality” as being illusory. Some philosophers, e.g., “qualia quietist” Pete Mandik (Mandik 2016), might argue there’s not even any pre-philosophical concept of quality to be consulted, but standard dictionary definitions of “quality” don’t obviously invoke any deep metaphysical distinctions, at least that I can detect.[1] Eric Schwitzgebel (2020) argues that there’s a metaphysically innocent (“uninflated”) notion of qualitative conscious experience (phenomenality) we can agree exists. Leaving that debate for another day, in what follows you can always substitute “qualities” for “qualia,” and I will use both terms interchangeably. Illusionists can substitute “seeming quality” for “quality” if they like.

In the next section (2) I’ll describe what I take to be the basic illusionist claim about phenomenal consciousness: that the belief we have qualities in experience is false, a mistaken application of a concept that has no real-world referent. I’ll then argue in section 3 that thinking about and communicating concepts requires the deployment of a non-conceptual format, and that sensory qualities are the obvious candidate to play this role. In section 4, I suggest that in denying that experience has any qualitative aspect, illusionists must come up with a non-qualitative alternative format, but when we consult our experience there seems no such alternative. In section 5, I take up Keith Frankish’s reactivity schema theory which, although intended to explain why qualia are illusory, ends up supplying a possible explanation of why qualitative non-conceptual content appears in consciousness. Frankish discounts that appearance as illusory, which I suggest in section 6 might be due to a commitment to physicalism as a metaphysics. I conclude that when investigating the nature of consciousness – phenomenal, quality-laden experience being the main explanatory target – we should remain metaphysically agnostic.

2. The purported illusion of phenomenality

Illusionists such as Daniel Dennett (Dennett, 2016, 2017), Keith Frankish (Frankish 2016, 2020, 2023), and Francois Kammerer (Kammerer 2023) submit that qualia, for example the felt quality of a searing pain, are illusions. As Frankish (2020) puts it “Introspection, illusionists claim, [produces] a raft of psychological effects which leave us convinced that we are acquainted with a private world of mysterious mental qualities.” Such qualities are the non-existent intentional objects of mistaken beliefs about them, in particular the belief that such qualities populate our conscious experience. It might seem to you that pain involves a distinctly phenomenal property, that it has a certain qualitative feel to it, a particular subjective character. But this, they claim, is a non-veridical judgment that such a property exists, just as if you entertained the (false) belief that unicorns exist on Earth. All that’s really going on when you feel a searing in pain are neural processes and physically instantiated psychological reactions, some of which produce the “user illusion” of there being a qualitative “what it’s like” aspect of pain – its feel. Here’s Dennett making this point in the context of having an afterimage of a red stripe (his italics, my underlining):

Qualia are supposed to be somehow the internal subjective properties that we are acquainted with more directly, when we are slightly less acquainted with their normal external causes – real red stripes, and so on in the world. When you make this move, you are positing an internal cause that has the same properties as the intentional objects that normally cause your perceptual beliefs – except that these are private, subjective versions, somehow, of the public, objective properties of redness and so forth. But once you realize that the intentional objects of mistaken beliefs simply don’t exist, anywhere, you have no need in your theory or conjecture for weird internal something-or-others with mysterious properties…So when you see a red stripe when there is no red stripe in the world as its source, there need be no other thing (made of red figment) that is the “real seeming” you take yourself to be experiencing. Dennett 2017, 360-1.

This passage illustrates the illusionist equivalence of qualia (in this instance the redness of red) and unicorns: both are the non-existent intentional objects of false beliefs. It’s this equivalence I want to challenge, and in doing so make a case against illusionism and for phenomenal realism. Unicorns obviously aren’t among the literal contents of consciousness (that would be weird) but qualities, I will argue, literally are. They aren’t concepts that we misapply in supposing we’re phenomenally conscious but the concrete, directly present, subjectively unmediated non-conceptual format in which concepts themselves are communicated (next section). The cause of the afterimage is some neural goings-on, but its red qualitative character is not an illusion, rather a real constituent of one’s experience. Its precise nature is an open question in the study of consciousness.[2]

3. Conceptual vs. non-conceptual content

As noted in the introduction, in entertaining a thought about unicorns you as a conscious subject undergo a specific, transient experience. This contrasts with any beliefs you might have about them, for instance that they don’t exist. Beliefs might be characterized as latent dispositions to assert a proposition, and although they sometimes get expressed in conscious episodes such as thoughts or verbal reports, such expression isn’t needed to hold them. But occurrent thoughts about a unicorn, e.g., a sub-vocal speech act or a visual presentation in one’s imagination, or the experience of looking at a picture of one, are all conscious episodes with specific qualitative features involving the sensory formats in question. Sub-vocal episodes when thinking about unicorns involve the auditory qualities of the phonemes of the language used (“unicorn” being approximately the sounds when saying aloud in English the words “you,” “knee,” and “corn”), and imagining, say, a red unicorn with a white horn involves shapes defined by color qualities.[3] I’ll proceed on the assumption that most readers are familiar with thoughts as conscious episodes that, whatever their propositional and conceptual content, are couched in qualities (illusionists: seeming qualities) that rapidly succeed themselves in one’s consciousness as the thought occurs. They are evanescent but nevertheless real conscious episodes.

It appears, therefore, that there are at least two sorts of content in play when thinking about unicorns: conceptual and propositional content, e.g., that they are mythical beasts with horns, and the occurrent qualitative content of the format in which the conscious episode transpires. The latter seems non-conceptual and non-propositional, not involving any sort of intentional content even though it participates in a paradigmatically intentional context, that of having a thought about unicorns.[4] If your thought is one of visually imagining a red unicorn, then the quality red, however vague and fleeting, is a conscious feature of the thought that, unlike the unicorn, exists for you as long as it lasts. You can of course also deploy the concept red, but that abstraction refers to the quality and is not itself qualitative, albeit transmitted in non-conceptual qualitative terms, e.g., the sound when saying “red”.[5]

4. The non-conceptual content challenge for illusionism

In denying that qualities exist in conscious experience, illusionists are faced with the problem of how to distinguish these two sorts of content. The unique qualitative character of red in a conscious episode, they claim, is like the unicorn: something you mistakenly believe exists but does not. It’s therefore something akin to intentional content, the non-existent intentional object of a mistaken belief that the quality redness exists. On illusionism, the apparent phenomenal character of red is the conclusion of a judgment deploying a concept that has no real-world referent, just as the concept of a unicorn has none. It is deployed in believing, falsely, that the quality of red is present in one’s experience. Supposing – believing, judging – that there are qualities in experience is on the same footing as having the false belief that unicorns exist somewhere on Earth. On illusionism both involve the deployment of a concept.

However, as suggested above, in deploying concepts in propositions, whether in thought, overt speech, text, or other media, there’s always a non-conceptual format in terms of which the proposition appears or is presented, or at least it very much seems that way. If not in terms of the non-conceptual content of the various formats that involve our sensory channels (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) and expressive capacities (voice, gestures, writing, etc.), how are propositions and concepts thought about or communicated? They are abstracta that only get expressed by using a multitude of more or less arbitrary sounds and symbols – the concreta of human language. There has to be some non-conceptual format with which to think, visualize, speak, write, or otherwise engage with concepts, and in the human case it is sensory qualities that are the media that support their expression: for an English speaker the sonically (but not semantically) arbitrary combination of the sounds “you – knee – corn” communicates the concept of a horse with one horn using the vocal-auditory channel.

The question then is this. If, as illusionists claim, what we take as qualitative red is akin to applying a concept in making a judgment, one that we mistakenly apply in supposing the quality red appears in experience, in terms of what non-conceptual format does that concept present itself? If formats are non-conceptual, then the illusionist needs to have some account of how the concept red, when communicated or thought about, is formatted in a way that isn’t itself conceptual. On illusionism the format can’t be qualitative since the illusionist denies the existence of qualities in experience. But absent qualities, there seems no obvious candidate that we can identify in conscious experience to play such a role; rather, and to state the obvious, red simply presents itself in experience as non-conceptual and qualitative, not as a concept, and there is no consciously available sub-format in terms of which it appears. The upshot is that under illusionism we are at a loss to say how concepts and propositions are deployed in conscious episodes. If, as illusionists claim, the apparently qualitative sounds “you – knee – corn” too involve nothing qualitative but rather the application of concepts in making judgments, then it seems that on illusionism all we have in consciousness are judgments and their attendant concepts, with some deceiving us into supposing there exists non-conceptual conscious content that presents itself as sensory qualities.

But again, when speaking or in having sub-vocally expressed thoughts, we don’t deploy phonemes as concepts but as the non-conceptual vocal-auditory vehicles with which concepts are communicated. Likewise, when dreaming about a red unicorn we’re not deploying the quality of redness as a concept; rather, it non-conceptually participates in how the unicorn appears in the dream experience. There’s no way around the need for non-conceptual content as the vehicle for communicating concepts, in which case the illusionists need something to play that role. Since they’ve ruled out sensory qualities, what can take their place as the non-conceptual format in which concepts and propositions get expressed, in particular the proposition expressing the belief that qualia exist?

5. The appearance of phenomenal character: the reactivity schema theory

On illusionism as presented by Frankish (2016, 2020, 2023), the belief that qualia exist – phenomenal realism in a strong sense – can involve the concept of a quale (quality) as a non-physical, private, intrinsic mental essence or feel presented to an internal subject, e.g., a homunculus sitting in Dennett’s Cartesian Theater, who alone has access to it. Introspective mechanisms mislead us into judging that experiences have such properties, when in fact they are a host of neurally instantiated (thus physical) psychological reactions, none of which involve anything qualitative or essentially private. The concept of a quale is thus a bit of faulty dualistic metaphysics, of believing that redness can’t just be these physical reactions. That our experience of red seems nothing like such reactions naturally contributes to such a judgment (see Papineau 2003 on this).

The difficulty here is that since we obviously don’t have conscious access to the physical goings-on that constitute the reactions, illusionists have to specify what we do have access to in experience that would lead us to adopt a faulty (on their view) metaphysics and then mistakenly apply the concept of non-physical qualia in characterizing consciousness. What on their account is directly and unmediatedly present for us in having experiences? According to Frankish’s recently proposed reactivity schema theory, introspection produces a vastly simplified model of the reactions that make up experiences, and it’s this model which induces the false belief in qualia. The model’s schematic information is made available to higher level cognitive processes such that we can reflect on our experiences and thus make judgments about them. The model is not itself a concept but that which induces (generates) the formation of the concept of non-physical mental qualities available only to the subject. But how is that concept arrived at? It would seem that the model’s content would have to be present in consciousness and it’s this, according to illusionism, that we’d mistakenly judge to be non-physical, thus applying a dualistic concept of qualia.

This in fact is how Frankish describes the situation. In a recent talk on reactivity schema theory, Frankish says (1:28:00) “The schema presents experience as an abstract pattern, an essence of significance, a pure feel.” This seems perilously close to how one would describe a basic quality (quale): as having an ineffable phenomenal character. Indeed, as he puts it a bit later: “I can’t tell you anything about it because it’s got no structure available to me… I can make comparisons and evaluations; we might say it’s a pure, ineffable feel that I’m acquainted with…” These remarks convey his considered judgment about how experience presents itself: as being like a feel. But Frankish immediately discounts that judgment as faulty: “But there’s no feel there, no quale, only a pattern of reactions that are schematically modeled that produces judgments about them which I express in the only way I can: it’s got this feel, hence the illusion of phenomenal consciousness.”

6. Physicalism as a possible driver of illusionism

Frankish, if I’ve understood him correctly, concedes the reality of the appearance in experience of what looks to be a phenomenal feel – a structureless, hence ineffable, quality. The reactivity schema theory has it that this appearance is the non-conceptual content of the schematic model of reactivity as delivered to higher level cognitive processes. And this appearance, says Frankish, then generates the false judgment involving the conceptual content that we have feels in consciousness, where feels are conceptualized as non-physical.

But nothing in Frankish’s account of the appearance of the content of the reactivity schema – that it presents itself like a quality, something with an unstructured essential character – requires us to judge that appearance as being either illusory or non-physical. Why might a philosopher make that judgment? One possibility is that they are committed to a physicalist metaphysics: since qualitative character is on the face of it difficult to physicalize (Kim 2005) we must discount the qualitative aspect of the appearances as illusory. Frankish (2016) says

The central problem, of course, is that phenomenal properties seem too weird to yield to physical explanation. They resist functional analysis and float free of whatever physical mechanisms are posited to explain them.

But Frankish has granted that the appearance itself is perfectly real: non-conceptual content present in experience delivered by the reactivity schema; and he has granted that it really seems qualitative, that is, non-structural. Nothing about being non-structural necessarily implies anti-physicalism such that physicalists must deny the non-structural (qualitative) character of appearances itself as illusory, weird though it might be. It’s only the judgment that such character must be non-physical that they need deny. As noted above, it’s perhaps understandable that such content might generate the intuition of its being non-physical, but that doesn’t impugn the non-conceptual reality of the appearance; a commitment to physicalism needn’t require us to discount it or its qualitative character as illusory. Rather, its metaphysical status is an open question, to be answered by a settled theory of consciousness (see note 2), but not, I think, its very existence. And indeed, many philosophers of the physicalist persuasion are phenomenal realists, not illusionists, e.g., Byrne (2001), Papineau (2014), and Tye (2014).

7. Conclusion

I hope to have shown that reactivity schema theory, proffered as an account of why we mistakenly judge ourselves to be phenomenally conscious, needn’t require us to make that judgment and indeed might help explain the appearance of qualities in consciousness. Such qualities – visual, auditory, tactile – can (and do) function as the non-conceptual format in which concepts and propositions are thought about and communicated. That illusionists such as Frankish might discount the reality of qualities due to their commitment to physicalism is the equal and opposite mistake illusionists sometime attribute to dualists: that their fear of physicalist disenchantment of consciousness drives their anti-physicalist intuitions about qualia. As Dennett puts it

We want our minds to be “inspired” and “uncanny,” and we tend to view attempts to dissect these, our most precious gifts, as impertinent assaults (and philistine to boot). “Anybody who is foolish enough to think our minds are all just so much neural machinery must have a pathetically impoverished acquaintance with the magic of our minds!” Dennett 2017, p. 318. (original emphasis)

Dualists, Dennett says, want to keep consciousness safe from physicalist reduction. Illusionists, it seems to me, might want to keep physicalism safe from qualities. Both stances derive from metaphysical commitments that are neither here nor there when investigating the nature of consciousness using science kept honest by philosophy.

Unicorns are mythical beasts about which we form beliefs, none of which refer to anything real on Earth. Qualia, the qualities that characterize sensory experience are, I suggest, real, non-conceptual contents of consciousness about which we form beliefs involving concepts, e.g., that they might be non-physical. Illusionists, usually in the physicalist camp, claim, mistakenly in my view, that they don’t exist, even as they adduce some interesting hypotheses about how they manifest themselves in consciousness. As the investigation of consciousness proceeds, we should remain metaphysically agnostic about the main explanatory target – phenomenal experience – until such time as it gets explained.

Tom Clark, August 2024

References

Byrne, A. (2001) Intentionalism defended. Philosophical Review, 110(2), 199-240.

Balog, K. (2012) In defense of the phenomenal concept strategy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 84(1): 1–23.

Clark, T.W. (2019) Locating consciousness: why experience can’t be objectified. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 26 (11-12):60-85.

Clark, T.W. (2024) Content: a possible key to consciousness. PsyArXiv, https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/79xg8.

Dennett, D.C (2017) From Bacteria to Bach and Back. W.W. Norton and Co., New York.

Dennett, D.C. (2016) Illusionism as the obvious default theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23 (11-12):65-72.

Frankish, K. (2016) Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23 (11-12):11-39.

Frankish, K. (2020) The demystification of consciousness. IAI News, 86.

Frankish, K. (2023) What is illusionism? Klesis Revue Philosophique, 55-04.

Kammerer, F. (2023) The illusionist conception of phenomenal consciousness: challenges and perspectives. Klesis Revue Philosophique, 55-03.

Kim, J. (2005) Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Princeton University Press. New Jersey.

Kuhn, R. (2024) A landscape of consciousness: toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 190, 28-169.

Mandik, P. (2016) Meta-illusionism and qualia quietism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23 (11-12):140-148.

Papineau (2003) Confusions about consciousness. Richmond Journal of Philosophy, 5.

Papineau, D. (2014) I—The Presidential Address: Sensory Experience and Representational Properties. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 114 (1pt1):1-33.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2020) Inflate and explode. http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/

Tye, M. (2014) Transparency, qualia realism and representationalism. Philosophical Studies (2014) 170:39–57 DOI 10.1007/s11098-013-0177-8.

Notes

[1] Here are some dictionary definitions of “quality”: “the attribute of an elementary sensation that makes it fundamentally unlike any other sensation,” a “peculiar and essential character,” and “an inherent feature” (Miriam Webster); “a characteristic or feature of someone or something” (Cambridge English Dictionary); “an essential or distinctive characteristic, property, or attribute: the chemical qualities of alcohol,” and the “character or nature, as belonging to or distinguishing a thing: the quality of a sound” (Dictionary.com).

[2] Hunches, hypotheses, and full-blown theories of phenomenal consciousness abound; see Kuhn 2024 for a survey. My own representationalist stab at an explanation is set forth in Clark 2019 and 2024.

[3] The subjective vividness and intensity of such episodes seems to vary among individuals, with some reporting no inner verbally formatted monologue of thinking at all, and others reporting that no visual imagery is ever present in consciousness (aphantasia). How such individuals might actively think about unicorns, as opposed to talk or write about or see pictures of them, is an interesting empirical question.

[4] Some philosophers, e.g. Byrne (2001) and Tye (2014), argue that sensory qualities are inherently intentional in that their phenomenal character derives from playing a representational role in our cognitive economy, while others disagree (Papineau 2014). Without taking sides on this debate, we can still distinguish non-conceptual from conceptual and propositional content.

[5] Some proponents of the phenomenal concept strategy (Papineau 2003, Balog 2012) argue that deploying the concept red necessarily triggers, uses, or involves - e.g., is partially constituted by - the experienced quality itself. Whether or not this is the case, the concept of a concept has it that concepts needn’t be instances of what they refer to. The phrase “the concept of red” needn’t involve a conscious episode involving redness as a quality, although it might, especially having drawn attention to that possibility.

Author:

The Quality of Consciousness: Thomas Metzinger's "The Elephant and the Blind"

Tom Clark

Book Title:

The Elephant and the Blind

Book Author:

Thomas Metzinger

Category:

Purchase this book via:

In a ground-breaking, open access analysis of deep meditative experience, philosopher Thomas Metzinger demonstrates its relevance for the scientific study of consciousness and argues that cultivating our potential for intrinsically valuable conscious states should be a goal of an enlightened culture.

Introduction

The nature of consciousness presents an intriguing puzzle for those seeking a scientific account of how mind fits into the world. The brain is material, but consciousness – sensations, emotions, thoughts – less obviously so. It isn’t clear why only certain neural goings-on and not others would give rise to the experiential qualities of sight, sound, touch, and thought that constitute your current awareness as you read and react to this text. And those qualities are yours alone, not observationally available to anyone else, unlike your brain.

In his most recent book, philosopher Thomas Metzinger, long engaged in the quest to solve consciousness, proposes that we might get a grip on its essence by researching the simplest kind of experience: the pure, non-dual awareness reported by skilled practitioners of meditation. Having a “minimal model of consciousness” in terms of such experiences could be key to its understanding. To this end, The Elephant and the Blind takes as its primary data hundreds of first-person descriptions of pure awareness episodes gathered in an anonymous online survey, the first of its kind. (The book is open access and has a companion website that links to the survey questionnaire for those wanting to participate.)

Despite the prima facie simplicity of an experience stripped of sensory and emotional contents, the sense of self, and occurrent thoughts, these descriptions nevertheless encompass a diverse set of metaphors aimed at the ineffable, among them “luminous,” “empty,” “pure,” “silent”, “lucid,” “boundless,” and “timeless.” The elephant of the book’s title is the phenomenology of pure awareness – its qualitative character – experientially “touched” from hundreds of individual perspectives, none of which can claim to have captured its entirety. But something fundamental is there:

…there clearly is a distinct phenomenal character of awareness itself, and for now, it does remain the prime candidate for the simplest and subtlest form of conscious experience that human beings are capable of. The elephant does, apparently, exist. (457)

Pure Awareness in Philosophical, Scientific, and Historical Context

Since what Metzinger calls a “minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE), is private, not publicly accessible, the best we can do is categorize descriptions of it to see how they converge. The bulk of the book is therefore a qualitative typology of MPEs, both as stand-alone episodes and as a background experiential mode present in more complex conscious states. The varieties of pure awareness are analyzed in the context of the history and practice of Eastern and Christian contemplative traditions, current philosophy of mind, and recent developments in cognitive neuroscience. Metzinger himself is a life-long meditator, and although his personal experience rarely intrudes, it’s clear he has first-hand acquaintance with the phenomenology in question. Only by taking it seriously, he says, can we get a fresh start in approaching the question of consciousness. In doing so we must put aside our metaphysical, religious, and cultural presuppositions about what the experience of pure awareness reveals, either about consciousness itself or the reality we inhabit. Metzinger sets an admirably explicit standard of intellectual honesty and self-awareness, cautioning against unwarranted assumptions and conclusions, so the book is a gem of good philosophical method. But he has a playful side as well, posing provocative, koan-like questions that will catch you up short, perhaps inducing a bit of cognitive vertigo.

He demurs at the outset that this is not a “scholarly” work, but the depth and breadth of his philosophical, scientific, and historical expertise on consciousness makes this an extraordinarily rich exploration; some sections will be fairly demanding for readers not familiar with the territory. Fortunately, he includes a glossary of terms and concepts that arise in the text. Some of these, original with him, will be new even to professional investigators of consciousness if they’ve not encountered his previous work, in particular his 2013 opus, Being No One. (His 2009 book The Ego Tunnel is a good introduction to his views for non-professionals.) Various “conceptual tools” are introduced in successive chapters and also summarized in the last chapter, an overview of what’s come before. This too is fortunate since the preceding material, as Metzinger advises in the introduction, is perhaps best read selectively and after one reads the introduction and last chapter. The experiential nuances that both distinguish and connect the several dimensions of pure awareness are many, and each gets a very detailed treatment with an abundance of phenomenological subtleties, some of which overlap considerably as the picture emerges. Not all readers will share Metzinger’s sensitivity to the differences he claims to have identified.

The Quality of Pure Awareness

What then is pure awareness? As abstracted from meditators’ reports, the root phenomenology of what he calls “full absorption episodes” is that of bare, alert wakefulness without any perceptual or cognitive content. The qualitative “feel” of such wakefulness is, he suggests, the experiential correlate of a kind of meta-awareness: an awareness of the open, as yet unpopulated space of awareness itself prior to the arrival of any specific content, including that of anyone having the experience. Such awareness thus constitutes what he calls the “zero-person perspective”: at its most basic, consciousness need not involve the sense of being a subject. The felt quality of a minimal phenomenal experience – open, unbounded, centerless, non-dual – is that of instantiating what William James called sciousness: a state of knowing the potential for knowledge but without a knower – what Metzinger calls the epistemic agent – being consciously represented as part of that state. What’s left is “the experience of a clear and unobstructed space of knowing” (460), the felt quality of “epistemic openness” (464).

In its essence, therefore, pure consciousness as a phenomenal (qualitatively experienced) phenomenon is the experiential correlate of a basic epistemic (knowledge-bearing) capacity that he suggests is always active behind the scenes but generally not experienced as such. Most of the time we’re necessarily preoccupied with the cognitive job of maintaining bodily integrity in a complex, risky world, which requires a lot of diverse content be present in consciousness. He speculates (and emphasizes it’s just speculation at this point) that the physical correlate of content-free wakefulness might just be the activation of the ascending reticular activation system (ARAS) in the brain stem. This is the first necessary step in making biological systems like us alert and in a position to process perceptual input, a basic cognitive function. Consciousness is thus closely tied to representation: having a behavior-guiding model of whatever it is we’re trying to anticipate and control, and basic consciousness might be the bare knowledge (awareness) that a neurally instantiated model of being an organism in the world exists, awaiting activation.

Pure Awareness Demystified

Perhaps to some spiritual seekers’ discomfort, Metzinger demystifies non-dual consciousness by placing it within a naturalistic, evidenced-based research program that may eventually pin down the physical and functional basis for phenomenal experience. The religious and metaphysical context of meditative practice going back millennia is accorded all due respect, as are its experiential findings, but pure awareness is, he says, “a fully embodied phenomenon” (459). But why should there be a conscious aspect to cognition, basic or not, in the first place? Why and how does the brain open up an inner “phenomenal state space” (464)? That’s the most troublesome problem for the science of consciousness, so troublesome that some philosophers, committed to physicalism as a metaphysics, argue that there’s really nothing phenomenal (qualitative) to be explained. They see no hope of physicalizing subjective feels, so hypothesize that they are illusory. These so-called illusionists thus part company with Metzinger – a phenomenal realist – at a very basic level. Realists, still the majority of philosophers and scientists, have floated a number of hypotheses connecting the phenomenal to the functional and the physical, but none have yet closed the “explanatory gap,” at least to most researchers’ satisfaction: no theory has gained anything like majority support. Metzinger doesn’t spend much time adjudicating theories of consciousness in this book but gives theorists plenty to chew on, including those exploring predictive processing and active inference explanations, to which he seems partial (476).

Why It Matters

Aside from posing an irresistible puzzle the solution to which would go a long way toward naturalizing the mind, why does the quest for consciousness matter? Conscious experiences themselves matter greatly to us, so understanding why and how they arise promises more control over them. We want to minimize negative states – pain, emotional distress – and maximize those affording us pleasure (of course) but also those associated with exploration, mastery, and insight. Experiences of non-duality, according to the descriptions Metzinger quotes, are largely positive states which can include bliss, equanimity, completeness, and clarity, aspects of “the depth and beauty that can come along with the experience of pure awareness” (455). They also, perhaps, reflect a basic truth about consciousness and our fundamental nature as organisms representing reality: the experienced self looking out at the world in ordinary waking consciousness is not an essence, but a construction within consciousness that can be let go. Metzinger suggests that non-dual experience is closer to the scientific view of ourselves, which finds no such essence, than worldviews which posit a soul or abiding substantial self. It also aligns with a naturalized version of spiritual self-transcendence: the experiential realization, all metaphysical concepts set aside (since no thinking is going on), of being fully embedded in an all-encompassing reality. For these reasons – affective, epistemic, spiritual – the experience of non-dual awareness recommends itself as a state worth cultivating. And indeed, meditation as a secular, non-denominational practice has been growing rapidly in popularity, even as affiliation with organized religion in the West has declined.

Toward a Culture of Consciousness

In a wide-ranging epilogue, Metzinger addresses the cultural significance of conscious experience as each person’s subjective, and inescapable, domain of affective and cognitive possibilities. Many of us may realize only a fraction of our positive experiential potential due to economic and social factors, and the very idea of developing that potential has seldom been proposed as a priority, at least in the cultural mainstream. (Timothy Leary and the psychonauts of the 1960s and 70s never persuaded most regular folk that the intentional pursuit of altered states was legitimate.) Metzinger suggests we embark on the creation of an ethical and rational “culture of consciousness”: identifying and cultivating intrinsically valuable conscious states while protecting each person’s mental autonomy. He understands the challenges such a project faces given rapid advances in psychoactive pharmacology, virtual reality systems, mind-brain interfaces, social media, and other technologies that can be used to capture and control our attention for corporate profit, not necessarily for our own good. The deliberate exploration of our conscious potential also raises difficult legal and regulatory questions about what sorts of experiences, if any, are too dangerous or destabilizing to permit.

An ethical culture of consciousness must, he suggests, confront the problem of animal suffering and the possibility that artificial intelligences too might become capable of it. Here, understanding the basis for consciousness becomes particularly important in determining which animals, and what sorts of non-biological systems, are conscious beings and thus moral subjects whose interests we should respect. In advance of a settled theory of consciousness, the pursuit of general machine intelligence thus risks the creation of artificial, but very real suffering about which we might remain blissfully unaware. For this reason, Metzinger advocates a global moratorium on developing artificial sentience.

On the positive side, he invites us to consider what routes we might take to maximize our conscious potential, including teaching secular meditation in school, the safe use of psychedelics, and developing technology-assisted aids such as neurofeedback. And what might a good conscious death involve? In closing, he calls for a naturalized spirituality in which meditative practice and intellectual honesty, by affording us some personal dignity, can help us cope with the looming existential crisis of climate change, what he describes as a manifest failure of collective responsibility.

Conclusion

Whether or not anything like a culture of consciousness emerges, Metzinger gives us an encyclopedic first cut at describing the experiential essence of advanced meditative practice, its possible basis in our embodied cognitive architecture, the role it might play in understanding consciousness, and its significance for personal and social good. He says, in typically modest fashion, that he’s merely provided an appetizer in advance of the main course, yet to come, on consciousness research and the cultivation of desirable conscious states. Perhaps, but in addition to his careful analysis of non-dual awareness, Metzinger sets an ambitious agenda for exploring and developing our experiential potential within a secular, scientific, and ethically informed framework. For anyone interested in consciousness and its possibilities, whether from a personal, cultural, or theoretical standpoint, this book is a unique and ground-breaking resource.

- Tom Clark, March, 2024

Free Will Foretold: Review of Peter B. Clark on Compatibilism

Tom Clark

Book Title:

The Compatibility of Free Will and Determinism

Book Author:

Peter B. Clark

Category:

Free Will

Purchase this book via:

The Compatibility of Free Will and Determinism

In 1963, a very smart senior at Reed College wrote a thesis prefiguring arguments of contemporary philosophers who claim that genuine human agency is compatible with determinism. It stands as a trenchant critique of libertarian free will, helping to naturalize our self-conception in light of science.

Free Will Foretold

Review of

Peter B. Clark

The Perceived Threat of Determinism to Human Agency

Despite efforts over decades by compatibilist philosophers – those who hold that determinism is compatible with free will and moral responsibility – determinism is still widely perceived as the enemy of human freedom. How can we be free and responsible if, as is possibly the case, we are the fully caused products of genetic and environmental factors we didn’t choose? And if the causal story of our creation is perhaps leavened by a random swerve here and there at the microphysical level, how can that add to our self-formation, our control over behavior, and our responsibility for it?

About sixty years ago as of this writing, one Peter B. Clark (Peter the Younger, PtY), a smart senior at Reed College and future economist at the International Money Fund, produced a thesis aiming to reassure us about this. Now brought to light, (Kindle edition here) it stands as an astute argument that, properly understood and put in its place, determinism poses no threat to human freedom and responsibility. Philosophy being what it is, there has of course been lots of continuing debate in the years since. As PtY puts it, given disagreements about the meaning of key terms “…philosophy is not a science; a proof in philosophy does not necessarily imply that anything has been proved.” His monograph thus remains a good exposition of much that’s still central to the free will debate, and his arguments pass the test of relevance, anticipating those put forth by today’s philosophers of agency.[1] It is therefore meet and right that his thesis be given its due as a cogent precursor of current thinking about free will. Not to mention that this precocious undergraduate had a good sense of style and clear argumentative structure, making for relatively straightforward reading despite the necessary technicalities. It could easily pass for graduate level work. How he managed at such a tender age to so skillfully command and disambiguate the concepts that populate the free will debate is, Peter the Elder (PtE) now admits, somewhat of a mystery. But the stewardship of philosopher Hugo Bedau, who signed off on the thesis, no doubt contributed.

Why It Matters: Moral Responsibility in Question

PtY locates the practical importance of the debate where many now agree it resides: in worries about moral responsibility.[2] If, as is conceivably the case, science eventually shows human behavior to be explicable in terms of reliable causal relations at various levels (physical, chemical, biological, psychological), then it seems to leave the person as an originator of action out of a job, calling into question commonsense ideas of credit and blame. If in an actual situation I couldn’t have acted otherwise given all the causes in play, how am I free and perhaps deserving of praise or censure? The potential personal and social ramifications of the free will debate are therefore considerable, encompassing deep disagreements about such things as retributive punishment, economic inequality, and just deserts.[3] As PtY points out in his introduction, the hope of compatibilists (who think free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism) is to persuade libertarians (who think determinism threatens freedom and responsibility) that in fact there is no incompatibility or threat here. Even if our behavior is physically necessitated, PtY will argue, we can still legitimately hold each other morally responsible. The arguments to come are thus mainly directed at libertarians, among whom are arguably the majority of non-philosophers, although a distinct minority of philosophers as well.[4] But he says determinists too sometimes stray from a proper interpretation of their outlook. He also rightly observes that the truth of determinism is not at issue: “…if it is true that determinism does not negate man’s freedom, then there is no need to find out whether determinism is true.” But since it might be true, the libertarian worry, and any determinist misconceptions, must be addressed in order to keep the world safe for moral responsibility.

Scientific Determinism

As described in the introduction (Chapter 1), the determinism that upsets libertarians is the idea that if human behavior follows scientifically described exceptionless natural laws, then those laws, when applied to a given situation, logically entail that only a single behavior is possible. Therefore, it seems that if determinism is true, one’s actions, whatever they were, were unavoidable. And to act freely and be morally responsible, one must have been able to avoid behaving as one did, that is, able to act otherwise than one did, what PtY calls the avoidability condition for moral responsibility: “That we do hold people responsible only for those acts which could have been avoided is a fact of our social life.” The challenge from science to human freedom thus looms: “So far precise laws with a high predictive value have been developed mainly in the physical sciences. However, there is no reason to suppose that such laws cannot be developed for human behavior.”

In a typically nuanced and careful discussion, PtY notes that the determinism in question – what he calls scientific determinism – is that of the logical relations between terms of a scientific theory which then are applied in describing human action:

If determinism is understood in this sense, i.e., as a term referring to the logically necessary connections between the terms of a scientific theory, then (in the formal mode) an event may be said to be determined if and only if its description is deducible from a set of expressions describing the initial conditions of a system in terms of a scientific theory. Throughout this thesis an event, choice, action, etc., will be said to be determined in that sense of “determined” defined here.

Why We Needn’t Escape Determinism

With the potential conflict between determinism and avoidability (and thus moral responsibility) introduced, Chapter 2 critiques elements of the libertarian position on free will, with extensive quotations from its then major proponents, in particular C.A. Campbell, its “most outspoken defender.” The basic libertarian contention is that “…a person is free if and only if his actions and choices cannot be predicted and explained by scientific laws...” It seems to the libertarian that only by being exceptions to determinism – by having contra-causal powers – do we have the ability to do otherwise that then makes us free and responsible. What’s properly meant by the ability to do otherwise will figure centrally in chapter 4, but here PtY offers an insightful analysis of what he takes to be faulty libertarian intuitions, showing them to be naturalistically implausible. Unfortunately (I’d say), they persist widely among the folk (my term for non-philosophers) and are still defended by some in the academy.

One is that determinism somehow robs the person of causal power, which is instead attributed to the antecedent conditions that explain (by having caused) the person, their motives, decisions, and actions. To be a free and responsible libertarian agent, the person must not be fully traceable to such conditions, but ultimately self-caused in some respect. But as PtY points out, the fact that the agent herself might be determined (and the science of human behavior grows apace) does not entail that she does not determine her choices. A consistent application of determinism locates causal power within the individual as well as outside, which meets what PtY suggests is the other main requirement for moral responsibility besides avoidability: the self-determination condition for a free choice. We are, in natural fact, determinators of action – we are robust proximate sources of behavioral control – even if it turns out we ourselves are fully explained in terms of a deterministic scientific description. Determinism might rule out alternative possibilities in actual situations (as opposed to counterfactual, see below re Chapter 4), but it doesn’t strip the agent of the causal powers and control that produce effects in those situations. The belief that it does, and the resulting intuition that determinism entails fatalism, is one factor blocking acceptance of a naturalistic causal understanding of ourselves.[5]

Another misconception harbored by libertarians is that our feeling of freedom – of choosing between what seem genuinely open possibilities – is good evidence that we somehow evade or transcend determinism and that there is a controlling self independent of motives and desires that arbitrates among them when making choices. Against what he calls “the appeal to introspection,” PtY observes: “The necessity of the deterministic system which the libertarian attempts to disprove is logical necessity, and this kind of necessity cannot be disproved by examining one’s feelings.” This anticipates what a respected philosophical expert, Alfred Mele, says about libertarian free will (“deep openness”) in his 2022 guide to free will for non-experts: “What I’m saying is that the difference between deep openness and its absence isn’t the kind of thing that can be felt. We sometimes do feel uncertain about what we will do. But we can have exactly that feeling even if the universe is deterministic.” (Mele 2022, p. 142) The basic epistemic precept PtY and Mele are getting at here is that one’s subjective experience shouldn’t be taken as a reliable indicator of what’s objectively the case.

PtY also makes an important and not uncontested claim about our essential nature which bears on conceptions of free will: “The point is that we don’t think of a person or a self as something over and above, and independent from the desires, habits, motives and dispositions of the person or self.” This is non-dual music to my naturalist ears, but evidence coming from Xphi research (see note 4) suggests many folks might harbor at least a latent, sometimes supernatural dualism concerning the self, e.g., of a soul or spirit that rides herd on desire.[6] If compatibilism requires giving up such a self, then it might be a tough sell in the wider culture. Dualism about the self and the belief that it has contra-causal capacities aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

Why Determinism Isn’t a Universal Excuse

After this bracing critique of libertarian intuitions, Chapter 3 proceeds to dispatch a further common misreading of determinism: that by explaining behavior as governed by laws it somehow excuses wrongful or criminal acts. One might suppose that, if determinism logically necessitates that a particular act occurred given the conditions and causal relations in play, then the agent couldn’t have done otherwise, so can’t be morally responsible, and thus must be excused. But in looking at the excuses commonly adduced in a criminal law textbook, and in analyses of tort liability, PtY finds no mention of determining conditions as a defense that negates culpability. But he also takes a careful look, in light of our actual conceptions of an excuse, at the faulty reasons that might lead us to imagine that determining conditions count as excuses. One is that determinism is akin to compulsion, that it somehow undermines the intentional, voluntary aspect of behavior originating in an agent’s character and motivations – the self-determination condition for moral responsibility. But, as PtY says, “to show that an action was determined would not enlighten us about the circumstances of the action in such a way that would influence us in our allocation of responsibility,” for instance, whether it was done intentionally and voluntarily as opposed to under duress. He points out that the logical necessity of determinism is quite other than the necessity involved in compulsion, which has to do with being forced to act against one’s intentions and desires, or with lacking the capacity to resist doing what one should not have done. Determinism leaves the distinction between voluntary action and compulsion perfectly intact.

The intuition that determinism might excuse wrongful acts has been dubbed the “fundamental psycho-legal error” by philosopher of law Stephen Morse (Morse 2004, Moore 2014). Morse concludes, as did PtY decades before him, that “All behavior may be caused in a physical universe, but not all behavior is excused, because causation per se has nothing to do with responsibility” (Morse 2004). Agents, albeit possibly fully caused to be who they are and act as they do, are themselves usually (not always) the reasons-sensitive and consequence-anticipating causers of action, and as such are justifiably held responsible as a means to “guide goodness,” as Morse puts it.

Could You Have Done Otherwise?

Still, the intuition might persist that determinism negates the avoidability condition. This is the central concern of chapter 4, a detailed analysis of what we mean, or should mean, by could have done otherwise. In the most demanding section of his thesis, PtY compares at length the views of philosophers, including J. L. Austin, P. H. Nowell-Smith, Gilbert Ryle, and John Canfield, on the meaning of can. He concludes that the best reading of it consistent with logic and ordinary usage is that you could have done something if you had the ability and opportunity to do it, even if you didn’t actually do it. The thought experiment he uses, “Austin’s putt,” originally described in J. L. Austin’s classic paper “Ifs and Cans” (Austin 1956) and Nowell-Smith’s paper of the same title (Nowell-Smith 1960), is also deployed by Daniel Dennett years later in his book Freedom Evolves (Dennett 2004, p. 75). Dennett uses it to reach the same conclusion: we shouldn’t suppose determinism entails unavoidability, what he calls inevitability.

What does it mean, they ask, to say that Austin on a particular occasion could have made the (easy) putt, even though he missed it? On a deterministic reading, that of physical necessity, it looks as if he couldn’t have done otherwise given all the conditions in play; but both PtY and Dennett argue that this isn’t the correct perspective to take when asking what he could have done. If you can regularly sink a putt at a certain distance, and nothing is preventing you from exercising that ability (so you have the opportunity to exercise it), then you could have sunk it even if you didn’t on a particular occasion. We can likely explain why you didn’t, e.g., a momentary lapse of attention, which, had it not occurred, would have resulted in you holing the ball. This means it wasn’t unavoidable or inevitable that you missed: you likely would have holed it had the lapse not occurred. In general, as PtY puts it, “To say that someone could have avoided doing something is to say that he had the ability and the opportunity to do something else.” Determinism doesn’t entail that neither the ability nor opportunity were present on the occasion when you didn’t make the putt, even though a causal analysis could likely explain why you didn’t. More consequentially, morally responsible agents are those that have the general abilities – rationality, sensitivity to and knowledge of norms, standard capacities of anticipation, deliberation, and self-control, all of which Dennett calls moral competence – to do the right thing, even if on a particular occasion they don’t. Such competence makes them justifiably subject to responsibility practices involving praise and blame which make it more likely they will exercise their ability to do the right thing on future occasions.

This sense of could have done otherwise, what PtY and Dennett want us to endorse, is called by philosophers conditional or counterfactual: I likely would not have cheated on the test had the conditions been somewhat different, for example had the proctor been standing over my shoulder. Had that been the case, I wouldn’t have cribbed from my friend’s worksheet since my abilities include sensitivity to surveillance and knowledge that cheating is wrong. So, in that sense it wasn’t inevitable or unavoidable that I cheated, and this sense is compatible with the determinism that may have held in the actual situation. However, there’s also what’s called the unconditional sense of doing otherwise, which has it that given conditions exactly as they were, I might not have cheated and thus could have avoided cheating. This sort of avoidability, it seems, is incompatible with determinism since on determinism there’s no reason to suppose I would have done otherwise given the conditions and causes in play in the actual situation. But it’s this sense – our being local exceptions to causal necessity – that the libertarian, whether in the academy or on the street, thinks is crucial in establishing moral responsibility (see above re chapters 2 and 3). According to PtY, as well as Dennett and most naturalist philosophers, we are not such exceptions, and they would say we don’t need to be exceptions be held morally responsible. We only need to be morally competent, and most of us are.

Compatibilism Meets Free Will Skepticism in the 21^st Century

An important conclusion PtY draws from his analysis is that “Whenever a philosopher says that the fact that an action is determined means that the agent could not have acted otherwise, he should be very careful to indicate the special meaning he is giving to ‘could’.” Good advice for anyone discoursing about free will. But, as noted above, this supposedly special meaning undergirds the widespread libertarian intuition among the folk, and among some philosophers, that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility. They think we need to be unconditionally free – ultimately self-created first causers in some sense – to be justly held responsible (Nadelhoffer et al. 2020). Currently, a growing band of free will and moral responsibility skeptics (Waller 2011, Focquaert et al., 2020, Caruso 2021, Pereboom 2021, Caruso & Pereboom 2022) leverage this intuition to argue against what they call basic desert responsibility, that which is used to justify punishment in the retributive sense, where no socially beneficial consequence of punishment need obtain, e.g., public safety, deterrence, or moral reform.[7] Determinists, they argue, need to show why morally competent agents deserve non-consequentialist harsh treatment if, as is likely the case, they were fully caused (determined) to become who they are and behave as they do, and where indeterminism, should it play a role, can’t add to anyone’s control or responsibility. So, although PtY presents a strong case against libertarianism, his compatibilist determinism, still very much the majority position in the academy, is being challenged as an insufficient basis for retribution, one of the dominant justifications for punishment in the United States (Focquaert et al. 2020, Caruso 2021).[8] He could not, sixty years ago, have anticipated the increasingly public questioning of libertarian free will coming from a scientific, naturalistic perspective that’s now underway (Harris 2012, Sapolsky 2017, Sapolsky 2023). Not only is retribution under pressure from such questioning, but also desert-based justifications for increasingly extreme social and economic inequality: are billionaires and the top 1% self-made in a way that makes them deeply deserving of their riches, or are they, perhaps, simply lucky in their causal antecedents? More generally, it challenges what’s called the just world belief: that people usually get what they deserve in life (e.g., rags instead of riches, prison instead of liberty) because they could have unconditionally done otherwise, but simply chose not to.[9]

These challenges, momentous as they are, do not upset the good sense that abides in PtY’s thesis and that still typifies compatibilist reassurances about being free and responsible. Were determinism the case (and indeterminism doesn’t help) we do, as he argues, have agential capacities that underwrite the self-determination condition for free, morally responsible action, and that make it the case (for most of us) that we could have done otherwise in the conditional, counterfactual sense, meeting the avoidability criterion thus defined. Peter the Elder can justifiably look back and admire the work of his personal predecessor in articulating a naturalistic and logically compelling case that determinism doesn’t threaten the practical basis, and necessity, for holding each other responsible, even if certain responsibility practices can be called into question. Those following the debate on free will and moral responsibility, especially those engaged in the philosophical arguments, will find much here not only of historical interest, but of current relevance as the science of human nature intrudes on libertarian intuitions. Determinism, should it be true, doesn’t diminish us, and Peter the Younger was ahead of the curve, for his age and in his era, in showing why.

TWC 10/2023

References

Austin, J. L. 1956. Ifs and Cans. Proceedings of the British Academy 42, pp. 109-152.

Bourget, D. & Chalmers, D. 2020. The 2020 PhilPapers Survey. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4838

Caruso, G. D. & Dennett, D. C. 2021. Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. Cambridge: Polity Books. Reviewed here.

Caruso, G. D. & Pereboom, D. 2022. Moral Responsibility Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Caruso, G. D. 2021. Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reviewed here.

Clark, T. W. 2001. Against retribution: review of Placing Blame by Michael S. Moore. Naturalism.Org https://www.naturalism.org/resources/book-reviews/against-retribution

Clark T. W. 2005. Re: Morse and retribution. Naturalism.Org https://www.naturalism.org/applied-naturalism/criminal-justice/retribution/morse-and-retribution

Clark, T. W. 2008. Don’t forget about me: avoiding demoralization by determinism. Naturalism.Org. https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/free-will/dont-forget-about-me

Dennett, D.C. 2004. Freedom Evolves. New York: Penguin Books.

Fischer, J. M. et al., 2007. Four Views on Free Will. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Reviewed here.

Fischer, J. M. forthcoming. Moral responsibility skepticism: semiretributivism. Reply to this here.

Focquaert et al. 2020. Justice Without Retribution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Stakeholder Views and Practical Implications. Neuroethics Special Issue V13 (1).

Harris, S. 2012. Free Will. New York: Free Press.

Hirstein, W. et al. 2018. Responsible Brains: Neuroscience, Law, and Human Culpability. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Kelly, E. I. 2018. The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Knobe, J. & S. Nichols 2017. "Experimental Philosophy," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/experimental-philosophy

Mele, A. R. 2022. Free Will: An Opiniated Guide. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moore, M. S. 2014. Stephen Morse on the fundamental psycho-legal error. Criminal Law and Philosophy V10, pp. 45–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9299-0

Morse, S. J. 2004. New neuroscience, old problems. Cerebrum. Dana Foundation. https://dana.org/article/new-neuroscience-old-problems/

Morse, S. J. 2004. Reasons, results, and criminal responsibility. Illinois Law Review. http://illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2004/2/Morse.pdf

Nadelhoffer, T., Yin, S., & Graves, R. 2020. Folk intuitions and the conditional ability to do otherwise. Philosophical Psychology, 33(7), 968–996. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2020.1817884

Nowell-Smith, P.H. 1960. Ifs and Cans. Theoria, 26, pp. 85-101.

Pereboom, D. 2021. Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sapolsky, R. M. 2017. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York: Penguin Books.

Sapolsky, R. M. 2023. Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Reviewed here.

Waller, B. N. 2011. Against Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: MIT Press. Exchange with Clark, Dennett, Waller on this book here.

Waller, B. N. 2020. Beyond moral responsibility to a system that works. Neuroethics 13, 5–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-017-9351-6

Wisniewski et al. 2019. Free will beliefs are better predicted by dualism than determinism beliefs across different cultures. Plos One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221617

Notes

[1] For debate among advocates of major positions on free will – libertarianism, compatibilism, revisionism, and skepticism – see Fischer et al., 2007.

[2] See for example Pereboom 2021 and Caruso & Pereboom 2022.

[3] See for example Waller 2011, Kelly 2018, Hirstein et al. 2018, Caruso 2021, and Caruso & Dennett 2021.

[4] Using surveys and focus groups, philosophers have studied beliefs about free will and moral responsibility in the general population over the last two decades in what’s called experimental philosophy (“Xphi”). Findings suggest that belief in libertarian free will (or that determinism poses a threat to free will) is common, but also that, depending on how survey questions are framed, non-philosophers also have compatibilist intuitions. Vigorous debate in the Xphi community on methods and the interpretation of data continues, about which see Knobe & Nichols 2017, section 2.2. A 2020 survey of philosophers (Bourget & Chalmers 2020) found that about 19% accept or lean toward libertarianism and nearly 60% accept or lean toward compatibilism.

[5] Fatalism is the thesis that no matter what one does, a particular unavoidable future awaits, effectively removing the agent as a causal influence in how events unfold. Determinism keeps the agent’s causal role intact, in which case what we do matters in determining future events, see Clark 2008.

[6] See for example Wisniewski et al., 2019.

[7] Note that other non-desert senses of moral responsibility survive on their views, about which see Waller 2011, Pereboom 2021, and Caruso & Pereboom 2022. John Martin Fischer, a compatibilist who endorses what he calls semi-retributivism, has noted the increasing influence of free will and moral responsibility skeptics (Fischer forthcoming).

[8] Compatibilists need not endorse retributivism (Daniel Dennett does not) but some of considerable prominence do, in particular Michael S. Moore in his book Placing Blame (reviewed in Clark 2001), Stephen J. Morse (Morse 2004, Clark 2005) and John Martin Fischer (forthcoming).

[9] About belief in a just world and its social consequences, see Waller 2020.

What's Wrong With Determinism? Review of "Determined" by Robert Sapolsky

Tom Clark

Book Title:

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will

Book Author:

Robert M. Sapolsky

Category:

Free Will

Purchase this book via:

Behavioral biologist Robert Sapolsky shows why causal determinism is key to understanding ourselves and how its acceptance can contribute to moral progress.

What's Wrong With Determinism?

review of

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Free will in opposition to determinism

When asked, most folks in most circumstances can give a plausible account of why they decided and acted as they did. They will cite the factors that played a role in the decision, what we can call its determinants, whether these were desires, available options, external constraints, advice they got, you name it. If asked to explain why you’re reading this review, you’ll come up with various reasons and causes that led you here, now.

This commonsensical observation about how we explain ourselves to ourselves and others nevertheless collides with one common conception of free will: that the determinants we might cite in explaining a choice aren’t fully explanatory. In addition, it’s often thought that we have a capacity or ability to select among options in a way that transcends the causal role of those determinants. This ability – what’s sometimes called in philosophical literature contra-causal or libertarian free will – makes it the case that even given all the factors in play we could have chosen otherwise in an actual situation just as it transpired. We are therefore buck-stopping, ultimate authors of our actions and ourselves whose nature and behavior can’t be fully traced to antecedent conditions: we are uncaused or ultimately self-caused causers – in philosophical parlance, a causa sui.

That many harbor this intuition about human agency is why in debates about free will it is commonly contrasted with determinism, the idea that events, including human behavior, can in principle (often not in practice) be fully accounted for by their presumptive determinants. Determinism has it that there is no causally untethered decider or actor in play when explaining a choice, so it couldn’t have turned out otherwise given its causes. For you not to be reading this review right now, some factor that explains your reading it would have to have been different. If free will is widely conceived as being opposed to determinism[1], it isn’t surprising that the latter is seen as a threat to responsibility, meaning, creativity, rationality, and other desiderata tied to our core notion of agency. If we’re fully caused to be who we are and do what we do, then it seems we’re merely biological robots, acting out a pre-ordained script; we don’t make real choices for which we might be praised or blamed.

Could you have done otherwise?

This is why Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, is likely to ruffle more than a few feathers (although it will do so very entertainingly, see below). Following up on his earlier work Behave, Sapolsky, a behavioral biologist, is intent on making it clear to anyone who will listen that there is no escaping determinism if we’re serious about understanding ourselves: understanding how we got to be the exact persons we are and why our intentions and choices arise as they do. Moreover, as he takes pains to point out, indeterminism or randomness doesn’t help the cause of agency. After all, as deciders we want to determine our choices, not have them be subject to factors we don’t control. Strangely enough, therefore, determinism, construed commonsensically as the existence of reliable causal, and more broadly, explanatory connections between our desires, decisions, actions, and their effects on the world, seems a necessary condition of genuine agenthood. We really make choices, just not undetermined or arbitrary ones.[2]

But the fact remains that Sapolsky’s thesis will likely find little immediate acceptance. Most folks will cling tightly to the idea that they could have chosen otherwise in an actual situation with all conditions, including their reasons and desires, exactly as they were. Philosophers call this the unconditional ability to do otherwise, as contrasted with the conditional ability in which, had some condition been otherwise, a different choice might have ensued given that we’re behaviorally flexible.[3] It isn’t difficult to see that exercising the unconditional ability would render a choice unintelligible and arbitrary by sidelining your very own reasons as the final determinants. Try this: If you suppose you could have chosen otherwise on a specific occasion, why didn’t you? Answer that question and you’ll be led to an essentially, albeit only approximately, deterministic explanation of your behavior in terms of the reasons and causes that were in play (approximate because we’re not omniscient about our own behavior, plus there might be inherent indeterminacy in nature). To have chosen otherwise something relevant to your choice would have had to have been otherwise. To want to be free to choose independently of the factors that in hindsight explain a choice, many of which have to do with who we are as specific persons, seems irrational, even though of course we sometimes wish we had chosen otherwise. The determinants of voluntary, deliberate action are thus the necessary currency of agency, not a threat to it. And what applies to your choice applies to you: in principle you’re explicable in terms of a very complex concatenation of causal factors, genetic and environmental, some of which would have had to have been otherwise for you not to be the exact person you are, doing what you’re doing right now.

The causal story

Sapolsky elucidates the determinants of behavior in encyclopedic detail, working back from your current intention to its associated brain state, then to all factors that explain you, your brain, and your intention as an emergent property of what neurons do. There are reams of footnotes, endnotes, and citations of scientific studies. His aim is to convince you that there is no place – none! – for an uncaused intervenor, for instance at the level of brain processes, to play a role in choice making. As far as we can scientifically tell, it’s causal mechanisms at whatever level you care to look, neural, bodily, environmental, or social, all seamlessly interlinked over time and place. Given the complexity of causal interactions and our limited knowledge of them, we usually can’t precisely predict or explain someone’s behavior. But the fact that our explanations and predictions are therefore often probabilistic, not algorithmic, is no reason to posit the causa sui.[4]

Sapolsky’s relentless documentation of the causal story is leavened by a wry, irreverent, and sometimes hilarious self-skepticism. Although his expertise is obvious, he makes sure we understand that he’s just the fallible messenger, so please not to shoot. And he is profusely apologetic for dragging us through the messy mechanics of how the brain governs behavior, and how our circumstances, genetic and environmental, shape us and our brains. He advises us not to underline or take notes, but simply absorb the big mechanistic picture. All told, the tone is like having a beer (or several) with a world-weary apostle of determinism who knows what he’s up against but slogs on, hoping that you’ll see the light (he says you likely won’t, not completely anyway). But slogging has never been so entertaining, and all the details are there if you care to look. If you don’t, there are frequent ordinary language summaries of the main points.

Living in light of determinism

Having argued in the first half of the book that there’s no ghost in the machine, that we are, even in the exercise our highest, most rational capacities, traceable in principle to conditions we couldn’t have controlled, the second half covers how we are to live with determinism. The psychological ideal, which Sapolsky ruefully admits he can’t attain, would be one of unbounded compassion and forbearance, of eschewing reactive attitudes such as anger, disdain, self-blame, and self-aggrandizement premised on the idea of contra-causal, libertarian free will: that we are essentially self-created and thus deeply deserve our accomplishments or failures. But even if we can’t completely divorce ourselves from our reactive attitudes (not a good idea in any case)[5], we should, he says, completely rethink core notions of blame, deservingness (desert), and moral responsibility. He hopes this radical shift in our concept of agency will translate into behavioral change, both personal and social.[6] The latter would involve policy reforms such as abandoning retributive punishment and addressing the conditions that are causally responsible for crime, addiction, mental illness, and other barriers to personal and social well-being. He points out that such a transformation would continue a centuries-long humanitarian evolution in our responsibility practices related to wrong-doing and behavioral disorders: we no longer burn people at the stake, crucify them, or hang them in public to satisfy calls for justice. We no longer blame and punish people for being autistic, schizophrenic, or bipolar. Accepting determinism would be the culmination of naturalizing our self-conception in accord with science: dropping the immaterial soul and its contra-causal freedom. Such naturalization subtracts supernatural and logically incoherent justifications for acting on our naturally evolved penchant for punishment; it thus can mitigate our reactive attitudes, in particular moral anger (see note 5).

**What’s wrong with libertarianism and compatibilism**

Sapolsky has two fights on his hands: one with free will libertarians who maintain that we really do have the unconditional ability to do otherwise (many regular folks probably fall in this camp, along with a small minority of philosophers and scientists), and the other with compatibilists (the majority of philosophers, probably not the folk), who maintain that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism and whatever randomness might exist in nature. He decisively dispatches libertarians by adducing the science behind behavior mentioned above: if you take a naturalistic, evidence-based approach to understanding the world, there really is no place to find the causa sui (if you don’t, then this book likely won’t make a dent in your beliefs about free will). Moreover, in one of his many detailed sub-investigations Sapolsky can discover no neural mechanism that corresponds to the unconditional ability to do otherwise, despite the claims of libertarian philosophers and neuroscientists, e.g., Robert Kane and Peter Tse, that there is such a mechanism.[7]

The fight with compatibilists isn’t about determinism; compatibilists agree that we and our choices are in principle explicable by various determinants, not the causa sui. It’s rather about the relative importance assigned to determinism and its implications for moral responsibility and other beliefs, attitudes, and social practices informed by our conception of agency. Sapolsky argues that compatibilists tend to ignore the causal story behind an individual in order to fix our attention on agents and their capacities for rationality and reasons-responsiveness, capacities that compatibilists argue justify holding each other morally responsible.[8] Most of us are capable in these respects to varying degrees, but by downplaying determinism and the causal story, what Sapolsky calls taking the ahistorical stance, compatibilists in effect block access to the psychological and practical benefits of putting determinism front and center: increased compassion and more attention paid to the conditions that thwart human flourishing. Due to factors beyond our control too many of us end up with the short end of the stick when it comes to health, education, social skills, and employability. Sapolsky is especially critical of compatibilist Daniel Dennett, who has claimed that “luck averages out in the long run”. He responds in characteristically plain-spoken style:

No it doesn’t. Suppose you’re born a crack baby. In order to counterbalance this bad luck, does society rush in to ensure that you’ll be raised in relative affluence and with various therapies to overcome your neurodevelopmental problems? No, you are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there. Well then, says society, at least let’s make sure your mother is loving, is stable, has lots of free time to nurture you with books and museum visits. Yeah, right; as we know your mother is likely to be drowning in the pathological consequences of her own miserable luck in life, with a good chance of leaving you neglected, abused, shuttled through foster homes. Well, does society at least mobilize then to counterbalance that additional bad luck, ensuring you live in a safe neighborhood with excellent schools? Nope, your neighborhood is likely to be gang-riddled and your school underfunded.

In arguing against compatibilists, Sapolsky engages with the philosophical literature, citing skeptics about free will and moral responsibility such as Neil Levy, Gregg Caruso, Derk Pereboom, and Sam Harris (see references below). Such backup suggests he is not completely crazy to think that a robust appreciation of determinism, and therefore the sheer contingency of our formative circumstances, should force reconsideration of our conceptions of credit, blame, reward, and punishment. Compatibilists generally suppose we can keep our current system of moral responsibility more or less as it stands; that, for example, rational wrong-doers who act intentionally deserve punishment independently of any forward-looking benefits – the definition of retribution. Incompatibilists such as Sapolsky and his allies say no: given determinism, such desert lacks foundation and therefore the criminal justice system in the US, committed to retributive punishment, needs radical reform. More broadly, we should question the idea of a just world: that people generally get what they deserve since they could, and should, have overcome their circumstances using their unconditional ability to have done otherwise. But no one has that ability, so your good or bad character or fortune, and the current exercise of your good or bad judgment, is ultimately traceable to circumstances that were not under your control.

Reassurances about determinism

All this is well taken in my view, but compatibilists also have a point: agency and responsibility must be compatible with determinism (and any indeterminism that plays a role in behavior, which can’t add to authorship or control).[9] In coming to terms with determinism and the science behind it, what Sapolsky urges on us, we shouldn’t deny the reality of our own causal powers or of our own local control.[10] We don’t need to be exceptions to cause and effect, or ultimately self-caused, to be potent causers and controllers in our own right, and to be held responsible in a forward-looking way that helps to shape behavior for the good. Reliable causal relations between desire, deliberation, intention, and action need to be in place for us to be effective agents, and as noted above any disconnection from the causal context would make the exercise of our will a mystery, not our own doing. Seen in this light, determinism is not a bitter pill, not a derogation of human dignity or power, but the very key to agency. Even if their defense of desert-based moral responsibility fails, compatibilists have got this much right.

Sapolsky reassures us that fostering disbelief in libertarian freedom will not result in moral anarchy. Just as atheists can be good without God, so too can skeptics about the unconditional ability to do otherwise. But he is circumspect about success in converting free will believers given the presumption against determinism. Fortunately, he is not alone in this quest. Besides the work of allies mentioned above (Levy, Caruso, Pereboom, and Harris) challenging the existence of contra-causal free will has become almost a commonplace in secular scientific circles as well as a topic of articles in the mainstream press.[11] And in the behavioral health community talk about the social determinants of health, addiction, and crime is now standard.[12] To what extent and how quickly might a determinist perspective spread among regular folk? Acceptance of determinism will depend in large part on how it’s portrayed: not as an affront to a realistic conception of autonomy, but its basis. Not as fatalism, but as key to effective action informed by greater knowledge of the causal and explanatory relations that govern behavior. Not as a blanket excuse, but as an evidence-based view of wrongdoing that will lead to a more humane criminal justice system. Not as universally true, given that indeterminism might exist in nature, but as a pragmatically useful perspective that affords us greater compassion and control, a secure basis on which to understand ourselves in service to human and planetary flourishing.

Determinism is unlikely to go viral any time soon given its image as the enemy of freedom, but that perception may shift as the incoherence of libertarian free will becomes apparent, and as the evidence for our complete inclusion in the causal order grows. Sapolsky has marshalled a compelling case for such inclusion, presented it with unconventional flair, and shown the practical and ethical advantages of taking determinism to heart. His persistence in seeing Determined to completion – a prodigious undertaking – is much to be congratulated, although he would disavow deserving any such praise. Even if he’s right about that, we’re still lucky to have him.

TWC, 9/16/2023

References

Caruso, G. 2021. Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice. Cambridge University Press.

Clark, P. B. 2023 (1963). The Compatibility of Free Will and Determinism. Opus/Politics and Prose.

Feldman, G., & Chandrashekar, S. P. (2018). Laypersons’ Beliefs and Intuitions About Free Will and Determinism: New Insights Linking the Social Psychology and Experimental Philosophy Paradigms. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(5), 539–549.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617713254

Harris, S. 2012. Free Will. Free Press.

Levy, N. 2015. Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Oxford University Press.

Pearl, J. 2018. The Book of Why. Basic Books.

Pereboom, D. 2001. Living Without Free Will. Cambridge University Press.

Pinker, S. 2008. “Fear of Determinism” in Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will, John Baer, James C. Kaufman, and Roy F. Baumeister, editors. Oxford University Press.

Nadelhoffer, T., Siyuan Yin & Rose Graves (2020) Folk intuitions and the conditional ability to do otherwise, Philosophical Psychology, 33:7, 968-996, DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2020.1817884

Waller, B. 2011. Against Moral Responsibility. MIT Press.

Notes

[1] Definitions of free will vary, so it’s important to specify what we mean by “free will” prior to claiming it exists or doesn’t. The intuition that we have the contra-causal variety (at odds with determinism) seems widespread, see Feldman et al. 2018.

[2] In a book chapter titled “Fear of Determinism,” Steven Pinker puts it this way: “The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you.”

[3] See Nadelhoffer et al. 2020 for evidence that many folks suppose they have the unconditional ability to do otherwise. See also note 6 below. For a careful analysis comparing the two senses of the ability to do otherwise, see Ch 4, “Determinism and Avoidability” in Clark, 2023 (1963).

[4] On how progress is being made in understanding causal relations and mathematically formalizing causal inference, see Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect.

[5] Losing our capacity for say, moral anger, altogether would make us easy marks for cheaters and wrongdoers, so isn’t advisable. But determinism can mitigate moral anger by eliminating the deeply deserving libertarian agent, thus reducing the chances of anger overshooting its naturally evolved function. On this point see my critique of philosopher John Martin Fisher’s proposal to adopt what he calls semiretributivism.

[6] Determinism, as Sapolsky points out, is no bar to change. That you couldn’t have done otherwise in an actual past situation doesn’t imply that you’re fated to act the same way in a future similar situation, given what you’ve learned from experience. Social progress too is perfectly compatible with determinism: knowing the determinants of beliefs, attitudes, and behavior is an aid, not an impediment, to implementing more enlightened policies.

[7] For philosophical and neuroscientific defenses of libertarian free will, see Robert Kane’s The Significance of Free Will and Peter Tse’s The Neural Basis of Free Will.

[8] Along the same lines, my review of Bruce Waller’s book Against Moral Responsibility is titled Singling out the agent.

[9] See Clark 2023 (1963) for a carefully argued case for compatibilism.

[10] Sapolsky sometimes seems to suggest we don’t have local, proximate control over our own behavior: “We are not captains of our ships, our ships never had captains.” “’There, I just decided to pick up this pen – are you telling me that was completely out of my control?’ Yes, I am.” We don’t have ultimate, contra-causal control, but I imagine he’d agree that the brain is more or less in control of the body (with lots of reciprocal influence of course). If as physical beings we are basically brains in bodies, then we are in control of what we do, even if we are entirely determined in how that control is exercised.

[11] See for example There’s No Such Thing as Free Will (2016) in The Atlantic and The Clockwork Universe: Is Free Will an Illusion? (2021) in The Guardian.

[12] See for example this explainer on the social determinants of health (SDOH) from the Healthy People 2030 initiative.

Causal Responsibility for Addiction

This 2022 paper was an invited contribution to the Addictive Behaviors special issue on New Directions at the Intersection of Addiction and Morality. Here's the abstract, and a pdf is linked below:

Addictive behavior sometimes involves harmful moral transgressions for which the addicted individual may be blamed. However, blame may motivate addiction stigma, which has its own harmful consequences, including failures to provide or seek out treatment and recovery resources. Minimizing blame and stigma, while acknowledging the moral dimension of addictive behavior, thus recommends itself as a worthy public health objective. The disease and choice models of addiction both face difficulties in reducing stigma, the latter because harmful choices are considered culpable. By challenging the widely held libertarian conception of human agency, an explicitly deterministic understanding of the genesis and expression of addiction, including voluntary choices, can help keep reactive attitudes to wrongdoing in check. This will mitigate the perceived blameworthiness of addicted individuals, thus reducing stigma and increasing the chances of finding compassionate and effective care. Such an approach to addiction will recognize the need for moral accountability but not include punitive attitudes and policies justified by belief in libertarian agency.

A pdf of the article is here.

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Coming to Terms with Determinism

This talk on pragmatic determinism was recorded on December 7, 2021, one of a series of lectures sponsored by Keele University and the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK.

Talk summary: One common conception of free will has it that if causal determinism is true, we can’t be free, what’s sometimes called the problem of free will and determinism. As a result, determinism – reliable cause and effect relations – is widely viewed as a threat to autonomy and responsibility. In this talk I aim to rehabilitate the reputation of determinism, showing how a pragmatic (not universal) determinism is not only true, but offers a practical and ethical perspective on human agency. Accepting our complete causal connection to the world can enhance our power and control, while grounding a more compassionate understanding of ourselves and our fellow human beings. We should all be good, pragmatic determinists.

Link to video.

Slides of this talk (PowerPoint) can be downloaded here.

Note: Articles on which this talk was based include Fully caused: coming to terms with determinism and, most recently, What should we tell people about free will? A 2017 talk on pragmatic determinism is linked and described here.

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Locating Consciousness: Why Experience Can't Be Objectified

Here's the abstract of a 2019 paper for the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and a PDF of the final pre-publication draft is linked below.

Abstract: The world appears to conscious creatures in terms of experienced sensory qualities, but science doesn’t find sensory experience in that world, only physical objects and properties. I argue that the failure to locate consciousness in the world is a function of our necessarily representational relation to reality as knowers: we won’t discover the terms in which reality is represented by us in the world as it appears in those terms. Physicalists who are realists about consciousness generally assume its objectivity: experience is something identical with physical processes or properties, perhaps the intrinsic nature of the physical, or perhaps some micro-physical, neural, or emergent property. I argue that this assumption wrongly reifies consciousness; it expects to find qualitative representational content – qualia – in the physical world as characterized using such content. Instead, we should grant that conscious experience constitutes a mind-dependent, subjective, representational reality for cognitive systems such as ourselves, and that the physical world described by science is a represented objective reality. The former, since it exists only for conscious subjects, won’t be found as an entity in the latter. I suggest that naturalistic approaches to explaining consciousness should acknowledge the representational relation and the non-objectivity of experience, and be constrained by evidence that consciousness accompanies certain sorts of behavior-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically-instantiated mind-systems. I evaluate a variety of current hypotheses about consciousness on that basis, and suggest that a mature science of representation may eventually help explain why, perhaps as a matter of representational necessity, experience arises as a natural but not objectively discoverable phenomenon.

A PDF of the final pre-publication draft is here.

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Epistemology