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Abstract
Agent-causal theories of free will, which rely on a non-reductionist account of the agent, have traditionally been associated with libertarianism. However, some authors have recently argued in favor of compatibilist agent-causal accounts. In this essay, I will show that such accounts cannot avoid serious problems of implausibility or incoherence. A careful analysis of the implications of non-reductionist views of the agent (event-causal or agent-causal as they may be) reveals that such views necessarily imply either the denial of the principle of supervenience or the assumption of bottom-level indeterminism. I will contend that the former alternative comes at a high cost, while the latter is quite plausible. Therefore, providing that they accept the condition of the truth of indeterminism, non-reductionist accounts of the agent do not have to contradict our scientific worldview. Interestingly, while they should be taken seriously by anyone who is concerned with the passivity of the agent’s role under a reductionist scenario, non-reductivist accounts end up contributing an extra incompatibilist argument to the free will debate.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Richard Holton and Tim O’Connor for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Joana Rigato is a post-doctoral fellow at the Systems Neuroscience Lab at Champalimaud Research, in Lisbon, where she is currently investigating the use of first-person experience in cognitive science. During the pursuit of her Ph.D., her research focused mainly on agency, free will and emergence.
Notes
1. The alternative, of course, would be to assume an identity theory according to which mental events are actually physical events, but that is something non-reductionists are not willing to do.
2. Despite her incompatibilist stance, Steward's account differs from mine in that, on the one hand, she considers universal probabilistic laws also to be a problem for downward causation and, on the other, her view does not require indeterminism to be located at the bottom-most level (cf. next section).
3. In response to this position, Derk Pereboom has recently argued for an account of “settling” based on deterministic agent-causation, which, as often happens in the free will literature, does not address the challenges posed by the exclusion problem. Pereboom considers there would be no contradiction in supposing the physical and biological laws, as well as the “laws governing action” (Citation2015, 291) to be deterministic, while the agent-causal power settles whether an action occurs. Given Pereboom's preference for a “physicalistically respectable” (292) description of this power as being supervenient on specific neural states and “necessitated by the underlying physical event-causal powers” (291), I do not see how his account can prevent it from draining down to the laws governing the microphysical reality.
4. Popper and Eccles (neurophysiologist), in their influential book The Self and its Brain, stated: “The emergence of hierarchical levels or layers, and of an interaction between them, depends upon a fundamental indeterminism of the physical universe” (Citation1977, 35). Astrophysicist and philosopher George Ellis, arguing for the presence of emergence in the world, contended: “random fluctuations along with quantum uncertainty provide the freedom at the bottom needed to allow [same-level and top-down causation] to happen” (Citation2009, 78). Finally, neuroscientist and philosopher Peter Ulric Tse, who has developed an empirical model of how downward causation (hence, free will) might happen in the brain, contended that Kim's Exclusion Argument can be overcome if ontological indeterminism is true of neural processes (Citation2013, 123–127).
5. Rayleigh–Bénard convection is a macro phenomenon that is easily observed in liquids that are submitted to a non-uniform temperature distribution (by putting them in a horizontal plane and heating it from bellow), which causes the formation of a regular pattern of geometric cells of moving fluid. This phenomenon has often been used to favor emergentist accounts that have no problem questioning supervenience.
6. An anonymous reviewer has noted that the model presented here, according to which bottom-level indeterminism leaves open the possibility for downward causation, does not allow one to distinguish free actions from unfree behavior. In fact, nothing in the present account prevents the behavior of a drug addict or a dog from being the result of the downward influence of the irreducible will of the agent over alternative physical possibilities. However, the aim of the present essay is to show how non-reductive accounts of the agent are possible, independently from other conditions that may be required for restricting free agency to a subset of actions performed by such agents. If we can show that all actions non-reductively caused by the agent or by her mental events require indeterminism, we are thereby providing an argument for incompatibilism about free will, since free actions will be a subset of actions simpliciter.
I have argued elsewhere for the distinction between cases of sub-actional behaviors and genuinely free actions, based on the consideration that the former are directly caused by the agent's mental states and events, while the latter are mediated by the agent as such: “in cases of deep addiction there is no intermediate agential intervention between the reasons and the intention, nor between the intention and the behavior”; in contrast, “when the agent acts, she does not do so merely by ‘having’ certain beliefs and desires; she ‘activates’ those reasons, and connects them to her intentions to act” (Rigato Citation2016, 50–51).
7. In a recent article (Citation2014), Stuart Hameroff and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, probably the two most famous defenders of the idea that consciousness is a product of quantum effects in the brain, cited many studies which purport to show evidence of quantum effects in biological processes such as ion channels, sense of smell, DNA, protein folding and biological water (Citation2014, 63).