The concept of free will is central to our lives, as we make day-to-day
decisions, and to our culture, in our ethical and legal systems. The very
concept implies that what we choose can produce a change in our physical
environment, whether by pressing a switch to turn out electric lights or
choosing a long-term plan of action which can affect many people. Yet volition
is not a part of presently known physical laws and it is not even known
whether it exists -- no physics experiments have ever established its presence.
The purpose of this article is to make two points: first, that free will
cannot be accounted for by presently known physical laws and second, that
if free will exists, any description of its effects in the physical world
would necessarily constitute a radical addition to presently known physical
laws.
A modern version of the classical Greek organic paradigm can be based on behavioural ecology, ecology being the study of the interrelationships between an organism and its environment. The ecological organic paradigm describes four general human mental functional capacities -- appetite, social conscience, reason and an interpretive capacity -- and associates them, in the context of evolutionary and psychological development, to four general categories of experience -- primal individual needs, society, the natural world in which we live and metaphysics -- with which we have to cope, adapt, and interrelate. The ecological organic paradigm is compatible with both natural and cultural evolution. The framework can accommodate both descriptive and normative concepts of human nature and it can accommodate both the individual and social dimensions of human knowledge and activity.
The framework gives some coherence to the ethical categories. The questions, What is obligatory? What is good? What is fitting? and What is humane? are all included within the framework as valid moral questions. Deontological, normative, communitarian and individual human concerns are all recognized.
One way to understand the ecological organic paradigm (EOP) is to contrast
it with the general state of philosophy in the last one hundred years,
which might be compared to the story of the blind men describing an elephant:
each perspective describes a particular part but none gives a coherent
view of the elephant. The EOP suggests that we reconsider in the context
of behavioural ecology a modern version of the organic paradigm as at least
one useful framework for describing the 'elephant'.The EOP is a framework
of analysis that has the ability to bring a greater degree of coherence
to discussions in moral and political philosophy and to provide a basis
for accommodation in a pluralistic society and world community.
The prevailing trend of deeming subjective experiences causally idle obfuscates consciousness research as epiphenomenal entities cannot be studied. The most flexible way for conscious experiences to be efficacious is for them to serve as a basis for free action. Regrettably, no objective evidence testifies for this possibility. In this paper I explain that if we seek the truth we must, for purely logical reasons, irrespective of theoretical ideas and empirical data about the origin of our activity, follow the Libertarian Imperative -- the demand to try always to act in accord with the belief that one exercises the incompatibilist free volition. The Libertarian Imperative urges us to try to reject any conception about our nature -- including the modern scientific picture of human beings -- which claims that we are entirely law-governed creatures.
Drawing on new evidence from the Dewey archive, this paper traces how John Dewey conceived his Hegelian-inspired theory of mind and how he tested it in the 1930s by collaborating with infant experimentalist Myrtle McGraw in her pioneering studies of the ontogeny of consciousness and judgment. Her studies challenged behaviourism and maturationism, which advanced environmental and genetic theories of human development, by showing that infants possess consciousness and the judgment needed to guide their own development.
Dewey drew on Darwinian evolution and neuroscience to transform the Hegelian phenomenology of being and becoming into psychological terms that would elucidate the role of mind, consciousness and judgment in human experience. Dewey believed that consciousness arises under conditions of uncertainty demanding ingenuity, self-confidence and a sense of balance. McGraw demonstrated how infants cope with uncertainty and the physical challenges posed by gravity and the biological forces of growth, by exploiting the contingencies of order and variation afforded by their experience of motor development. McGraw demonstrated how consciousness emerges through reciprocal processes of neural and behavioural interaction which make possible the introduction of novel changes in ontogeny.
This paper describes the extraordinary methods that McGraw devised,
with Dewey's help, during the heyday of behaviourism and maturationism,
to find a place for consciousness in human development. I contend that,
while Dewey's theory of mind and McGraw's discoveries remain controversial
and poorly understood, they are not merely of historical interest but approach
the threshold of an integrated neurobiological and neurobehavioural understanding
of consciousness.
A thought experiment focuses attention on the kinds of commonalities and differences to be found in two small parts of visual cortical areas during responses to stimuli that are either identical in quality, but different in (retinal) location, or identical in location and different only in the one visible property of colour. Reflection on this thought experiment leads to the view that patterns of neural activation are the best candidates for causes of qualitatively conscious events (qualia). This view faces a strong objection, namely, that patterns can be realized in many media, and thus candidates for patterns that cause qualia might be realized in ways that would not plausibly result in consciousness. It is argued that this objection can be overcome if qualia-causing patterns of events must be realized within small spatial and temporal regions. Much more importantly, it is argued that this restriction on region size need not be ad hoc. The key concept needed to establish this important point is 'natural salience', i.e., distinction from background noise that does not depend on application of a criterion of selection. It is explained how natural salience could figure in an empirically-based theory that would entail size restrictions for qualia-causing neural activation patterns.
The question is then raised as to how the resulting view diverges from Chalmers' (1996) account, which relies on the Principle of Organizational Invariance. A second thought experiment envisages replacement of neurons by computer chips with synaptic interfaces. Reflection on this thought experiment enables us to conceptually, and possibly empirically, separate the two views. An argument for preferring the patterns- as-causes (of qualia), or PACQ, view is given. Because natural salience does not plausibly produce strictly discontinuous boundaries between pattern and noise, questions naturally arise as to the relation of the PACQ view (as developed here) to panpsychism and to 'emergence'. The PACQ view is distinguished from panpsychism, and it is explained how the former avoids what Seager (1995) calls 'the combination problem', and is thus preferable to panpsychism. The relation of the PACQ view to 'emergence' is explained. The conclusion of the paper is that the PACQ view is a philosophically defensible and potentially scientifically fruitful view that offers qualia realists the best hypothesis concerning the neural causes of