Religion, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft/Religion, Theology, and Natural Science

Herausgegeben vonAntje Jackelén, Gebhard Löhr, Ted Peters

und Nicolaas A. Rupke

Band 13

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Philip Clayton

In Quest of Freedom

The Emergence of Spirit in the Natural World

Frankfurt Templeton Lectures 2006

Herausgegeben vonMichael G. Parker und Thomas M. Schmidt

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Mit 13 Abbildungen

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Table of Contents

Preface to the Frankfurt Templeton Lectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Chapter 1: The Age of Neuroscience and the End of Freedom? . . . 19

The Data on Neural Correlates of Consciousness – A Neuroscientific Theory of Cognition: The Global Workspace Model – The Burden of Proof and the Loss of Innocence – Have We Lost All Conscious Control? – Why a Revised View of the Person Has Become Necessary – First Conclusions – A More Radical Entailment? – The Task Before Us

Chapter 2: Growing Freedom? Complexity, Spontaneity, and Social Behaviors in Biological Evolution . . . . . . 40

Introduction – Studying the Evolution of Biological Novelty – The Diverse Means of Complexification in Natural History – The Emergence of Species – From Sociality to Culture – Culture as a New Type of Evolutionary Dynamic – First Conclusions

Chapter 3: Co-evolution, Mental Causality, and Human Action: Freedom and the Emergence of Culture . . . . . . . . . 60

Introduction – The Architectonic of the Argument – Learning and Culture – Co-evolution – What is Right, and what Wrong, about Evolutionary Psychol-ogy? – The Self, Sociality, and Cognition – The Biological Birth of Spirit – Toward a “Gradualist” Theory of Freedom

Chapter 4: Forms of Freedom, As-If Freedom, and Asymptotic Freedom: A Challenge to Neurophilosophy 84

Kant and Compatibilism: The Last Word on Freedom? – Is Spontaneous Agency Sufficient for Freedom? – Agential Actions and Self-Determination – Incompatible but not Counterfactual: Conceptual Parameters for Talk of

Freedom – The Doctrine of Gradual or Asymptotic Freedom – An Episte-mological Aside – Transcendental Freedom? – Freedom and Being Respon-sible for One’s Past – The Unexplored Option: Openings toward a Philoso-phy of Nature

Chapter 5: On Religion: A Speech to its Scientifically Cultured Despisers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

The Theme of Freedom – To the Scientific Despisers of Religion – Dangers in the “Science of Religion” – Criticism Based on Natural Science – When Even Theologians Are Opposed – What Is a Religious Vision? – Conclusion

Chapter 6: Freedom and Transcendence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Freedom and the “More Than” of Human Action – Excursus: From Regu-lative to Constitutive – Imago Dei Correlations – Two Modes of Self-Tran-scendence – Freedom, Ground, and the Emergence of Spirit – A Two-Lev-eled Theory of Freedom – The Unity of the Person, Moral Responsibility, and the “Basic Orientation” – Retrospective and Conclusions

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

Chapter 1: The Age of Neuroscience and the End of Freedom?

The 1990s were widely described as “the decade of the brain.” Of course, we have always known that the brain plays an essential role in producing our most intimate thoughts, wishes, feelings, and decisions. Yet, I will argue, until recently many could dismiss brain functioning as merely a background condition for the real life of the mind or spirit, without giving it a more cen-tral role for explaining human mental life than, say, the laws of physics.

Today things have changed. Whichever side of the debate one is drawn to – purely natural scientific accounts, or the “neurophilosophy” of Daniel Dennett and his allies, or social scientific treatments of the person, or the tra-ditional dualism of body and spirit, or humanity as created “in the image of God” – the data of neuroscience now demand close attention from all parties to the debate. The point is not just that mind requires a functioning brain; ev-erything would be simple if that were the only challenge raised by the neuro-sciences! The point is that brain events now appear to be both necessary and sufficient for explaining human mental experience. As we will see, research-ers are now able to correlate specific mental reactions with specific brain events, allowing them to establish precise causal lines running from changes in brain states to changes in mental experience.

I suggest that, in the long history of philosophical speculation on the na-ture of mind or spirit, no non-reductive theory has yet been developed that is capable of doing justice to this intimate yoking of brain and mind. And that means: either we accept the conclusions of reductionism – that is, the reduc-tion of mind to brain, of mental events to neuronal events – or, if we wish to resist them, we are required to develop an alternate conceptual framework capable of defending more traditional or commonsense notions of mind.

The goal of these pages is to argue that the philosophy of reductionism is mistaken and that dispensing with it casts important new light on the ques-tion of human freedom. In order to achieve this goal, it will be necessary to look for new resources in the sciences, to develop new arguments in philos-ophy, and to explore some radical new options in theology. The debate be-tween reductionism and non-reductive accounts is all the more urgent be-cause, as these pages will show, the decision about human freedom is closely linked to one’s decision about human mind. Or, more carefully, one’s theory of mind tends to correlate closely with one’s theory of freedom – and rightly

The End of Freedom?20

so. Reductionist positions on the nature of mind are conceptually linked to denials of freedom in the traditional (“libertarian”) sense and to affirmations of its rivals, compatibilism and determinism. The common link, we will find, is the theory of agency: what happens when humans act, and what kinds of causal influences are involved? I will try to show that it is possible to defend a non-reductive theory of agency that is fully consistent with, and even mo-tivated by, contemporary science. But the only way to achieve this goal is to develop a sort of “natural history of mind.” In the following two chapters we will find that this natural history tells a rather different story than the reduc-tionistic picture one is so often presented with in the name of science.

But before we take on this task, we must get as clear as possible on what the exact nature of the challenge and why recent work in the neurosciences has brought it home more forcibly than ever before.

The Data on Neural Correlates of Consciousness

The basic thesis is not difficult to formulate: recent work in neuroscience has greatly tightened the bond between conscious phenomena and the neural states that produce them, suggesting that the causes, and thus the explana-tions, of conscious states lie exclusively at the neurological level. One can flesh out the argument for this conclusion in four steps:

(1) Nancy Kanwisher notes that “FMRI and ERPs [brain imaging technol-ogies] have enabled us to peer into the human brain and observe the neural signatures of the contents of awareness, the shadows on the cave wall of the mind.”1

Let’s start with one of the most elementary of mental operations: recog-nizing an object. Most people know that perception begins with some phys-ical steps: light rays fall on the retina, and the image is transmitted up the optical nerve to the brain. Then, according to the commonsense view, the subject perceives the image, and she recognizes or “becomes conscious of” the object which the visual image represents. But we now know that matters are not quite that simple.

(2) Consider the research of Johan Eriksson and his team. In a straightfor-ward study, subjects were shown images on a computer screen that had been parsed or broken apart, e. g., a hairbrush without the handle, a tree painted the wrong color, etc. They were asked to press a button when they became aware of the identity of the object and then to remain attentive to it from that

1 Kanwisher, Neural Events, 109.

Neural Correlates of Consciousness 21

point on. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed during the duration of each trial.

During the time the subjects were perceiving images before recognition, the researchers observed activation of the motor and auditory sensory re-gions (primary and premotor cortex, brainstem, cerebellum, basal ganglia, and primary and secondary auditory cortex), as well as of the visual cortex (see figure 1.1).2 The moment of awareness or recognition of the image was associated with activation of certain areas of the occipito-temporal region,

2 Eriksson et al., Visual Consciousness, 66.

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

The End of Freedom?22

as well as frontal and parietal regions and the medial temporal lobe (see fig-ure 1.2).3 Finally, the period of sustained perception (i. e., the maintenance of conscious awareness) was marked by increased activity in medial prefrontal (cingulum and B9), lateral prefrontal, and parietal regions, among others.

A rather clear picture emerges from the data. The moment of “pop-out,” when the subjects became aware of the brush as a brush, is preceded by a period of visual search, during which neural impulses are traveling to the frontal lobe and medial temporal lobe. When the incoming visual pattern be-comes sufficiently similar to the prerecorded or “remembered” image of a brush, that information is transmitted to the frontal lobe, and the subject then experiences a feeling of “recognizing” the brush; at that moment the images on the screen change from nonsensical shapes to having a semantic content for the observer.4

The process can of course be described in mental terms: the subject sees images, recognizes a brush, and concentrates on the brush. But we now un-derstand what is actually producing these mental experiences. The medial temporal lobe works to match patterns in the new perceptual data with pre-viously recorded patterns; when it succeeds, it transmits this data to the ven-tral visual and fronto-parietal regions, which are associated with perceptual awareness. The processing in the visual and fronto-parietal regions is then transmitted to the frontal cortex, at which point the subject knows that she knows that she is seeing a brush.

These findings offer a good first introduction to a wide range of brain studies that explore perception prior to awareness. In most of these studies, images are projected onto a screen in front of the subject for a period of time too short for conscious awareness, yet still sufficient for the subject to per-ceive them. For example, a European team of researchers led by Dr. Corne-lia Kranczioch flashed letters onto a screen at 500 millisecond intervals. At a certain time a vowel was flashed on the screen (T1), and at a later time an X was flashed (T2). The subjects were told to respond when they saw a vowel or an X, and real-time fMRI imaging was employed.

The results of the Kranczioch study reveal some of the complex interac-tions between the cortex and the regions associated with perception. Because of the different cortical state associated with the mental goal of “looking

3 Ibid., 67. 4 Eriksson et al., Visual Consciousness, 70:

Most likely, pop-out is preceded by a visual search, thereby making eye-movements and attentional requirements different before and after target identification. This could possibly affect the results in that the related activity might “spill-over” to pop-out. […] Finally, the per-cept in the present study changed from nonsensical to having a semantic content. Therefore, some frontal activity may have been related to semantic contextualization of the identified object, i. e., a semantic retrieval process.

Neural Correlates of Consciousness 23

for an X,” the pre-conscious perceptual regions fired differently, including clusters in both inferior parietal lobules (IPL), the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and the left superior frontal gyrus/anterior cingulate cortex (SFG/ACC).5 It appears that detecting a particular visual cue that one is looking for (here, an X) is a process that is mediated by the visual cortices. They “pass on” information to the frontal lobes of the brain, which then exert “top-down” control over the visual processing. Visual awareness is a joint prod-uct of these two processes, and not just a matter of perceptions “bubbling up” into conscious awareness. Put differently, the parietal and frontal areas of the brain mediate the process of producing conscious awareness, serving as a “selection network” which ultimately activates neural representations within the visual cortex.6 Kranczioch argues, “These areas may exert top-down control over processing in sensory cortices, providing ‘bias signals’ that can modulate the selection of stimuli in a context-dependent fashion.”7

The authors conclude:

What emerges from these studies is that conscious awareness presupposes a complex set of intertwined functions, including sensory preprocessing, attention, and working memory (Crick/Koch, 1990, 2003; Rees et al., 2002). The NCC [neural correlate of consciousness], thus, is likely to involve a highly distributed set of brain areas sub-serving these functions. This network engages, via large-scale dynamic interactions, in globally coherent states (Dehaene et al., 2003; Engel/Singer, 2001; Engel et al., 2001; Varela et al., 2001) that seem required for the establishment of a global work-space carrying the contents of awareness (Newman/Baars, 1993).8

(3) In fact, it is not just in elementary mental operations such as recognizing an object that scientists are coming to understand the precise way in which mental experience is constructed by means of interactions among specific brain regions. New studies are shedding light on even our most cherished subjective experiences, such as our image of ourselves and how we recog-nize ourselves.

Consider the fascinating study by Feinberg and Keenan of patients with delusional disorders of the self. In the first portion of their study, the re-searchers analyzed 29 separate cases of patients who suffered from brain traumas that cause them to lose a sense of themselves. Symptoms ranged from extreme delusion (one woman believed that her arm was a “pet rock”)

5 Kranczioch et al., Neural Correlates, 708. 6 Kranczioch et al., Neural correlates, 713:

Taken together, the picture that emerges is that conscious awareness presupposes several interrelated processes, including sensory preprocessing by modality-specific cortical circuits, attentional selection by frontoparietal networks, and transfer of the selection results into work-ing memory (Crick/Koch, 1990, 2003; Rees et al., 2002). 7 Kranczioch et al., Neural correlates, 713. 8 Kranczioch et al., Neural correlates, 704.

The End of Freedom?24

to a loss of self in time (another man believed that he and his wife were adopting a child, when in fact they had never adopted and his wife was now dead). In 96.6 % of the cases, the right frontal lobe had undergone trauma, indicating that self-delusions can be causal by-products of trauma to the right frontal lobe of the brain.9 As Feinberg and Keenan note,

These observations suggest that the right frontal damage that these patients have sus-tained creates a disturbance of ego boundaries and ego functions and that the right hemisphere, particularly the right frontal region, under normal circumstances plays a crucial role in establishing the appropriate relationship between the self and the world. In these conditions, the ego dysfunction results in a two-way disturbance of personal relatedness between the self and the environment that can lead to disorders of both under- and over-relatedness between the self and the world.10

(4) The conclusions from brain trauma studies of the sense of self are sup-ported by recognition studies. Many of these studies analyze brain activa-tions when people are presented either with an image of themselves or an image of a celebrity (one study used the picture of Bill Clinton, for exam-ple). Across a range of fMRI studies, activity of the right frontal lobe in-creased at a rate of 1.26–1.8 times above the activation levels of the left frontal lobe. Likewise, studies show that the right frontal cortex is more of-ten involved in the recognition of other persons than any other region. We can thus conclude with Seger, Stone, and Keenan (2004) that it is in the right frontal lobe and the medial prefrontal cortical areas that we distinguish the self from the other. As Feinberg and Keenan rightly emphasize,

The findings regarding the clinical disorders of the self, as well as the experimental and imaging studies, strongly suggest that the right hemisphere plays a special role in the creation of the self. We do not wish to make the claim, however, that the self “resides” in the right hemisphere. Rather these findings suggest that the right hemi-sphere is dominant for these aspects of the self.11

A Neuroscientific Theory of Cognition: The Global Workspace Model

One model of human conscious awareness, known as the global workspace model, has gained rather significant support among neuroscientists; some would call it the dominant current model.12 This theory views consciousness

9 Feinberg/Keenan, Where in the brain. 10 Feinberg/Keenan, Where in the brain, 675. Quotation edited for grammar. 11 Feinberg/Keenan, Where in the brain, 675. 12 See Dehaene/Naccache, Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience; Dehaene et al., A Neuronal Network, see also Dehaene (ed.), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness. Bernard Baars

The Global Workspace Model 25

as a massive parallel distributed system of highly specialized processors in the brain, in which coordination and control take place by way of a central in-formation exchange, allowing some specialized processors – such as sensory systems in the brain – to distribute information to the system as a whole.13

The following chart, assembled by Bernard Baars, shows similarities in the views of some leading brain theorists:14

Baars, 1983: Conscious contents provide the nervous system with coherent, global information.

Edelman, 1989: Global mapping in a reentrant selectionist model of consciousness in the brain.

Dennett, 2001: Theorists are converging from quite different quarters on a version of the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness […] On the eve of the Decade of the Brain, Baars (1988) had already described a “gathering consensus” in much the same terms: consciousness, he said, is accomplished by a „distributed society of spe-cialists that is equipped with a working memory, called a global workspace, whose contents can be broadcast to the system as a whole” (42).

Kanwisher, 2001: […] in agreement with Baars (1988), it seems reasonable to hypo-thesize that awareness of a particular element of perceptual information must entail not just a strong enough neural representation of information, but also access to that information by most of the rest of the mind/brain.

Dehaene/Naccache, 2001: We propose a theoretical framework […] the hypo thesis of a global neuronal workspace. […] We postulate that this global availability of infor-mation through the workspace is what we subjectively experience as the conscious state.

Edelman/Tononi, 2000, 148–149: When we become aware of something […] it is as if, suddenly, many different parts of our brain were privy to information that was pre-viously confined to some specialized subsystem. […] the wide distribution of infor-

is the major originator of Global Workspace Theory; see e. g. Baars, In the Theater of Con-sciousness; Baars/Gage (ed.), Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness. This model is also gaining increased support from philosophers of mind as well, including for example, Daniel Dennett. 13 Baars, The Global Brainweb, also available online at http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Baars-update_03.html. Baars adds in the online version that Global Workspace Theory makes sense in a brain that is a brainweb, viewed as a massive parallel distributed system of highly specialized processors. In such a system coordination and control may take place by way of a central information exchange, allowing some specialized processors – such as sensory systems in the brain – to distribute information to the system as a whole. 14 The chart can be found at http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Baars-update_03.html, Table 2, verified October 23, 2007. The sources for these quotations and theories are respectively: Baars, Conscious Contents; Edelman, Neural Darwinism; Dennett, Are We Explaining Consciousness, 221f; Kanwisher, Neural Events,105; Dehaene et al., A Neuronal Network, 8520–5; Edelman/Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness; Rodolfo Llinas et al., The Neuronal Basis,1841–9; John, Consciousness; Varela et al., The Brainweb, 237; Damasio, Time-Locked Multiregional Retro-activation, 25–62.

The End of Freedom?26

mation is guaranteed mechanistically by thalamocortical and corticocortical reentry, which facilitates the interactions among distant regions of the brain.

Llinas et al., 1998 : […] the thalamus represents a hub from which any site in the cor-tex can communicate with any other such site or sites. […] temporal coincidence of specific and non-specific thalamic activity generates the functional states that char-acterize human cognition.

John, 2000: Evidence has been steadily accumulating that information about a stim-ulus complex is distributed to many neuronal populations dispersed throughout the brain.

Varela et al., 2001: […] the brain […] transiently settling into a globally consistent state […is] the basis for the unity of mind familiar from everyday experience.

Damasio, 1989: Meaning is reached by time-locked multiregional retroactivation of widespread fragment records. Only the latter records can become contents of con-sciousness.

Baars suggests a theater metaphor: consciousness “is like a bright spot on the stage of immediate memory, directed there by a spotlight of attention, under executive guidance. The rest of the theater is dark and unconscious. Once a conscious sensory content is established, it is distributed widely to a decentralized ‘audience’ of expert networks sitting in the darkened theater, presumably using corticocortical and corticothalamic fibers. This is the pri-mary functional role of consciousness: to allow a theater architecture to op-erate in the brain, in order to integrate, provide access, and coordinate the functioning of very large numbers of specialized networks that otherwise operate autonomously.”15

What is impressive about global workspace theory is that it is both con-sistent with empirical results and is giving rise to productive empirical re-search. Among other functions, it has immediate implications for learning, working memory, voluntary control, and theories of the self. To mention just one example, Sergent and Dehaene made fMRI recordings of subjects who were observing words flashed briefly onto a screen. The images reveal both bottom-up and top-down effects in a manner consistent with the the-ory. They show first a “feed-forward sweep”, in which a stimulus is auto-matically processed by a series of brain areas activated sequentially in a bot-tom-up manner, without conscious awareness. Then one detects a top-down amplification: on trials in which the stimulus is perceived consciously, bot-tom-up and top-down inputs reinforce each other until a broad network of cerebral areas becomes ignited via long-distance connections. If by contrast the first activation does not reach a critical threshold for self-amplification,

15 See Baars, The Global Brainweb.

Burden of Proof and Loss of Innocence 27

brain activation is confined to transient bottom-up signals, and the stimulus is not consciously perceived.16

What view of consciousness emerges from this model? There is now compelling evidence that perception without awareness is possible, as in the well-known examples of “blindsight.” Moreover, perception “happens” in many different areas of the brain. It thus appears that the contents of aware-ness are not represented in a single unitary consciousness system – a sort of “Cartesian theater” – but rather each conscious perceptual content is repre-sented by means of the same set of neurons that stored that perceptual infor-mation in the first place. Nancy Kanwisher writes,

[I]n order for a focal neural representation to reach awareness it may have to be ac-cessible to other parts of the brain. […] The construction of a fully conscious per-cept may involve interactions between domain-specific systems for representing the contents of awareness (primarily in the ventral visual pathway) and domain-general systems (primarily in the dorsal pathway) for organizing those contents into struc-tured percepts.17

The Burden of Proof and the Loss of InnocenceBurden of Proof and Loss of InnocenceOf course, the fact that a particular theory of conscious awareness is gain-ing increasing support in neuroscience today does not mean that the problem of consciousness has now been “solved.” But this short summary does show that much progress has been made and that much is now known about how consciousness arises and how it functions. Surely any philosophical or theo-logical speculations about the nature of mind must incorporate these data and be able to explain them.Given the empirical precision and explanatory power of the results, it would seem that the burden of proof now rests upon the more dualistically oriented thinkers, i. e. those who offer accounts of conscious phenomena that deny this dependence on and close correlation with neurophysiology. It seems

16 Sergent/Dehaene, Is Consciousness a Gradual Phenomenon, 727: According to this theory, the first stage of processing corresponds to what has been called

the “feed-forward sweep” […] in which a stimulus is automatically processed by a series of brain areas activated sequentially in a bottom-up [minus consciousness] manner. The second stage corresponds to top-down amplification. On trials in which the stimulus is perceived con-sciously, bottom-up and top-down inputs reinforce each other until a broad network of cerebral areas becomes ignited via long-distance connections. […] If, however, this first activation does not reach the dynamic threshold for self-amplification, activation is confined to a bottom-up transient, and the stimulus cannot be consciously perceived. 17 Kanwisher, Neural Events, 109. I am grateful to Zach Simpson for assistance in locating these studies.

The End of Freedom?28

increasingly clear that neurological events are both causally necessary for consciousness and that they play a central role in explaining these events. After all, the brain-based explanations are scientifically testable and inter-subjectively verifiable. Simple appeals to the immediacy of our own experi-ence cannot undercut the explanatory power of the scientific accounts; after all, if these accounts are right, they even help us to understand why we would have the attitudes we do have toward our own thoughts.

Although I will oppose claims for a simple victory of brain language over mental language, I do agree with neuroscientists and neurophilosophers re-garding the burden of proof. It is up to those of us who are anti-reduction-ists – those who deny that the neurosciences offer the ultimate explanatory context for conscious phenomena – to provide an alternate account of the mind-brain relation, one that substantiates our claim that mentality has a causal efficacy that is more than these brain processes. We will discover that it’s only possible to provide such an account when one ventures into the do-main of questions once known as the philosophy of nature. That is, one must attempt to synthesize the results of the various sciences into a philosophical account of what and how the world really is. In particular, one must show that underlying the various purely physical accounts of human agency and language there is an implicit philosophical picture of the nature of the world as a whole that is less plausible than non-physicalist accounts. As we pro-ceed to discuss the central questions of evolution, neuroscience, and human agency in the following chapters, I will argue that at least one philosophical account rises above the others as a competitive alternative, an account that I will call the philosophy of the emergence of spirit.

Have We Lost All Conscious Control?

Still, it is a long route that we must travel before reaching our destination, and the journey must be taken one step at a time. The first step is to acknowl-edge the various ways in which the neuroscientific results constrain all fur-ther reflection on the nature of mind. As it turns out, the number of viable philosophical options is rather smaller than one might expect. There has been a certain loss of innocence in the philosophy of mind or consciousness, and the question now is: how many of the traditional answers can now been excluded? Can one still make any sense of the claim that humans exercise conscious control over their actions? Is freedom a notion to be relegated to the past, to more innocent days before the advent of neuroscience?However one responds to this question, it is clear that the control function of consciousness must be radically reconceived. When Gilbert Ryle wrote his famous essay on mind in 1949, his main target was the belief in “the ghost in

Have We Lost All Conscious Control? 29

the machine.” Ryle effectively ridiculed the traditional conception of mind as a sort of little homunculus inside the brain, a miniature control center, and the net result of his work was to significantly decrease the plausibility of dualist theories of mind. No rational soul pulls the levers and pushes the buttons, like the “man behind the curtain” in The Wizard of Oz. Among the majority of philosophers and scientists today, the “substantial soul” of tra-ditional philosophy and theology is no longer a live option; most have long since abandoned that picture.

It has turned out to be rather more difficult, however, to give up the idea that consciousness plays some causal role in human cognition, that it represents a whole which is more than the sum of its parts. The question is, do conscious choices sometimes lie at the origin of human actions and, if so, in what sense? Put this way, the connection with the question of free will be-comes obvious. What is at stake in this debate is not merely a particular pic-ture, such as the metaphor of a little man or woman inside the brain, who by somehow pulling levers consciously controls all the neural firings and reg-ulates the synaptic potentials. What is at stake at a more fundamental level is our very sense that we are conscious agents who can first form mental in-tentions or make mental “choices” and then, as a result of these choices, say certain things or perform certain actions. What could be more basic to our understanding of ourselves than this? You hold your hand in front of you. I ask you at some moment to decide whether or not to raise your index finger. At some point you decide to raise your finger, and subsequently we observe your finger to go up. Are you not obviously free at least in this sense?

And yet, if the highly influential experiments of Benjamin Libet show what they seem to show, this intuitive picture is fundamentally mistaken. Libet’s data suggest that what actually happens is that subjects first have an impulse to act approximately 550 milliseconds before the action, which becomes a conscious wish about 350 ms. before the act. Only with the rise to consciousness, and hence after the impulse has already set things in motion, can persons perhaps intervene and consciously veto the “planned performance.”18 Note that the data reverse common-sense views on the order of causation, since they suggest that the actual neural causes of the action precede any conscious intervention. But if so, your conscious deci-sion is not really the cause of your act; it is an after-the-fact awareness of an action that is about to take place. As Libet writes,

I have taken an experimental approach to the question of whether we have free will. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical charge in the brain (the “Readiness Potential”, RP) that begins 550 msec before the act. The volitional pro-

18 Libet, Do We Have Free Will, 557.

The End of Freedom?30

cess is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function could still con-trol the outcome; it can veto the act. Free will is therefore not excluded.19

Of course, as Libet notes, the agent may still view herself as free, in this ex-periment as in other contexts. Yet the experiment appears to provide evi-dence that at least her sense of freely initiating her actions is in error. Worse, it also seems to explain why she would think that her action is free, namely because her awareness of the action precedes the action taking place. To the skeptic, Libet’s data appear to offer an empirical verification of David Hume’s famous skeptical challenge:

When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other […] Consequently, there is not, in any single, particular instance of cause and effect, any thing which can suggest the idea of power or necessary con-nexion […] All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we can never observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but never con-nected.20

Hume realized that constant conjunction does not prove causal force. That is, one cannot conclude that event A causes B merely because A precedes event B. Are we misled by this “constant conjunction” into the false belief that our conscious experiences – what we like to call our “decisions” – cause our actions? This was Hume’s contention:

Here the mind wills a certain event: Immediately another event, unknown to our-selves, and totally different from the one intended, is produced: This even produces another, equally unknown: Till at last through a long succession, the desired event is produced. […] How indeed can we be conscious of a power to move our limbs, when we have no such power; but only that to move certain animal spirits, which, though they produce at last the motion of our limbs, yet operate in such a manner as is wholly beyond our comprehension? […] That their motion follows the command of the will is a matter of common experience, like other natural events: But the power or energy by which this is effected, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable.21

The Libet experiments are a quick way to see what is at stake in a rather large set of neuroscientific experiments and data. In each case we are able to observe a series of specific brain events taking place, which we can ex-plain increasingly well in anatomical, organismic, and evolutionary terms. Subsequent to a set of neuron firings, the subject experiences a conscious

19 Libet, Do We Have Free Will, 551. 20 Hume, Enquiry, 103, 113. 21 Hume, Enquiry, 106f.

Why a Revised View of the Person Has Become Necessary 31

impression, say, the wish to do or say something. A moment later, she sees her body perform the action or hears herself speaking the words that she “in-tended.” Of course she concludes that her conscious experience of willing or “planning” was the cause of the words she spoke or the movements her body performed. The trouble is, Libet’s data do not support this subjective sense of causality. Instead, they seem to show that one’s becoming aware is only one by-product of neurological processes that are already in motion, most of which occur at pre-conscious levels. Drives for bodily comfort – for food, sleep, or sex – and basic emotional needs set processes in motion that by themselves lead to actions; consciousness is merely the “Johnny-come-lately” that senses what the body is about to do and then inhibits it – or, iron-ically, takes full credit for the ensuing action. Or so it would seem.

What comes under attack, if this interpretation is correct, is not only the traditional belief that consciousness initiates and controls what we do, but also the claim that free will undergirds our actions. After all, one can only be said to freely decide to carry out some action – at least on the traditional con-ception – if one’s decision is the initiating step in a process that causes a series of lower-level brain events that ultimately lead to the action itself. If the causal order is reversed, in the way that Libet’s data suggest it is, the claim that one has freely initiated the action seems to lose all support. Indeed, it appears that one no longer even needs to appeal to many of the complicated conceptual arguments often used by opponents of free will in the past.

This, in short, is the challenge that any theory of the emergence of con-scious agency must wrestle with if it is to be successful.

Why a Revised View of the Person Has Become Necessary

What kind of philosophical responses can be found to this serious chal-lenge? The facts themselves are difficult to deny. Clearly they require cer-tain revisions to classic accounts of human agency and action. But the ques-tion is, what kind of revisions must be made, and where? In order to answer this question, let us examine as our case study the work of one of the best known contemporary philosophers of mind, Daniel Dennett.22 We will see that matters are in fact rather more complicated than they might at first appear.Dennett’s work is powerful because it appears to formulate the “obvious” philosophical implications of the recent neuroscientific data. His early work is, as he admits, influenced by Gilbert Ryle. Dennett argues that the scientific

22 Dennett is famous for quotes such as, “We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious” ( Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 406), which he tells us not to quote out of context.

The End of Freedom?32

data clash with our cherished picture of “the solitary audience in the theatre of consciousness, the internal decision-maker and source of volitions or di-rective, the reasoner.” These ideas, “if taken as parts of a person, serve only to postpone analysis.”23 Dennett thus recommends “the banishment of these [traditional] concepts from our analysis”24.

Instead, he insists, “having an inner life – being something it is like some-thing to be – is on this account a matter of having a certain sort of func-tional organization.”25 Henceforth consciousness must be studied in terms of its functions. Consciousness is not “about” lofty ideas and mental reali-ties; it must be understood in the context of the quest to survive in a concrete physical environment. Dennett takes his motto from the character Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ famous short story A Christmas Carol. At one point Scrooge admits that he seems to be seeing a ghost, but he decides he has bet-ter reason to think that his senses are deceived:

Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!26

With mental realities out of the way, Dennett is free to look for completely physical explanations of human experience. Thought has the functional or-ganization that it does, he notes, because we are “highly evolved and so-cialized creatures.”27 Dennett’s “naturalized” theory of mind causes him to give a very different answer to the question of the inner world, the question, “what is it like to be” this or that person:

Suppose an entity were all wired up in some fashion so as to realize the flow chart [of human cognitive functioning] in Figure 9.1. What would it be like (if anything) to be such an entity? At first glance the answer seems to be: not like anything. The whole system has been designed to operate in the dark, as it were, with the various compo-nents accomplishing their tasks unperceived and unperceiving. In particular, we have not supposed any inner introspecting eye to be watching the perceptual analysis pro-cesses, the control decisions, the efforts of PR to execute its orders. And yet to us on the outside, watching such an entity, engaging it in conversation, listening to its efforts to describe the effects on it of various perceptual environments, there will be at least the illusion that it is like something to be the entity. In fact it will tell us (or at least seem to be telling us) just what it is like. But inside it is all darkness, a hoax. Or so it seems. Inside your skull it is also all darkness, and whatever processes occur in your gray matter occur unperceived and unperceiving. Can it be said that

23 Dennett, Content and Consciousness, 190. 24 Ibid. 25 Dennett, Brainstorms, 171. 26 Dennett, Brainstorms, 174. 27 Dennett, Brainstorms, 171.

Why a Revised View of the Person Has Become Necessary 33

just as there is some other point of view that you have, there is some other point of view that it has?28

Recognizing this inner darkness, Dennett insists, does not mean that we should never interpret human beings as having intentions and a subjective life. It is still sometimes useful to speak of intentionality and to take what he calls the “intentional stance.” But henceforth we must interpret the language of human intentions as purely regulative, in the Kantian sense: “The inten-tional stance is the strategy of interpreting the behavior of an entity (per-son, animal, artifact, whatever) by treating it as if it were a rational agent who governed its ‘choice’ of ‘action’ by a ‘consideration’ of its ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires.’”29 It is a philosophical mistake to believe that intentional language really reflects an inner subjective reality. To drive home his point, Dennett turns to Nietzsche:

“Body am I, and soul” – thus speaks the child. And why should one not speak like chil-dren? But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body. The body is a great reason, a plural-ity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. An instrument of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call “spirit” – a little instrument and toy of your great reason […]. Behind your thought and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage – whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body. There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.30

Interpreters have called this a “deflationary” theory of mind. The deflation occurs, we are told, as soon as we realize that there is no such thing as a Car-tesian subject at the center of human experience. Susan Blackmore summa-rizes what she takes to be the traditional view:

We seem to imagine that there is some place inside “my” mind or brain where “I” am. This place has something like a mental screen or stage on which images are pre-sented for viewing by my mind’s eye. In this special place everything that we are conscious of at a given moment comes together and consciousness happens. The ideas and feelings that are in this place are in consciousness, and all the rest are un-conscious. The show in the Cartesian theater is the stream of consciousness, and the audience is me.31

28 Dennett, Brainstorms, 164f. 29 Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 27. 30 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Despisers of the Body,” in Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathus-tra, 146, quoted by Dennett in Kinds of Minds. Interestingly, Dennett can even find passages in Descartes, which support this view of the human person. Thus in the same work he quotes from the sixth meditation: “By means of these feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on, nature also teaches that I am present to my body not merely in the way a seaman is present to his ship, but that I am tightly joined and, so to speak, mingled together with it, so much so that I make up one single thing with it.” 31 Blackmore, Consciousness, 65.

The End of Freedom?34

In order for the deflation to succeed, its advocates must account for the con-tinuing conviction that people have that we are actors with a genuine inner dimension, a first-person perspective, who carry out actions as the result of subjective intentions. Dennett’s deflation, for example, tends to appeal to the functions that such language serves, while studiously avoiding the hypo-thesis that there actually is a self that “has” any of the subjective experiences we seem to have. Dennett describes his mistaken assumption that he could find the London underground by following the sign for “subway.”32 In the same way, he suggests, the search for the self, for the subjective center of the person, is nothing more than a category mistake:

You enter the brain through the eye, march up the optic nerve, round and round the cortex, looking behind every neuron, and then, before you know it, you emerge into daylight on the spike of a motor nerve impulse, scratching your head and wondering where the self is.33

A correct understanding of the data, he suggests, deflates traditional notions of the self like letting air out of a balloon. Dennett and his allies are happy to admit that people still have a strong urge to interpret themselves as conscious selves. The deflationary account will only be successful, they realize, if they can explain away the tug that com-monsense or “folk psychology” still has upon us. For this purpose Dennett turns to something he calls the “user illusion,” which restates the traditional view in the most unflattering of terms:

Doesn’t it follow [you might think] […] that our conscious minds are located at the termination of all the inbound processes, just before the initiation of all the outbound processes that implement out actions? Advancing from one periphery along the input channels from the eye, for instance, we ascend the optic nerve, and up through vari-ous areas of the visual cortex, and then […]? Advancing from the other periphery by swimming upstream from the muscles and the motor neurons that control them, we arrive at the supplementary motor area in the cortex and then […]? [… M]ust there not be, by sheer geometric extrapolation, a highest point, a turning point, a point such

32 Dennett, Elbow Room, 74f:The first day I was ever in London, I found myself looking for the nearest Underground sta-

tion. I noticed a stairway in the sidewalk labelled SUBWAY, which in Boston is our word for the Underground, so I confidently descended the stairs and marched forth looking for the trains. After wandering about in various galleries and corridors, I found another flight of stairs and somewhat dubiously climbed them to find myself on the sidewalk on the other side of the inter-section from where I had started. I must have missed a turn, I thought, and walked back down-stairs to try again. After what seemed to me to be an exhaustive search for hitherto overlooked turnstiles or side entrances, I emerged back on the sidewalk where I had started, feeling some-what cheated. Then at last it dawned on me; I’d been making a sort of category mistake! 33 Dennett, Elbow Room, 75.

Conclusions 35

that all tamperings on one side of it are pre-experiential and all tamperings on the other are post-experiential?34

But that conclusion is, in the end, an illusion: “there is no single, definitive ‘stream of consciousness,’ because there is no central Headquarters, no Car-tesian Theatre where ‘it all comes together.’”35

One cannot help but notice that few if any dualists actually subscribe to a view of the inner sense or self as a little man-in-the-machine, spatially localized in this rather extreme sense. (Indeed, it’s unlikely that even that most notorious of all dualists, Descartes, actually held such a view). More subtle dualist positions, such as William Hasker’s emergentist dualism in The Emergent Self36, clearly offer a more interesting philosophical alterna-tive than Dennett’s account would suggest (though I do not in the end en-dorse them). And certainly the understanding of conscious human agency as a holistic attribute or by-product of our complex brain and central nervous system – the dominant view in the literature on emergence – is caricatured rather than captured by Dennett’s description.

First Conclusions

Dennett is right to note the close connection that exists between one’s view of the human person and one’s position in the heated debates over human freedom. Thus there is a direct connection between his deflationary philos-ophy of mind and his attack on freedom. Once we recognize what is wrong with traditional views of the self, neurophilosophers insist, we will have to let go of traditional notions of freedom as well. Freedom doesn’t exist in the traditional (“libertarian”) sense of the term, i. e. in the sense of select-ing among options. Instead, freedom becomes “the capacity to achieve what is of value in a range of circumstances.”37 Or, as Dennett puts it in Elbow Room,

[…] those same decisions [that seem to be voluntary] can also be seen to be strangely out of our control. We have to wait to see how we are going to decide something, and when we do decide, our decision bubbles up to consciousness from we know not where. We do not witness it being made; we witness its arrival. This can then lead to the strange idea that Central Headquarters is not where we, as conscious introspec-tors, are; it is somewhere deeper within us, and inaccessible to us.38

34 Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 108. 35 Dennett, Consciousness Explained, see index under “Cartesian theater.” 36 Hasker, The Emergent Self. 37 Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 302. 38 Dennett, Elbow Room, quoted in Freedom Evolves, 227.

The End of Freedom?36

The notion of moral responsibility changes correspondingly. Along with freedom and the intentional stance, it becomes a merely regulative idea – something that we ascribe to persons, even though we know all the while that they are not actually responsible in the traditional sense. This treatment of freedom as a regulative fiction does indeed represent the major challenge from science (in this case neuroscience) to the traditional belief in human freedom. This challenge sets the stage for the discussion in the following three chapters and will deeply influence, but not determine, the theory of freedom advanced in chapter 4.

What holds for moral responsibility holds also for guilt, Dennett maintains:

How should one respond to the idea that one is guilty? If the concept of guilt one is contemplating applying to oneself is the traditional, absolute concept of guilty-before-the-eyes-of-God, then one has as much reason to dismiss it as one does to dis-miss the other dubious absolutist notions that are its kin: the perfect Kantian will, the Sartrian self-created self, the ideal Socratic agent who can never knowingly do wrong, the Chisholmian agent as unmoved mover. No one, not monsters like Hitler or Eichmann, not ordinary sane criminals like Agnew or Vesco, and not you when you last broke a law, or broke a promise, is or could be guilty in that sense. For that sense of guilt has been screwed so tight by philosophical and theological tradition that the condition it purports to name defies description.39

Normative obligations, then, as opposed to descriptions of the dominant mores of a society of social group, are equally personae non gratae; like freedom and moral responsibility, they have no place in the sanitized view of the person that Dennett is attempting to derive from the sciences.Does this mean that one must then abandonall notions of freedom and moral responsibility? No, not necessarily; responsibility remains a significant con-cept for many neurophilosophers. But how they defend responsibility, and thus how the word is subsequently used, is quite distant from traditional philosophy, as well as from the emergentist position that I will be defending in these pages. In Freedom Evolves, for example, Dennett formulates a sim-ple modus ponens argument:

(P1) Ought implies can.(P2) We sometimes hold people responsible for their actions, and we are sometimes justified in ascribing moral responsibility to them in this way.(C) In these cases, therefore, we are justified in saying that they could have done otherwise.40

What is Dennett actually doing when he argues in this fashion? He states his own maxim: “Don’t try to use metaphysics to ground ethics, [Stephen

39 Dennett, Elbow Room, 166. 40 Paraphrased from Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 297.

A More Radical Entailment? 37

White] argues; put it the other way around: Use ethics to fix what we should mean by our ‘metaphysical’ criterion.”41

Here we reach the climax of the challenge that the so-called neuro-phi-losophers present to traditional philosophy and to the commonsense view of human agents and action. These philosophers begin from the recent neuro-scientific data, including its challenges to notions of freedom and the auton-omy of consciousness. They then reconceive mind, and along with it the hu-man person, in terms derived from the neuroscientific perspective. Finally, they formulate an ascriptive or regulative theory of freedom, of agency, and of moral responsibility that is consistent with their reductive-naturalistic starting point. This is the challenge to those of us who wish to offer a more robust account of human freedom. Are Dennett’s conclusions consistent? Are they required by the data? Do they leave out anything that is essential? At the same time, as we attempt to formulate a more robust theory of free-dom we must continually ask: do the alternatives that we are considering re-main consistent with the scientific data and with the scientific method?

A More Radical Entailment?

What we will discover is the challenges to the neurophilosophers are deeper, and the implications of their work more radical, than most have admitted. Their accounts of human personhood seek to preserve some sort of notion of personal agency, albeit without the classical attributes of free will. As we have seen, their approach cuts deeply into traditional accounts of mind and freedom. But the knife may in fact cut deeper than they intend; it may elim-inate not only free will but also conscious agency as such. This unforeseen consequence provides reason, I will suggest, to question some of the basic assumptions of their position.

The trouble for the neurophilosopher is not just that deflationary accounts of conscious agency undercut free will in the traditional sense. The problem is that, on any reductively physicalist account of human agency, no causal effects at all can be ascribed to mental events qua mental. First, they are not the right sort of thing to count as an explanation in the scientific context. Next, they must maintain that the existence of “mental causes” clashes with the principle of the causal closure of the physical world, which is presup-posed by all strongly physicalist accounts such as Dennett’s. Finally, as Jae-gwon Kim has shown, ascribing mental causes any causal role leads to the problem of over-determination. That is, if there are mental causes, then some particular brain state (in Figure 1.3, B2) would be fully caused both by the

41 Ibid., emphasis added.

The End of Freedom?38

Figure 1.3

The Task Before Us 39

antecedent brain states (here, B1) and by the mental event (M1) that preceded and supposedly caused it. But if either one of the two causal explanations is sufficient, then the other one is redundant. Now indisputably any given brain state is causally influenced by the brain states that preceded it; hence the ex-planatory role of B1 is indispensable. M1, by contrast, involves a mysterious form of “downward causation” which is, at best, mysterious and poorly un-derstood. Thus if one of the two putative influences is explanatorily redun-dant, it is much more reasonable to dispense with the mental cause. But, since the argument applies to any putative mental cause, this appears to re-quire one to dispense with mental causation altogether.

Some neurophilosophers are happy to accept this consequence. For those who wish to defend a more moderate account in which some talk of mental causes is preserved, the argument raises a difficult dilemma: either weaken the sense in which one’s theory of mind is physicalist, or dispense with men-tal causation altogether.

The Task Before Us

In the remaining chapters I seek to make the full case on behalf of conscious agency and mental causation. Yet this argument can no longer be credibly formulated in terms of a dualism that introduces an autonomous spirit into the midst of the brain machinery. Only a rethinking of the philosophy of na-ture from the ground up will suffice. In the end I shall argue that the strict or physics-based naturalism (i. e., physicalism) that has dominated the dis-cussion over the last few decades must give rise to a “broad” naturalism – a naturalism that includes emergent properties. Whether this “broad natu-ralism” can finally support theological conclusions, thereby increasing the plausibility of theism; whether it is neutral vis-à-vis theism; or whether it is as soundly anti-supernaturalistic as most of the alternatives – these are ques-tions that will accompany us throughout the journey that lies ahead.