#mental causation

[thehumanfront]

Animal agency and free will

Pictured: A simple earthworm and Daniel Dennett.

Do animals make their own decisions? However small an input they have, are they free? Or are they just collections of cells—organisms—operating together according to external physical laws?

For, you see, we are animals too; and if we believe in free will, we ought to be able to establish signs of agency in them—that is, if we believe in evolution—because we share similar origins.

One particularly influential theory belongs to Daniel Dennett. Dennett grants animals agency if they are able to act on intentions. As per his ‘Intentional stance’, if an animal (an intentional system) possesses the ability to act on mental activities, such as beliefs and desires, it has intentions which can be treated independently from the physical laws that govern its behaviours.

It doesn’t matter that these intentions can be wedded to the deterministic predictions of physical sciences. Dennett purportedly finds what free-will theorists are seeking: freely born, subjective intentions, which can’t be deprived by predictions. From the minds of lowly entities, such as clams and earthworms, to the cognitively advanced minds of orangutans and Asian elephants, who show semblances of self-awareness, agency is graduated and ranges with the sophistication of intention.

The crazy thing, though, is that Dennett doesn’t require consciousness, though it can certainly affect what kinds of intentions animals have. Thus Dennett can’t even rule out thermostats and other inanimate objects which ‘act’ on ‘considerations’ of their surroundings! Moreover, animals (and objects?), like us, can face one physically possible future and still be treated as responsible agents for whatever transpires.

Is Dennett too ambitious? His account is certainly popular amongst determinists.

[word-association]

Pull my finger

I'm trying to think of ways of making mind-body dualism vivid and palpable--a sort of captatio to the mind-body problem. The sort of thing you'd write in the first chapter of a mind-body problem textbook--to get a sense of why the mind-body problem is a problem.

(I forget who it was that said that the man on the street is by default a Cartesian dualist (Poincare?). Anyway: if this is true, i.e. if we have a built-in unreflective inclination to think of the mind as separate from the body, then there should be ways to inject some mystery & doubt into this intuitive way of thinking.)

\[1\]

So, here's an exercise. Put your hand on the table, palm facing downward. Now move each finger, one at a time. Look at how each of the extrinsic muscles twitches as its corresponding finger moves.

You are, of course.

But that's a funny thing to say, because an external observer would perhaps remark: no, it's the hand muscles (by contraction and relaxation) that pull the fingers and make them move (like the strings moving a puppet in a puppet show).

And sure, you do see the muscles contracting as the fingers move, and you sort of know they have something to do with the fingers moving. But it's a funny thing, because it doesn't feel like it's the muscles that are moving the fingers. It feels like it's you who is moving the muscles, and you're doing it with your mind--how? through a 'mental remote control' of sorts. 

This is mysterious, right? Right?

Because at some level you know it's the muscles doing all the work-- all the causal work. But intuitively, it doesn't feel like that--it feels like you're sort of giving a command and the fingers just 'obey'.

"Well, you are giving a command--you're activating the muscles, and you're telling them to move the arm, and this is what happens."

But think of it, that's not what you're doing (it doesn't feel like that's what you're doing)--your mental act is not one of moving the muscles; it's of moving the fingers. 

Ok.

So it feels like you're directly moving the fingers, but at the same time you sort of know that it's the muscles moving the fingers.

\[3\]

Who is moving the fingers?

"It's me who's moving the fingers (with my mind, as it seems like it)."

Do this experiment: cut off your muscles and see if you can still do it.

"It's the muscles actually moving the fingers."

Then the question is: who makes the muscles contract?

"The causal chain is more complex; there's neurons firing, which activate the muscles, which move the fingers."

Ok, but that just makes it more mysterious: who makes the neurons fire?

\[4\]

So what I'm trying to point out is: there seems to be an interesting clash viewpoints when you try to describe actions such as finger movement-- more precisely, when you try to describe the causal mechanisms that determine this event. The phenomenological account, whereby I describe it as 'my mind' giving commands and my fingers obeying, seems incomplete (it leaves out all the complex contributions of the muscles). however, the phenomenological account seems to be the most natural description.

The purely physical description of the event (neurons firing \(\rightarrow\) muscle activation \(\rightarrow\) fingers moving) seems richer in detail, and closer to the actual 'fact of the matter'. But it's ultimately incomplete as well: where the fuck is the mental act of willing the movement of the fingers?

\[5\]

It would be nice if we could squeeze in both factors (physical and mental) into one single coherent picture, but that seems difficult to do, because they seem to employ different notions of causation.

So, what to do.