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Copyright by Neal Damian Judisch 2005 Copyright By Neal Damian Judisch 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Neal Damian Judisch certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: MECHANISM, PURPOSE AND AGENCY: The Metaphysics of Mental Causation and Free Will Committee: _______________________________ Robert Kane, Supervisor _______________________________ Robert Koons, Supervisor _______________________________ John Martin Fischer _______________________________ David Sosa _______________________________ Michael Tye MECHANISM, PURPOSE AND AGENCY: The Metaphysics of Mental Causation and Free Will by Neal Damian Judisch, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2005 For Janice and the Little Ones Acknowledgments I owe a very large debt of gratitude to my dissertation committee, Robert Kane, Robert Koons, John Martin Fischer, David Sosa and Michael Tye, each of whom has influenced my thinking on these matters greatly. I thank Robert Koons in particular for the inordinate amount of time he has spent with me over the past couple of years. His generosity has been incredible, and without his help the present work would no doubt have taken a very different shape. He and Michael Almeida have been invaluable philosophical and personal mentors to me, and I am deeply indebted to both of them. My thanks, too, to Max Goss, Timothy Pickavance and Justin Tiehen for all of the conversations, sympathetic listenings and trenchant criticisms, and especially to my mother and father for their constant encouragement and help. Last, thanks above all to my wife, Janice, for her much-needed support, love and, especially, for looking after the kids while I hammered away at this thing. v MECHANISM, PURPOSE AND AGENCY: The Metaphysics of Mental Causation and Free Will Publication No.__________ Neal Damian Judisch, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisors: Robert Kane and Robert Koons Libertarianism is a thesis according to which free will is incompatible with determinism and human agents possess free will to some degree. Three formidable objections have been raised against this thesis by its opponents: (i) Libertarianism requires the falsity of philosophical naturalism or materialist theories of mind; (ii) Indeterminism threatens freedom by undermining the rational, volitional control of agents; (iii) If indeterminism does not threaten our freedom, then neither does it enhance our freedom or add to human agency anything of appreciable value. I address these challenges in novel ways by assessing recent work on mental causation and consciousness and applying that work to the problems at hand, arguing that progress may be made in the free will debate by vi reorienting it toward an examination of those conditions which are essential to agency simpliciter. In response to (i) I argue that a coherent account of libertarian agency requires no greater an ontological inventory than naturalism allows provided that there is a naturalistic solution to the problem of mental causation, one that (i*) secures the causal efficacy of mentality, (ii*) coheres with the characteristic purposiveness of intentional behavior, and (iii*) illuminates what it is for an agent to produce or bring about an action. I show that (ii) is unfounded on a causal construal of action, since the most promising sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for purposive behavior are adeterministic, and therefore do not require the obtaining of deterministic causal connections between intentions and matching behavior. Since agents exercise the relevant capacities of control just in case they act purposively, it follows that indeterminacy does not in itself vitiate agential control. I analyze the claim expressed in (iii) as a special case of the conceptual gap between the first-person and the third-person perspectives, arguing that the conceptual irreducibility of agential production (iii*), which results from the deployment of phenomenal concepts in our thinking about agency generally, is what lies at the root of the present objection, but that such conceptual irreducibility does not entail that the exercise of genuine free will cannot consist in suitably related indeterministic event causes. vii Table of Contents 1. Introduction..................................................................................................................... 1 2. A Survey of the Dialectical Landscape......................................................................... 31 3. Mental Causation: The Problem and Some Parallels with the Problem of Free Will... 69 3.1 Substantival and “Naturalistic” Dualism ................................................................ 70 3.2 Type Physicalism and Reductionism...................................................................... 74 3.3 Anomalous Monism................................................................................................ 80 3.4 Nonreductive Physicalism in General................................................................... 101 3.4.1 Supervenience ................................................................................................ 102 3.4.2 Causal/Explanatory Exclusion....................................................................... 112 3.4.3 Causal Realism and Explanatory Practice ..................................................... 116 3.4.4 Causal Relevance and Counterfactual Dependence....................................... 134 3.4.5 The Special Scientific Reductio..................................................................... 154 3.5 Reductionism Revisited ........................................................................................ 158 3.5.1 Disjunctive Properties and Nomic Kinds....................................................... 159 3.5.2 Species-Specific Reductions.......................................................................... 172 3.5.3 Functionalized Reductions............................................................................. 173 4. Mechanism, Purpose and Agency............................................................................... 197 4.1 The Determinism/Epiphenomenalism Link Explained......................................... 199 4.2 Three Essential Components of Agency............................................................... 218 4.3 A Naturalistic Theory of Free Will?..................................................................... 223 4.4 Indeterminism and Control ................................................................................... 233 4.5 Production, Origination, and the Phenomenology of Agency.............................. 263 Appendix: Emergentism and Agent-Causation .............................................................. 299 A.1 Free Will and Naturalism Revisited..................................................................... 299 A.2 Ontological Emergence........................................................................................ 303 A.3 Dependence and Downward Causation: Exploring Some Options ..................... 316 A.4 Emergence and Agent-Causation......................................................................... 341 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 363 viii Vita.................................................................................................................................. 380 ix 1. Introduction Necessitarianism cannot logically stop short of making the whole action of the mind a part of the physical universe. Our notion that we decide what we are going to do, if as the necessitarian says, it has been calculable since the earliest times, is reduced to illusion. Indeed, consciousness in general thus becomes a mere illusory aspect of a material system. What we call red, green, and violet are in reality only different rates of vibration. The sole reality is the distribution of qualities of matter in space and time. Brain-matter is protoplasm in a certain degree and kind of complication—a certain arrangement of mechanical particles. Its feeling is but an inward aspect, a phantom. For, from the positions and velocities of the particles at any one instant, and the knowledge of the immutable forces, the positions at all other times are calculable; so that the universe of space, time, and matter is a rounded system uninterfered with from elsewhere. But from the state of feeling at any instant there is no reason to suppose the states of feeling at all other instants are thus exactly calculable; so that feeling is, as I said, a mere fragmentary and illusive aspect of the universe. This is the way, then, that necessitarianism has to make up its accounts. It enters consciousness under the head of sundries, as a forgotten trifle; its scheme of the universe would be more satisfactory if this little fact could be dropped out of sight. On the other hand, by supposing the rigid exactitude of causation to yield, I care not how little—be it by only a strictly infinitesimal amount—we gain room to insert mind into our scheme, and to put it into the place where it is needed, into the position which, as the sole self-intelligible thing, it is entitled to occupy, that of the fountain of existence; and in so doing we resolve the problem of the connection of soul and body. – C.S. Peirce We approach the issue
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