Thomas W. Clark

This paper critiques the view that consciousness is likely something extra which accompanies or is produced by neural states, something beyond the functional cognitive processes realized in the brain. Such a view creates the `explanatory gap'between function and nomenology which many suppose cannot be filled by functionalist theories of mind. Given methodological considerations of simplicity, ontological parsimony, and theoretical conservatism, an alternative hypothesis is recommended, that subjective qualitative experience is identical to certain information-bearing, behaviour-controlling functions, not something which emerges from them. This hypothesis explains the isomorphism between the structure of experience and neural organization, while providing a naturalistic account of qualiait's relational properties of informational states, not a sparate ontology of phenomenal essences. On this functionalist view, the hard, empirical problem of consciousness is to discover precisely which neural functions constitute subjective experience.

As a worldview, naturalism depends on a set of cognitive commitments from which flow certain propositions about reality and human nature. These propositions in turn might have implications for how we live, for social policy, and for human flourishing. But the presuppositions, basis, and implications of naturalism are not uncontested, and indeed there’s considerable debate about them among naturalists themselves. This dialog between David Macarthur and Richard Carrier is a productive contribution to that debate.

In “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.

Those of the New Age persuasion often suppose that reductionist science threatens what makes us most human, the immaterial soul or spirit, and what makes life most meaningful, the existence of a transcendent non-physical realm. To escape the perils of materialism and mechanism, they take refuge in the fringe pseudo-science of paranormal and occult phenomena. But there's no need to resort to pseudo-science to defend our humanity or discover life's significance. The physical world is the marvelously sufficient basis for our highest capacities, including the capacity to discover meaning in a wholly natural universe.

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.

This article reviews contributions to The Volitional Brain, some of which defend a libertarian, contra-causal account of free will, while others take a so-called compatibilist view, in which adequate conceptions of human liberty and moral responsibility are claimed to be compatible with naturalistic causality. Siding with compatibilism, this review finds that defenders of libertarian free will place undue weight on the first person feeling of freedom, while discounting scientific evidence that human choices are fully a function of antecedent causes at various levels of description. It is argued that morality, justice, and personal responsibility and efficacy do not require the assumption that persons are first causes, so that we need not fear mechanism when applied to human agency.

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. Qualia -- arguably a type of representational content -- will therefore not be found in the physical world as characterized in experience or science. Instead, consciousness constitutes a subjective, representational reality for cognitive systems such as ourselves, and the physical world is a represented objective reality. I suggest that naturalistic approaches to explaining consciousness should acknowledge the non-objectivity of experience, and be constrained by evidence that consciousness accompanies certain sorts of behaviour-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically instantiated mind-systems. I evaluate a variety of current hypotheses about consciousness, and suggest that a mature science of representation may help explain why, perhaps as matter of representational necessity, experience arises as a natural but not objectively discoverable phenomenon.

Phenomenal consciousness is often thought to involve a first-person perspective or point of view which makes available to the subject categorically private, first-person facts about experience, facts that are irreducible to third-person physical, functional, or representational facts. This paper seeks to show that on a representational account of consciousness, we don't have an observational perspective on experience that gives access to such facts, although our representational limitations and the phenomenal structure of consciousness make it strongly seem that we do. Qualia seem intrinsic and functionally arbitrary, and thus categorically private, because they are first-order sensory representations that are not themselves directly represented. Further, the representational architecture that on this account instantiates conscious subjectivity helps to generate the intuition of observerhood, since the phenomenal subject may be construed as outside, not within, experience. Once the seemings of private phenomenal facts and the observing subject are discounted, we can understand consciousness as a certain variety of neurally instantiated, behaviour controlling content, that constituted by an integrated representation of the organism in the world. Neuroscientific research suggests that consciousness and its characteristic behavioural capacities are supported by widely distributed but highly integrated neural processes involving communication between multiple functional sub- systems in the brain. This 'global workspace' may be the brain's physical realization of the representational architecture that constitutes consciousness.

Human freedom, responsibility and autonomy have traditionally been linked to or even identified with conscious control of behavior, where consciousness is widely understood as possibly non-identical with its neural correlates. But the rise of neuroscience strongly suggests that brain processes alone are sufficient for behavior control, and indeed nothing non-physical plays a role in scientific explanations of behavior. In this chapter I address three worries that arise in response to investigations of consciousness: the philosophical worry about mental causation; the practical worry about the influence of unconscious processes; and the existential worry that, absent a contra-causal conscious controller, we lack true freedom, responsibility and autonomy. These worries can be defused, I suggest, by 1) acknowledging the causal powers of brain-based conscious capacities, those associated with (but perhaps not identical to) conscious experience 2) expanding the reach of conscious capacities by understanding their limitations, and 3) naturalizing our conceptions of freedom and autonomy.

REMARKS ON EVOLUTION AND TIME-SCALES, Graham Cairns-Smith; HODGSON'S BLACK BOX, Thomas Clark; DO HODGSON'S PROPOSITIONS UNIQUELY CHARACTERIZE FREE WILL?, Ravi Gomatam; WHAT SHOULD WE RETAIN FROM A PLAIN PERSON'S CONCEPT OF FREE WILL?, Gilberto Gomes; ISOLATING DISPARATE CHALLENGES TO HODGSON'S ACCOUNT OF FREE WILL, Liberty Jaswal; FREE AGENCY AND LAWS OF NATURE, Robert Kane; SCIENCE VERSUS REALIZATION OF VALUE, NOT DETERMINISM VERSUS CHOICE, Nicholas Maxwell; COMMENTS ON HODGSON, J.J.C. Smart; THE VIEW FROM WITHIN, Sean Spence; COMMENTARY ON HODGSON, Henry Stapp.

In Freedom: An Impossible Reality, Ray Tallis argues that we escape imprisonment by causal determinism, and thus gain free will, by the virtual distance from natural laws afforded us by intentionality, a human capacity that he claims cannot be naturalized. I respond that we can’t know in advance that intentionality will never be subsumed by science, and that our capacities to entertain possibilities and decide among them are natural cognitive endowments that supervene on generally reliable neural processes. Moreover, any disconnection from the multi-level determinants that account for human behavior cannot augment, but would likely undermine, effective human agency. Our full inclusion in nature, understood in terms of a pragmatic, explanatory determinism, is therefore not a prison from which we need to escape.

The brain disease model of addiction is widely endorsed by agencies concerned with treating behavioral disorders and combatting the stigma often associated with addiction. However, both its accuracy and its effectiveness in reducing stigma have been challenged. A proposed alternative, the “choice” model, recognizes the residual rational behavior control capacities of addicted individuals and their ability to make choices, some of which may cause harm. Since harmful choices are ordinarily perceived as blameworthy, the choice model may inadvertently help justify stigma. This paper seeks to fully naturalize the choice model by highlighting the determinants of voluntary action and thus increase its potential for destigmatizing addiction. In light of a deterministic understanding of behavior, it is unreasonable to suppose that addicted individuals could have made different choices in becoming addicted and in subsequent situations. To the extent that stigma is motivated by the supposition that addicted individuals could have chosen otherwise in actual situations, a deterministic understanding of addictive behavior promises to mitigate blame and stigma.