Jenann Ismael

Of the things that happen, a person thinks of some as things he does. What distinguishes these from those that merely happen to him? The things a person does are produced by volition. But that just pushes the question back a step. If a person’s actions are his doings because of their connection to volition, what about the volitions? This chapter suggests that the answer has to do with the logic of the choice situation. It argues that the practical judgments arrived at as the result of deliberation are non-question-begging and inalienably up to a person, that there is no way to take a passive attitude toward them, treating them in the way he treats the objects of other beliefs as something that is there to be represented.

In the search for a theory of quantum gravity, there are strong theoretical pressures that have pushed in the direction of theories in which space (or spacetime) is not present at the fundamental level. The task of recovering the appearances is especially pressing in such theories. This chapter looks at the cognitive processes that produce spatial experience to better understand the empirical constraints on such theories. There is no question that we have immediate awareness of the visible and tangible reality of space, but what that awareness amounts to, and whether it supports the requirement that space has to be recovered as concrete external structure, is not something that has received enough attention. This chapter fills that gap.

This chapter addresses the relationship between the humanistic and scientific visions of the human being, says why the humanistic vision is not undermined by what science is teaching us about ourselves, and then turns to a discussion of the kind of understanding that the humanities provide. It argues that that understanding differs from the kind of understanding provided by the sciences, and that it is indispensable to human flourishing. The humanities enrich our experience of the world; educate the imagination; help us understand ourselves and other people; and teach us how to live, how to love, and how to feel.

The visual imagination is one of our most powerful tools in helping us think through abstract problems in physics and it plays an especially prominent role in spacetime physics, but it is also behind some of the most trenchant misunderstandings about what physics tells us about the nature of time. This chapter is about the images of time coming out of physics and the philosophical confusions to which they give rise. By casting the viewer in the position of an imaginary point of view outside of time and portraying time as (one dimension of) a static block of events, these images lead to people to say that the relativistic conception of time has eliminated much of what is essential to time as we know it. I argue that this is a matter of being misled by the logic of an image. Where, in this picture, do we find change? Where is the passage of time? Where is the familiar flux of everyday life and the surge of process? I suggest that we find them on the _inside_. We recover the familiar flowing time of everyday sense by seeing how things look from the point of view of an inhabitant of the Universe whose life is extended in time.

This chapter addresses the worry that the existence of causal antecedents to your choices means that you are causally compelled to act as you do. It begins with the folk notion of cause, leads the reader through recent developments in the scientific understanding of causal concepts, and argues that those developments undermine the threat from causal antecedents. The discussion is then used as a model for a kind of naturalistic metaphysics that takes its lead from science, letting everyday concepts be shaped and transformed by scientific developments.

In most day-to-day physics, one is modelling other systems and it is possible to maintain a provisional separation of subject and object, or of investigator and system being investigated. Ultimately, though, we are part of the universe. The fact that we act in the domain that we are representing can make it impossible to stabilize certain facts or features of the world as objects of knowledge. I’ll suggest that this casts light on the sense in which the universe is participatory and use differences in the way that the effects propagate to distinguish the classical and quantum worlds.

The most powerful argument for the incompatibility of freedom and determinism was given its simplest expression, and dubbed the Consequence Argument, by Peter van Inwagen. The Consequence Argument aims to show that if the natural laws are deterministic, and if neither the initial conditions of the universe nor the laws of nature are under our control, then our actions cannot be under our control. This chapter examines the kind of control that a self-governing system has over its behavior. It includes brief discussions of two related arguments: Derk Pereboom’s Manipulation Argument, which assimilates determination by law to covert manipulation, and Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument.

Suppose someone who claims to have full knowledge of the scientific laws and the initial conditions of the universe predicts some voluntary action of yours, and that the prediction is made known to you before you act. Now make it your policy to act counterpredictively. Can you do this? And if you can make it your policy to decide contrary to whatever prediction is made, is there anything keeping you from carrying it out? Most of us would answer yes to the first question and no to the second. An argument adapted from Michael Scrivens’s Paradox of Predictability is presented in this chapter to show that this kind of freedom is compatible with the existence of deterministic laws and it is suggested that the ability to act contrary to what anyone tells us they think we are going to do provides a concrete, practical sense in which our actions are free.

The worry that our actions are not free because they are compelled by their causal antecedents is addressed. The everyday notion of cause is a mix of different elements, and it has taken science a long time to develop a mature concept that separates out the objective content, providing us with a clean, precise, formalizable notion freed of the subjective and phenomological components. This chapter is about the historical developments that led to that notion, culminating in the interventionist conception of causation, accompanied by complementary developments in our understanding of the function of causal thinking. It is argued causation appears in mature science not as necessary connections written into the fabric of nature, but robust pathways that can be utilized as strategic routes to bringing about ends. Causal relations, in this form, function not as challenges to freedom, but handmaids to decision.

This chapter suggests that what is special about being human—that is, about being a self in the sense of a possessor of a first-person deliberative standpoint—is that you have a self-consciously creative role in the production of your life and an unavoidably creative role in the production of your self. The sense in which you create your life is that your life is partly made up of your choices. And the sense in which you create your self is that you are the author of your choices. This vindicates the perfectly familiar and perfectly mundane fact that by making choices, you partly make your life what it is. The discussion draws on Koorsgaard’s work on self-constitution, work in moral psychology on human autonomy, and the large body of literature on the construction of a first-person narrative.

This chapter is about the physics that underwrites asymmetries in our practical relationship to the past and future. It discusses the physical reasons that our actions make a difference to the future but not to the past. This asymmetry is one of two temporal asymmetries that shape our experience of the world. The other is an epistemic asymmetry in the information we have about the past and future. This chapter starts with a brief description of the asymmetries, relay the progress that has been made in the last three centuries understanding the physics that underwrites them, and then discuss the sense in which the future is open to a decision-making agent.

This chapter looks at the emergence of selves in nature. Different kinds of complex system—simple groups, dynamical systems, self-organizing systems, and self-governing systems—are discussed from a dynamical perspective. The self-governing system is introduced as a model for the human being. Self-governing systems are systems in which at least some organized activity is the result of a centralized process that involves the integration of information, and the formation of an overall plan that coordinates joint activity. In creating an internal point of view on the world, self-governance opens up the psychological space for the growth of a self.

This chapter suggests that what is special about being human—i.e., about being a self in the sense of a possessor of a first-personal deliberative standpoint—is that you have a self-consciously creative role in the production of your life and an unavoidably creative role in the production of your self. The sense in which you create your life is that your life is partly made up of your choices. And the sense in which you create your self is that you are the author of your choices. This vindicates the perfectly familiar and perfectly mundane fact that by making choices, you partly make your life what it is. The discussion draws on Koorsgaard’s work on self-constitution, work in moral psychology on human autonomy, and the large body of literature on the construction of a first-personal narrative.

Three types of unity that self-governing systems possess are discussed. The first is the synthetic unity attained when information drawn from incommensurate sources is mapped into a common frame of reference. The second is the unity of voice—or “univocity”—attained when a set of separate, potentially conflicting informational streams is united into a single collective voice. The third is the dynamical unity achieved when the parts of a system operate under the command of a single voice. Peeling back the curtain and looking at how the personal point of view arises, and how the unities that are given introspectively are generated by work that the brain does dispels the mystery that is at least partly behind the imaginative pictures of self as mental substance or soul-stuff.

Dennett’s story “Where am I?” is used to set up the difficulty of locating the self in the natural world. The story is told from a first-person point of view in which the narrator maintains his identity across exchanges of brain and body, but there is no physical thing in the story that can act as bearer of his identity. The story seems to present a dilemma between Cartesian dualism and Dennett’s a “no-self” view. This chapter argues for a third option. Prepersonal processes in the brain stabilize separable conceptions of self and world out of patterns in sensory information. The conception of self starts out as a mere sensorimotor point of view but gradually develops into something richer. Seeing how the first-person point of view arises is seeing how the self arises, because the self is nothing but the proper subject of a first-person point of view.

Bayesians take “definite” or “single-case” probabilities to be basic. Definite probabilities attach to closed formulas or propositions. We write them here using small caps: PROB(P) and PROB(P/Q). Most objective probability theories begin instead with “indefinite” or “general” probabilities (sometimes called “statistical probabilities”). Indefinite probabilities attach to open formulas or propositions. We write indefinite probabilities using lower case “prob” and free variables: prob(Bx/Ax). The indefinite probability of an A being a B is not about any particular A, but rather about the property of being an A. In this respect, its logical form is the same as that of relative frequencies. For instance, we might talk about the probability of a human baby being female. That probability is about human babies in general — not about individuals. If we examine a baby and determine conclusively that she is female, then the definite probability of her being female is 1, but that does not alter the indefinite probability of human babies in general being female. Most objective approaches to probability tie probabilities to relative frequencies in some way, and the resulting probabilities have the same logical form as the relative frequencies. That is, they are indefinite probabilities. The simplest theories identify indefinite probabilities with relative frequencies.3 It is often objected that such “finite frequency theories” are inadequate because our probability judgments often diverge from relative frequencies. For example, we can talk about a coin being fair (and so the indefinite probability of a flip landing heads is 0.5) even when it is flipped only once and then destroyed (in which case the relative frequency is either 1 or 0). For understanding such indefinite probabilities, it has been suggested that we need a notion of probability that talks about possible instances of properties as well as actual instances..

This chapter introduces some central notions. It treats the conscious mind as part of a larger dynamical system and focuses on the interfaces with other parts of the system; that is, experience, on the incoming end, and action or volition, on the outgoing end. The fundamental point of contrast with traditional representational approaches is that whereas representational approaches treat intentional relations expressed by model-theoretic mappings as fundamental mind-world relations, the dynamical approach takes relations of covariation relative to specified ranges of contexts as basic and recognizes no mind-world relations that cannot be understood in these terms.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Dennett's view of self-representation. It introduces the so-called “Joycean Machine”, special narrative module in the brain charged with production of an autobiography. It is argued that the synchronic unity of the thinking subject is the unity of voice and agency wrought by the unifying activity of the Joycean Machine. In dynamical terms, the collective voice can have a causal role. Turned outward, it can mediate the communication between systems, allowing them to act as unified agents in interaction with one another. Turned inward, it can govern the activity of the components.

This chapter argues that the formal requirements on self-describing media shed light on two elusive questions in the philosophy of mind. The first is a question that Dretske raised in Naturalizing the Mind: why do we have conscious access to the intrinsic properties of experience? In his terms, the question is: what is experience for? The second is a question that has hounded philosophy of mind since Brentano: in what sense, if any, is thought intrinsically intentional? What is the property that some states have of pointing, or purporting to point, beyond themselves? The chapter also addresses the question of why we self-represent, and what advantage self-representation gives us in the fight for survival.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. It addresses the problem of how to bring the view from within, on which I am the frame of the world, the unrepresented representer who contains the whole of it, together with the view from without, on which the world is the frame, and I am somewhere inside the picture, an undistinguished thing among things. It argues that the pressures that lead us to view the self, or the individual consciousness, as something outside of the natural order are many and deep, but a surprising number hinge in one way or another, on misunderstandings about reflexivity.

This chapter discusses the Problem of Inverted Spectra, which has been used as fuel against a number of different philosophical positions, for example, in attempts to analyze phenomenal properties in functional or behavioral terms, and recently by David Chalmers as another argument for dualism. It argues that by recognizing the ineliminable relationality of thought about the experience of others, we can acknowledge the epistemic and cognitive gaps brought out by the Knowledge Argument and the possibility of inverted spectra, while restricting them to purely epistemic ones.

This chapter examines Frank Jackson's argument for dualism. It argues that transitions between media involve information-preserving transformations of vehicles of content that convert the output of one medium into something that can interact computationally with the states of another. Just as the contents of observations have to be expressed symbolically before they can be fed into the computational apparatus of a physical theory, and English sentences have to be rendered in French before they can be combined in inferences with French expressions, phenomenal states have to be converted into an inferentially articulated form before they can interact with the machinery of thought. So conceived, the transition from experience into thought involves little more than a simple transformation of vehicle.