Decomposing the Will: Meeting the Zombie Challenge
The belief in free will is firmly entrenched in our folk understanding of the mind and among the
most deep-rooted intuitions of western culture. The intuition that humans can decide
autonomously is absolutely central to many of our social institutions from criminal responsibility
to the markets to democracies and marriage. Yet despite the central place free will occupies in
our commonsense understanding of human behaviour, the nature of this very special human
capacity remains shrouded in mystery. It is widely agreed that the concept of free will has its
origins in Christian thought (Arendt 1971, part 2, ch.1) and yet from the earliest days
philosophers, theologians, and lawyers have disagreed about the nature of this capacity. Many
have doubted its existence, some goes as far as to charge the idea of free will with incoherence.
Nietzsche famously declared the idea of free will “the best self-contradiction that has been
conceived” (Nietzsche BGE, 21). The philosophical controversies surrounding free will roll on
to this day (see e.g. Kane 2004; Baer et al 2008), while the folk, for the most part, continue to
employ the concept as if its meaning were wholly transparent, and its reality beyond question.
Into this happy state of affairs the cognitive sciences dropped a bomb. All of a sudden it seemed
as if the folk’s happy state of ignorance might have come to an end, and the questions
surrounding free will might now be settled once and for all using the experimental tools of the
new sciences of the mind. The truth the scientists told us they had uncovered was not pretty:
some claimed to have decisively demonstrated that there is no free will, and any belief to the
contrary was a relic of an outdated and immature folk understanding we must leave behind once
and for all (Libet 1985; Roth 1994; Wegner 2002; Prinz 2003; Lau, Rogers et al. 2004; Soon, Brass
et al. 2008).
1
The scientists told us that we are the puppets of our unconscious brain processes
which “decide” what we will do quite some time before we know anything about it. Some of the
scientist’s statements were clearly intended as polemical provocations. However, they were also
giving expression to an increasingly well-founded scepticism that free will as it is ordinarily
understood might be a particularly powerful and striking illusion on a par with the magic tricks of
the best conjurers. Unsurprisingly, the response from the intelligentsia was swift (see e.g. Wolfe
1996; Horgan 2002; Brooks 2007) and the findings have also generated a wave of interest within
the academic world with a number of excellent monographs and collections of essays emerging
aimed at evaluating the scientist’s findings (see e.g. Pockett et al 2006; Baer et al 2008; Vierkant
1
Libet, in common with the other researchers we have cited, argues that our actions are prepared for and
initiated unconsciously, but unlike these other researchers he doesn’t deny the causal efficacy of conscious
volition. He argues that we should replace our concept of free will with a concept of free won’t that works
“either by permitting or triggering the final motor outcome of unconsciously initiated process or by vetoing the
progression of actual motor activation.” (Libet, 1985: 529)
2008; Mele 2010). However so far what has been missing from the debate is a serious attempt to
use the knowledge we undoubtedly gain from the experiments to enhance our understanding of
human behaviour and its causes.
This collection aims to fill that void; it is designed to work as a tool for anybody who is interested
in using the advances in the sciences of the mind to better understand the hitherto mysterious
capacity for free will. Our talk of Decomposition in the title of our collection should be understood
as an explanatory aim: we propose to take the conscious will, the original home of the
homunculus, and to explore some of the ways in which scientists think it can be broken down
into simple mechanisms whose interactions make us free agents. In doing so we aim for a better
understanding of the relationship between psychological mechanisms and the experience we have
of authoring and controlling our own actions. We embrace the scientific advances as an
opportunity for a deeper scientifically informed self-understanding. We leave it as an open
question, to be settled through a careful dialogue between philosophy and science, the extent to
which such a self-understanding will turn out to be consistent with the folk belief in free will.
Category mistake?
Before we turn to the real substance of the book we must pause to consider some objections to
such an explanatory enterprise. Many philosophers have pointed out that the sciences might be
well placed to help us understand volition better, but there are important limits on what can
science can tell us about autonomy (see e.g. Roskies (this volume)). Science might be able to help
us with the “will” part of “free will”, but there are limits to the help it can offer us with regards to
the “free” part. When we say that a person has acted autonomously or freely we are attributing
responsibility to the person for the action, and hold the person accountable for the consequences
of their action. It is far from obvious that the concept of moral responsibility answers to anything
relating to psychological mechanism. On a natural enough understanding of responsibility, it
refers to a magical ingredient that transforms clever cognitive mechanisms into autonomous
agents.
The reason why some philosophers think that the sciences can’t really help us with the big
question of what free will consists in, is that this question, at least in the philosophical discourse,
has centrally been understood as the question of whether or not our actions are fully causally
determined by nature, and what implications this has for our status as autonomous agents.
In philosophy the debate has been mainly played out between parties that believe free will exists.
Libertarians (who believe that determinism and freedom are incompatible and that we are free)
have argued with compatibilists (who also believe that we are free, but who also believe that we
are determined and that freedom and determinism are fully compatible). The position that many
neuroscientists seem to favour of hard determinism also exists in the philosophical debate, but is
much less prominent.2 Hard determinists agree with the libertarians that freedom of the will and
determinism are incompatible, but they agree with the compatibilists that determinism is
probably true and therefore they conclude that we do not have free will.
It is easy to see why the participants in the dispute between libertarians and compatibilists were
not very impressed by the findings from cognitive science. At best, neuroscience can help with
the question whether or not human behaviour and decision making really is determined. (Even
here you might wonder whether that really is possible, given that scientific experiments seem to
simply assume the truth of determinism.) It is difficult to see how the sciences should be able to
help us to settle the conceptual question, whether or not freedom of the will is compatible with
determinism.3
As our contributors show in some detail it is difficult to see how the advances of the
neurosciences will help us with the metaphysical question of whether or not free will is
compatible with the truth of determinism (Roskies). It is an interesting sociology of science fact
that even though most philosophers agree broadly on this, it still does not seem to stop the
publication of more and more books on the question. John Baer and colleagues (Baer et al. 2008)
have edited an excellent volume on free will and psychology and the question of the relationship
between determinism and free will is very prominent within the book.
In our volume we start from the assumption that the cognitive sciences will not be able to help
us directly with the discussion between libertarians and compatibilists. However, a simple
dismissal of the scientific findings as irrelevant to the free will debate would be premature. Even
though these findings might not have any bearing on the truth or falsity of compatibilism or
libertarianism, it doesn’t follow that the scientific debate about volition is unrelated to the
philosophical one about free will. To see why this is the case imagine for a moment that
2
Saul Smilansky (e.g. 2002). Free Will, Fundamental Dualism, and Centrality of Illusion. The Oxford Handbook
of Free Will. R. Kane. Oxford, Oxford University Press. is one of the more prominent contemporary
philosophers in favour of hard determinism.
compatibilism is correct, and freedom of the will is consistent with a belief in determinism.
Obviously this does not mean that everything that is determined would also be free.
Compatibilists are keen to work out which kind of determinants are the ones that make us free
and which ones don’t. What does it take to be an agent and for an instance of behaviour to count
as a free action (see e.g. Velleman 1992)? If compatibilism were true, human autonomy would
consist in behaviours being produced by the right kinds of mechanism, but which are those? Is it
crucial that we can evaluate action options rationally? Is it important that we can initiate actions
in a context (or stimulus) independent manner? Does it matter whether we can think about our
own mental states? Must we be able to think about thinking? Do we need to control our
behaviour in a conscious manner in order to be responsible for it (see Roskies)? These are all
important philosophical questions about necessary conditions for human autonomy. But the
answer to the question of whether or not we have any of these abilities, and to what extent we
employ them in everyday action and decision-making is at least partly an empirical question. If
we think that mental agency or conscious control is necessary for free will, the question of
whether we are free or not will depend on whether we have these capacities and can exercise
them in going about our everyday business. Hence, the question of whether we are free or not,
turns out to crucially depend on a better scientific understanding of the machinery of our minds.
Now, take away our initial assumption about the truth of compatibilism, suppose libertarianism
was the right answer to the determinism question. It seems not a lot would change. If you want
to know the conditions for libertarian human autonomy you look at the compatibilist ones and
add the crucial indeterminist extra. Libertarians will make use of exactly the same or at least very
similar ingredients (rationality, action initiation, self knowledge) to give the necessary conditions
an agent needs to fulfil, before adding ’true’ freedom of choice that turns merely self-controlled
behaviour into truly free action.4 If we don’t have or rarely exercise self-knowledge and rationality
in generating our behaviour, this would seem to spell trouble for a libertarian account of free will
just as much as for a compatibilist account.
Still one might worry that an account of free will needn’t be interested in questions about
mechanisms. Philip Pettit (2007) for has for instance argued that neuroscience is only threatening
to commonsensical free will notions that are built on an “act of will” picture.5 Such a picture
might attempt to identify specific cognitive mechanisms that causally enable “acts of will”.
According to Pettit this would be to underestimate the social dimension of the free will discourse.
4
For a very good account of the conditions of libertarian freedom see Mele, A. (1995). Autonomous Agents.
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
5
Similar arguments are found in many other contemporary compatibilist positions e.g. Fischer or Velleman
Whether somebody is free or not crucially depends on their ability to justify their actions
according to the normative rules set by society. The idea of free will works because we take
ourselves to be free agents and have normative ideas about what the behaviour of a free and
responsible agent should look like. As we all strive to fulfil the normative ideal of a free agent our
behaviour begins to resemble the ideal more and more. This assimilation to the ideal is not
dependent on their being a prior independent mechanism in the agents that would lead to such
behaviour naturally without normative guidance.
This move familiar to the philosopher of mind from the discussion on folk psychology ((Dennett
1987)) seems particularly appealing in the case of free will and autonomy. Free will is such a
loaded concept, a concept on which so much human high minded ideals are based that it seems
rather likely that it is an idealisation, an abstraction, that is not reducible to actual mechanisms.
If Pettit’s suggestion turns out to be along the right lines, it wouldn’t follow that our interest in
mechanisms is futile. It does nothing to undermine the thought that there may be specific
functions of the machinery of mind, which are essential for being an autonomous agent. If it
were really the case that free will is important only as a self-attribution, this would still invite the
question why this self-attribution is important. It seems very likely that it can only be important
if the self-attribution does in some way exert an influence on behaviour. Whether the will,
understood in the way Pettit proposes, does exercise a causal influence on our behaviour will
then be a question that will be answered in part by looking to the empirical sciences. It might
well turn out that even though free will might be conceptually quite coherent and even though it
would be quite possible to have the mechanisms to be free, cognitive science reveals that the
machinery of the mind works in way that are inconsistent with our being free agents. We will
label this worry the zombie challenge.
The zombie challenge
The zombie challenge is based on the amazing wealth of findings in recent cognitive science that
demonstrate the surprising ways in which much of our everyday behaviour is controlled by
processes that are automatic and unfold in the complete absence of consciousness. One of the
key aims of this volume is to see whether and how these findings are relevant for our thinking
about free will and even more importantly to give examples of how these findings might form the
basis for empirically informed accounts of autonomy.
What we are calling the zombie challenge is quite different from the debate in the metaphysics of
mind (Chalmers 1996) about the logical possibility of creatures physically and functionally like us
that lack phenomenal consciousness. Our question is about the actual world and whether
consciousness plays as significant a functional role in the causation of our behaviour as is
normally assumed. The zombie challenge suggests that the conscious self takes a back seat in the
control of our behaviour. The functional machinery that is responsible for the initiation and
control of much of our everyday behaviour does all of its work without involving the conscious
self. If the zombie challenge is effective, consciousness will turn out to be epiphenomenal. Such
a finding would seem to be bad news for any belief in free will, even if we grant the correctness
of compatibilism. Most compatibilists think that some form of control is what is special about
freedom.6 Exactly what the control consists in is up for grabs, but in most accounts it seems to
be an assumption that this control is consciously exercised. If the zombie challenge is upheld,
the capacity for conscious control would turn have been revealed to be idle. We may well have a
capacity for conscious control, but if it doesn’t do any work in the production of our everyday
behaviour this would seem to have major implications for views that take conscious control to be
necessary for the exercise of free will. It would show that one of the conditions the compatabilist
identifies as necessary for free will does little or no work in generating our behaviour. This
increase the temptation to conclude the same is true for free will. We believe it is something like
the zombie challenge that motivates scientists to claim that free will is an illusion. The
experiments that motivate free will scepticism have very little to do with the truth or falsity of
determinism.7 The experiments all seem to point to the conclusion that the conscious self is an
epiphenomenon.
In his essay for our collection, Richard Holton helps to diagnose why determinism might have
been thought to be a problem for free will by showing how the folk often mistake the doctrine of
determinism for an alternative doctrine that he labels “predictability”. Predictability claims that
complete knowledge of conditions of the world at a given time together with knowledge of the
laws of the nature will allow one to predict what will happen at the next instant. Holton argues
that the truth of predictability would indeed justify scepticism about free will. It would encourage
the thought behind the Stoic’s lazy argument that our decisions are powerless to make a causal
difference to what will happen. What will happen was always going to happen, and our decisions
and choices can make no difference. Holton points out however that predictability (which of
course amounts to fatalism) is metaphysically much more demanding and stronger hypothesis
than determinism, and is moreover probably false. Now according to the zombie challenge our
6
See e.g. J. Fischer, and M. Ravizza (1998). Responsibility and Control. Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press. discussion of guidance control.
7
In many conversations we had compatibilism was described by scientists as a cheap philosopher’s trick to
simply redefine arbitrarily what free will is. In our collection John Dylan Haynes explicitly makes it clear at the
beginning of his piece that he is an incompatibilist.
conscious choices are epiphenomenal: our behaviour is determined automatically, and the
conscious self is an impotent bystander.
If choices do not make a difference it seems
permissible, and indeed rational to stop trying.8 The predictability Holton talks about is clearly
science fiction, but as John Dylan Haynes shows in his essay, worries about predictability feel
increasingly real. Haynes can already predict simple decisions such as whether we will use our left
or right index finger in making a button press using machine learning algorithms that identify
patterns of fMRI BOLD signals in various brain regions. There are many more findings along
similar lines that seem to indicate that full predictability of behaviour is just around the corner
(e.g. Haynes et al 2007; Kay et al 2008; Soon et al 2008). By disentangling determinism from
predictability, Holton helps us to understand how the threat to free will comes not from
determinism, but from predictability. Predictability leads to resignation, the feeling that the
conscious self can make no difference to what will happen. If predictability undermines free will,
so too does the zombie challenge. Both imply that the conscious self can make no difference to
what happens.
The evidence behind the zombie challenge
We will discuss two prominent strands of evidence in the empirical literature. There is on the one
hand all the work done in the wake of Libet’s seminal studies that seem to show that conscious
intentions are preceded by unconscious brain processes that signal that the brain is already
preparing to act. As Adina Roskies notes in her review of the Libet related literature initiating
actions is one of the key concepts associated with the will and it seems at first glance as if Libet
has given us strong empirical evidence that we do not consciously initiate actions. The findings
themselves have stood up surprisingly well to very close scrutiny, but the discussion as to what
the findings mean is still raging (see for instance the recent anthology edited by SinnottArmstrong & Nadel 2011). A standard reply to Libet’s findings has been that consciousness
cannot be measured in milliseconds (Dennett 2003?). This criticism is partially undermined by
the findings of John Dylan Haynes’ lab where they used fMRI to predict simple left/right
decisions many seconds (9-11 seconds) before subjects were aware of their decisions (Haynes,
this volume).
Still many questions remain about how we should interpret the Libet studies. Indeed, Libet
himself did not believe that his findings showed that we do not have free will, arguing that our
capacity for free will is to be found in the ability to exercise a veto on any unconsciously
generated action. Libet does not deny that conscious intentions might have a causal role to play
8
Again this is clearly what some scientists have in mind too. See Fridja on Prinz and fatalism
in action initiation (in contrast to Wegner (2002) discussed below), but he does worry that these
conscious intentions are simply the product of an unconscious decision and that there might not
be a role for consciousness in the decision making process. The veto is supposed to answer this
worry. If the veto were possible, it would give the conscious self the final say in whether a
behaviour gets to executed. Much has been written about the possibility of the veto. There have
been studies which seem to support the possibility of the veto (Brass & Haggard 2007) and
studies that have denied that the veto is possible (Lau & Passingham 2007). In his essay for our
collection, Mele shows that the empirical work, crucial as it is, does not suffice to establish the
possibility of a conscious veto. Mele discusses four different interpretations a subject might arrive
at of an instruction to veto. He shows that the strategy that most closely fits the conceptual
requirements of a real veto is also one that is most difficult to make sense of. Mele’s final verdict
is therefore the mainly negative one that existing empirical work doesn’t tell us whether the
vetoing of conscious proximal intentions is possible. Mele suggest that the veto is crucially
important for healthy moral development, but before we can empirically investigate its underlying
mechanisms we must resolve some very difficult questions about its operationalisation.
The zombie challenge is not restricted to questioning the efficacy of proximal conscious
decisions in the etiology of our actions.9 The Libet studies were primarily concerned with
decision, and volition was operationalised as open response selection. From the go/no go
scenario in the original Libet experiments to the left right presses in the Haynes studies what
these studies have in common is that they are built on the intuition that subjects should be able
to decide what they want. These experiments buy into the compelling intuition that free will
consists essentially in the ability to do otherwise, an intuition at the heart of incompatibilist
notions of free will. The zombie challenge arises to the extent that seemingly conscious choices in
open response selection paradigms are screened-off from doing any causal work by an
unconscious process that gets started well in advance of any conscious decision by the subject.
In the social psychology literature, the zombie challenge takes a rather different form. Here
volition is located in the control of behaviour, and the zombie challenge takes the form of an
argument to the effect that consciousness isn’t in control of our actions, and we are ignorant of
the unconscious processes that really in the driving seat (for reviews of this literature see the
essays by Morsella & Bargh, Gollwitzer et al, and Hall et al). Morsella and Bargh in their
contribution to this volume begin by reviewing a host of striking findings that show how
Adina Roskies shows that there are five ways in which volition is investigated in the neuroscience literature today:
1) action initiation; 2) intention; 3) decision; 4) inhibition and control; and 5) the phenomenology of agency.
9
powerful is the influence of the automatic juggernaut in steering our behaviour. From the speed
of walking to the elevator after a psychology experiment to cooperation in moral games, Bargh
and colleagues have shown time and again that these behaviours are hugely dependant on
automatic primes. Daniel Wegner’s lab have shown that not only are we frequently ignorant of
the causal factors that are influencing our behaviour, sometimes we do not even know whether
we’ve initiated an action. Wegner (2002) describes a whole range of cases from facilitated
communication to automatic writing where people have no sense of authorship for actions
they’ve initiated and controlled. Wegner and Wheatley (1999) report an ingenius and complex
experiment in which they create the illusion of authoring an action in their participants. Again
there is a lot that could be said about the philosophical implications of these studies (see e.g.
Nahmias 2005; Bayne 2006; Roskies, this volume). Wegner has however certainly succeeded in
planting the seeds of scepticism about conscious will firmly in the empirical discourse concerned
with agency.
Social psychology is replete with examples of our self-ignorance about the reasons behind our
decisions (Wilson 2002). Johansson and colleagues (2005) have come up with a particular
striking paradigm that seems to demonstrate that people can be quite easily fooled into believing
they have made decisions, which in reality they never made. In the original paradigm participants
are shown photographs of two faces and then asked to rate which of the two faces they judge
more attractive.
In random trails they are asked to justify their choice.
Sometimes the
experimenters switch photographs showing the subjects a face they didn’t choose. In 75% of
trails, participants fail to notice the mismatch between the photograph they are shown and the
one they chose, and freely volunteer an explanation for a choice they have not in fact made. In
their contribution to this volume, Johansson and colleagues report evidence that this choice
blindness extends into the realm of moral decision making. In one study (under review at the
time of writing) participants are given a two page questionnaire and asked to rate a list of morally
charged statements relating to topical news stories. After all the questions had been answered
participants were asked to read aloud statements and explained their reasons for agreement or
disagreement. In manipulated trails, the statements they read out had been tampered with in
ways that reverse the meaning of the original statements the subjects read. The reversal of
meaning tended to be noticed when people either strongly agreed or disagreed with a statement,
but 60% of manipulated trails were not detected. Particularly striking was the finding that just in
the earlier choice blindness studies, subjects that did not detect the change, nevertheless
proceeded to construct “detailed and coherent arguments defending the position they had
disagreed with minutes earlier” (Hall et al, ms, p.12).
We have described two strands of a vast empirical literature that strongly supports the zombie
challenge. The evidence clearly does not establish that there is no role for consciousness in
decision making (see essays by Roskies and Vargas for more on this point). It does however
show that conscious intention, and conscious control aren’t necessary causal precursors for much
of what we do. It is all to easy to slip back into a Cartesian way of thinking according to which
the mind is absolutely transparent and we have privileged access to the processes that lead to our
actions. This is strongly counter-argued by the empirical findings we’ve outlined above.
Even if the zombie challenge has been slightly exaggerated, it nevertheless invites an important
question that has hitherto not been on the agenda in philosophical discussions of agency. Can
we come up with a testable function for conscious behavioural control? Given how much of our
everyday behaviour can proceed without conscious guidance and control, what is it that
consciousness does? Many papers in this volume deal with this question in one form or another
(see in particular the contributions by Bayne, Vargas, Vierkant, Gollwitzer et al, Fridja, Morsella &
Bargh)
Meeting the zombie challenge
One tempting response to the zombie challenge is to try to disentangle questions about free will
from their traditional associations with consciousness (see Ross et al 2007).
The idea of
conscious control seems to be inextricably linked with a Cartesian homunculus, an inner
conscious self that makes free decisions (whatever those may be). We know that there is no
Cartesian homunculus populating our minds: our cognitive machinery is composed of soft
assembled, decentralised, self-organising distributed systems.
What holds for cognition in
general, also holds for free will. If we are going to find the will, it is somewhere in the distributed
systems that make up our cognitive machinery that we must look. This means dispensing with
the idea of a central executive planning and micro-managing the actions we undertake. We are in
complete agreement with Dennett’s (2003) that if free will requires a Cartesian self, then free will
is an illusion, in just the same way that true love would be an illusion if it required the
intervention of Cupid. Of course true love doesn’t require Cupid’s arrow, and nor does free will
require a Cartesian self.
Once we abandon the myth of the Cartesian self must we also give up on the idea that conscious
control is necessary for free will? Perhaps what makes human beings free and flexible is our
culture. Social norms and the enforcement of those norms allow to live rich and varied lives and
multiply what Dennett (2003) calls evitability. Control is the key to free will, but it doesn’t matter
whether that control is conscious or not.
The conclusion that conscious control isn’t necessary for free will finds an echo in the Christian
literature. The (former) priest Anthony Freeman has argued that the lesson we should draw from
cognitive science is not that our responsibility for our behaviour is reduced because it is outside
our conscious control (Freeman 2000). We should accept responsibility for all our behaviour
whether it is consciously or unconsciously controlled. Freeman wants full responsibility even in
cases where conscious control is wholly absent. Many scientists argue that because we do not
have conscious control we do not have full responsibility either. Dennett, by contrast argues that
we have full responsibility because we have all the control that we could reasonably want. All
three approaches invite us to give up on the deep-rooted intuition that free will and conscious
control are necessarily intertwined, and you can’t have one without the other. Can we do away
with the Cartesian homunculus without giving up altogether on the intuition that there is
connection between conscious control and free will?
The sense of agency
We all have a feeling that we are the authors of our own actions, and we experience ourselves
choosing what to do from the most trivial decisions about what to select from the menu at our
favourite restaurant to the potentially life-changing decisions about whether to accept a job offer
or a marriage proposal. This sense of self-efficacy is one that we have from very early days of our
childhood as every parent can testify. Nico Fridja recounts the story of his son as a toddler who
when offered helped would fly into a rage with the cry: David do.10 It is this strong intuition that
we can choose how we act that can make the zombie challenge seem so deeply counterintuitive.
Proposals that ask us to give up on the intuitive connection between conscious control and free
naturally inherit something of this counterintuitiveness insofar as they invite us to give up on the
intuition that we exercise conscious control over our behaviour.
A good deal of work has been undertaken in cognitive neuroscience in recent years explicitly
aimed at understanding the neural mechanisms that underpin the experience of being an agent
(for some discussion see the essays by Tsakiris & Fotopolou and Gallagher). We will return to
some of this work below. However first we want to briefly point to the important place the
10
See as well the fascinating studies on three months old, who seem top enjoy being able to control the mobile
much more then if they get the exact same effect passively Watson, J. S. and C. T. Ramey (1987). Reactions to
Response-Contingent Stimulation in Early Infancy. Cognitive Development in Infancy. J. Oates and S. Sheldon.
Hillsdale NJ, Erlbaum.
experience of agency has in the literature on philosophy of action concerned with free will. Carl
Ginet (1990) has described free actions as actions that the agent feels have issues directly from
him, a feeling Ginet describes as an actish quality. Ginet takes this feeling to be at the heart of all
libertarian intuitions. He describes: “My impression at each moment that I at that moment, and
nothing prior to that moment, determine which of several open alternatives is the next sort of
bodily exertion I make.” (1990: 90) One might not wants to follow Ginet in his libertarian views
whilst nevertheless retaining his gloss on the experience of agency. David Velleman (1992) in a
seminal paper accepts on behalf of compatibilists the obligation to account for the experience of
agency, an obligation he discharges by appealing to the desire to act rationally. The details of
Velleman’s proposal are intriguing, but we will forego any discussion of them here. What we
want to take from Velleman is the thought that any account of free will, compatibilist or
otherwise, owes an account of the experience of agency. Indeed if cognitive science could reveal
this experience to be veridical, this would be one strategy for meeting the zombie challenge.
Conversely if cognitive science revealed the experience to be illusory (see Wegner 2002) this
would provide further support for the zombie challenge.
In his essay for this volume, Paglieri argues that there is no positive experience of freedom.
Paglieri considers a number of candidates that have been appealed to in the literature on the
phenomenology of agency and he argues that in each case we do not make our judgements of
agency based on an experience of freedom. Rather our judgement is based on absence of
coercion. Our belief that an action is a free action is our default attitude unless we are presented
with evidence to the contrary. If Paglieri is right, this would block any appeal to the experience
of freedom in responding to the zombie challenge. For Paglieri claims there is no positive
experience of freedom.
Paglieri however also recognises that the phenomenology of agency is exceptionally complex, and
that many varieties of experiences each with their own distinctive content feed into our
experience of being free agents. Gallagher (this volume) distinguishes between three layers to the
sense of agency each with its own complex character that is part retrospective, and part
prospective. He begins by distinguishing a pre-reflective or first-order sense of agency from a
higher-order reflective sense of agency that depends on taking up an introspective attitude
towards our first-order experience of initiating and controlling an action.11 This pre-reflective
experience involves a fairly coarse-grained awareness of what I’m doing, or trying to do.
For a related distinction see Bayne & Pacherie (2007) and Synofzik et al (2008). Tsakiris & Fotopolou (this
volume) make a similar distinction between what they call “feelings of agency” and “judgements of agency”.
11
Gallagher is careful to distinguish aspects of the phenomenology of agency that are prospective
and retrospective from aspects of the phenomenology of agency that relate to acting in the here
and now. Actions that are the outcome of a future-directed and/or present-directed intention are
accompanied by a sense of agency, but the sense of agency will derive in part from the prior
planning. The sense of agency can also take a retrospective form that derives from my ability to
explain my actions in terms of my beliefs, desires and intentions. I feel like I am in control of my
actions because they fit with my beliefs and desires that rationalise the action.
Both the
retrospective and prospective ingredients are associated with reflective sense of agency. In the
case of the prospective ingredients, the actions concerned are the outcome of some kind of
reflective deliberation, and the sense of agency derives from this deliberative process.
In the
case of the retrospective ingredient, the sense of agency comes from the process of reflecting on
an action and one’s reasons for performing it. One can have a thin recessive experience of being
the agent of an action without either of these ingredients being in place. This is arguably the case
with many of our skilful behaviours – the skilled pianist doesn’t have to reflectively deliberate on
the finger movements he makes in performing a piece of music. So long as his performance of
the piece is going smoothly, there is no need for him to reflect on what he is doing. His attention
can be completely taken up with what he is doing. However it would be a mistake to conclude
that just because there is no reflective sense of agency, there is no sense of agency whatsoever for
skilled behaviours. It is not as though skilled behaviours are performed unconsciously, as we find
in cases of somnambulism or automatic writing. There seems to be a clear phenomenological
difference between performing an action while sleepwalking and performing a skilled behaviour.
In the latter case the subject has some awareness of what he is trying to accomplish and of the
effects of his actions on the world.
Gallagher distinguishes an agent’s pre-reflective experience of what she is trying to accomplish,
from motor control processes that give me the sense that I am moving my body, and that my
actions are having certain effects on the world. This distinction also provides the starting point
for Tsakiris and Fotopolou in their paper, more on which shortly. One way that cognitive
neuroscientists have set about studying the sense of agency is to give subject’s tasks where they
are asked to judge whether they caused a particular sensory event. Gallagher discusses an fMRI
study by Farrer & Frith 2002 in which subjects manipulate a joystick moving a coloured circle on
a screen. Sometimes the subject causes the movement, sometimes the computer does, and
subjects must judge which of the movements they are seeing are effects of their own actions.
When subjects report causing a movement of a coloured circle, Farrer & Frith found bilateral
activation of the anterior insula. Gallagher argues that what is being measured in these studies is
not the neural mechanisms that underpin a pre-reflective sense of agency, but neural mechanisms
that are involved in motor control. Echoing Gallagher’s worry, Tsakiris and Fotopolou argue
that experiments that ask subject to judge whether they caused a given sensory event can tell us
very little about the experience of agency. At best they can tell us something about the “crossmodal matching process” that integrates representations of one’s voluntary actions with sensory
representations of actions and their consequences. They fail to advance our understanding of the
experience of initiating and controlling an action, key constituents of the pre-reflective experience
of agency.
Tsakiris & Fotopolou make some positive proposals about how to investigate the pre-reflective
experience of agency, which they characterise as “the feeling that I voluntarily move my body”.
They argue that a key requirement is a control condition in which the movement parameters are
the kept constant, for example, subjects are asked to press a button, but the movement is made
passively or involuntarily (also see Tsakiris & Haggard 2005). The question they suggest we must
answer if we are to scientifically investigate the experience of agency is in what way agency
changes the experience of the body. This is an experience that is present both when we passively
move and when we actively move.
Is the sense of agency simply an addition to an
“omnipresent” sense of body ownership or is the sense of agency a different kind of experience
to the experience of body-ownership? Tsakiris & Fotopolou report neuroimaging experiments
that support the latter view that the experience of agency is qualitatively different (Tsakiris et al,
under review at time of writing). They find no activations common to active movement and
passive movement conditions, and distinct patterns of activation in the two conditions strongly
supporting the view that an experience of agency is a qualitatively distinct kind of experience
from the experience of body ownership.
Does this pre-reflective sense of agency provide evidence for free will and the neural mechanisms
that underpin voluntary action? One conclusion we do seem to be warranted in drawing is that
the sense of agency isn’t an illusion as has been powerfully argued by Wegner (2002). Wegner
and colleagues have amassed substantial evidence that our experience of mental causation – the
experience that our intentions are the causes of our actions, may be a post hoc inference. We
undergo a conscious thought about an action at an appropriate interval of time before acting.
The action we perform is consistent with the action we thought about performing, and there are
no other rival causes of the action. So we infer based on the satisfaction of these conditions that
we are the authors of an action. The sense of agency we arrive at via this route is a reflective
sense of agency and we’ve seen that this doesn’t exhaust our experience of agency. In addition
there is what we’ve been calling a pre-reflective sense of agency. This is the outcome of neural
processes involves in motor control. However one might worry about whether the pre-reflective
sense of agency really adds up to the experience of freedom that is required for a robust response
to the zombie challenge. Recall that this is the kind of experience of freedom we have when for
instance we make a life changing decision. The control we have over our everyday skilful
behaviours finds a phenomenological echo in the pre-reflective sense of agency, but this looks to
be too thin a kind of control to secure rationally responsible agency.
What is the function of conscious control?
Suppose you are not yet swayed by the idea that the role of consciousness for the will is
overrated. Yet you also feel that the force behind the zombie challenge? What are you to do?
One obvious strategy would be to try to identify a functional role for consciousness that is
compatible with the automaticity and neuroscientific findings, and tells us what consciousness
might be needed for when it comes to acting voluntarily. Traditionally the role of consciousness
has been connected with self-knowledge, and the capacity humans have to evaluate their reasons
in advance of acting. This link can be found in Aquinas but it is also implicit in traditional
hierarchical compatibilist accounts of free will. In his seminal work Harry Frankfurt (Frankfurt
1971) equates freedom of the will with the ability to have self directed desires. But it seems that
models like Frankfurt’s requires the agent to know that she has first-order desires about which
she in turn can have second order desires. In other words it seems that in order to be free an
agent has to be able to metarepresent i.e. to understand the nature of beliefs and desires.
There is nevertheless a tension between an account that places self-awareness and self-knowledge
at the heart of free will and the zombie challenge.
The social psychology literature seems to
show that we are self blind. We do not know our desires that lead to our behaviours and we can
even fail to know which choices and decision we have made as is evidence by the choice
blindness studies discussed earlier. Nevertheless, at least two of our contributors locate the
functional role of consciousness for the will in metacognitive monitoring. Morsella & Bargh
argue that consciousness is necessary in order to resolve conflicts between high-level processes
that are vying for control of the skeleto-muscular system. According to this proposal, it is the
function of consciousness to resolve conflict between incompatible high level action plans. It
seems that Bargh may have finally found what he had previously feared might never be found
(automaticity paper) a functional role of consciousness for agency.
Nico Fridja also defends a self-monitoring role for consciousness. He thinks that the role of
consciousness for the will consists in resolving conflict between emotions. He explicitly quotes
Frankfurt here as a model for his account. However, Fridja is as well aware of the worry that
consciousness might be less well informed about our real motivations then we ordinarily think
and that this might pose a major puzzle for his account. (JK: more needs to be said here about
Frijda’s account.)
One moral we can draw from these very different but related proposals is that it would be
premature to dismiss consciousness as an epiphenomenon. We simply need a more realistic view
of what it is that consciousness does. In these two papers we find two very different but equally
plausible accounts of the role of consciousness in the control of behaviour.
Joelle Proust also explores a role for self-monitoring this time in the context of mental agency.
Proust is concerned with the nature of mental actions. According to her mental actions differ
from bodily actions in three important ways: (1) they cannot have prespecified outcomes; (2) they
contain a passive element; (3) they do not exhibit the phenomenology of intending. Crucially,
Proust believes that mental actions do require a metacognitive element, but she does not believe
that mental agents need to be metarepresenters. Building on Proust’s account it seems not too
difficult to develop an alternative answer to the zombie challenge. One might speculate that the
metacognitive capacities which are necessary for mental actions are not propositional knowledge
about mental states, but come rather in the form of epistemic feelings. As Proust argues in her
paper our “common sense categories like trying to remember or trying to perceive” (page 8 of
draft) are woefully inadequate descriptions of the real monitoring processes. If this were right it
would explain the self blindness found in the social psychology studies as well as the idea that self
awareness is crucial for agency. Self awareness is crucial, because it distinguishes mental
happenings from mental actions, but being able to act mentally does not entail that our
commonsensical descriptions actually match the real goings on of the monitoring process.
But, perhaps free will should not be thought of as a capacity which requires second order mental
states? Hierarchical views of free will like that of Frankfurt have come under attack pretty much
from the outset (see. e.g. (Watson 1982; Wolf 1990) etc). Recently there has been a very lively
debate in philosophy in the wake of the work of Richard Moran (Moran 2001) about the question
whether mental agency should be thought of along the lines of bodily agency. As mentioned
already, Proust argues that mental actions are special because of the element of passivity which is
characteristic of them. Proust, however, does want to retain a clearly intentional element.
Philosophers like Pamela Hieronymie (Hieroymi 2009) have gone further and argue that the most
important kind of mental actions are fundamentally different to bodily actions, insofar as they do
not involve a clear distinction between agent and intentional object. Evaluative control as she
calls this form of mental action is characterised by the agent being able to be responsive to
reasons.
If we accept Hieronymie’s analysis of what makes us mental agents the need for reflective self
awareness is diminished. What makes us free agents is not that we can think about our own
mentality, but a special way of thinking about the world. The scepticism about the importance of
self awareness in Hieronymie’s work can be mapped nicely on the central topic of this volume.
The zombie challenge relies almost exclusively on work that tests for the presence or absence of
consciousness by looking at subjects reports, but perhaps this method is as problematic as it is
wide spread. Tim Bayne argues that traditionally agency had been understood as a marker of
consciousness (AMC). He then investigates why so many scientists in recent times have been
sceptical of AMC and instead insisted on introspective report as the only sufficient marker of
conscious episodes (IMC). Bayne rejects the main arguments in favour of IMC. Many of these
arguments are equivalent to the zombie challenge. Bayne argues that the experiments in favour of
IMC may show that agents are conscious of less that they think they are, but it might still be true
that being conscious is a necessary condition for agency. Bayne does not claim that he can spell
out the positive connection between consciousness and agency, but he does raise some serious
doubts about the often unquestioned validity of the claims made by the proponents of the
zombie challenge.
Obviously the notion of agency that Bayne is employing is much weaker than what we would
normally require for the will, so that there clearly will be creatures who do possess agency and
therefore consciousness, but who do not possess free will. Nevertheless there is a clear argument
that, if Bayne is right, the zombie challenge will fail. Nobody would seriously deny that humans
possess agency (in the weak sense Bayne has in mind) and if that entails that they are conscious
then it seems plausible that consciousness will play a role in all higher forms of agency as well.
Kiverstein’s paper provides further support for AMC by looking specifically at skilful behaviours.
He argues that skills mark out a kind of voluntary action that occupies a space in between
automatic behaviour and action that is the outcome of reflective deliberation (see the earlier
discussion of sense of agency).
Bargh (2008) has argued that subjects in his priming studies
behave just like patients with utilisation behaviour whose behaviour is controlled by “external
stimuli at the expense of behaviour autonomy” (Lhermitte, 1986: 342).
Kiverstein argues
however that the comparison between normal agents and patients with utilisation behaviour is
instructive in a way that undermines any generalisation that might be made about conscious
control based on the priming studies. Normal agents don’t perform actions that are wholly under
the control of environmental influences. They exercise internal motor control to act only on
environmental affordances that are relevant to their projects, interests and needs. We exercise
what Kiverstein calls a “situated freedom” performing actions that line up with our embodied
concerns. What does consciousness do according to Kiverstein? Kiverstein agrees with Bayne
that there is a constitutive link between consciousness and agency. He borrows from recent work
by Ward, Roberts and Clark the idea that the function of consciousness is to poise the agent over
a space of possible actions. This view of consciousness allows us to find a role for conscious
control in everyday action that highlights how different normal agents are from both the subjects
in priming studies and from patients with utilisation behaviour.
b) Hierarchical accounts could be right, but do not require self knowledge
Vierkant presents a mixed model of hierarchical and non hierarchical accounts of free will. He is
impressed by the idea of evaluative control and allows that is at the heart of mental agency.
However, Vierkant argues that what makes human agency different is the ability to manipulate
their own mentality in an intentional way. These self-manipulations share with traditional
hierarchical models that what makes us free is the ability to choose who we want to be. In
contrast to the tradition however, Vierkant does not see the meta-stance that humans can take
towards their own mentality as an ideal and special way to gain better knowledge about
themselves, but argues instead that this stance allows them to become free from what seems
naturally rational and to instead take on board the desired (mainly social) norms. The role of
conscious self awareness on this model is not important at the point of learning about what it is
that we really want to do, but at the point of implementing our desires about who we want to be
efficiently.
Peter Gollwitzer’s work on implementation intentions could be understood as empirical support
for such a position. Gollwitzer’s work has always been special in the relevant research, because
in addition to contributing to the social psychology research that seems to support the zombie
challenge he was always interested as well in doing research on what the function of
consciousness might be. In a series of fascinating papers reviewed in his contribution Gollwitzer
has shown that the conscious contribution to action execution might be the formation of
implementation intentions. The role of consciousness might consist in specifying circumstances
under which behaviour should be triggered in order to reach a desired goal.
This work is bad news for the zombie challenge with its claim that consciousness is largely or
completely irrelevant for behavioural control, but it as well counterintuitive to what philosophers
might have expected to be the role of consciousness. Traditionally consciousness has been
associated with the rational evaluation of goals, but Gollwitzer seems to indicate that the role of
consciousness if far more mundane than that and consists mainly in an instrumental managing
function that ensures that the system implements its intentions in the most effective way. In
addition to this long standing research programme
Gollwitzer adds in this contribution the fascinating dimension of the role of emotions wait for
reply to comments .
A similar position seems to be advocated by the Hall and Johanson paper, who discuss the role
of modern technologies for self shaping.
Finally: The role of the social
The last point which needs to be discussed in this introduction is the importance of the social for
the will and the question of how well the rediscovered importance of the social domain meshes
with the role of consciousness with this collection examines.
In the already discussed collection distributed volition it seems that there is a dichotomy with the
Cartesian conscious self on the one hand and distributed automatic mechanisms on the other
side.
All our contributions want to go a middle way between the two extremes. Vargas argues very
forcefully that our growing knowledge about the situatedness of human volition is not mainly a
threat, but a chance. Once it has been understood that environments matter for moral agency the
design and influencing of these environments can become a much higher priority as in a world
where we insist that autonomous choices reside exclusively in a stable internal conscious self.
One as fascinating as provocative idea of how this knowledge could be put to concrete use in this
context is in the work of Professor Susan Hurley, who would have, had she been still alive, been
part of this collection. Hurley argues in her paper Media violence (Hurley 2004) that the
distributors of violent media entertainment should be at least partially responsible, if there were
(as she argues there is) an increase in real violence as result of this. She argues that this is the case,
because the link between media and real violence functions via an automatic imitative link that
individuals do not control.
The conclusions that Hurley draws are surely very controversial, but she shows the way in how
the cognitive sciences can help us to re-examine questions of autonomy with a fresh perspective
which is enriched and not threatened by the progress of the sciences of the mind.
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