David Hodgson

This article looks at two approaches to the human brain and to the causation of behaviour: the objective approach of neuroscience, which treats the brain as a physical system operating in accordance with physical laws of general application; and the subjective approach of folk psychology, which treats people, and thus their brains and minds, as making choices or decisions on the basis of beliefs, desires, etc. It suggests three ways in which these two approaches might be related, two physicalist and one non-physicalist; and argues, with reference to ethical and legal issues,ues that there are strong commonsense grounds for preferring the non-physicalist alternative, and that science does not justify its rejection. It is suggested that a considerable onus of proof lies on proponents of physicalist approaches, having regard to the implications of such approaches for important issues of justice and human rights.In this paper, I outline two approaches to the human brain, involving two different views of the causation of human behaviour; and I consider how these two approaches might be linked or related. The first is the objective approach of neuroscience, which treats the human brain as a physical object, operating in accordance with the same physical laws as other physical objects. The second is the subjective approach of folk psychology, which we apply both in our ordinary interactions with other people and in our thinking about our own behaviour; and which treats people as choosing or deciding what to do on the basis of their beliefs, desires and so on

Fifty years ago the philosopher Wilfred Sellars identified two images of “man”, which he called respectively the “manifest image” and the “scientific image”; and he considered whether and how these two images could be reconciled. In this paper, I will very briefly look at the distinction drawn by Sellars and at his suggestions for reconciliation of these images. I will suggest that a broad distinction as suggested by Sellars can indeed usefully be drawn, but that the distinction can be more helpfully characterised than it was by Sellars. I will argue that there are more ways of reconciling the two images than those proposed by Sellars. And I will elaborate on what I think are the most promising lines along which the reconciliation could take place.

Responses to my article on Dawkins and God have fallen into two classes: those that challenge my criticism of Dawkins’ atheism, and those that challenge my criticism of the morality on display in some Bible stories. I will briefly respond to those in the first class, and then those in the second class. P. J. Moss suggests I am attracted to “the Cartesian notion of mind body dualism,” and do not have regard to “the work of those philosophers of mind who … see the task of the philosopher as posing the problem into a precise enough form so that it admits of scientific resolution;” and he commends the work of John Searle. I am indeed attracted to a kind of dualism. However, it is not the Cartesian dualism of “two distinct realms” rejected by Searle, but rather a dualism that accepts, as Searle does, that there are two categories of empirical reality, subjective and objective, which are mutually irreducible The Rediscovery of the Mind, pp19, 98), and that there are features of subjective reality that cannot be fully understood in terms of objective reality. In a major work published in 2001, Rationality in Action, Searle even leaves open as a reasonable possibility a view I support, namely that consciousness may be able to cause things that cannot be fully explained by the causal behaviour of neurons, and he also supports a non Humean notion of the self, as an entity that can, as a whole, consciously try to do things: see my review in Journal of Consciousness Studies 9, 92 94. In any event, my argument against Dawkins does not depend on acceptance of dualism, just on the undoubted fact that science does not yet have the first idea what objective features are necessary and sufficient to give rise to subjectivity. Robert McLaughlin makes out a reasoned case against my three suggested errors in Dawkins. It would take a book to deal fully with points of the kind he raises, but I have to be brief here.

'Plain' persons tend to accept that free will exists and is inconsistent with determinism, but this commonsense position is widely debunked by professional philosophers and cognitive scientists. In this special issue of the _Journal of Consciousness Studies_ David Hodgson defends a simple, robust account of the plain person's position on free will, and intends it to support equally robust views of personal responsibility for conduct. In a lively debate his ideas are discussed and challenged by ten philosophers and scientists of varying opinions, including Robert Kane, Henry Stapp, and veteran philosopher of mind J.J.C. Smart, with a response by the principal author.

Max Bennett is a distinguished Australian neuroscientist, Peter Hacker an Oxford philosopher and leading authority on Wittgenstein. A book resulting from their collaboration, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, has received high praise. According to the Blackwell website, G.H. von Wright asserts that it 'will certainly, for a long time to come, be the most important contribution to the mind-body problem that there is'; and Sir Anthony Kenny says it 'shows that the claims made on behalf of cognitive science are ill-founded'. M.R. Bennett & P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience

In this paper, I argue that a satisfactory account of consciousness will involve both (1) local indeterminism, in that some relevant events are not wholly and unequivocally pre‐determined by immediately prior local events, and (2) nonlocality, in that, within the leeways left by local indeterminism, what happens can be immediately affected by spatially separated or extended events. I briefly consider if this can be avoided by treating consciousness as supervenient and epiphenomenal; and I suggest that current theories of consciousness break down through failure to incorporate local indeterminism and nonlocality. I conclude by outlining possible implications for freedom of the will, physicalism, and the relevance of quantum mechanics to consciousness.

         Many scientists and philosophers would answer nothing. According to them, the physical world operates in accordance with the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, and is closed to being affected by anything non-physical.  Thus, any effects that conscious experiences may have can only come about by virtue of physical brain processes that are associated with and perhaps constitute these experiences.          This physicalist approach, however, raises the question why, if all is achieved by physical processes operating in accordance with physical laws of nature, are some of these processes associated with and possibly constitutive of subjective conscious experiences, when this association does precisely nothing. From an evolutionary viewpoint, this would not seem to make sense: the selection of consciousness through the survival and reproduction of conscious organisms strongly suggests that consciousness confers an advantage on an organism that has it.          A possible answer is that somehow conscious experiences are inevitably associated with certain advantageous physical processes, so that when these advantageous processes were selected in evolution, consciousness was selected with them. Just as, for example, a polar bear can’t have the useful warmth of its coat..

In my experience, plain persons (here meaning persons who are neither philosophers or cognitive scientists) tend to accept something like a libertarian position on free will, namely that free will exists and is inconsistent with determinism. That position is widely debunked by philosophers and cognitive scientists. My view at present is that something like this plain person's position is not only defensible but likely to be closer to the truth than opposing views. To put this to the test, I have written a simple and straightforward outline of what I hope is a philosophically and scientifically respectable version of the plain person's position on free will, and have offered it for demolition by those who say such a view is untenable. My account of free will is a robust one, explicitly inconsistent with determinism and intended to support equally robust views of personal responsibility for conduct. I see three broad areas of difficulty for this account.