Adina Roskies (Dartmouth College)

FREEDOM, AWARENESS, AND
THE CHALLENGE FROM THE
COGNITIVE SCIENCES
Adina Roskies
Dartmouth College
Princeton University Center for Human Values

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

FREEDOM AND AWARENESS
• In folk psychological views, awareness plays an important role
in decision and action:

• In order to be free and responsible for action A, we must
consciously will to perform action A.

• To consciously will is to be conscious of willing A, i.e.
conscious of intending to A

• In order to be responsible for our actions we must be aware
of the real (i.e. causally efﬁcacious) reasons for our actions


PRESSURE FROM THE BRAIN/
COGNITIVE SCIENCES
• Challenge 1: The brain sciences highlight the problem of
determinism for freedom by showing that brains are deterministic

• False

• Challenge 2: The brain sciences show that conscious will is
inefﬁcacious

• Challenge 3: The brain sciences show that we act automatically,
are moved by causal forces of which we are unaware, and invent
reasons for action post hoc


CLAIMS 2 AND 3 CONCERN
FREEDOM AND AWARENESS
• The role of awareness in decision and action

• Conscious will is inefﬁcacious: Awareness of intention

• Libet and the challenge to conscious will

• Modern-day analogues: Reading intentions

• We are not responsible for our actions: Awareness of
reasons

• The challenge from the cognitive and social sciences


LIBET-STYLE EXPERIMENTS


SUMMARY OF RESULTS ON
SUBJECTIVE TIMING

(Banks and Pockett, 2007)


WHAT LIBET STUDIES
MEASURE

STOP!
STOP!

Conscious Will?
Awareness of Conscious Will

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN
CONSCIOUS INTENTION AND
CONSCIOUSNESS OF INTENTION

W C of I
??

(modiﬁed from Banks and Pockett, 2007)

PROBLEMS WITH LIBET-LIKE
STUDIES
• Not clear what the RP is an indication of:

• it may not indicate that a decision has been made

• it may be a precursor to conscious will

• Experimental and interpretive difﬁculties in measuring time of awareness
limit the conclusions that can be drawn about efﬁcacy of conscious will.

• In particular, these studies may say more about time of awareness of
conscious intention, a metaconscious state, than about the time of
conscious intention. We typically are not conscious of our intention
when we freely act.

READING INTENTIONS

(Haynes et al., 2007)


FMRI VERSION OF LIBET
(Soon et al, 2008)


THE UPSHOT FROM
INTENTION-READING
STUDIES
• Some studies suggest that there is decodable brain information when
an intention is consciously held in mind, but this is no challenge to
conscious will.

• Other studies suggest that some causal factors detectable prior to
decisions inﬂuence those decisions. But there is no evidence that is an
intention.

• Indeed, as physicalists, we would expect nothing else.

• No studies show that brain activity determines action prior to and
independently of awareness.

PRESSURE FROM THE BRAIN/
COGNITIVE SCIENCES
• Challenge 1: The brain sciences highlight the problem of determinism
for freedom by showing that brains are deterministic

• False

• Challenge 2: The brain sciences show that conscious will is inefﬁcacious

• False

• Challenge 3: The brain sciences show that we act automatically, are
moved by causal forces of which we are unaware, and invent reasons
for action post hoc


THE CHALLENGE TO
“NEW COMPATIBILISM”
• Sie and Wouters (2009)

• Traditional Compatibilism: Freedom is the ability to do
otherwise

• The “New Compatibilism”: Freedom is the ability to act for
reasons

• The Challenge: “Research in the BCN sciences ...indicates that it
is not as obvious as it seems that the ability to act for reasons
can serve as an unproblematic basis to justify our daily practices
of responsibility.”

THE COMPETING PICTURES
• FOLK PICTURE • SCIENTIFIC PICTURE

• aware of our reasons • aware of some of our reasons

• reasons enter into explicit • many other factors (implicit
deliberation reasons/situational factors) of which
we are unaware also drive action
• free actions, those for which we can
be held responsible, issue from and • we justify our reasons for acting
only from deliberation in which we post hoc, but do not have access to
are conscious of all our operative the actual causal factors of our
reasons actions

• free actions?


THE “NEW COMPATIBILISM”

• The “new compatibilism” is a version of the capacity view;
the notion that acting freely is having certain metaphysically
unproblematic capacities (i.e. sanity (Wolf,1987)); moral
competence; the ability to act for reasons).

• It highlights the capacity of being appropriately reasons-
responsive

• However, the claim is that the brain/cognitive sciences
undermine the notion that we act for reasons


WHY DOUBT REASONS-
RESPONSIVENESS?
• Our actions are largely determined
by automatic processes, not
processes of reason

• Situationism suggests lack of robust
dispositions

• Demonstrably mistaken inferences
from phenomenology

• Confabulation and post hoc
rationalization


THE SITUATIONIST
CHALLENGE
• Milgram experiment

•A huge proportion of
normal people will
torture someone if
ordered to do so by
an authority ﬁgure

• 1/10th of 1%
expected to comply;
62% went all the way.


THE SITUATIONIST
CHALLENGE
• Situational
factors
affect moral behavior

• Darleyand Batson’s
Good Samaritan
experiment

• Even seminary
students don’t help
if in a hurry


THE SITUATIONIST
CHALLENGE
• Emotion can drive moral
judgment

• Disgust and hypnosis
(Wheatley and Haidt,
2005)

• Dirty desk (Schnall et al,
2008)


UPSHOT OF SITUATIONIST
PSYCHOLOGY

• What do these experiments show about acting for reasons?

• features of situations play an important role in generating
behavior

• situations provide reasons we may not acknowledge

• we often are unaware of all the reasons that affect our
behavior


MISLEADING
PHENOMENOLOGY
• Wegner: the experience of
willing is a retrospective
inference; our phenomenology
can be misleading

• we do not have access to the
causal chains between action
and experience of action

• we can be fooled about
whether we or external
forces initiate action


CONFABULATION
• Confabulation and post-hoc
rationalization:

• Gazzaniga split-brain studies:

• we routinely confabulate to
rationalize our actions

• Upshot: People are not aware
of the real causes of their
actions


REASONS AND CAUSES
“The mistakes indicate that the process of providing reasons
is quite different from what it seems and only loosely
connected to the processes that generate the actions. Initially
one might think that when we give reasons we recollect the
motives that drove our actions. The fact that people can
make real errors in reporting reasons (errors that are
neither the result from conscious or unconscious distortion
of what they perceived, nor of an unwillingness to perceive
their motives) shows that we have no direct access to our
motives and, hence, that we do not recollect our motives
when asked for reasons, but infer them on the basis of the
information we do have.”(S&W, 127)


WHAT THESE EXPERIMENTS
DO AND DO NOT SHOW:
• These experiments show that we are not aware of all the causes of our
actions

• These experiments do not show that conscious states are not causes of
actions

• These experiments show that we are sometimes in error about the
reasons for our actions

• Errors do not show that we are always in error

• Error in reporting does not mean that the causes are not reasons for
which we act


HOW DO RESULTS FROM
COGNITIVE/SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY CHALLENGE
REASONS-RESPONSIVENESS?
• Potential challenges:

• Lack capacity to act for reasons

• Lack capacity to control our behavior

• Lack capacity to have knowledge of our reasons

• Lack capacity to assess the goodness of reasons


CAPACITY TO ACT FOR
REASONS?
• Is awareness of reasons necessary for acting for
reasons?

• NO:

• When you are driving and talking and stop at a red
light

• Are you aware of the reason that you stop? Or
aware of the light? And are you even aware of the
light in the sense of explicitly conscious of it? Many
governing causes of responsible action are automatic
(see, e.g. studies by Bargh).

CAPACITY TO CONTROL OUR
BEHAVIOR
• Is awareness of reasons necessary for control?

• No - take trafﬁc light again. Automatic processes kick
in and you slam on your breaks without deliberating
at all.

• We are not unaware of the behaviors we produce.
That is the awareness we must have to exert
conscious control. Not the underlying causes of those
behaviors.


CAPACITY FOR KNOWLEDGE
OF CAUSES?
• Must we be aware of or be able to correctly identify the determining
inﬂuences to be responsible for our behavior? Must we have
knowledge of internal causes of behavior?

• Certainly not true in general: in all action we are unaware of many
of the causes of our actions (i.e. neural activity, genes). That does not
mean we lack responsibility for our behavior.

• What causes are the causes we must have knowledge of? Reasons?
All reasons? Just some reasons? Governing reasons? External forces?
Internal forces? None of these seem like necessary conditions for
responsibility for behavior.


REASONS-RESPONSIVENESS:
THE CAPACITY
• Fischer and Ravizza (1982)

• Reasons-responsiveness is the capacity to be
appropriately (behaviorally) sensitive to reasons

• What does this mean?

• Behavior will alter appropriately as reasons
for action change

• Counterfactual situations provide
information about capacity in actual situation

REASONS-RESPONSIVENESS:
EVALUATION
• Importantly, sensitivity to reasons does not require awareness of
reasons; it requires an appropriate pattern of counterfactual
dependency

• Does sensitivity to the right reasons require awareness of those
reasons?

• Perhaps in some cases, such as when both good and bad reasons
are present and competing, but not as a rule

• But it does not seem that explicit evaluation and/or accurate
evaluation of goodness of reasons is necessary for free action or for
responsibility


THE EPISTEMIC PROBLEM
• There is an epistemic problem:

• Science suggests that many actions for which agent gives reasons are
automatic responses to factors unknown to the agent

• How do we distinguish automatic actions for a reason from automatic
actions not for a reason?

• How do we determine whether agents should be expected to act in
opposition to automatically-inﬂuenced actions?

• Deciding when an agent should be held responsible for actions is a hard
problem. But it is not a new hard problem!


SUMMARY OF CHALLENGES
TO THE NEW COMPATIBILISM
• Experiments suggest that we are often inﬂuenced by factors of which we
are unaware, and that we may not have direct access to the reasons for our
actions

• These experiments do not show that we are not reasons-responsive, that
we do not act for reasons, that we are unable to control our actions, or that
we are unable to access reasons for our actions.

• Reasons responsiveness is a notion that depends not on reporting
accurately, but counterfactual sensitivity.

• However, the cognitive sciences do suggest that assessing responsibility in
individual cases may be difﬁcult.


SUMMARY OF ROLE OF
AWARENESS IN FREE WILL
• Science does not show that conscious will is inefﬁcacious

• Science does not show that in general we lack awareness of
our reasons for action

• Moreover, consideration of cases suggests that awareness of
reasons for action is not necessary for acting for reasons, for
reasons-responsiveness, or for control. The biggest impact
appears to be on our position as assessors of responsibility.


THANK YOU
FOR YOUR
CONSCIOUS
ATTENTION


Adina Roskies (Dartmouth College)

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