Running head: CONSCIOUSNESS AND FREEDOM NELSON

CONSCIOUSNESS AND FREEDOM

Free Will in an Evolving Universe

ADRIAN DAVID NELSON

-2015-
CONSCIOUSNESS AND FREEDOM NELSON

CONTENTS

ABSTRACT
page 2

I-FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM

page 3

II - C O M P A T I B I L I S M A N D C O N T E X T U A L I SM
page 8

III - C O N S C I O U S N E S S, E X I S T E N C E A N D V A L U E
page 16

IV - V A L U E A N D M O R A L I T Y
page 24

REFERENCES
page 27

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ABSTRACT

In exploring the question of free will, this essay encounters the apparent

confrontation between determinism and our sense of agency as conscious,

rational actors in the universe. In an attempt to make sense of this issue and

the moral, sociological and cosmological implications involved in dealing

with it, several forms of argument are explored. Finally I investigate the

possibility that an explanation will involve a view of consciousness as an

intrinsic rather than incidental feature of nature, and that a full

understanding of free will necessitates a deeper excavation of the character of

the universe out of which we emerge.

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I consciously choose to raise my arm and the damn thing goes up!

John Searle

I. FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has argued that cortical damage

can impair cognition to such an extent that those unfortunate afflicted no

longer have free will (2005). This essay will tackle a deeper question: the issue

of whether any of us have free will. This concern rises from an apparent

confrontation between two of our deeply held beliefs. These are the view we

have of our selves, and the view we have of the universe. We think of events

in the physical universe as forming a continuous causal chain stretching all

the way back to the Big Bang, unfolding into the present through the

immutable logic of natural law. To live comprehensible lives we need such a

comprehensible view of the universe. However we also think of our selves as

constantly choosing between alternative courses of action. Should I pursue a

masters degree in psychology or philosophy? Should I settle down with my

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book or go to my friends party? The apparent confrontation between

determinism and our view of self seems to suggest we must choose between

our ability to make truly free choices and a comprehensible description of the

universe. Determinism suggests that our choices are the result of events that

never could have been ours to choose, being as they were, set in motion

billions of years before our birth. From this perspective it is by no means

clear what sense it can make to imagine that we could have acted differently,

or that real alternatives were ever truly available for us. We are beings living

in the universe and our choices are events within it. But if all events in the

universe connect causally to earlier events, how can we explain our perceived

nexus of control the intimate sense we could have done otherwise? Much

hangs on the resolve of this issue. Our experience of choice is the basis of

moral responsibility. It is central to our ethical beliefs and values, and

integral to our societal systems of governance. If free will is an illusion, are we

morally accountable for our actions? How can we justify our system of law?

The apparent confrontation between free will and determinism is not

difficult to grasp. Many of us reflected on the question in some form as

children. The issue has troubled thinkers down through the centuries.

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Historically philosophers have come down in agreement on both sides. The

Stoics, of the 3rd Century BC, believed that determinism must be true and as

a result concluded that free will was an illusion. The Epicureans of the same

era reasoned in the opposite direction, concluding that because free will is

obvious, determinism had to be false. In 1880, William James wrote an essay

tracing the contradictory notions of free will and determinism titled The

Dilemma of Determinism (1880). He finally took side with the existence of free

will, believing that real freedom must exist. Unfortunately James struggled to

demonstrate how this could be so. Jean Paul Sartre developed his

existentialist philosophy around a basic truth of freedom (1992; 2001a;

2001b). Similar to Descartes dualism, Sartre divides the world into two

domains, comprising consciousness and being. The world of consciousness was

the nexus of freedom and the world of being was the dominion of

determinism. Sartre, however, could not resolve the real issue looming in the

background: how a free consciousness could exist as part of a deterministic

landscape of being.

Consider again the deterministic argument against free will through the

following four premises.

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1. All events are the result of events causally determined by earlier events.

2. Choices are events in the universe.

3. Choices happen because of events caused by earlier events outside our control.

4. There is no free will.

The existence of free will apparently hinges on our accepting or

denying these four premises. If we agree with the premises, we must accept

the conclusion. We might worry, however, if all of the premises truly follow

from each other. A possible response is to disagree with one of the premises.

We might, for example, challenge the first premise, and argue that modern

physics suggests that we dont actually occupy a deterministic universe. A

central tenet of quantum physics is the notion that nature is probabilistic. This

was the premise Einstein famously rejected, immortalised in his famous

response to quantum physicist Neils Bohr, God does not play dice! (as cited

in Penrose, 2005). Despite Einsteins unease, a central premise of the most

powerful physical theory ever conceived hinges on the fact that some events

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in the universe must occur without a tangible cause. When the quantum

revolution saw Newtons universe replaced by Plancks, strict determinism

was dethroned and several thinkers attempted to frame an argument for free

will in light of modern physics probabilistic description of nature (Compton,

1935; Eccles, 1974). The problem, however, was that the introduction of

quantum indeterminism doesnt seem in any way to advance the argument

for free will. For example, if certain events in the universe are the result of

unpredictable random events, then we have just as little control over these

random events in our brains as we do over classically determined events.

Quantum mechanics may challenge the first premise, but it doesnt replace it

with something with more promise. A comprehensive rebuttal to hopes for

free will based on quantum-indeterminacy can be found in Harris (2012).

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II. C O M P A T I B I L I S M A N D C O N T E X T U A L I SM

There exists a line of approach through which several thinkers believe

that we can hold onto a coherent concept of free will as well as a

comprehensible account of the universe. This is the compatibilist approach.

Compatibilist arguments can be found as far back as Hobbes (1651), writing

in the 16th century, with contemporary thinkers providing nuanced versions.

The essential thrust of the compatibilists argument is that when we really

understand what we want to mean by free will, we can have both free will and

determinism. The argument typically focuses on unpacking what we really

mean by cause. According to the compatibilist, the above deterministic

argument against free will conflates cause with coercion. For example, the fact

that choices we make occur in the context of a cause and effect universe does

not imply that they are in some way coerced. The conditional compatibilist, for

example, defines the freedom necessary for free will by the condition that our

actions match our desires. I wanted to order the salad, and I did so. To say that

I could have chosen the steak means nothing more than to say that I would

have chosen the steak if I had wanted it. In this general sense, actions may

track desires, making them free, but also caused, making them determined.

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One of the problems facing such an account of free will is that there

exist apparent instances when actions track desires and yet the individual was

not truly free. An example is addiction. It seems that the mind gripped by

addiction is not acting freely, despite the fact that their actions track their

desires. Employing a novel thought experiment the philosopher Harry

Frankfurt argues that it is possible to make a free choice even when an

individual could not have acted differently. Frankfurts thought experiment

describes an assassin on a mission to shoot the president. Our assassin is the

unknowing patient of a nefarious doctor who has implanted a device in his

brain. If the assassin changes his mind before pulling the trigger, the device

will activate, causing the assassin to change his mind back again and shoot

the president anyway. As it happens, the assassin holds to his conviction and

kills the president. He acted of his own choice and based on his own desires,

but was it really a free choice? If he had changed his mind, the device would

have changed it back again. Frankfurt deploys this argument to illustrate that

free will must constitute something more than actions tracking desires. He

establishes his position by drawing a distinction between human

consciousness and the consciousness of other animals. According to

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Frankfurt, what distinguishes humans from other animals is our ability to

have desires about desires. For example, you may love the taste of steak and

desire it for your lunch, but worry about the moral ambiguities associated

with meat. The other option, the healthier salad, however, is simply not as

appealing. You wished you wanted it, but you dont. Frankfurt claims that it

is in this ability to hold a second order desire - to desire that you desired the

salad, that lies the secret to understanding free will. Real freedom, Frankfurt

offers, comes from our exercising those desires that we desire to be effective.

This account goes beyond the conditional compatibilists, who describe free

will merely as choices matching desires, to adopt a hierarchical approach, in

which free choice is contingent on being free to track second order desires

(1971). A problem for this artful reimagining of the question, apart from its

troubling dimension of human exceptionalism, is of the actual freedom in

these so-called free events. Where is the freedom in being able to choose a

desired option when those desires are themselves determined by events over

which we had no control?

Another voice in this debate is that of the contextualist. We were free to

choose between the steak and the salad, but our choices were in the context

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of the limited options on the menu. From one contextual reference frame, we

are free to choose between the menu options, but in the larger sense, we can

go to the restaurant across the street. Consider again the determinist

argument against free will. According to the contextualist, our deterministic

intuition sets up the context one way, but then shifts to mean something else.

Even though we are not free to determine external causes, our actions can be

free in the context of the ordinary kinds of choices we make - and it is

precisely these kinds of freedoms that we are actually interested in. The

determinist account portrays free will as something somehow outside or

independent of the universe. The contextualist argues that by subtly shifting

context within the flow of the argument, we are misled into believing that

free will cannot be possible in any context, which, according to the

contextualist, is an unjustified step. The philosopher Daniel Dennett adopts a

novel compatibilist approach. Determinism seems to suggest our choices

were determined and therefore our actions are inevitable. Dennett calls our

attention to this word inevitable. According to Dennett, to say that the future is

inevitable has no meaning beyond a confidence that there actually will be a

future. He unpacks the rarely used antonym of inevitable, evitable - meaning

avoidable. According to Dennett, our perceived centre of agency in the

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universe arrives from our ability to internally construct possible courses of

events and avoid those that are not desired (Dennett, 2004). A rock falling

from the mountainside will almost certainly land on the ground below. We

have the choice to avoid standing where it will land. This is the result of our

being able to track forward, with some degree of accuracy, the unfolding of

deterministic events. In this respect free will is not only compatible with

determinism, it requires it to make sense. A similar argument was proposed by

Benjamin Libet, whose conception of human consciousness was defined by

the power to veto rather than instigate choices. Libet is best known for

demonstrating that electro cortical activity correlating with specific choices is

identifiable in a participants physiology prior to the perceived conscious

occasion of choice (1993). Later research has identified predictive activity in

the prefrontal and parietal cortices up to seven seconds before a participant

signals conscious choice (Soon, Brass, Heinze & Haynes, 2008). This may

seem rather damning evidence against any causal nexus of choice, suggesting

our sense of agency was preceded by a readiness potential in the brain. This,

however, is not a confounding issue for the compatibilist, who embraces

determinism and therefore expects to track preceding causes of choice. But if

choices are not made in consciousness, why does this sense of choice make it

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to the level of consciousness? Libet takes the stance that a function of

conscious acquiescence serves a suppressive action to events originating in

the subconscious a kind of final checkpoint before volitional activity is

initiated. Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran famously referred to this

suppressive function of consciousness as free wont (1998).

A problem for theories such as those of Dennett and Libet, which argue

a reductive function of consciousness over choices and actions, is that a

choice to not do is equally a decision occurring downstream of prior

causes. Neuroscientist Sam Harris has given voice to this concern (2012). The

problem with compatibilist arguments in general, according to Harris, is that

what we end up calling free will is not at all what we really meant by free will

in the first place: that we are the authors of our experiences and the thinkers

of our thoughts. Harris points out that we dont actually choose our thoughts

at all. This would imply that we somehow think about our thoughts before

we think them. This kind of free will, Harris reasons, we simply cannot have.

Significant to Harris argument is the rejection that moral responsibility

requires free will. To paraphrase his thought experiment, imagine that a man

murders his neighbour in cold blood. Before the trial it is revealed to the

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court that the defendants violent behaviour was the result of a tumour

pressing on emotional centres in his brain. As a result of the discovery it is

subsequently ruled that the defendant was not guilty of murder. The jury

agrees that his behaviour and choices had an obvious cause outside of his

control. In other more typical cases in the criminal courts, however, these

causes are often much subtler and distributed the maladaptive lessons of a

troubled childhood, genetic predispositions and so on. The issue is that we

often dont see these hidden causes. Imagine we could see how specific genes

are transferred from generation to generation and a detailed map of that

individuals relative entanglement with their complex social environment.

This world of unseen, untracked forces is ultimately, Harris argues, as

exculpatory as a tumour in the frontal cortex. A bear that mauls a young

family acts purely on genetic and environmental influences. Many would not

hold any blame to the bear for these reasons. However, there is nothing that

sets human beings apart from these same natural laws. Recognizing the

importance of our choices as experiences in consciousness, according to

Harris, ought not to be conflated with free will. By recognizing each

individual as the centre of a confluence of changing forces would underpin a

more compassionate justice system, orientated around care and

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rehabilitation, unfed by our cruder retributive instincts. This logic also

intellectually outmanoeuvres the justification of a vengeful gods retributive

action in response to sin. I think this is a thought provoking insight into the

limitations of existing justice systems and the parsimony of believing in an all-

knowing yet vengeful creator. However, I think we still need an explanation

for the obvious fact that each of us perceives choices among possible courses

of action, perhaps equally as much as we need a coherent model of causality

and the universe. An exculpatory account of free will, and thus all morally

questionable action burdens us with the pragmatic issue of our collective self-

governance as well as an absence of coherent concepts of self and

responsibility.

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III. C O N S C I O U S N E S S, E X I S T E N C E A N D V A L U E

It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to

some extent inherent in every electron

Freeman Dyson
physicist
(1988)

I suspect the issue of freewill is inextricably tied to the question of

consciousness; a phenomenon which as I will also defend, reflects a

fundamental perspectival aspect of existence. Could it be, as Dyson offers,

that choice, or intentionality is in some way fundamental? Does human

consciousness and its freedom meaningfully partake in the same freedom that

permits the entire universe to exist? In this section I will summarize the

justification for three posits that form the basis of my current intuitions on

free will. They are as follows,

1. Consciousness is intrinsic to reality.

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2. The universe is teleological.

3. Existence involves value.

To begin, please forgive the need to first clear some philosophical

brush. I am among those philosophers that reject psychophysical

reductionism as a coherent response to the mind-body problem. To my

lights, no account of the causal extrinsic structure of matter and its physical

processes can explain nor anticipate conscious experience. I further take

consciousness to be an intrinsic nature as revealed by direct experience. As

several historical and contemporary philosophers have pointed out, empirical

science seems to have an inherent inability to reveal the world as it exists in

itself (Seager, 2005). The intrinsic nature of the world is essentially

unknowable through objective means. That the world should have such an

intrinsic nature, however, seems necessary to ground the physical in reality.

Descartes is famous for observing that the existence of consciousness is the

only thing that is revealed to us without inference, and ultimately the one

thing we cannot doubt that exists. The psychic interiority of experience is the

only intrinsic nature we know, and for that matter can conceive of. I find

myself in company with several historical and contemporary philosophers

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who defend that the intrinsic perspectival nature of experience is an

attractive candidate for the necessary intrinsic nature of the world. In this

view the brains structure and processes are understood to modulate a

fundamental interiority of nature.

In order to understand free will, I think we need not only an intrinsic

view of consciousness, but also that it be applied to our larger picture of the

universe. This, I think, ultimately leads us to the view that the universe is

teleological. This is a position that has been comprehensively argued by the

philosopher Thomas Nagel, who maintains that in addition to consciousness,

the existence of purposes and goals in living organisms should prompt us to

re-examine our basic assumptions about the character of the physical

universe (2012). For reasons similar to my own, Nagel takes consciousness to

be fundamental. He also argues that it does not seem possible to separate it

from the intentional and purposive. The existence of purposes and goals is

self-evident in organisms which, as Nagel defends, cannot be accommodated

by the neo-Darwinian model or the materialist assumptions upon which it is

based. This observation forms part of the basis of his teleological view of the

universe, in which evolution, cosmic and biological, is drawn toward future

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value conditions that involve the development of mind and consciousness.

This might further explain the surprising finding of 20th century cosmology,

that the physical principles that govern the very evolution of the universe

could have existed within multiples of trillions of intelligible arrangements

and yet only an infinitesimal fraction of these could be hospitable to complex

life of any kind (Davies, 2006). Nagels view that the universe subsumes its

own explanation through a natural teleology has several moving parts that

Ill omit for our purposes, yet I wish to bring to our attention what I believe is

Nagels key observation on this matter; the need to recognize the

fundamentality of value.

I share Nagels intuition that the larger evolutionary process inherently

involves the development of consciousness in some form. To explain why

involves a deeper excavation of value. As we will now explore, the question of

value appears to penetrate to that deepest question we have about the

universe; why it exists at all. The question can be summarized simply: How

does existence cause itself? No physical process or thing can be invoked for

this role. To do so is to simply add to that we are trying to explain. Any

attempt to invoke a physical event as the cause of the universe, a quantum

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fluctuation for example, leads to an apparently infinite regress of questions.

How did the primordial situation come to acquire its quantum

underpinnings, and what caused that? Nagel is among a modest though

growing number of philosophers that think the answer must ultimately lay

with value. Historically, Schelling and Hagel defended versions of this view in

the late 18th and 19th centuries. In the early 20th century the celebrated

philosopher Alfred North Whitehead declared that, Existence, in its own

nature, is the upholding of value intensity. (1938) In recent times the idea

has been perhaps most comprehensively discussed in Leslies Value and

Existence (1979) and in Nagels Mind and Cosmos (2012). For these thinkers, the

self-realizing nature of existence must, in the last analysis, reduce beyond the

physical to a question of value. Existence, they offer, has intrinsic value over

non-existence. Provided we accept this, another realization also follows. The

only known vehicle for value is consciousness. The evolution of the universe, life

and consciousness may require the concomitant understanding that the

universe requires the resolution of certain value conditions to satisfy the

causal closure of existence. It seems to be both coherent and parsimonious

that the universe is governed not simply by causes pushed blindly from

behind, but also by forces that pull toward future value conditions. The

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universe is trillions of times more ordered than our understanding of entropy

anticipates. This is a real mystery in cosmology. Perhaps another kind of

force exists, maybe akin to gravity, that draws the universe toward greater

complexity.

Recall the three posits outlined in the section above; that consciousness

is intrinsic to reality, that the universe is teleological, and that existence

involves value. As summarized, these admittedly controversial posits are

unlikely to be convincing. Much more comprehensive treatments of each

posit can be found in the references cited, including my book, Origins of

Consciousness (2015). However, with these three posits now in view I can

articulate my intuitions about free will.

I submit that the universes evolution is connected to the causal closure

of its own existence. Rather than restricting the creative activity of the

universe to a single instant some 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang, I think

the creative activity of the universe is on going and imminent to every

moment. I suspect that the evolution of consciousness is an intrinsic aspect of

a larger cosmic self-actualization process. We are extensions of this process

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and our minds are continuous with it. In this view we are embedded within a

larger matrix of meaning that transcends and includes our lives. As I

articulated at the beginning of this section, I suspect that the question of

consciousness and thus free will, is intimately tied to that other primordial

mystery, that of existence itself. The exercising of a certain freedom permits

the universe to exist. I take this unfoldment to involve value, and therefore

consciousness. In this view we can regard our lives and choices as extensions

of that same freedom imminent in the on-going creative activity of the

universe. In recognizing ourselves as extensions of this larger cosmic

evolutionary process we confront a dramatically expanded view of identity

into which the self is dissolved. We are the universe seeking itself into being

through form. It is, I think, in this expanded identity that true freedom exists.

The constellation of intuitions about many areas of science and

philosophy lead me to suspect that a view such as this is at least in the right

direction, if only that it grants ontological reality to consciousness. There is

however, the difficult-to-ignore sense of participation mystique that seems to

goad all our attempts to model reality. I have no doubt that my own musings

on freedom are far too narrow and parochial. In spite of our extraordinary

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achievements, I think we humans must accept that we understand much less

about the full picture of reality than we often imagine. A fair criticism of the

defended view is that it is, in essence, unscientific. The intuitions are based in

scientific observations and the concomitant discourse, and yet it is not clear,

at least to my lights, that the ontological freedom hypothesis supported here

is falsifiable, at least as currently formalized. This is a serious problem

because falsifiability is an important component in the construction of a

scientific hypothesis. Indeed, this is the same issue that troubles much of the

discussion on free will. With terms as loaded as consciousness and freedom

there is always a risk we are simply talking past each other. This, I think, is

why there are so many competing arguments about free will. The issue of

freedom seems intractably relevant to beings like us. I suspect that a truly

satisfying answer will depend on progress not only in the neurosciences and

philosophy, but also in physics, cosmology and metaphysics. Given what I

take to be the intimate connection of free will to the enduring enigma of

consciousness and possibly existence itself, I fear that understanding free

will may be some way down the line.

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IV. V A L U E, F R E E D O M A N D M O R A L I T Y

The issue of moral responsibility is an important aspect of any

comprehensive discussion of free will. Within the line of thinking I have

outlined above, I tentatively offer, also exists a basis of morally right action

a central concern in the free will debate. If the teleological view I have

defended is correct, we might think of our lives as part of what Nagel

describes as the lengthy process of the universe waking up. (2012) If the

evolution of consciousness satisfies a necessary value condition in the causal

closure of existence, than our relative contribution to that process is the basis

of all value and meaning. In this view, the development of science, the

construction of knowledge, building community, the cultivation of

compassionate and harmonious behaviours, and all other activities to which

we infer value have it only in so far that they pertain to the evolution of

consciousness. The view seems attractively intuitive. If we take the lifting of

consciousness as our basic value, then cooperation will always be preferable

to conflict, compassion will always outmode cruelty, and greater knowledge

will always have relative value over ignorance. These values are not distinctly

human, but universal, applying to all instantiations of consciousness and its

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evolution. This forms the basis but not the structure of a universal moral

framework, which would conceivably evolve alongside a developing

understanding of the role and relationship of mind in the physical universe.

The continuity between consciousness and reality remains deeply mysterious,

and yet I think every moral question can ultimately be reduced to a concern

about consciousness and its evolution. Harris makes a persuasive argument

for this in his 2011 book, The Moral Landscape. A view of consciousness as

intrinsic grounds these values within the metaphysical integrity of reality

itself. There are, I think, many benefits to this view, including aesthetic ones.

Our most essential identity is no longer of an isolated illusion of the chemical

complexity of brains; it is sutured to the very process of reality. Other beings

are no longer islands of intentionality with which no direct communion can

occur. They become extensions of the same creative principle through which

the universe is seeking itself into being. This, at least to me, feels both

instructive and connecting.

In summary, I submit that organisms like us experience free will, and that

this is indeed a veridical experience in so far that our freedom to choose

between possible courses of action is an extension of the on-going creative

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activity of the universe. The view I have defended can be understood as a

form of compatibilism, because both the reality of the world and the reality

of the mind are coherently preserved. However, in contrast to other

compatibilist accounts of free will, I think this view carries the benefit of

conserving space for the basic ontological fact of consciousness. Without

underplaying the complex cognitive activity of brains and biology, freedom is

understood as intrinsic to the underlying physics from which they emerge. I

tentatively offer that this view provides the basis of a universal framework of

values. I take value to pertain solely to consciousness and its evolution, and

thus behaviours that contribute to this process form the basis of all moral

concerns. In recognizing consciousness and value as intrinsic rather than

incidental features of the universe, we can avoid psychophysical reductionism

in our understanding of free will, in addition to providing the necessary

concepts of self and responsibility in a way that is continuous, unifying and

integral.

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