Free will and consciousness : a determinist account of the illusion of free will / Gregg D. Caruso.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Caruso, Gregg D.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Free will and determinism.

Consciousness.

Phenomenology.

Physical Description:

viii, 301 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books, [2012]

Summary:

In recent decades, with advances in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences, the idea that patterns of human behavior may ultimately be due to factors beyond our conscious control has increasingly gained traction and renewed interest in the age-old problem of free will. In Free Will and Consciousness, Gregg D. Caruso examines both the traditional philosophical problems long associated with the question of free will, such as the relationship between determinism and free will, and recent experimental and theoretical work directly related to consciousness and human agency. He argues that our best scientific theories indeed have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of our actions and that because of this we do not possess the kind of free will required for genuine or ultimate responsibility. It is further argued that the strong and pervasive belief in free will, which the author considers an illusion, can be accounted for through a careful analysis of our phenomenology and a proper theoretical understanding of consciousness. Indeed, the primary goal of this book is to argue that our subjective feeling of freedom, as reflected in the first-person phenomenology of agentive experience, is an illusion created by certain aspects of our consciousness. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 The Problem of Free Will: A Brief Introduction and Outline of Position 1

1.1 Hard-Enough Determinism and the Illusion of Free Will 2

1.2 Freedom and Determinism: Defining the Problem 6

1.3 A Word About Moral Responsibility 10

Notes 12

2 Against Libertarianism 15

2.1 Agent-Causal Accounts of Free Will 18

2.2 The Problem of Mental Causation 29

2.3 Naturalized Libertarianism: Is Anyone Up For a Role of the Dice? 42

Notes 55

3 Against Compatibilism 59

3.1 Compatibilism and the Consequence Argument 60

3.2 The Folk Psychology of Free Will 79

3.3 The Phenomenology of Freedom 87

Notes 90

4 Consciousness and Free Will (I): Automaticity and the Adaptive Unconscious 97

4.1 Is Consciousness Necessary for Free Will? 99

4.2 Automaticity and the Adaptive Unconscious 107

4.3 The Unbearable Automaticity of Being 116

4.4 Implications for Free Will 126

Notes 130

5 Consciousness and Free Will (II): Transparency, Infallibility, and the Higher-Order Thought Theory 139

5.1 Consciousness and Freedom: The Introspective Argument for Free Will 141

5.2 Two Concepts of Consciousness 145

5.3 The Higher-Order Thought (HOT) Theory of Consciousness 154

5.4 Misrepresentation and Confabulation 160

5.5 What the HOT Theory Tells Us About Free Will 164

5.6 On the Function of Consciousness 168

Notes 174

6 Consciousness and Free Will (III): Intentional States, Spontaneity, and Action Initiation 179

6.1 The Apparent Spontaneity of Intentional States 180

6.2 The Asymmetry Between Intentional States and SensoryStates 183

6.3 Do Our Conscious Intentions Cause Our Actions? 189

6.4 Libet's Findings and the HOT Theory 202

6.5 Explaining the Phenomenological Illusion 206

6.6 Wegner's Theory of Apparent Mental Causation 209

Notes 212

7 Consciousness and Free Will (IV): Self-Consciousness and Our Sense of Agency 217

7.1 When Self-Consciousness Breaks Down 219

7.2 Self-Consciousness and Higher-Order Thoughts 224

7.3 Errors of Identification, Thought Insertion, and the HOT Theory 231

7.4 Accounting for Our Sense of Agency 240

7.5 Conclusion 255

Notes 257.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780739171363

0739171364

9780739171370

0739171372

OCLC:

773022202