Can Life Be Meaningful without Free Will?

Philosophia - If we lack deep free agency, like that supposed by metaphysical libertarianism, should we view life as meaningless, pointless, or not worth living? Here I present a new argument in...     

“Free will” is vague

This paper argues that “free will” is vague. The argument has two steps. First, I argue that free will is a matter of degrees and, second, that there are no sharp boundaries separating free decisions and actions and non-free ones. After presenting the argument, I focus on one significant consequence of the thesis, although others are mentioned along the way. In short, considerations of vagueness help understand the logic behind so-called manipulation arguments, but also show why these arguments are ultimately flawed.     

Free will and moral responsibility: does either require the other?

This article explores the conceptual connections between free action and action for which the agent is morally responsible. Questions addressed include the following. Can agents who are never morally responsible for anything sometimes act freely? Can agents who never act freely be morally responsible for some of their actions? Various compatibilist and incompatibilist responses to these questions are discussed, as is the control over their behavior that ordinary agents attribute to themselves.     

Free to blame? Belief in free will is related to victim blaming

The more people believe in free will, the harsher their punishment of criminal offenders. A reason for this finding is that belief in free will leads individuals to perceive others as responsible for their behavior. While research supporting this notion has mainly focused on criminal offenders, the perspective of the victims has been neglected so far. We filled this gap and hypothesized that individuals’ belief in free will is positively correlated with victim blaming—the tendency to make victims responsible for their bad luck. In three studies, we found that the more individuals believe in free will, the more they blame victims. Study 3 revealed that belief in free will is correlated with victim blaming even when controlling for just world beliefs, religious worldviews, and political ideology. The results contribute to a more differentiated view of the role of free will beliefs and attributed intentions.     

Is consciousness intrinsically valuable?

There are some things that we think are intrinsically valuable, or valuable for their own sake. Is consciousness—subjective, qualitative experience—one of those things? Some theorists favor the positive view, according to which consciousness is intrinsically valuable. According to a positive theorist, consciousness itself accrues intrinsic value, independent of the particular kind of experience instantiated. In contrast, I favor the neutral view, according to which consciousness is neither intrinsically valuable nor disvaluable. The primary purpose of this paper is to clarify what is at stake when we ask whether consciousness is intrinsically valuable, to carve out the theoretical space, and to evaluate the question rigorously. The secondary purpose is to show why the neutral view is attractive and why certain arguments for the positive view do not work.

     

What is consciousness for?

The answer to the title question is, in a word, volition. Our hypothesis is that the ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible. All conscious processes exist to subserve that ultimate function. Thus, we believe that all conscious organisms possess at least some volitional capability. Consciousness makes volitional attention possible; volitional attention, in turn, makes volitional movement possible. There is, as far as we know, no valid theoretical argument or convincing empirical evidence that consciousness itself has any direct causal efficacy other than volition. Consciousness, via volitional action, increases the likelihood that an organism will direct its attention, and ultimately its movements, to whatever is most important for its survival and reproduction.     

How many kinds of consciousness?

Ned Block's influential distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness has become a staple of current discussions of consciousness. It is not often noted, however, that his distinction tacitly embodies unargued theoretical assumptions that favor some theoretical treatments at the expense of others. This is equally so for his less widely discussed distinction between phenomenal consciousness and what he calls reflexive consciousness. I argue that the distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, as Block draws it, is untenable. Though mental states that have qualitative character plainly differ from those with no mental qualities, a mental state's being conscious is the same property for both kinds of mental state. For one thing, as Block describes access consciousness, that notion does not pick out any property that we intuitively count as a mental state's being conscious. But the deeper problem is that Block's notion of phenomenal consciousness, or phenomenality, is ambiguous as between two very different mental properties. The failure to distinguish these results in the begging of important theoretical questions. Once the two kinds of phenomenality have been distinguished, the way is clear to explain qualitative consciousness by appeal to a model such as the higher-order-thought hypothesis.     

Are we explaining consciousness yet?

Theorists are converging from quite different quarters on a version of the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, but there are residual confusions to be dissolved. In particular, theorists must resist the temptation to see global accessibility as the cause of consciousness (as if consciousness were some other, further condition); rather, it is consciousness. A useful metaphor for keeping this elusive idea in focus is that consciousness is rather like fame in the brain. It is not a privileged medium of representation, or an added property some states have; it is the very mutual accessibility that gives some informational states the powers that come with a subject's consciousness of that information. Like fame, consciousness is not a momentary condition, or a purely dispositional state, but rather a matter of actual influence over time. Theorists who take on the task of accounting for the aftermath that is critical for consciousness often appear to be leaving out the Subject of consciousness, when in fact they are providing an analysis of the Subject, a necessary component in any serious theory of consciousness.     

The consciousness continuum: from “qualia” to “free will”

The consciousness continuum is seen as extending from simple sensory experiences to complex subjective constructions resulting in the apparent exercise of conscious will. The phenomena between these two extremes include spontaneously occurring mental contents, unintended perceptual experiences, memory retrievals, and problem solving including feedback of conscious contents. Two factors describe this continuum: The presence or absence of intention (psychologically defined) and the complexity of the cognitive construction involved. Among other benefits, such an analysis is intended to provide an alternative to metaphysical and vague concepts such as qualia, free will, and intentionality.     

Free will fallibilism and the “two-standpoints” account of freedom

Synthese - In this paper I propose a form of free will fallibilism. Unlike the free will realist who is fully persuaded that we have sufficient evidence of freedom to justify holding individuals...     

Dialectic – a universal for consciousness?

Dialectic is a word of many meanings but used here in the classical sense of the apposition of thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis. The first, counterfactual phase is expressible symbolically by the symmetric difference $, “one or the other, but not both”. The second, synthesis phase is taken here to correspond to the complement ∼$, consisting of commonality and context within the universe of discourse. After a brief discussion of parallels between “events” in quantum theory and the dialectical pair ($, ∼$), it is argued that the latter is more fundamental for brain and mind. Consciousness is “carved at the joints” as comprising basic awareness (=not-unconscious), self-awareness, perception and cognition factored by attention, and emotion. The dialectical pair ($, ∼$) is then referred to Working Memory and Long-Term Memory, categories both mathematical and psychological, knowledge and learning, negotiation and dialogue, problem solving, affect and emotion, and brain structure and function. Coupling previous work by the author for the ($, ∼$) model with the present analysis, it is concluded that the dialectical pair provides a universal for consciousness parallel to its known universal property for the most general sorts of equivalences in mathematics.     

Response-dependence without reduction?

I will discuss those epistemic accounts of truth that say, roughly and at least, that the truth is what all ideally rational people, with maximum evidence, would in the long run come to believe. They have been defended on the grounds that they can solve sceptical problems that traditional accounts cannot surmount, and that they explain the value of truth in ways that traditional (and particularly, minimal) accounts cannot; they have been attacked on the grounds that they collapse into idealism.

I show that all these claims are mistaken. The system of statements accepted by an adherent of an epistemic account who also accepts the equivalence scheme is the same as that accepted by an adherent of a traditional account who also accepts a remarkably strong thesis of epistemic optimism. The singling out of one rather than another claim within this system as defining ‘true’ cannot make as much difference as to imply idealism or refute scepticism.

However, it can make all the difference when it is a matter of explaining the value of truth. For a crucial point in such explanation depends on what can be soundly substituted for what in intensional contexts; above all those governed by such verbs as ‘know’, ‘hope’, ‘believe’, ‘value’. That is, it depends on what expressions are intensionally equivalent. And one point of singling out one formulation as definitional can be to settle just this.

But though some epistemic theorists have deemed ability to explain the value of truth a merit of their account (and lack of this ability a fatal defect of traditional accounts, of minimal accounts in particular), it turns out that minimal accounts of ‘true’ fit a sound account of our valuing of truth in a way that epistemic accounts do not.

In the course of this argument I rebut related positions: e.g. Dummett's, that minimal definitions fail because they cannot account for the point of having a notion of truth, and that an account of the practice of assertion is what would fill this lacuna. I argue to the contrary that if the point of the notion could not be explained on the basis of a traditional definition, it could not be explained at all.     

Doing without representing?

Connectionism and classicism, it generally appears, have at least this much in common: both place some notion of internal representation at the heart of a scientific study of mind. In recent years, however, a much more radical view has gained increasing popularity. This view calls into question the commitment to internal representation itself. More strikingly still, this new wave of anti-representationalism is rooted not in armchair theorizing but in practical attempts to model and understand intelligent, adaptive behavior. In this paper we first present, and then critically assess, a variety of recent anti-representationalist treatments. We suggest that so far, at least, the sceptical rhetoric outpaces both evidence and argument. Some probable causes of this premature scepticism are isolated. Nonetheless, the anti-representationalist challenge is shown to be both important and progressive insofar as it forces us to see beyond the bare representational/non-representational dichotomy and to recognize instead a rich continuum of degrees and types of representationality.