Does consciousness cause behavior?  The flippant answer suggested
by the the title is simply, "no".  My awareness (of the world
around me, or of my actions) doesn’t cause anything.  As William Banks, one of
the contributors to this anthology, writes (p. 237), "How could an idea
move a muscle?  Ideas have no mass and no solid parts that could connect to a
neuron or a muscle fiber."

Yet our experience, bolstered by folk psychology, is that ideas do move
the world.  Ideas, we believe, can topple kingdoms; faith can move mountains;
the pen is mightier than the sword.

We make plans and carry out decisions when we could just as well have
changed our minds — or could we?  What does it mean to say that we could have
done things differently when there is only ever, at least insofar as we can
observe, one way that we did do things?  Descartes is derided for having
characterized non-human animals as purely physical automata.  Who’s to say that
humans are not?  The skeptic asks:  how do we know that our sense of free will
is not a comforting illusion, and that, as Shaun Gallagher says (p. 113),
"We, as conscious animals, are seemingly just along for the ride"?

This is consciousness as epiphenomenon.  That is to say, the physical
world causes consciousness, but consciousness does not cause anything in the
physical world.

There are two dominant concerns driving the contributors to this volume: 
one more general, one more specific.  The general concern is with how one
reconciles the apparent indeterminacy of human decision making with a physical
universe that is causally closed (all events in the physical universe can be
explained completely within the physical universe) and deterministic (cause
reliably produces effect:  one cause, one effect).

The specific concern is with a series of experiments conducted by
Benjamin Libet, beginning in the early 1980s.  His findings are as tantalizing
for their implications as they are controversial.  Libet asked a series of
subjects to make a finger movement at random intervals.  At the same time they
were to watch a special clock and make a mental note of precisely when they
formed the intention to move their fingers.  The subjects were meanwhile being
monitored by EEG.  What Libet found was that what he called a "readiness
potential" — an activation of certain areas in the brain — occurred
several hundred milliseconds before the subjects became aware of their
intent to move.

Libet’s conclusion:  the conscious intention to move the fingers could
not have caused the finger movement. As Gallagher says of the results: 
"The brain seemingly decides and then enacts its decisions in a
nonconscious fashion, on a subpersonal level, but also inventively tricks us
into thinking that we consciously decide matters and that our actions are
personal events." (p. 114)

One might naturally be wary of how much one concludes from Libet’s
findings, or from subsequent related experiments by Daniel Wegner.  Part of the
problem is that Libet was dealing only with very simple movements, of the kind
that people don’t normally pay much attention to.  I don’t spend my time
deciding when and how to flex my fingers, because I’m more concerned with
finishing a book review or cycling to university.  Bertram Malle says: 
"…People may not have detailed awareness of their movements…
but are perfectly aware of their actions — what they are intending to
do no matter how it is exactly implemented by the motor system." (p. 216)

Another difficulty is the apparent arbitrariness of picking out the first
element in a causal chain as the cause of an action — regardless of
whether Libet’s readiness potential really is the "first cause". 
(After all, the subjects in his experiments all had a prior intention to move
their fingers at some point.)  Even if the specific intention to move my
fingers now is not first in the causal chain, that does not mean it
plays no causal role.

But the biggest problem is a practical one:  though there may be plenty
of other factors guiding our actions, of which we may be more or less aware,
nonetheless the idea that our intentions somehow cause our actions seems
intrinsic to our notion of what it is to be human.  Walter Freeman writes: 
"It is absurd in the name of causal doctrine to deny our capacity as
humans to make choices and decisions regarding our own futures, when we
exercise the causal power that we experience as free will." (90)

If all of this sounds a bit heavy on the philosophy, it is, even though
the book is divided in a way intended to give equal consideration to
philosophy, neuroscience, and public policy.  The public policy considerations
are what make this book of critical interest to non-philosophers; so it’s
unfortunate that this section of the book is, perhaps, the weakest of the
three, with the exception of Susan Hurley’s outstanding essay on the
relationship between media violence and violent behavior.  (If studies
consistently show a statistically significant correlation between violent
entertainment and both short- and long-term behavior, then what ought we to do
about it?)

The fact is that these esoteric philosophical and neuroscientific
discussions do come to shape public opinion and government policy.  As Leonard
Kaplan, a lawyer, writes:  "Minimally, the new brain research may well
reinforce tendencies in political modalities of social control adding to
present practices of preventive detention." (p. 278)  If people’s actions
are less the result of their willful intentions than powerful unconscious
forces, then why not, for everyone’s safety, lock up the people who seem to
pose the greatest risk for antisocial behavior?  Indeed the US takes just this
approach with certain sex offenders, and the UK has contemplated applying it to
certain classes of the mentally ill.

A believer in some libertarian form of free will might be expected to
emphasize personal responsibility when it comes to law enforcement.  Whatever
unconscious reasons you may have had, nonetheless you performed this
action and you must bear the consequences.  A compatibilist — someone who
believes that free will is compatible with a deterministic and causally closed
universe — and even more so someone swayed by Libet’s and Wegner’s arguments
might be expected to favor rehabilitation over retribution:  what caused this
person to be this way, and how can we fix it?  Of course these approaches need
not be mutually exclusive.  As Hurley says, "Holding individuals
accountable for the harms their acts cause should not exempt others further
back in the causal chain from sharing accountability for avoidable harms to
third parties." (p. 325)

But the implications of these discussions go far beyond criminal law.  We
live in a society in which, as Sabine Maasen notes, drugs are increasingly seen
as the primary means for treating not just physical but mental illnesses, where
drugs are seen not just as a means of treating illness but of reshaping our
consciousnesses, letting us tailor ourselves into the people we want to be. 
Maasen writes:  "we are surrounded by a culture of efficiency and
efficiency-enhancing procedures, all of which are more or less visibly
connected to the conscious effort of working on oneself." (p. 355)

If brain chemicals and electric signals make the man, what room is left
for dealing with the individual as an individual, with intentions to be held
accountable for, with urges and motivations that seem ultimately part of a
mental and not a physical world at all?  Even the most hard-line of
materialists may balk at attempting to give a complete explanation of
human reasoning at the neural level: it looks too much like a category error. 
As Albert Einstein so famously put it, "gravitation cannot be held
accountable for two people falling in love."  Intuition holds that, however
much explanation neuroscience may give us about who we are, there is much about
being and acting human that will remain a mystery.

 

© 2007 Joel Parthmore

 

Joel Parthemore is a
second-year DPhil student studying knowledge representation formalisms and the
nature of conceptual knowledge at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.  He
is a member of the Philosophy of AI and Cognitive Science research group in the
Department of Informatics. In his spare time he plays with Linux computer
systems. You can find him online at joel@parthemores.com
or http://www.parthemores.com/research.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology